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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (2490)	2/15/2004 6:14:03 PM
From: CalculatedRisk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Chinu, First, I am supporting Kerry. The more I learn about him, the more I like him. He is going to be the nominee, so I think everyone should move on from the Dean vs. Kerry debate. We can revisit this after Kerry is elected President. Second, when Kerry voted for the war resolution in Oct of 2002, I did NOT know that the intelligence was flawed. I believe Senator Kerry voted for the resolution to give Bush added leverage with Iraq. I actually think this was a mistake, since the Senate abdicated its constitutional authority over war powers, but I do not consider this a major error. However, between Bush’s SOTU address on Jan 28, 2003 and the start of the war in March 2003, we did learn that there were significant flaws in our intelligence. To be specific, we discovered that the documents, purporting to show Iraq attempted to acquire “yellow cake” from Niger, were forged. We also learned that the “Aluminum tubes” could not be used for centrifuges as claimed by both Bush and Powell. Also, UN inspector, Dr El Baradei, reported that Iraq did not have an active nuclear weapons program. All of this information was available before the war. But the Bush administration made the strategic error of conflating, as “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, Nuclear weapons with Mustard gas and other chemical and biological weapons. These are very different threats and should be treated differently. Even on these lesser threats, Dr. Hans Blix was reporting that U.S. intelligence was flawed. On the so-called “killer drones”, Blix reported that this was a “line of sight” remote control airplane suitable only for reconnaissance (a large version of RC model airplanes available at any hobby store in America). Blix also reported that US intelligence of so-called “mobile weapons labs” had just led UN inspectors to trucks full of seed. Although Blix had not cleared Iraq of chemical and biological weapons, he was pointing out that the U.S. intelligence was flawed. I fault Bush for not realizing, before the war, that there was something seriously wrong with America’s intelligence on Iraq. I knew there was something wrong. Best to all.