If Bush Was A Liar On Iraq Then So Were the Libs

[vulturesrow]

Here is a quote from McCain, who I think most people believe to be honest. In fact McCain in general has been rather critical of the conduct of the Iraq war. On the subject of intel, here is what McCain had to say on Face the Nation.

[ QUOTE ]
SCHIEFFER: President Bush accused his critics of rewriting history last week.

Sen. McCAIN: Yeah.

SCHIEFFER: And in--he said in doing so, the criticisms they were making of his war policy was endangering our troops in Iraq. Do you believe it is unpatriotic to criticize the Iraq policy?

Sen. McCAIN: No, I think it's a very legitimate aspect of American life to criticize and to disagree and to debate. But I want to say I think it's a lie to say that the president lied to the American people. I sat on the Robb-Silverman Commission. I saw many, many analysts that came before that committee. I asked every one of them--I said, `Did--were you ever pressured politically or any other way to change your analysis of the situation as you saw?' Every one of them said no.

[/ QUOTE ]

Take that FWIW.

[andyfox]

The Dems/Libs were just accepting what they saw and wanted to see because they know they're susceptible to being painted as too soft on foreign policy issues. But consider:

-Bush said that if we don't act, we'd see a mushroom cloud. The Dems didn't use this scare tactic.


-Bush said we found the WMDs. He was referring to the mobile weapons labs, which, had they been labs, would have been labs, not weapons. Turns out they were trucks which contained equipmentto make hydrogen for weather balloons.

-Bush told an adviser to look for evidence of Hussein's complicity in 9/11.

-Bush administration officials were prepared to use 9/11 as a pretext for invasion regardless of what the evidence showed as to who was actually responsible for 9/11.

-Bush sent Colin Powell to the UN with a briefcase full of misinformation.

-The Senate Intelligence Committee released its initial findings on prewar integlligence in July 2005. The committee's Republican chairman, Pat Roberts, promised that a Phase 2 to determine whether the White House had misled the public would arrive after the presidential election. It still hasn't. Murray Waas reported in the National Journal on that Vice President Cheney and Scooter Libby had refused to provide the committee with crucial documents, including Scooter Libby-written pasages from early drafts of Colin Powell's presentation of WMD evidence to the U.N.

-Vice President Cheney, early on, said that American troops would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. Last summer, he said the insurgency was in its last throes.

-In December, 2001, Cheney, on "Meet the Press" said "it's been pretty well confirmed" that there was a direct pre-9/11 link betwen Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence. When that link was later disproved, Cheney was confronted about his Meet the Press remark by Gloria Borger on CNBC. Three times Cheney told her that he never said it.

-In October, the president announced the foiling of ten Al Qaeda plots. USA Today reported that at least six of the ten "involved preliminary ideas about potential attacks, not terrorist operations that were about to be carried out."

-In June, President Bush said that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects" and that "more than half" of those had been convicted. The Washington Post found that only 39 of these convictions had involved terrorism or national security.

-Keith Olbermann recently compiled 13 "coincidences" in which "a political downturn for the administration is followed by a 'terror event'--a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning." For example, in 2002, during the fallout from the televised testimony of FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley, John Ashcroft broadcast via satellite from Russia that the government had "disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot" to explode a dirty bomb. What he was actually referring to was the arrest of one person, Jose Padilla, for allegedly exploring such a plan. The arrest had taken place one month earlier.

The Dems might have taken the politically expedient path to war; they might now also be taking what they see as the politically expedient path to electoral success in 2006 and 2008. They ought to be ashamed of themselves, but there is very little shame in a politician.

But the Bush admimistration has lied and spun and distorted and misled every step of the way. I don't find this particularly remarkable. What administration of any political stripe in any country hasn't done this when going to war? What is more remarkable is that people are claiming it ain't so.

Also, let's not forget Bush's duplicity in keeping on a member of his staff who outed a covert CIA agent. This administration is very strong on terror issues unless it is not politically expedient.

[andyfox]

"I sat on the Robb-Silverman Commission. I saw many, many analysts that came before that committee. I asked every one of them--I said, `Did--were you ever pressured politically or any other way to change your analysis of the situation as you saw?' Every one of them said no."

The two official investigations, by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and by the commission co-chaired by Lawrence Silberman and Charles Robb, determined that analysts were not pressured, CIA and other U.S. intelligence professionals find that laughable -- especially the idea that analysts would answer in the affirmative when asked by commissioners or senators if they had been pressured.

W. Patrick Lang, formerly head of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East section, said, "The senior guys got together and said, 'You guys weren't pressured, right? Right?'"

32 year CIA veteran Richard Kerr, brought out of retirement to lead an investigation of the agency's failures on Iraq WMD was even more blunt about the pressure brought to bear by the Bush administration. In a series of five reports, Kerr found that CIA analysts felt squeezed -- and hard -- by the administration." Kerr bluntly stated that the squeeze came from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others within the administration:

"Everybody felt pressure. A lot of analysts believed that they were being pressured to come to certain conclusions…I talked to a lot of people who said, 'There was a lot of repetitive questioning. We were being asked to justify what we were saying again and again.' There were certainly people who felt they were being pushed beyond the evidence they had…"It was a continuing drumbeat: 'how do you know this? How do you know that? What about this or that report in the newspaper?'"

Michael Scheuer, the former CIA agent who gained prominence with his 2004 anonymous book, Imperial Hubris, backs Kerr's assessment. Scheuer noted the dissent within the CIA over the claims made in the controversial October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a document critical in the march to war. "I know a lot of people in the Iraq shop who were dissenting," he said. "There were people who were disciplined or taken off accounts. There was a great deal of dissent about that [NIE]. No one thought it was conclusive. One gentleman that I talked to, a senior Iraq analyst, regrets to this day that he did not go public."

FWIW.

[jt1]

[ QUOTE ]
Here is an honest question: If Bush or Rummy or Cheney knew that the Nigerian document was most likely false or very well could be false and still allowed the President to cite it in his address, would you consider that a lie?

The other concern I have with Bush's credibility are his claims that Al Quaida and Saddam were working together. We now know those claims to have been false: If the administration knew before the war that those claims were most likely false or very well could be false, would you consider that to be a lie?


[/ QUOTE ]

Answer the questions, BluffThis. They are very relevant to what we are trying to do here. I imagine we're trying to find out if we are on Bush's side or not.

[CORed]

Kerry, Lieberman, et. al stuck their fingers in the wind, looked at Bush's then impressive approval ratings in the polls, and said "This idiot wants to get us into an unnecessary war, but if we oppose him, everybody will think we're soft on terrorism and we'll lose votes.", so they went along with him. Good job Democrats.

[jt1]

[ QUOTE ]
ush worked with the best though imperfect intel and advice that he had and believed that we couldn't run the risk of Saddam acquiring WMD's no matter how low the probability might have been. And the quotes above clearly show that the Democrats believed the same and are now hypocrites and the actual liars if they claim Bush lied.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's not the point.
The point is 1) did the President or his advisors know that the nigerian document was likely a forgery before the State of the Union address? 2) Did the President know that no connection existed between Al quaida and Saddam while he was inferring that there was one.

These are the questions that the Dems and everyone else should be asking. Any other points or conjectures regarding the matter are irrelevant.

[CORed]

I don't really care whether Bush &Co. lied about WMD, or were so inept that they believed their own propaganda. I think it's a little bit of both. I think they had their own reasons for wanting to invade Iraq (helping Israel? stabilizing the Middle East? Oil?), and saw 9/11 as an opportunity to push that agenda. I think they took some questionable intelligence data, convinced themselves that it was valid, and figured it was good enough to use to sell the UN and the public on the war. They failed with the UN, but not, to begin with, Congress and the public. I think the decision to go to war was wrong. I think their failure to understand the true nature of what they were getting into and prepare adequately to win the war was inexcusable. They make the Johnson adminstration's Vietnam policy look brilliant.

[andyfox]

"This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda," Bush once said. "We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda."

President Bush often mentioned Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein's Iraq in his press conferences and televised speeches, often in the same breath. He never pinned blame for the attacks directly on Hussein. But the overall effect was to reinforce an impression that persisted among much of the American public: that the Iraqi dictator did play a direct role in the attacks. Polls in 2003 showed that 45 percent of Americans believed Hussein was "personally involved" in Sept. 11.

Yet right after Sept. 11, 2001, when Americans were asked open-ended questions about who was behind the attacks, only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Hussein. But by January of 2003, miraculously, attitudes had been transformed. In a Knight Ridder poll, 44 percent of Americans reported that either "most" or "some" of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens.

Polls also showed a strong correlation between those who saw the Sept. 11-Iraq connection and those who supported going to war in Iraq.

Later on, polls showed that three out of four Americans said that if Iraq did not have WMDs or suppport Al Qaeda, we shouldn't have gone to war.

So what are we to make of this? The conclusion is inescapable that the administration sought to foster a climate of opinion that would support its goal, a goal which prominent members of the administration had voiced publicly long before the 2000 election, and which was the subject of its very first national security meetings, of overthrowing the Hussein regime. 9/11 provided the pretext and an association between Hussein and Al Qaeda had to be played up, as did Hussein's WMDs.

SOP. It should come as no surprise.

[Cyrus]

[ QUOTE ]
Kerry, Lieberman, et. al stuck their fingers in the wind, looked at Bush's then impressive approval ratings in the polls, and said "This idiot wants to get us into an unnecessary war, but if we oppose him, everybody will think we're soft on terrorism and we'll lose votes.", so they went along with him. Good job Democrats.

[/ QUOTE ]

Post-9/11 the Americans rallied behind their leadership as one. It was natural. They would have rallied behind Winnie the Pooh if it were prez. There was clearly no way to undo that -- and certainly not through an act that resembles treason!

The president's popularity did not indicate an "approval" about how he was handling things (they hit the Towers on his watch for pete's sakes) but rather a mandate for him to take action as appropriate in order to defend America.

You can't fool all the people all the time. Initially even that "adventure" against Eye-rak seemed the right thing to do - and the people were approving. (Hell, a lot of 'em still think we found WMDs and that Saddam was behind 9/11!)

Soon people saw things different. And so, Dubya's numbers are now in the basement. As appropriate.