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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (20162)	6/10/2003 1:06:32 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Bush's Deceptions on Iraq Intelligence by Derrick Z. Jackson Published on Friday, June 6, 2003 by the Boston Globe WITH SUCH empty hands after the battle, President Bush is losing the war for his honor. The primary pretext for his unprecedented first-strike war was that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had the most horrifying arsenal of weapons of mass destruction on earth. Last summer, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said ''there is no doubt'' and ''there's just no question'' that Hussein had the weapons. Bush turned up the rhetoric in September. ''For the sake of your children's future,'' Bush said, ''we must make sure this madman never has the capacity to hurt us with a nuclear weapon, or to use the stockpiles of anthrax that we know he has, or VX, the biological weapons which he possesses.'' In his fateful 48-hour warning to Saddam to leave Iraq, Bush said, ''Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.'' With about 180 American soldiers sacrificed and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and citizens killed, the unprecedented war is unraveling into a scandal that dwarfs President Clinton's Thong-gate and threatens to surpass the violation of national trust symbolized by Watergate. Bill and Monica was about lying about sex. Watergate was about President Nixon lying about a break-in. Iraq is about Bush sending Americans to die for what may have been a lie. Despite 160,000 American and British troops and the world's greatest technology, no weapons of mass destruction have been found. The commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, Lieutenant General James Conway, said whatever intelligence he was given on WMD, ''We were simply wrong.'' Conway said, ''We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there.'' Many current and former intelligence officers are now saying that the White House either ignored intelligence reports that failed to confirm weapons of mass destruction or trumped up skimpy or lame reports. A claim by Bush that Saddam was buying uranium from Africa for nuclear weapons turned out to be a forged document on the letterhead of a minister of foreign affairs in Niger who had been out of office for a decade. Greg Thielmann, a recently retired State Department analyst who could not believe that Bush would use ''that stupid piece of garbage'' to make his case, told Newsweek, ''There is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused.'' A Central Command planner told Newsweek that the CIA's information on the sites where weapons of mass destruction were stored was ''crap.'' An intelligence official told US News and World Report that ''the policy decisions weren't matching the reports we were reading every day.'' In a 2002 document, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded, ''There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons.'' Time quoted a senior military official who helped plan the war in Iraq but quit after seeing the White House exaggerate bad intelligence. Time also quoted an Army intelligence officer who said Rumsfeld ''was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence.'' US News and World Report detailed how Cheney's staff fed Secretary of State Colin Powell reams of ''evidence'' that could not be confirmed on the eve of Powell's testimony to the United Nations. David Albright, a former Atomic Energy Agency arms inspector, said the White House ''deliberately selected information that would increase the perception that Iraq was a serious threat'' and ''made a decision to turn a blind eye'' to the evidence that ''the large number of deployed chemical weapons the administration said that Iraq had are not there.'' Patrick Lang, a former CIA analyst on Iraq, has said intelligence was ''exploited and abused and bypassed'' by the White House. Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of CIA counter-terrorism operations, said many intelligence officials ''believe it is a scandal.'' Cannistraro said Bush had a ''moral obligation to use the best information available, not just information that fits your preconceived ideas.'' Ignoring that moral obligation may have needlessly wasted thousands of lives and lowered the United States onto the shelf of rogue states we claim to be saving the world from. Before the war, Bush said Saddam used ''denial and deception'' on weapons of mass destruction. Bush must now tell Americans to what level he deceived us. If Bush cannot shoulder the burden of truth, his disgrace should be one that makes Bill Clinton's lust a footnote in history and Richard Nixon's tapes a petty larceny of democracy. The denial and deception of President Bush ended in debauchery and death. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company commondreams.org

To: American Spirit who wrote (20162)	6/10/2003 8:51:56 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 89467

You guys just don't get it. This was an ok lie. Tonkin Gulf was an ok lie. Ike's U2 lie was an ok lie. Iran-contragate was a bunch of ok lies. Nixon's plan to end the war was an ok lie. It is only "I didn't have sexual relations with that woman" which is a damnable, impeachable lie. Also, in practical terms, with the R's in charge, don't even think about impeachment. Maybe a new face on Mt. Rushmore, but not impeachment. I think they may try to impeach Kennedy, too. Rat

To: American Spirit who wrote (20162)	6/10/2003 6:34:53 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Who's Accountable? __________________________ By PAUL KRUGMAN Columnist The New York Times June 10, 2003 The Bush and Blair administrations are trying to silence critics — many of them current or former intelligence analysts — who say that they exaggerated the threat from Iraq. Last week a Blair official accused Britain's intelligence agencies of plotting against the government. (Tony Blair's government has since apologized for January's "dodgy dossier.") In this country, Colin Powell has declared that questions about the justification for war are "outrageous." Yet dishonest salesmanship has been the hallmark of the Bush administration's approach to domestic policy. And it has become increasingly clear that the selling of the war with Iraq was no different. For example, look at the way the administration rhetorically linked Saddam to Sept. 11. As The Associated Press put it: "The implication from Bush on down was that Saddam supported Osama bin Laden's network. Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks frequently were mentioned in the same sentence, even though officials have no good evidence of such a link." Not only was there no good evidence: according to The New York Times, captured leaders of Al Qaeda explicitly told the C.I.A. that they had not been working with Saddam. Or look at the affair of the infamous "germ warfare" trailers. I don't know whether those trailers were intended to produce bioweapons or merely to inflate balloons, as the Iraqis claim — a claim supported by a number of outside experts. (According to the newspaper The Observer, Britain sold Iraq a similar system back in 1987.) What is clear is that an initial report concluding that they were weapons labs was, as one analyst told The Times, "a rushed job and looks political." President Bush had no business declaring "we have found the weapons of mass destruction." We can guess how Mr. Bush came to make that statement. The first teams of analysts told administration officials what they wanted to hear, doubts were brushed aside, and officials then made public pronouncements greatly overstating even what the analysts had said. A similar process of cherry-picking, of choosing and exaggerating intelligence that suited the administration's preconceptions, unfolded over the issue of W.M.D.'s before the war. Most intelligence professionals believed that Saddam had some biological and chemical weapons, but they did not believe that these posed any imminent threat. According to the newspaper The Independent, a March 2002 report by Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee found no evidence that Saddam posed a significantly greater threat than in 1991. But such conclusions weren't acceptable. Last fall former U.S. intelligence officials began warning that official pronouncements were being based on "cooked intelligence." British intelligence officials were so concerned that, The Independent reports, they kept detailed records of the process. "A smoking gun may well exist over W.M.D., but it may not be to the government's liking," a source said. But the Bush administration found scraps of intelligence suiting its agenda, and officials began making strong pronouncements. "Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons — the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have," Mr. Bush said on Feb. 8. On March 16 Dick Cheney declared, "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." It's now two months since Baghdad fell — and according to The A.P., military units searching for W.M.D.'s have run out of places to look. One last point: the Bush administration's determination to see what it wanted to see led not just to a gross exaggeration of the threat Iraq posed, but to a severe underestimation of the problems of postwar occupation. When Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, warned that occupying Iraq might require hundreds of thousands of soldiers for an extended period, Paul Wolfowitz said he was "wildly off the mark" — and the secretary of the Army may have been fired for backing up the general. Now a force of 150,000 is stretched thin, facing increasingly frequent guerrilla attacks, and a senior officer told The Washington Post that it might be two years before an Iraqi government takes over. The Independent reports that British military chiefs are resisting calls to send more forces, fearing being "sucked into a quagmire." I'll tell you what's outrageous. It's not the fact that people are criticizing the administration; it's the fact that nobody is being held accountable for misleading the nation into war. nytimes.com

To: American Spirit who wrote (20162)	6/11/2003 11:31:29 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Reaping the World's Disfavor ___________________________ by Harold Meyerson Published on Wednesday, June 11, 2003 by the Washington Post Save for the continuing search for its justification, the war in Iraq is over. For the United States, if not yet for Iraq, the consequences are clear. We have established yet again the utter supremacy of our hard power. Unfriendly governments tremble anew at our armed might and our willingness to use it. Some, to be sure, are hard at work building their atomic arsenals, and the last thing we need is a trembling adversary with a nuclear trigger. Still, if the challenge before us is military, our government is justly confident we can deter or defeat it. But when it comes to our soft power -- our ability to persuade nations to work with us, to inspire their people to admire us and our social arrangements and ideals -- we have all but unilaterally disarmed. At least so long as George W. Bush is president. Consider some new polling by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which measured public opinion in 44 nations during the summer and fall of 2002 and took further soundings in 21 nations in late April and May. All told, 54,000 people were surveyed, the clear majority of whom were mightily peeved at the United States in general and Bush in particular. Not surprisingly, the number of people holding a favorable view of the United States has plunged in the wake of the war. Last summer the percentage of Germans who viewed us positively was 61 percent; today it's 45 percent. In France, our favorability rating has declined from 63 percent then to 43 percent now. In Spain, where Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's government supported the war, U.S. favorability ratings are down to a scant 38 percent. Look at the numbers a little more and you see unmistakable evidence that support for the Western alliance is coming unglued. The idea that Western Europe should have an approach to security and diplomatic matters that's more independent of the United States won the support of 76 percent of the French, 62 percent of the Spanish, 61 percent of the Italians, 57 percent of the Germans. If the Bush administration's goal was to keep the European Union from becoming a rival superpower, its war seems to have had precisely the opposite effect. In nations that have not been our historical allies, fear of the United States has skyrocketed. The number of Indonesians who are "very or somewhat worried" that the United States could become a threat to their country is 74 percent, and the same apprehension was voiced by 72 percent of Nigerians and 71 percent of both Russians and Turks. The Indonesian apprehension is worth some special scrutiny. On any number of questions, respondents from the world's fourth most populous country showed themselves to be overwhelmingly antagonistic to American viewpoints and positions. Partly this reflects a perspective now common to the Muslim world. But I suspect it also results from Indonesians' rage at their treatment by the International Monetary Fund and Robert Rubin, then U.S. treasury secretary, during the East Asian financial meltdown of the late '90s. With Indonesia facing an economic collapse the likes of which the United States hadn't seen since the Hoover administration, the mandate from the Americans was to cut back spending -- which had the predictable consequence of plunging Indonesia into a profound and lasting depression. For the rest of the planet, the problem isn't Clinton's guys, it's Bush. In nation after nation, people affirm democratic ideals that they still generally associate with the United States -- but not with its president. In the 21 nations polled last month, respondents in 17 said that the problem with the United States was "mostly Bush" rather than "Americans in general." All of which follows quite logically from the administration's reversals of what had been America's fundamental relationships to other nations. In disdaining the United Nations and NATO, in proclaiming for his nation the right to preemptive war and immunity from international standards, and in waging a war based on trumped-up allegations, George W. Bush has clearly decided that it is better for the United States to be feared than admired. Our greatest presidents haven't viewed foreign relations as requiring this kind of trade-off. Under Franklin Roosevelt, the United States had the world's mightiest arsenal and was its beacon of hope. But that's the kind of synthesis that Bush seems incapable even of imagining. Besides, it was Bush's father -- the special envoy to China, U.N. ambassador and CIA director -- who felt comfortable in the world. Our current Bush is the guy who almost never traveled abroad until he became governor of Texas. On the contrary, he revels in the role of the belligerent provincial. And after 21/2 years as president, damned if he hasn't remade the world in his own xenophobic image of it. _______________________ The writer is editor at large of the American Prospect. © 2003 The Washington Post Company commondreams.org