Chuckmanjoe
I wonder how the hell Sandy Berger figures into this thread. Try to stay on topic if you can.
As far as Eric Margolis visiting KGB headquarters, all that suggests is that Eric Margolis is taken seriously as an intelligence reporter.
One more time: NOTHING about the report coming out this week can be called “good news for Bush” unless you are desperately spinning as hard as possible. (Raise your hand BostonBarrister).
Even Senator Pat Roberts (co-chairmain of the committee and GOP member) did not portray the report as good news for Bush.
[quote]Lumpy wrote:
Chuckmanjoe
I wonder how the hell Sandy Berger figures into this thread. Try to stay on topic if you can.[/quote]
It seems pretty obvious to me, Lumpy. Anything Margolis has to say on this subject is now moot, because Berger stuck a few sticky notes in his pocket. That proves it, right joe?
I’m really supposed to believe that poor little George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were just minding their own business, when along comes the Big Bad CIA telling them lies about WMD?
And that Team Bush really didn’t WANT to go to war in Iraq, they reluctantly did it only because the CIA made them do it?
Wow, another thing to add to the list of things Dubya wasn’t responsible for. His shirking abilities are world-class!
Your post is what’s known as a straw man. No one claimed Bush/Cheney et al did not want to go in and deal with Hussein, for multiple reasons that have been discussed ad nauseum in previous threads. This whole matter concerns the anti-Bush factions shrill cries of “Bush Lied!” concerning intelligence, and the argument is that the intelligence he received indicates he was not lying, in that he was not claiming something he believed to be untrue.
Looks as if I’m not the only one who thinks the reports will be good for Bush. And not just for the reasons I’ve already stated. From the AP Newswire:
Warner: New Report Backs Iraq WMD Claims
APARNA H. KUMAR
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - An upcoming report will contain “a good deal of new information” backing up the Bush administration’s contention that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass destruction, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., said Tuesday.
The administration cited Saddam’s hunger for such weapons as a main reason to invade Iraq last year.
“I’m not suggesting dramatic discoveries,” Warner told reporters, but “bits and pieces that Saddam Hussein was clearly defying” international restrictions, “and he and his government had a continuing interest in maintaining the potential to shift to production of various types of weapons of mass destruction in a short period of time.”
The report is by the civilian head of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, who reports to the CIA director. Initially the report was expected to be done this summer, but instead it will come out in September, Warner said.
Warner said the new information covers “some weapons that predate the first Gulf War that are still around and were used at the time Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Iranians” as well as “remnants of what he was doing himself here in the last several years.” He would not elaborate, saying he didn’t want to pre-empt the report.
The senator made the comments after a closed briefing by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, who updated the panel on the Iraq Survey Group’s progress. Dayton returned from Iraq last month after giving up his post as the military head of the hunt for weapons as part of a routine rotation. Marine Brig. Gen. Joseph J. McMenamin became director of the Iraq Survey Group on June 12.
The intelligence community, meanwhile, hopes the trials and interrogations of “high-level detainees” by the new Iraqi government could yield more information about Saddam’s weapons programs, Warner said.
“The Iraqi people are still concerned that some remnants of this program are yet to be found,” Warner said.
A defense official speaking on condition of anonymity Tuesday, said the survey group has not yet found any new evidence of Saddam weapons. While there are “all kinds of documents” showing his intent to produce weapons of mass destruction, there is “no treasure map that shows ‘Here is where the missing munitions are,’” the official said.
What we disagree on is “who lead the way” into war with Iraq, based on bad intelligence.
As I understand it, Team Bush first came up with a final conclusion that they wanted (“We should invade Iraq, lets do it because Iraq has WMDs”) and then molded the intelligence and cherry-picked intelligence (and gathered their own intelligence from bogus sources like “Curve Ball” and Chalabi) to support a pre-conceived conclusion.
But you seem to imply that Team Bush had an open mind about Iraq, and were misled by the CIA, forcing Team Bush to take action.
[quote]Lumpy wrote:
What we disagree on is “who lead the way” into war with Iraq, based on bad intelligence.
As I understand it, Team Bush first came up with a final conclusion that they wanted (“We should invade Iraq, lets do it because Iraq has WMDs”) and then molded the intelligence and cherry-picked intelligence (and gathered their own intelligence from bogus sources like “Curve Ball” and Chalabi) to support a pre-conceived conclusion.
But you seem to imply that Team Bush had an open mind about Iraq, and were misled by the CIA, forcing Team Bush to take action.
I would say that is re-writing the story.[/quote]
No we don’t. I’m fine with saying “Bush led the way”. And I would also be fine with saying that 20 years of experience with Mr. Hussein had given the Bush Administration some preconceived notions. But the Bush Administration didn’t make up intelligence, or use intelligence it knew was false, in order to make its case.
And that’s been the criticism leveled at the Bush Admin for a long time now: “Bush Lied! People Died! 16 Words!” etc. etc. I don’t care to go searching through the archives to prove this, but I’m fairly certain you, Lumpy, were making those claims, not the more measured, less shrill critique you are making above.
But, giving you the benefit of a change of heart, I will address your new position thusly: Bush never claimed the WMD were the lynch pin of the decision to take out Hussein. There were 4 distinct rationales for going in to Iraq that were emphasized during the build up to hostilities. The CIA’s intelligence affected only the WMD rationale, so there’s not really anything to dispute your contention that “his mind was made up.”
On the other hand, if all the intel had come back saying “No WMD; no immediate threat” you cannot just gaze in to your crystal ball and say that Bush would certainly have gone ahead as planned, given the hostility from the French, Germans and Russians to his plan.
Suffice it to say, Bush didn’t lie, and there are those of us who think he acted appropriately given the information he had in hand in terms of the threat Saddam posed (in terms of the decision to move ahead and take Saddam out at least, if not in putting together a better plan for the immediate post-combat occupation of Iraq).
Oh yes they did. The obvious example is the 13 words included in the State of the Union address. Afterwards, administration officials have admitted that those words should not have been included.
Then there is the administration’s reliance on Ahmed Chalabi, who was the source for 90% of the administartion’s information on chemical and biological weapons. The State Department has long known that Chalabi was not reliable, but the Defense Department insisted on relying on him for information. Now it turns out Chalabi may be an agent of Iran’s.
You’re really just parsing words though… what did “Bush” know… did “Bush” actually lie.
It’s obvious that on his own, George Bush doesn’t know jack shit. He only knows whatever his handlers tell him. So saying that “Bush didn’t lie, because he believed what he was saying” is besides the point.
When Bush gets dumped in November, he’ll get his pink slip along with Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Rumsfeld, Rice, and so on.
When people say that Bush Lied (and I maintain that he absolutely did) it is shorthand for saying the Bush Administration lied. It’s a whole group of people who deserve blame, with Bush in command.
The fact that George Bush might believe whatever he’s been told is cold comfort. Who cares if he believes it. It’s his job to be RIGHT, not to just THINK he’s right! Trying to deflect responsibility is just shirking… “Don’t blame me, I’m just the Boss!”
On an unrelated note, the 9-11 intelligence report coming out will supposedly say that Team Bush missed 6 chances to avert the 9-11 attacks. It also says that Team Clinton missed 4 chances to possibly avert 9-11.
Unfortunately for George W. Bush, 9-11 happened on his watch. And Clinton isn’t coming up for election, Bush is.
Ahhh…Let us talk about those famous 13 words , President Bush made in his State of the Union Address: There is a new revelation that is coming out: It is a very long article. But it now centers on one person…Joe Wilson. ANd do hope everyone gets to read it.
This is on the Senate Intelligence Committee Report by Dan Darling…
But since it is so long, I am just going to post a few of the key paragraphs from it…
So, about Joe Wilson …
I see Instapundit as well as both the Associated Press and the Washington Post has already beaten me to the punch on this one, but it’s a point that needs to be made. Joe Wilson is a liar and not a particularly good one at that. As the report, starting on p. 39 and going through p. 47 very carefully explains, the claims that Wilson during his media blitz and subsequent canonization as a representative of all that is righteous and pure within anti-war circles were every bit as misleading if not factually inaccurate as anything that one may charge that the administration had done. Even more so, I would argue, if only for the fact that he was making claims about a number of issues, for example the forged documents referring to Niger, of which he had no actual knowledge - a very polite way of saying that the man was blowing smoke out his ass…"
"…Now, onto the red meat …
Most of my own personal attention within the report, as most people can probably find understandable, is based around statements concerning Iraq’s ties to al-Qaeda. The report notes on p. 305 the difference of opinion within the CIA between the Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) and the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis (NESA) as far as the Iraqi relationship with al-Qaeda that I’ve written about here before. In other words, the CTC believed (and still does) that there were definite ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, whereas the NESA is far more skeptical on this count. One might reasonably guess where our pal Mike “Anonymous” is working these days on the basis of his opinion of the relationship.
The CTC position was essentially that a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda developed over time to where it was prior to the war, whereas the NESA saw the contacts as more of a sporadic, wary phenomenon. As I wrote in my last special analysis, the evidence is frequently such in these types of instances where reasonable people can conclude things one way or another entirely without any accusations of warmongering or bad motivations. If these are going to come up every time someone takes a different position on these issues, then we may as well scrap our intelligence services altogether. Feith’s office also gets added into the equation on p. 307 and basically states the same as what I’ve said before on the subject and I would also note the instance of the DIA detailee on p. 308 as well with regards to finding various pieces of information that fell through the bureaucratic cracks in the CIA analysis but were subsequently incorporated into the broader intelligence picture as a direct result of the work of Feith and his people over at the Pentagon. The complaint listed on p. 309 that the CIA (in particular the analysis wing) was relying on requiring “juridical evidence” concerning ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda is an entirely valid one to make with regard to the issue of intelligence. In many cases what you have to go off of is not going to be of the same standard that one would use in a court of law - this is simply the way that intelligence works…"
SO please go and read this very incredible article on someone who read this report: ANd what this report will come out…
Oh yes they did. The obvious example is the 13 words included in the State of the Union address. Afterwards, administration officials have admitted that those words should not have been included. [/quote]
Dude, have you suffered some sort of anneurism to remove from your memory all the debunking of Joe Wilson that has gone on the past 3 weeks? Or the fact that it was 16 words, and the words you’re omitting are “British have found”?
Ummm – if they were relying on intelligence provided by Chalabi, how where they making it up? Also, how many times must it be explained to you that when there is contradictory information coming in from various sources, choosing one source is not lying or making stuff up?
[quote]You’re really just parsing words though… what did “Bush” know… did “Bush” actually lie.
It’s obvious that on his own, George Bush doesn’t know jack shit. He only knows whatever his handlers tell him. So saying that “Bush didn’t lie, because he believed what he was saying” is besides the point.
When Bush gets dumped in November, he’ll get his pink slip along with Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Rumsfeld, Rice, and so on.
When people say that Bush Lied (and I maintain that he absolutely did) it is shorthand for saying the Bush Administration lied. It’s a whole group of people who deserve blame, with Bush in command.
The fact that George Bush might believe whatever he’s been told is cold comfort. Who cares if he believes it. It’s his job to be RIGHT, not to just THINK he’s right! Trying to deflect responsibility is just shirking… “Don’t blame me, I’m just the Boss!”[/quote]
What don’t you understand about the definition of “lie”? Even if you’re referring to the entire administration, you still have the problem that to maintain your little stance of standing there, shaking your fist and shrieking “Bush Lied!” you have to show that they, you know, lied. And that involves showing they were advancing items they knew to be untrue. Which, of couse, they weren’t.
[quote] On an unrelated note, the 9-11 intelligence report coming out will supposedly say that Team Bush missed 6 chances to avert the 9-11 attacks. It also says that Team Clinton missed 4 chances to possibly avert 9-11.
Unfortunately for George W. Bush, 9-11 happened on his watch. And Clinton isn’t coming up for election, Bush is.[/quote]
Too bad for you the report isn’t the fiery damnation of Bush for which you hoped and prayed. Here’s a link:
[quote]Lumpy wrote:
“But the Bush Administration didn’t make up intelligence, or use intelligence it knew was false, in order to make its case.”
Oh yes they did. The obvious example is the 13 words included in the State of the Union address. Afterwards, administration officials have admitted that those words should not have been included.
quote]
because if you had you would notice that in the past week every respectable newspaper has had editorials saying the GW was RIGHT about those 16 words…go read them.
BB
British intelligence can’t “learn” something that isn’t true. As far as Joe Wilson being discredited, says who? I don’t care how many articles you post on Wilson, it doesn’t change the fact that the Niger claims were bogus, and Wilson told the administration the claims were bogus. Condoleeza Rice admitted that she FORGOT to remove the claim from the State of the Union address.
Maybe you don’t remember Bush apologizing for including the 16 words?
Why then did Bush apologize for something he didn’t need to apologize for?
As far as Chalabi goes, the State Department knew all along that he was a fraud and protested against the Defense Department relying on him as a main WMD intelligence source. But Rumsfeld and his team in the Defense Department won the ear of the president, over Powell and his team in the State Department. Chalabi has been floating around Washington for years, and Team Clinton knew he was a phony. They didn’t even let the guy in the door. However Chalabi had a message that the war hawks in Bush’s cabinet found useful. Did they know Chalabi was lying? It’s their damn job to know he’s lying!!!
Perhaps you know the story about Colin Powell disgustedly throwing down the intelligence report on Iraqi WMD he was supposed to deliver before the UN, and saying “I’m not reading this bullshit!”
Then the administration went over the report again and removed “some” claims and changed language to make things more acceptable to Powell. Still, it turns out that Powell repeated many lies before the UN (many of them “deliberate” according to Powell), a fact that Powell recently admits he “regrets deeply”. Any of this ringing a bell?
I don’t know about you, but I expect a certain amount of competence, double-checking, and accountability from the people who take our country to war. It seems like you’re willing to excuse some incompetence, though. Your claims that Team Bush might not have actually known that they were repeating lies, seems a whole lot like arguing over what the meaning of “is” is. If someone doesn’t know they are telling a lie, is it still a lie? Your defense seems to center on the idea that repeating someone else’s lie isn’t lying. Isn’t that a pretty meager standard to hold the President to? Is Bush guilty of being incompetent, or is he a liar? I think it comes down to one or the other! Either way, the guy has dropped the ball, big time!
Where does responsibilty lie, in the executive branch? Who is going to stand up and say that “the buck stops with me”? Is there anything that this administration WILL accept responsibilty for? Maybe it would be faster and easier to discuss things from that perspective?
[quote]Lumpy wrote:
BB
British intelligence can’t “learn” something that isn’t true. As far as Joe Wilson being discredited, says who? I don’t care how many articles you post on Wilson, it doesn’t change the fact that the Niger claims were bogus, and Wilson told the administration the claims were bogus. Condoleeza Rice admitted that she FORGOT to remove the claim from the State of the Union address.
Maybe you don’t remember Bush apologizing for including the 16 words?
[/quote]
No, I do. It’s called political expediency, unfortunately. Look back on that carefully worded “apology” and see if any wrongdoing was admitted. But this explains why the administration itself isn’t jumping all over Joe Wilson. It’s kind of embarassing to have apologized for something you weren’t wrong about in the first instance – and, of course, there is the matter that one of documents concerning Niger uranium was a forgery – however, that fact wasn’t known until AFTER the State of the Union Address. And, of course, that forgery doesn’t negate the other intelligence that the British and others still stand by that indicates Saddam attempted to obtain uranium from Niger.
See above. Political expediency combined with good wordsmanship.
[quote]As far as Chalabi goes, the State Department knew all along that he was a fraud and protested against the Defense Department relying on him as a main WMD intelligence source. But Rumsfeld and his team in the Defense Department won the ear of the president, over Powell and his team in the State Department. Chalabi has been floating around Washington for years, and Team Clinton knew he was a phony. They didn’t even let the guy in the door. However Chalabi had a message that the war hawks in Bush’s cabinet found useful. Did they know Chalabi was lying? It’s their damn job to know he’s lying!!!
Perhaps you know the story about Colin Powell disgustedly throwing down the intelligence report on Iraqi WMD he was supposed to deliver before the UN, and saying “I’m not reading this bullshit!”[/quote]
How do you manage to perfectly describe an internal debate and then come forth with “lying” as a verdict? I wouldn’t have thought that was possible, but you indeed did it.
Maybe that is because they changed the meaning by changing the words. You see, words mean things. Words have definitions that matter and change the meaning of statements when they are added and subtracted. Definitions of words and statements matter. YOu know, kind of how “lying” means saying something you know to be untrue.
Lumpy, just for the sake of this discussion, lets accept your premises about dropped balls and whatever else – that ISN’T LYING. It’s not lying to say something you believe to be true, even if you are incorrect. And the moral culpability of being incorrect is hugely different from lying, which is why it’s important to make the distinction.
They will accept responsibility for being seemingly being incorrect on the WMD issue. They should also accept responsibility for poor occupation planning and for being too clement with the Iraqi army, especially the Republican Guard and the Baathists.
On responsibility: Let’s see if Congress will step up and accept responsibility for emasculating U.S. intelligence with the various committee findings, from Church onward, and their legislation handcuffing what the CIA could do in order to gather intelligence. Let’s focus on changing that, and fixing that.
Let’s see if Congress will step up and accept responsibility for emasculating U.S. intelligence with the various committee findings, from Church onward, and their legislation handcuffing what the CIA could do in order to gather intelligence.
Well, if they did that we couldn’t listen to diatribes about how it was all Clinton’s fault.
The Clinton administration made the problem worse (see Jamie Gorelick), but Congress deserves the lion’s share of the culpability. Particularly former Senator Toricelli and his crusade against letting the CIA deal with, basically, anyone mean and nasty – you know, the type of people that one might run into and have to deal with while gathering intelligence. No wonder they thought they could replace human intel with satellites – the humans weren’t allowed to work anyway.
Here is an excellent post to refresh your memory as to the “16 words.” I pick up the original post after a few graphs of explanatory stuff (follow the link to see all the internal links in the post):
…
But I beg to differ. Wilson claimed that his February 2002 report exposed the Italian documents on Iraqi-Nigerien relations as forgeries. But the CIA didn’t have those documents until October 16, 2002.
Nine days earlier, on October 7th, George Bush delivered an address in Cincinnati which the CIA aggressively edited to ensure the accuracy of Bush’s comments about African uranium. As Tom Maguire points out, what the CIA removed were very specific claims about the Nigerien uranium that it couldn’t back up.
Then, shortly after the Cincinnati speech, the CIA suggested replacement language that was extremely similar to the 16 words that ultimately made it into the SotU. What the CIA suggested was “Sought uranium from Africa to feed the enrichment process.” What Bush ultimately said was “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
As Tom points out, the similarity of these two statements debunks Matt’s claim that the CIA specifically objected to the SotU language (aka the “16 words”) as early as October.
Now, since Matt wasn’t able to help me resolve my initial confusion about the efforts of Rice, Tenet, et al. to distance themselves from the 16 words, I’ve come up with a hypothesis of my own: Wilson’s accusations may have been false, but they drew attention to the fact that the American, British and French intelligence services had all based their conclusions about the Nigerien uranium on a set of forged documents.
Arms inspector Mohammed El-Baradei publicly exposed the documents as forgeries in March 2003. What I can’t figure out is when, exactly, the US government learned out that the documents were forged.
This post from TPM suggests that the British didn’t identify the documents as forgeries until at least February 2003, i.e. after the State of the Union. My best guess is that if the UK didn’t know until February 2003, neither did the US.
So, in conclusion, my hypothesis is that the Bush administration’s panicked response to Wilson’s accusations reflected its embarrassment about the forgeries, not Wilson’s false accusation that the administration lied.