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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend.... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (12249)	7/14/2005 2:23:39 AM
From: sandintoes	Respond to of 35834

She was the one who said Iraq was trying to buy the stuff for WMD from Niger, and told it to Blair and Bush...She wanted a job for her hubby..plain and simple and everyone in DC knew she was in the CIA, so all this much ado about nothing is just that...the democrats rant of the week. Old news move on...hang up the microphone and let's discuss Clintons killing CIA agents..

To: American Spirit who wrote (12249)	7/14/2005 2:29:36 AM
From: sandintoes	Respond to of 35834

Fools" (also translated as "Useful Idiots.) « CBS Headline - An Outright Lie \| Main \| Niger Uranium - The French Connection » July 12, 2003 Niger Uranium - Republicans Shouldn't Apologize [RELATED UPDATES: See Niger Uranium - The French Connection and Niger Uranium - WHY the Forgeries?] When I bemoaned the outrageous press bias (and outright lies) about the Bush Iraq-Africa-Uranium statement, my friend commented that the Republicans were handling the incident poorly. And he is right. Why are Republicans apologizing? Bush didn't lie. His information was not based on the bad intelligence so often mentioned (forged documents). More on this later. The whole issue is, of course, trivial to begin with. It was one sentence in a long speech. It was a tiny piece of a substantial argument about Iraq's WMD capability, a capability fully accepted by the whole world and even the Democrats just months before! But suddenly, all has changed. All of this prior history has been forgotten. Because Saddam's devastated, shocked and demoralized army didn't "slime" our troops, Bush must have been lying about WMD's. Because the Iraqi's chose to not be caught with their WMD's after an inevitably successful invasion, Bush was lying. The way the press and the Democrats are jumping on this is very telling: it shows both how desperate the left is and how biased the media coverage will be during next year's election, when it really counts. Somehow the Democrats and their syncophants in the major networks and New York Times imagine that, with this issue, they can convince the American people that the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction issue was a neo-conservative plot to justify Bush stealing Iraqi oil for Enron, or some such nonsense. Sadly, the primary effect will be to further damage the image of the nation overseas. Americans have too much common sense to be taken in by this silliness. I suspect the main reason this issue has been handled so badly by the White House is because it is so trivial that they had no plan to deal with it. And it hit during the summer news doldrums, while staffers are on vacation and the President is out of the country. But still, they should have been ready. They should know that the most trivial will be blown out of proportion by today's hostile media. They should recognize that the media elite is not merely biased... they HATE George Bush they same way they hated Ronald Reagan. He has driven the left wing elite crazy, first by getting elected (illegitimately in their minds), with his successes, and with his attitude. So the White House and Republicans in general need to be on the alert. They need to recognize that the enemy has a tremendous "force multiplier" in ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, AKA The Great Left Wing Media Conspiracy™. The playing field is far from level. The right must be ready for asymmetrical political warfare! Anyway... The Facts of this Issue ...just in case the media has confused anyone out there... If you followed any of the major networks, you would think that George Bush said that Iraq bought uranium from Niger. But that is not what he said. The exact quote is: " The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." And the British government today stands by that statement. To confuse things a bit more, it turns out that shortly after Bush said this, forged papers were publicized purporting to show that Iraq was trying to get Uranium from Niger. Much was made of how the US was fooled by this "faulty intelligence," and indeed the CIA and the Brits may have been confused by this. But the British say that this was not the only source of their intelligence, and it was the British intelligence to whom Bush referred. Furthermore, Niger had a history of selling uanium to Iraq. The information about these forgeries was public well before the war started, and yet the President's statements now in dispute were not questioned by those making so much noise today! This is probably because they, like the rest of the world, expected that the US would indeed find a nuclear weapons WMD program (and keep in mind that we did find lots of uranium at Tuwaitha). More FUD turned up when Joseph C. Wilson, a former diplomat, wrote an editorial for the leader of The Great Left Wing Media Conspiracy™, the New York Times. He proclaimed that, while on an 8 day mission to Niger in February 2002, he determined there was no plan to trade Uranium between Niger and Iraq. Wilson accused Bush of making the uranium statement based on false information about Niger, and he accused the White House of twisting the evidence. But how did Wilson know that the Niger information was the basis for Bush's statement? Bush didn't mention Niger, but rather Africa. Britain and the US had intelligence that Iraq appeared to be seeking uranium from other African countries. Did Wilson know this? How? The British claim that the intelligence they used was more recent than Wilson's visit to Niger. One also has to question why Wilson waited until now - after the war which he claims was started based on false information - to make his accusations. Finally, just before this controversy took off, an Iraqi nuclear scientist led American investigators to uranium enrichment technology (centrifuge parts) which had been buried in his rose garden at the order of the Saddam regime. This material was exactly the sort of banned nuclear WMD technology that Hans Blix was searching for! It's careful burial (along with many document buried with it) clearly establishes that Iraq was planning on restarting its nuclear weapons program in the future, and was planning to enrich uranium. So why are the Republicans apologizing for this non-error? Beats me!