Sure, if they had already accepted that their handlers were intent on invading Iraq.
The National Intelligence Estimate evidently included value judgements on whether certain scenarios were highly likely, somewhat likely, not likely. You get the idea.
Sam. Not like you to pick the points that support your view and leave out the parts that would indicate to a thinking person that there were doubts about much of the conclusions that you seem to think the report drew.
The highlights from the report do nothing but convince me that the Bush Administration blew it.
Samclem: Did you miss the part in the last message where I said that the report wasn’t all roses for Bush, and called into question some of his claims?
A prosecutor attempts to prove the guilt of a defendent. in so doing, he provides a whole bunch of evidence to the jury. Some may be rock solid, some may be reasonable, but along the way ONE piece of evidence turns out to be discredited.
Does one piece of discredited evidence mean the defendent should go free? Or can we still convict based on the other pieces of evidence?
What you guys are attempting to do is pick one minor piece of evidence that looks shakey, and claim that that PROVES that the President lied about the whole thing. In fact, it does nothing of the sort. And the National Intelligence Estimate, the summary of which was released today, paints a pretty good picture of the evidence, and it’s reasonable.
Oh, please. And knock off the gratuitous insults hostility, or take it to the pit.
How was ALL the evidence discredited? Cites, please. You mean just because weapons haven’t been found yet, it means that all of the intelligence of the western intelligence agencies has been discredited?
Or is it more fair to say that it hasn’t yet been proven?
By this reasoning Hitler should have been given the benefit of the doubt. He was absolutely convinced that he was “doing the right thing” for his country. He thought Jews were a danger to civilization and he “believed this fervently.” Ergo, “He should be given the benefit of the doubt.”
Political leaders don’t get points for acting on “fervent beliefs.” When you spend lives and national treasure on a project you need more than that.
Let me offer a different analogy than a trial and a very differnt opinion of the NIE. Instead of a trial, consider a strategic proposal for a major corporation. Listening to the two separate news reports on the “nine pages” and reading one hasty on-line report, I was struck by the similarity between the report and every top-down major proposal I have had the misfortune to deal with in industry. The report (written by the upper managers who have already been told the outcome they are supposed to reach) is filled with “this is probable” and “this is a reasonable conclusion” and all the supporting data (supplied by the functional people and technicians in the field) is filled with “highly dubious” and “scant evidence to support.”
I do not accuse Bush of doing this for oil or to make Haliburton rich(er). I think this was done for the very simple reason that Bush had already proclaimed it the “right thing to do” during his campaign for the presidency, long before the WTC/Pentagon attack, and he had made it clear to the executives of the various intelligence groups just exactly what they were supposed to find. Claims that “The president does not read these entire reports” simply reinforce my impression that the man is ideologically driven and intellectually lazy. (I do not believe he is stupid.) If he is going to order a war against a country that does not threaten us (with a horribly ill-considered approach to our post-war actions), then it behooves him to take the time to read the whole report (all horrors 80 pages of it). Launching a war because his advisors tailored a report that he did not read to support the conclusion that he had issued to them does not strike me as a legitimate action for the leader of the world’s most powerful nation.
Bush decided to go after Iraq before the election,
He made that intention known to the intelligence community,
or
That they manufactured any evidence.
This is great debates. I’d like cites, please. Because as I recall, before the election Bush was not interested in ‘nation building’, and was more of an isolationist than an imperialist. I saw absolutely no evidence of the stuff you’re claiming.
tomndeb has the patience of a saint, and the writing ability of a God.
Sam Stone. Again, I am losing faith in you. You were the one conservative on these boards that appeared to see that the entire Iraq invasion was unjustified by the evidence. But you backslid.
Nope! I saw that. That was your equivalent of a december post. Very disappointing.
But then you concluded
Iraq was no threat to the US or the world. Maybe to the Kurds. There was no “case for war there.” How could Iraq “change their ways?” I don’t understand. What would you have had them change?
For Sam the forgetful, here’s the Iraq relevant parts of the SOTU.
Nearly an outright lie, but in any case discredited. For 8 of those years inspectors roamed the Iraqi countryside finding
and destroying his weapons. At the time they left in 1998, they were certain that 98% of his weapons had been
destroyed and that no new weapon capabilities had been created while they where there. Some number of weapons were also destroyed by GW II which could have accounted for that remaining 2%, but the inspectors couldn’t confirm that.
If Saddam did restart his weapons programs, he did so after 1998. But it turns out that he did not. Inspectors returned
to Iraq in 2002 and found no evidence of banned weapons. They had unfettered access to the sites that US intelligence
said contained revamped weapons programs, and found that the US intelligence was flat out wrong about these sites.
Well, something restrained him, because we now know he didn’t actually make any new banned weapons.
Discredited. Saddam in fact claimed that he HAD disarmed. And US forces now in Iraq have essentially verified that he was telling the truth.
Rehtorical bullshit. It was US intelligence that sent the inspectors and a non-productive scavenger hunt. Saddam claimed to have no weapons, and this has subsequently proved to be true.
Discredited by facts on the ground in Iraq. It turns out that they weren’t hiding weapons after all. Before GW II the inspectors could go where they pleased, they found nothing. Since the war, US forces could go where they pleased and question whoever they pleased. They have also found nothing. At this point, the British goverment has concluded that there is nothing to be found.
Bullshit. They concluded that he could possibly have these materials. But the evidence on the ground in Iraq is clearly that he didn’t.
Once again, these are projections, not factual numbers. But in any case, all of these are volatile compounds, Even if they existed in 1991, the would have been just so much sludge by 1999. US forces haven’t even found the sludge in the months, and they’ve run out of places to search at this point.
Discredited, most likely this was a lie to begin with. But in any case the only trailers found were completely unsutable for making germs. They were designed to make hydrogen to fill weather ballons. It turns out that the British made them
Yep, right before the inspectors on the ground destroyed these programs. :rolleyes: This is a dishonst rhetorical device rather than an actual argument for invasion.
The famous not-quite-lie. Needless to say the CIA has already indicated that they didn’t believe this was true at the time,
they even tried to convince the British, but the Brits stuck by their intelligence while refusing to divulge it. If this had
said “The British government thinks” then it would have at least been a (deliberately misleading) true statement, but
one can’t be said to have ‘learned’ a non-fact. So this is a lie, even on it’s own terms.
Discredited. The tubes walls were too thick. The coating was wrong, and the tubes were too long for use in a centrifuge. The tubes were designed for, and in fact used for conventional artillery.
:rolleyes: Brittiney Spears posters, and vacuum cleaners aparently. But NONE of the banned weapons that the Bush administration claimed he was hiding in Iraq have been found in Iraq.
Actually. It seems that he did disarm. And Bush is the one decieving.
Possibly true. Though no evidence has ever been given, and the smoking gun conversation of ‘sanitizing a site’ presented by Colin Powell to the UN turns out to have been an innocuous conversation edited to sound damning.
Flat out lie. The Iraqis havn’t controlled their own skies since 1991. The simply lacked the ability to block U2 surveillance flights except with harsh language.
Well, since he didn’t have any WMD. It seems that Bush is, shall we say, making shit up here??
And if wishes were horses we would all be eating steak!
Discredited. Although it is clear that he gave money to the familes of palestenians who had committed suicide attacks, there is no evidence that he ever worked with Al Queda and some credible testimony from both Iraqi’s and Al Queda agents that he did not.
A truism and a smear all in one. Saddam was not associated with a shadowy terrorist network, or at least, not any one that targets the West.
Pure fear mongering. In fact, the 19 Hijackers did enormous damage without any vials, canisters or crates at all…
As I thought. Your position is that since no actual weapons have been found yet, the western intelligence agency findings have all been discredited.
My position is that the lack of evidence is not proof of anything, yet. Look: the U.S. is now being attacked with RPG’s and surface-to-air missiles. If weapons like that can still be hidden in large quantities, so can a few thousand gallons of chemical weapons.
Feel free to hang yourself out on a limb by claiming that Bush’s case has been factually disproven by absence of positive evidence. Myself, I’ll wait and see.
No. It is supposed to give them information which they should include in their decision making, not more, not less. It does not trump law of any kind.
You are misrepresenting what it said. It spoke of possibilities.
False. Not changing its ways is not a case for war. Clear and PRESENT danger is. That the danger is not present is even confirmed by your quotes.
It, like that of the US, knowingly emphasized information that was outdated.
I hate to tell you this, but low confidence means that it is no basis to build a war on. It also means that the UN inspectors, who actually were on the ground in Iraq, probably have a better grasp of what’s going on-
Your conclusion has already been disproven.
The only one trying to make hay out of one sentence is you and Bush. Fact is that almost the entirety of the presented evidence for WMDs was found to be fabricated. The alleged sanitization of a bunker complex was misrepresented. The alleged plane capable of distributing WMDs of which a satellite picture was shown was destroyed in the first inspection stint.
My feeling is that to support Bush, one has to be completely and utterly scientifically illiterate and to consider assertions by Bush as holy writ will dismissing any actually solid data as propaganda.
Let’s recap:
Uranium deal: Never happened
Bunker sanitization: Never happened
WMD plane: Destroyed a decade ago
Aluminium tubes: Totally unsuitable for what the Bush administration claimed they were for
Bioweapons trailers: Hydrogen production and filling machinery.
Intelligence data relayed to UN inspectors: Considered ‘garbage’ by those who had to do the footwork to verify it.
Making hay out of one sentence in a speech? Hardly. More like: No piece of evidence has so far been presented that actually panned out.
I see. So what you say is that in your eyes, when a murder happens, we should just round up the usual suspects, butcher them all, and then sort out if we actually had the right person among them?
It is telling that you consider it perfectly ok to butcher people without the slightest hint of evidence.
By the way: Being a wee bit more familiar with modern scientific detection methods than you is not ‘hanging out on a limb’. That RPGs can be hidden is not surprising. Everyone knows the country is awash in weapons, and that RPG propellant sniffers would find something practically everwhere. Chlostridium botulinum is a wee bit less ubiquitous, as is VX.
Prove it - maybe I haven’t been following the news very much lately, but my impression has been that this one is unsure either way. British Intelligence still holds to this claim,.
Um, no, you prove that it happened. You use it as an argument to support war, you have to prove it’s for real. The British government might hold to this claim, but the document used to support it was known to be a forgery even before the war started. No one admits that he’s been had gladly.
