Some Lied and some were mislead and repeated lies...Originally Posted by Roo
http://www.debatepolicy.com/showthre...027#post448027
Senior Member
Some Lied and some were mislead and repeated lies...
http://www.debatepolicy.com/showthre...027#post448027
It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. James Madison
Live as free people, yet without employing your freedom as a pretext for wickedness; but live at all times as servants of God. 1 Peter 2:16
Senior Member
that's a good report, Sounds a bit breathless and hopeful though.
Again you guys should be 9-11 toofers if the level of evidence only needs to rise to this level.
Satellite Photos Support Testimony That Iraqi WMD Went to Syria
The history books on this issue shouldn’t be written just yet.
by
Ryan Mauro
Bio
June 6, 2010 - 12:08 am
Ha’aretz has revived [1] the mystery surrounding the inability to find weapons of mass destruction stockpiles in Iraq, the most commonly cited justification for Operation Iraqi Freedom and one of the most embarrassing episodes for the United States. Satellite photos of a suspicious site in Syria are providing new support for the reporting of a Syrian journalist who briefly rocked the world with his reporting that Iraq’s WMD had been sent to three sites in Syria just before the invasion commenced.
The newspaper reveals that a 200 square-kilometer area in northwestern Syria has been photographed by satellites at the request of a Western intelligence agency at least 16 times, the most recent being taken in January. The site is near Masyaf, and it has at least five installations and hidden paths leading underneath the mountains. This supports the reporting of Nizar Nayouf, an award-winning Syrian journalist who said [2] in 2004 that his sources confirmed that Saddam Hussein’s WMDs were in Syria.
The mere presence of a facility and Hidden Path Supports it?
One of the three specific sites he mentioned was an underground base underneath Al-Baida, which is one kilometer south of Masyaf. This is a perfect match. The suspicious features in the photos and the fact that a Western intelligence agency is so interested in the site support Nayouf’s reporting, showing that his sources in Syria did indeed have access to specific information about secret activity that is likely WMD-related. Richard Radcliffe, one of my co-writers at WorldThreats.com, [3] noticed that Masyaf is located on a road that goes from Hamah, where there is an airfield sufficient to handle relatively large aircraft, into Lebanon and the western side of the Bekaa Valley, another location said to house Iraqi weapons.
It seems to be commonly accepted that Iraq did not have WMDs at all. The intelligence was obviously flawed, (LIED ABOUT -Re Curveball) but the book has not been closed on what actually happened. The media blasted the headline that Charles Duelfer, the head of the Iraq Survey Group tasked with finding out if Saddam had WMDs, concluded that a transfer did not occur. In reality, his report said [4] they were “unable to complete its investigation and is unable to rule out the possibility that WMD was evacuated to Syria before the war” due to the poor security situation.
Although no conclusion was made, Duelfer has since said that he is “convinced” that no WMD went to Syria. He is a competent and credible individual, but there is evidence that key information on this possibility was not received by the Iraq Survey Group, which had many of its own problems.
On February 24, 2009, I went to see a talk Duelfer gave at the Free Library of Philadelphia to promote his book [5]. He admitted there were some “loose ends” regarding the possibility that Iraqi WMD went to Syria, but dismissed them. Among these “loose ends,” Duelfer said, was the inability to track down the Iraqis who worked for a company connected to Uday Hussein that sources said had driven “sensitive” material into Syria. A Pentagon document reveals [6] that an Iraqi dissident reported (wasn't curveball was it?) that 50 trucks crossed the border on March 10, 2003, and that his sources in Syria confirmed they carried WMD. These trucks have been talked about frequently and remain a mystery.
During the question-and-answer period and during a follow-up interview, Duelfer made several interesting statements to me that reinforced my confidence that such a transfer occurred, although we can not be sure of the extent of it.
General Georges Sada, the former second-in-command of the Iraqi Air Force, claimed in his 2006 book [7] that he knew two Iraqi pilots that flew WMD into Syria over the summer of 2002, which came before a later shipment on the ground. I asked Duelfer if Nizar Nayouf or the two Iraqi pilots were spoken with.
“I did not interview the pilots nor did I speak with the Syrian journalist you mentioned,” he said. “We were inundated with WMD reports and could not investigate them all. … To narrow the problem, we investigated those people and places we knew would have either been involved or aware of regime WMD activities.”
He then told me that the lack of testimony about such dealings is what convinced him that “a lot of material went to Syria, but no WMD.” He cited the testimony of Naji Sabri, the former Iraqi foreign minister, in particular.
“I knew him very well, and I had been authorized to make his life a lot better, or a lot worse,” he told me.
He said that Sabri’s position would make him aware of any such deal between the two countries. However, in his book, Duelfer said that Sabri had nothing to do with any of Iraq’s WMD efforts at any time. “His statements on WMD from an intelligence perspective would have been irrelevant,” Duelfer wrote.
“Someone among the people we interviewed would have described this,” Duelfer said. However, such testimony does exist. Don Bordenkircher, who served as the national director of jail and prison operations in Iraq for two years, told me [8] that he spoke to about 40 Iraqis, either military personnel or civilians assigned to the military, who talked about the WMDs going to Syria and Lebanon, with some claiming they were actually involved. (This is Interesting but it's one source giving the testmony of 40 + , if true it would be very good evidence. )Their stories matched and were not contradictory, he said. Another military source of mine related [9] to me how an Iraqi intelligence captain in Al-Qaim claimed to have witnessed the movement of suspicious convoys into Syria between February and March 2003.
I also asked Duelfer if he was aware of the intelligence provided by the Ukrainians and other sources that the Russians were in Iraq helping to cleanse the country shortly before the invasion. His facial expressions before I even finished the question showed he genuinely had never even heard of this...
It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. James Madison
Live as free people, yet without employing your freedom as a pretext for wickedness; but live at all times as servants of God. 1 Peter 2:16
Senior Member
Why are we even concerned about Syria?
General Wesley Clark
HEARD that there was a plan to attack 7 governments of 7 countries in 5 years . back in 2001-02 from people in the pentagon and directly from Wolfawitz. The policy really hasn't changed it seems.
Countries listed below !
Iraq, CHECK
Libya, CHECK
Syria, CHEC.....
Lebanon,
Samolia,
Sudan
and Iran CHE... CHE... CHE...
( 7 countries in 5 years)
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/TY2DKzastu8?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. James Madison
Live as free people, yet without employing your freedom as a pretext for wickedness; but live at all times as servants of God. 1 Peter 2:16
Thatcherite Minion
This is the same old story, isn't it ? Lefties absolutely refusing to accept either evidence or doubts which blow a hole in their cherished beliefs.
Here's part of what's laughable about this whole 'did they have them or didn't they, and what did they do with them' controversy about Iraq's WMD's.
Iraq was KNOWN to have WMD's at the time of Gulf War #1, when Saddam's invasion force was kicked out of Kuwait ... after all, they'd used one against the Kurds, just a couple of years previously !! Part of the agreement by which that invasion force wasn't utterly crushed, why they were allowed back into Iraq territory and not fought against further, was that Saddam would become totally accountable for the weaponry his regime held.
So, the long and drawn-out farce of UN Resolution after UN Resolution being passed, then defied, kicked off ... and lasted over a DECADE.
Saddam never did give a full account of those weapons. Only after the especially toughly worded Resolution 1441 did he take them even half seriously, and even then, what did he do ? Just declared that he had no weapons of mass destruction. No numbers of them were supplied. No totals of what had been held, and when, and what quantities destroyed, where and when. NOTHING of that sort was definitively declared.
No, Saddam merely 'gave his word' that none were held. That, and also some inspectors were taken to sites where it could be proved that WMD's had been destroyed. No amounts declared. No precise records ever released properly detailing the tally of how much had been destroyed, and how that related to the total stockpile.
Saddam ... 'gave his word'. And for all the strong protests from the Left, it's a fact that the 'we are sure Iraq had no WMD's' just comes down to a blind faith IN SADDAM'S WORD. This from a brutal, rogue leader who'd evaded giving direct accounts of anything held for over a decade, and who was persisting in his evasiveness !!
Between the passing of UN Resolution 1441 and the Iraq invasion, Saddam had several months to ensure that and stocks held could be hidden or moved, or both. But the Left has always been wilfully blind to that, choosing instead their myopic propagandising over facing realities squarely.
So it's hardly surprising, is it, that any and all evidence suggesting that Iraqi WMD's are now held by Syria will likewise be rejected out of hand.
If Lefties in the US were confronted with news that police had discovered a Syrian terrorist cell in their territory, that they were holding a cache of Iraqi-acquired WMD's all primed for deployment, WMD's clearly stamped 'Made In Iraq' on them, and if that terrorist cell just happened to have documented evidence of when, where and how Syria had got a hold of them, if all of that could be PROVED, still, they'd refuse to believe any of it. They'd say it was all 'a Right wing plot', or that all the evidence was forged. Or, they'd do what they did with the four pages of declassified intelligence released by your Intelligence services back in June 2006, and just keep all news of it out of the Left-wing controlled media ..... ANYTHING to keep their propagandist stance in place.
Who'd like to deny the existence of the following link ? >
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3492930/Iraq-WMD-Declassified
.. or, declare the document a forgery ? Come on, Lefties, don't be shy, form a queue for the privilege ....
[To the best of my knowledge, folks, the existence of that document, and any account of its findings .. WAS NEVER, ONCE, REPORTED AT ALL BY ANY MEDIA OUTLET IN EUROPE. Certainly, the British media never released news of it. I only know of it myself, thanks to my reviewing the Fox News site at the time.]
I've seen it claimed in this thread that the war against Iraq shouldn't have been fought. Well, had it not been, US authorities would've never found what they DID find (.. or rather, 'didn't find', as some would insist was true).
Perhaps it's better not to fight for the truth, or to ever face the consequences of that truth, if that truth isn't preferred by the Left ?
It's That Bloody Foreigner Again !!!
Thatcherite Minion
Perhaps there's some little-known law of nature that would physically prevent any terrorist from ever acquiring a WMD from any rogue nation, anywhere, anytime, ever ?
OR, could it be that a regime whose leadership have little or nothing in the way of moral or ethical standards might just feel themselves free to give (or sell) some WMD's to them ??
But then again ... maybe this possibility, too, defies any and all Leftie propaganda designed to arrange myopic complacency in us all ? Yes, INDEED, why are any of us 'even concerned about Syria' ... ???
After all, that little-known law of nature will ensure that no terrorist could ever get a Syrian-owned WMD. Absolutely Guaranteed. After all ... LEFTIES don't want to believe it, so, why should anyone else ?
Therefore .. It Cannot Happen. So There ...
Senior Member
Drummond that would be fine it that was the WHOLE story but it's not.
there are 2 questions here
1- Did we know that Saddam had WMDs WHEN WE ATTACKED?
and
2- Did Bush Blair and Cheney LIE about the intel to try to make Look worse than it was.
the 1st question is what some like to harp on but only to say he had them whithout being specific as to when. NO ONE denies that at one point in the 80 and and early 90s he DID have WMDs the question was whether he had WMDs in 2000 2001 2002 and the Answer is Only some old unsealbe stuff and some items that where unaccounted for on paper that have yet to be found but That The IAEA and other acknowledge could have been destroyed in previous batches. And NONE of that added up to TONS of VX Sarin or a possible mushroom cloud.
Han Blix DID go into Iraq and said Shortly before we invaded that IF there was any WMDs that were unaccounted for then withen a few months of continued investigation they could determine the status.
That's was NOT Saddams promise that the word of the U.N Chief investigator in April before the Invasion, Why do you overlook that truth?
to the 2nd question Did they Lie,
As i pointed out earlier but you you seemed to miss or ignored is that Col Wilkerson has stated repeatedly in writting and in interviews that he was LIED to by Cheney's office and by members of the CIA. He had knowledge after the fact that they KNEW that much of what Colan powell was given as evidence was false. I wish ONE or you would acknowledge at lest that fact.
And you Drummond should be well aware of the Downing St memos and much of the other info that has come out in th UK exposing the "sexing up" of intel.
Just to be clear definitions, when someone intends to decieve others into thinking something is far worse thann it is, that is lying. Even if they think it's for a good cause.
they LIED on multiple occasion Drummond i'm not sure what skin the right losses by admitting that politicatians are proven liars, and Are willing to lie their own nations in wars for reasons they keep
secret to themselves. it's part of history of power both left and right. We don't do ourselves any favors defend corruption of any side. the rank and file end up dying in wars, getting tortured and paying the bills not the politicians.
Last edited by revelarts; 07-22-2012 at 04:28 PM.
It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. James Madison
Live as free people, yet without employing your freedom as a pretext for wickedness; but live at all times as servants of God. 1 Peter 2:16
Senior Member
For a just the facts ma-am
a short list people who KNEW that the intel was flase and that Cheney, Rumsfelid Bush and Blair were Lying. many in the intel comunity knew the officail accusations were false.
Anyway
Lt Col Karen Kawaitski's Pentagon.
http://www.q-and-a.org/Video/?ProgramID=1069
C-Span is a pretty fair place to start. She been in the New Yorker Magazine, Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano, Democracy Now , militaryweek.com, Huffington Post, AntiWar.com, The American Conservative magazine, Salon, Motherjones, LA Weekly, Coommondreams.com, Russia Today, and more. She's been in several documentaries, Superpower, Why We Fight , Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire, Uncovered: The War on Iraq and Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War.
She work for Doug Feith In the Pentagon on the near east desk and saw an adjunct office created By Feith called the Office of Special Plans that she says Cherry picked intel info messaged it and fed it to the the BCRandR. She saw the same intel they did but knew that much of it WAS OLD others parts had been discredited by DIA and CIA reports. And On some intel they just removed the caveats like the timing to create the impression that what Iraq did in the past they were doing now. the OSP was accountable to no one but the Vice President and Rumsfled.
If she was alone in her Assertions then you might , MIGHT, want to dismiss her. but she's not.
---BUT IF YOU BELIEVE ONE IRAQI GENERALS STORY then ONE U.S. LT Col STORY SHOULD BE GOOD TOO.--
New Yorker Magazine Article by Symour Hersh 1 paragraph
Originally Posted by New Yorker Magazine
They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. By last fall, the operation rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda. As of last week, no such weapons had been found. And although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question….
the article goes on to
W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the D.I.A., said, “The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi. The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the C.I.A.”
Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis at the C.I.A., worked with Shulsky (OSP Boss) at a Washington think tank after his retirement. He said, “Abe is very gentle and slow to anger, with a sense of irony. But his politics were typical for his group—the Straussian view.” The group’s members, Cannistraro said, “reinforce each other because they’re the only friends they have, and they all work together. This has been going on since the nineteen-eighties, but they’ve never been able to coalesce as they have now. September 11th gave them the opportunity, and now they’re in heaven. They believe the intelligence is there. They want to believe it. It has to be there.”…
…In interviews, former C.I.A. officers and analysts described the agency as increasingly demoralized. “George knows he’s being beaten up,” one former officer said of George Tenet, the C.I.A. director. “And his analysts are terrified. George used to protect his people, but he’s been forced to do things their way.” Because the C.I.A.’s analysts are now on the defensive, “they write reports justifying their intelligence rather than saying what’s going on. The Defense Department and the Office of the Vice-President write their own pieces, based on their own ideology. We collect so much stuff that you can find anything you want.”…
…A former high-level intelligence official told me that American Special Forces units had been sent into Iraq in mid-March, before the start of the air and ground war, to investigate sites suspected of being missile or chemical- and biological-weapon storage depots. “They came up with nothing,” the official said. “Never found a single Scud.”…
…On April 22nd, Hans Blix, hours before he asked the U.N. Security Council to send his team back to Iraq, told the BBC, “I think it’s been one of the disturbing elements that so much of the intelligence on which the capitals built their case seemed to have been so shaky.”…
So there a are few others that seem to corroborate her story but sadly there's more.
Patrick Lang, DIA
Patrick Lang, the former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence, said the Office of Special Plans "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat. Lang said in interviews with several media outlets that the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy.
"“I don’t have any problem with them bringing in a couple of people to take another look at the intelligence and challenge the assessments. But the problem is that they brought in people who were not intelligence professionals, people brought in because they thought like them. They knew what answers they were going to get.” [New York Times, 4/28/2004]"
That agency was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD," or weapons of mass destruction, he added in a phone interview. He said the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy.
Vincent Cannistraro Head of CIA's counter-intelligence unit
“I think that early on in the administration—sometime within the first five to six months after Sept. 11, 2001—the decision was made that Iraq had to be dealt with. The intelligence community was tasked to collect information.” [ABC News, 6/16/2003]
“They are politicizing intelligence, no question about it. And they are undertaking a campaign to get George Tenet [the director of central intelligence] fired because they can’t get him to say what they want on Iraq.” [Washington Post, 10/25/2002]
“Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there’s a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA.” [Guardian, 10/9/2002]
“The [INC’s] intelligence isn’t reliable at all. Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi’s own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches.” [Independent, 9/30/2003]
He told Reuters that “he knew of serving intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for playing up ‘fraudulent’ intelligence” that had been acquired through the notorious Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress. [Reuters, 5/30/2003]
-----
Tyler Drumheller, CIA chief in Europe
CBS NEWS
Former Top CIA Official On "Faulty" Intelligence Claims
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/...in;contentBody
Drumheller was the CIA's top man in Europe, the head of covert operations there, until he retired a year ago. He says he saw firsthand how the White House promoted intelligence it liked and ignored intelligence it didn’t:
"The idea of going after Iraq was U.S. policy. It was going to happen one way or the other," says Drumheller.
Drumheller says he doesn't think it mattered very much to the administration what the intelligence community had to say. "I think it mattered it if verified. This basic belief that had taken hold in the U.S. government that now is the time, we had the means, all we needed was the will," he says….
...Meanwhile, the CIA had made a major intelligence breakthrough on Iraq’s nuclear program. Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister, had made a deal to reveal Iraq’s military secrets to the CIA. Drumheller was in charge of the operation.
"This was a very high inner circle of Saddam Hussein. Someone who would know what he was talking about," Drumheller says.
"You knew you could trust this guy?" Bradley asked.
"We continued to validate him the whole way through," Drumheller replied.
According to Drumheller, CIA Director George Tenet delivered the news about the Iraqi foreign minister at a high-level meeting at the White House, including the president, the vice president and Secretary of State Rice.
At that meeting, Drumheller says, "They were enthusiastic because they said, they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis."
What did this high-level source tell him?
"He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program," says Drumheller.
"So in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam's inner circle that he didn't have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?" Bradley asked.
"Yes," Drumheller replied. He says there was doubt in his mind at all.
"It directly contradicts, though, what the president and his staff were telling us," Bradley remarked.
"The policy was set," Drumheller says. "The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."
Drumheller expected the White House to ask for more information from the Iraqi foreign minister.
But he says he was taken aback by what happened. "The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they're no longer interested," Drumheller recalls. "And we said, 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said, 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.'"
"And if I understand you correctly, when the White House learned that you had this source from the inner circle of Saddam Hussein, they were thrilled with that," Bradley asked.
"The first we heard, they were. Yes," Drumheller replied.
Once they learned what it was the source had to say — that Saddam Hussein did not have the capability to wage nuclear war or have an active WMD program, Drumheller says, "They stopped being interested in the intelligence."
The White House declined to respond to Drumheller's account of Naji Sabri’s role, but Secretary of State Rice has said that Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister turned U.S. spy, was just one source, and therefore his information wasn’t reliable.
"They certainly took information that came from single sources on uranium, on the yellowcake story and on several other stories with no corroboration at all and so you can’t say you only listen to one source, because on many issues they only listened to one source," says Drumheller.
"So you’re saying that if there was a single source and that information from that source backed up the case they were trying to build, then that single source was ok, but if it didn’t, then the single source was not ok, because he couldn’t be corroborated," Bradley asked.
"Unfortunately, that’s what it looks like," Drumheller replied.
"One panel after another found that agencies were giving conflicting information to the president," Bradley remarked.
Drumheller admits they were. "And that's the problem. No. There was no one voice in coming out of the intelligence community and that allowed those people to pick and choose those bits of information that fit what they wanted to know."
…."The American people want to believe the president. I have relatives who I've tried to talk to about this who say, 'Well, no, you can’t tell me the president had this information and just ignored it,'" says Drumheller. "But I think over time, people will look back on this and see this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy mistakes of all time."
CIA CHief Drumheller interview with Spiegel about "Curveball" Info in Powells U.N. Speech.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...462782,00.html
…Drumheller: I had assured my German friends that it wouldn't be in the speech. I really thought that I had put it to bed. I had warned the CIA deputy John McLaughlin that this case could be fabricated. The night before the speech, then CIA director George Tenet called me at home. I said: "Hey Boss, be careful with that German report. It's supposed to be taken out. There are a lot of problems with that." He said: "Yeah, yeah. Right. Dont worry about that."
SPIEGEL: But it turned out to be the centerpiece in Powell’s presentation -- and nobody had told him about the doubts.
Drumheller: I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it.
Larry Johnson, CIA analyst
“We’ve entered the world of George Orwell. I’m disgusted. The truth has to be told. We can’t allow our leaders to use bogus information to justify war.” [Sunday Herald (Glasgow), 6/8/2003]
“By April of last year, I was beginning to pick up grumblings from friends inside the intelligence community that there had been pressure applied to analysts to come up with certain conclusions. Specifically, I was told that analysts were pressured to find an operational link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. One analyst, in particular, told me they were repeatedly pressured by the most senior officials in the Department of Defense.… In an e-mail exchange with another friend, I raised the possibility that ‘the Bush administration had bought into a lie.’ My friend, who works within the intelligence community, challenged me on the use of the word, ‘bought,’ and suggested instead that the Bush administration had created the lie.… I have spoken to more than two analysts who have expressed fear of retaliation if they come forward and tell what they know. We know that most of the reasons we were given for going to war were wrong.” [Bamford, 2004; Falls Church News-Press, 2/2004]
Melvin A. Goodman Senior Analyst CIA Intell Specialist National war college
“To deny that there was any pressure on the intelligence community is just absurd.” [Reuters, 6/6/2003]
[ed: Goodman is referring here to the lectures he gives to intelligence analysts at the State Department’s Foreign Services Institute] “I get into the issue of politicization. They don’t say much during the question period, but afterwards people come up to me, DIA and CIA analysts who have had this pressure. I’ve gotten stories from DIA people being called into a supervisor’s office and told they might lose their job if they didn’t revise a paper. ‘This is not what the administration is looking for. You’ve got to find WMD’s, which are out there.’” [Vanity Fair, 5/2004]
Stansfield Turner, former director of CIA
“There is no question in my mind (policymakers) distorted the situation, either because they had bad intelligence or because they misinterpreted it.” [USA Today, 6/17/2003]
Richard Clarke, White House counterterrorism advisor
Clarke recounts how on Jan. 24, 2001, he recommended that the new president's national-security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, convene the president's top advisers to discuss the Qaeda threat. One week later, Bush did. But according to Clarke, the meeting had nothing to do with bin Laden. The topic was how to get rid of Saddam Hussein. "What does that tell you?" Clarke remarked to Newsweek. "They thought there was something more urgent. It was Iraq. They came in there with their agenda, and [al*Qaeda] was not on it."
Clarke emphasizes that Bush's focus on Iraq actually served to increase the terrorist danger. Clarke writes that Bush "launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide."
Clarke is not a Democrat, and his sentiments are not antiwar in principle. In fact he is a foreign-policy hawk and career government official who served five presidents, three of them Republicans.
"Beginning on the night of 9/11, we have the secretary of defense and others talking about going to war with Iraq. I think we knew pretty much that week that the probability of finding a justification for going to war with Iraq was high on their agenda."
"And he said: "Saddam! Saddam! See if there's a connection to Saddam!" And this wasn't "See if there's a connection with Iran, and while you're at it, do Iraq, and while you're at it, do the Palestinian Islamic group." It wasn't "Do due diligence." It wasn't "Have an exhaustive review." It was "Saddam, Saddam." I read that pretty clearly, that that was the answer he wanted.
I said to him, "We have already done that research prior to the attack" -- in fact, we'd done it a couple of times -- "and there's nothing there." And the facial expression back was, "That wasn't the right answer."
So I said, "Well, but we will do it again." And we asked CIA to do it again. CIA did it again, came up with the same answer. That answer was written up and handed to the president by George Tenet in one of his morning meetings, and it said, "For the third or fourth time, we've gone back to look at the relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and there is no real cooperation between those two.""
"I remember vividly, in the driveway outside of the West Wing, Scooter Libby, from the vice president's office, grabbing me and saying, "I hear you don't believe this report that Mohamed Atta was talking to Iraqi people in Prague." I said, "I don't believe it because it's not true." And he said: "You're wrong. You know you're wrong. Go back and find out; look at the rest of the reports, and find out that you're wrong." I understood what he was saying, which was: "This is a report that we want to believe, and stop saying it's not true. It's a real problem for the vice president's office that you, the counterterrorism coordinator, are walking around saying that this isn't a true report. Shut up!" That's what I was being told.
I'm somebody who has been in Washington national security for 30 years. I'm not easily intimidated. Imagine if you're an analyst at the CIA who's been there for four or five years."
“I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq.” [Washington Post, 3/22/2004]
Associated Events
“The White House carefully manipulated public opinion, never quite lied, but gave the very strong impression that Iraq did it. They did know better. We told them. The CIA told them. The FBI told them. They did know better. And the tragedy here is that Americans went to their death in Iraq thinking that they were avenging Sept. 11, when Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11. I think for a commander in chief and a vice president to allow that to happen is unconscionable.” [New York Times, 3/23/2004]
Larry Wlkerson, Gen Powell's Chief of staff
Look him up and see what he has to say if your interested
Hans Blix
Between late November and mid-March 2003, Blix reports, the UN inspectors made seven hundred separate visits to five hundred sites. About three dozen of those sites had been suggested by intelligence services, many by Tenet's CIA, which insisted that these were "the best" in the agency's database. Blix was shocked. "If this was the best, what was the rest?" he asked himself. "Could there be 100-percent certainty about the existence of weapons of mass destruction but zero-percent knowledge about their location?"
By this time Blix was firmly opposed to the evident American preference for disarmament by war. "It was, in my view, too early to give up now," he writes. Tony Blair in late February tried to convince Blix that Saddam had WMD even if Blix couldn't find them – the French, German, and Egyptian intelligence services were all sure of it, Blair said. Blix told Blair that to him they seemed not so sure, and adds as an aside, "My faith in intelligence had been shaken." On March 5, Blix on the phone with Rice asked her point-blank if the United States knew where Iraq's WMD were hidden. "No, she said, but interviews after liberation would reveal it."
In that meeting of the Security Council both ElBaradei and Blix reported their continuing plans for further inspections, and both said that outstanding issues might be resolved within a few months. This was not what the United States wanted to hear. In mid-February, President Bush had derided efforts to give Iraq "another, 'nother, 'nother last chance." Blix had pleaded in a phone call about the same time to Secretary of State Colin Powell for a free hand at least until April 15. "He said it was too late."
Three years later, in a speech to the Arms Control Association, Blix reflected on that moment in his office at the UN – the afternoon of March 16 – when the State Department's John Wolf called to say that the time had come to pull the inspectors out of Iraq. "My belief is that if we had been allowed to continue with inspections for a couple of months more, we would then have been able to go to all of the sites which were given by intelligence," he said. "And since there were not any weapons of massive destruction, we would have reported there were not any." An invasion might have taken place anyway, Blix concedes; the Americans and British had sent several hundred thousand troops to Kuwait and could not leave them sitting in the desert indefinitely. "But it would have been certainly more difficult," Blix said. Even so, in Blix's view, something important had been achieved. "The UN and the world had succeeded in disarming Iraq without knowing it." Blix guessed that Saddam hid his compliance so Iran wouldn't think him weak, but it was the Americans who were deceived.
Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, formerlythe director of policy planning at the State Department. A former Rhodes Scholar, he also served as the U.S. coordinator for policy toward the future of Afghanistan and was senior director of Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.
frontline interview
"Was it necessary to go to war when we did?
"When we did, no. That was a question of choice. Obviously, you could have delayed it a day, a week, a month, a year. There was no necessity then. It wasn't as though the Iraqis were poised to suddenly do something or break out. So the decision to go to war -- which obviously was the president's decision -- like everything else about this war, was an elective decision."
curveball
the best source for WMD info was a complete fraud
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...808,full.story
60 minites
Hussien Kamel, former Director of Iraq's Industrialization Corporation in charge of Iraq's weapons program, stated in an Aug. 22, 1995 briefing with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA):
"I don't remember resumption of chemical weapon production before the Gulf War. Maybe it was only minimal production and filling. But there was no decision to use chemical weapons for fear of retaliation. They must have a revision of decision to start production.
All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missiles, nuclear were destroyed."
Aug. 22, 1995 - Hussein Kamel*
http://usiraq.procon.org/view.resour...ourceID=000674
...
It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. James Madison
Live as free people, yet without employing your freedom as a pretext for wickedness; but live at all times as servants of God. 1 Peter 2:16
Senior Member
Pakistan has WMD's
India Has WMDs
N. Korea has WMDs
RUSSIA has Rouge WMDs scattered about.
there are little reported Incidents of people in the U.S. SELLING WMD info and material to rouge powers.
it's another BS argument to say we have to attack a ANOTHER nation to keep WMDs from speading to the "wrong hands".
But Drummond i don't think you really care about facts that don't line up with your view of the world.
You keep thinking that a rightist gov't can keep you safe from all danger. and will never allow 60 year old tech to fall into the wrong hands. keep dreaming buddy. there are far worse tech items down the line and as i've mentioned before.
If 50 terrorist of any strip decided to do only what the batman shooter did all at one time in gov't bldging on the east and west coast of the U.S.. the US population would losses it freaking mind.
that's without ANY WMDs.
Saftey is an illusion for old ladies and lil kids. We don't want to encourage proliferation but to say that Syria is a threat to us of any significance is BS of a HIGH order.
Last edited by revelarts; 07-22-2012 at 04:55 PM.
It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. James Madison
Live as free people, yet without employing your freedom as a pretext for wickedness; but live at all times as servants of God. 1 Peter 2:16
Member
To say that their WMD's pose NO threat to us is BS of the highest order.......to deny that would make on a flat earther.
Thatcherite Minion
Sorry to disappoint you (.. but I'm sure you'll disregard what you choose to, so it doesn't really matter ...) .. but, both your questions are spurious.
On the first one, the whole point was that Saddam had utterly refused to comply with the UN Resolution 1441's demand of Saddam that he EITHER account for WMD stocks, OR that he declare, with supporting evidence, what had been destroyed. To simply declare 'we have no WMD's' and to expect that assurance to be taken on its face value, unsupported by those little, 'incidental' things called .. FACTS .. wasn't nearly good enough.
Blix and his teams were far too few in number to just go and scour Iraq on their own, and expect to get anywhere in the process. The reality of their so-called 'inspections' was that they were reliant on Iraqi officials for information as to where to go and inspect !! And as Blix himself admitted on an O'Reilly Factor interview .. I watched it myself, via our Sky satellite service in the UK .. Blix told Bill O'Reilly that the best they could do was determine that WMD destructions had occurred at sites they were LED to. They had no way of verifying the quantities destroyed.
On your second question, I don't buy that Bush, Blair, Cheney, knowingly lied. But what difference would it have made ?? Saddam had not cooperated properly with the UN, the inspections were farcical, and no way existed to definitely determine what WMD stocks were being held.
No, the only option that meant ANYTHING was to militarily invade. That is the reality that existed.
And by trying to deny that reality, you're allowing propagandist illusion to triumph over realism.
Because Lefties would've preferred Saddam's regime to be free of WMD's isn't the same as saying it WAS. But then ... you'll never accept that, will you ?
Some of us don't allow wishing for what we prefer to be an adequate response to the harsh realities of this world, Revelarts. Some of us consider that a Russian roulette approach to world security isn't remotely sensible.
Maybe, one day, the Left will agree. Somehow, though, I doubt it.
Steelers in '23
How many books have been sold by these folks? LOL And I see you're still spouting Kwiatkowski's name around, too funny. And Clarke? That cracks me up even more. Why do these people not have any solid proof and it's mostly hearsay, while their hawking their books and websites of course?For a just the facts ma-am
a short list people who KNEW that the intel was flase and that Cheney, Rumsfelid Bush and Blair were Lying. many in the intel comunity knew the officail accusations were false.
Anyway
Lt Col Karen Kawaitski's Pentagon.
http://www.q-and-a.org/Video/?ProgramID=1069
C-Span is a pretty fair place to start. She been in the New Yorker Magazine, Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano, Democracy Now , militaryweek.com, Huffington Post, AntiWar.com, The American Conservative magazine, Salon, Motherjones, LA Weekly, Coommondreams.com, Russia Today, and more. She's been in several documentaries, Superpower, Why We Fight , Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire, Uncovered: The War on Iraq and Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War.
She work for Doug Feith In the Pentagon on the near east desk and saw an adjunct office created By Feith called the Office of Special Plans that she says Cherry picked intel info messaged it and fed it to the the BCRandR. She saw the same intel they did but knew that much of it WAS OLD others parts had been discredited by DIA and CIA reports. And On some intel they just removed the caveats like the timing to create the impression that what Iraq did in the past they were doing now. the OSP was accountable to no one but the Vice President and Rumsfled.
If she was alone in her Assertions then you might , MIGHT, want to dismiss her. but she's not.
---BUT IF YOU BELIEVE ONE IRAQI GENERALS STORY then ONE U.S. LT Col STORY SHOULD BE GOOD TOO.--
New Yorker Magazine Article by Symour Hersh 1 paragraph
They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. By last fall, the operation rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda. As of last week, no such weapons had been found. And although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question….
the article goes on to
W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the D.I.A., said, “The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi. The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the C.I.A.”
Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis at the C.I.A., worked with Shulsky (OSP Boss) at a Washington think tank after his retirement. He said, “Abe is very gentle and slow to anger, with a sense of irony. But his politics were typical for his group—the Straussian view.” The group’s members, Cannistraro said, “reinforce each other because they’re the only friends they have, and they all work together. This has been going on since the nineteen-eighties, but they’ve never been able to coalesce as they have now. September 11th gave them the opportunity, and now they’re in heaven. They believe the intelligence is there. They want to believe it. It has to be there.”…
…In interviews, former C.I.A. officers and analysts described the agency as increasingly demoralized. “George knows he’s being beaten up,” one former officer said of George Tenet, the C.I.A. director. “And his analysts are terrified. George used to protect his people, but he’s been forced to do things their way.” Because the C.I.A.’s analysts are now on the defensive, “they write reports justifying their intelligence rather than saying what’s going on. The Defense Department and the Office of the Vice-President write their own pieces, based on their own ideology. We collect so much stuff that you can find anything you want.”…
…A former high-level intelligence official told me that American Special Forces units had been sent into Iraq in mid-March, before the start of the air and ground war, to investigate sites suspected of being missile or chemical- and biological-weapon storage depots. “They came up with nothing,” the official said. “Never found a single Scud.”…
…On April 22nd, Hans Blix, hours before he asked the U.N. Security Council to send his team back to Iraq, told the BBC, “I think it’s been one of the disturbing elements that so much of the intelligence on which the capitals built their case seemed to have been so shaky.”…
So there a are few others that seem to corroborate her story but sadly there's more.
Patrick Lang, DIA
Patrick Lang, the former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence, said the Office of Special Plans "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat. Lang said in interviews with several media outlets that the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy.
"“I don’t have any problem with them bringing in a couple of people to take another look at the intelligence and challenge the assessments. But the problem is that they brought in people who were not intelligence professionals, people brought in because they thought like them. They knew what answers they were going to get.” [New York Times, 4/28/2004]"
That agency was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD," or weapons of mass destruction, he added in a phone interview. He said the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy.
Vincent Cannistraro Head of CIA's counter-intelligence unit
“I think that early on in the administration—sometime within the first five to six months after Sept. 11, 2001—the decision was made that Iraq had to be dealt with. The intelligence community was tasked to collect information.” [ABC News, 6/16/2003]
“They are politicizing intelligence, no question about it. And they are undertaking a campaign to get George Tenet [the director of central intelligence] fired because they can’t get him to say what they want on Iraq.” [Washington Post, 10/25/2002]
“Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there’s a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA.” [Guardian, 10/9/2002]
“The [INC’s] intelligence isn’t reliable at all. Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi’s own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches.” [Independent, 9/30/2003]
He told Reuters that “he knew of serving intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for playing up ‘fraudulent’ intelligence” that had been acquired through the notorious Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress. [Reuters, 5/30/2003]
-----
Tyler Drumheller, CIA chief in Europe
CBS NEWS
Former Top CIA Official On "Faulty" Intelligence Claims
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/...in;contentBody
Drumheller was the CIA's top man in Europe, the head of covert operations there, until he retired a year ago. He says he saw firsthand how the White House promoted intelligence it liked and ignored intelligence it didn’t:
"The idea of going after Iraq was U.S. policy. It was going to happen one way or the other," says Drumheller.
Drumheller says he doesn't think it mattered very much to the administration what the intelligence community had to say. "I think it mattered it if verified. This basic belief that had taken hold in the U.S. government that now is the time, we had the means, all we needed was the will," he says….
...Meanwhile, the CIA had made a major intelligence breakthrough on Iraq’s nuclear program. Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister, had made a deal to reveal Iraq’s military secrets to the CIA. Drumheller was in charge of the operation.
"This was a very high inner circle of Saddam Hussein. Someone who would know what he was talking about," Drumheller says.
"You knew you could trust this guy?" Bradley asked.
"We continued to validate him the whole way through," Drumheller replied.
According to Drumheller, CIA Director George Tenet delivered the news about the Iraqi foreign minister at a high-level meeting at the White House, including the president, the vice president and Secretary of State Rice.
At that meeting, Drumheller says, "They were enthusiastic because they said, they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis."
What did this high-level source tell him?
"He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program," says Drumheller.
"So in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam's inner circle that he didn't have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?" Bradley asked.
"Yes," Drumheller replied. He says there was doubt in his mind at all.
"It directly contradicts, though, what the president and his staff were telling us," Bradley remarked.
"The policy was set," Drumheller says. "The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."
Drumheller expected the White House to ask for more information from the Iraqi foreign minister.
But he says he was taken aback by what happened. "The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they're no longer interested," Drumheller recalls. "And we said, 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said, 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.'"
"And if I understand you correctly, when the White House learned that you had this source from the inner circle of Saddam Hussein, they were thrilled with that," Bradley asked.
"The first we heard, they were. Yes," Drumheller replied.
Once they learned what it was the source had to say — that Saddam Hussein did not have the capability to wage nuclear war or have an active WMD program, Drumheller says, "They stopped being interested in the intelligence."
The White House declined to respond to Drumheller's account of Naji Sabri’s role, but Secretary of State Rice has said that Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister turned U.S. spy, was just one source, and therefore his information wasn’t reliable.
"They certainly took information that came from single sources on uranium, on the yellowcake story and on several other stories with no corroboration at all and so you can’t say you only listen to one source, because on many issues they only listened to one source," says Drumheller.
"So you’re saying that if there was a single source and that information from that source backed up the case they were trying to build, then that single source was ok, but if it didn’t, then the single source was not ok, because he couldn’t be corroborated," Bradley asked.
"Unfortunately, that’s what it looks like," Drumheller replied.
"One panel after another found that agencies were giving conflicting information to the president," Bradley remarked.
Drumheller admits they were. "And that's the problem. No. There was no one voice in coming out of the intelligence community and that allowed those people to pick and choose those bits of information that fit what they wanted to know."
…."The American people want to believe the president. I have relatives who I've tried to talk to about this who say, 'Well, no, you can’t tell me the president had this information and just ignored it,'" says Drumheller. "But I think over time, people will look back on this and see this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy mistakes of all time."
CIA CHief Drumheller interview with Spiegel about "Curveball" Info in Powells U.N. Speech.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...462782,00.html
…Drumheller: I had assured my German friends that it wouldn't be in the speech. I really thought that I had put it to bed. I had warned the CIA deputy John McLaughlin that this case could be fabricated. The night before the speech, then CIA director George Tenet called me at home. I said: "Hey Boss, be careful with that German report. It's supposed to be taken out. There are a lot of problems with that." He said: "Yeah, yeah. Right. Dont worry about that."
SPIEGEL: But it turned out to be the centerpiece in Powell’s presentation -- and nobody had told him about the doubts.
Drumheller: I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it.
Larry Johnson, CIA analyst
“We’ve entered the world of George Orwell. I’m disgusted. The truth has to be told. We can’t allow our leaders to use bogus information to justify war.” [Sunday Herald (Glasgow), 6/8/2003]
“By April of last year, I was beginning to pick up grumblings from friends inside the intelligence community that there had been pressure applied to analysts to come up with certain conclusions. Specifically, I was told that analysts were pressured to find an operational link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. One analyst, in particular, told me they were repeatedly pressured by the most senior officials in the Department of Defense.… In an e-mail exchange with another friend, I raised the possibility that ‘the Bush administration had bought into a lie.’ My friend, who works within the intelligence community, challenged me on the use of the word, ‘bought,’ and suggested instead that the Bush administration had created the lie.… I have spoken to more than two analysts who have expressed fear of retaliation if they come forward and tell what they know. We know that most of the reasons we were given for going to war were wrong.” [Bamford, 2004; Falls Church News-Press, 2/2004]
Melvin A. Goodman Senior Analyst CIA Intell Specialist National war college
“To deny that there was any pressure on the intelligence community is just absurd.” [Reuters, 6/6/2003]
[ed: Goodman is referring here to the lectures he gives to intelligence analysts at the State Department’s Foreign Services Institute] “I get into the issue of politicization. They don’t say much during the question period, but afterwards people come up to me, DIA and CIA analysts who have had this pressure. I’ve gotten stories from DIA people being called into a supervisor’s office and told they might lose their job if they didn’t revise a paper. ‘This is not what the administration is looking for. You’ve got to find WMD’s, which are out there.’” [Vanity Fair, 5/2004]
Stansfield Turner, former director of CIA
“There is no question in my mind (policymakers) distorted the situation, either because they had bad intelligence or because they misinterpreted it.” [USA Today, 6/17/2003]
Richard Clarke, White House counterterrorism advisor
Clarke recounts how on Jan. 24, 2001, he recommended that the new president's national-security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, convene the president's top advisers to discuss the Qaeda threat. One week later, Bush did. But according to Clarke, the meeting had nothing to do with bin Laden. The topic was how to get rid of Saddam Hussein. "What does that tell you?" Clarke remarked to Newsweek. "They thought there was something more urgent. It was Iraq. They came in there with their agenda, and [al*Qaeda] was not on it."
Clarke emphasizes that Bush's focus on Iraq actually served to increase the terrorist danger. Clarke writes that Bush "launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide."
Clarke is not a Democrat, and his sentiments are not antiwar in principle. In fact he is a foreign-policy hawk and career government official who served five presidents, three of them Republicans.
"Beginning on the night of 9/11, we have the secretary of defense and others talking about going to war with Iraq. I think we knew pretty much that week that the probability of finding a justification for going to war with Iraq was high on their agenda."
"And he said: "Saddam! Saddam! See if there's a connection to Saddam!" And this wasn't "See if there's a connection with Iran, and while you're at it, do Iraq, and while you're at it, do the Palestinian Islamic group." It wasn't "Do due diligence." It wasn't "Have an exhaustive review." It was "Saddam, Saddam." I read that pretty clearly, that that was the answer he wanted.
I said to him, "We have already done that research prior to the attack" -- in fact, we'd done it a couple of times -- "and there's nothing there." And the facial expression back was, "That wasn't the right answer."
So I said, "Well, but we will do it again." And we asked CIA to do it again. CIA did it again, came up with the same answer. That answer was written up and handed to the president by George Tenet in one of his morning meetings, and it said, "For the third or fourth time, we've gone back to look at the relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and there is no real cooperation between those two.""
"I remember vividly, in the driveway outside of the West Wing, Scooter Libby, from the vice president's office, grabbing me and saying, "I hear you don't believe this report that Mohamed Atta was talking to Iraqi people in Prague." I said, "I don't believe it because it's not true." And he said: "You're wrong. You know you're wrong. Go back and find out; look at the rest of the reports, and find out that you're wrong." I understood what he was saying, which was: "This is a report that we want to believe, and stop saying it's not true. It's a real problem for the vice president's office that you, the counterterrorism coordinator, are walking around saying that this isn't a true report. Shut up!" That's what I was being told.
I'm somebody who has been in Washington national security for 30 years. I'm not easily intimidated. Imagine if you're an analyst at the CIA who's been there for four or five years."
“I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq.” [Washington Post, 3/22/2004]
Associated Events
“The White House carefully manipulated public opinion, never quite lied, but gave the very strong impression that Iraq did it. They did know better. We told them. The CIA told them. The FBI told them. They did know better. And the tragedy here is that Americans went to their death in Iraq thinking that they were avenging Sept. 11, when Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11. I think for a commander in chief and a vice president to allow that to happen is unconscionable.” [New York Times, 3/23/2004]
Larry Wlkerson, Gen Powell's Chief of staff
Look him up and see what he has to say if your interested
Hans Blix
Between late November and mid-March 2003, Blix reports, the UN inspectors made seven hundred separate visits to five hundred sites. About three dozen of those sites had been suggested by intelligence services, many by Tenet's CIA, which insisted that these were "the best" in the agency's database. Blix was shocked. "If this was the best, what was the rest?" he asked himself. "Could there be 100-percent certainty about the existence of weapons of mass destruction but zero-percent knowledge about their location?"
By this time Blix was firmly opposed to the evident American preference for disarmament by war. "It was, in my view, too early to give up now," he writes. Tony Blair in late February tried to convince Blix that Saddam had WMD even if Blix couldn't find them – the French, German, and Egyptian intelligence services were all sure of it, Blair said. Blix told Blair that to him they seemed not so sure, and adds as an aside, "My faith in intelligence had been shaken." On March 5, Blix on the phone with Rice asked her point-blank if the United States knew where Iraq's WMD were hidden. "No, she said, but interviews after liberation would reveal it."
In that meeting of the Security Council both ElBaradei and Blix reported their continuing plans for further inspections, and both said that outstanding issues might be resolved within a few months. This was not what the United States wanted to hear. In mid-February, President Bush had derided efforts to give Iraq "another, 'nother, 'nother last chance." Blix had pleaded in a phone call about the same time to Secretary of State Colin Powell for a free hand at least until April 15. "He said it was too late."
Three years later, in a speech to the Arms Control Association, Blix reflected on that moment in his office at the UN – the afternoon of March 16 – when the State Department's John Wolf called to say that the time had come to pull the inspectors out of Iraq. "My belief is that if we had been allowed to continue with inspections for a couple of months more, we would then have been able to go to all of the sites which were given by intelligence," he said. "And since there were not any weapons of massive destruction, we would have reported there were not any." An invasion might have taken place anyway, Blix concedes; the Americans and British had sent several hundred thousand troops to Kuwait and could not leave them sitting in the desert indefinitely. "But it would have been certainly more difficult," Blix said. Even so, in Blix's view, something important had been achieved. "The UN and the world had succeeded in disarming Iraq without knowing it." Blix guessed that Saddam hid his compliance so Iran wouldn't think him weak, but it was the Americans who were deceived.
Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, formerlythe director of policy planning at the State Department. A former Rhodes Scholar, he also served as the U.S. coordinator for policy toward the future of Afghanistan and was senior director of Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.
frontline interview
"Was it necessary to go to war when we did?
"When we did, no. That was a question of choice. Obviously, you could have delayed it a day, a week, a month, a year. There was no necessity then. It wasn't as though the Iraqis were poised to suddenly do something or break out. So the decision to go to war -- which obviously was the president's decision -- like everything else about this war, was an elective decision."
curveball
the best source for WMD info was a complete fraud
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...808,full.story
60 minites
Hussien Kamel, former Director of Iraq's Industrialization Corporation in charge of Iraq's weapons program, stated in an Aug. 22, 1995 briefing with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA):
"I don't remember resumption of chemical weapon production before the Gulf War. Maybe it was only minimal production and filling. But there was no decision to use chemical weapons for fear of retaliation. They must have a revision of decision to start production.
All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missiles, nuclear were destroyed."
Aug. 22, 1995 - Hussein Kamel*
http://usiraq.procon.org/view.resour...ourceID=000674
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I can give you a list just as long, from people not looking to sell anything, and you won't believe it unless it's good news about the enemy. Bottom line, there would be quite a few top democrats that would be all over this if it had any teeth. Shit, only Paul and Kucinich are willing to buy the books, and we knew them 2 have about 5 brain cells between another to share.
And we were going in to remove Saddam unless he fully cooperated - WHICH HE NEVER DID. To this day, there are literally TONS of chemical weapons that WERE ACCOUNTED FOR in 1998 that never have showed up. That WAS PART of the UN resolutions, that they account for these weapons, and they not only never did, they outright refused. I don't care about the reports of what Blix believed, as his own words and words of his colleagues show that Iraq remained in material breach up till the day they were invaded.
But lets help some shitheads sell some books off of hearsay rather than based on 12 years of FACT finding from the entire effing world!
“You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named "Bush", "Dick", and "Colin." Need I say more?” - Chris Rock
Thatcherite Minion
I'm not sure what a 'rouge power' is supposed to be. One consisting of 'reds', maybe ? And I have to ask .. is a WMD wearing cosmetics more dangerous than one that doesn't ?
But you have a point of sorts, in that proliferation of WMD's just has to make it that much easier, certainly statistically, to imagine that terrorists will one day get their hands on some.
But Syria is a particular concern, though for reasons best known to yourself you're refusing to see the truth of that. What if Assad's regime is overthrown, and we see a situation develop there much like Libya, with rebel forces just taking everything over ? What if some of those rebels had sympathies with terrorist groups ? What if some WERE terrorists, who'd infiltrated ?
Some Nation States are more stable than others, and by nobody's standards is Syria stable today. BUT, Revelarts, you seem not to have taken that into account, or, to WANT to ?
Now ... why would that be ?
Because some Leftie imperative would rather have it that you didn't ?
Last edited by Drummond; 07-22-2012 at 06:07 PM.
Senior Member
What are you suggesting that the US do in order to defend itself from WMD's that may be/are in Syria ?
A nutcase will do nutty things.
Thatcherite Minion
I take it from your question that you accept the nature of the danger this situation poses ? All well and good, if so.
Well, it's difficult, I'll give you that.
One problem is that Russia and China both want to continue to defend Assad's interests. Which from a world security angle, MIGHT be reasonable, if Assad had the means of asserting power decisively. However, it's becoming clear that he doesn't.
So establishing stability is the key.
Both Russia and China need to be told (maybe via the UN ?) that all they're doing is helping to prop up an unstable situation, and that this must stop. They would be wise to cooperate in an initiative which lands forces in the area to lend stability to warzone areas (with American forces a part of that; you can't just have them march in on their own !!). Better that they cooperate than not, though if they don't, they need to butt out while others do the job instead.
The UN might have a role as a communications medium, but can they be trusted with any more than that ? I really think not.
So, unless you also go in for carpet-bombing .. NOT my first choice ! .. I'd say you need to land troops there and either take the place over, or, do what the Soviets did in Afghanistan and prop up a native Government. Perhaps purely as a temporary measure, though ... I'm sure you'd prefer to institute proper democracy there.
Whatever the precise logistics of what would need to be done, one overriding imperative has to surely be applied .. which is to absolutely avoid just standing on the sidelines, and letting any manner of militant crazies step in, instead. You need CONTROL of the situation, and if YOU don't have it, then anyone else, no matter how savage or hostile, may grab it instead.
... and what would THAT mean for your security ??
Last edited by Drummond; 07-22-2012 at 06:46 PM.
Member
The only thing Revel had right was that security is an illusion.
I don't remember which security official said this....."The bad guys only have to be right once...we have to be right every time". ( a paraphrase)
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