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

To: Dan B. who wrote (69267)	11/2/2005 12:44:06 PM
From: Orcastraiter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

What the Prime Minister said is that he was approached "by a delegation" about expanded trade. There was no mention of uranium in that exchange. We don't know who this was that approached him. I'd call it the slightest indication of seeking yellow cake that there could be. To add this bit of raw unconfirmed intelligence to a SOTU address is shear deception and manipulation of raw intelligence that should not have been dangled in front of Congress and the American people as a justification for war. It's not just that piece of the nuclear threat of Iraq put forth. It was the aluminum tubes said to be only useful for a centrifuge (not true) and Condi and Cheney spouting off about mushroom clouds and reconstituted nuclear weapons (also not true). This was not a true assessment of the intelligence that we had available. It was skullduggery. Cap that with the fact that 95% of the intelligence on B/C weapons came from Curveball. This intelligence was what Powell trotted out in front of the UN. All shown to be faked by an unreliable source...an alcoholic! Just go down the line of the intelligence that we used to justify the Iraq invasion, and it's clear that this administration cherry picked intelligence...often raw intelligence from dubious sources...to make it's case for war. What they didn't like from the CIA they made up with their own White House intelligence group. All of these failures have been covered in the report by the Senate intelligence committee. The conclusion by the committee...massive intelligence failures! The lion's share of the failures fall on the Bush administration for the way they used scant intelligence and unreliable sources to build their case for war. It's entirely shameful. Orca

To: Dan B. who wrote (69267)	11/2/2005 12:59:01 PM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 81568

More NOT to be proud of... CIA Runs Secret Terrorism Prisons Abroad: Washington Post by Andrew Gumbel WASHINGTON - The CIA has been holding and interrogating al Qaeda captives at a secret facility in Eastern Europe, part of a covert prison system established after the September 11, 2001, attacks, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday. The Soviet-era compound is part of a network that has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand and Afghanistan, the newspaper reported, citing U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement. Thailand denied it was host to such a facility. "There is no fact in the unfounded claims," government spokesman Surapong Suebwonglee said. The newspaper said the existence and locations of the facilities were known only to a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country. The CIA has not acknowledged the existence of a secret prison network, the Post said. A CIA spokesman did not immediately return a call seeking comment. The prisons are referred to as "black sites" in classified U.S. documents and virtually nothing is known about who the detainees are, how they are interrogated or about decisions on how long they will be held, the report said. About 30 major terrorism suspects have been held at black sites while more than 70 other detainees, considered less important, were delivered to foreign intelligence services under a process known as "rendition," the paper said, citing U.S. and foreign intelligence sources. The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners are isolated from the outside world, they have no recognized legal rights and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or see them, the sources told the newspaper. The paper, citing several former and current intelligence and other U.S. government officials, said the CIA used such detention centers abroad because in the United States it is illegal to hold prisoners in such isolation. The Washington Post said it was not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program at the request of senior U.S. officials. The officials argued that disclosure could disrupt counterterrorism efforts or make the host countries targets for retaliation, the newspaper said. The secret detention system was conceived shortly after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, when the working assumption was that another strike was imminent, the report said. Surapong, the Thai government spokesman, said Bangkok was probably mentioned because it helped catch Hambali, an Indonesian accused of being Osma bin Laden's key link to Southeast Asia, in 2003. Thailand's security cooperation with the United States would have to be done "in an open and legitimate manner", he said. © Reuters 2005