Though I certainly agree those 10 bad predictions were not "lies." Throughout the build-up, the war, and aftermath, there has certainly been a lot of dishonesty by many of the same people who were making those predictions, as well as numerous lies and distortions passed on by the media and swallowed whole by politicians. The Niger-uranium story is just the latest example: You still have newspeople, pundits, and politicians discussing it as though a) the Administration or the CIA stated that either the story or the actual statement was "false," b) Bush has been shown to know it was false, c) (leftwing war opponent) Joe Wilson's observations about the Niger connection were treated as definitive and taken directly to Cheney, d) the line in the speech constituted multiple "claims," e) the claim itself was based on the notorious forged documents, f) the Administration claimed SH had obtained nuclear materials rather than merely sought them, g) the item could have been central to the war decision or even to the speech itself, when it was uttered months after the Congressional authorization, and amidst a laundry list of other itmes, h) it was somehow pushed as representing an "imminent" danger (evidence of seeking nuclear materials = imminent? - under what definition of "imminent"?), and i) imminent danger of a threat from nuclear weapons was somehow presented as a deciding issue... It's not always easy to determine whether the people pushing these various points of view are misinformed or dishonest or both.
Very interesting interview with David Kay, head of the WMD survey effort. http://www.msnbc.com/news/939347.asp
It is my point that certain,(including the president, vice-president, sec. defense, sec. state, etc...) of the administration's statements have been made in direct conflict with officially recognized evidence to the contrary, and under the oath of office, and before the American people and our Congress. Clearly there is a distinction between the warnings you cite, and the deceit of the administration, and if you attempt the exercise I suggested, it should become obvious to you as well. __________________ -tatertrader _______________________ Please list the administraions' specific lies and the corresponding truth. The entire country listened (at least according to the ratings), to the before listed warnings, constantly before and during the war. When none of these warnings came to pass I know people are questioning the warnings and the warners. If it hadn't been an exact repeat of the Afgan war it wouldn't have been so noticable but you can only cry wolf so many times.
Is it proper to characterize these as "lies"? Or were they just, *ahem* "intelligence" failures on the part of those who issued these pre-war warnings? _______________________ This is part of the quote from the website and I believe that it asks a question on how to characterize these "warnings". Lies or intelligence failures, you choose. I don't attribute them to any one person or persons but they were repeated continually on the TV before and during the war. I am sure at least one person besides myself heard them (at least the writer of this article is one besides me). If you are so sure of the administraions lies it shouldn't be very hard to enumerate them.
U.S. General Says Iraq Has Become a Guerrilla War Reuters Wednesday, July 16, 2003; 3:17 PM WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. troops are facing a classic guerrilla war in Iraq spearheaded by Saddam Hussein loyalists, and American forces need to adapt their tactics to crush this increasingly organized resistance, the head of the U.S. Central Command said on Wednesday. This contrasted with an assessment given by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on June 30 that it was not "anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance." But Central Command chief Gen. John Abizaid, who commands U.S. forces in Iraq, said a guerrilla war is exactly what U.S. troops are confronting. "It think describing it as guerrilla tactics being employed against us is, you know, a proper thing to describe in strictly military terms," Abizaid said during a Pentagon briefing. He said U.S. forces are fighting remnants of Saddam's Baath Party throughout Iraq. He said mid-level officials of Saddam's government, including from the old intelligence and security agencies and the Special Republican Guard, "have organized at the regional level in cellular structure." Abizaid said they "are conducting what I would describe as a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us. It's low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms, but it's war however you describe it." "The level of resistance, I'm not so sure I would characterize it as escalating in terms of number of incidents. But it is getting more organized and it is learning. It is adapting -- it is adapting to our tactics, techniques and procedures. And we've got to adapt to their tactics, techniques and procedures," Abizaid said.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/881syxjx.asp The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship? From the July 21, 2003 issue: The Americans and the Iraqis are getting along better than we've heard. by Reuel Marc Gerecht 07/21/2003, Volume 008, Issue 43 EXCERPT: AS I WALKED the streets of Baghdad at night, which in most districts of the city isn't a particularly dangerous thing to do, as I visited mosques and clerics in the Sunni and Shiite lands to the north and south, I picked up a fairly acute case of cognitive dissonance. Reading too much of the Western press before and especially during a visit to Iraq is mentally unbalancing. Though the problems in Iraq are enormous and the isolation of many U.S. officials in the Jumhuriyah Palace headquarters in Baghdad is surreal, neither the country nor its American administrators appeared to be sliding downhill into chaos. In most of Iraq--in the key areas of the country, in the Shiite south, the Kurdish north, and in Baghdad--just the opposite is happening. Productive energy and commerce are slowly returning to the streets, which is impressive given how long it is taking to rebuild a functioning nationwide telephone system. In mid to late June, U.S. officials--for all their clumsiness, lack of language skills, and enthusiastic ethos of "force protection"--appeared to be drawing closer to the Iraqi population, not farther away. This was especially true in the Shiite regions of Iraq, which are essentially everything from Baghdad south.
Bush credibility gap - a slow, quiet crumble By Dante Chinni WASHINGTON â President Bush is not really an "issue guy." He never has been and probably never will be. As CEO of America Inc. - an image he likes to sell - he isn't one to get bogged down in minutiae. He's content to let an army of wonks go about their wonkery while he sits in the big office and oversees the big picture. And for 2-1/2 years this model had served him well. People don't necessarily trust that George W. Bush knows and understands the workings of the EPA or the FCC or the Treasury, but they trust him to oversee it all fairly and honestly. This was, in fact, one of the primary reasons he won the presidency in the first place, in that unbelievably close election in 2000. Many voters thought that former Vice President Al Gore, a member of troubled administration, had trouble telling the truth. Mr. Gore might have been more experienced and more knowledgeable about the workings of government, but Mr. Bush resonated with people as a down-to-earth guy they could trust. In the past few weeks some questions have begun to arise about just how candid this White House is being in a variety of areas. The accusations aren't really of lying, per se, but rather they center on this administration's ability to give people the entire truth, the full picture of reality. Slowly and quietly, a credibility gap is opening, and this White House needs to be careful. If not, the gap may open wide enough to swallow up Bush's high poll numbers. The highest-profile case concerns Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Not long ago these weapons were called the principal reason the United States went to war. Now, as days go by without any revelatory discoveries in Iraq, even members of the administration are backing away from talk of their existence. Congress has begun closed-door hearings into whether the intelligence given to the White House was shaded to let the administration hear what it wanted. Last week, at a Monitor breakfast, former Congressman Lee Hamilton, himself once chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the intelligence reports he saw were almost always ambiguous and in this case the intelligence gathered was "probably used selectively." The question, of course, is by whom and at what level of command. In the area of tax cuts, one of the president's favorites, the $350 billion cut designed to bring relief to "everyone who pays income taxes," will in fact give cuts to the vast majority of Americans - if not actually all of them. But according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, the plan will give half of all taxpayers a cut of less than $100. That may be "tax relief," but if most Americans knew how little "relief" they were going to be in line for, it's hardly likely they would have backed this sweeping set of cuts. And last week, The New York Times reported that a soon-to-be-released environmental report from the EPA was edited by the White House so that an entire section on global warming is whittled down to just a few paragraphs. The White House struck sections about the possible human effects on global warming and a study that showed sharp increases in temperature over the past decade. They, instead, added a reference to a study funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute that questioned those findings. The report was not some leftover effort from the Clinton administration - it was put together by Bush's own EPA to offer a picture of the state of the environment. It's easy to discount these problems as little bumps in the road for the president. As 2004 nears, his approval numbers are in the 60s, as people continue to put faith in him as governmental CEO, and assume that every politician stretches the truth now and again. But there's a saying in journalism. "One is an event. Two is a coincidence. Three is a trend." And this trend could be particularly troubling for the president. Bush's support doesn't come from his positions; it comes from something more personal. People like him in large part because they believe he's being straight with them. If that changes, his ride toward reelection may have more than a few twists and turns.
You earlier wrote: "It is my point that certain,(including the president, vice-president, sec. defense, sec. state, etc...) of the administration's statements have been made in direct conflict with officially recognized evidence to the contrary, and under the oath of office, and before the American people and our Congress." If you can't back this accusation up with, as Doubter put it, the specific lies and the corresponding truths, then the honorable thing for you to do would be to withdraw the statement.
CIA didn't get disputed documents until February 2003 after Bush claim By John J. Lumpkin, Associated Press, 7/16/2003 18:04 WASHINGTON (AP) When the Bush administration issued its pre-war claims that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa, the CIA had not yet obtained the documents that served as a key foundation for the allegation and later turned out to be forged, U.S. officials say. The CIA didn't receive the documents until February 2003, nearly a year after the agency first began investigating the alleged Iraq-Africa connection and a short time after it assented to language in President Bush's State of the Union address that alleged such a connection, the officials said. Without the source documents, the CIA could investigate only their substance, which it had learned from a foreign government around the beginning of 2002. One of the key allegations was that Iraq was soliciting uranium from the African country of Niger. Even as the CIA found little to verify the reports, Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to put them into public statements. Sometimes CIA succeeded in getting the information removed. For instance, the agency tried to have the Niger reference removed from a State Department fact sheet in December 2002, but the document was published before the change could be made, one U.S. intelligence official told The Associated Press, speaking only on condition of anonymity. CIA Director George J. Tenet spoke in closed session to the Senate Committee on Intelligence about the matter Wednesday. The discredited documents at the center of the controversy are a series of letters purportedly between officials in Iraq and Niger. The letters indicated Niger would supply uranium to the government of Saddam Hussein in a form that could be refined for nuclear weapons. ''Big questions remain about who forged the documents and the paper trail that followed,'' Rep. Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said this week. The CIA declined to say how the agency eventually obtained the documents. Officials at several other U.S. agencies, including the State Department, declined to say whether another U.S. government agency possessed or viewed them before Bush's speech last January. After the CIA received the documents, the government provided them to the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, which quickly determined them to be forgeries. The U.N. Security Council was alerted March 7, two weeks before American and British forces invaded Iraq. But the documents had already been used for public claims in at least two places: the Dec. 19 State Department fact sheet and Bush's Jan. 28 address, in which he uttered the line: ''The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.'' When the Niger claim first arose, the CIA sent a retired diplomat to Africa to investigate in February 2002. The diplomat, Joseph Wilson, reported finding no credible evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. Tenet said the CIA was unaware of any documents purporting to show such transactions at the time, and it is unclear when the U.S. government learned that the documents existed and were the source of the Niger claim. The CIA's doubts about the uranium claim were reported through routine intelligence traffic throughout the government, one U.S. intelligence official said. Those doubts were also reported to the British. The Niger report, along with a notation that it was unconfirmed, was also included in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the classified summary of intelligence on Iraq. Tenet said the report was not a key part of the CIA's judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. On Jan. 28, 2003, the Africa allegation went into the State of the Union address. As the speech was being written, CIA officials protested the line, so the administration changed it to attribute it to British intelligence instead of U.S. intelligence. Tenet said last week it should have been removed. In recent weeks, the Bush administration has offered a number of defenses for using the statement: The CIA should have had it removed. It was based on more intelligence information than the Niger letter. It was technically true because it was attributed to British intelligence. It wasn't the reason the United States invaded Iraq. The uranium claim didn't appear in Colin Powell's address to the United Nations on Feb. 5. It first surfaced in a Sept. 24, 2002, British dossier, which said Iraq ''sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.'' The Blair administration says it did not view the now-discredited documents until October 2002, after the publication of the dossier. Blair told the House of Commons Wednesday that ''the intelligence on which we based this was not the so-called forged documents.'' The Blair administration has not detailed its other intelligence. Bush administration officials have also said other information pointed to possible Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But Tenet has called these reports ''fragmentary'' a term in intelligence circles for unconfirmed information of suspect accuracy. The chain of possession of the forged documents remains unclear. The apparent forger has also not been identified. The documents were first acquired in Rome, a Bush administration official said. Another administration official said the Italian government possessed them. In a carefully worded statement, the Italians this week denied providing the documents themselves to the U.S. or British governments, but the head of an Italian parliamentary intelligence committee said Wednesday that Italy may have passed on the disputed claims informally. ''This is possible,'' committee chief Enzo Bianco said. ''I don't rule it out.'' French diplomatic sources told AP on Wednesday the French government never possessed the documents but did have suspicions Iraq was seeking nuclear material from Niger. Associate Press writers Pamela Sampson in Paris, Tom Rachman in Rome and Robert Barr in London contributed to this report.