<p>[BBC</a> NEWS | Middle East | BBC uncovers lost Iraq billions](<a href=“http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7444083.stm]BBC”>BBC NEWS | Middle East | BBC uncovers lost Iraq billions)</p>
<p>Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction found.</p>
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<p>Oh my god, Barrons, what are you smoking? Do your homework.</p>
<p>YES, Bush lied.</p>
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<p>Remember: all that supposed intelligence – intelligence “products”, intelligence “estimates”, intelligence “assessments”, intelligence “information”, had a sole source - Curveball. That’s the big story. The rest is just dross.</p>
<p>Bedhead–what is your point? Some people disagreed. Big deal. Some people disagree about every policy known to government.Some scientists disagree with the majority on virtually every new theory. Sometimes they are right–sometimes wrong. In the real world you rarely have perfect data.</p>
<p>Waxman is one of the ugliest humans I have ever seen.</p>
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<p>Never fear. </p>
<p>Under the secret plan currently being negotiated with Iraq, the Bush administration is demanding legal immunity under Iraqi law for private contractors.</p>
<p>The next step is granting legal immunity under US law.</p>
<p>I find the Senate report humorous on several levels. First, they are critical of the President for not highlighting the caveates in his speeches but yet the caveates were clearly mentioned in the NIE which each member of Congress had at their disposal. Were the caveates deemed sufficient to keep them from voting for war? Of course not, they read the report and the caveates and deemed the caveates insufficient to sway their vote. Yet, now in hindsight, when there’s political gains to be made, suddenly those unspoken caveates constitute “lies”. Right.</p>
<p>Secondly, the hypocrisy of Jay Rockefeller knows no bounds. Does he even recall that he was even more outspoken about the threats of Saddam and linkages to al Qaeda than Bush? Is he that dumb? Or, does he think the American public is that dumb?</p>
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<p>hopscout - you seem to have the inability to decipher actual WMDs (and in particular, those of a nuclear bent) and nuclear WASTE material - which aren’t WMDs, but nonetheless can be fashioned into a “dirty bomb”.</p>
<h2>If we were to totally do away w/ nuclear warheads and bombs in our military stockpile - we still would be left w/ nuclear waste material (get it?).</h2>
<p>As for the Dems (and Reps. as well) - they totally were asleep at the wheel or were too afraid to go against the nationalistic fervor at the time.</p>
<p>The same goes for pretty much every major news publication (esp. the NYTimes - but we all know the reason for that) and news channels.</p>
<p>The only exception would be Knight-Ridder - which had 2 reporters who actually DID some investigation and in their stories rebutted the claims by the administration, or at the very least, put some serious doubt on the claims (the LA Times and Wash Post also had some articles which rebutted the claims put forth by the admin, but they tended to be buried in the back-pages).</p>
<p>FundingFather is absolutely correct:</p>
<p>“There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years … We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.”
– Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002</p>
<p>There wasn’t even a hint of evidence, not a shred, that supported this statement - not even Curveball.</p>
<p>Jay Rockefeller was one of the leading cheerleaders for the illegal Iran Liberation Act of 1998, based on his certain knowledge (with even a shred of evidence) that Iraq not only had WMDs, not only had a program to produce WMDs, not only was producing WMDs, but that Saddam Hussein was planning use of them, an “imminent threat” to the United States.</p>
<p>That Bush lied is clear and obvious. That he didn’t have to “lie too hard” to convince is what constituted Tenet’s “slam-dunk” - the “experienced Democrats” had already bought the Clinton/Tenet Big Lie hook, line, and sinker when they started the hot war against Iraq with the December 1998 bombings.</p>
<p>“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” - Voltaire</p>
<p>fundingfather, I agree with you about the hypocrisy of Rockefeller. You ask, however, “Is he that dumb?” The answer is no. I don’t why he chose to speak as he did, but I know for a fact that, as a high ranking member of the US Senate, he’s “in the loop” on serious issues facing this country. (My husband knows Rockefeller and once went on an overseas fact-finding mission with him.)</p>
<p>Also want to make note of one of the most blatant lies by the Bush Administration that I recall. President Bush made this claim in his 2003 State of the Union address: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”</p>
<p>Months before his address, Bush was informed by intelligence officials that the documents were likely forged and the sale never took place. A memo from the State Department stated that the sale was unlikely and went on to point out serious flaws in the document.</p>
<p>What I remember most, however, is Joseph Wilson’s trip to Niger in February 2002–financed by the CIA–to investigate the claims. Along with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick, he concluded the sale was unlikely. When Bush later made the Niger claim in his State of the Union address, Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times questioning why the Bush administration chose to ignore intelligence about the claim.</p>
<p>Next thing we know, Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame is outed…</p>
<p>mapesy,</p>
<p>This has been hashed out so many times. Here’s a summary:</p>
<p>The evidence that the Brits had about the inquiry had **nothing **to do with forged documents. They had other sources which were checked out after the war started in the British version of their own self-investigation and were found to be credible and concluded that Bush’s SoU reference to the British intelligence was justified. Hence - no lie.</p>
<p>Regarding Wilson’s trip, his report back to the CIA was that there were indeed some inquiries for sale and hence actually bolstered the British intelligence. He has been outed by the Senate Intelligence Committee as a liar/distorter of the truth.</p>
<p>And Mapesy, welcome back from FF-land when you finish reading the last post. Wilson’s report was precisely as you state. The claim that Wilson reported that Iraq had made"inquiries for sale" of Uranium is laughable. The reason for the weasel-wording in the SOU was that our intelligence knew the British “report” was full of…hot air. The “dodgy dossier” and its September predecessor are a source of huge embarrassment to the British, as well they should be. </p>
<p>But FF will never admit it. He clings to his hatred of Wilson for speaking the plain truth like a life preserver is a stormy sea. FF: you hug the Senate reports written by Republicans, including every inference, hint and suggestion, but sputter with indignant rage at the follow up report written by the same committee after the Dem’s take control of Congress. Now there’s intellectual consistency. Of a sort.</p>
<p>Are you suggesting that ALL of the Dems on the committee who signed the report did so thinking that the lies of Wilson that were pointed out were erroneously put into the report? </p>
<p>You can live in your “Bush lied” fantasy land all you want, but unfortunately none of the investigations that have been conducted (and there have been many) on either side of the ocean back you up. All you have to fall back on is an oft-repeated but erroneous mantra.</p>
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<p>The level of certainty with which the Administration was not supported at all by consensus of the intelligence community. That’s the point. And then when things didn’t go so well, the Administration turned around and blamed the intelligence community. </p>
<p>You are absolutely 100% correct that people make decisions based on imperfect data, but the Administration trumped up very uncertain data to appear much certain and representative of a broad consensus than it was and in other cases just flat out lied.</p>
<p>Only fringe holdouts who can’t handle the truth think otherwise.</p>
<p>I’m curious why these debates still rage. I don’t think there are any doubts that we were going to war with Iraq, one way or another, and there could have been any number of reasons. WMD’s happen to have been the most convenient excuse. Aside from those that never want any wars or are just anti-military, I didn’t hear too terribly many people, elected officials et al, complain about doing this. Did we go in there and create a mess, yes. We broke it so we have to fix it. It would be interesting to see how quickly we would get out of there if the oil ran out tomorrow however.</p>
<p>“but the Administration trumped up very uncertain data to appear much certain and representative of a broad consensus than it was and in other cases just flat out lied.”</p>
<p>And Dems looked at the same data with its uncertainties and decided that the uncertainties were trivial enough to ignore and voted for (and promoted) the war anyway.</p>
<p>Wow PMRLCOMM, what a rationalization, combining fatalism (it was inevitable) along with sloppy justification (there could have been any number of reasons) and willful ignoring of considering what reputable people on both sides of the aisle were saying (Brent Scowcroft for example who wrote an oped against it).</p>
<p>So you put all this together and come up with the notion that it doesn’t matter if Bush lied to get us into this war. That very fact has ramifications both for who we should trust about this moving forward and for what the right path should.</p>
<p>Here you go, quoting myself:</p>
<p>Iraq War in a nutshell:</p>
<p>1) The War was fought for ideological reasons that are about the political landscape in the Middle East and not about direct security threats to Americans on American soil – i.e. to install a democracy in the Middle East that would be friendly to our nation and spur democratization in that part of the world. This was argued by Wolfowitz and others. Bush bought into this vision and this is why we went to war. Other reasons were thrown into the mix to justify the war publicly.
2) The threat Iraq posed was trumped up by the Administration. The Administration stampeded Congress – both Dems and Republicans – into supporting their position, and Congress let itself be stampeded. Blame sits with all those who let themselves be stampeded without being skeptical; however, the vast preponderance of blame sits with Bush, Cheney and the rest of his Administration for pursuing an unnecessary war and doing so for false reasons.
4) Iraq under Saddam did not collaborate to any important degree at all with the Al Qaeda forces that were responsible for 9/11. Saddam did pay off suicide bombers prior to our invasion, but these were to attack Israel and they were not Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda’s rise in Iraq was purely a function of our invading there. People who suggest fighting in Iraq was motivated by an effort to take the fight against the 9/11 to the terrorists to the enemy are either lying or misunderstand entirely what is going on in that country.
3) Over time, the goal of achieving a peaceful, democratic govt in Iraq – the stated objective of the original military mission – changed into a much less ambitious effort to have a government capable of governing a unified Iraq. At the same time that greatly reduced aims and ambitions of this war were posited, the Administration was selling the notion that this did not represent a failure, that important results from our noble effort could still be achieved and that Iraq would require patience and fortitude.
4) This “dumbed down” objective of installing a government capable of governing a unified Iraq is what we are aiming for now, but it is not an objective we can reach through military means alone. The surge was justified by the effort to provide a security envelope in which this government could take shape. This has still not happened.
5) It is by no means clear that we will have Iraq repair itself by staying there for the same reasons that invading was a dumb idea in the first place. Nations, as a very solid general rule, don’t want outsiders deciding their fate or imposing their solutions even if those solutions are as laudable as supporting democracy. The presence of outsiders tends to breed resentment and spur insurgent violence.</p>
<p>When people suggest that we need to stay to fix Iraq, they don’t realize that our presence alone is one of the reasons why Iraq remains broken in the first place. When people argue for staying the course, they tend not to acknowledge that the course we adopted is one we have already failed at – we are no longer trying to install democracy. We are not staying the course at all. We have chosen a different course which is to limit the damage caused by our initial stupidity of invading the country. We are hoping for an outcome that will involve a unified Iraqi government and that will enable us to declare some kind of a victory.</p>
<p>The first step to resolving a problem is to squarely face past mistakes, problems, and yes lies. We can’t count on the President or his Administration to do this. So we the people must move forward and make sure to vote for Obama and set the stage so this can happen. McCain might garner more votes if he were honest, but he refuses to acknowledge the truth of what has really happened in Iraq and he suggests we just need to hold out for more of the so-called “success” that has been taking shape. Iraq is on its face already a huge failure in the sense that when you set out to do something and are unable to achieve that and have to drastically alter your objectives, you have failed by any real definition.</p>
<p>THERE WASN’T ANY DATA. Between late 1998 and October 2002, there was only Curveball. </p>
<p>[Amazon.com:</a> Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War: Bob Drogin: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Curveball-Spies-Lies-Con-Caused/dp/1400065836/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213206978&sr=8-1]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Curveball-Spies-Lies-Con-Caused/dp/1400065836/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213206978&sr=8-1)</p>
<p>“We broke it so we have to fix it.”</p>
<p>We broke it so we have to PAY for it. Meanwhile, mom has to take us out of the store.</p>
<p>“Al Qaeda’s rise in Iraq was purely a function of our invading there.”</p>
<p>and General Betrayus “losing” $190 million in weaponry, much of which went directly into Al-Qaeda’s hands to kill U.S. troops.</p>
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<p>Wow, FundingFather, it seems to be okay for Bush to lie so long as you can point to the incompetence of the Dems to spread the blame. Didn’t your mother tell you two wrongs don’t make a right? Bush lied to the nation, not just to Congress.</p>
<p>I am not saying that the Dems “lied”.</p>
<p>The trouble with your “Bush lied” mantra is that there is no proof of it. All of the investigations, including the latest, say that what he said was consistent with the intelligence. You are trying to hang your hat on the very weak point that there were a few agencies who had some issues with some parts the report that were noted as caveats, but, all of the agencies bought into the essence of the report. The fact that the caveats were indeed minor is scope relative to the report as a whole is evidenced by the fact that the Dems didn’t think them worthy to change their vote. It has nothing to do with them having “lied”. </p>
<p>The lie from the Dems is a current lie - where they NOW try to claim that they were deceived into voting for the war. They weren’t and the investigations to date have shown that they weren’t.</p>