No WMD's? Strike 1. No Saddam/Qaeda connection? Strike 2

[RTFirefly]

*Originally posted by Sam Stone *
But the amount of stuff we’re looking for is relatively small. As i read today, the amount of anthrax Saddam was suspected of having would fill about 20 55 gallon drums. Those could be anywhere.

And so we come back to the same point I’ve been raising in Iraq thread after Iraq thread, for a full month now:

**Why didn’t the Bush war plan involve securing prospective WMD sites?

Why did we let them get looted, once we’d chased Saddam’s soldiers away?

Why doesn’t the Bush Administration seem particularly concerned that WMDs from these sites are loose in the Middle East?**

Your quotes are worthless, Sam. What we know is that the Bush administration got us into this war on the basis of the WMD threat, but conducted the war as if no such threat existed. And continues to act as if there’s nothing to worry about from loose Iraqi WMDs in the war’s aftermath.

Words don’t mean much. But actions speak powerfully.

I don’t think we’ll find that the Bush Administration lied.

I think the case that he has either lied to us, or worse, is already a slamdunk.

[Boo]

“a former military intelligence officer said”

I love those named sources from the times. I wonder if that was the same source blair “used?”

[ElvisL1ves]

*Originally posted by Sam Stone *
Exactly right. I don’t have an answer. I am waiting for evidence.

You can stop waiting. The inspection teams have run out of places to look, in case you hadn’t seen that in “Right Wing News”.

I would support hearings to determine what happened if WMD are not found.

No more room for “if”. Let’s get started. And we can get started on those 9/11 hearings too, whaddaya say?

But the amount of stuff we’re looking for is relatively small. As i read today, the amount of anthrax Saddam was suspected of having would fill about 20 55 gallon drums.

The credibility of that “source” you’re resorting to citing is what?

Those could be anywhere. They could have been moved by Saddam loyalists so no one but them knew where they are.

“Yeah, that’s the ticket!” C’mon now.

[quoteBut right now, that theory doesn’t stand up, because we have so many other people outside of the administration agreeing with them. That WMD were in Iraq was CLEARLY the consensus of the intelligence community.[/quote]
And there was a time when that was true. But was it true when Bush and Powell claimed it was? And did they know, or should have known, differently?

I don’t think we’ll find that the Bush Administration lied.

Your faith is indeed touching. But it, as is usual for you, is not derived from facts.

“Wake up and smell the coffee, Buttercup” - Ann Landers

[sailor]

What many of us said is becoming clear now: A lot of the “evidence” is just not true. The president made a decision to go to war and evidence which was contrary to that was suppressed while evidence which was favorable was disseminated, no matter how flimsy.

Washington Post Link

A key component of President Bush’s claim in his State of the Union address last January that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program – its alleged attempt to buy uranium in Niger – was disputed by a CIA-directed mission to the central African nation in early 2002, according to senior administration officials and a former government official. But the CIA did not pass on the detailed results of its investigation to the White House or other government agencies, the officials said.

The CIA’s failure to share what it knew, which has not been disclosed previously, was one of a number of steps in the Bush administration that helped keep the uranium story alive until the eve of the war in Iraq, when the United Nations’ chief nuclear inspector told the Security Council that the claim was based on fabricated evidence.

A senior intelligence official said the CIA’s action was the result of “extremely sloppy” handling of a central piece of evidence in the administration’s case against then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. <snip> However, a senior CIA analyst said the case “is indicative of larger problems” involving the handling of intelligence about Iraq’s alleged chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and its links to al Qaeda, which the administration cited as justification for war. “Information not consistent with the administration agenda was discarded and information that was [consistent] was not seriously scrutinized,” the analyst said. <snip> After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy’s conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the “dates were wrong and the names were wrong,” the former U.S. government official said.

However, the CIA did not include details of the former ambassador’s report and his identity as the source, which would have added to the credibility of his findings, in its intelligence reports that were shared with other government agencies. Instead, the CIA only said that Niger government officials had denied the attempted deal had taken place, a senior administration said.

(bolding mine)

[ElvisL1ves]

And all those days of “grilling” of intelligence agencies by Powell over the credibility of the UN story he was assembling didn’t reveal this?

[PatriotX]

*Originally posted by RTFirefly *
**Why didn’t the Bush war plan involve securing prospective WMD sites?
**

Apparently, it did. The site searches just came up empty.

Task Force 20’s principal assignment is to “seize, destroy, render safe, capture, or recover weapons of mass destruction,” according to a Special Operations mission statement. To that end it staged raids ahead of the U.S. and British ground advance to seize suspected caches of nonconventional arms, gathered hundreds of weapons samples and captured as many as half of the “high value” weapons scientists and Baath Party leaders now in U.S. custody. Its role in the search for illicit arms, military and intelligence sources said, turned out to be far more important than that of the search teams operating in the open.

The reliability of the Bush admin’s double-secret evidence…

[Tee]

Originally posted by ElvisL1ves
And all those days of “grilling” of intelligence agencies by Powell over the credibility of the UN story he was assembling didn’t reveal this?

It might have. Sailor’s quote mentions a “key component” of Bush’s claim that Saddam sought to acquire uranium from Niger. That was in the State of the Union address. Powell’s presentation - later - didn’t mention that, he focused on Iraq’s plans to enrich uranium on its own.

[ElvisL1ves]

Fair enough, Tee. Powell has enough 'splaining to do as it is.

The White House didn’t offer even a Fleischer version of a “clarification” of the Niger bullshit to anyone, though, even now. They might have read Nicholas Kristof beforehand, though.

[RTFirefly]

SimonX - fascinating. I hadn’t gotten around to reading that article yet; I’d say that’s pretty good evidence that there really were no WMDs all along.

Still, a Special Forces unit with presumably no more than a few hundred soldiers can check out only so many prospective WMD sites, and the article indicates they had other missions as well. Meanwhile, our regular ground forces weren’t securing WMD sites:

By far the greatest impediment to the weapons hunt, participants said, was widespread looting of Iraq’s government and industrial facilities. At nearly every top-tier “sensitive site” the searchers reached, intruders had sacked and burned the evidence that weapons hunters had counted on sifting. As recently as last Tuesday, nearly a month after Hussein’s fall from power, soldiers under the Army’s V Corps command had secured only 44 of the 85 top potential weapons sites in the Baghdad area and 153 of the 372 considered most important to rebuilding Iraq’s government and economy.

McPhee saw early in the war that the looters were stripping his targets before he could check them. He cut the planning cycle for new missions – the time between first notice and launch – from 96 to 24 hours. “What we found,” he said, was that “as the maneuver units hit a target they had to move on, even 24 hours was too slow. By the time we got there, a lot of things were gone.”

Short and powerfully built, McPhee has spent his adult life as a combat officer. He calls his soldiers “bubbas” and worries about their mail. “It ain’t good” that suspect sites are unprotected, he said, but he refused to criticize fighting units who left evidence unguarded.

"You’ve got two corps commanders being told, ‘Get to Baghdad,’ and, oh, by the way, ‘When you run across sensitive sites, you have to secure them,’ " he said. “Do you secure all those sites, or do you get to Baghdad? You’ve got limited force structure and you’ve got 20 missions.”

And why did they have too few forces to both drive on Baghdad and secure WMD sites along the way? Because Rumsfeld pared the ground forces to the bone, apparently to make the point that the Army needed far less troops than they believed to take Baghdad.

And he was right, but he apparently forgot that we were fighting this war to keep WMDs out of the hands of terrorists. Or he didn’t believe in the WMDs to begin with.

[PatriotX]

Yes, definitely doesn’t add credibility to GWB’s double-secret evidence.

[Clucky]

It’s obvious that Iraq couldn’t attack the U.S. and didn’t plan to attack the U.S. On top of that, we’ve yet to allow the Iraqis to exercise independence or democracy. That was another selling point for this war. Any bets on whether we let them control their own destiny with truly democratic elections? Rumsfeld already is talking about how Hitler was elected, so, you know, elections aren’t always a good thing. (Hmmm, what about George W. Bush in 2000?)

We’re over there making decisions for Iraqis, because the overall goal is to ensure that their nation is hospitable to our own interests. We’re moving our military bases from Saudi Arabia, because now we have Iraq. Why move from Saudi Arabia? Because, those bases there in Saudi Arabia caused the Al Quaida terrorism to begin with. That was Osama bin Laden’s beef with the U.S. His group argued that the U.S. desecrated their sacred soil. And, 9-11 was that group’s biggest revenge. Well, okay, we’re out of Saudi Arabia, after much damage done, but, how many other groups will form in order to attack the U.S. for its attack on Iraq and subsequent occupation?

Meanwhile, we remain over there in Iraq, with our soldiers still fighting, facing death and having to decide who’s the enemy, and what to do. But, you know, the war’s over, right? That’s what Bush declared a month ago. We won. Thanks for watching. Have a safe trip home. Except, of course, there’s still a war going on. If Bush did lie, which it’s obvious to most of us he did, let’s not just have hearings. Let’s pull out of Iraq altogether, fer crying out loud.

As for Saddam Hussein and the importance of getting him out of power, funny how that didn’t matter back before Gulf War I, when the U.S. was quite friendly with Iraq indeed. In selling this war, W. often referred to Halabja when building his case against Saddam Hussein. But, Saddam was our friend then, and our government said nothing about that vicious attack at the time. And, Bush Sr. called on a rebellion against Saddam after the first Gulf War. Then, when Shiites in the south decided to rise up, our nation allowed Saddam’s forces to brutally beat them down.

The problem is this: Our foreign policy is all about ensuring that other nations meet the interests of the U.S. first. The Shiites don’t fall into our nation’s “friendly” category, so that majority group really has no chance in establishing a representative government.

It’s just a mess.

[Sofa_King]

*Originally posted by Clucky *
**Rumsfeld already is talking about how Hitler was elected, so, you know, elections aren’t always a good thing. (Hmmm, what about George W. Bush in 2000?) **

Okay, by even mentioning this, the Bush-backers win this debate, but I think Clucky will enjoy this a lot. And there ain’t jack we can do about what’s going on, anyway.

Last year, it came out that during the 2000 Florida fiasco, Enron and Halliburton lent Bush campaigners the use of their corporate planes on credit.

Does that sound familiar to you? Don’t feel bad if it doesn’t because it’s largely forgotten now, but in 1932, Erhard Milch, founder of Lufthansa, allowed a certain someone to charter a Lufthansa plane on credit so that he could campaign across the country. Yep, it was that madcap madman, Hitler himself.

You can find a partial cite on page 31 of e-book, but check out some of Len Deighton’s historical works for the full skinny on how Milch went out of the way to bend the rules for his new pal.

Fortunately, nobody’s burned down the Capitol and tried to pin it on the Liberals, so I think that’s where the historical parallels end for now. Anyway, I just thought you’d like to know, Clucky, in case you were forgetting to renew your Prozac prescription.

[PatriotX]

I don’t think this a godwin situation. Rumsfeld did say that stuff about Hitler.
no one called the Bush admin nazis.

[rjung]

*Originally posted by SimonX *
no one called the Bush admin nazis.

No, but certain folks on that staff give me the willies. Does that count?

[Sofa_King]

Look, I don’t want to hijack two threads in as many days. So I’m taking Godwin, and leaving.

You can flame me here.

[Reeder]

*Originally posted by Tee *
**Snip…

If Saddam had stepped down, fled, whatever - even shown signs of co-operating on the terrorism issue and being something other than his normal stupid self for a while - there’d have been no war in Iraq.

**

How do we know he didn’t flee?

[capacitor]

The sad part about all of this is that the US gov’t didn’t have to go through this route of Tinkerbell WMD to justify ouster of Sadaam Hussein. All Bush has to do is claim that Sadaam is on record as actively supporting the extreme terrorists who fight for no land, just destruction, if not financailly, then very publicly. Saddam impeded the Middle East peace process by inducing disillusioned Palestinians to think that violent suicide is financially more beneficial to their families than living and protesting for freedom, rights and self-respect would be.

[PatriotX]

Saddam Hussein is an evil fuck. There were legitimate reasons for wanting his ouster. No doubt about that. I still believe that he had CBW capabilities.

[urban1a]

In case no one else mentioned it:

quote:

There is, however, another possibility that may take months to uncover. Iraq may have shifted to a concealed R&D and breakout effort, rather than maintaining stocks of weapons, believing it could stall the UN and hide its development efforts and ability to use dual use facilities until it broke out of sanctions. In this case, the US and UK were fully justified in acting even if Iraq did not have large inventories of war fighting weapons in stock.

---

Bush, et al, presented the world with the argument that Iraq represented an imminent threat to the US as the justification (the only legal one) for the war. I can’t find the cite but Iraq was said to have thousands of tons of this, hundreds of liters of that and a delivery system which could be used to attack the US. None of this has proven to be true.

R&D hardly counts.

Bob

[Ben]

Well, like they say, the histoire du jour is that Bush went to war to destroy Saddam’s WMD program.

Haven’t you been reading december’s posts?