This is from the July 6, 2003.
KRON On The White House Admission Of Shrub Inaccuracies (Small – 2 MB)
Video Clip: KRON On The White House’s Admission Of Inaccuracies In The Shrub’s State Of The Union Address
Leave a reply
Category Archives: The Shrub War – WMD Lies
More On Shrub’s Bogus WMD Intelligence
U.S. Envoy Says Bush ‘Twisted’ Iraq Intelligence
By Reuters.
A former U.S. ambassador who investigated a report about Iraq buying uranium from Niger accused the Bush administration on Sunday of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
Joseph Wilson, Washington’s envoy to Gabon from 1992 to 1995, said in an article in the New York Times that he went to Niger in February 2002 at the request of the CIA to assess the intelligence report — which the International Atomic Energy Agency later dismissed as being based on forged documents.
White House Admits To WMD Evidence Mistake, Sort Of
Bush Recantation Of Iraq Claim Stirs Calls for Probes
By Walter Pincus for the Washington Post.
Democrats called for investigations yesterday after the White House acknowledged Monday that President Bush should not have said in his State of the Union address last January that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa.
The White House acknowledgment followed a British parliamentary report casting doubt on intelligence about the alleged uranium sale, which Bush had attributed to the British.
“Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq’s attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech,” the White House statement said. In the speech, Bush was trying to make the case that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program…
The senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), said the administration’s admission was not a revelation. “The whole world knew it was a fraud,” Rockefeller said, adding that the current intelligence committee inquiry should determine how it got into the Bush speech. “Who decided this was something they could work with?” Rockefeller asked.
Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, yesterday questioned why, as late as the president’s Jan. 28 speech, “policymakers were still using information which the intelligence community knew was almost certainly false.”
NBC Nightly News On The Missing WMD
Here’s a piece from the July 6, 2003 episode of NBC Nightly News. I’ll be putting up the Meet the Press episode the story mentions over the weekend.
NBC Nightly News On The Missing WMD
Vietnam Vets Don’t Take Kindly To Shrub’s Tough Remarks – 2 of 2
Political Veteran
By Peter Carlson for The Washington Post.
Last fall, Cleland voted for the resolution authorizing President Bush to attack Iraq, but now he feels he was bamboozled.
“I voted for it because I was told by the secretary of defense and by the CIA that there were weapons of mass destruction there,” he says. “The president said it, Colin Powell said it, they all said it. And now they can’t find them! Our general over there, who has no dog in this fight, he said he sent troops all over the place and they found two trailers and not much of anything else. So we went to war for two trailers?”
The war in Iraq is beginning to look awfully familiar to Max Cleland.
“Now wait a minute,” he says. “Let me run this back: We have a war. A bunch of Americans die. After the war, we try to figure out why we were there. There’s a commitment of 240,000 ground troops with no exit strategy. You know what that’s called? Vietnam! Hey, I’ve been there, done that, got a few holes in my T-shirt.”
Shrub Manages To Pull Off A Modern Day Vietnam
That’s right! Not only is nobody going home, but were actually going to send more troops over there.
At least they’re admitting now that these guys might be a formidable enemy after all, calling them “well-trained militants that have been killing and injuring US forces.”
Unfortunately, that just means that more of our soldiers will die.
Bush foresees long, ‘massive’ role in Iraq
By Dana Milbank for The Boston Globe.
President Bush acknowledged yesterday that the United States faces a ”massive and long-term undertaking” in Iraq but said US troops would prevail over what his administration described as well-trained militants that have been killing and injuring US forces.
Bush delivered his statement of resolve, some of his most extensive remarks about Iraq in the two months since he declared heavy fighting was over, as Americans are expressing concern about the unrest in US-occupied Iraq and as some legislators are accusing the administration of understating the task ahead…
Bush cast the struggle in Iraq as part of the ongoing war against terrorism in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. He said that some of those attacking US forces in Iraq were from the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam and that the US government suspects fighters tied to Abu Musab Zarqawi, whom Bush called an Al Qaeda ”associate,” are preparing to attack. ”Less than two years ago, determined enemies of America entered our country, committed acts of murder against our people, and made clear their intentions to strike again” he said. ”As long as terrorists and their allies plot to harm America, America is at war.”
As part of the justification for the war in Iraq, Bush and his lieutenants described ongoing ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. But a still-classified national intelligence report from that time raised doubts about those ties, intelligence officials have said.
According to a poll released yesterday by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, 71 percent said they believed the Bush administration implied that Hussein was involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, while 25 percent believed Iraq was directly involved in the attacks…
Of the 195 US military personnel killed in combat and accidents since the Iraq war started on March 20 (42 British soldiers have been killed), nearly a third have died after May 1, when Bush, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, declared major combat operations were over.
The messiness of postwar Iraq had provoked criticism that the administration did not adequately prepare for the difficult task of rebuilding. Before the war, Bush spoke optimistically about a clean transformation of Iraq, saying US troops would not remain in the region ”for one day longer than is necessary.”
Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said last week that the US presence in Iraq would be necessary for ”at least five years” and criticized Bush’s rhetoric. ”This idea that we will be in just as long as we need to and not a day more – we’ve got to get over that rhetoric,” he said. ”It is rubbish. We’re going to be there a long time. We must reorganize our military to be there a long time.”
The administration, which declines to forecast the duration of the US presence in Iraq, is due to decide later this month whether it needs more troops there. Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, yesterday played down the attacks on US soldiers as ”pockets of violence,” adding the media are ”ignoring the tremendous number of success stories” in Iraq.
Time Asks: Who Lost the WMD?
Who Lost the WMD?
As the weapons hunt intensifies, so does the finger pointing. A preview of the coming battle
By Massimo Calabresi and Timothy J. Burger for Time.
What Was Cheney’s Role?
Lawmakers who once saluted every Bush claim and command are beginning to express doubts. Two congressional panels are opening new rounds of investigations into the Administration’s prewar claims about WMD. One of their immediate inquiries, sources tell Time, involves Vice President Dick Cheney’s role in reviewing the intelligence before the bombing started. Cheney made repeated visits to the CIA in the prelude to the war, going over intelligence assessments with the analysts who produced them. Some Democrats say Cheney’s visits may have amounted to pressure on the normally cautious agency. Cheney’s defenders insist that his visits merely showed the importance of the issue and that an honest analyst wouldn’t feel pressure to twist intelligence. The House intelligence committee (and possibly its Senate counterpart, sources say) plans to question the CIA analysts who briefed Cheney, and that could lead to calling Cheney’s hard-line aides and perhaps the Veep himself to testify.
Is Powell Trying To Have It Both Ways?
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who staked his reputation on his February declaration at the U.N. about Saddam Hussein’s arms program, is also feeling the heat. Powell’s aides fanned out after that performance to say the Secretary had gone to the CIA and scrubbed every piece of intelligence to make certain it was solid. But since then, little of Powell’s presentation has been proved by evidence on the ground, and last week his aides were on the defensive over a memo from the State Department’s intelligence bureau that questioned whether two Iraqi trailers discovered in April were mobile bioweapons labs, as Powell has asserted. Questionable intelligence that made it into Powell’s February speech leaves him particularly vulnerable. Expect a push by Democrats, and perhaps some Republicans, to seek Powell’s testimony too.
Bills To Investigate WMD Lies Further Fail House
House Rejects Deeper Probe on Iraqi Arms
By Ken Guggenheim the Associated Press.
The House on Thursday rejected two attempts by Democratic lawmakers for additional inquiries into the handling of intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs.
Democrats sought to include the inquiries in a bill authorizing 2004 intelligence activities. That bill, whose details are mostly classified, was expected to be approved late Thursday or early Friday…
Reviews of administration assertions of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction already under way by the House and Senate intelligence committees and the Senate Armed Services committees. But some Democrats said they don’t go far enough.
An amendment proposed by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas to require the U.S. comptroller general to study U.S. intelligence-sharing with U.N. inspectors was defeated 239-185.
By a 347-76 vote, the House rejected an amendment by Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio to require the CIA’s inspector general to audit all telephone and electronic communications between the CIA and Vice President Dick Cheney relating to Iraq’s weapons.
Kucinich, a presidential candidate and outspoken opponent of the war, cited a Washington Post story in which unidentified intelligence analysts said they had felt pressured by Cheney to make their assessments meet administration policy objectives.
MoveOn’s “Distortion Of Evidence” Page
Just wanted to make sure you guys saw this:
MoveOn: Distortion of Evidence
Distortion of Evidence
The President took the nation to war based on his assertion that Iraq posed an imminent threat to our country. Now the evidence that backed that assertion is falling apart. We believe that:
“Congress must establish an independent,
bipartisan commission to investigate and
hold the President and his officials accountable
if they manipulated or fabricated intelligence
to justify taking the country to war.”
Please join us below. We’ll send your comments to your Representative and your Senators, and we’ll keep you posted about what more you can do to support this campaign.
Shrub Says That WMDs Were Found
Whaa? I guess he figured if it wasn’t on Fox or CNN, the word would never get out to the U.S.?
Reason to Deceive
WMD Lies Could Be the New Watergate
By Cynthia Cotts for the Village Voice.
Bush is so comfortable bending the truth to defend this war that he recently denied the consensus that no WMD have been found. On Polish TV last month, he said, “We’ve found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories. . . . And we’ll find more weapons as times goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong. We found them.”
…In retrospect, the Bush administration’s most publicized war stories have all been the products of smoke and mirrors. Contrary to the initial hype, the Hussein “decapitation strike” turned up no bodies and no bunkers. Chemical Ali walked out alive. Jessica Lynch was never shot, stabbed, or tortured by Iraqis. And despite all the hot tips Ahmad Chalabi spoon-fed to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, the WMD search teams have not found a single silver bullet or smoking gun. The war on Iraq is a Byzantine puzzle that begins and ends with a lie. The media have an obligation to expose it.