President Bush: Is He a Liar?

Because he was a liar and a cheat (pretty much the same as George Bush)

dyslexia, your statement is a clear example of why many of us can't muster much respect for the liberal left in this country.

Some of them were destroyed in the war and couldn't be verified as the the quantity destroyed.
Some of them were dumped in the desert and couldn't be verified.

Where in the treaty signed in 1991 does it require that destruction must be verified 100%?

The only verification required is that there are not ongoing programs. There is nothing in there about all destruction must be witnessed.

Okie, maybe you can earn our respect and point to where in the treaty it requires 100% verification of destruction of WMDs. I bet you can't find it...

WMD's? Everyone thought there were WMD's in Iraq- all of the US's Intelligence agencies; the major intelligence agencies of the European Countries; The CIA AND INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH, THE DEMOCRATS INCLUDING BILL CLINTON, HILLARY CLINTON, JOHN KERRY AND AL GORE.

No one, no one, no one, not even Mr. Parados, has rebutted this information as yet:

Source for below: do a Web Search for

"Who is Lying in Iraq"-Podhoretz

If you can't rebut the quotes in that essay, the WMD's were in Iraq according to all of those people!




COMMENTARY

December 2005

Who Is Lying About Iraq?

Norman Podhoretz

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.




The main "lie" that George W. Bush is accused of telling us is that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidiary "lie" that Iraq under Saddam's regime posed a two-edged mortal threat. On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even "imminent") possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against us and/or our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still more dangerous possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those who had already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom he was linked.

This entire scenario of purported deceit has been given a new lease on life by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby stands accused of making false statements to the FBI and of committing perjury in testifying before a grand jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush administration had "outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV. The supposed purpose of leaking this classified information to the press was to retaliate against Wilson for having "debunked" (in his words) "the lies that led to war."

Now, as it happens, Libby was not charged with having outed Plame but only with having lied about when and from whom he first learned that she worked for the CIA. Moreover, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who brought the indictment against him, made a point of emphasizing that

[t]his indictment is not about the war. This indictment is not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.

This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person?-a person, Mr. Libby?-lied or not.

No matter. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke for a host of other opponents of the war in insisting that

[t]his case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the President.

Yet even stipulating?-which I do only for the sake of argument?-that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.

How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Tenet had the backing of all fifteen agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that

Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.

The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel, and?-yes?-France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix?-who headed the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past?-lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:

The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.




So, once again, did the British, the French, and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the UN in the period leading up to the invasion. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as Secretary of State. But Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of Defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did:

I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits, and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the UN on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP?-Ammunition Supply Point?-with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.

Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) was convinced:

People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.

In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about

Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.

But, according to Wilkerson,

The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?

In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.

Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written,

I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).

No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high confidence" was that

Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.1




But the consensus on which Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:

Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:

He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.

Finally, Clinton's Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.

Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic Senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President

to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.

Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:

Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.

This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Bush succeeded Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new President, a number of Senators led by Bob Graham declared:

There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.

Senator Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Bush's benefit what he had told Clinton some years earlier:

Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:

There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.

Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush's opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:

We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

And here is Gore again, in that same year:

Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.

Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force?-if necessary?-to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.




Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:

Kennedy: We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.

Byrd: The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.2

Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that

without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again.

The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was

hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation.

So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with the admonition that

[o]f all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous?-or more urgent?-than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.3




All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the sixteen resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?

Another fallback charge is that Bush, operating mainly through Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it

did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.

The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding

no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . [A]nalysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments.

Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Bush of telling a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Bush consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war.4 Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Bush declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he would "not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word "imminent" itself precisely in order to repudiate it:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest, as Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to "meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives."5


You have not rebutted a single line of this essay, Mr. Parados.

I am sure that you have noted that much of the evidence in this essay comes from quotes. You will find that those quotes are accurately presented.

Your thesis that someone lied about WMD's falls flat, Mr. Parados!!!!

It's so nice that you keep posting that Bernie but still haven't addressed when I pointed out the problems with it.


Do you live in a complete fantasy world? Are you ever going to address the issues I raised?

Your failure to address my points shows you have capitulated. End of story. No more to be said.

Go sit in the corner and drool while you keep repeating "But Podhoretz said.. but Podhoretz said.... but Podhoretz said. It would certainly have a better effect than constantly posting an article that has been answered.

You have answered it? I may have missed your answer. Please be so good as to give me a link to your answer. Please be informed in advance that I will scrutinize your alleged answer, rebut any mistakes you have made in giving a rebuttal, and POINT OUT THE SECTIONS IN MR. PODHORETZ' ESSAY YOU HAVE NOT ADDRESSED.

Please do not be so foolish to think you can make totally irrational and unproven comments about the genesis of the statements about WMD's in Iraq with such a puerile comment as saying an "article that has been answered"

To the best of my knowledge. you have done no such thing.

I await your alleged link to show how you have COMPLETELY REBUTTED ALL OF PODHORETZ' CLAIMS.

Now links are required again Bernie?

Make up your mind. You are spinning like a top. I don't have to answer anything unless there is a link. You do have to answer things without a link. Failure to rebut something line by line means you capitulate. I don't have to rebut anything if there isn't a link. You just like to make up your own rules as you go along, don't you Bernie.

My posts are in this thread. You can go find them or not. I don't give a rat's ass. Repeating something over and over is YOUR milieu, not mine. If you can't read it the first time, that's your problem. It's not like it disappeared. Why don't you go find another year old poll to post and claim it was recent. That should make you look intelligent.

No, it's a practical appeal. I'm stating what the stakes were. We actually don't want a superweapon to annihilate one of our cities, so any non-negligible possibility that an evil dictator might acquire the capability must be treated with the utmost seriousness.


No, I have not failed to address it at all. My point is that based on the history there was some reasonable probability that he was in the process of acquiring them.


I have addressed exactly this issue over and over again in posts on this board. He could have agents smuggle the components of the weapon into the target city, reassemble the components, and detonate the weapon from inside. Fascinating that you tell me that I have failed to address something that I have addressed numerous times in posts.


What countermeasures would you propose against a Saddam Hussein armed with nuclear and/or biological weapons?

Bush Resurrects False Claim That Congress Had "Same Intelligence" On Iraq
In his speech today, President Bush claimed that members of Congress who voted for the 2002 Iraq war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" as his administration. This is patently false.

Nevermind that much of the intelligence offered to the public and to Congress was inaccurate and misleading, or that according to the Downing Street memo and other documents, such intelligence was likely intentionally "fixed." It is simply not true to state that Congress received the "same intelligence" as the White House:

FACT ?- Dissent From White House Claims on Iraq Nuclear Program Consistently Withheld from Congress:

[S]everal Congressional and intelligence officials with access to the 15 assessments [of intel suggesting aluminum tubes showed Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program] said not one of them informed senior policy makers of the Energy Department's dissent. They described a series of reports, some with ominous titles, that failed to convey either the existence or the substance of the intensifying debate." [NYT, 10/3/04]

FACT ?- Sen. Kerrey: Bush "Has Much More Access" to Intel Than Congress:

Former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE), ex-Senate Intelligence Committee vice chairman: "The president has much more access to intelligence than members of Congress does. Ask any member of Congress. Ask a Republican member of Congress, do you get the same access to intelligence that the president does? Look at these aluminum tube stories that came out the president delivered to the Congress ?- ?'We believe these would be used for centrifuges.' ?- didn't deliver to Congress the full range of objections from the Department of Energy experts, nuclear weapons experts, that said it's unlikely they were for centrifuges, more likely that they were for rockets, which was a pre-existing use. The president has much more access to intelligence than any member of Congress." [10/7/04]

FACT ?- Rockefeller: PDBs, CIA Intel Withheld From Senate:

Ranking minority member on the Senate Intelligence Committee Jay Rockefeller (D-WV): "[P]eople say, ?'Well, you know, you all had the same intelligence that the White House had.' And I'm here to tell you that is nowhere near the truth. We not only don't have, nor probably should we have, the Presidential Daily Brief. We don't have the constant people who are working on intelligence who are very close to him. They don't release their ?- an administration which tends not to release ?- not just the White House, but the CIA, DOD [Department of Defense], others ?- they control information. There's a lot of intelligence that we don't get that they have." [11/04/05]

FACT ?- War Supporter Ken Pollack: White House Engaged in "Creative Omission" of Iraq Intel:

In the eyes of Kenneth Pollack, "a Clinton-era National Security Council member and strong supporter of regime change in Iraq," "the Administration consistently engaged in ?'creative omission,' overstating the imminence of the Iraqi threat, even though it had evidence to the contrary. ?'The President is responsible for serving the entire nation,' Pollack writes. ?'Only the Administration has access to all the information available to various agencies of the US government - and withholding or downplaying some of that information for its own purposes is a betrayal of that responsibility.'" [Christian Science Monitor, 1/14/04]

FACT ?- White House Had Exclusive Access to "Unique" Intel Sources:

"The claim that the White House and Congress saw the 'same intelligence' on Iraq is further undermined by the Bush administration's use of outside intelligence channels. For more than a year prior to the war, the administration received intelligence assessments and analysis on Iraq directly from the Department of Defense's Office of Special Plans (OSP), run by then-undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas J. Feith, and the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a group of Iraqi exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi." [MediaMatters, 11/8/05]

From the Washington Post;

Wash. Post injected qualifier that diluted Bush administration's false prewar Iraq intel claim
Days after the White House rebuked a November 12 Washington Post report debunking the administration's claim that Democrats in Congress had access to the same prewar Iraq intelligence as the administration, a November 18 Post article watered down the administration's allegation by introducing a qualifier that makes it less clearly false. In the article written by staff writer Michael A. Fletcher, the Post reported that the administration has responded to accusations that it misrepresented prewar intelligence by asserting that congressional  Democrats had access to "essentially" the same intelligence upon which the administration was basing its public pronouncements of the Iraqi threat. In fact, the White House has included no such qualifier in its response to critics: From President Bush on down, administration officials have claimed that Democrats had access to "the same" intelligence, not "essentially" the same intelligence.

From the Post article by Fletcher, who also documented the administration's response to the previous Post report:

The White House has argued that Democrats in Congress received essentially the same intelligence it had about weapons of mass destruction, including the caveats about its potential pitfalls. "The reality is that there was a massive intelligence failure in this country," [White House communications director Nicolle] Wallace said.

In fact, the White House has repeatedly claimed that Congress had access to the same intelligence as the administration, not "essentially" the same intelligence. For example, in a November 14 speech, Bush said: "Leaders in my administration and members of the United States Congress from both political parties looked at the same intelligence on Iraq, and reached the same conclusion: Saddam Hussein was a threat." In a November 11 speech, Bush similarly declared that "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate -- who had access to the same intelligence -- voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power."

Fletcher's report came less than a week after the White House went on the offensive against the November 12 Post article, which reported that the White House claim that "Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war" was not "wholly accurate." In that front-page article, the Post noted that "Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material." The next day, the White House countered with its memo, titled "Setting the Record Straight: The Washington Post On Pre-War Intelligence."

The Fletcher article did note the November 12 Post article and the White House's response, but that paragraph -- which immediately followed the paragraph reporting that the White House has accused Democrats of seeing "essentially" the same intelligence -- did not include the qualifier:

Meanwhile, the White House is letting few provocations pass unnoticed. Among its official rebuttals was one regarding a Nov. 12 Washington Post article which asserted that it is not "wholly accurate" for the administration to say that members of Congress had access to the same prewar intelligence as Bush.

?-A.S.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WENT TO UN | CONGRESS APPROVED | MOOT POINT | IT'S NOT "NEWS"
BUT WE REELECTED HIM | NOTHING NEW | ONLY "OPINION" | NO INTEL MANIPULATION
FRANCE BELIEVED IN WMD | CLINTON OK'ED REGIME CHANGE


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But we went to the UN

President Bush, Prime Minister Blair and their supporters frequently point to the timing of the DSM and other leaked documents and say, "but we went to the UN after that, which proves we wanted a peaceful solution."

First, we should note that for Blair, going to the UN was an imperative. As a party to the International Criminal Court, the UK needed a legal justification for invasion, and regime change was not adequate, as is indicated by several of the leaked UK documents. However, both Blair and Bush needed the imprimatur of a UN resolution to build public support.

As Peter Ricketts' memo to Jack Straw on March 22, 2002 states, the UN strategy was twofold: "either Saddam against all the odds allows Inspectors to operate freely, in which case we can further hobble his WMD programmes, or he blocks/hinders, and we are on stronger ground for switching to other methods." But the plan backfired--Saddam did let the inspectors back in, but after visiting over 100 sites multiple times they found no WMD. They did find some conventional missiles that exceeded set restrictions on range--still no threat to the US or UK--and they were promptly destroyed.

With the basis for war evaporating with each passing day, Bush went back to the UN to try for a second resolution that would have declared Iraq in "material breach" of resolution 1441, thus rubber stamping his invasion plan. When it became clear he didn't have the votes, Bush ordered inspectors and other foreigners out of the country and invaded anyway.\

The exercise at the UN was a sham. From the beginning, it was seen by the US and UK as a means to justfiy war, not prevent it. The DSM clearly indicates the policy of invasion was set long before the US went to the UN (and before Bush sought approval from Congress for the use of force against Iraq). The other leaked UK memos show a British Cabinet scrambling to find a legal basis for a war their Prime Minister had already committed them to. When the UN ceased to offer any further benefit to the war agenda, the US and UK moved on--to Baghdad.

Congress had access to the same intel as Bush and they approved the invasion

On October 10, 2002, Congress voted to approve the use of force against Iraq. The President has indicated on several occasions that members of Congress had access to the same intelligence his administration had, and made their choice on the basis of this information. What is less known is the fact that what Congress was given bore little resemblance to the detailed reports the Bush administration was reading.

Senator Bob Graham, in his book, recounts a Sept 5, 2002 meeting he and Senators Durbin and Levin had with then CIA director George Tenet and his staff. Though the administration had long before decided on invasion, to the senators' amazement no National Intelligence Estimate for Iraq had yet been produced. Graham, Durbin and Levin demanded to see one, and three weeks later Tenet produced a 90-page document rife with caveats and qualifications (though these were buried in footnotes) about what we knew--or didn't know--about WMD in Iraq.

That report was classified, and as such was available only to those on the House and Senate intelligence committees. Graham pressed for it to be declassified, and got what he asked for on Oct 4--less than a week before Congress was to vote on the use of force. However, this declassified version was more like a marketing brochure: 20 pages in length, slickly produced with splashy grahics and maps, and with none of the caveats contained in the original. Graham described it later as "a vivid and terrifying case for war."

This 20-page, unqualified summary was presented to our senators and representatives as the best information on Iraq's WMDs, and it was provided to them one week before the vote on the use of force. The intelligence material Congress had was what the administration was willing to give them, namely a promotional piece whose lies of omission outweighed what was included.

The issue of why we went to war is moot

We can all agree that a stable Iraq is the most desirable outcome, but this is a separate issue from the question of why we went to war and how the case for war was made.

There is ample evidence?-in the DSM and elsewhere?-that the administration misrepresented the nature and extent of the threat posed by Saddam's Iraq, that the case for war was built on this misrepresentation, and as a consequence many tens of thousands of people (Americans, Iraqis and others) have lost their lives. Every time someone is killed or injured as a result of the ongoing violence in Iraq, it becomes more?-not less?-important that we understand why and how we went to war. We were misled, and the people who misled us must be held accountable for their deception.

Information that is now publicly available, such as the DSM, makes it at least possible that a crime may have been committed by the Bush administration. To say that the issue of why we invaded Iraq is irrelevant because it's in the past is akin to saying that the specifics of Watergate became irrelevant when Richard Nixon resigned.

The information in the DSM is not "news"

Much of the information contained in the DSM has been reported elsewhere, so in that sense it is perhaps not a "smoking gun" in itself. This, however, does not diminish the importance of what the memo reveals. When viewed in context?-as we have attempted to do with DowningStreetMemo.com?-the DSM and other leaked documents paint a damning portrait of an administration artificially pumping up its case for war while at the same time disingenuously asserting its desire to avoid it. The DSM is also highly credible, as it is the official record of the Prime Minister's meeting and not the more easily dismissed recollection of a former White House official.

What makes the DSM so vital from a news perspective is:
• The source - short of a similar document on the US side, there isn't a much
more credible source than the British Prime Minister and his senior staff.
•The timing - the fact that the meeting in question took place in July 2002
illustrates just how early on Bush had made up his mind to "remove Saddam,
through military action, justified by the conjunction of WMD and terrorism."
•The "nutshell" - in a few sentences, the memo summarizes all of the key
components of Bush's deception: that Iraq posed an imminent threat to
the United States, that the US was willing to work with the UN on a diplomatic
solution, that war was a last resort, but if undertaken that the legal basis for it
was sound, and that the aftermath of an invasion, if necessary, would
be managed responsibly.

In the wake of belated media coverage of the DSM, mainstream media outlets balked at the suggestion that they missed the story. Editorial pages were filled with claims that "everyone knew" the administration had made up its mind to go to war, even in the summer of 2002. If that was the case, one has to ask why no reporter ever challenged the President on the many occasions between July 2002 and the start of the invasion when he claimed not to have come to a decision on war.

The US media was at least uncritical and at worst overtly supportive of the invasion; to claim differently now is disingenuous.

Americans knew the case for war was thin from the outset, but supported the invasion anyway, and confirmed this by reelecting Bush in 2004.

Let us assume for the moment that Americans had the benefit of a truly fair and balanced news media from which to gather information and form an opinion on the necessity of war. The DSM makes it clear that there were some things that the public did not know and could not have known (e.g., the National Security Council's unwillingness to work with the UN). There were other things too that were presented by the administration in such a distorted way as to render them useless to even the most engaged American citizen in forming an opinion on the necessity of war.

The non-existent connection between Saddam and al Qaida, for example, was cited so many times by the administration that at the height of prewar hysteria, well over half of Americans polled believed Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks when in fact Iraq had nothing to do with them. Similarly, claims about Iraq's WMD capability featured regular invocations of "mushroom clouds" when there was in fact no evidence on which to base such claims--particularly in the area of nuclear weapons.

What we now know is that the conflation of Saddam, WMD and terrorism was in essence a marketing strategy, a preconceived justification for a preconceived war. As early as July of 2002, the President and his administration had not only decided to invade Iraq in order to depose Saddam, they had also determined how to enlist the support of the American people by playing on their worst fears.

Bush's reelection came well before the release of the DSM, so it is impossible to know what impact it might have had on what was a very close election.

The DSM doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know.

For those of us who saw through the Bush administration's house of cards before the invasion, the DSM doesn't really offer anything we "didn't already know." However, its provenance and its comprehensive yet straightforward representation of the administration's Iraq policy present the facts in a much more compelling light. It also represents hard evidence of the administration's willful misrepresentation of its own policies.

The DSM's importance lies not so much in what it says but who said it. This is not "sour grapes" coming from ousted White House officials with a bone to pick?-it is the official record of a meeting held by America's staunchest ally. The DSM may not tell us anything really new, but it does offer hard evidence that the Bush administration misled the country into war.

An excellent piece on this very subject can be found here: "Some questions for media dismissing Downing Street Memo as old news."

The DSM is just one aide's impressions of what was said in a meeting, so we don't know what the players actually said or thought.

This argument seeks to discredit the document's accuracy by suggesting that it represents one person's?-presumably erroneous?-impression of the meeting. This is simple wrong. The DSM is the minutes of a meeting, and they were circulated after the meeting to all who took part. If one of the participants was misquoted, he would have had ample opportunity to correct the error.

However, given numerous opportunities to refute or clarify any of the memo's contents, none of the players has done so. Not the British government, the Prime Minister, or any members of his cabinet. In fact, no one from President Bush to Tony Blair and all the members of their respective senior staffs has ever denied the authenticity of the memo, and the only critiques offered of its accuracy have been vague denials about the President's and PM's intentions. Those denials were offered up only after the DSM became the subject of media attention. No one has ever offered any reasonable explanation as to why the document would be so far off from what Blair and Bush claim was their position at the time.

The issue of manipulation of intelligence has already been settled.

This is, quite simply, false. The President's commission on intelligence did not address the issue because it was not authorized to do so under its charter. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was originally going to investigate how intelligence was used but, under White House pressure, scaled back its inquiry to deal only with "intelligence failures" in terms of how the information was collected, not how it was used as a basis for war.

What the DSM clearly states is that the head of British Intelligence believed that the Bush Administration was using certain pieces of intelligence to support a course of action rather than determining a course of action based on the totality of intelligence. So far, no investigation into how intelligence was used has been undertaken.

Many other nations, France included, believed Saddam had WMD, so this was not a justification cooked up by the US/UK.

While it's true that many governments suspected Saddam had WMD, there was no agreement as to what his actual capabilities were, or on what to do about it. Further, simply believing something to be true does not make it so, and certainly does not form a basis for war.

The administration never had a "smoking gun" to prove Saddam had WMD, and in fact the intelligence supporting the administration's view was alarmingly thin. As we now know from various reports, US intelligence affirming WMD frequently came from paid informants who, in some cases, were later proven to be fabricators. There was virtually no intelligence coming out of Iraq itself?-the country was impenetrable, leaving the US and others with little in the way of credible sources.

It is also worth noting that while there was a range of opinion (and widespread error) as to Saddam's chemical and biological weapons capability, there certainly was not a consensus. The issue of nuclear weapons is a different story. Here, the US and UK stood nearly alone in their dire assessment. It was also on this issue that the administration demonstrated its willingness to use highly dubious intelligence reports by claiming that Iraq had sought nuclear material from Niger. This claim, of course, was based on crudely forged documents and should never have been made. The fact that the President did made this claim, and did so in a State of the Union address, is all the more troubling, especially given that the same statement was pulled from a speech he gave just a few months earlier.

Regime change was already US policy before we invaded Iraq--President Clinton did that when he signed HR 4655, the Iraq Liberation Act, in 1998.

The Iraq Liberation Act expressed the Clinton administration's support for democratic opposition groups inside Iraq and authorized a variety of mechanisms by which to provide that support. These included military assistance in the form of supplies and training. However, the final section of the act expressly limits the administration to just these forms of military support. From this we can safely assert that the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 provided no policy precedent for invasion, air strikes or any use of American military force.

If Norman Podhoretz's essay below is unacceptable because he is conservative, using the same logic, Mr. Imposter's post is unacceptable because the source, The Washington Post, is very liberal.

I do not use ad hominem to discredit respectable sources.

Here is Mr. Podhoretz's essay again:



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WMD's? Everyone thought there were WMD's in Iraq- all of the US's Intelligence agencies; the major intelligence agencies of the European Countries; The CIA AND INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH, THE DEMOCRATS INCLUDING BILL CLINTON, HILLARY CLINTON, JOHN KERRY AND AL GORE.

No one, no one, no one, not even Mr. Imposter, has rebutted this information as yet:

Source for below: do a Web Search for

"Who is Lying in Iraq"-Podhoretz

If you can't rebut the quotes in that essay, the WMD's were in Iraq according to all of those people!




COMMENTARY

December 2005

Who Is Lying About Iraq?

Norman Podhoretz

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.




The main "lie" that George W. Bush is accused of telling us is that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidiary "lie" that Iraq under Saddam's regime posed a two-edged mortal threat. On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even "imminent") possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against us and/or our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still more dangerous possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those who had already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom he was linked.

This entire scenario of purported deceit has been given a new lease on life by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby stands accused of making false statements to the FBI and of committing perjury in testifying before a grand jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush administration had "outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV. The supposed purpose of leaking this classified information to the press was to retaliate against Wilson for having "debunked" (in his words) "the lies that led to war."

Now, as it happens, Libby was not charged with having outed Plame but only with having lied about when and from whom he first learned that she worked for the CIA. Moreover, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who brought the indictment against him, made a point of emphasizing that

[t]his indictment is not about the war. This indictment is not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.

This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person?-a person, Mr. Libby?-lied or not.

No matter. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke for a host of other opponents of the war in insisting that

[t]his case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the President.

Yet even stipulating?-which I do only for the sake of argument?-that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.

How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Tenet had the backing of all fifteen agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that

Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.

The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel, and?-yes?-France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix?-who headed the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past?-lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:

The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.




So, once again, did the British, the French, and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the UN in the period leading up to the invasion. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as Secretary of State. But Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of Defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did:

I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits, and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the UN on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP?-Ammunition Supply Point?-with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.

Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) was convinced:

People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.

In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about

Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.

But, according to Wilkerson,

The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?

In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.

Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written,

I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).

No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high confidence" was that

Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.1




But the consensus on which Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:

Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:

He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.

Finally, Clinton's Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.

Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic Senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President

to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.

Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:

Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.

This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Bush succeeded Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new President, a number of Senators led by Bob Graham declared:

There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.

Senator Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Bush's benefit what he had told Clinton some years earlier:

Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:

There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.

Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush's opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:

We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

And here is Gore again, in that same year:

Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.

Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force?-if necessary?-to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.




Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:

Kennedy: We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.

Byrd: The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.2

Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that

without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again.

The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was

hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation.

So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with the admonition that

[o]f all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous?-or more urgent?-than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.3




All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the sixteen resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?

Another fallback charge is that Bush, operating mainly through Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it

did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.

The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding

no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . [A]nalysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments.

Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Bush of telling a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Bush consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war.4 Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Bush declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he would "not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word "imminent" itself precisely in order to repudiate it:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest, as Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to "meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives."5


You have not rebutted a single line of this essay, Mr. Imposter

I am sure that you have noted that much of the evidence in this essay comes from quotes. You will find that those quotes are accurately presented.

Your thesis that someone lied about WMD's falls flat.

What the 9/11 Commision in fact said in Statement No. 15 (Overview of the Enemy) was:

"Bin Laden also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein's secular regime. Bin Laden had in fact at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Sudanese, to protect their own ties with Iraq, reportedly persuaded Bin Laden to cease this support and arranged for contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting Bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

That is not, as Bernard describes it "a cooperative if informal relationship". There is no actual cooperation. Notice the Commission says "they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship".. In other words, Saddam did nothing for AlQaeda. Bernard is, again, spinning things.

Mr. Username's point may be questionable--

Note

The staff's sweeping conclusion is found in its Statement No. 15 ("Overview of the Enemy"), which states:


Bin Laden also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein's secular regime. Bin Laden had in fact at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Sudanese, to protect their own ties with Iraq, reportedly persuaded Bin Laden to cease this support and arranged for contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting Bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.

Note the fourth sentence above, Beginning with the words--"A senior Iraqi intelligence officer.....

Then again, it may not be questionable.

Your sanity on the other hand....

Drew Dad- Do you do Psychological Analyses from a distance? What a wonderful skill? Did you learn it on your own or did you go to school to be trained. You had better be careful. It is illegal to make medical diagnosis without being certified.

Did I offer a diagnosis? Perhaps you should go back and read it again.

The sanity on the other hand....

ON THE OTHER HAND? Which hand is that?