Dems on WMD

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

The mere presense of WMD in Iraq would not have been a sufficient grounds for regime change anyway, so it’s irrelevant if the Dems believed they were there. All that would have mattered was if they had both the ability and the intention to do harm to the US. Under the UN Charter, if they can’t hurt us, we can’t overthrow their government. It’s just that simple.

As for credibility, the idea that any Bush supporter would question the credibility of the Dems is too bizarre to even require an answer.

[E72521]

@furt

I haven’t heard that.

If my doctor tells me my right nut has to go because it’s cancerous, and I give him permission to remove it, and it turns out it isn’t cancerous, that doesn’t change the fact that I have him permission to cut it off, while still able to claim that I was misinformed.

@furt

Because the people you want to convince already voted for him. They supported the war. Many of them think he’s an alright guy, even if they aren’t sure, in hindsight, that he’s made the best decisions.

Insisting that they must come around all the way to the view of “he’s an evil, horrible liar” is just dumb politics – even if he is indeed an evil liar. Implicit in that is a suggestion that “and you’re an idiot if you even think about supporting him.”

There’s a reason that smart politicians refer to “my distinguished opponent” or even “my freind from across the aisle.” You don’t need to convince people your opponent is satan, and you’re setting the bar too high if you try. You just need to convince them that you’re slightly better.

Well yeah, I support good manners and all. This board is proof enough that slinging insults back and forth is a waste of time. I hold no grudge against his supporters, but if the president really is an “evil, horrible liar”, let’s not let him get away with it because he’d be cool guy to drink and fish with, and probably meant well. I can forgive my fellow citizen for falling for the “alright guy”, but my charity ends right there.

[SteveG1]

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=6804281&postcount=290

is my reply to the “Dems and WMD” flap.

[RTFirefly]

@John Mace

The problem with those “only other alternative” analyses is that they are never the ONLY other alternative.

I suppose, as Voyager suggests, that they could be incompetent buffoons - and they are incompetent with respect to things they don’t care about, but that gets us back to their not giving a damn whether there were WMDs in Iraq or not.

Or they could just be on psychedelics…but you get the idea.

No need to convince me on that part. My take is the Iraq War hawks were so certain that they’d find SOME sort of WMDs, that they just played fast and lose with the intel. You know the old saying-- it’s better to ask forgiveness later rather than permission in advance. They figured that few people would care about the particulars as long as something was found.

That’s been my theory for a coupla years now. But that also dovetails with the notion that they didn’t expect whatever WMDs they might find to actually represent a threat to America, which was why the war plan was rather casual about them.

My guess is that they fully expected to find biological or chemical weapons. They also didn’t count on an insurgency like the one that emerged, so all would be forgiven.

Nobody expects the Iraqi insurgency!!

OK, a lot of people did. Just not the dunderheads in the Bush Administration.

Except that Rummy’s now saying he had a memo with 29 bullet points of things like that that we might have to deal with, when we invaded. But did he prepare for them? Nope. Wanker. (Rummy, that is, not you.)

If you want to call that lying, I won’t quibble. I suppose it’s close enough for government work. It seems to be working in the court of public opinion, too. I just don’t find it useful, since I never thought the so-called WMDs were cause enough for war in the first place.

Like you (and most people), I assumed Saddam had something in the way of bio or chem weapons - but also like you, I hardly thought that amounted to a threat, let alone a casus belli for war.

But I still think it matters that they were very very dishonest in making the case for this war, and the numerous deceptions and omissions go well beyond chance. They’re a pattern of “denial and deception”, as the White House web pages from 2003 still say. (I love unintentional self-parody.)

[John_Mace]

@RTFirefly

Like you (and most people), I assumed Saddam had something in the way of bio or chem weapons - but also like you, I hardly thought that amounted to a threat, let alone a casus belli for war.

No need for the “for war” part, since that’s covered by “belli”.

Yeah, we had him pretty well contained. Plus, there were lost of other countries was more worried about in terms of funneling WMDs to terrorists.

[lawoot]

Whenever I hear the “Congress saw the same inteligence the PResident did” argument, I thnk of it like this:

The intellegence is a deck of cards. GWB shows Congress the red suits, but not the black suits. He can still say that they all saw the same intelligence, except that congress didn’t see all of the intelligence he did.

[RTFirefly]

@John Mace

No need for the “for war” part, since that’s covered by “belli”.

That’s what you think - but we at the Department of Redundancy Department disagree!

Yeah, we had him pretty well contained. Plus, there were lost of other countries was more worried about in terms of funneling WMDs to terrorists.

And a number of more pressing threats in the world unrelated to terrorism, notably the progress of North Korea and Iran towards becoming nuclear powers, and the instability of Pakistan, which already is one. Between those three nations and al-Qaeda, I couldn’t, at the time, see room for Iraq to rank higher than fifth on the list of short- to medium-term threats.

[What_the]

I have not read the posts since I was last here but will do so. First I wanted to post this article on the Dems who claim they’ve been hoodwinked by that dunce Bush:

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47490

WARNING: Comes from an unapproved source.

[RTFirefly]

@What the .... ?!?!

I have not read the posts since I was last here but will do so. First I wanted to post this article on the Dems who claim they’ve been hoodwinked by that dunce Bush:

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47490

WARNING: Comes from an unapproved source.

Yeah, WorldNetDummy is definitely an unapproved source.

Like the intelligence that Congress got to see (even though few did), the WND summary of Dana Priest’s article in the April 27 WaPo left a few things out.

For instance, the WND says:

an April 7, 2004, Washington Post article said, “No more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page National Intelligence Estimate executive summary, according to several congressional aides responsible for safeguarding the classified material.”

And how did the aides know that?

From the WaPo article, but not included in the WND piece:

In the fall of 2002, as Congress debated waging war in Iraq, copies of a 92-page assessment of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction sat in two vaults on Capitol Hill, each protected by armed security guards and available to any member who showed up in person, without staff.

So: they can’t read the NIE in their offices, and they can’t have staff read it for them and summarize (which is how they’re used to getting most of their information, of course). They have to leave the Capitol itself, go over to the Hart Senate Office Building (according to the article, further down), enter a secure vault, read the 92 pages of the NIE in the vault, and can’t take notes on the NIE (also later in the article).

They had the summary, which most of them apparently read. They had a few colleagues who did read the whole NIE, and could be queried as to whether there was anything major in the NIE as a whole that diverged from the summary.

Was that enough? I dunno. I wish more Congresspersons on both sides of the aisle had read it - I’d say that Republicans were as derelict in their oversight responsibilities by voting for the war without reading it as Democrats were by voting however they voted without reading it. And I certainly wish more people on both sides were taking the time to read things like this. But I can also understand why they don’t, when they’ve got to go down to some vault in order to read it, and can’t even take notes to help them remember what they’ve read. I think at some level, one has to trust Congress to some degree (beyond this) with classified information, whether they’ve got a clearance or not: they are the ones who have the Constitutional responsibility to decide whether or not we’re going to war. And if they’re the ones who’ve got to make that call, they’re the ones who need decent access to the information that will help them make the right call. I’m sure Bush didn’t have to go down into a vault, without aides and without being able to take notes, in order to read the NIE - assuming he read it at all, of course.

The disturbing thing here isn’t that so few Congresspersons read the entire NIE, but that Congress let itself be put in a secondary role with respect to its war-making powers, in this way and in others.

[tomndebb]

this article on the Dems who claim they’ve been hoodwinked

Well, it is an article on one Dem who made that claim with a couple of not very clear allusions to a couple of others along with the notation that several Dems did read it.

Of course, since it was tailored, to begin with, the fact that some congresscritters relied on the general consensus of their fellows who read the tailored document speaks poorly of them, but does not change the fact that the information on which they relied (even at one remove) had been doctored to give a false presentation nor does it change the fact that Bush lied when he claimed they had the “same” information that he had…

[SteveG1]

@lawoot

Whenever I hear the “Congress saw the same inteligence the PResident did” argument, I thnk of it like this:

The intellegence is a deck of cards. GWB shows Congress the red suits, but not the black suits. He can still say that they all saw the same intelligence, except that congress didn’t see all of the intelligence he did.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0511/18/ltm.02.html

@CNN

MILES O’BRIEN: As the violence continues in Iraq, the debate over the decisions that led to the war has grown more shrill. The subject of pre-war intelligence has been our mind a lot this week. You’ve got Democratic accusations the president mislead the country. The Republican countered, Democrats trying to rewrite history. So what really happened? National Security Correspondent David Ensor with a fact check. …
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And members of the United States Congress, from both political parties, looked at the same intelligence on Iraq and reached the same conclusion, Saddam Hussein was a threat. …
**But it is not accurate to say Congress and the administration looked at all the same intelligence. The White House had access to far more than lawmakers did. Presidential daily briefs on intelligence are never given to Congress.

Some intelligence available to the White House, but not to Congress, gave reason to doubt some of the president’s blunt pre-war assertions. For example, that Iraq had helped al Qaeda on weapons.** …
MILES O’BRIEN: As the violence continues in Iraq, the debate over the decisions that led to the war has grown more shrill. The subject of pre-war intelligence has been our mind a lot this week. You’ve got Democratic accusations the president mislead the country. The Republican countered, Democrats trying to rewrite history. So what really happened? National Security Correspondent David Ensor with a fact check.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID ENSOR, CNN CORRESPONDENT, (voice over): The president and his aides have counter attacked against critics with two major arguments. The key one, Congress and the administration had access to the same intelligence.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And members of the United States Congress, from both political parties, looked at the same intelligence on Iraq and reached the same conclusion, Saddam Hussein was a threat.

ENSOR: In a general sense, that is true. U.S. intelligence believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and said so in a national intelligence estimate Congress had access to before the war. But it is not accurate to say Congress and the administration looked at all the same intelligence. The White House had access to far more than lawmakers did. Presidential daily briefs on intelligence are never given to Congress.

Some intelligence available to the White House, but not to Congress, gave reason to doubt some of the president’s blunt pre-war assertions. For example, that Iraq had helped al Qaeda on weapons.

BUSH: We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.

ENSOR: The president said that in October 2002. Yet eight months earlier, the Defense Intelligence Agency questioned the reliability of the captured al Qaeda operative who was the source of that assertion in a document delivered to the White House. It was recently declassified at the insistence of Democratic Senator Carl Levin.

Speaking of Iban Alshak Alibi (ph), the DIA said, “it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers.” Pentagon spokesman called the release of the DIA document, “irresponsible” and “out of context.”

The next major argument from the White House, independent reviews have already determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence before the war.

STEPHEN HADLEY, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: They were looked at by the Silberman-Rob Commission. They were looked at by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Both of them concluded that there was no manipulation of intelligence.

ENSOR: But, in fact, no commission or committee has yet spoken on whether the White House misrepresented pre-war intelligence. The Senate Intelligence Committee, under pressure from Democrats, is working on it. The orders to the Silverman Commission from the White House specifically left it out.

LAURENCE SILBERMAN, FORMER CHAIRMAN, IRAQ WMD COMMISSION: Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policy makers and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.

ENSOR: There is, however, plenty of blame to go around. Congress may have voted on Iraq without doing its homework. Members could read the 92-page national intelligence estimate by signing in at a reading room to do so. “The Washington Post” reported that no more than six senators and a handful of house members took time to read beyond the five-page executive summary.

Bob Graham - What I Knew Before the Invasion

@former Senator Bob Graham

In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats for being hypocrites on the Iraq war. “[M]ore than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power,” he said.

The president’s attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace – that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud. …
As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq war, I probably had as much access to the intelligence on which the war was predicated as any other member of Congress.
I, too, presumed the president was being truthful – until a series of events undercut that confidence.
In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq – a war more than a year away. Even at this early date, the White House was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda. …
From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth – or even had an interest in knowing the truth.
On Oct. 11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.

So what does the latest salvo from the White House look like?
“Bwah ha ha ha we lied to you Congresscritters and you were stupid enough to believe us”
“So, now everything is your fault because you believed us hahahahahahaha”
Pretty sickening. Caveat emptor.

[RTFirefly]

@SteveG1

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0511/18/ltm.02.html

[non-nitpick]
The bolded words that you’ve attributed to GWB were spoken by CNN correspondent David Ensor, according to the transcript.

Ensor’s words are still factual, I’m sure, but Bush hasn’t changed his BS line about Congress having access to the same stuff he did.
[/non-nitpick]

[SteveG1]

@RTFirefly

[non-nitpick]
The bolded words that you’ve attributed to GWB were spoken by CNN correspondent David Ensor, according to the transcript.

Ensor’s words are still factual, I’m sure, but Bush hasn’t changed his BS line about Congress having access to the same stuff he did.
[/non-nitpick]

Damn. I did proof read it. Apologies for any confusion it caused.

[Zoe]

furt: I think they’re better off just admitting they were wrong then, and painting Bush as a guy who meant well, but is now stubbornly refusing to admit a mistake and cut our losses.

I guess I’m just one of those Democrats who would like to rewrite history. I would go back to the summer and fall of 2000 and make Bush’s campaign slogan:

Elect George W. Bush President. He Means Well…

[scotandrsn]

Boy, am I glad I stopped registering as a Democrat…

Any Democrat that voted in favor of war powers for the president should be ashamed of themselves, and yes, they have lost credibility in my eyes. Dianne Feinstein, if even nominated for re-election to her seat, does not have a prayer of getting my vote, because this whole issue undermines my opinion of her ability to perform the most crucial aspects of her job.

Never mind whether or not the info presented to Congress was true, complete, or whatever. The opposition party should have looked at this President, who:

won his election under troubling circumstances involving a state, run by his brother, whose election was tallied by his local campaign worker;

whose father was widely accused of having “not finished the war” back in the 1990s, a war whose prosecuters were all appointees in the new administration;

and said to themselves, “We can not possibly take anything this President says at face value, especially when, in such dark times, with our worst enemy still at large, a war against another nation would stretch our resources too thin to ensure America’s safety.”

They should have, but they didn’t. And now the right can get traction for pointing it out, because it’s true.

They didn’t look at what was in front of them, they looked at poll numbers. Ever since the Dems decided to abandon their base and yip after the table scraps of the right, the few moderate Republicans who would give up on their party and change their stripes, they look at nothing but polls. The President was popular then, so they decided it would be politically expedient to do whatever the President wanted. It’s hard for them to make the case now that what they’re doing now is being done now for any other reason than that the President’s numbers have fallen. Where the fuck have they been for the last two years?

No, they have not a shred of credibility left at all.

[John_Mace]

Correct me if I’m wrong on this, but don’t Senators and Congressmen who sit on their respective Intel Committees have access to the same info that the WH does? IOW, if they want to see the detail behind the reports, they can, although they have to make an effort to do so. If this is the case, then I think both sides aren’t really telling the straight truth when they say who had access to what intel reports.

[elucidator]

@John Mace

Correct me if I’m wrong on this…

With grave reluctance.

Reference the testimony of ex-Sen. Graham, a few posts above.

[jshore]

@John Mace

Correct me if I’m wrong on this…

From this Washington Post news analysis:

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material.

…

But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President’s Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community’s views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.

[John_Mace]

@elucidator

With grave reluctance.

Reference the testimony of ex-Sen. Graham, a few posts above.

That sounds to me like he’s confirming, not denying, that assertion. He says that’s why he voted against the war.

@jshore

From this Washington Post news analysis:

Are you correccting or confirming? That cite, and especially your quote, doesn’t do the former. In fact it chastizes Congressmen for not even viewing the reports they DID have access to:

The lawmakers are partly to blame for their ignorance. Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002 vote. But, as The Washington Post reported last year, no more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page executive summary.

Further, it doesn’t address wheter or not the Intel Committees had full access or not. That was the point I was trying to make.

[XT]

I’ve asked this very question in the past without ever really getting a satisfactory answer. I’ve looked myself by its difficult to get a straight answer…especially when one starts looking at the subcomittees and what exactly THEY get to see. My Tom Clancy-esq understanding of how the government works is that these subcomittees have access to all intelligence…nothing is held back from they (if they request it). This is because they are supposed to be our direct representatives (and also to avoid the kind of abuse Bush is being accused of here).

Here is Wiki’s brief take on United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to answer this question one way or the other…but then nothing cited in this thread (or in the others I recall from the past) does either.

The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is a select committee of the United States Senate dedicated to overseeing the American Intelligence Community—the agencies and bureaus of the U.S. federal government who provide information and analysis for leaders of the executive and legislative branches. The committee was established in 1975 by the 94th Congress.

As part of its oversight responsibilities, the Committee performs an annual review of the intelligence budget submitted by the President and prepares legislation authorizing appropriations for the various civilian and military agencies and departments comprising the Intelligence Community. These entities include the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, as well as the intelligence-related components of Department of State, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of the Treasury, and Department of Energy. The Committee makes recommendations to the Senate Armed Services Committee on authorizations for the intelligence-related components of the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Marine Corps. The Committee also conducts periodic investigations, audits, and inspections of intelligence activities and programs.

-XT