Tag: Iraq

Cheney’s Five Deferments Vs. Murtha’s Distinguished Service

Jon Ponder

Vice President Cheney’s five deferments from the Vietnam War draft:

  • 1st deferment: Cheney enrolled in Casper Community College in January 1963 — he turned 22 that month — and sought his first student deferment on March 20.
  • 2nd deferment: (student), after transferring to the University of Wyoming on July 23, 1963.
  • 3rd deferment:(student)on Oct. 14, 1964.
  • 4th deferment: attended graduate school at the University of Wyoming on Nov. 1, 1965.
  • 5th deferment: On Oct. 6, 1965, the Selective Service lifted its ban against drafting married men who had no children. Nine months and two days later, Cheney had his first daughter. Cheney applied for 3-A status, the ”hardship”exemption, which excluded men with children or dependent parents. It was granted.

And then there’s Rep. Jack Murtha:

A hawkish Democrat war hero with a highly decorated 37-year career in the U.S. Marine Corps. He volunteered for Vietnam in ’66-’67 and received two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star with Combat “V”. Retired from the Marine Corps Reserve as a colonel in 1990. Awarded the Navy Distinguished Service Medal by the Marine Corps Commandant when he retired. Well-respected by both parties for his first-hand knowledge of military and defense issues, of which he has dutifully served and advised both Republican and Democratic presidents. One of the most effective advocates for a strong national defense. A ranking member and former chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. This rare combination of experience enables him to understand defense and military operations from every perspective. So when Murtha opens his mouth to speak, everyone listens intently.

“Potted Plant” Rumsfeld Cautions Against Speaking Out

Trish

Sec. Of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was so adept at bobbing and weaving to avoid responsibility on ABC’s This Week that Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria later said he made it sound as if his role in Iraq up to now is like that of a “potted plant.”

Indeed, listening to Rumsfeld, he had nothing to do with anything, ever. Unless it was good, and then it’s probably attributable to him and/or the Bush administration. If it was bad it’s because of Congress, impatient or disloyal Americans, and/or terrorists-insurgents. He’s only the secretary of defense, for crying out loud, what can he do?

Would he have still advocated invading had he known there were no weapons of mass distruction, Stephanopoulos asked. I didn’t advocate it, Rumsfeld answered, because the president never asked me. So was he not in favor of it? The president knew his feelings on the matter.

Did we have too few troops going in and do we still? That decision was always up to military leaders. So if they wanted more, as they have publicly stated, they could have them? A formal request from one of the three commanders of the Iraq war has never been formally turned down.

And on, and on. Rumsfeld played both sides of the net so exhaustively he was able to change the direction of the ball in midair, without it even touching the racket.

Rumsfeld just wants the questions to go away, even if it means making veiled threats, or as lapdog Jean Schmidt demonstrated, performing character assassination.

“We have to all have the willingness to have a free debate, but we also all have to have the willingness to understand what the effects of our words are,” he said.

He should know. The lies and distortions of the Bush administration have reaped horrific effects. Mere words can do that. And the unwillingness to debate first, then act with restraint and certainty later, is deadly.

Bush Knew Curveball’s Intelligence on WMD Was Wrong

Jon Ponder

Powell knew too: The man who was the principal source for President Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was so emotionally and mentally disturbed that he was considered unreliable.

The Bush Conundrum:
When they cited the faulty intelligence, were they merely being incompetent or was it treason?

Now the Los Angeles Times reports that U.S. government officials, including the president, knew that the source, code named “Curveball,” was unbalanced and yet repeatedly cited his unreliable intelligence in the run-up to war.

Curveball was captured by the Germans and is under their control. A German official who supervised the suspect’s interrogation described his mental state this way:

“He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy… He is not a completely normal person.”

Furthermore, “the White House … ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball’s account. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq’s biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years.”

The president knowingly cited Curveball’s phony intelligence in his January 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had “mobile biological weapons labs” designed to produce “germ warfare agents.” Bush cited the mobile germ factories in at least four prewar speeches and statements, and other world leaders repeated the charge.

In a presentation before the U.N. a month later, Sec. of State Colin Powell also referred to Curveball’s intelligence as providing an “eyewitness account” that Iraq had sufficient germ stockpiles to kill “thousands and thousands” of people.

How is it possible that the president and the secretary of state did not know that Curveball was a flake and that information sourced to him was inoperative? Or did they know and choose to use it anyway because it supported their campaign to market the war?

These question brings us once again to the Bush conundrum: When the president and the secretary of state cited the faulty intelligence, were they merely being incompetent or was it treason?

‘Mean Jean’ Didn’t Know Murtha Was a Marine

Jon Ponder

Clueless: Apparently, Rep. Jean Schmidt did not know that Rep. Jack Murtha was a Marine and a Vietnam war vet when she called him a coward on the House floor last Friday:

Several Republicans who were on the House floor said afterward that Ms. Schmidt did not appear to know she was referring to a much-decorated veteran.

“The poor lady didn’t know Jack Murtha was a Marine – she really just ran into a hornet’s nest,” said Representative Jack Kingston of Georgia.

Representative David Dreier of California said, “Very clearly, she did not know that Jack Murtha was a Marine.”

How could she not know this? Every news report about Murtha’s about-face on Iraq mentioned his status as a pro-military Dem.

She’s called “mean Jean” back home in Cincinatti, which is nicer than the more accurate “stupid Jean,” we suppose.

GOP M.O. – If You’re Caught Lying Accuse Your Accusers of Lying

Jon Ponder

Also works for fifth-graders: Vice President Dick Cheney has set a new low standard for senior government officials who tell lies. In the run-up to the war in Iraq, he looked into cameras and lied to the American people about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities and other matters. He has also made knowingly false statements to the public about the conditions in Iraq.

Now that most Americans have caught onto him – his approval rating is in the mid-20’s, according to a recent poll – he has gone on the offensive by sharply accusing his critics of being exactly what he is – and notice that his boss, the Worst President Ever – is chiming in too:

Vice President Dick Cheney is joining President Bush and other Republicans in accusing Democrats of foul play for asserting that the administration misrepresented intelligence to build support for taking the nation to war in Iraq.

Cheney said Wednesday the accusation is “one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city.”

“Some of the most irresponsible comments have, of course, come from politicians who actually voted in favor of authorizing force against
Saddam Hussein,” Cheney told the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, a conservative policy group.

“I agree with the vice president,” Bush said Thursday in South Korea when asked about Cheney’s remarks. “I think people ought to be allowed to ask questions. It is irresponsible to say that I deliberately misled the American people.

McCain: Telling the Truth About Torture

Buck Banks

Wages of sadism: In this week’s Newsweek cover story, Sen. John McCain weighs into the current fray surrounding whether, how and whether we should torture detainees, suspects or armed insurgents. His position is opposite that of pro-torturers George Bush and Dick Cheney, as one would expect from a man who was tortured for years by the Viet Cong while in captivity during the Vietnam War.

His reasoning is simple: torture is inhumane and so violates and denigrates our moral superiority in war, and it produces bad intelligence. Here are some of McCain’s main points:

  • In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear—whether it is true or false—if he believes it will relieve his suffering.
  • Mistreatment of enemy prisoners endangers our own troops who might someday be held captive.
  • This is a war of ideas, a struggle to advance freedom in the face of terror in places where oppressive rule has bred the malevolence that creates terrorists. Prisoner abuses exact a terrible toll on us in this war of ideas.
  • It is indispensable to our success in this war that those we ask to fight it know that in the discharge of their dangerous responsibilities to their country they are never expected to forget that they are Americans, and the valiant defenders of a sacred idea of how nations should govern their own affairs and their relations with others—even our enemies.

I hope McCain’s reasonable and moral argument will find traction in Congress and that his anti-torture bill will pass. But I fear that the sadists in charge are so dehumanized that they cannot stop the whip.

Team Bush Is Lying about Their Position on Torture – and the MSM Is Letting Them Get Away with It (Again!)

Jon Ponder

Same as ever: They’re doing it again. The Mainstream Media is letting senior White Officials get away with a blatant and illogical inconsistency within their own statements – an inconsistency less generous observers might call a “lie.”

“What is at issue with the McCain [anti-torture] amendment is to try and deal in this issue of detainees and interrogations, and come up with an approach that both allows us to do what we need to do to defend the country against terrorist attack, and at the same time, make good on the president’s commitment that we will not torture and we will act within the bounds of law.”

The subject is torture and the gambit from the Bushites is familiar. One senior official makes a declarative statement, like this one from President Bush on Nov. 7: “We do not torture.”

Fine. That’s settled then, right?

Well, no. Very soon after the left hand says something definitive like this, the West Wing’s right hand says something that’s meant to contradict the definitive statement and muddy the water. Here’s Bush’s National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, attempting to “clarify” the president’s statement:

We have an obligation — the president has an obligation, the Congress has an obligation to do what we need to do to protect the people of the United States from terror attack.

But the president has said that while we’re going to be aggressive in that effort, we are going to do it consistent with law, consistent with our international obligations. That means we do not torture.

What is at issue with the McCain [anti-torture] amendment is to try and deal in this issue of detainees and interrogations, and come up with an approach that both allows us to do what we need to do to defend the country against terrorist attack, and at the same time, make good on the president’s commitment that we will not torture and we will act within the bounds of law…

It’s a difficult dilemma to know what to do in that circumstance to both discharge our responsibility to protect the American people from terrorist attack, and follow the president’s guidance of staying within the confines of law. These are difficult issue.

Of course, Blitzer failed to ask what everyone watching the interview was screaming at their televisions: Does the United States torture detainees? Based on what Hadley said, a cynical observer would have to say, yes.

And then there’s this from our Vice President, speaking soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks:

“We have to work… the dark side, if you will.”

These people are a menace to society.

Ritter: Iraqis Thwarted CIA-Organized Coup against Saddam in Clinton Era

Jon Ponder

Too bad it failed: In the mid-1990’s, the CIA infiltrated the UN’s weapons inspection efforts in Iraq and used their position to engineer a coup against Saddam Hussein. This is according to Scott Ritter – who was one of the actual weapons inspectors in Iraq at the time – in an interview that just went up on Buzzflash:

Iraqi intelligence discovered that the CIA was “using the inspection process to facilitate a coup d’etat by another group of Iraqis that was being handled by the CIA outside the framework of the weapons inspections.”

BuzzFlash: At some point during this process, Iraqi intelligence officers learned that the CIA was planning a coup. How exactly did they learn about the coup, and what happened as a result?

Scott Ritter: By … 1996, the Iraqis had put together a fairly sophisticated matrix of who the inspectors were and who they ultimately worked for. So whenever we submitted a roster of inspectors to the Iraqis, they were pretty locked in on what kind of inspection it would be, and what kind of emphasis there would be, and who on the inspection team they should be concerned about. So they have a good feel for that.

But the Mukhabarat [the Iraqi intelligence] also had to deal with aspects of protecting Saddam Hussein that had nothing to do with UNSCOM [weapons inspectors], such as the CIA’s own efforts to recruit people inside Iraq to target Saddam. And what the Mukhabarat did is they were tracking these two separate issues and found that there was crossover – that the CIA was using the inspection process to facilitate a coup d’etat by another group of Iraqis that was being handled by the CIA outside the framework of the weapons inspections.

And the Iraqis tracked this. They infiltrated the coup and they pulled the plug on it, executed the plotters and terminated the CIA’s effort. But in the process, they got definitive proof that the CIA was using the inspection process as a vehicle not only to gather intelligence, but to trigger a coup d’etat. And it destroyed the integrity of the inspection process.

The CIA infiltration into the weapons inspection efforts – and its discovery by the Iraqis – dampered, if not ruined, the efficacy of U.N. weapons inspections in the future as a peaceful means for disarming predator states.

Ritter also believes that had the CIA undercover effort not been exposed the inspections might have worked:

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