Reply With Quote
And what happened to Powell when he started grumbling?
He got dumped. And now we don't even have a Sec. of State. It has been reduced to a useless position.
Why would it come from saddam? I understand he was completely surprised by our invasion.
I also think it's "most likely" that Powell has information that supersedes the definition of "most likely".
And what happened to Powell when he started grumbling?
He got dumped. And now we don't even have a Sec. of State. It has been reduced to a useless position.
What's that got to do with your original premise that Colin Powell lied at the U.N.?
I'm not doing your work for you. If you are claiming the President continues to rely on information provided at the U.N., by Secretary Powell, that was later determined to be untrue or mistaken, I wish you'd post the quote or the article containing the quote or the transcript containing the quote or the video containing the quote.
I'll take it from there.
Telling me to find something I doubt exists, ain't gonna cut it.
Powell is hedging his bets. He's saying the intel he was given and reported turned out to be exaggareted, but stops short of saying who's responsible for exaggerating the intel.
INTERVIEWER: But, still, those countries who didn't support the Iraqi Freedom operation use the same argument, weapons of mass destruction haven't been found. So what argument will you use now to justify this war?
THE PRESIDENT: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.
from a 2003 interview
My "original premise" is what he later admitted. He didn't come to this conclusion without knowledge.
I was asking you why Bush still uses Powell's address? Why does he do that? Is it because he is capable of ignoring truths? Is it because he suspects Pol's aren't swift enough?
Or would you suggest that Powell;s admission is equal to treason?
He also says he thoroughly checked the information and was satisfied of its authenticity at the time.
I went back and checked. He doesn't use the word "exaggerated." He says it was wrong, untrue and in "some cases" deliberately misleading.
We don't know if he's hedging or if it's just not discussed in that interview. I'd like to know who misled him as well. And, as far as I know he's given numerous interviews since that time -- maybe someone should ask him.
But, I'm not going to jump to conclusions on where the bad intel originated. Of course, since you and clambake believe this administration is full of s bags, feel free.
But remember, telling the lie repeatedly, before you know the facts, leads to the same syndrome clambake demonstrated when he jumped in here insinuating Colin Powell exaggerated and made stuff up for his U.N. presentation. The lies become liberal articles of faith.
2003 is before 2004 (the date of the Russert interview) just in case you hadn't noticed.
I wasn't going to do that OG. It's pretty stupid to suggest something doesn't exist because someone has someone else on ignore.
Make sure Yoni sees this too:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/...j.irq.no.labs/
Note this article appeared the month before Bush's interview with Polish TV.
Your not making any sense. When has the president relied on this information? Oh Gee's example pre-dates the Russert interview and when, apparently, Secretary Powell learned of the inaccurate and misleading intelligence.
When did the president rely on this, after it was known to have been untrue or misleading?
At that point, Powell's position was beginning to be steamrolled. Why do act like you've never seen the wheels turning?
What wheels?
You've obviously constructed some grand scenario in your mind. Do share.
Because, from what we've discussed in here, we've found out that Colin Powell made what he believed to be true statement at the U.N. prior to the invasion.
President Bush referred to that same presentation in 2003.
Post-invasion and after it was becoming clear WMDs weren't where the administration thought they'd be found, Colin Powell states, in an interview, that some of the intelligence upon which he based his statement was wrong, untrue, and deliberately misleading.
Now, I've not seen the President contradict that and I've not seen him rely on the information after it was learned to be untrue.
What is your point?
all i have to say is saddam is a big and id slap him with my tiny 1 incher
My point is why is Powell the only one brave enough to admit it? Certainly not you. You're satisfied with pretending it never happened. If I had voted for someone that did what Bush has done, I'd be outraged.
Washington Postl Sunday, May 22, 2005
More Evidence Of Bush Aides' Doubts on Iraq
By Walter Pincus
On Jan. 24, 2003, four days before President Bush delivered his State of the Union address presenting the case for war against Iraq, the National Security Council staff put out a call for new intelligence to bolster claims that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear, chemical and biological weapons or programs.
The person receiving the request, Robert Walpole, then the national intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs, would later tell investigators that "the NSC believed the nuclear case was weak," according to a 500-page report released last year by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
It has been clear since the September report of the Iraq Survey Group -- a CIA-sponsored weapons search in Iraq -- that the United States would not find the weapons of mass destruction cited by Bush as the rationale for going to war against Saddam Hussein.
But as the Walpole episode suggests, it now appears that even before the war many senior intelligence officials in the government had doubts about the case that was being trumpeted in public by the president and his senior advisers.
( dubya and head hyped WMD as certain enough to justify invasion, while suppressing/classifying numerous doubts by intel analysts. ie, dubya and head had a war for oil to sell, and nobody was going to stop them.)
The question of prewar intelligence has been thrust back into the public eye with the disclosure of a secret British memo showing that, eight months before the March 2003 start of the war, a senior British intelligence official reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that U.S. intelligence was being shaped to support a policy of invading Iraq.
Moreover, a close reading of the recent 600-page report by the president's commission on intelligence, and the previous report by the Senate panel, shows that as the war approached many U.S. intelligence analysts were internally questioning almost every major piece of prewar intelligence about Hussein's alleged weapons programs.
These included claims that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium in Africa for its nuclear program, had mobile labs for producing biological weapons, ran an active chemical weapons program and possessed unmanned aircraft that could deliver weapons of mass destruction. All these claims were made by Bush or then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in public addresses even though, the reports made clear, they had yet to be verified by U.S. intelligence agencies.
( hype hype hype, dubya didn't care about the truth )
For instance, Bush claimed in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address that Hussein was working to obtain "significant quan ies" of uranium from Africa, a conclusion the president attributed to British intelligence and made a key part of his assertion that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program.
More than a year later, the White House retracted the statement after questions were raised about its veracity. But the Senate report makes it clear that even in January 2003, just before the president's speech, analysts at the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center were still investigating the reliability of the uranium information.
Similarly, the president's intelligence commission, chaired by former appellate judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), disclosed that senior intelligence officials had serious questions about "Curveball," the code name for an Iraqi informant who provided the key information on Hussein's alleged mobile biological facilities.
The CIA clandestine service's European division chief had met in 2002 with a German intelligence officer whose service was handling Curveball. The German said his service "was not sure whether Curveball was actually telling the truth," according to the commission report. When it appeared that Curveball's material would appear in Bush's State of the Union speech, the CIA Berlin station chief was asked to get the Germans to allow him to question Curveball directly.
On the day before the president's speech, the Berlin station chief raised a warning about using Curveball's information on the mobile biological units in Bush's speech. The station chief warned that the German intelligence service considered Curveball "problematical" and said their officers had been unable to confirm his information. The station chief recommended that CIA headquarters give "serious consideration" before using that unverified information, according to the commission report.
Nonetheless, Bush told the world the next day, "We know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile weapons labs . . . designed to produce germ warfare agents and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors." He attributed that information to "three Iraqi defectors."
A week later, Powell said in an address to the United Nations that the information on mobile labs came from four defectors, and he described one as "an eyewitness . . . who supervised one of these facilities" and was at the site when an accident killed 12 technicians.
Within a year, doubts emerged about the truthfulness of all four, and the "eyewitness" turned out to be Curveball, the informant the CIA station chief had red-flagged as unreliable. Curveball was subsequently determined to be a fabricator who had been fired from the Iraqi facility years before the alleged accident, according to the commission and Senate reports.
As Bush speeches were being drafted in the prewar period, serious questions were also being raised within the intelligence community about purported threats from biologically armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
In an Oct. 7, 2002, speech, Bush mentioned a potential threat to the U.S. mainland being explored by Iraq through unmanned aircraft "that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons." The basis for that analysis was a single report that an Iraqi general in late 2000 or early 2001 indicated interest in purchasing through a procurement agent outside the country autopilots and gyroscopes for Hussein's UAV program. The manufacturer chosen by the procurement agent automatically included topographic mapping software of the United States in the package.
When the list was submitted in early 2002, the manufacturer's distributor determined that the U.S. mapping software would not be included in the autopilot package, and the distributor informed the procurement agent in March 2002. By then, however, U.S. intelligence, which closely followed Iraqi procurement of such material, had already concluded as early as the summer of 2001 that this was the "first indication that the UAVs might be used to target the U.S."
When a foreign intelligence service questioned the procurement agent, he originally said he had never intended to purchase the U.S. mapping software, but he refused to submit to a thorough examination, according to the president's commission. "By fall 2002, the CIA was still uncertain whether the procurement agent was lying," the commission said. Nonetheless, a National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002 said the attempted procurement "strongly suggested" Iraq was interested in targeting UAVs on the United States. Senior members of Congress were told in September 2002 that this was the "smoking gun" in a special briefing by Vice President Cheney and then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.
( no certainty by the intel people, but for head and Tenet, it was certain smoking gun )
By January 2003, however, it became publicly known that the director of Air Force intelligence dissented from the view that UAVs were to be used for biological or chemical delivery, saying instead they were for reconnaissance. In addition, according to the president's commission, the CIA "increasingly believed that the attempted purchase of the mapping software . . . may have been inadvertent."
In an intelligence estimate on threats to the U.S. homeland published in January 2003, Air Force, Defense Intelligence Agency and Army analysts agreed that the proposed purchase was "not necessarily indicative of an intent to target the U.S. homeland."
By late January 2003, the number of U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf area was approaching 150,000 and the invasion of Iraq was all but guaranteed. Neither Bush nor Powell reflected in their speeches the many doubts that had surfaced at that time about Iraq's weapons programs.
Instead, the president said, "With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in that region." He added: "Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own."
=================
dubya, head, Powell, and dubya-sucker Tenet presented evidence as certain when the various intel orgs all had serious doubts about every single piece of the "evidence".
All of this is old news. NONE of justifications for the invasion were true, ever, and were proven after the invasion to be false.
So why was the WH so bent for invading, going back to the late 1990s? A US/UK grab for Iraqi oil and the war as means to privatize military operations and enrich Halliburton, etc with $Bs in no-bid, un-monitored contracts.
The WH said the Dems had the same intel as the Repugs, but the WH suppressed/classified all doubts about their "evidence", so Dems were fed, at best, only half the intel story. The other half, the widespread doubts, were not given to the Dems.
Who said Powell was the only one?
Bush admits Iraq intelligence was wrong
Bush takes responsibility for invasion intelligence
Bush Admits He Was 'Wrong'
That's just the first three links in what appears to be several pages of links after I googled "Bush admits intelligence was wrong.
I don't know what rock you've been under.
We might as well give it up, boutons. Powell turned out to be the only real man left standing. At least he regrets his actions.
That's right, Yoni. He's the guy being provided with endless excuses. It would be nice to have a pres. that could own up to something.
dubya said was the intel was wrong, as if he were surprised, he's "responsible" but he's not accountable.
Had dubya and fellow murderers really been serious about the intel, he would have known, very probably did know, that the various intel orgs had SERIOUS DOUBTS about all the intel.
But dubya didn't care about the doubts, nor about the truth. Those doubts turned out to be ACCURATE. He instead he cherry-picked and hyped the positive interpretations and extrapoloations of the dubious intel as justifying his grab for oil and enrichment of US contractors.
Did Bush ever say that his entire strategy for the invasion and occupaiton of Iraq was completely myopic and tragically flawed and that he as commander-in-chief is responsible for the entire debacle?
That's the one I'm waiting for.
But his speech doesn't account for the administration's heavy hand in spinning faulty intelligence.
So why doesn't he feel compelled to expose the ones at fault?
LOL. I never said a "source" was Saddam, just that he was leaking misleading information for whatever sources there were to pick up. And whoever said the surprise line is an idiot.
Don't you love when people drop the most reasonable explanation because it doesn't fit their theory?
He's talking about the sources when he mentions the "deliberately misleading". Rather obvious what he meant.Powell: I'm very concerned. When I made that presentation in February 2003, it was based on the best information that the Central Intelligence Agency made available to me. We studied it carefully; we looked at the sourcing in the case of the mobile trucks and trains. There was multiple sourcing for that. Unfortunately, that multiple sourcing over time has turned out to be not accurate. And so I'm deeply disappointed. But I'm also comfortable that at the time that I made the presentation, it reflected the collective judgment, the sound judgment of the intelligence community. But it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that, I am disappointed and I regret it.
Nice pick up on the Village Voice sub le.
There was an investigation and it was determined the administration didn't try to get the intelligence community to lead the intelligence in any direction.
What do you...er, what does the Village Voice mean by "heavy handed spinning?"
, I don't know. I don't know why half the CIA isn't in jail over the NSA leaks.
Something I'll ask him if I ever get the chance.
I wonder why the media isn't curious.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions