Tag: Iraq

Raw Story:

…As a bipartisan investigation into prewar intelligence heats up, some key Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), have unearthed unreported evidence that indicates Congress was misled. This evidence includes [former CIA Director George] Tenet’s testimony before Congress, dissenting views from the scientific community and statements made by members of the administration in early 2001.

Tenet told Congress in February 2001 that Iraq was “probably” pursuing chemical and biological weapons programs but that the CIA had no direct evidence that Iraq had actually obtained such weapons. However, such caveats as “may” and “probably” were removed from intelligence reports by key members of the Bush administration immediately after 9/11 when discussing Iraq…

In fact, more than two dozen pieces of testimony and interviews of top officials in the Bush administration, including those given by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz prior to 9-11, show that the U.S. never believed Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to anyone other than his own people.

On “Face the Nation” in 2001, then Sec. of State Colin Powell said, “We have been able to keep weapons from going into Iraq … We have been able to keep the sanctions in place to the extent that items that might support weapons of mass destruction development have had some controls.”

Around that same time, Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld agred with Powell in a Fox News interview: “Iraq is probably not a nuclear threat at the present time.”

Within a year, these guys were singing a different tune – but these earlier statements put the lie to the White House’s current claims that “everybody” believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

When the Bush-Cheney-Rove juggernaut was at full force, the splinter groups within the GOP were held together by their fear of reprisal and retribution from the White House. Now that the public has gotten wise to the Bush team’s flimflaming of America, the Republicans in Congress are coming undone:

In an August Washington Post-ABC News poll, a solid 85 percent of GOP moderates approved of the job George W. Bush was doing as president, including 60 percent who “strongly approved.” By early November, overall support had dropped 24 points among moderates, and only 30 percent remained strong backers. In contrast, overall support among Republican conservatives has held steady.

It’s not just Bush who is getting lackluster reviews. While 74 percent of conservatives say Republicans in Congress are doing a good job, backing falls to 54 percent among GOP moderates, down 22 points from early summer. About one-third of moderates say their party’s leadership is taking them in the wrong direction.

One potential wedge is the role of conservative religious groups in determining the party’s agenda. In the most recent Post-ABC News poll, 44 percent of GOP moderates said that conservative religious groups have “too much influence” in the Bush administration, compared with 17 percent who thought those groups didn’t hold enough sway. About a third saw religious conservatives as appropriately influential.

What was he thinking? We can only assume that Bush/Rove message team meant the president’s Veteran’s Day speech today to play to their pro-military base. Maybe it worked. Perhaps using a solemn occasion to launch a counter-attack against his political enemies successfully rallied the hyper-patriotic guts and glorys crowd.

For everybody else, it came across as inappropriate. And that’s the problem with constantly having to shore up your base: You risk alienating Independent voters.

Typically, the president defends himself against charges of lying by telling more lies. From ThinkProgress:

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.

ThinkProgress offers back up and sourcing on each of these facts on their site:

• Dissent From White House Claims on Iraq Nuclear Program Consistently Withheld from Congress:
• Sen. Kerrey: Bush “Has Much More Access” to Intel Than Congress:
• Rockefeller: PDBs, CIA Intel Withheld From Senate:
• War Supporter Ken Pollack: White House Engaged in “Creative Omission” of Iraq Intel:
• White House Had Exclusive Access to “Unique” Intel Sources:

Blame game: Earlier this week, CNN reported that the Bush White House will go on the offensive to counter accusations that they lied about the reasons for war by implicating that the Democrats colluded with them in their deception of the American public.

As Buzzflash put it:

On Veterans Day, on the defensive (a good sign), Bush is going to claim Democrats saw the same intelligence on Iraq he did. Well, not really, because he saw the intelligence before it was “fixed.” The Democrats saw it after Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Bush manipulated the intelligence and forced the CIA to come up with speculation, no matter how doubtful, and turn it into propaganda factoids — along with assistance from Rumsfeld’s “little neo-con elves of deception” shop over at the Defense Department. So the Democrats voted to authorize Bush to go to war based on lies and only if all U.N. options were exhausted, which they weren’t.

There’s another lie that the GOP echo chamber is floating – and, as is typical, it floated out of Wolf Blitzer’s mouth on CNN last week – and that is that the Democrats in Congress saw the contents of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE).

In a news conference a few days ago, three Democratic senators – Dianne Feinstein, Dick Durbin and Jay Rockefeller, the vice-chairman of the Intelligence Committee – flatly refuted that assertion that they were routinely briefed on the contents of the NIE.

Saddam did it first: Evidence from a number of international sources is mounting that U.S. troops used chemical weapons in Fallujah during some of the hardest combat of the Iraq War. Please recall that, besides the dangerous imaginary yellowcake uranium he didn’t buy from Niger, Saddam also mustard-gassed Kurdish villages in the 1988 — part of our rationale for Operation Who’s Your Daddy and apparently for using weapons banned by interational treaty.

The Independent of London provides an overview of many of the reports that chemical weapons were used in Fallujah on both insurgents and civilians, though the alleged chemical assaults were not reported by any Western media. A documentary by Italian state television network RAI called “Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre” was released recently and documents, through video and interviews with former U.S. soldiers, how the United States used white phosphorus during the fighting in Fallujah.

The allegations focus on white phosphorus, which apparently melts the skin while leaving clothing intact.

A biologist in Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq, interviewed for the film, says: “A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-coloured substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact.”

The documentary also gives evidence that a new, better napalm, called Mark 77, was also used in Fallujah — a direct violation of United Nations weapons conventions.

Not surprisingly, the Bush administration has fervently denied any and all allegations related to the use of chemical warfare, and, if its past behavior is any indication, is likely to continue to do so in the face of mounting evidence.

Whatever works: The maneuver by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and company to unilaterally call the Senate into closed session yesterday turns out to have been quite effective.

The move clearly knocked the Republican Leader Bill Frist off his game. His performance before the cameras in the minutes before the closed session began is just further proof that he lacks the temperament for anything but the coddled life of a millionaire. (It’s amazing that such an emotionally unstable person could be a heart surgeon!)

As many of us recall from the half-dozen or so closed sessions held by the Senate during the impeachment trial of President Clinton, what goes on in the closed session stays there. So it may be a while before we learn what the Democrats said to the Republicans that made the majority party do a 180 on their failed investigation into the faulty intelligence that led us into the Iraq war.

Whatever it was the Dems said must have worked:

Republicans condemned the Democrats’ maneuver, which marked the first time in more than 25 years that one party had insisted on a closed session without consulting the other party. But within two hours, Republicans appointed a bipartisan panel to report on the progress of a Senate intelligence committee report on prewar intelligence, which Democrats say has been delayed for nearly a year.

The closed session manevuer also worked in another important way: It gave American liberals something to cheer about.

Lying, Italian-style: In the run-up to the Iraq war, President Bush had so few supporters among European leaders that it’s hard not to remember who they were: Tony Blair in the U.K. and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

But now, on the eve of his visit to Washington – and with his poll numbers at home tanking as much as Bush’s are here – Berlusconi is lying about his attitude toward Bush’s harebrained crusade to conquer Islam:

For years, he has been one of President Bush’s most loyal supporters in Europe, a leader who steadfastly backed the U.S.-led war in Iraq and one of the few on the continent to send troops to help out.

So it came as something of a surprise this weekend when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi revealed his reservations about the war, on the eve of a visit to Washington no less.

“I tried repeatedly to convince the American president not to go to war,” Berlusconi told an interviewer with the La7 television channel. “I was never convinced that war was the best system to achieve democracy in a country that had to emerge from a bloody dictatorship. I maintained that military action should be avoided.”

This is a prime example of how conservative corruption does not respect international boundaries – and of how rats desert each other when the ship is sinking.

Lacking authority: Within the last hour, the cablers went live for a speech by President Bush in which he urged the United Nations to hold Syria accountable for aiding terrorists and for the assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri.

On substance: An investigation by the U.N. confirmed that Hariri’s murder was engineered inside the Syrian government. How – or whether – Syria experiences consequences from this is an open question.

On style: Worst. Speech. Ever. Does he even bother to read the text beforehand? He comes off as being completely unprepared. His speechifying – the loud, almost shouting, staccato delivery – is like a caricature of Capt. James T. Kirk. Has he never watched a replay of himself giving a speech? Does he have any idea how unpleasant that is to listen to?

Obviously, by sounding tough on Syria, Team Bush hopes to reignite some of their long lost swagger. Problem is, if you’re going to swagger, you’d better produce results. They have only produced a crisis.

We are landlords in the Middle East, thanks to Mr. Bush. When neighboring governments have their political rivals rubbed out, we can’t afford to treat it like business as usual. With Bush team in charge, however, we could very well end up igniting a second front in the terror wars.

As I listened to the president, I realized that we are experiencing a crisis of leadership. The credibility of the man who serves as the Leader of the Free World is damaged beyond repair, both at home and abroad. We can no longer trust him, or his message.

Great crises often bring out great leaders. We can only hope that this crisis produces a great leader sooner than later.