Bush signs "finding" authorizing wider covert offensive v. Iran

[ivan_astikov]

[QUOTE=Merijeek]
If a known shitbag is willing to admit to stealing a dollar, it’s a pretty safe bet that he’s actually managed to lift a five spot.

-Joe
[/QUOTE]

But a known shitbag shouldn’t have been let anywhere near your wallet…

[Merijeek]

[QUOTE=ivan astikov]
But a known shitbag shouldn’t have been let anywhere near your wallet…
[/QUOTE]

I didn’t suggest giving the guy our credit cards and PINs.

-Joe

[Sevastopol]

[QUOTE=Ale]
blink-blink

Is this, honestly, your recollection of the motive for invading Iraq? Search and (I presume) securing actual nuclear weapons?
[/QUOTE]
As ever, it is worth remembering many people in the US live within a bunker of GOP branded media. Nothing else gets in, nothing else comes out,“Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons” “Every country in the world believed Iraq had WMD” “George Bush did not lie” “Bill Clinton is a criminal,” &etc. Starving Artist, Clothahump, Shodan; 3 of this board’s endemic examples, but there are many others. It’s a way to win elections.

[John_Mace]

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Cockburn is no longer the sole source for this – Seymour Hersh has picked up on it.

Sources remain confidential, but Hersh at any rate has Pulitzer-level credibility as a journalist.
[/QUOTE]

He used to be. Until he went off the deep about the US invading Iran several years ago. How long has it been now that Hersh has been predicting this invasion? You should know-- you start up another one of these threads every time he publishes something about it.

[elucidator]

Mr Hersh would be thrilled to be wrong. Mr Hersh probably hopes that his reporting might actually decrease the liklihood of war. And unless you think he’s just making shit up, he has good reason.

[John_Mace]

Yeah, when Bush leaves office and we haven’t gone to war with Iran, that will be the ultimate proof that Hersh was right, and that his reporting prevented the war. Of course if we do go to war, then Hersh will also have been right. Nice little gig he’s got!

[elucidator]

Yeah, always got that from his writing, that sense of a happy go lucky guy, got it made.

[BrainGlutton]

Here’s a more encouraging analysis.

[BrainGlutton]

[QUOTE=John Mace]
Yeah, when Bush leaves office and we haven’t gone to war with Iran, that will be the ultimate proof that Hersh was right, and that his reporting prevented the war. Of course if we do go to war, then Hersh will also have been right. Nice little gig he’s got!
[/QUOTE]

Which makes him the best kind of journalist, in the sense that the fire inspector saves more lives than the firefighter, though we can never know how many.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

[QUOTE=Ale]
blink-blink

Is this, honestly, your recollection of the motive for invading Iraq? Search and (I presume) securing actual nuclear weapons?
[/QUOTE]

Not necessarily operable nuclear weapons, but Colin Powell’s UN speech pretty clearly laid out the Administration’s belief:

[QUOTE=Colin Powell]
Numerous human sources tell us that the Iraqis are moving, not just documents and hard drives, but weapons of mass destruction to keep them from being found by inspectors.
[/QUOTE]

We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons program. On the contrary, we have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons.

If Saddam had not been stopped, Iraq could have produced a nuclear bomb by 1993, years earlier than most worse-case assessments that had been made before the war.

Saddam Hussein already possesses two out of the three key components needed to build a nuclear bomb. He has a cadre of nuclear scientists with the expertise, and he has a bomb design.

Since 1998, his efforts to reconstitute his nuclear program have been focused on acquiring the third and last component, sufficient fissile material to produce a nuclear explosion. To make the fissile material, he needs to develop an ability to enrich uranium.

It was all part of a speech that emphasised four points: existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities, “any day now” nuclear capability, and existing delivery systems (ie. ballistic missiles)

Of course, the Administration’s other key officials put on a much harder sell for US public consumption:

[QUOTE=El Presidente, October 2002]
If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.
[/QUOTE]

If you poke around you’ll find a million similar quotes, with the oft-repeated gibberish of “what if the smoking gun is a mushroom cloud?”

In other words, yes and no- the Administration didn’t explicitly say, “Iraq has a nuke”, but they spent a lot of time saying, “Iraq is about to have a nuke”… and that’s more or less “what we were looking for” - a new or reconstituted nuclear weapons program.

We were also officially looking for chemical and biological agents, but that’s not what the public cared about, obviously, and the Administration played on nuclear fear very well.

[Patty_O_Furniture]

[QUOTE=elucidator]
And you, John, as well, have been rather careful in your parsing. For instance, in your insistence that anything that is not a direct invasion does not constitute war. A “surgical strike”? One of the more sublime euphemisms I have ever beheld. Rest assured, however the bomber might define it, the bombed have their own definitions. What do we say? "Hey, no fair, you can’t make this into a war because we said ‘not a war’ "?
[/QUOTE]

C’est true. 9/11 was about as surgical as a strike can get. The only thing missing was the iodine.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

[QUOTE=Patty O’Furniture]
C’est true. 9/11 was about as surgical as a strike can get. The only thing missing was the iodine.
[/QUOTE]

I think, by definition, a “surgical strike” is one that only hits the intended military targets, with minimal splash/collateral damage.

So 9/11 would best be described as an extremely accurate strike, but probably not a surgical one.