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Who Is Lying About Iraq?

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Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.





The main "lie" that George W. Bush is accused of telling us is that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidiary "lie" that Iraq under Saddam's regime posed a two-edged mortal threat. On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even "imminent") possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against us or our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still more dangerous possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those who had already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom he was linked.
This entire scenario of purported deceit was given a new lease on life by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby stands accused of making false statements to the FBI and of committing perjury in testifying before a grand jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush administration had "outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The supposed purpose of leaking this classified information to the press was to retaliate against Mr. Wilson for having "debunked" (in his words) "the lies that led to war."

Now, as it happens, Mr. Libby was not charged with having outed Ms. Plame but only with having lied about when and from whom he first learned that she worked for the CIA. Moreover, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who brought the indictment against him, made a point of emphasizing that "this indictment is not about the war":

This indictment is not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.

This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person--a person, Mr. Libby--lied or not.

No matter. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke for a host of other opponents of the war in insisting:
This case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president.
Yet even stipulating--which I do only for the sake of argument--that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Mr. Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Mr. Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.
How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Mr. Tenet had the backing of all 15 agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that "Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions."

The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and--yes--France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix--who headed the U.N. team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past--lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:


The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km [105 miles] southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.
Mr. Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.




So, once again, did the British, the French and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the U.N. in the period leading up to the invasion. Mr. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as secretary of state. But Mr. Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did:

I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP--Ammunition Supply Point--with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.
Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Mr. Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, was convinced:


People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.
In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about:

Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.
But, according to Wilkerson:
The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this rpm, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?

In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Mr. Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.
Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written:


I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).
No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high confidence" was that "Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material." (Hard as it is to believe, let alone to reconcile with his general position, Joseph C. Wilson IV, in a speech he delivered three months after the invasion at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, offhandedly made the following remark: "I remain of the view that we will find biological and chemical weapons and we may well find something that indicates that Saddam's regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons.")




But the consensus on which Mr. Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Bill Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.
Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:

Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.
Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:

He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.
Finally, Mr. Clinton's secretary of defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.
Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Mr. Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President "to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs."

Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:


Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.
This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Mr. Bush succeeded Mr. Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new president, a group of senators led by Bob Graham declared:

There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.
Sen. Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Mr. Bush's benefit what he had told Mr. Clinton some years earlier:

Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.
Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:

There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.
Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush's opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:

We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.
And here is Mr. Gore again, in that same year:

Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.
Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force--if necessary--to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.
Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Mr. Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:
Kennedy: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."

Byrd: "The last U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons."





Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that "without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again."
The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was "hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation."

So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with this admonition:

Of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous--or more urgent--than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.

All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Mr. Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Mr. Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the 16 resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?





Another fallback charge is that Mr. Bush, operating mainly through Mr. Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.
The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."

Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Mr. Bush of telling a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Mr. Bush consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war. Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Mr. Bush declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he would "not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word "imminent" itself precisely in order to repudiate it:


Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.
What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest, as Mr. Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to "meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives."




Which brings us to Joseph C. Wilson, IV and what to my mind wins the palm for the most disgraceful instance of all.
The story begins with the notorious 16 words inserted--after, be it noted, much vetting by the CIA and the State Department--into Bush's 2003 State of the Union address:


The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
This is the "lie" Mr. Wilson bragged of having "debunked" after being sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to check out the intelligence it had received to that effect. Mr. Wilson would later angrily deny that his wife had recommended him for this mission, and would do his best to spread the impression that choosing him had been the vice president's idea. But Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, through whom Mr. Wilson first planted this impression, was eventually forced to admit that "Cheney apparently didn't know that Wilson had been dispatched." (By the time Mr. Kristof grudgingly issued this retraction, Mr. Wilson himself, in characteristically shameless fashion, was denying that he had ever "said the vice president sent me or ordered me sent.") And as for his wife's supposed nonrole in his mission, here is what Valerie Plame Wilson wrote in a memo to her boss at the CIA:

My husband has good relations with the PM [the prime minister of Niger] and the former minister of mines . . ., both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.
More than a year after his return, with the help of Mr. Kristof, and also Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and then through an op-ed piece in the Times under his own name, Mr. Wilson succeeded, probably beyond his wildest dreams, in setting off a political firestorm.
In response, the White House, no doubt hoping to prevent his allegation about the 16 words from becoming a proxy for the charge that (in Mr. Wilson's latest iteration of it) "lies and disinformation [were] used to justify the invasion of Iraq," eventually acknowledged that the president's statement "did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address." As might have been expected, however, this panicky response served to make things worse rather than better. And yet it was totally unnecessary--for the maddeningly simple reason that every single one of the 16 words at issue was true.

That is, British intelligence had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Furthermore--and notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assertion that this assurance has now been discredited--Britain's independent Butler commission concluded that it was "well-founded." The relevant passage is worth quoting at length:


a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
b. The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.

c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium, and the British government did not claim this.

As if that were not enough to settle the matter, Mr. Wilson himself, far from challenging the British report when he was "debriefed" on his return from Niger (although challenging it is what he now never stops doing), actually strengthened the CIA's belief in its accuracy. From the Senate Intelligence Committee report:

He [the CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the report [by Mr. Wilson] was that Niger officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Niger prime minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium.
And again:

The report on [Mr. Wilson's] trip to Niger . . . did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium deal.
This passage goes on to note that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research--which (as we have already seen) did not believe that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons--found support in Mr. Wilson's report for its "assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq." But if so, this, as the Butler report quoted above points out, would not mean that Iraq had not tried to buy it--which was the only claim made by British intelligence and then by Mr. Bush in the famous 16 words.
The liar here, then, was not Mr. Bush but Mr. Wilson. And Mr. Wilson also lied when he told the Washington Post that he had unmasked as forgeries certain documents given to American intelligence (by whom it is not yet clear) that supposedly contained additional evidence of Saddam's efforts to buy uranium from Niger. The documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but, according to the Butler report:


The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine [that assessment].
More damning yet to Mr. Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that he had never laid eyes on the documents in question:

[Mr. Wilson] also told committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article . . . which said, "among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.' " Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports.
To top all this off, just as Mr. Cheney had nothing to do with the choice of Mr. Wilson for the mission to Niger, neither was it true that, as Mr. Wilson "confirmed" for a credulous New Republic reporter, "the CIA circulated [his] report to the Vice President's office," thereby supposedly proving that Cheney and his staff "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie." Yet--the mind reels--if Mr. Cheney had actually been briefed on Mr. Wilson's oral report to the CIA (which he was not), he would, like the CIA itself, have been more inclined to believe that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.
So much for the author of the best-selling and much-acclaimed book whose title alone--"The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity"--has set a new record for chutzpah.





But there is worse. In his press conference on the indictment against Mr. Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that lying to federal investigators is a serious crime both because it is itself against the law and because, by sending them on endless wild-goose chases, it constitutes the even more serious crime of obstruction of justice. By those standards, Mr. Wilson--who has repeatedly made false statements about every aspect of his mission to Niger, including whose idea it was to send him and what he told the CIA upon his return; who was then shown up by the Senate Intelligence Committee as having lied about the forged documents; and whose mendacity has sent the whole country into a wild-goose chase after allegations that, the more they are refuted, the more they keep being repeated--is himself an excellent candidate for criminal prosecution.
And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped, and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the larger policy being tested in Iraq--the policy of making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy--have consistently used distortion, misrepresentation and selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of American ideals.

Mr. Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary and author of 10 books, most recently "The Norman Podhoretz Reader," edited by Thomas L. Jeffers (Free Press, 2004). This article will appear in Commentary's December issue.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007540
 
Spin away. But polls are showing that more and more Americans think Bush cooked the intelligence that lead us into the Iraqi war.
 
Forget all the polls, the spin, the critics....etc.. the bottom line is that Georgie wanted to get
"even" with Saddam trying to set an assination plot on the old man Bush.. Pure and simple!! REVENGE!! no matter what the costs..which are now billions of $$$$ and thousands of lives!!!
 
Bush has been lying or skewing the facts for years about WMDs.

In 2002-
"CAMP DAVID, Maryland (CNN) -- President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Saturday there is ample evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, but critics questioned that conclusion and late Saturday some of the evidence the leaders cited was brought into question.
Both leaders cited a report indicating possible nuclear construction by Iraq, although a spokesman for the international agency in charge of nuclear inspection said no conclusions could be drawn from the report. But by Saturday evening the whole issue of the existence of a "new report" was being denied by officials at the White House, the National Security Council, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the supposed author of the alleged report.
Blair said on Saturday morning, "We only need look at the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency this morning, showing what has been going on at a former nuclear weapon site."
He said satellite pictures indicate new construction in Iraq at "former nuclear weapon sites."
Blair said he had just read about a number of attempts by Saddam to conceal weapons of mass destruction and concluded that he must act. "A policy of inaction is not a policy we can responsibly subscribe to," he said.
Later in the day, officials confirmed the IAEA does have satellite photographs which the agency's scientists say show fresh construction and new buildings at weapons sites where U.N. weapons inspectors once visited.
But the IAEA said it has been reviewing these pictures for more than two years and that there are no new photos or evidence of Iraqi nuclear activity.
The New York Times wrote about the satellite pictures in an article published Friday.
'There's no report'
"There's no report," IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky, said.
"[Bush and Blair] are going off of a New York Times article that really didn't get it right yesterday. In fact, we issued a press release last night saying there's no new information about any Iraqi nuclear activity, and until we get inspectors on the ground we can't draw any conclusion about whether they're in compliance with the Security Council resolutions with regard to nuclear activities."
Gwozdecky went on to say that the Times article discussed commercially available satellite imagery that the agency has been reviewing for more than two years."


Link to full article below; my emphasis.

http://web.archive.org/web/20021119123619/http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/09/07/bush.blair/
 
kolanuraven said:
.....the bottom line is that Georgie wanted to get
"even" with Saddam trying to set an assination plot on the old man Bush.. Pure and simple!! REVENGE!!
REVENGE? Well, darn! I thought I had this deal figured out. You mean it wasn't oil, after all? I thought you guys said it was oil? I'll sure be glad when you liberal, conspiracist, wackos decide something for sure. I'm trying to learn something here. Thanks.
 
I never said it was oil.......I've always said REVENGE and I'm stickin' with it!!! Oil may have one of the side elements....but not the core of the deal.
 
X: REVENGE? Well, darn! I thought I had this deal figured out. You mean it wasn't oil, after all? I thought you guys said it was oil? I'll sure be glad when you liberal, conspiracist, wackos decide something for sure. I'm trying to learn something here. Thanks.
Welcome to the board X, you're sure to learn lots of things from these guys. You will notice they have no answer for cold, hard facts beyond the usual propensity for throwing mud and screaming insults, which is typical of this intellectually and factually challenged bunch. Oh, and don't bother trying to educate them – they don't want to hear that kind of stuff and will refuse to even read anything that disproves their mantra of "Bush lied".

Good post passin' thru – you do realize that dis will be calling you names again if you keep this up.

Probably keeps you awake nights, huh? :wink:
 
kolanuraven said:
I never said it was oil.......I've always said REVENGE and I'm stickin' with it!!! Oil may have one of the side elements....but not the core of the deal.
Okay, okay. I follow you. You can simmer down (!!!) now. Obviously I made the mistake of not reviewing all of your past musings. You have my word that I will work to overcome that oversight. As you can tell, I'm the new one here. Not real good at maneuvering around the internet and these forum thingies. Yet. Please allow me time.

Maybe you can help me with something else? No hurry, now. I can't be here long. I'll just check back from time-to-time. Would you mind?

kolanuraven said:
.....the bottom line is that Georgie wanted to get
"even" with Saddam trying to set an assination plot on the old man Bush..
An assination plot? :shock: What on earth is that? Dare I ask? Has to do with the ass, I suppose? Is that some kind of sex thing? :oops: Look, that kind of stuff might be normal for you. But I don't mind being frank with you--if I found out some evil, arrogant, lying, rapist, murderous, camel-smelling dictator was thinking those thoughts about my daddy, I'd be plenty pissed, too. Really, now....be honest (try, try, try). That sort of stuff doesn't bother you libs?
 
Liberty Belle said:
Welcome to the board X......
Thank you very much, Liberty Belle. I suppose I should have asked permission first. Inquired as to whether or not one actually had to be a real rancher to post here. It's just that after a few seconds of delving into the minds of some of these posters, the answer is quite obviously, "No!"

Thank you again, Liberty Belle. A kind and gracious conservative never surprises me. :wink:
 
The thing is one can post articles on here, but there is no use in getting in a p______g match with ole dis as she doesn't follow any common sense.
See the thing about her is if you post something she doesn't want to like because it doesn't fit the Hate Bush agenda she just ignores it as she doesn't wan't to be inconvenienced by the truth.
 
Disagreeable said:
Spin away. But polls are showing that more and more Americans think Bush cooked the intelligence that lead us into the Iraqi war.

I think it's obvious who's actually doing the spinning here, dis. Rather than refuting ANY point of the preceding article, you just say "Spin away" and then talk about polls again, which are obviously the single shining beacon of joy in your life, since they're all you can talk about.
 
Normally I would say someone like dis is a coward and a fool who believes in the lies of fearmongers.
 
passin thru said:
The thing is one can post articles on here, but there is no use in getting in a p______g match with ole dis as she doesn't follow any common sense.

It's not worth getting to a p_________g match with me because you can't defend your stand with any facts.

See the thing about her is if you post something she doesn't want to like because it doesn't fit the Hate Bush agenda she just ignores it as she doesn't wan't to be inconvenienced by the truth.

If you're talking about your original post, it's an opinion. Here's the link you posted:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007540 (my emphasis)

Everyone has a right to an opinion and I'm not going to take time to respond to every opinion posted on this board.

You, on the other hand, ignored my factual post where Bush claimed "there is ample evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction" based on an IAEA report. The IAEA said they had no such evidence.

In fact the Agency said "In fact, we issued a press release last night saying there's no new information about any Iraqi nuclear activity, and until we get inspectors on the ground we can't draw any conclusion about whether they're in compliance with the Security Council resolutions with regard to nuclear activities."

So you and your friends can spin all you want, but Bush lied here and apparently no one in the media followed up on it!

While you moan and cry that I don't accept someone's opinion as fact, you ignore a factual post in a thread you started!
 
passin thru said:
Normally I would say someone like dis is a coward and a fool who believes in the lies of fearmongers.

George W. Bush and his Administration are the fearmongers and everyone now knows it. The "mushroom cloud" that we were threatened with before Bush invaded Iraq is a prime example.

Below is a link to the report that your post in this thread references. (Note that your "opinion" piece doesn't give a link to this article.) I know why. It's not flattering to the Bush Bunch. And it does not say, as many right wingers are claiming, that the intelligence data wasn't manipulated. The Commission was not charged with looking into that question. I'd invite everyone to read it and compare it to the your post. It's classic spin. Some things are true, many are ignored.

From the report: "Rather, it was that the PDBs and SEIBs, with their attention-grabbing headlines and drumbeat of repetition, left an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact there were very few sources. And in other instances, intelligence suggesting the existence of weapons programs was conveyed to senior policymakers, but later information casting doubt upon the validity of that intelligence was not. In ways both subtle and not so subtle, the daily reports seemed to be "selling" intelligence--in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested."

"In fact, the Community's position on Iraq's biological weapons program was largely determined by sources who were telling lies--most notably a source provided by a foreign intelligence service through the Defense Intelligence Agency..."


http://www.wmd.gov/report/report.html
 
I was talking about dis in general.
She does not acknowledge any post if they prove your own little narrowminded world wrong. In the past I have posted facts and she chose to ignore them..............that is why I said what I did.

Besides much of the facts that ole dis posts are no more than the biased news media inserting their opinions into the news. Like I said I will not get into a p____________g match with dis as she has stated before she wasn't going to click on a link I posted, so why try to debate anything if she does this.

Funny thing she thought I was talking to her, I was talking about her. One thing is she forgot to call me names this time, she must be slipping.
 
In short, the Democrat's charges aren't even possible, let alone feasible, and those who are making those charges know it. The central charge is that the president is a liar. The more irresponsible among the loony left, including Howard Dean, have said so in so many words.

Here is the conundrum the Democrats have created for themselves: If Bush didn't lie, then they are themselves liars for making the accusation without knowing that it is true. On the other hand, if Bush did lie, then they accuse themselves of incompetence at best, and dereliction of their constitutional duty at worst.

But nobody will hold the Democrats accountable for lying. It's only wrong when Republicans do it.
link; http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47446
 
square-large-looney.jpg
 
I'm headed to Billings this morning to help a friend deliver her grand daughter to the airport. The grand daughter is a Black Hawk helicopter mechanic, recently returned from Iraq, who will be visiting her father in Alaska while she is home on leave.

This little girl is one vet who is absolutely incensed by these comments from Clinton. She doesn't think a traitor, like the former president is, should be allowed back into the country!! And I agree.

Read this:

Bill Clinton: Saddam's Aides Mostly 'Good, Decent'

Former president Bill Clinton praised Saddam Hussein's lieutenants and their underlings on Tuesday, saying they were mostly "good" and "decent" people."

"When [the U.S.] kicked out Saddam, they decided to dismantle the whole authority structure," Clinton told an audience at American University in Dubai. "Most of the people who were part of that structure were good, decent people who were making the best out of a very bad situation," he added.

While Clinton didn't name, names, Saddam's authority structure was dominated by his two murderous sons, Uday and Qusay, as well as notorious characters like Ali Hassan al-Majid, [aka Chemical Ali], Barzan al-Takriti, who ran the Iraq's brutal intelligence service, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who governed northern Iraq during chemical weapon attacks in the Kurds, and Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash [aka Mrs. Anthrax], who was a member of Saddam's Baathist National Command.

Clinton offered praise for Saddam's lieutenants during the same speech where he criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq as "a big mistake."
While that comment received wide coverage, only the United Arab Emirates Khaleej Times noted his description of Saddam's underlings as mostly good and decent.

November 17, 2005

And yes dis, this story is from Newsmax. Care to point out any inaccuracies?

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/11/17/93029.shtml
 
wdcook said:
In short, the Democrat's charges aren't even possible, let alone feasible, and those who are making those charges know it. The central charge is that the president is a liar. The more irresponsible among the loony left, including Howard Dean, have said so in so many words.

No the central charge is that Bush twisted, sifted intelligence and took us into a war without basis. He outright lied in some instances, especially to the Congress and the American people about the threat Saddam was to the US.

Here is the conundrum the Democrats have created for themselves: If Bush didn't lie, then they are themselves liars for making the accusation without knowing that it is true. On the other hand, if Bush did lie, then they accuse themselves of incompetence at best, and dereliction of their constitutional duty at worst.

:) Only in your mind. The American people are turning their back on this war. They're looking for someone to blame for 2,000 dead Americans and a multi trillion$ budget deficit. Congress got the intelligence that Bush gave them. Even Republican Congressmen and Senators are starting to turn on Bush.

But nobody will hold the Democrats accountable for lying. It's only wrong when Republicans do it.
link; http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47446

Stop whining. A Democratic president was impeached for lying. He was held accountable.
 

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