Nobody to match Bush

Bush Knew Iraq Info Was False

WASHINGTON, July 10, 2003


(CBS) Senior administration officials tell CBS News the President’s mistaken claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa was included in his State of the Union address -- despite objections from the CIA.

Before the speech was delivered, the portions dealing with Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were checked with the CIA for accuracy, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin.

CIA officials warned members of the President’s National Security Council staff the intelligence was not good enough to make the flat statement Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa.

The White House officials responded that a paper issued by the British government contained the unequivocal assertion: “Iraq has ... sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” As long as the statement was attributed to British Intelligence, the White House officials argued, it would be factually accurate. The CIA officials dropped their objections and that’s how it was delivered.

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” Mr. Bush said.

The statement was technically correct, since it accurately reflected the British paper. But the bottom line is the White House knowingly included in a presidential address information its own CIA had explicitly warned might not be true.

Today at a press conference during the President’s trip to Africa, Secretary of State Colin Powell portrayed it as an honest mistake.

“There was no effort or attempt on the part of the president or anyone else in the administration to mislead or to deceive the American people,” said Powell.

But eight days after the State of the Union, when Powell addressed the U.N., he deliberately left out any reference to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa.

“I didn’t use the uranium at that point because I didn’t think that was sufficiently strong as evidence to present before the world,” Powell said.

That is exactly what CIA officials told the White House before the State of the Union. The top CIA official, Director George Tenet, was not involved in those discussions and apparently never warned the President he was on thin ice.

Secretary Powell said today he read the State of the Union speech before it was delivered and understood it had been seen and cleared by the intelligence community. But intelligence officials say the director of the CIA never saw the final draft.

 

Optional,

If the 37 recycled stories about the uranium are the best you can do, I'd say Bush has little to worry about. Despite obsessive focus from the networks, this story has zero traction. Except for the NY Times editorial board and the usual backstabbers in the Democrat Party, people are glad and relieved Saddam is gone.

The specific report may or may not have been accurate. Frankly, the so-called debunking, which was loudly trumpeted by some retired ambassador no doubt desperate to get his name in the news, left me cold. Basically he went to some African hellhole and asked a couple of the thugs in power if they had sold Saddam any uranium. They said, " Why no, that would have been wrong." He then pronounced the report a fake.

We really have no way of knowing what happened, but can anyone really doubt that Saddam wanted to get nuclear material? Of course, he probably could just have bought it off the French or Germans, but that's another issue.

 

We have no way of knowing? Does that mean we shouldn't care to know or do everything we can to find out the truth?

I fully expect if we do find out Bush lied, the Republicans will spin it that Clinton's lie was bad, and Bush's lie was good because we liberated Iraq.

The issue is about lying, or have you forgotten about the importance of knowing if a President lies to the Amercian people?

Such a small event, the initial news of the break-in at the Watergate Hotel....

"It began with a "third-rate burglary." It ended with the resignation of a president. When five burglars were arrested in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, at the Democratic National Committee offices, no one could figure out the significance of the event, and no one could have guessed where it would lead."



Bush actually has a lot to worry about in addition to potential scandal, it is called:

"THE ECONOMY STUPID!"

So funny to me.....Democrats watched Republicans ignore public opinion polls for their own private witch hunt with Clinton, which the American people didn't care about, and now that the Democrats are doing the same thing it is wrong in the biased eyes of a Republican.

Puuuuleeeeeze....Fair, Balanced, News.......

 

What We Do Know in Iraq
Editorial
July 2003

by: Andrew E. Busch


Titillated by the administration’s admission that President Bush cited a forged document in making his case against Iraq in his January, 2003 State of the Union address, Democratic lawmakers are again insisting on a full-scale investigation into the use and possible abuse of intelligence in the lead-up to war. More generally, administration critics in Congress and in the media have become increasingly strident in their claims that Bush deceived the nation in regard to both Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs and its ties to organized terrorism.

It is impossible to say what discoveries the future will bring (a fact which, incidentally, makes the Democratic strategy quite risky) but it is useful to refocus attention on what we know—not what we thought we knew, or what we think today, but what is known beyond serious dispute.

In the area of weapons of mass destruction, we know that:

Saddam Hussein in the far and recent past had an active chemical and biological weapons program.
Saddam had as recently as 1998 significant stockpiles of these weapons, according to both U.S. intelligence and U.N. weapons inspectors, who had seen and catalogued this stockpile.
The Baathist regime used these chemical and biological weapons on at least half a dozen instances.
Saddam provided no significant evidence to inspectors in 2002-2003 that he had destroyed any of this stockpile.
In 1998, the Clinton administration launched an intensive, though short, preemptive air war against Iraq because it was convinced that Saddam’s WMD program was unchecked.
The Iraqi dictatorship was reasonably close to obtaining nuclear weapons on two occasions in the past, and was prevented from doing so only by military force. In 1981, an Israeli air strike crippled the Osirik nuclear reactor which had been producing nuclear material for bomb use. In 1991, Operation Desert Storm again crippled Iraq’s nuclear program, which experts later estimated had been within one year of developing a bomb.
The Iraqi dictatorship retained the scientific know-how and the services of many of the scientists who had been active in its previous nuclear efforts. It also coordinated the concealment of equipment necessary for a nuclear program. Recently, an Iraqi nuclear scientist led allied forces to a key piece of equipment that he had been instructed to bury under a rose bush at his home.
Likewise, in late April, an Iraqi scientist involved in the biological and chemical weapons program led Americans to a site in the desert where chemical components for chemical weapons had been buried by the regime immediately prior to the onset of war.
In both the nuclear and chemical/biological arenas, Iraq possessed many “dual use” facilities that had been used for weapons programs and could have been again with little difficulty. For example, early in the war U.S. forces stumbled across a giant buried complex which seemed well-suited for chemical weapons production. As it turned out, the facility had been a chemical weapons plant until 1998, when it had been converted to civilian production. A vast underground facility was also discovered beneath Iraq’s main civilian atomic research center, filled with sealed barrels of uranium. Upon investigation, the site was known to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which had sealed the uranium. In neither case was there any significant barrier to the reconversion of those facilities for WMD purposes on short notice.
As was widely reported, two mobile laboratories have been captured, and many (though not all) weapons analysts consider it either probable or possible that they were used for biological weapons development.
Along the route to Baghdad, large numbers of Iraqi troops were killed or captured in possession of gas masks. Military headquarters and bases were consistently found stocked with chemical warfare suits and large stockpiles of nerve gas antidote.
When it comes to terrorism, what we know is this:

Saddam actively sponsored the terrorist group Hamas, boasting that he had sent $35 million to provide for the families of Hamas suicide bombers.
Notorious terrorist figures Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas (of Achille Lauro fame) had taken up residence in Baghdad under Saddam’s protection (at least until Abu Nidal committed "suicide" last year by multiple gunshots to the head).
A Palestine Liberation Front training camp was maintained outside of Baghdad, complete with airplane chassis for hijacker training.
In northern Iraq, U.S. and Kurdish forces overran a base and training camp for Ansar-al-Islam, an Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist organization with hundreds of members. The Ansar-al-Islam camp included a crude poison lab, with evidence pointing to the possibility that the group had made the deadly toxin ricin for use in attacks.
Another major terrorist facility in the desert of central Iraq was recently uncovered and destroyed by U.S. forces.
Iraqi intelligence documents published by the London Daily Telegraph indicated that Iraqi officials had traveled to Sudan in 1998 to meet with Osama bin Laden, seeking a “strategic alliance” against America. For his part, bin Laden released a tape shortly before hostilities began urging jihadists to flock to the defense of Iraq.
The deputy of a key Al-Qaeda associate who had been reported in Baghdad receiving medical treatment after fleeing Afghanistan was captured there shortly after the fall of the Iraqi capital.
Whatever ties Iraq did or did not have with Al-Qaeda, it is clear that Saddam supported the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Upon their arrival in Iraq, coalition forces found items like official murals celebrating the 9-11 attack and 9-11 commemorative cigarette lighters complete with etchings of bin Laden and the World Trade Centers carried by Baath Party functionaries.
Saddam had no compunction about using terrorism against the United States directly. In 1993, Iraqi agents were apprehended in Kuwait before they were able to carry out a plan to assassinate former president George H.W. Bush on his visit to the Emirate. Considerable evidence also links Saddam and Iraqi intelligence to the first attack on the World Trade Centers in 1993.
Much of this compilation of evidence on WMD and terrorism is inferential, but most court cases are determined on the strength of inferential evidence. Many a convict has been sent to the Big House on the basis of less than we already have on Saddam. The odds—even absent any other special intelligence—would still seem to favor the proposition that Iraq did possess significant WMD capability and was seeking more, and there can be no question that Iraq’s was a terrorist regime.

So where are the stockpiles? Perhaps, having existed once, they no longer existed by March 2003; some Iraqis, including Tariq Aziz, claim that they were destroyed shortly before the war. Perhaps they are still hidden. Perhaps they were spirited out of Iraq by terrorists or Baathists—a possibility much more troubling than the misreading of intelligence by an over-eager administration. The least likely scenario is the one fixed upon by the hysterical left that Bush simply lied in order to justify a war waged for who-knows-what real reason.

The bottom line remains that Iraq was an avowed and dangerous enemy of the United States, and that no serious offensive against our foes in the war on terrorism could leave Saddam’s regime standing. Yet unless the administration does a better job of reminding the public (and the world) of what we do know, it runs the risk of allowing its credibility to be unnecessarily undermined with potentially great cost in Iran, North Korea, and beyond. And one of Bush’s greatest electoral assets—public belief in his sincerity and trustworthiness—will be vulnerable to attack.

 

IF there were no WMD how was Iraq a danger to the US?
This is not rhetorical.

 

Off the top of my head, with the opening bell approaching:

1. If there were no WMD munitions available to Iraqi forces at any given time, but there remained WMD capacities (the expertise, equipment, whatever chemical or biological precursor agents, etc.) , then Iraq could have fairly quickly re-constituted its WMD program and arsenal at a time of its choosing - when the heat was off. This seems very much in fact to have been the Iraqi intention.

2. As was previewed in Kuwait ca. 1990-1, even leaving WMDs behind, Iraq's geographical position and economic potential makes control of the country by a hostile, aggressive regime a source of immediate danger to world oil reserves and therefore the world economy, as well as to individual US allies.

3. By providing logistical and financial support, or even through use of its own operatives, Iraq could maintain a terrorist threat. For some reason it is frequently forgotten that Ramsi Yusef, organizer of the first WTC attack, was traveling on an Iraqi passport at the time. As we have seen numerous times, on 9/11 in particular, terrorists do not necessarily need nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons in order to inflict mass destruction.

 

The bottom line is that the war was pre-emptive.

The bottom line is that Bush & Company made a case for urgency, based on the existence of (not potential to re-create) WMD.

The bottom line is that perhaps Bush and company did knowingly lie to the American people.

The bottom line is that the spin of the Republicans is that we should ignore how we got pushed into the war, we should not investigate the possibility that the country was lied to, but that we should now act as if we know we did the right thing, and accept only those arguments to support a belief that we were justified in our actions. Simply put, they want don't want to deal with the facts of how it went down. They want to convince people the war was justified. This is 100% a process of spin, because rather than just point to the facts, they want to ignore important facts that led up to the decision to go to war, and focus the attention on a danger that may have existed and justification for the war.

Why wouldn't anyone want to know if the American people were lied to by the president?

Why wouldn't they support a full scale investigation?

What is there to hide?

Why is it so damn hard for the Republicans to accept the possibility, if not probability that Bush and company lied to the people to justify the war?

After all, isn't that all we are hearing from their side now? Justification arguments?

 

Freddie N.´s WMD

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KymarFye,

Excellent editorial by Andrew Busch. Where was that published?

It should be clear that the President is under a full scale media/Dem smear attack. Their goal is nothing less than to undermine and destroy the legitimacy of our Commander in Chief while we are at war, all for short term political expediency.

Viewed objectively and in the very best light for them, their argument that the President "lied" is as believable as Hillary Clinton's account of her cattle futures trades. As you demonstrated at length, the President never premised regime change solely or even principally on the existence of WMD and certainly not on the throw away line about the British intelligence report that Saddam was trying to buy uranium.

But in time-honored Clinton fashion, objective facts are not that important in this game. Repeat a smear enough times and people begin to believe it. Of course, it helps immensely if the national media are in on the game. You can almost hear Dan Rather,' Hey we can make this another Watergate."

To read the NY Times or watch the networks, one would believe we had invaded Holland rather than one of the most horrifying dictators and mass murderers in history. How important is one possibly incorrect intelligence report balanced against Saddam's 25 year obsession with obtaining nuclear weapons? Even the soft-on-terrorism appeasers in the Clinton administration felt Saddam's WMD programs warranted destruction in 1998. Now they actually claim that the half dozen "monica's" they fired at Iraq eliminated the threat.

The American people need to cut through all this media propaganda and ask themselves one simple question: Do you feel safer now or with Saddam in power?

 

You said: "Repeat a smear enough times and people begin to believe it."

The same is true that when the administration repeated WMD (that have not been proven to exist) and Iraq under Hussein is an immediate threat sufficient to go to war preemptively enough times people began to believe that too, even if it is false.

You said: "How important is one possibly incorrect intelligence report?"

I hate to call anyone stupid, but even Bush has admitted the intelligence report was incorrect, but you write it was "possibly" incorrect.

Man, when the bias is as strong as yours is, the myopia is blinding.


Feeling safer doesn't mean safer.

People felt safe the morning they went to work at the WTC on 9/11.