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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 (71004)	11/26/2005 2:09:18 PM
From: Orcastraiter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

There plainly were many lies and half truths told. Here is an example of a lie from the Mission Accomplished speech: "We have removed an ally of al-Qaida" This is a lie. And we know that Bush knew it was a lie because he was told by intelligence that Iraq and Al Qaida were not in cahoots: MSNBC Ten days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President Bush was advised that U.S. intelligence found no credible connection linking the attacks to the regime of Saddam Hussein, or evidence suggesting linkage between Saddam and the al-Qaida terrorist network, according to a published report. The report, published Tuesday in The National Journal, cites government records, as well as present and former officials with knowledge of the issue. The information in the story, written by National Journal contributor Murray Waas, points to an abiding administration concern for secrecy that extended to keeping information from the Senate committee charged with investigating the matter. In one of the Journal report's more compelling disclosures, Saddam is said to have viewed al-Qaida as a threat, rather than a potential ally. Presidential brief The president's daily brief, or PDB, for Sept. 21, 2001, was prepared at the request of President Bush, the Journal reported, who was said to be eager to determine whether any linkage between the Sept. 11 attacks and the Iraqi regime existed. And a considerable amount of the Sept. 21 PDB found its way into a longer, more detailed Central Intelligence Agency assessment of the likelihood of an al-Qaida-Iraq connection. The Journal story reports that that assessment was released to Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, and other senior policy-makers in the Bush administration. The Senate Intelligence Committee has requested from the White House the detailed CIA assessment, as well as the Sept. 21 PDB and several other PDBs, as part of the committee's continuing inquiry into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the months before the start of the war with Iraq in March 2003. The Bush administration has refused to surrender these documents. “Indeed,” the Journal story reported, citing congressional sources, “the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004.” Long-alleged connection After Sept. 11, the administration insisted that a connection existed between Iraq and al-Qaida. President Bush, in an October 2002 speech in Cincinnati, said the United States had “learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and gas.” And Vice President Cheney, in a September 2003 appearance on NBC's “Meet the Press,” alleged there was “a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s.” But the National Journal report said that the few believable reports of contact between Iraq and al-Qaida “involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group.” Saddam considered al-Qaida “as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime,” the Journal reported. “At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks” of al-Qaida with Iraqi intelligence operatives as a way to get more information about how the organization worked, the Journal said. Journal: Little has changed The Journal story asserts that little has changed to refute the initial absence of information linking Saddam and the al-Qaida network. “In the four years since Bush received the briefing, according to highly placed government officials, little evidence has come to light to contradict the CIA's original conclusion that no collaborative relationship existed” between Iraq and al-Qaida, the Journal reported. Reporter Waas quotes one former administration official, whose assessment is a problematic contradiction of the administration’s longstanding assertions: “What the President was told on September 21 was consistent with everything he has been told since — that the evidence was just not there.” Orca

To: Dan B. who wrote (71004)	11/26/2005 2:37:13 PM
From: Orcastraiter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

John Kerry was for it from its start, in his own words No...that would be in your words. To read Kerry's words go here: msnbc.msn.com Excerpt: MATTHEWS: Are you surprised that the president himself went after you personally last Friday? KERRY: I'm not surprised by anything from this White House. I learned that during the course of the campaign. I'm sorry for America that on Veterans Day, a day that is sacred to veterans and certainly not a day for attack politics, the president not only engaged in attack politics, but continued to distort, continued to misrepresent to America my position, the position of the United States Congress. Point blank. The United States Congress did not get the same intelligence that was available to this administration, and for them to say so is to continue to mislead America. MATTHEWS: What's the difference between what you believe Dick Cheney had in hand when he pushed for the war, and what you had in hand when you voted to authorize the president's use of force if necessary? KERRY: Well, I'll give you a number of examples: In the State of the Union message, the president of the United States used information about nuclear materials and Saddam Hussein trying to get them from Africa. Three times the White House had been told by the CIA, in writing and verbally, that is not accurate, don't use that intelligence. They used it. They didn't tell Congress it wasn't accurate. Likewise when they announced to people that they had the delivery ability for weapons, biological and chemical weapons, within — I think it was — 45 minutes, if I recall, but less than an hour. That was not shared by members of the intelligence community, and it was not shared with Congress that the intelligence community disagreed. When they said that there were poisonous gas and bomb-making training given by Iraqis to al Qaeda, that was not accurate. It was discounted by the Defense Intelligence Agency. They never told us about the discount. There were a whole series of occasions where they took evidence, took the best light of the evidence only, kept the worst or alternatives from Congress, and fed the American people with the imperative for war. MATTHEWS: Why did they have their on the war, that they would this sort of thing? KERRY: I personally believe now, the evidence is clear as we've looked at any number of things. I mean, it's amazing to me that the memos from Great Britain, from Prime Minister Blair's cabinet have not received more analysis here, because they talk about how people within that cabinet believed the intelligence was being shaped to try to fit the mission. And I think that the decision was fundamentally made that they wanted to remake the Middle East, remove Saddam Hussein, have a foothold in that part of the world, and they naively and inaccurately believed the intelligence people like Chalabi and others. And it was a cause of many people like Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and others. This was the course they wanted to go on, and Vice President Cheney was pushing it very hard. Orca

To: Dan B. who wrote (71004)	11/26/2005 3:02:45 PM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 81568

The point that is being missed or deliberately ignored is that Bush Jr. like Bush Sr. received support to go to war. But look at the way Bush Sr. went to war and look at how Jr. went to war. Sr. sent James Baker to world capitals several times to build up a "broad based" coalition. He was particularly careful to include all the Arabs so much so that he excluded Israel from the coalition by refusing to provide them with the code signals for pilots etc. etc. Sr. had a specific goal in mind and he stuck to it. His goal "Move the Iraqi troops out of Kuwait and back to their borders." When that was accomplished, he ordered Schwarzkoff and the troops back in spite of the General's request to march into Baghdad. He had a specific goal, he articulated that goal and won over a based coalition, and displayed his Executive skills to achieve that goal." Has Jr. gone about it that way? Why is he trying to push the blame onto others. He doesn't admit he has made a mistake, does he? His behavior reminds me as that of a 20 year old.