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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (174860)	11/12/2005 8:09:55 PM
From: mistermj	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Yeeee Haaaaa! Democrats Losing Race For Funds Under Dean The Democratic National Committee under Howard Dean is losing the fundraising race against Republicans by nearly 2 to 1, a slow start that is stirring concern among strategists who worry that a cash shortage could hinder the party's competitiveness in next year's midterm elections. The former Vermont governor and presidential candidate took the chairmanship of the national party eight months ago, riding the enthusiasm of grass-roots activists who relished his firebrand rhetorical style. But he faced widespread misgivings from establishment Democrats, including elected officials and Washington operatives, who questioned whether Dean was the right fit in a job that traditionally has centered on fundraising and the courting of major donors. Now, the latest financial numbers are prompting new doubts. From January through September, the Republican National Committee raised $81.5 million, with $34 million remaining in the bank. The Democratic National Committee, by contrast, showed $42 million raised and $6.8 million in the bank. MORE... washingtonpost.com

To: geode00 who wrote (174860)	11/12/2005 8:49:15 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

JOSH MARSHALL: What a sorry, sorry, unfortunate president -- caught in his lies, his half-truths, his reckless disregard ... caught with, well ... caught with time. Time has finally caught up to him. And now he doesn't have the popularity to beat back all the people trying to call him to account. He could; but now he can't. So he's caught. And his best play is to accuse his critics of rewriting history, of playing fast and loose with the truth -- a sad, pathetic man. Chronicling the full measure of the Bush administration's mendacity with regards to the war is a difficult task -- not because of a dearth of evidence for it but because of its so many layers, all its multidimensionality. It's almost like one of those Russian egg novelties in which each layer opened reveals another layer beneath it. Hard as it may be, in the interests of getting Mr. Bush past the phases of denial and anger, let's just hit on some of the main themes. 1. Longstanding effort to convince the American people that Iraq maintained ties to al Qaida and may have played a role in 9/11. This was always just a plain old lie. (And if you want to see where the real fights with the Intelligence Community came up, it was always on the terror tie angle and much less on WMD.) The president and his chief advisors tried to leverage Americans' horror over 9/11 to gain support for attacking Iraq. Simple: lying to the public the president was sworn to protect. 2. Repeated efforts to jam purported evidence about an Iraqi nuclear weapons program (the Niger canard) into major presidential speeches despite the fact the CIA believed the claim was not credible and tried to prevent the president from doing so. What's the explanation for that? At best a reckless disregard for the truth in making the case war to the American public. 3. Consistent and longstanding effort to elide the distinction between chem-bio-weapons (which are terrible but no immediate threat to American security) and nuclear weapons (which are). For better or worse, there was a strong consensus within the foreign policy establishmnet that Iraq continued to stockpile WMDs. Nor was it an improbable assumption since Saddam had stockpiled and used such weapons before and, by 2002, had been free of on-site weapons inspections for almost four years. But what most observers meant by this was chemical and possibly biological weapons, not nuclear weapons. Big difference! The White House knew that this wasn't enough to get the country into war, so they pushed the threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam for which there was much, much less evidence. 4. The fact that the administration's push for war wasn't even about WMD in the first place. Scarcely a week goes by when I don't get an email from a reader who writes, "I always knew that Saddam didn't have WMDs. How is that you, with all your access and reporting, didn't know that too?" Good question. They were right. And I was wrong. But like many things in this reality-based universe of ours, this was a question subject to empirical inquiry. No one really knew what Saddam was doing between 1998 and 2002. And US intelligence made a lot of very poor assumptions based on sketchy hints and clues. But the solution, at least the first part of it, was to get inspectors in on the ground and actually find out. That is what President Bush's very credible threat of force had done by the Fall of 2002. But once there the inspectors began making pretty steady progress in showing that many of our suspicions about reconstituted WMD programs didn't bear out, the White House response was to begin trying to discredit the inspectors themselves. By early 2003, inspections had shown that there was no serious nuclear weapons effort underway -- the only sort of operation which could have represented a serious or imminent threat. From January of 2003 the administration went to work trying to insure that the war could be started before the rationale for war was entirely discredited. They wanted to create fait accomplis, facts on the ground that no subsequent information or developments could alter. The whole thing was a con. It wasn't about WMD. Beneath these top-line points of dishonesty, there were second order ones, to be sure -- claims that the entire war would cost a mere $50 billion, insistence that the whole operation could be managed by only a fraction of the number of troops most experts believed it would take. Of course, these may be categorized as willful self-deceptions or gross irresponsibiity. And thus they are properly assigned to different sections of the Bush-Iraq Lies and Deceptions (BILD) bestiary than the cynical exploitation of lies and attempts to confuse proper. In the president's new angle that his critics are trying to 'rewrite history', those critics might want to point out that his charge would be more timely after he stopped putting so much effort into obstructing any independent inquiry that could allow an accurate first draft of the history to be written. In any case, he must sense now that he's blowing into a fierce wind. The judgement of history hangs over this guy like a sharp, heavy knife. His desperation betrays him. He knows it too. talkingpointsmemo.com

To: geode00 who wrote (174860)	11/12/2005 9:36:49 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Bush knowingly misled us By Paul Campos* Rocky Mountain News November 8, 2005 rockymountainnews.com The Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq to the American people by claiming that Iraq was training al-Qaida terrorists to use weapons of mass destruction, and that there was a serious risk Saddam Hussein would give these terrorists such weapons. This was always the key argument for invading Iraq, since it was by far the most compelling reason for doing so. Anyone who bothers to look back at the speeches President Bush gave just before the invasion, or at Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations, or at Vice President Cheney's many statements on the matter, will see that the administration invariably put this claim front and center. For example, a month before the war began President Bush asserted twice in the space of three days that "Iraq has provided al-Qaida with chemical and biological weapons training." It now turns out President Bush and his subordinates were aware at the time they were making them that there was no solid basis for these claims. In other words, they persuaded the American people to go to war by saying things they knew were probably false. Here's what happened: In November of 2001, a senior al-Qaida operative named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was captured in Pakistan. After a furious turf battle between the FBI and the CIA for the right to interrogate Libi was won by the latter agency, the CIA turned him over to Egyptian "specialists," who apparently tortured him. Libi's statements during these interrogations appear to have been the sole basis for the administration's claims that Iraq was training al-Qaida terrorists. Leaving aside ethical objections, one reason why torture had been largely abandoned as an interrogation technique is because the information torturing people produces tends to be of dubious value. This turned out to be the case with Libi. By February of 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which oversees and evaluates the flow of intelligence to high government officials, had concluded that Libi was probably lying. In a newly declassified document, the agency informed the White House that Libi's claims included no details about which Iraqis were involved in the supposed training, where the training took place, and what weapons were used. "It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers," the February 2002 report concluded. Why would Libi lie? After several weeks in the hands of the Egyptians, the agency noted, Libi "may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest." (We can only imagine). As Jonathan Chait points out in a recent Los Angeles Times column, the Bush administration is now laboring mightily to confuse two separate issues: the question of what mistakes our intelligence agencies made, and the question of the extent to which the administration intentionally distorted the information it was given by those agencies. The distinction is crucial. Everyone was wrong about whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Yet the long-standing assumption that Hussein had WMD was never considered a good enough reason to take the enormous risk of invading and occupying a large Middle Eastern country. But 9/11 supposedly changed all that. Iraq, the president and all his men told us, had to be invaded because Hussein was training al-Qaida terrorists - a "fact" which supplied the crucial missing link between the proposed invasion and the war on terror. George W. Bush took the country to war on the basis of an argument he himself didn't really believe. In the annals of presidential dishonesty, this isn't quite as unambiguous as lying about an extra-marital affair. But it will be what he is best remembered for. *Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado.