Because of Congressional cowardice.
And the political calculation that it would impede getting anything else done. But, based on the GOP’s automatic filibuster of literally everything the Dems have tried, even that calculation has proven wrong. It would have been better both for their responsibility as statespersons and for partisan advantage to do it.
Besides, what would be the basis? He hasn’t had a blowjob that we know of.
BTW, yes, we know Saddam had chemical weapons. We kept the receipts.
The oath he swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States?
Yes.
Well, I know tomndebb calls him Hussein, but the thing is that Hussein isn’t a family name, it was his father’s name. He was known as simply Saddam in Iraq, so that’s how we usually call him.
From GQ: Why Saddam rather than Hussein
Yeah cowardice on the side of mostly democrats…
Why don’t you check the Constitution on the number of votes needed to impeach and then convict, and then check who had the majority up to 2006. And the Pubbies wouldn’t vote to impeach even if he supported torture and kidnap - which he does.
their news reports are unbiased. their opinion editorials, that’s a different story. Although I don’t think they slant one way or the other. They’re more inclined to state an opinion on a newsworthy story when other newspapers may disregard it or spin it into a more slanted perception.
right.
I think people might dismiss Fox News because they don’t care for their opinion programs, like O’Reilly and Hannety and Combs. But their news reporting is more than fair and balanced, as they claim. And even in their opinion shows, they’ll always have a counterpart debating the issue. They’ll provide both sides to a story.
There are so many times I’ll watch a breaking news item on Fox and switch to CNN to see exactly how they reported the same story. It’s amusing for me to see just how slanted CNN really is, they’re not just reporting, they’re pushing a political agenda … also the NYTimes is notorious for this too…
Dismissing a blog is more expected since most blogs are not reporting news, but mostly opine.
Here is one site:
http://fs.huntingdon.edu/jlewis/Outlines/MidE/PowellUNspeech5Feb03htm.html
Iraq has not complied with access to personnel as required by 1441. Uses minders, refused to allow personnel to leave.
Iraq did not supply up to date list of scientists – only 500 names. UNSCOM already had 3500 names.
Saddam warned personnel of death penalty for divulging info – and those leaving Iraq to talk would be treated as a spy. Trained personnel in resistance to inspection.
False death certificate issued for one scientist in hiding – others sent home or in house arrest.
1441 false statements and failure to cooperate constitute material breach.
Iraq failed that early test.
This body in danger of irrelevance if allows Iraq to not respond.
How long before we as UN say “Enough, enough.”
I’ll find more sites later when I have more time.
How do you know they are unbiased? In general I believe i’ve heard people say it’s quite slanted towards the more conservative elements of the country. What was your method for judging its lack of bias?
Having a counterpart doesn’t imply fairness. Watch;
A: Hey, Bush is a great leader. Look at all these points (facts go here)! My case is clearly made.
B: Nuh uh! Bush is a big doody head!
A counterpoint to A’s claims has been shown - but it’s not a very good one. B’s argument can easily be knocked down; while it is certainly a counterpoint, it’s not the best argument that could be made. Providing two sides of a story - but only showing one’s sides weaker arguments, or odder proponents - can actually be worse than just having one opinion, because people see it and are inclined to think both sides are representative. A person who saw that argument up above would think “Wow, look at all these good arguments A has, while B is useless! Now that I have seen both sides of the story, I can clearly see A is correct”. I believe that it is arguments like this that are often addressed to Hannity and Combs.
But how do you know that Fox isn’t just slanted the other way? Again, I have to ask; what’s your method for judging whether a source is biased or not?
Good point. My exposure to American media is pretty much mostly from these boards, so while I know who the evil conservative brown-nosing ones are, i’m less in the know about who the despicable liberal cretins are. 
I realised that it’s actually pretty difficult to cite that something hasn’t happened, so if it’s tricky I apologise. I’ve got a couple of cites the other way, if that’s ok instead.
In the interests of fairness; Blix does mention two problems; one of which was solved and the other was the unwillingness to guarantee the safety of an aerial reconaissance plane.
2 things need to be pointed here:
- That that was Sec. Colin Powell, speech on Iraq. Powell is one of the administration members that misled the people of the United States in that speech.
- Even Colin Powell said later that he was misled.
Colin Powell Said He Was Misled Before UN Speech on WMDs
What moderation is there if you can not identify a bad cite? Or worse, a cite that was debunked by its own creator?
Thank you for the link. This proves the Bush Administration did not lie, but were misled by a National Intelligence estimates report which was also given to the Congress and other decisionmakers.
This proves the report in question, (linked in my first post), is biased and slanted to discredit the bush adminstration.
simply by being as objective as possible. And a person’s objectiveness can come in to question. No response to your question will satisfy you since there are degrees of objectiveness.
So, how would you respond to this question? How can you tell when a source is unbiased? What is your method for judging it’s lack of bias? 
JohnnieEnigma:
The NIE, as you pointed out, was a pack of lies. However, the reason for this is not some effort on the part of the intelligence community to mislead the executive. This report and others were manipulated from above, data was cherry picked and massaged until it said what their handlers wanted it to say. All of this was known at the time of Colin Powell’s speech and was widely reported in international papers. In the U.S., of course, Powell was almost universally praised for his amazing command of the “facts.” I recommend Fiasco.
This is not the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. When the powerful leader goes in front of the people and wishes to use the military by backing his claims with secret sources using an intelligence network not accountable to public he is lying. This is a general rule but you’ll find it works out the vast majority of the time. An example of this in action was JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis: he put his cards on the table. The pictures couldn’t be debunked because they were real and in your face.
But all of this is just a shellgame. As Arthur Silber points out, trying to argue against imperial acts by wringing your hands over the intelligence is a sucker’s game. WMDs? Democracy? Terrorism? Move down the line until something sticks to the people’s hearts.
It proves nothing of the sort. From the OP’s original link:
It seems quite clear from this and other listed items in the report that the Administration wanted the war first, and that the National Intelligence Estimate providing a convenient justification for it came after.
Actually whether or not the source is biased on some way is irrelevant. There is no bias in facts. The facts of the report linked by the OP are that several members of the Bush administration made hundreds of false statements about Iraq, and that those statements were part of an orchestrated campaign to justify an invasion of Iraq. The OP has been asked several times to show where any of these facts are in dispute. As he has not done so, we can assume that the OP accepts the report as factual. Where, then is the bias?
Johnnie, sorry, but you have utterly failed to support your position. Furthermore, your apparently intentional non-responses to numerous requests to back up your assertions of bias show that you are not looking for answers to anything, in this thread at least.
No. What it “proves” is that the National Intelligence Estimate was manipulated by ther administration using too much input from the spin factory in Rumsfeld’s Office of Special Plans rather than relying on the actual information provided by the CIA, NSA, and other professional intelligence agencies.
Note that in the recent brouhaha over the CIA releasing the NIE information that Iran is not nearing nuclear capability, one of the explicit reasons provided by the CIA for releasing that information was that they wanted to avoid a repeat of the 2002 situation in which their input was sidelined and cherry-picked to provide a false image to present to the U.S. people after which they were blamed for the presentation over which they had no control.
Wrongo, when the administration is not willing to investigate where things did go wrong and Cheney and others continue to spout that all intelligence agencies were also wrong they are certifiably lying. The report indeed makes the point that there has not been a formal investigation of where the misinformation came from (and many suspect Cheney’s OSP (Never wonder why the fair an balanced media never mentioned that to you?))
When an administration is willing to continue with a plan and later continue misleading even more people what I see here is a lesson even the Veggietales can tell you (I have a little niece so I was forced to watch one): Continuing telling a lie only makes you resort to tell even more lies, which leads to a downward spiral of telling bigger and bigger lies to cover for themselves. (Like the new lie of “If we leave Iraq Al-qaeda wins”, never mind that Al-qaeda was not a force in Iraq before invading and it is clear Al-qaeda is hated in Iraq and they would be dead in Iraq even faster if we are gone)
Speaking of being misled, you thought that Powell speech was great evidence still even after later the majority of the items were shown to be false or exaggerated, this requires that you continue to accept the right wing spin on the matter, once again a demonstrated lack of moderation on this subject.
No, certainly there are responses that would satisfy me, or I wouldn’t have asked it. 
In the first place admitting that I probably can’t. Being able to judge a source as being entirely free of bias is pretty much beyond me, given that I can’t look into the heads of writers or newsreaders or whoever. But generally I try to compare it with other sources - to go with the counterpoint idea, I can compare with a source that is obviously and impressively biased to see whether the same arguments are being made; true balance needs to be checked for. If two sources come to two entirely different ideas on a subject, that brings both of them into question, not just one. And there’s the old standby that when a source agrees with something that’s entirely opposite what you’d expect from their political slant, it’s more likely (though not certain) to be accurate, on the idea that if they could make it sound worse they probably would.
I do call into question your methods for this, though. I mean, it seems like your answer to “how do you check bias?” is “see if it’s biased or not”, which doesn’t really explain very much. What is it you’re checking against? Say you pick up a newspaper, any newspaper, and there’s a story in there. What is it you actually do to evaluate potential bias?
The proof that the National Intelligence Estimate was manipulated by a spin factior in Rumsfeld’s office of Special Plans is mostly a perception; although it’s a perception that is well believed at this point, but without any base. There is no real proof of this, right? I got the impression from what Powell said (in the youtube link above) that the nat’l intelligence report originated from the CIA… and their sources for their report were possibly from the Middle east ( I’m assuming here). Where else would the CIA get the notion that Iraq had WMD’s? They must have had some solid evidence from their own secret sources that probably cannot be revealed for security reasons. Whomever their (the CIA) sources were wanted to create the impression that Iraq had wmd’s - or maybe they really did. I don’t know. They were never found.
Well, no, it probably wasn’t that complex. Saddam had WMD back when he attacked the Kurds. He never demonstrated that he had completely disarmed himself of them. That’s why pretty much everybody, Republicans and Democrats alike, agreed that Saddam still had them.
Well, some were. Warning: PDF. Hans Blix even said so -
Discussions on the “spin” of various NIEs is somewhat ironic. Bush is excoriated for cherry-picking the intelligence data. But compare that with the reaction to the NIE on Iran, which stated
Which is always presented as if the NIE were saying that the Iranian nuclear program is no longer any threat, and Bush was lying about it all along. Even when he said (prior to 2003) that they were pursuing nukes.
Regards,
Shodan
That a small amount of chemical weapons, namely artillery shells, were found post invasion is irrelevant to the substance of the debate. No way would anyone have agreed to go to war over that. The invasion was justified by reference to possible nuclear weapons production and long range missiles. Not pissant artillery shells.
I guess it’s kind of like Clintongotablowjob. Saddamhadsomechemicalweapons.