John Murtha: America has had Enough of Bush's Iraq war

There have been WMDs found

LoneStarMadam wrote:

There have been WMDs found

Oh, wait, you're serious! Let me laugh even harder:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Syria's foreign minister called Sunday for a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces to help end Iraq's sectarian bloodbath, in a groundbreaking diplomatic mission to Iraq that comes amid increasing calls for the U.S. to seek cooperation from Syria and Iran. At least 112 people were killed nationwide, following a week that had already seen hundreds of deaths.

Walid Moallem, the highest level Syrian official to visit since the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein, denounced terrorism in Iraq even as Washington mulled its own overture to Damascus for help in ending Iraq's violence.

Syria and Iraq share a long and porous desert border and both Baghdad and Washington have accused Damascus of not doing enough to stop the flow of foreign Arab fighters.

Moallem spoke at the end of a day that saw suspected Sunni Muslim bombers kill at least 33 Shiites and the kidnapping of a deputy health minister ?- believed the senior-most government official abducted in Iraq. Many Sunni attackers are believed to have infiltrated from Syria.

A suicide bomber in the predominantly Shiite city of Hillah south of Baghdad lured men to his KIA minivan with promises of a day's work as laborers, then blew it up, killing at least 22 and wounding 44, police said.

Babil province police Capt. Muthana Khalid said three suspected terrorists, two Egyptians and an Iraqi, were arrested on suspicion of planning the suicide attack with the bomber, a Syrian.

Within hours, a roadside bomb and two car bombs exploded one after another near a bus station in Mashtal, a mostly Shiite area of southeastern Baghdad, killing 11 and wounding 51, police said.

Besides the victims of the bombings in Hillah and Baghdad, at least 23 other people were killed nationwide. In addition, the bodies of 56 murder victims, many of them tortured, were dumped in three Iraqi cities, 45 of them in Baghdad alone.

Also Sunday, gunmen kidnapped Iraq's deputy health minister from his home in northern Baghdad, the Iraqi army and police reported. They said the gunmen wore police uniforms and arrived in seven vehicles to abduct Ammar al-Saffar, a Shiite.

Al-Saffar was snatched nearly a week after dozens of suspected Shiite militia gunmen in police uniforms kidnapped scores of people from a Ministry of Higher Education office in Baghdad. That ministry is predominantly Sunni.

In the deep south of Iraq, security forces searching for five private security contractors, four Americans and an Austrian who were kidnapped near the Kuwait border, detained about 200 suspected insurgents, police said Sunday. Police Maj. Gen. Ali al-Moussawi said none of the hostages was found.

Family members identified one of the American captives as Jonathon Cote, 23, a native of Getzville, N.Y. He worked as a security guard for Crescent Security Group, his stepmother said. Family members spoke to The Associated Press anonymously out of fear for Cote's safety. A second captive was identified late last week as Paul Reuben, 39, a former police officer from a Minneapolis, Minn., suburb.

In one of the most significant diplomatic breakthrough since the ouster of Saddam, a restoration of contacts between Damascus and Baghdad was seen as a means of convincing Damascus to exert tighter control over its border.

The frontier has been a major crossing point for Sunni Arab fighters who infiltrated to join the insurgency that has been responsible for the deaths of most U.S. soldiers since the American led invasion in 2003.

Fighters for Al-Qaida in Iraqi and allied terror groups, who also have crossed from Syria, have killed hundreds of Americans as well as tens of thousands of Iraqis in bombings, drive-by shootings and mortar attacks.

Syria broke diplomatic ties with Iraq in 1982, accusing Iraq of inciting riots by the banned Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. Damascus also sided with Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Trade ties were restored in 1997.

In addition to Baghdad and Washington's complaints about poor border control, the two countries have blasted Syria for supporting the insurgency by allowing Saddam loyalists to take refuge in Damascus to organize financing and arms shipments. Syria denies the charges.

A U.S. blue ribbon panel on Iraq, led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Democrat Rep. Lee Hamilton, will soon release recommendations on how to avoid the collapse of an increasingly violent and chaotic Iraq.

The proposals were expected to include openings to Syrian and Iran in a bid to internationalize efforts to clamp the sectarian conflict.

Iran is believed to be financing and arming Shiite militias in Iraq who have engaged insurgents and Sunni civilians in civil-war style conflict in Baghdad and surround cities and towns. Many of the Shiite militia fighters were trained by Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard.

Even as diplomacy gained some traction, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who negotiated an end to the Vietnam War more than 30 years ago, said a conventional victory was no longer an option for Washington.

"If you mean, by 'military victory,' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible," he told the BBC's Sunday AM program.

Kissinger has also said Iran and Syria need to be drawn into efforts to curb violence.

By luring workers to his bomb in Hillah, the suicide attacker used a technique has been employed repeatedly in poor Shiite regions throughout Iraq where unemployment is especially high and men often must hire themselves out daily to feed their families. Sunday is a working day in mostly Muslim Iraq.

"The sudden explosion shook the whole area and shattered the windows of a store where I was standing," said Muhsin Hadi Alwan, 33, one of the wounded jobseekers. "The ground was covered with the remains of people and blood, and survivors ran in all directions."

"How will I feed the six members of my family when I return home without work and without money?" Alwan asked.

The U.S. military announced that five-days of joint operations with Iraqi forces in the region between Tikrit and Kirkuk killed nearly 50 Sunni insurgent fighters and led to the capture of 20. The announcement detailed the discovery of huge arms caches, usable portions of which were turned over to the Iraqi army to equip its soldiers. The military did not say when the operation began or ended nor precisely where it took place.

U.S. and Iraqi forces also killed 12 insurgents, detained 11 and freed eight Iraqi hostages during raids in Baqouba and two villages near Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, police said. Iraqi forces also killed a local al-Qaida in Iraq leader and his son in a village 60 miles north of Baghdad.

go to google, type in "wmd found in iraq".

In fact, the long-awaited report, authored by Charles Duelfer, who advises the director of central intelligence on Iraqi weapons, says Iraq's WMD program was essentially destroyed in 1991 and Saddam ended Iraq's nuclear program after the 1991 Gulf War.

The Iraq Survey Group report, released Wednesday, is 1,200 to 1,500 pages long.

The massive report does say, however, that Iraq worked hard to cheat on United Nations-imposed sanctions and retain the capability to resume production of weapons of mass destruction at some time in the future.

"[Saddam] wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted," a summary of the report says.

Duelfer, testifying at a Senate hearing on the report, said his account attempts to describe Iraq's weapons programs "not in isolation but in the context of the aims and objectives of the regime that created and used them."

"I also have insisted that the report include as much basic data as reasonable and that it be unclassified, since the tragedy that has been Iraq has exacted such a huge cost for so many for so long," Duelfer said.

The report was released nearly two years ago to the day that President Bush strode onto a stage in Cincinnati and told the audience that Saddam Hussein's Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons" and "is seeking nuclear weapons."

"The danger is already significant and it only grows worse with time," Bush said in the speech delivered October 7, 2002. "If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today -- and we do -- does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?"

Speaking on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania, Bush maintained Wednesday that the war was the right thing to do and that Iraq stood out as a place where terrorists might get weapons of mass destruction.

"There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks, and in the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take," Bush said.

But Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, seized on the report as political ammunition against the Bush administration.

"Despite the efforts to focus on Saddam's desires and intentions, the bottom line is Iraq did not have either weapon stockpiles or active production capabilities at the time of the war," Rockefeller said in a press release.

"The report does further document Saddam's attempts to deceive the world and get out from under the sanctions, but the fact remains, the sanctions combined with inspections were working and Saddam was restrained."

But British Prime Minister Tony Blair had just the opposite take on the information in the report, saying it demonstrated the U.N. sanctions were not working and Saddam was "doing his best" to get around them.

He said the report made clear that there was "every intention" on Saddam's part to develop WMD and he "never had any intention of complying with U.N. resolutions."

At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee Wednesday, panel Chairman John Warner, R-Virginia, called the findings "significant."

"While the ISG has not found stockpiles of WMD, the ISG and other coalition elements have developed a body of fact that shows that Saddam Hussein had, first, the strategic intention to continue to pursue WMD capabilities; two, created ambiguity about his WMD capabilities that he used to extract concessions in the international world of disclosure and discussion and negotiation.

"He used it as a bargaining tactic and as a strategic deterrent against his neighbors and others."

"As we speak, over 1,700 individuals -- military and civilian -- are in Iraq and Qatar, continuing to search for facts about Iraq's WMD programs," Warner said.

But Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the committee, said 1,750 experts have visited 1,200 potential WMD sites and have come up empty-handed.

"It is important to emphasize that central fact because the administration's case for going to war against Iraq rested on the twin arguments that Saddam Hussein had existing stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and that he might give weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda to attack us -- as al Qaeda had attacked us on 9/11," Levin said.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, asked Duelfer about the future likelihood of finding weapons of mass destruction, to which Duelfer replied, "The chance of finding a significant stockpile is less than 5 percent."

Based in part on interviews with Saddam, the report concludes that the deposed Iraqi president wanted to acquire weapons of mass destruction because he believed they kept the United States from going all the way to Baghdad during the first Gulf War and stopped an Iranian ground offensive during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, senior administration officials said.

U.S. officials said the Duelfer report is "comprehensive," but they are not calling it a "final report" because there are still some loose ends to tie up.

One outstanding issue, an official said, is whether Iraq shipped any stockpiles of weapons outside of the country. Another issue, he said, is mobile biological weapons labs, a matter on which he said "there is still useful work to do."

Duelfer said Wednesday his teams found no evidence of a mobile biological weapons capability.

The U.S. official said he believes Saddam decided to give up his weapons in 1991, but tried to conceal his nuclear and biological programs for as long as possible. Then in 1995, when his son-in-law Hussain Kamal defected with information about the programs, he gave those up, too.

Iraq's nuclear program, which in 1991 was well-advanced, "was decaying" by 2001, the official said, to the point where Iraq was -- if it even could restart the program -- "many years from a bomb."

U.S. investigators hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have found no evidence that such material was moved to Syria for safekeeping before the war, according to a final report of the investigation released yesterday.

LoneStarMadam wrote:

go to google, type in "wmd found in iraq".

Ironically, the first search results that show up with this query are

- FOXNews.com - Report: Hundreds of WMDs Found in Iraq

and

- CIA's final report: No WMD found in Iraq





Anyways, I hope you're not suggesting that the mightiest nation on Earth has gone to war over defunct pre-Gulf-War-I munitions. I know that you've identified yourself as right of the neocons, but that would be truly pathetic!

Why isn't FNC acceptable to you? I'm sure Al Jazeera nor MoveOn would have that story, sorry.
Is that the same CIA that said there were WMDs in Iraq? The same ones that told BC & this president that WMDs was in Iraq?

JTT wrote:

LoneStarMadam wrote:

That is your opinion, which you have every right to, others may differ.

No, Madam, that is fact. Follow the facts. No WMDs, no connection to Al Quaeda, no UN security council approval, UN inspectors within the country doing their job, USA inspectors there after finding nothing.

It is immoral to kill thousands of innocents based on a pack of lies.

No, it's your fact There have been WMDs found, a connection has been proven, & we don't need the UNs approval. As soon as a UN station got hit in Baghdad, the UN sledaddled out of there.
The UN, in fact, didn't do anything about the 17 UN resolutions that Saddam broke, & he fired at our pilots on a daliy basis before we went in. Now maybe you think it's ok for our planes to get shot at by an enemy & we do nothing, I certainly do not.

Fox News does not lean to the right, IMO, it's because all of the others lean so far to the left making FNC lookas though they lean right.

What do you think the defunct pre-1991 munitions show us in regard to the claims the US government made about Iraq's nuclear capabilities in the run-up to the invasion?