Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GST who wrote (4383)	8/27/2003 11:15:50 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 10965

Dubious Dossier Fueled Bush Deceits ____________________________ by John Nichols Published on Tuesday, August 26, 2003 by the Madison Capital Times "It's official - Saddam was not an imminent threat," read the headline in weekend editions of Britain's Guardian newspaper. London's Daily Mirror declared: "NO THREAT - Revealed: E-mail from Blair's top man said Saddam was NOT imminent danger." The lead editorial in The Independent newspaper declared, "Now we know that No. 10 did order a rewrite of the dossier to justify war." For the most part, American media is doing a lousy job of following the British investigation of how Blair and his aides spun the case for war with Iraq. Hopefully, that will change this week, as Blair takes the stand in the inquiry. After all, the story of official deceit in Britain is also the story of official deceit in the United States. When Bush was trying to con Congress into giving him a blank check to launch a war with Iraq last fall, the president's efforts were hindered by his rather serious credibility gap. Veteran members of the U.S. intelligence community were signaling - from behind the scenes and, in some cases, publicly - that they did not buy the argument that Iraq posed a serious enough threat to merit military action. And senior members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, including former chair Bob Graham, were asking what had happened that would require a dramatic change in U.S. policy. Other members of Congress, such as Senate Foreign Relations Committee members Russ Feingold, a Democrat, and Lincoln Chafee, a Republican, said the U.S. should focus on fighting terrorism, as opposed to squandering resources to remove a secular Iraqi leader who was at odds with the Islamic fundamentalists of al-Qaida. Bush was even having trouble with some top Senate Republicans, who were talking about the need to attach some strings to the resolution authorizing the administration to use military force against Iraq. The president was able to evade those restraints, and to thwart congressional debate on the Iraq issue, by flashing around a so-called "intelligence dossier" prepared by the office of British Prime Minister Blair. Widely viewed as a more moderate player than Bush, Blair was supposed to be the sensible partner in the emerging "coalition of the willing." Dozens of members of Congress who had expressed doubts about the Bush administration's case for war say they were influenced by the dossier - which appeared less than three weeks before the October 2002 congressional votes - to believe that Iraq was aggressively developing weapons of mass destruction and that those weapons threatened the world. Now, however, it turns out that the dossier was doctored. New revelations from Britain are confirming the skepticism of objective members of Congress - including Graham, Feingold and Chafee - who last fall rejected the so-called "evidence" as insufficiently credible to legitimize the blank check. Britain's independent investigation, led by Lord Hutton, a respected senior jurist, was launched to answer questions about the death of David Kelly, a British expert on chemical and biological weapons, who helped reporters expose the Blair team's manipulation of intelligence data. But it has turned into a broad examination that is considering information not merely regarding Kelly but the whole question of how Blair and his aides made the case for war. Last Tuesday, Hutton released copies of e-mails revealing that Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, cautioned against using the dossier to claim Iraq posed anything akin to "an imminent threat." After reviewing the evidence, Powell e-mailed top members of the prime minister's team to argue that the information "does nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat from Saddam." The prime minister's chief of staff found the evidence on which the dossier was based so thin that he said it would only be "convincing for those who are prepared to be convinced." Blair and his top aides chose to disregard the cautions and hyped the dossier with claims that it confirmed Iraq's WMD program was "active, detailed and growing." Even after U.S. intelligence agencies warned that the dossier was of questionable validity, Bush peddled the dubious data. This week's revelations about the extent to which Blair and his aides massaged and manipulated the intelligence data should suggest to members of the U.S. Congress that it is time for the United States to again follow the lead of Britain. Congress should authorize a full investigation to determine whether, in the midst of a debate about war and peace, Bush and his cohorts chose to deceive Congress and the American people. Copyright 2003 The Capital Times commondreams.org

To: GST who wrote (4383)	8/28/2003 12:35:19 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

<<...America should have concentrated its efforts on the "fundamental problem" of fighting "terrorism"...>> ____________________________________________________ General blames US for Iraq 'chaos' BBC News Last Updated: Thursday, 28 August, 2003, 01:53 GMT 02:53 UK news.bbc.co.uk The former commander of Nato forces in Europe, General Wesley Clark, says American policy has "created chaos" in Iraq. General Clark said the fundamental problem was the US tendency to fight states to get at "terrorists", rather than take on the "terrorists" themselves. "We may have given Osama Bin Laden the recharge he needed to rebuild his arsenal and his ranks," he told the BBC's World Today programme. General Clark is being encouraged to become a democratic candidate for next year's presidential election, but has not yet announced if he will stand. His criticisms coincided with a warning from the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, that the country would need tens of billions of dollars to rebuild its shattered infrastructure. The bill to overhaul essential services would reach almost $30bn, on top of the estimated $1bn per week the US already spends on its forces in Iraq, he said. President George W Bush has pledged "no retreat" in Iraq, saying US-led forces are making good progress in restoring order and insisting Iraq is part of the wider war on terror. But General Clark expressed reservations about waging war on a country that he did not believe was "particularly linked to terrorism" or an "imminent danger". He said the war should have resulted in restored Iraqi relations with the UN and Nato, finding weapons of mass destruction and ensuring Iraq would "not become a hotbed of international terrorism". "We are drawing in terrorists. We have created chaos in Iraq," he said. 'Rethink strategy' America should have concentrated its efforts on the "fundamental problem" of fighting "terrorism", he argued. "What I have seen again and again is a tendency to want to attack states to get at terrorists rather than dealing with the harder problem of getting the terrorists themselves." He said America should rethink its strategy on Iraq, and work to ensure Iraqis could take back control of their borders, security and reconstruction. General Clark said he would announce in the coming days if he would stand as a democratic candidate in next year's presidential elections. The situation in Iraq is fast becoming an issue for next year's presidential election, the BBC's Justin Webb reports from Washington. Mr Bush's speeches have been branded "empty rhetoric" by opposition candidates, and his popularity ratings have fallen. The number of American deaths since the end of major combat operations on 1 May has now surpassed the number killed during the war - 139 compared to 138.