Who Is Buried in Bush's Speech?

Thanks for the invite, Lola, I've been appreciating reading along with both posts here and following links.

I have tried to phrase my immediate reaction a few times and have had a hard time with it. Basically, my experience in management is telling me that there is one story behind closed doors, another for public consumption. Experience in management isn't necessary to see that, but that's what really jumps out at me, especially in the Washington Post article by the two Danas. Ari is saying one thing, Condi is saying something else, Bush is saying something else entirely.

What that says to me is that they are saying one thing in private, the "real" reasons, agreeing that they should say something else to the public, but are not coordinated enough in figuring out what their message IS. It's NOT _____, they're all agreed on that, but they spent too much time on _____ to adequately prepare the not-_____ message.

I was especially struck by the fact that Bush has shown no apparent remorse or displeasure with the fact that he said something inaccurate, while Ari is saying, ""I assure you, the president is not pleased... The president, of course, would not be pleased if he said something in the State of the Union that may or may not have been true and should not have risen to his level."

My own opinion is that Bush wanted Saddam out of power for some decent reasons (he's an all-around bad guy) and some not-decent reasons (SOME kind of decisive action post-9/11, etc.) The WMD thing came late in the game, and was used as a way to justify doing what he wanted to do anyway. The reports were cobbled together quickly, not as a basis for the decision to go to war (which had been made), but as a marketing tool. As a marketing tool, they served their purpose, and as a marketing tool, it didn't matter if they were factual. Bush is unperturbed. Ari sees a few steps further, sees the cynicism behind Bush being unperturbed, and tries to color it differently. Forgot to tell the boss to adhere to the script, though.

Bush reminds me of someone who commits a heinous crime and has no remorse. I am beginning to believe he has no conscience and does not understand right from wrong. He would be found unfit for trial because of mental deficiency.
I should hope that they give IQ tests to candidates for presidency. This one seems to be hovering between idiot and moron.

The Buck stops where?

Tony Blair is the 'real' fall guy. This president has no shame. c.i.

Officials: CIA Got Documents After Claim
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ats-ap_top11jul16,1,2418147.story?coll=chi-news-hed

Officials: CIA Got Documents After Claim
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
Associated Press Writer
July 16, 2003, 5:22 PM CDT

WASHINGTON -- When the Bush administration issued its pre-war claims that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa, the CIA had not yet obtained the documents that served as a key foundation for the allegation and later turned out to be forged, U.S. officials say.

The CIA didn't receive the documents until February 2003, nearly a year after the agency first began investigating the alleged Iraq-Africa connection and a short time after it assented to language in President Bush's State of the Union address that alleged such a connection, the officials said.

Without the source documents, the CIA could investigate only their substance, which it had learned from a foreign government around the beginning of 2002. One of the key allegations was that Iraq was soliciting uranium from the African country of Niger.

Even as the CIA found little to verify the reports, Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to put them into public statements. Sometimes CIA succeeded in getting the information removed.

For instance, the agency tried to have the Niger reference removed from a State Department fact sheet in December 2002, but the document was published before the change could be made, one U.S. intelligence official told The Associated Press, speaking only on condition of anonymity.

CIA Director George J. Tenet spoke in closed session to the Senate Committee on Intelligence about the matter Wednesday.

The discredited documents at the center of the controversy are a series of letters purportedly between officials in Iraq and Niger. The letters indicated Niger would supply uranium to the government of Saddam Hussein in a form that could be refined for nuclear weapons.

"Big questions remain about who forged the documents and the paper trail that followed," Rep. Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said this week.

The CIA declined to say how the agency eventually obtained the documents. Officials at several other U.S. agencies, including the State Department, declined to say whether another U.S. government agency possessed or viewed them before Bush's speech last January.

After the CIA received the documents, the government provided them to the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, which quickly determined them to be forgeries. The U.N. Security Council was alerted March 7, two weeks before American and British forces invaded Iraq.

But the documents had already been used for public claims in at least two places: the Dec. 19 State Department fact sheet and Bush's Jan. 28 address, in which he uttered the line: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

When the Niger claim first arose, the CIA sent a retired diplomat to Africa to investigate in February 2002. The diplomat, Joseph Wilson, reported finding no credible evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger.

Tenet said the CIA was unaware of any documents purporting to show such transactions at the time, and it is unclear when the U.S. government learned that the documents existed and were the source of the Niger claim.

The CIA's doubts about the uranium claim were reported through routine intelligence traffic throughout the government, one U.S. intelligence official said. Those doubts were also reported to the British.

The Niger report, along with a notation that it was unconfirmed, was also included in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the classified summary of intelligence on Iraq. Tenet said the report was not a key part of the CIA's judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.

On Jan. 28, 2003, the Africa allegation went into the State of the Union address. As the speech was being written, CIA officials protested the line, so the administration changed it to attribute it to British intelligence instead of U.S. intelligence. Tenet said last week it should have been removed.

In recent weeks, the Bush administration has offered a number of defenses for using the statement:

* The CIA should have had it removed.

* It was based on more intelligence information than the Niger letter.

* It was technically true because it was attributed to British intelligence.

* It wasn't the reason the United States invaded Iraq.

The uranium claim didn't appear in Colin Powell's address to the United Nations on Feb. 5.

It first surfaced in a Sept. 24, 2002, British dossier, which said Iraq "sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The Blair administration says it did not view the now-discredited documents until October 2002, after the publication of the dossier.

Blair told the House of Commons Wednesday that "the intelligence on which we based this was not the so-called forged documents." The Blair administration has not detailed its other intelligence.

Bush administration officials have also said other information pointed to possible Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But Tenet has called these reports "fragmentary" -- a term in intelligence circles for unconfirmed information of suspect accuracy.

The chain of possession of the forged documents remains unclear. The apparent forger has also not been identified.

The documents were first acquired in Rome, a Bush administration official said. Another administration official said the Italian government possessed them.

In a carefully worded statement, the Italians this week denied providing the documents themselves to the U.S. or British governments, but the head of an Italian parliamentary intelligence committee said Wednesday that Italy may have passed on the disputed claims informally.

"This is possible," committee chief Enzo Bianco said. "I don't rule it out."

French diplomatic sources told AP on Wednesday the French government never possessed the documents but did have suspicions Iraq was seeking nuclear material from Niger.

Associate Press writers Pamela Sampson in Paris, Tom Rachman in Rome and Robert Barr in London contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press

Except for my peace sign, I don't like to have bumper stickers on my car. But I think it's time to trot out a nice succinct little one which reads, "Someone else for president." I suspect it will have more effect in this Republican area than a Dean or Kerry or Kucinich sticker. I suspect a lot of Republicans are wishing some (any!!) other Republican would challenge Bush.

[] Iraq: Yellowcake Aside, How Real was the Rest?
Besides the intelligence the Administration knew was bad, it's worth examining the intel they assumed was good 
[]
Wednesday, Jul. 16, 2003
The Niger yellowcake uranium imbroglio concerns a piece of intelligence Washington knew was bad that was nonetheless restated in President Bush's State of the Union address. A bureaucratic snafu, says the Bush Administration, and one which doesn't detract at all from the case for war; in fact it was hardly a significant part of that case in the first place. Indeed. But three months after taking control of Iraq, the deeper question looming on the horizon is less how one item of bad intelligence slipped into a keynote speech than how so much of the intelligence the Administration had believed was solid appears to have been rather liquid, even gaseous.

Article puts all the other falsehoods or intelligence lapses in perspective worth a read.

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/karon/article/0,9565,465087,00.html

au, Got a nice American Express ad, and nothing else.

c.i.
Try again. I had no problem. You may have been getting spam.

Dys,

Sorry to have offended your tender sensibilities.........but you know, sometimes you mens can be real whiners. But I love you all anyway, even if you are all home with your wives. (not)

Who started this penis analogy anyway? Sofia, I believe that was you. If has served a very useful purpose. It's been a good fit. Because the question seems to be about whether it's fake or real. And once it's employed, how well does it do it's job. It's provided lots of entertainment today. May we all be happy with what we are able to get for ourselves. :wink:

Tartarin,

I agree with you about Rove serving as a replacement for Bush's questionable anatomy. He's (Rove's) been selling Machiavellian tactics for a long time. How I hope it's finally caught up with him. If not now, eventually. :wink:

Got it, but is sounds like so much rehash of all the stuff we've heard over and over. c.i.

Yes, c.i., we need more. Because I believe there's much more to this story and it should be easy to find it, if only the press will stop cowering and do their job. Why has it taken so long?

James Schlessinger tonight, on the PBS Newshour, said he admired george Tenet, who was taking the rap. Is another one who says Tenet fell on his sword. He and Albright were on, and they agreed about where the buck stops. It was interesting. These two are not outsiders; they have been involved in inner circle White House affairs for years. Albright made a point of saying that the State of the Union Address is the most heavily vetted speech - that they used to call it "State of the Onion" because of all the layers. They each said the protestations of ignorance really couldn't be believed. But the implications were very plain about Tenet taking the fall - that this may be misguideed loyalty, but still......... If Schlessinger, who was a Nixon man, a Ford man, a republican all the way, could sound like this, I suspect some other top republicans may also - there was almost a sense of betrayal included in the way he was talking.

Lola - good penis analogy. I had also thought that pix of Bush was strange, until my husband explained to me about the proper placement of equipment on the body (he was in the same part of service)> Which, of course, does lead one to wonder about those rumors of Bush and the service.

I don't know if you've seen something else that's been making email rounds for a while. It's about the condom being the new emblem of the republican party.

Mama, I haven't seen this one yet. Did you hear the story about Bush making a mistake with his flight suit? He didn't know to take something off or something, which made him walk funny. Am I the only one who heard this? I think it was on CNN. Some interview.

Mamaj -- I do like your new avatar. Very Magritte or son of Magritte. Or Zen Magritte.

Agree wholeheartedly with Sozobe's comment about the lack of apology, remorse. Though in all honesty I'm also glad. There are quite a few people out there, I'm pretty sure, who would have been won over by an apology. The absence of one makes things worse for Bush, which is just fine with me.

The chances of Bush apologizing are zero. Not least of all because the chances of him admitting a mistake is zero. As smart as Rove is, his smarts are of the Machiavellian sort - manipulation, defence by attack, never giving an inch to an oponent, etc. But he is very stupid about the values of honesty and integrity. The state of the economy (Greenspan today spoke against continuing deficit budgets) will hurt Bush, but it is this blind spot of Rove's that leaves Bush most open.

Um i kinda think Machiavelli would have known that sometimes you win by taking a loss on the chin thereby gaining respect, but thats way beyond Rove and Bush thinks Machiavelli comes al fredo.

Yes, Rove and Bush are strictly from the Machiavelli Made Simple school................

Machiavelli sliced VERY thin and served with artichokes + aioli and a dry white lambrusco can be quite good. Likewise, immediate apologies can be very valuable politically (and don't leave you with garlic breath).