So Now Dems are 'Rewriting History'?

[boutons]

"trigger the long-awaited inquest into the Iraq intervention"

Why need it be "triggered" now when it's supposed to have been completed by now (without the Plame game), or certainly not totally stopped by the Repubs? That was the whole point of the Reid stunt.

The Repubs don't want the investigation into pre-war intelligence to proceed, and will do everything possible to string it out, to limit its scope, to water down conclusions and culpability. When an investigation is impeded, the immediate su ion, with a very high probability of accuracy, esp with these lying Repugs, is COVERUP.

Going to war with Iraq was never the ONLY option and priority in the war on terror.

Going to war with Iraq was not the IMMEDIDATE option (2003 election campaign was the immediate motivation).

What the Repubs can't COVERUP is the horrible failure to plan for and provide enough troups and equipment (Repubs gave the money away in tax cuts to rich+corps), to secure the infrastructure, the re-building of infrastructure, and public safety. Lying before the war, incompetence in executing the war.

"stay the course" is dumb dubya's slogan, not an exit strategy.

The Repubs who started this war were adults during the VN war. How could they possibly assume, in good faith, that the Americans would support the Iraq war for year and years? The Repubs were going to start the Iraq war NO MATTER WHAT.

And now, the entire justiification for the war was absent, has not made the US safer, is costing 1000's of US casualties, the end is not in sight, and the majority US is calling BULL .

[gtownspur]

Wrong.

Senator Roberts (R) has been delaying the Phase 2 investigation into faulty intelligence for 2.5 years, this is exactly why the Democrats closed the Senate last week. So in essence, W is commenting on a still on-going investigation.

That's even farther from the truth.

The Bipartisan Silbermann-Robb commission is a totally seperate investigation that targeted solely wether the administration used political pressure to influence intelligence gathering. That commision found no evidence of wrong doing whatsoever.

The other Senate investigation is about wether the intelligence itself was faulty. Two very different investigations especially since The admin itself doesn't formulize intelligence reports. The various national agencies do.

Both reports are not linked to each other and have no correlation to one another.

Nice spin.

[Nbadan]

"Some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past," Bush said. "They're playing politics with this issue and they are sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy. That is irresponsible."

[Nbadan]

"President Bush and his administration spent 18 months trying to convince the American people that there was a tie between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida and even to the 9/11 attacks. There wasn't. There was never any evidence for that. But they knew the charge would be effective. And, for them, that was more than enough.

"They can't wash out the taint of that cynicism and infamy no matter how much they try and no matter how loud they yell.

"As I said above, many Democrats ran scared in the face of this once-popular president's onslaught and said many things they probably now wish they hadn't. Let's catalog those statements and let them answer for their cowardice and wobbliness. But the president was president -- a fact of accountability he never seems to grasp. He drove the train. He and his advisors cynically worked to convince the public that Saddam was tied to 9/11 -- an explosive claim in the aftermath of the 9/11 horror. That's something they knew wasn't true and which none of the president's critics, to be the best of my knowledge, ever agreed with or argued for. President Bush and his administration are on the line for that.

"Now they want to go back and try to wriggle out from under the past we all remember. So to use his words, bring it on. The facts indict him. And his White House's ferocious desperation in response shows they know it.

"Let them dig through the transcripts. And if there's collateral damage among today's accusers, so be it. Let the facts get hashed out and the chips fall. There's only one side of this argument running scared from the truth. We know what happened. We were there. We all remember."

Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo

[Nbadan]

Bush's Reverse Slam Dunk

On Friday, President Bush skipped the traditional Veterans Day wreath-laying at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in order to deliver a promised "hit back" against those calling for a strategy for success in Iraq. One senior administration official described the speech as the "most direct refutation" of Iraq critics "you've seen probably since the election," and said it marked the first stage of a coordinated "offensive" that "will play out over several weeks." (The offensive continued this weekend with remarks by National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Ken Mehlman, former White House deputy to Karl Rove.) Before the war, the Bush administration presented its pre-war intelligence as a "slam dunk"; now it wants to engage in revisionist history. President Bush's latest case (which is notably similar to past efforts) is based upon three fundamentally flawed arguments: 1) that Congress had access to the same intelligence as the White House prior to the war; 2) that the bipartisan Senate investigation found that the Bush administration did not misrepresent prewar intelligence; and 3) that intelligence agencies around the world agreed with the Bush administration's assessment of the Iraqi threat. Bush is en led to his own opinion as to how the administration got it so wrong on Iraq; however, he is not en led to his own facts.

FACT: CONGRESS DID NOT HAVE THE "SAME INTELLIGENCE" AS THE WHITE HOUSE: In his speech, President Bush claimed that members of Congress who voted for the 2002 Iraq war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" as his administration. This is false. As the Washington Post pointed out Saturday, "Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material." For instance, in the lead up to war, the Bush administration argued that Iraq had made several attempts to "buy high-strength aluminum tubes used in centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." The White House sent 15 intelligence assessments to Congress supporting this notion, but according to the New York Times, "not one of them" informed readers that experts within the Energy Department believed the tubes could not be used to recons ute a nuclear weapons program. Even Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) -- who has led efforts to delay and downplay the need for investigating prewar intelligence -- confirmed this broader point yesterday. Asked whether the differences between the intelligence available to the White House and to Congress was a "legitimate concern," Roberts acknowledged that it "may be a concern to some extent."

FACT: SENATE INTEL REPORT SHOWED MANIPULATION OF THE EVIDENCE: Bush claimed that "a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs." That argument is wrong on at least two counts. First, "the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions." The so-called Phase II of the pre-war intel investigation is not expected to be completed this year. Second, the Senate Intelligence Committee's Phase I report found, according to the Los Angeles Times (7/10/04), that the unclassified public version of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was manipulated. "arefully qualified conclusions were turned into blunt assertions of fact." For example, the classified version of the NIE said, "Although we have little specific information on Iraq’s CW stockpile, Saddam Hussein probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons" of certain poisons. The phrase "although we have little specific information" was deleted from the unclassified version. Instead, the public report said, "Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents."

FACT: THE WORLD WAS NOT IN AGREEMENT WITH BUSH: One frequent talking point of Bush's defenders is that the pre-war intelligence failure was a global failure. "Every intelligence agency in the world, including the Russians, the French...all reached the same conclusion," Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said on CBS's "Face the Nation." Similarly, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) claimed, "This was a worldwide intelligence failure," citing the French and Russians, among others. In fact, many of our friends and allies believed that, based on the intelligence they had, the threat of Iraq did not rise to the level of justifying immediate force. French President Jacques Chirac said, "e just feel that there is another option, another way, a less dramatic way than war." German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said he did not believe the threat rose to the level requiring the "'ultima ratio,' the very last resort." And Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said, "It is our deep conviction that the possibilities for disarming Iraq through political means do exist."

Progress America

[xrayzebra]

We have no recourse to correct the injustices of the past. What has been, either through conspiracy or not, propagated against the American people and the people of the world in the past cannot now be undone. We cannot refight the Spanish-American war, nor WW1 or WW2, or for that matter we can-not keep refighting Vietnam. However, in Iraq we still have a chance to set things right, but in order to do this Americans have to start being honest about the cir stances that led our country to war, and whether the administration cherry-picked and manipulated intelligence that fit it's plans. Only when we reach this ultimate truth can we start reversing the ground we have lost in the last 3 years on this war on religious fanaticism.

Why cant we dan? You and your brethren are using the same tactics that was used during the VN war. No different. In one post you say the military
is killing the innocent and in the next you say you support them. You, sir, are a liar and have no other motive other than seeing the US go down in defeat so you can bring the dimm-o-craps back into power. You just follow the script of the talking points handed down from your leaders in the dimm-0-crapic party.

[boutons]

shrub's polls on leadership, direction of country, trustiworthiness, morality vs earlier admins, all continue to crater, and probably haven't seen the bottom yet. I bet if you asked those pollees to read this succinct article on why shrub/Repugs have shot themselves in the foot, they'd probably agree:

btw, belows "deny" is a civilized euphemism for "lie"

=========================

November 15, 2005
Editorial NYTIMES

Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials

To avoid having to account for his administration's misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial, saying he did not skew the intelligence. He's tried to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as well as President Bill Clinton. He's tried to pass the buck and blame the C.I.A. Lately, he's gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in Congress of aiding the terrorists.

Yesterday in Alaska, Mr. Bush trotted out the same tedious deflection on Iraq that he usually attempts when his back is against the wall: he claims that questioning his actions three years ago is a betrayal of the troops in battle today.

It all amounts to one energetic effort at avoidance. But like the W.M.D. reports that started the whole thing, the only problem is that none of it has been true.

Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had - Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress - and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.

Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact.

It's hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working - a view we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new evidence about Iraq, just new politics.

The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger, later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise.

The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.

Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. That is true only in the very narrow way the Republicans on the committee insisted on defining pressure: as direct pressure from senior officials to change intelligence. Instead, the Bush administration made what it wanted to hear crystal clear and kept sending reports back to be redone until it got those answers.

Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was "significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration's "hammering" on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency.

Mr. Bush and other administration officials say they faithfully reported what they had read. But Vice President Cheney presented the Prague meeting as a fact when even the most supportive analysts considered it highly dubious. The administration has still not acknowledged that tales of Iraq coaching Al Qaeda on chemical warfare were considered false, even at the time they were circulated.

Mr. Cheney was not alone. Remember Condoleezza Rice's infamous "mushroom cloud" comment? And Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, when the rich and powerful met in Davos, Switzerland, and he said, "Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it into material for nuclear weapons?" Mr. Powell ought to have known the report on "special equipment"' - the aluminum tubes - was false. And the uranium story was four years old.

•

The president and his top advisers may very well have sincerely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It's obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein's weapons and his terrorist connections. We need to know how that happened and why.

Mr. Bush said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of war, but that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are rewriting history.

[boutons]

"If you're against me, you're against America"

It didn't work for Nixon, it's not working for shrub

[boutons]