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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (177358)	11/1/2003 12:35:06 PM
From: Alighieri	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573827

The interesting thing is that anyone with a brain predicted as much. Guess bush doesn't have one Al ======================================================== Disinformation through the stovepipe by our Middle East editor Bertus Hendriks, 31 October 2003 The US Senate Intelligence Committee has set a deadline for the White House, Defense Department and State Department. Today at 1700 UTC, they are to present documents and answer questions about the intelligence available to them prior to the war on Saddam Hussein. CIA Director George Tenet faces the same deadline. The euphoria about the swift US military victory in Iraq is long over. This week's announcement that the total number of American servicemen killed by attacks in post-war Iraq surpasses the death toll of the war itself has given added ammunition to the growing chorus of criticism within Congress. Democrats, in particular, but also Republicans, are asking how things could have got this far. The case against Saddam After all, US intelligence said it had evidence that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a weapons of mass destruction programme and maintaining ties with al-Qaeda. The war was intended to put an end to this acute threat and, at the same time, free the Iraqi people from a cruel dictator. The US troops would be welcomed as liberators, according to US intelligence. We know better by now. Not a trace of Saddam's notorious WMD machine has been found, President George Bush recently admitted there was no demonstrable link between the ousted Iraqi dictator and al-Qaeda, and US troops on the ground have been pelted with grenades instead of flowers. So, has the White House been deliberately lying? As yet, there's no evidence to back up such a strong accusation. The question now is: what was the quality of the intelligence data that prompted the US president to go to war in Iraq? We already know that the claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to procure weapons-grade uranium from Africa was based on forged documents. The CIA knew that too. Nevertheless, the allegation was included in the President's State-of-the-Union address to Congress in January, fuelling doubts about the reliability of CIA intelligence. CIA scapegoat Is all this George Tenet's fault? The CIA boss is ultimately responsible for assessing the reliability of intelligence data presented to the White House, and so he presents an easy scapegoat. But Seymour Hersh and other critical investigative journalists of such leading magazines as the New Yorker and the the New Republic have come up with a more plausible explanation. They say an influential group of neoconservatives and other hardliners within the Bush administration, including Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Minister Donald Rumsfeld, had taken September 11 as a splendid opportunity to finally settle scores with Saddam, although the Iraqi leader had nothing to do with the suicide attacks on Washington and New York. From the moment the closed-door decision had been taken to go to war, intelligence services came under mounting pressure to underpin it with data. Exiled Iraqi opposition leaders and dissidents produced ominous revelations about Saddam's secret chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes. They predicted that the Iraqi people would welcome the Americans as a liberating force. Any critical assessment of these types of claims was watered down under pressure from the Pentagon and the White House. Shortcut to the top When professional spies remained sceptical, customary procedures for vetting intelligence were conveniently set aside. Raw intelligence data were no longer filtered at lower levels; instead so-called stovepipes were created to channel the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Professionals within the CIA resisted this political pressure to re-interpret data to fit certain political objectives. They blame their boss, George Tenet, for not sufficiently acting against it. But Mr Tenet himself was under considerable pressure, too. The CIA's failure to prevent September 11 had put his position under threat, and this may have prompted the intelligence chief, appointed by President Clinton, to be more amenable to the neoconservatives. And so, the Republicans in Congress have their scapegoat. The Democrats see it as a ploy to deflect attention away from the Bush administration. They will not be fobbed off that easily. After all, elections are due next year, and the Iraq question could well prove to be decisive.

To: Road Walker who wrote (177358)	11/1/2003 4:12:10 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573827

re: "Leaving Iraq prematurely would only embolden the terrorists and increase the danger to America." Bush, this morning. Amazing... and frightening how many folks will buy that logic. There were few if any terrorist in Iraq before we invaded, now it's full of "terrorist" (who probably view themselves as Arab freedom fighters), so we can't leave because that would "embolden" them. The fact that we are there is what has created them; the longer we stay, the more they will be emboldened. John, Bush is counting on Americans buying into his argument. And he has every reason to believe they will........they've bought every other BS he's put out. I am afraid Americans need to start paying more attention to what's going on before they find themselves in a mess up to their collective eyeballs. ted

To: Road Walker who wrote (177358)	11/2/2003 2:32:03 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1573827

There were few if any terrorist in Iraq before we invaded, now it's full of "terrorist" (who probably view themselves as Arab freedom fighters), so we can't leave because that would "embolden" them. Terrorists are terrorists. They aren't defined by their cause, but by their actions. I don't know the best way to fight them, but one thing is certain -- rewarding them for their actions isn't it. The suggestion that we may bail out because the going got tough is simply rewarding them for their actions. One must question the intellect of those who are suggesting we should pull out of Iraq. Whether you agree that we should be there or not, it would be obscenely stupid to pull out before we finish what we went to do. The fact that we are there is what has created them; the longer we stay, the more they will be emboldened. The longer we stay, the better we'll get at killing them. And dead terrorists is what this is all about.