The Other Insider Tell-all
I’m sure you’ve all heard plenty about our man Scottie’s book, so I won’t bother linking to, say, any excellent op-eds about the hindsight contained therein, both revealing of the administration and unintentionally condemning of the writer who enabled so much of what he now decries (cough).
But you might want to check out this op-ed on Lt. General Sanchez’s new book, which gives a similarly revealing look at the business end of the administration’s decision making: military strategy in Iraq. What I find interesting here is both the commanders-in-the-field eye view of the politically-driven decision making McClellan describes, but also how the “mission accomplished” event was a reality for those within the administration — they truly believed that the war was over and force could be drawn down early on, until reality quickly interfered. This to me is the most damning of explanations of how we ended up where we are in Iraq: the administration was too insular and self-deluded to realize that a brief war was not possible, and once that became clear their reaction was not to reevaluate their strategy, it was to solve the problem politically. The notion that “conditions on the ground” would drive decisions was just a convenient rhetorical trick to dismiss criticism.
June 3rd, 2008 at 7:52 am
And lest we forget Richard Clarke, who was actually man enough to speak up even when it wasn’t popular to do so.
June 3rd, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Okay then, there is this from wiki:
Many of the events Clarke recounted during the hearings were also published in his memoir, Against All Enemies. Among his highly critical statements regarding the Bush Administration, Clarke charged that before and during the 9/11 crisis, many in the administration were distracted from efforts against Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization by a pre-occupation with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Clarke had written that on September 12, 2001, President Bush pulled him and a couple of aides aside and “testily” asked him to try to find evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected to the terrorist attacks. In response he wrote a report stating there was no evidence of Iraqi involvement and got it signed by all relevant agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the CIA. The paper was quickly returned by a deputy with a note saying “Please update and resubmit”.[5] After initially denying that such meeting and request between the President and Clarke took place, the White House later reversed its denial when others present backed Clarke’s version of the events.
June 4th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Some folks have been asking: well why didn’t these people stand up and stop it?
Well for one thing, Generals are supposed to carry out the directives of the civilian leadership. And indeed some did try to bring reality to the process (recall Sinseki was canned when he dared to say that we need several times as many troops to actually occupy Iraq and the costs the dumbya regime were putting out were off, way off).
For another, who says Gen Sanchez (et al) didn’t try to get the morans to listen to reason? Richard Clark certainly did try to get the dumbya neocon war machine to pay attention to the threat from AQ and elsewhere: they had but one focus, the oil fields of Iraq (and possibly Iran and Saudi Arabia – why do you think they had the maps of Iraqi and Saudi oil fields at Cheney’s Energy Task Force meetings?) btw – oil is now about $130 a barrel (no I didn’t check today) it was around $20 a barrel during the Clinton years…
Think of what kind of clusterfark we’d be be in right now if some of the wiser hands didn’t push back… it could be even worse (I know, hard to believe).
So we lost a city (New Orleans), and had the worst terrrrrst attack on US soil ever, and invaded the wrong country (screwing up our invasion of the right country btw), the economy is tanking, the debt nearly doubling and the dollar is at historic lows. Really, heck of a job bushie!
June 4th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
The passage in the (cough) link that I thought was interesting was:
Because it was Armitage who leaked Plame’s name, McClellan was the White House Spokesman, his job is to be the voice of the White House, they said they had not leaked the name to Novak. They were right, ask Novak. My god guys, do you not read, are you that stupid? Are you that partisan? (Rhetorical question) . I mean, come on guys, the proof is there that the White House wasn’t the leak, and yet you keep trudging on with the lie. I guess the truth really doesn’t matter does it? (Rhetorical question)
June 4th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Right, sorry, we should have been paying more attention to the people who stand the most to gain by lying about the leak’s source, and nobody else. And I’m certain that Armitage came up with the idea of the leak completely without direction…
McClellan has been talking about how all the indicators at the time were that Bush and Cheney were the ones ordering the leak, no matter who actually made the phonecall. He’s not ignoring some ironclad proof that Armitage and nobody else was involved. Yes, it’s pretty clear that McClellane doesn’t have proof, so if you want to believe that this is all fabrication to sell books, then fine. But your assertion that Armitage was this rogue leaker seems pretty laughable to me.
June 5th, 2008 at 5:15 am
What does Novak have to gain by lying about who the leaker was? I’ve heard him say on numerous occasions, at length, it wasn’t Libby. “Armitage came up with the idea of the leak without direction”, you are sounding like Knarly and his conspiracies now. State and Armitage were against the war from the beginning, why would they be party to discrediting an ally (Wilson)?
All the indicators at the time may have pointed to the pres and vice pres but that all changed when the truth came out. Bringing this all up now is moot (or a reason to sell books). If I am missing a saw out of my garage all the indicators may point to my neighbor who is always borrowing tools. But when my brother shows up a couple days later to return the saw it is rather silly to still blame my neighbor.
From what I have heard and read, and that is a lot, Armitage wasn’t a “rouge leaker”, he was just gossiping about something he thought everyone knew.
June 5th, 2008 at 6:13 am
problem is you only read (a lot! of) right wing crap – always looking to reinforce your views that dumbya and uncle dick are jes true ‘merkin patriots and everyone else is a damn lib liar. Plame was a CIA agent, you wwnjs burned her cover to get your war on.
June 5th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Hey shcb it’s about time you stfu about your stupid conspiracy theories.
ymatt was simply applying well established principles of law. If the prosecution can provide evidence that a person had the means, motive and opportunity to commit a crime then the prosceution has established a case against the accused. That’s what ymatt provided. Anything else (e.g. eyewitnesses) is just gravy. Once means, motive and opportunity are established it is up to the defendant to provide evidence to the contrary (e.g. my wife was with me all day and will vouch for me that I did not go to your garage to steal your saw, besides we were out of town that day.) Once all the evidence is presented, a judge or jury will determine whose case is stronger (e.g. can the neighbor verify he was out of town that day and is the wife a reliable witness or does she have a material interest in the outcome which could influence her to lie?)
Given that Novak’s bread and butter depends on continued access to political insiders it would not be very smart to put your faith in his statements that would exonnerate the insiders.
By the way, “Crossing the Rubicon” is a superb presentation of Cheney’s means, motives and opportunities to direct events on 911. Any jury or impartial judge would be convinced of his involvement, absent evidence to the contrary. So far, there has been no substantive evidence to the contrary that would counter the prosecution’s evidence. Since the book’s publication there has been additional evidence for the prosecution. You need a real investigation into 911, too bad you fear the truth.
June 5th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Finding the person who did it (Armitage) pretty much covers the defendant providing evidence to the contrary wouldn’t you think?
June 5th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Only when you define “it” as making a phonecall rather than, say, conspiring to ruin someone’s career to make a political point.
June 6th, 2008 at 4:32 am
Yeah, a conspiracy by the administration to out a covert agent for political reasons is pretty slimy, and should concern most people.
June 6th, 2008 at 4:46 am
You are assuming that someone wanted to destroy Wilson’s career, which as far as I can see was that of an unemployed ambassador at the time. I am saying there wasn’t a malicious motive in “outing” Plame. If you wanted to discredit Wilson and Plame there were legitimate reasons. Wilson not being qualified for the mission, Plame lobbying for her husband to make the trip, inconsistencies in his oral report and his book, no written report ect.
June 6th, 2008 at 6:08 am
Sorry, my mistake.
So anyway, how about this book by Sanchez? It’s disgraceful how a retired general could make a mockery of Bush’s long-sighted military strategy just to sell a few books. I mean Dana Perino was just saying the other day how “Mission Accomplished” just meant the first active phase of combat, and they were fully aware that a protracted battle was just beginning.
June 6th, 2008 at 7:48 am
… or the long awaited Phase II of the report about intelligence failures in Iraq. It concludes (surprise?!) that the administration made claims not supported by the intelligence.
June 6th, 2008 at 7:58 am
The point was to destroy Joe Wilson’s credibility (the career thing would just be a byproduct). Why? Because when tasked with finding out if the yellowcake story was true, he quickly found out it was a – wait for it – lie. And then he had the gall (just like that ungrateful Sanchez feller!) to report the truth and not stfu about it.
The outing of Valerie Plame (and the intentional destruction of her career, which btw was working on non-proliferation) certainly worked for wwnjs whose faith and steadfast jingoism requires them to see only the right-wing side of any issue. Anything else is jes LibLies™
June 6th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Enk the point was to assert their power to destroy upstarts who want to speak the truth. It’s a pattern repeated by Bush’s administration so many times that it is now expected for criticism to be countered by their malevolence or vengeance.
June 6th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Ah, satire ar ar ar (Mork from Ork)
Dana is right, there are numerous speeches given before and after the Lincoln speech where Bush and other administration members say the war is long from over, in fact you will be hard pressed to find a speech about the progress of the war where some reference is not made to this being a protracted war, Bush said this was only the beginning in at least two instances in the Lincoln speech, but if history is any indication I doubt any of you have read the actual speech he gave that day.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/us/05/01/bush.transcript/
Now to Sanchez,
I always liked Sanchez, but he wasn’t really successful in Iraq, there was Abu Ghraib under his watch and we seemed to adopt a “Fort Apache” style of warfare under him. Now I have always tried to give people like him a lot of leeway. Since we don’t have a parallel universe where we can try two different things and then pick the one we like best, we sometimes don’t make the right choices. And sometimes a choice we made that didn’t seem like the best one really was, as bad as the outcome, any of our other actions would have been worse, those no win situations.
Franks did a good job winning the early battles, Petraeus is doing an outstanding job of finally winning the campaign, between there Sanchez and Casey didn’t do so well. But, as good a job as Franks did, if he would have done this or that would Sanchez have had more success, if Sanchez would not have had Abu Ghraib, allowing him to have more time would he have been more successful. We’ll never know. I agree with a few points Sanchez is making and disagree on others. Some of his points are “so what?” points. We should have had more troops, well ok, but we didn’t, did Sanchez ask for more troops? Were they available? If we had sent more troops under Sanchez’s strategy would it have made any difference? We’ll never know.
Would Petraeus have devised his current strategy without seeing the failures of Sanchez and Casey, and their successes? A lot of this is just the way things work, the old your car keys are always in the last place you look thing.
As an aside, isn’t it interesting how critical of Sanchez and the military in general you all were during Abu Ghraib but now that he is being critical of the Bush administration he is one hell of a guy?
Enky,
Actually Wilson’s report said there was evidence Sadam as trying to acquire yellow cake, his book said the opposite, that is the discrepancy, here is a Washington Post article to that effect.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39834-2004jul9.html
June 6th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Steve,
which report are you referring to?
June 6th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
LOL! Where are these numerouse reports?
What about the report where Cheney said the war “would last days, weeks, I doubt six months.” You know, the guy who just called West Virginians inbreds.
And here we are going on six years later and your country is screwed (in every possible way) with a declining dollar, recession, housing crisis, you’re less secure, your military is stretched to the brink… I could go on but I think I will stop.
Because it’s obvious you have some kind of super-happy-rose-coloured glasses glued to your forehead so why bother.
It’s all a big mess, but I believe Obama can and will fix it all. Unfortunatley I will probably have no reason to visit this site anymore because of that.
June 6th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
NL, I said speeches, not reports, you can start with every State of the Union Address since we invaded Iraq. Obama is running for president, not king, even if his ideas are the cure for all evils he can only do so much, and his ideas aren’t the cure.
June 6th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Show me these numerous speeches before the war where the war was said to be a prolonged effort.
If you think someone who says the war is going to be a long one 3, 4 or 5 years after it was stated it was going to be a cakewalk is a genius, then I can see why you identify yourself as a republican.
Have a good weekend.
June 6th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
shcb,
We’ve been through all this before – your specious claims about Wilson saying one thing to the CIA and writing something else in his book are as warped as most everything else. Because Wilson clearly knew at the time and communicated the message that the Niger claims were stupid.
That is described fully in his book with plenty of added descriptions about failsafes and covenants governing uranium sales that would preclude any possibility of a private company selling Nigerian uranium to Saddam’s Iraq regime.
Yet you wwnj’s fail to comprehend all of that and instead moronically equate Wilson’s statements that the claims were stupid as being the same thing as if he had substantiated the claims.
With that, and your inability to admit that, despite speeches about extended struggles, the key message that the Bush administration continually blasted out over the years since 2003 to your people was that the troops would be coming home in just a few more months, you have earned another letter. “M” for moronic, as in mwwnj.
By the way, you are right I do not read Bush speeches. The hypocricy and idiocy in his words makes me, like many many other people, literally feel sick.
Maybe that is a small part of the exlanation for why his approval rating now sits at 25%, one percent higher than Richard Nixon at tricky dicks LOWEST point ever. http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/0608econ.pdf
Is it too late to impeach?
June 6th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Actually I should specify:
Show me numerous pre-invasion speeches warning of what would happen in Iraq, excluding Barack Obama’s.
June 6th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Here are some quotes from *before* the war was begun:
http://www.lies.com/wp/2008/06/02/the-other-insider-tell-all/#comments
Certainly there’s some picking and choosing, but I’d urge you to find others that contradict this.
And the State of the Union — given 9 months *after* the invasion — is hardly a convincing reference point for statements that the war would be long and difficult. In fact the kind of statements we get in that speech are “Having broken the Baathist regime, we face a remnant of violent Saddam supporters.” That’s hardly convincing.
I’m done, this is pointless as usual.
June 6th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
citing a 2004 article is ridiculous…
and you cherry pick the part that you like, ignoring:
So a year after dumbya gets his war on, and even the wapo has to concede there weren’t any WMDz. If you kept searching, wwnj you would have found that there isn’t any debate about these things anymore: the war was sold on a pack of trumped up fears and outright lies.
Indeed, it often seems useless to ‘debate’ wwnjs when they look at the same info and draw such counter-reality conclusions. Heck, mb I should just go back to 100% mocking… so, what IS the latest on that R wwnj CongressCritter with the DUI/mistress-with-love-child thing? Not as humorous as Senator WideStance, or that Bob Allen fella, but it is the latest of so many scandals.
June 6th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
ymatt,
You’ve confused me with your circular link to the beginning of these comments and your labelling of them as being “before the war was begun”
was that a mistake or ?
June 6th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
btw the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Iraq Phase II can be viewed in their original forms here:
talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/198873.php
or the actual PDFs
intelligence.senate.gov/080605/phase2a.pdf
intelligence.senate.gov/080605/phase2b.pdf
Here are the key points from the reports, according to a press release from Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s office:
–Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
–Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
–Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
–Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
–The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
–The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.
– – – – –
or as they are more commonly known: lies.
June 6th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
but Enkidu,
The Bush administration made it clear that the world could not wait for international weapons inspectors or their own intelligence sources to obtain solid proof that Iraq had WMD’s, because that proof could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
By that standard (i.e. flawed logic) the Bush administration assumed for themselves the authority to wage wars of aggression (the worst of any war crime) on any country they might choose.
That they actually did so against Iraq makes them the worst criminals on earth at this time.
And that makes apologists like shcb either morons or conspirators after the fact, or both.
June 6th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
I think you misspelled the word moran
June 6th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
You are absolutely right about the administration underestimating the length of the war, you can have that one.
You guys haven’t read this report yet have you? I’m only on page 58 but this is GREAT! Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention. I didn’t realize this was even in the works. I haven’t read anything about in the media and now I know why, this report pretty much says the administration was correct given the intelligence available at the time. Where have we heard that before? Here’s conclusion 2, it deals with Iraq and bio WMD
most of the rest of the conclusions were similar, they are a bit critical that the administration minimized the amount of contradictory opinions in some of its statements, but that is a matter of opinion as to what is proper.
June 7th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Here are the key points from the reports, according to a press release from Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s office:
–Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were NOT substantiated by the intelligence.
–Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were CONTRADICTED by available intelligence information.
–Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did NOT reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
–Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did NOT reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
–The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was NOT substantiated by available intelligence information.
–The Intelligence Community did NOT confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.
so… anything to say about the lies that brought us to invade a country? yeah yeah Saddam was a bad guy, but he was boxed in, defanged and basically neutered… dumbya and his neocon cabal of wwnjs sold us a war for oil ($137 a barrel yesterday and it climbed $11 in a single day) on the premise that mr bad guy had WMDz (which turned out to be a lie).
But just keep cherry picking the one or two areas where they didn’t murder the truth – just bent it. No amount of evidence is ever enough for a partisan fanatic like dear ol wwnj. 1.5 to 3 trillion dollars later… 4000+ dead US soldiers, 30 to 40k wounded, up to a million dead Iraqis (only 9 more million to go eh wwnj?)
June 7th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
I’ll wait until tomorrow to explain the game that is being played with this report by the Democrats just in case someone else is reading it you have to get up around page 100 to understand. Obviously you are too lazy to read it and too partisan to get what is going on Enky, but some of the others may be more interested.
June 8th, 2008 at 5:55 am
This report is divided into 3 parts, the first section is where all the investigative information resides, the second part are the Democrats and Republicans debating what was in the report, and the third are amendments.
This report is very narrow in its scope, only analyzing 5 speeches against only published intelligence from a handful of sources. There is nothing wrong with limiting the scope of a report like this, and they give some legitimate reasons for doing so, but one must realize these limitations when you look at some of the conclusions. Overwhelmingly the conclusions reached in this first section show statements administration members make in the buildup to invading Iraq were supported by the intelligence community, not one hundred percent of course, there are always dissenting opinions.
In the second section Democrats (and Snowe) trot out the same old platitudes of the administration ignoring the intelligence, lying to the American public and all the bromides spouted here on a daily basis. This is where you are getting your quotes from. Now these statements by Democrats are not supported by the first section of this report. Republicans (without Snowe) then go through point by point explaining these errors. There are also some interesting stories of the making of the report. Here is an example, when the report was first being studied Democrats wanted to bring in a whole bunch of witnesses to testify in front of congress including speech writers. Republicans on the committee said they should wait until the report was at least complete enough to see if there was even a reason to have them appear. When the report got to that point the Democrats refused to call any witnesses. Republicans of course now wanted to call witnesses that would corroborate the fact that the administration had indeed used intelligence available at the time faithfully, this of course would have brought cameras and the media in to the discussion. The Chairman blocked all attempts to allow witnesses in front of this committee. So keep yourself in ignorant bliss and only read press releases from Democrats if you prefer, or read your own links and be informed. By the way, does Rockefeller give any page numbers from the report for his bullet points? If he does it is probably around 100 since that is where he gives his opinions that are unsupported by information in the earlier pages.
Q. What is an informed Liberal?
A. A neo-con
June 8th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Nice summary shcb, sure you didn’t miss anything (like statements taht should have been made based on intelligence that DID NOT SUPPORTthe war, or was the intelligence swept under the rug so the people would not know it?
We interrupt this program to introduce something real from a Kentucky boy who was actually there: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOj7Nxcn6gg
it’s under ten minutes, he deserves to be heard.
June 8th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Knarly,
They are pretty clear when and where there were dissenting views and what those views were. For instance the Aluminum tubes, everyone except one agency, DOD I believe thought the tubes were destined for centrifuges. DOD thought they were for missiles. I could have that wrong, the version I have is not searchable and cannot be copied and pasted so I’m not going to go back and find the exact situation.
Also, in Enky’s last example above, they are careful to state early on in the report, first ten pages of so, that decisions may have been made based on information not included in the several reports by the few agencies in the scope of the report. So while the statement may be correct given the scope of the report, Atta meeting with Iraqi agents may have been correctly reported by the administration if that information came from other sources than those in the scope of this report. They are fairly good at telling you there may have been other sources in those cases.
June 8th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Q: what do you call an informed Liberal?
A: angry
Q: what do you call an informed Rethugglican?
A: nonexistent
You haven’t answered even one of Senator Rockefeller’s points, but just keep pretending that everyone else is wrong and you will see what a landslide looks like come November.
June 8th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Actually I did address one of his statements in the post above, but I will give you another, your item 4 regarding the production of chemical weapons. That statement is correct, it was conclusion 4 (page 38), conclusion 3 on the page previous says the intelligence said Sadam had chemical weapons stock piles in the 100 to 500 ton range. Both NIA and DIA agreed on that. DIA didn’t think there was any production going on and NIA did, NIA used as evidence new chlorine plants that were not needed to fulfill Iraq’s chlorine needs. DIA contradicted itself however when it said in a September 2002 report that “Iraq likely has resumed some chemical and biological agent production, but we lack conclusive proof due to Iraq’s effective national-level denial and deception (D&D) program” (page 33).
So while Rockefeller’s web page correctly states a position in the report, it gives the impression to the uninformed that there was no intelligence that Iraq had Chemical weapons. When all it says is two groups had differing opinions, actually they both had the same opinion, but one wasn’t as willing to stick its neck out as far as the other. So Jay even gets that wrong
June 8th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
so Steve, now that you have had time to read this report, is it all you hoped for?
June 8th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
it would be interesting to hear Steve’s thoughts.
To cut through all the crap, anyone could tell in 2003 that there was not enough evidence of a clear and present danger to warrant an invasion of a sovereign nation. The UN was not convinced, despite serious strong arm tactics to get member nations on-board for the attack, and millions of people around the world held the largest anti-war demonstrations in history (is that an exaggeration, I do not think so) in a vain attempt to stop America’s madness, to no avail. http://www.condimustgo.com/
Look buddy, in 2003 I read all I could and saw no justification for the war. Lots of assertions from the Bush administration, very little (virtually nothing in fact) in the way of evidence to back that up was presented to us.
Then the war started (“shock and awe”) bomb the fuck out of Baghdad, and I said to myself, well that’s that, there must be rock solid proof for Bush to authorize something like that. Then we learn he did not have any proof. Far from it. Anything but. Nada zilch crappo.
Bush declared he acted on the scanty (mis)information on hand and his gut feeling, based what “God” told him to do. God? Allah? He who brings joy and light?
You have a war criminal leading your present administration, supported by multiple war criminals; their evil has seeped deep into places like Guantanimo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
June 8th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Listen to this: http://www.condimustgo.com as an example.
June 9th, 2008 at 3:17 am
but that’s not what this report says,
June 9th, 2008 at 6:56 am
Actually it IS what the report says – Jay Rockefeller (who is actually on the committee and is considerably better informed then blinkered wwnj) made a nice neat list that you just pretend doesn’t make any sense. The problem is only 25% or so of America is that dumb/partisan/violent. The rest of us look at this report and say “wow, they really DID lie and ignore any inputs that didn’t get their war on.”
Better get busy with your October Surprise. I am still betting it will be a RC controlled boat full of dead brown folks and a bunch of explosives ramming into a US warship in the gulf – gotta have a better causus belli this time around: the lies won’t work as well after you’ve cried wolf for the hundredth time.
knarly: I just hope Obama uncovers the rats nest and then sends the rats to the Hague. In all likelyhood, they’ll tut tut and say we must move on for the sake of the country. I am sick of the Iran/contra criminals getting off yet again. Slam these mfs in jail, seize their war profiteering gains and really consider capital punishment for Big Dick etc – drawing and quartering would be too nice.
June 9th, 2008 at 8:24 am
but you won’t read the report yourself and risk finding out Jay isn’t being truthful will you? It was your link after all.
June 9th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Then please read it for me as I am so laz and stoopid
Debunk Jay’s points one by one with backup. Lets see it wwnj. Prove Jay and I wrong. Spend as much time as you need.
Make sure you back up your nut jobbery with something other than rush limpbaugh or macho mike’s xenophobic rantings. We invaded for the oil. The current regime lied to get their war on. It is just that simple. btw oil is about $136 a barrel (weren’t you wwnj’s promising ponies and $20 a barrel before you started bush’s boondoggle?)
I was listening to Bill Moyers address the National Conference for Media Reform and he had a one liner that related to your Q&A wwnj.
“A neocon is an arsonist, who sets the house on fire, then six years later, boasts that no one can put it out ”
Is there anything you wwnjs have touched that hasn’t been totally fubar?
June 9th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Tax cuts for the wealthy seem to be working well for them.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:52 am
I did read it for you and I did debunk one of Jay’s statements complete with page numbers.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:17 am
shcb,
So are you actually saying that the President’s and VP Cheney’s statements actually reflected the true nature of the intelligence product’s uncertianties and concerns ???! That’s bullshit.
There is barely a single statement anywhere from the Bush administration (especially the Presnitwit and VP) prior to the attack where the intelligence was presented in a reasoned manner, WE ALL HEARD THE CRIMINALS ASSURE US HOW ROCK SOLID THE CASE AGAINST SADDAM WAS WHEN IT WAS NOT. They lied and 4080+ of your kids have died. And a society of 25 million has been torn to shreds, virtually EVERY family in Iraq has lost a close relative. And here you sit shcb trying to argue semantics to make excuses for the mass murderers. That is sick and that is criminal too.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:53 am
shcb chose to attempt to debunk Jay’s statement #4 in Enkidu’s list, which is this:
shcb attempt was to erect strawman mumbo-jumbo “complete with page number references” to the documented uncertainties written in the report about the quality of the intelligence.
That only proves further Jay’s statement that there were uncertainties present in the intelligence that were not reflected in Bush and Cheney statements
June 9th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Knarly,
Please read my post more carefully. (june 8 18:33)
June 9th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Also, see if you can make it through a post without using the word “strawman”, there are no exaggerations in my post, I am using the senator’s words and the text from the report.
June 9th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
#4 Knarly, not #3
June 9th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
shcb,
Thanks for your civility. I can’t hold off on “strawman” this time, but I will explain it better…
Sure I can read it more closely. Here it is, the meat of your June 8 18:33 post, drawn, quartered and splayed now before us in the light of day:
Okay, right off the bat you confirm that Jay Rockefeller’s statement is correct. But yet you continue…
That’s a remarkable discrepancy, either it’s 100 or it is 500 they do not know. They are guessing. I see paltry evidence of certainty there, certainly not enough to support the Preznitwit and the VP statements of certainty. Let me suggest something to you: if you have not seen El Dorado, and a couple of explorers who has not actually seen it either tells you they think it is there and it might contain either 100 tons of gold or it might contain 500 tons of gold, well then by golly a smart fella might start to get suspicious at that point and wonder if it contains in fact zero nada zilch gold. But we are not accusing Bush & Cheney of being un-smart fellas here, we are accusing them of purposeful deception. Shall we continue?
You fail to convince anyone of a certainty here, in fact this helps prove Jay Rockefeller’s case. Shall we continue?
WHOA!!! Stop right there. You built yourself a ten foot high strawman, and he’s on fire. Well done you neo-con sympathizer!
We were talking about the statement item #4 off Enkidu’s list of Rockefellers. Then you go and create a new straw man about a Rockefeller web page. Not so fast slinky, I’m not going there…
Let’s stay on topic. How does Enky’s statement #4 of Rockefeller give, in your words, “the impression to the uninformed that there was no intelligence that Iraq had Chemical weapons”? Answer: it does not. Shcb is wrong, unless you agree to arguing from his burning strawman position.
Shall we continue? No, there is no point after all that, shcb has wandered so far off track that by the time he reaches his conclusions they bear no resemblance to actual question at hand. So let’s repeat that:
Was Jay Rockefeller being forthright in stating that:
Yes. As we see from shcb’s own post of June 8, 18:33, there was uncertainty as to whether such production was ongoing.
As usual, shcb has: (a) done an excellent job of arguing against erroneous arguments of his own creation; and, (b) utterly failed to show that the people he disputes have done anything but speak the truth.
June 9th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
(With thanks to Bill Warren):
shcb owned a large farm for several years.
He had a large pond in the back, fixed up really nice, along with
some picnic tables, horseshoe courts, and some apple and peach trees.
The pond was properly shaped and fixed up for swimming when it was built.
One evening the shcb decided to go down to the pond, as he
hadn’t been there for a while, and look it over. He grabbed a five gallon bucket to bring back some fruit.
As he neared the pond, he heard voices shouting and laughing with glee.
When he came closer, he realized it was a bunch of young women skinny-dipping in his pond. He made the women aware of his presence and they all went to the deep end to shield themselves.
One of the women shouted to him, “We’re not coming out until you leave!”
shcb frowned and replied, “I didn’t come down here to watch
you ladies swim naked or make you get out of the pond naked.” Holding the bucket up he said, “I’m here to feed the alligator.”
Moral of the story: don’t under-estimate shcb.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:29 am
That’s a cute story, I like it.
I was going to make screen shots of the report and put them on my blog since you guys have an aversion to reading the native documents, but I decided I have more important things to do. I have read most all the 170 pages of this report, skimmed the rest, I’ve re-read large sections of it, I’ve given you guys page numbers etc. there is little more screen shots would help you understand what is going on here. You tend to get too caught up in the minutia, it doesn’t matter if he had 100 or 500 tons of stuff for this discussion, what matters is the intelligence community all said he had the stuff, they also agreed he wanted to make more, what they disagreed about was he making more right now. The best I can figure is the early DIA report said he was and the most current report said they weren’t sure. That’s all, they weren’t sure. I picked this point because it is so glaring because there are two conclusions so close together, literally a page break from each other. One says Sadam had chemical weapons, everyone agreed, the other said there was some dispute as to whether we was currently making more. So why did the senator pick the second and not the first? It would seem he is doing the same thing he is accusing the administration of doing. If Jay was being as honest as he wanted the president to be wouldn’t it have been better to say “everyone in the intelligence community agreed Sadam had chemical weapons, one report said they weren’t sure if he was producing more, Bush didn’t tell us that emphatically enough”
The reason Democrats don’t say it in this manner is because they know they have been caught in a lie, they said Bush ignored the intelligence community, but if you read this report you will see he clearly followed what his intelligence told him.
Here is the comment directly after the conclusion, in the same paragraph, Jay chose to leave this out.
The flip side to that comment is that they could not tell if production wasn’t ongoing.
June 10th, 2008 at 9:25 am
So basically what you are saying is a few fabricated sources (say Chalabi, Ghorbanifar, ‘Curveball’ and a couple of Iranian counterintel agents) makes the lies more likely? Even when your own intel agencies are saying that this stuff doesn’t check out? (hell, I came to that conclusion not long after Powell’s snow job at the UN, there was plenty of dissent if you bothered to check up on the wwnj cavalcade of lies).
Excuse me for having reality intrude here, but did we find 500 tons of chemical weapons? 100 tons? er, uh 10 tons? 10,000? What’s that? None? Oh, then listening to liars… known fabricators and nuisances (I am using our intel agency’s own words here) and the angry voice in wwnj’s head brought us to invade a country that didn’t have any WMDs.
None.
No significant strategic, world threatening WMDs of any kind (just ask TV, he is still smarting from the drubbing I gave him years ago on his “we found teh WMDz!!!1!!1!” bullshit)
I think this may be one of those ‘Darlak at Tanagra’ things: wwnjs just see the minority view as the only truth and that is that. Just like their counterparts the ienjs. Hey maybe we could just ship all you wwnjs over to Iraq and we could gitrdun?
June 10th, 2008 at 10:02 am
The subject at hand is did the administration faithfully make their assessments of the situation in Iraq based on the intelligence of the day. And the answer in this report is overwhelmingly yes they did. The rest of your nonsense is just that, dare I say a “strawman”?
June 10th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Much of “the intelligence of the day” was clearly fabricated crap.
You never answer anything that you know you will lose (war funding, lies that led up to it, etc). The three wwnj assholes I mentioned are major sources of bogus intel – and we knew it in the run up to the war. To say that there was no dissent is a lie. Go wiki Office of Special Plans (and Cheney’s role in our coming confrontation with Iran). Millions of people the world over protested against the Iraq war.
Why is it nonsense to test the assertions which brought us to invade Iraq against – you know – REALITY? Your wwnj bullshit hasn’t panned out. That is a truth you dare not concede. Judging by your (occasionally humorous) fanaticism, you never will be able to face reality and say “our leaders misled us and I screwed up by supporting them so unquestioningly”.
But I am sure you will suddenly find dissent and questioning our leaders to be the highest patriotic duty… once Obama is sworn in.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:28 am
so where ARE all those WMDs chief?
prove it
June 10th, 2008 at 11:09 am
So what does either of those posts have to do with the subject of this report? even if the Intelligence was fabricated (which it wasn’t) the administration would have still been making decisions based on that information. That is the point of this report.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Enkidu is right. However, the first mistake everyone makes is calling this stuff “intelligence”.
For example, much of it came from informants who were known liars and fraudsters, who had a known interest in the USA attacking Iraq.
So the term “intelligence” would be better called “stupidity”, since it was apparent at the time that it was suspect (heck even I knew that then!) and there were other good sources of information available to the administration (as the report duly notes in the introduction.)
So we should all agree that this debate is about what “stupidity” says since it is not about “intelligence”.
SHCB,
If you want to hold to the position that the subject at hand is that the administratino faithfully made their statements based on the intelligence of the day, that is fine I will hold you to that.
But please remember that the big picture is that there is at least some truth in the controversy about the “stupidity” being gathered to support the cause. So you must acknowledge that the report starts with a stacked deck. I.e. the “stupidity” was reported in such as way as to support what they wanted to say.
Nevertheless, by my count there are at least SEVEN areas where the administration was found to have seriously misrepresented what it was being told its own “stupidity”. These are listed in the report conclusions numbered:
Conclusion #1: Bush, Cheney, Condi and Runsfeld presented Iraqi nuclear weapon program assertions as facts and did not even hint that there were substantial disagreements about those assertions in the “stupidity” that they had asked to be reported to them.
Conclusion #4:
Conclusion #6
Conclusion #8
Conclusion #12
Conclusion #13
Conclusion #15
Conclusion #16
So shcb, you are wrong again in your reading of this report. There are plenty, yes, plenty of cases were the “stupidity” did not support the asinine assertions made by Bush and his administration.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:43 am
I am beginning to think I might agree with my buddy Spork: debating anything with wwnj fanatics is useless.
So… clearly labeling the lies that brought us to war as lies is nonsense? Identifying the actual liars is nonsense?
Asking you to identify where all the WMDs actually are, that is nonsense?
The point is there is plenty of proof these jingoistic fucktards manipulated the intelligence (or the stupidity to use knarl’s term) to get their war on.
Nonsense is what rolls around in wwnj’s head…
June 10th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Enk,
The only benefits to debating with wwnj’s is to make them realize that there are actually other people (sometimes their own sisters or brothers) who think better than they do and who do not agree with their deep rooted racism, homophobia and especially xenophobias and that wwnj’s do not own the world nor have the right to dictate policy to everyone who lives on this planet.
The collossal fires of ineptitude…
(Heckuva job!)
and policy errors…
(ATTACK BAGHDAD with the shock and awe of a THOUSAND 9/11’s AND GET ‘EM WMD’S and T’rrissts before they all come over here and git us!!!)
… unleashed upon the world by George W. Bush’s first term wwnj
screwball administration (friends of GWB) was due to the more rationale people in America simply getting fed up listening to, let alone arguing with, such close minded arrogant wwnj’s that they just checked out of the political debate.
Enter wwnj talk radio and everyone just sort of rolled their eyes and wondered who in their right minds actually listens, let alone believes in that crap. Unfortunately, you found out, and here we are.
I like Ray McGovern’s comment that back in the Reagun years the neo-con freaks and Texas oil idiots were laughed at as just soooo looney that they’d never get any real power; but here we are and the nightmare continues.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I doubt Obama wil be able to dig your country out of the mess it has made of itself over the past eight years; he may not even get the chance despite an Obama presidency being the wish of most Americans.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
funny!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xob2HyCbj50
Cindy is gonna be so pissed
No word from McBush’s first wife that he abandoned after coming home from Vietnam
http://www.washingtonindependent.com/view/mccain-campaign
also word is that AZ is in play as a swing state (this from R strategists)
McBush can’t even reliably count on the support of his own state!
only 3 comments, but 2 of them seem like they might not be voting for McMoran (bwahahahaha!)
June 10th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Well at least you read some of the report. It seems you have picked all the conclusions that blame Bush for not giving enough airtime to the dissenting intelligence reports. The problem with that is twofold, what is the proper amount, does he oversell the intelligence that says Iraq is not a threat and then get another 911? Secondly it is the weaker of the arguments. To say the intelligence says Iraq has weapons it isn’t suppose to have, and they want to use them on one side of the ledger and that Bush gave 30 minutes of air time for invading and 5 minutes against is pretty nitpicky.
June 10th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
shcb,
You’d be a better asset “for your side” if you would just be quiet, you sound deranged and pathetic.
The people expect an honest president, and administration, NOT a sales team giving them sales jobs to go to war. “Oversell” or undersell, as you euphemistically try to re-frame the debate, either way it means DECEIPT.
As in LIES. As in stfu already all you stupid narrow minded wwnj war profiteers.
So now you want to talk about the degrees to which your president might be allowed to deceive the people. That’s funny, very funny. Because you should recall that I already accepted your terms for the debate, remember? Here:
So now that you have been shown to be wrong about that,
i.e. the administration was NOT forthright and has been shown to have even misrepresented their own slanted “stupidity” reports with incredibly asisnine assertions; after all that now you want to change the rules and talk about how much lattitude we should give Mr. Bush and his to henchmen to properly spin a war sales pitch?…
Three words spring to mind: Go to Hell.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:20 am
But of course you are completely mischaracterizing what I am saying. This administration thought Iraq posed a threat to the US based on the intelligence of the day, they decided we needed to stop Iraq with force, there was nothing dishonest in their minds in those assessments, that is what this report says. The intelligence community wasn’t one hundred percent in agreement, they never are, the administration wasn’t one hundred percent sure on every count, you never are. On balance the risk of going to war was less than the risk of not going to war in their minds based on the intelligence of the day. Whether they oversold or undersold is a matter of opinion shaded by 5 years time. I think it is funny that you guys (liberals) have said that Powel didn’t really believe what he was saying in his UN presentation, and yet that is what you want the President to have done, sell not going to war when he really thought we should.
So your tactic to winning a debate is stfu and go to hell, you’re going to love the fairness doctrine.
June 11th, 2008 at 5:04 am
You see, you are doing the same thing you are accusing the President of doing, you are underselling conclusion 3 and/or overselling conclusion 4. Why? Because you have made your decision that Bush lied and 4 bolsters that conclusion better than 3. There were no caveats in your post like “while conclusion 3 says the Iraq has chemical weapons, the administration undersold the dissenting opinions (conclusion 4)”. I did say that, I then said that whether they had or didn’t have chemical weapons is more important to me than the degree to which the information was presented. So does that make me more honest than you?
June 11th, 2008 at 8:26 am
you are having a fine ‘debate’ (IF the date were 2002/early 2003)
reality check: today’s date is mid 2008
now test conclusion 3 and conclusion 4 against reality
NONE of the crap the dumbya regime listed in 2002/2003 turned out to be, you know, TRUE. None. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.
you lose yet again wwnj (note: looz, not loos)
just like your ridiculous comments on the projected cost of the war (off by an order of magnitude and more), the 75%pork/25%mil spending ‘analysis (you can’t back that up so you dropped it, as usual), the lies that lead us into this boondoggle (you keep saying all the intelligence said the same thing: WMDz!!1!1!!! this is patently, provably, completely false), and virtually every other issue of the day.
You can’t admit you have helped railroad our country into a very dark and disturbing place. Why? Same reason you reflexively vote for Rethuglikkkans. Pure hidebound obstinacy and blinkered partisanship. I sympathize with knarls losing (note: loosing would also work in this context) his temper with the sheer ridiculousness of your postings.
And suddenly you are all about the fairness doctrine? give me a fucking break
June 11th, 2008 at 8:40 am
hooray we caught some real trrrrsts!
firedoglake.com/2008/06/10/the-media-dont-care-about-the-other-kind-of-terrorists/#more-25659
question:
I wonder why we haven’t heard about this on the national news?
or this:
dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004/05/right-kind-of-terrorist.html
or this:
dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004/06/terror-in-eye-of-beholder.html
or this:
dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/04/other-kind-of-terror.html
and what ever happened to this guy?
dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/09/other-terror-anniversary.html
answer:
they are just your garden variety wwnjs.
Since they aren’t brown muslim trrrrsts there isn’t anything special or newsworthy about wwnjs using murder and mayhem (shoutout to knarls: possibly including the 9/11 false flag trrrrst attack) to terrorize the sane populace.
Of course, a bunch of muslim guys playing paintball and talking smack is much more serious than the wwnjs listed above… (note: I haven’t followed that case, so those guys could be just as whacked as the wwnjs listed above, I used them for comedic contrast only – oooo paintball! scary!)
I bet the reason we haven’t heard from leftymcfrootloop is he is the slob in the center pic on that first link.
June 11th, 2008 at 8:57 am
thx. Enk, but I didn’t “loose’ my temper, it was a calculated reaction to shcb’s asinine positions, at some point the wwnj’s idiocy becomes so overwhelmingly obvious that there is simply nothing further to discuss.
ymatt reached that point of recognizing he was dealing with the mind of an ass a long time ago on this thread when he said “this is pointless” to shcb.
shcb, your comparisons between me and Bush’s statments in 2002 are irrelevant because the topic is different, the venue is different, the size of the audience is different, the access to information resources is different, the level of understanding of the audience is different, the level of trust is different, the obligations and sworn allegiances to the US constitution are different, the stakes are different, the resources at our disposal are different, the level of knowledge about classified information is different now than in 2002, and… oops I forgot for a second that this is pointless because I am talking to a wwnj. Let me put this into terms that you might understand: Go to hell.
June 11th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Enk, your first link (firedoglake) does not work.
June 11th, 2008 at 9:13 am
http://firedoglake.com/2008/06/10/the-media-dont-care-about-the-other-kind-of-terrorists/#more-25659
works for me
firedoglake.com/2008/06/10/the-media-dont-care-about-the-other-kind-of-terrorists/
?
June 11th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Yes it works: http://www.firedoglake.com/2008/06/10/the-media-dont-care-about-the-other-kind-of-terrorists/ , the error must have occured somewhere in the processing between my eyes and the keyboard.
Those articles illustrate the lunacy of the MSM.
Other items you might be interested in are the impeachment articles read into the Congressional record yesterday and Blair Gadsby getting some attention from McCain’s staff.
June 11th, 2008 at 11:10 am
here is another great link:
money.cnn.com/2008/06/11/news/economy/candidates_taxproposals_tpc/index.htm?postversion=2008061111
That’s a hell of a lot of salad at the Applebees salad bar ;-)
I’d like Obama’s plan to add zero to the deficit and perhaps begin to pay it down a bit (during the Clinton years when we did that, investment and opportunity skyrocketed in America, same with tax revenues). But for heaven’s sake when one adds 4.5 trillion in debt and the other 3.3 trillion in debt, it is clear one plan is better then the other.
Sorry to have reality intrude again wwnj, back to your fantasies of nuking 9 million brown folk so they ‘surrender’…
June 11th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Senator Karen Johnson gives a good speach in the Arizona legislature:
http://www.blip.tv/file/get/ChangeArizona-StateSenatorKarenJohnson657.flv
June 11th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Link to Sne. J’s speach is also here: http://www.911blogger.com/node/16064#comment
June 11th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Heh. You guys are prolific. I’ll get my comments about the report posted later this week. My initial thought is that this report doesn’t lend itself well to talking points, but that the general theme is that the case for war with Iraq made by the administration was dishonest.
More detailed thoughts to come when I get some spare time.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
OMG!
Steve doesn’t think the administration faithfully reflected the stupidity collected under the direction of the administration’s “Iraq Group” in Bush, Cheney, Condi and Rummy’s public statements, and he even suggests that there was dishonesty. Gosh!
Steve, you might also want to review Kucinich’s motion to impeach Bush too, as it provides some background as to how the stupidity (aka “intelligence”) was manipulated.
June 11th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Sounds good Steve, looking forward to it. I think we’re just going in circles so I’m going to wait for Steve’s comments before continuing on this report subject.
Convention update. Reasonable Liberals may have saved Denver some heartache and broken windows in the last few days. It seems groups like the Green Party, Code Pink and such have decided to split from the Recreate 68 crowd after they attended some organizational meetings with Glenn S and heard his rhetoric. Spagnuolo is calling them a bunch of liberals as a pejorative from what Rosen was saying today. I guess he doesn’t consider Code Pink left enough. Rosen was saying Spagnuolo and the Colorado chairman for the Green Party were trading barbs on some site called drunkablog ? I haven’t looked at it yet. Might be a fun distraction.
Hopefully Glen and his bullhorn will be the only two things at the Recreate 68 rally.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
“going in circles”
Now that’s FUNNY!!! He hasn’t got a clue.
June 12th, 2008 at 6:05 am
good luck with that steve
wwnj won’t ever admit the garbage he spews is wrong, no matter how much you back up your side of the debate with, o you know, reality.
When his main source of ‘information’ is macho mike rosen and hate radio, there isn’t much overlap in terms of the real world.
I think I’ll go back to 100% mocking and satire for a while
hey did you see the youtube where McBush says he’s such a furin policy eggspert by saying how he listened to a speech by President Putin of Germany? true
or the gaff where McBush responds to a Mac or PC? question by saying he is illiterate? Sweet geezuz we’ve already had one illiterate wwnj moran in the oval office, we don’t need another.
June 12th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Here is what I’m thinking in my assessment of the report:
I’m not interested in whether or not there were actually WMD in Iraq, I’m only interested in the administration’s honesty. The huge failure in regards to those predictions are not 100% the administration’s fault, because there was a large degree of faulty intelligence.
The real measurement is whether or not the administration is trustworthy. While there is much more data that leads me to believe that they are not trustworthy, I’m only using information from this report concerning the existence of WMD and ties to Al-Qaida.
Also, I believe the report to be a credible and reliable report.
Next, the raw numbers:
Out of 14 conclusions: 5 stated that the administration’s claims were not substantiated by the intelligence, 9 stated that the administration’s claims were substantiated, and 3 of those 9 conclusions stated that the extent of the disagreement in the intelligence community was omitted from administration statements.
My own conclusion from this data is that the administration is not full of pathological liars. More often than not, the statements by the administration were accurate according to intelligence they had.
What this report portrays to me is an administration that has little regard for the truth. If someone lies to me 36% of the time, tells me the truth 43% of the time, and claims certainty in a gray area 21% of the time, I would not trust anything they said without verification.
That’s the position I’ve found myself in with the Bush administration for years. Once I realized that they had little regard for the truth, I found that I couldn’t take anything they said at face value anymore.
June 12th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
testify Scotty, testify!
June 12th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Steve,
That was value added. Cut through both sides’ BS. Concise too. Kudos.
NL – I thought Scotty was a big fat liar, turns out he only looked that way because he was trying to defend lies told to him that he thought were true; and that made him look very, very uncomfortable. Yes, he’ll testify, unless he suddenly gets depressed, writes a suicide note and shoots himself twice in the head like Hunter S. Thompson did, or dies in a small plane crash or traffic tunnel or gets a sudden bad case of plutonium poisoning.
June 12th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Good to hear some perspective, thanks Steve.
June 12th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Get your barf bag ready, now Bush wants his legacy to be that he was a peacemaker!
I warned ya. After you’ve cleaned that mess, you might want to read the rest, which includes a good summation about how Bush;s real legacy of lies here: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/columnists/2008/06/12/george-bush-is-a-right-wing-zealot-89520-20604289/
June 12th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I wouldn’t worry too much about that knarly. No matter how hard his spin doctors try, history will remember what he did to our world and judge him accordingly.
I also heard he regrets saying “shock and awe” and “dead ‘er alive”. LOL, he only regrets it because he was wrong and none of his fucked up plans worked out!
“There’s no question that the day I became president, the storm clouds on the horizon were getting directly overhead.”
– George W. Bush (aka Fuck Face)
June 12th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
shcb,
Looks like your heroes in Iraq are getting tired of bashing in doors and terrifying the locals, or (casualtyu rates are down so) maybe they’ve stopped going on real patrols so they don’t get shot at and instead just order the air force drop bombs on suspect houses,
whatever the case it seems like they’ve got nothing good to do, or are Iraqi puppies on suspected terrorist lists too?
http://www.livenews.com.au/MultimediaPopUp.aspx?id=46827&cat=10
Heckuva job, marines. Looks like it is time for them to come back home and f*ck-up their own neighborhoods again.
June 12th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Knarly,
According to Snopes the Marine throwing the dog has been discharged, presumably dishonorable and the other has received non judicial punishment, in less that two months. Thanks for your support of the troops.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
shcb,
Well if Snopes says it’s true then it must be true, or is there another site that debunks what snopes says?
Hey, while you were on snopes, did it mention whether that was the first and only puppy those marines chucked into the ravine? Or does Snopes shy away from those kinds of questions?
It could have been a regular thing the guys did to blow off steam after their long shifts of, in your own words, “killing people and blowing things up” (and killing more people in the process of blowing things up)?
I mean seriously, did snopes mention if anyone followed up by going down into the ravine to determine how many puppies were dead down there, and if any were mortally injured and just left there to die in the hot sun?
Okay that’s enough mocking of shcb and black satire.
I’ll start over.
shcb,
You fail to understand, again, sigh.
The problem is that you, and America, do not support your troops.
Those marines do not need to be discharged and punished, that is not support. What does that accomplish except turn them into even bigger outcasts and pariahs than they were already after the world saw their puppy murder? (Also, what kind of a message does that send to the rest of the troops who have to stay in that hellhole they created: a USA occupied Iraq?
It’s a little bizarre actually, it’s okay to shoot people who are in the way of your target, but if you throw a puppy into a ravine boy oh boy you are going to be sent home pronto?
Do you think those marines and their cavalier killing of defenseless animals (or people for that matter) will stop after they are punished and let loose amoung your society? Of course they won’t. They’ll just realize that next time they need to be more careful not to get caught.
Make sure you got a loaded rifle at the ready in case those marines, no wait I mean goons, show up on your front step some day. Except they are trained killers you wouldn’t stand much of a chance if they wanted to mess with you or your dogs. Those sicko’s need help, serious long term mental health help. Are they going to get it from your Veterans Affairs after a dishonorable (or even regular) discharge?
You don’t have the cash to support your troops for their obvious injuries let alone long term psychological trauma and damage… too bad you don’t have a health and criminal system that can actually help people like those severely psychologically damaged marines who threw the puppy, some countries do you know, e.g. Norway.
But you do have the cash for the killing and for the boondoggles, corruption and outright fraud that is private contractors in Iraq.
Back to your reality of Iraq and America. The way I see it, a discharge just creating a bigger problem for innocent people to deal with back home when you shcb, or your daughters, have to deal with these former marines at the park or outside a restaurant or bar. There are two practical solutions for losers who like to murder puppies: 1. get six guys and heave the puppy thrower into the ravine to meet the same fate as the puppy (or puppies) that he threw in, or 2. SUPPORT YOUR TROOPS by giving them the help and assistance they need including extended psychological programs.
Hey I’m not making this up as I go along. This is what your own Iraq war veterans are demanding. I support them in their cause seeking dignity and humane treatment.
Why don’t you learn a little about the people you say you support, but in fact only support if they agree to continue to be used as pawns of Cheney and Halliburton?
http://www.ivaw.org/faq
Do you support your troops AND your veterans; or just the ones that have not yet been caught throwing puppies off cliffs?
June 12th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
shcb,
Well if Snopes says it’s true then it must be true, or is there another site that debunks what snopes says?
Hey, while you were on snopes, did it mention whether that was the first and only puppy those marines chucked into the ravine? Or does Snopes shy away from those kinds of questions?
It could have been a regular thing the guys did to blow off steam after their long shifts of, in your own words, “killing people and blowing things up” (and killing more people in the process of blowing things up)?
I mean seriously, did snopes mention if anyone followed up by going down into the ravine to determine how many puppies were dead down there, and if any were mortally injured and just left there to die in the hot sun?
Okay that’s enough mocking of shcb and black satire.
I’ll start over.
shcb,
You fail to understand, again, sigh.
The problem is that you, and America, do not support your troops.
Those marines do not need to be discharged and punished, that is not support. What does that accomplish except turn them into even bigger outcasts and pariahs than they were already after the world saw their puppy murder? (Also, what kind of a message does that send to the rest of the troops who have to stay in that hellhole they created: a USA occupied Iraq?
It’s a little bizarre actually, it’s okay to shoot people who are in the way of your target, but if you throw a puppy into a ravine boy oh boy you are going to be sent home pronto?
Do you think those marines and their cavalier killing of defenseless animals (or people for that matter) will stop after they are punished and let loose amoung your society? Of course they won’t. They’ll just realize that next time they need to be more careful not to get caught.
Make sure you got a loaded rifle at the ready in case those marines, no wait I mean goons, show up on your front step some day. Except they are trained killers you wouldn’t stand much of a chance if they wanted to mess with you or your dogs. Those sicko’s need help, serious long term mental health help. Are they going to get it from your Veterans Affairs after a dishonorable (or even regular) discharge?
You don’t have the cash to support your troops for their obvious injuries let alone long term psychological trauma and damage… too bad you don’t have a health and criminal system that can actually help people like those severely psychologically damaged marines who threw the puppy, some countries do you know, e.g. Norway.
But you do have the cash for the killing and for the boondoggles, corruption and outright fraud that is private contractors in Iraq.
Back to your reality of Iraq and America. The way I see it, a discharge just creating a bigger problem for innocent people to deal with back home when you shcb, or your daughters, have to deal with these former marines at the park or outside a restaurant or bar. There are two practical solutions for losers who like to murder puppies: 1. get six guys and heave the puppy thrower into the ravine to meet the same fate as the puppy (or puppies) that he threw in, or 2. SUPPORT YOUR TROOPS by giving them the help and assistance they need including extended psychological programs.
Hey I’m not making this up as I go along. This is what your own Iraq war veterans are demanding. I support them in their cause seeking dignity and humane treatment.
Why don’t you learn a little about the people you say you support, but in fact only support if they agree to continue to be used as pawns of Cheney and Halliburton? http://www.ivaw.org/faq
Do you support your troops AND your veterans; or just the ones that have not yet been caught throwing puppies off cliffs?
June 12th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
shcb,
Well if Snopes says it’s true then it must be true, or is there another site that debunks what snopes says?
Hey, while you were on snopes, did it mention whether that was the first and only puppy those marines chucked into the ravine? Or does Snopes shy away from those kinds of questions?
It could have been a regular thing the guys did to blow off steam after their long shifts of, in your own words, “killing people and blowing things up” (and killing more people in the process of blowing things up)?
I mean seriously, did snopes mention if anyone followed up by going down into the ravine to determine how many puppies were dead down there, and if any were mortally injured and just left there to die in the hot sun?
Okay that’s enough mocking of shcb and black satire.
I’ll start over.
shcb,
You fail to understand, again, sigh.
The problem is that you, and America, do not support your troops.
Those marines do not need to be discharged and punished, that is not support. What does that accomplish except turn them into even bigger outcasts and pariahs than they were already after the world saw their puppy murder? (Also, what kind of a message does that send to the rest of the troops who have to stay in that hellhole they created: a USA occupied Iraq?)
It’s a little bizarre actually, it’s okay to shoot people who are in the way of your target, but if you throw a puppy into a ravine boy oh boy you are going to be sent home pronto?
Do you think those marines and their cavalier killing of defenseless animals (or people for that matter) will stop after they are punished and let loose amoung your society? Of course they won’t. They’ll just realize that next time they need to be more careful not to get caught.
Make sure you got a loaded rifle at the ready in case those marines, no wait I mean goons, show up on your front step some day. Except they are trained killers you wouldn’t stand much of a chance if they wanted to mess with you or your dogs. Those sicko’s need help, serious long term mental health help. Are they going to get it from your Veterans Affairs after a dishonorable (or even regular) discharge? Not in this lifetime.
You don’t have the cash to support your troops for their obvious injuries let alone long term psychological trauma and damage… too bad you don’t have a health and criminal system that can actually help people like those severely psychologically damaged marines who threw the puppy, some countries do you know, e.g. Norway.
But you do have the cash for the killing and for the boondoggles, corruption and outright fraud that is private contractors in Iraq.
Back to your reality of Iraq and America. The way I see it, a discharge just creating a bigger problem for innocent people to deal with back home when you shcb, or your daughters, have to deal with these former marines at the park or outside a restaurant or bar. There are two practical solutions for losers who like to murder puppies: 1. get six guys and heave the puppy thrower into the ravine to meet the same fate as the puppy (or puppies) that he threw in, or 2. SUPPORT YOUR TROOPS by giving them the help and assistance they need including extended psychological programs.
Hey I’m not making this up as I go along. This is what your own Iraq war veterans are demanding. I support them in their cause seeking dignity and humane treatment.
Why don’t you learn a little about the people you say you support, but in fact only support if they agree to continue to be used as pawns of Cheney and Halliburton? http://www.ivaw.org/faq
Do you support your troops AND your veterans; or just the ones that have not yet been caught throwing puppies off cliffs?
June 12th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
shcb,
Well if Snopes says it’s true then it must be true, or is there another site that debunks what snopes says?
Hey, while you were on snopes, did it mention whether that was the first and only puppy those marines chucked into the ravine? Or does Snopes shy away from those kinds of questions?
It could have been a regular thing the guys did to blow off steam after their long shifts of, in your own words, “killing people and blowing things up” (and killing more people in the process of blowing things up)?
I mean seriously, did snopes mention if anyone followed up by going down into the ravine to determine how many puppies were dead down there, and if any were mortally injured and just left there to die in the hot sun?
Okay that’s enough mocking of shcb and black satire.
I’ll start over.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
shcb,
You fail to understand, again, sigh.
The problem is that you, and America, do not support your troops.
Those marines do not need to be discharged and punished, that is not support. What does that accomplish except turn them into even bigger outcasts and pariahs than they were already after the world saw their puppy murder? (Also, what kind of a message does that send to the rest of the troops who have to stay in that hellhole they created: a USA occupied Iraq?)
It’s a little bizarre actually, it’s okay to shoot people who are in the way of your target, but if you throw a puppy into a ravine boy oh boy you are going to be sent home pronto?
Do you think those marines and their cavalier killing of defenseless animals (or people for that matter) will stop after they are punished and let loose amoung your society? Of course they won’t. They’ll just realize that next time they need to be more careful not to get caught.
Make sure you got a loaded rifle at the ready in case those marines, no wait I mean goons, show up on your front step some day. Except they are trained killers you wouldn’t stand much of a chance if they wanted to mess with you or your dogs. Those sicko’s need help, serious long term mental health help. Are they going to get it from your Veterans Affairs after a dishonorable (or even regular) discharge? Not in this lifetime.
You don’t have the cash to support your troops for their obvious injuries let alone long term psychological trauma and damage… too bad you don’t have a health and criminal system that can actually help people like those severely psychologically damaged marines who threw the puppy, some countries do you know, e.g. Norway.
But you do have the cash for the killing and for the boondoggles, corruption and outright fraud that is private contractors in Iraq.
Back to your reality of Iraq and America. The way I see it, a discharge just creating a bigger problem for innocent people to deal with back home when you shcb, or your daughters, have to deal with these former marines at the park or outside a restaurant or bar. There are two practical solutions for losers who like to murder puppies: 1. get six guys and heave the puppy thrower into the ravine to meet the same fate as the puppy (or puppies) that he threw in, or 2. SUPPORT YOUR TROOPS by giving them the help and assistance they need including extended psychological programs.
Hey I’m not making this up as I go along. This is what your own Iraq war veterans are demanding. I support them in their cause seeking dignity and humane treatment.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Why don’t you learn a little about the people you say you support, but in fact only support if they agree to continue to be used as pawns of Cheney and Halliburton? http://www.ivaw.org/faq
Do you support your troops AND your veterans; or just the ones that have not yet been caught throwing puppies off cliffs?
June 13th, 2008 at 4:40 am
Steve,
Thanks for that appraisal, that is probably as good as I’m going to get here. My assessment of the report is similar, the administration didn’t ignore information in the buildup to war, they used information as it was presented on the important issues correctly. They were not adequately prepared for post war (initial invasion) Iraq, I’m not sure why that is in this report which is supposedly about intelligence, but that is why party trumps person, the party in power gets to stack the deck in number of members and sets the agenda. But I would agree they were not prepared, I’m not sure if you could have been prepared. At the end of the day when a highly politicized report like this comes out of a partisan committee controlled by the other side and all they can find wrong with the administration’s actions is they didn’t make their opponents case strongly enough you call it a good day, turn out the light and go home.
June 13th, 2008 at 5:25 am
The intelligence community should not be thought of as the opponents of the administration.
June 13th, 2008 at 6:01 am
No, I’m talking about the anti war crowd. You are right, the IC should give a brutally honest assesment of the situation, and that’s it.
June 13th, 2008 at 8:01 am
if the people feeding the pro-war Office of Special Plans are known fabricators liars and nuisances (this is our government’s own assessment of Ghorbanifar) like Chalabi, Ghorbanifar, Curveball and a handful of MEK agents, why is this even considered worthwhile ‘intelligence’?
And why is it nonsense to test the claims that brought us to war against the reality of what we found? We didn’t find any WMDs. None. This seems to make little difference to wwnj and curiously Steve seems unconcerned about reality as well. Reality matters. 4000+ dead Americans, tens of thousands of wounded, 3 trillion spent thus far, 100s of thousands of Iraqi dead (possibly as many as a million or more). All for an illegal, immoral invasion and occupation.
I ask – politely – again, why isn’t reality important?
The reality is the administration cooked the intel until they got whatever tall tales they wanted to get their war on. Oil is $135 a barrel, gas $4 a gallon. Now that is reality.
June 13th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Plus the mis-information campaign – something like 76% of Americans thought Iraq was involved with 9/11 right before the war.
Lies!
June 13th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Don’t forget about the people of Iraq who have been treated like useless puppies since the invasion.
June 13th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Enky,
There is nothing wrong with testing the claims against the results, it’s just that that is a different issue, this report is about the claims against the intelligence. The previous report was the intelligence against the results. There is nothing malicious if the claims match the intelligence, which this report says they do by and large. The intelligence didn’t match the results but that doesn’t mean there was anything malicious either, it might, but not necessarily.
June 13th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
shcb,
I agree wih your comment to Enk except that your assertion that “the claims match the intelligence..by and large” is total bullshit.
As Steve succinctly noted, they were lying to us almost as much as when they were telling the truth (9 vs 5) and when they were telling the truth a third of the time they were misrepresenting it to further a sales pitch for war. This is not a ball game where the highest score wins, and if it were a liberal who LIED that often you’d be all over him.
Let’s put it this way: Michael Moore has a 100% truth to lies record in his film Fahrenheit 911 and there were 10 times or 100 times more damning facts in that film about the Bush debacle of America than there has ever been in the Administration’s case against the Iraq regime.
You tried to ridicule us when you thought we had not read this (long boring) report and yet were criticising it, but in fact you are the stooge for maliciously blasting Michael Moore’s credibility and you have not even watched Moore’s entertaining ad informative (Academy Award “Best Documentary Film”) F911. shcb, you would do well to watch the film, you might learn something and as a plus you will gain in Karma because you will cease to be a raving hypocrite. At the worst it might make you think a little, that can’t be too bad now can it?
June 13th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
In my crystal ball I can see the plaque on a new Presidential Library in Denver that will be built in 2014. “Dedicated to our esteemed Democratic President Hillary Clinton, 2008 – 2012: she only lied to us 36% of the time, and when she told the truth it was not the whole truth only about 21% of the time. That’s good enough for old shcb!”
June 15th, 2008 at 6:24 am
But this is more than just a tick sheet, here is a list of the conclusions, my classifications are (s) statements were substantiated (us) statements were not substantiated, (tli) too little information, the administration didn’t make their opponents case vigorously enough.
1. Nuclear weapons program (s) (tli)
2. Bio weapons (s)
3. Chemical weapons (s)
4. Chemical weapons production (tli)
5. Possession of WMD (s)
6. Underground WMD facilities (us)
7. Ballistic missiles (s)
8. UAV’s (s) (tli)
9. Iraq considering using UAV against US (s)
10. Support for terrorist groups (s)
11. Safe haven for al Qa’ida (s)
12. Iraq and al Qa’ida had partnership (us)
13. Iraq’s contacts with al Qq’ida (s) (tli)
14. IC did not confirm Atta met with Iraq intelligence in Prague
15. Sadam would give WMD’s to terrorists (us)
16. Postwar (tli)
So let’s recap, according to the intel, he had a nuclear program, bio and chemical weapons, ballistic missiles, was developing UAV’s to use the WMD’s on our soil, although Israel would probably be the first target (my opinion), and Al Qa’ida was in Iraq. So I’ll stand by my statement that this report says the intelligence supported the important stuff and the worst this report says administration did was not make their opponents case for them.
June 15th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
You’re funny, shcb, let me know when you get back on your medications or otherwise return to reality.
By the way, you forgot #17, that the intelligence agencies had confirmation from “credible sources” that he had Godzilla in a pen ready to let loose on the world. (s) (tli)
June 15th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
What did I say that was funny? What did I say that was insane? I think my score is about the same as Steve’s. I kind of hedged on 14 so that is the tie breaker. Where have I been unfair in my assesment of this report?
June 16th, 2008 at 11:44 am
shcb, ‘the intel’ wasn’t conclusive on any of those items you claimed were substantiated. Even if there were some intel fed from reliable sources rather than the main instigators of the fabricated reasons for war (think liars like Chalabi, Ghobanifar, Curveball – known misinformants), the bushco regime trumpeted only the most dire fantasies of Iraq’s WMDs.
So let me compare your checklist with reality.
1. Nuclear weapons program (nothing)
2. Bio weapons (nothing)
3. Chemical weapons (nothing)
4. Chemical weapons production (nothing)
5. Possession of WMD (nothing)
6. Underground WMD facilities (nothing)
7. Ballistic missiles (nothing)
8. UAV’s (nothing)
9. Iraq considering using UAV against US (nothing)
10. Support for terrorist groups (Saddam paid off Palestinian trrrrst suicide bomber families – this one is true in part)
11. Safe haven for al Qa’ida (nothing – ludicrous)
12. Iraq and al Qa’ida had partnership (nothing)
13. Iraq’s contacts with al Qq’ida (nothing substantial)
14. IC did not confirm Atta met with Iraq intelligence in Prague (nothing)
15. Sadam would give WMD’s to terrorists (nothing – goes to intent, plus he had nothing to give [now Pakistan…])
16. Postwar (catastrophe – incompetence)
So we invaded because Saddam had all these terrible world threatening weapons (btw the USA has the world’s largest stockpiles of all these weapons), consorted with trrrrrsts and Bad Guys and was a dire, imminent threat.
And reality says how many of those things were, you know, true?
None (save one).
June 16th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Enkidu – powerful points there, I thought shcb had killed the thread with his fantasy that the Bush administration’s statements reflected their Spooks’ stupidity reports.
I would just add that the one claim you indicate was partially true is actually quite laughable in its silliness.
It shows that the wwnj’s were afraid that some of the suicide bombers would find their own destruction so profitable that they would keep blowing themselves up over and over again until their family got rich.
For comparison, Saddam provided less $ to the widows and dependents of suicide bombers than the Americans now give to Iraqi’s who can prove their relatives were wrongfully killed by American troops.
June 16th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
but of course that isn’t the subject of the report.
June 17th, 2008 at 9:06 am
right… no need to check the intel against reality, it is just a game of gotcha on some partisan report, no biggee, just same ol same ol
nothing to see, move along