Yes, George W. Bush knowingly mis-lead (lied) the American people into a war with Iraq. A career CIA officer in charge of Middle East intelligence has said Bush "cherry picked" the intelligence that he released to the public and Congress.
Your post is funny. I posted just recently excerpts from this same batch of information recently released where Saddam said specifically he had no WMDs. If Saddam had WMDs why didn't he use them on American forces? No one on this board has ever explained that. But I'd be happy to hear your reasoning on that fact.
Several government agencies investigated and found no ties between Saddam and Bin Laden. Did they ever have contact? Apparently. So what? Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. The UN weapons inspectors were on the ground in Iraq. They could have gotten the truth if Bush had not ordered them out of Iraq so he could invade. Two of the 9/11 highjackers were from Dubai and Bush was willing to turn some of our major seaports over to them! Why didn't he invade that country instead of Iraq? My emphasis; links to all article below.
The 9/11 commision said:
The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday that Osama bin Laden met with a top Iraqi official in 1994 but found "no credible evidence" of a link between Iraq and al-Qaida in attacks against the United States.
In a report based on research and interviews by the commission staff, the panel said that bin Laden explored possible cooperation with Saddam even though he opposed the Iraqi leader's secular regime and had, at one time, supported "anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan."
The commission staff said that bin Laden, at the urging of allies in Sudan eager to protect their own ties to Iraq, ceased the support in the early 1990s. That opened the way for a senior Iraqi intelligence officer to meet with bin Laden in 1994 in Sudan, a session at which bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps in Iraq as well as Iraqi assistance in procuring weapons.
But Iraq apparently never responded to bin Laden's request, the staff report said.
No 'collaborative relationship' seen It said that reports of subsequent contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship," and added that two unidentified senior bin Laden associates "have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al-Qaida and Iraq."
The report concluded, "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."
The panel's findings were released two days after Vice President Dick Cheney asserted that Saddam had "long-established ties" with al-Qaida. President Bush defended the statement in a news conference Tuesday, saying the presence in Iraq of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is accused of trying to disrupt the transfer of sovereignty as well as last month's decapitation of American Nicholas Berg, provides "the best evidence of connection to al-Qaida affiliates and al-Qaida."
In making the case for war in Iraq, Bush administration officials frequently cited what they said were Saddam's decade-long contacts with al-Qaida operatives. They stopped short of claiming that Iraq was directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, but critics say Bush officials left that impression with the American public."
In writing his book, Mickey Herskowitz spent a lot of time with Bush and he says:
"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade·.if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."
Bush's choice for Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'neill said:
"“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.
“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”
As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.
"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’" says O’Neill. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”
How they reacted to 9/11:
"(Retired General Wesley) Clark's assertion corroborates a little-noted CBS Evening News story that aired on September 4, 2002. As correspondent David Martin reported: "Barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, the secretary of defense was telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks." According to CBS, a Pentagon aide's notes from that day quote Rumsfeld asking for the "best info fast" to "judge whether good enough to hit SH at the same time, not only UBL." (The initials SH and UBL stand for Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.) The notes then quote Rumsfeld as demanding, ominously, that the administration's response "go massive...sweep it all up, things related and not."
Another White House insider, Richard Clark, says
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush ordered his then top anti-terrorism adviser to look for a link between Iraq and the attacks, despite being told there didn't seem to be one.
The charge comes from the adviser, Richard Clarke, in an exclusive interview on 60 Minutes.
The administration maintains that it cannot find any evidence that the conversation about an Iraq-9/11 tie-in ever took place. (Dis’s note here: first the White House declared this conversation never took place. But when Clark named two other individuals who were there at the time, the White House dropped it.)
Clarke also tells CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl that White House officials were tepid in their response when he urged them months before Sept. 11 to meet to discuss what he saw as a severe threat from al Qaeda.
Who’s Richard Clark?
“Clarke helped shape U.S. policy on terrorism under President Reagan and the first President Bush. He was held over by President Clinton to be his terrorism czar, then held over again by the current President Bush.”
You guys can spin and pretend all you want. But there's plenty of evidence that George W. Bush used the worst mainland attack on this country, the deaths of thousands of Americans, as an excuse for his own personal war. That you defend this unjust and illegal war speaks volumns about your character.
http://www.politiqueglobale.org/article.php3?id_article=843
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1028-01.htm
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1842
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/19/60minutes/main607356.shtml