The quotation you supplied supports my point, not contradicts it. Bush was underlining the distinction between Iraq’s words and Iraq’s actions. “Saddam’s actions have put us on notice. . .”
I take any perjury seriously. But a President’s lying under oath about his personal sex life can in no measure compare with a President’s lying to Congress for the purpose of causing a pre-emptive strike and an ensuing war under any circumstances. It is Congress that is given the power to declare war and any President who knowingly misleads Congress for that purpose is in breach of his Oath of Office.
Is there truly anyone here who thinks that the first is as serious as the last?
If the President did not knowingly lie, then he should be making every effort to find out who mislead him and used him and for what purpose. And he must make that information available to Congress for appropriate action or face impeachment himself.
Just as a reminder of the certainty with which he lay our case before the United Nations, consider reading this press release from the Security Council of the United Nations.
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2003/sc7658.doc.htm
It is a detailed summary of Colin Powell’s address to the United Nations General Assembly and contains the following:
There is absolutely no doubt that the Bush Administration at least wanted the United Nations to believe that the threat was imminent. Paraphrasing an oft-quoted Senator during the Watergate hearings: I have no problem understanding the English language. It is my native tongue.
lucwarm, how do you reconcile these three statements?
Also, lucwarm, I am beginning to wonder if I am being whooshed by you name and your posting style:
Oh, please. Not another Zinn cite…
You are supposed to provide links to information that you refer to, especially if it is quoted more than once.
In this case, I find it a little obvious that you left out the lies of Eisenhower, Reagan and Bush the Elder quoted on the same page. (It is pre-Bush the Younger information and the info is apparently limited to one page…) You’re not partisan, are you?
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, November 8, 2002:
Impeach the United Nations Security Council!
Approved unanimously by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: China, France, Germany, Russia, United Kingdom, United States.
Oops. Germany is not a permanent member.
Walloon: I see that you’ve now dragged the stuff you’ve been posting in this thread: Was the Iraq War moral? into this one.
I’m still waiting for some kind of coherent explanation of the point you’re trying to make, if there is one.
**adaher, are you stating that ethnic cleansing in Kosovo was not, in fact, occurring? Or that the UN sanctions were Clinton’s responsibility, not the UN’s?
**
Ethnic cleansing as in booting people out of their homes, yes. Ethnic cleansing as in genocide, apparently not.
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1571/45_15/58050616/p1/article.jhtml
There may be more reason for their resentment. Clinton had claimed on March 23 that “what we are trying to do is to limit [Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s] ability to … engage in ethnic cleansing and slaughter innocent people.” Secretary of Defense William Cohen told viewers of CBS News that “100,000 military-age Albanian men are missing … and may have been murdered.” Clinton ally Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said: “By the time the snows fall next winter, there will be genocide documented on a large scale in Kosovo.”
Gee, sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? We are confident the WMD will be found?
But the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, or ICTY, quietly has been backing off even the more modest recent claims that more than 10,000 persons were slaughtered by Yugoslav forces. The problem is that when international forensic teams went into Kosovo to examine alleged “mass-burial” sites, they found far fewer bodies than anticipated and declined to provide any analysis of the relative proportion of Albanians killed by Serbs, Serbs killed by Albanians, civilians vs. military or Kosovo Liberation Army irregulars.
The charge of genocide has been difficult to sustain. When the Allies entered Nazi concentration camps, the evidence of mass killings was so massive that no search was necessary. In Cambodia and Rwanda, the piles of skulls were everywhere, often not even in mass graves. In East Timor, the bodies had not yet completely decayed. But in Kosovo the evidence of genocide was elusive. The ICTY had received reports of a possible 11,334 bodies in 529 gravesites. Although only about one-third of the sites have been examined, most of the reports have proved unsubstantiated. According to figures presented by the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, only 2,108 bodies have been exhumed.
When the teams arrived and were directed to what presumably would be the most notorious sites, they were relieved to find little to do. The Spanish team had been told to be prepared to exhume and autopsy 2,000 victims. They could find only 187 bodies, each buried in single graves. Similarly, a crack FBI team made two trips and could find only 200 bodies buried in 30 sites. “In the former Yugoslavia crimes were committed, some no doubt horrible, but they derived from the war,” said the Spanish team’s chief inspector, Juan Lopez Palafox.
U.S. and NATO officials had reported that more than 1,000 bodies had been trucked to the Trepca mine under the cover of darkness and thrown down the shafts or dumped in vats of hydrochloric acid. But the ICTY’s report says that no bodies were found in the mine. Another NATO report claimed that 350 Albanians had been killed by retreating Serbs at Ljubenic near the town of Pec. The ICTY’s report says that authorities found only five victims.
COPYRIGHT 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not condemning Clinton here. In fact, Clinton has been a credit to himself by refraining from taking cheap shots at Bush the way many people here and in Congress are. Clinton knows well that intelligence is not a sure thing and that judgement calls have to be made.
As for the sanctions, I don’t blame Clinton for them, only pointing out that he supported the policy on the basis of Saddam being a threat and having WMDs.
Errr, my point is that predidential lying (as well as congressional lying) is commonplace. Most or all presidents, as well as many congressmen and senators, have told lies about issues of public policy. I find the practice annoying and lame, but I don’t believe it should result in impeachment. For one thing, we wouldn’t have any presidents left. What annoys me the most is that the American people accept these sorts of lies. It would be nice if the American people didn’t elect lying sacks of sh*t into office. Clear enough?
**
No need to start acting like a Junior Mod. Just ask me nicely and I’m happy to endeavor to provide a link.
**
Actually I’m not partisan. I focused on Kennedy (and later Clinton) because I was responding to folks who were focusing on Bush and I wanted to test their positions. For the record, I believe that lying is a widespread practice among all politicians, both Democrat and Republican.
Let me try to focus the discussion a little though:
Do you believe that an elected official who lies about issues of public policy (as opposed to his or her own personal life) should be removed from office?
Feeling persecuted are we? Just provide the link. Assuming that there is one.
This would be nice. However, we live in a world where fallible human beings with their own agendas tend to run for office. Saints are in the business of tending the suffering, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, etc., not running for public office as a general rule.
I’m going to have to give you an “It depends” on this. There are many issues on which the public is just plain not interested. If, for example, it should turn out that an Undersecretary of State blocked the importation of kumiss from Kyrgyzstan not because of reasons of public health and safety but rather becuase he’d taken a payoff from Borden or Kraft or one of the big dairy cooperatives, it would take a major campaign aimed at stirring public outrage to get to the point where insistence on his resignation or firing would be required. And it’s possible that despite this particular lapse, the man may have been doing a good job by any reasonable objective standard.
Part of the standard set forth in Nixon v. U.S. is that the President needs to be able to keep some material confidential, in order to do his job properly. For example, we no doubt have contingency plans in the works for the full-scale invasion of any country you care to name, not because we’re imperialist aggressors, but because there is an outside chance that any given country can be taken over by persons who hate the U.S. and are prepared to use it as a threat to our own national security. Contemplate, for example, the Bahamas run by Al-Qaeda after infiltration and a coup. Such plans should not be public knowledge, for reasons I think are obvious.
Naturally there need to be limits on this, as Burger outlined – but the fact of the need is I think indisputable.
There is also the partisan misconstruing of public remarks. An example from 63 years ago will prove instructive without hijacking the thread. During the 1940 campaign, FDR pledged numerous times that “your sons will not be sent to fight in overseas wars unless we are attacked.” In one speech in Boston, he referenced that pledge: “I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it here: your sons will not be sent to fight in foreign wars.” On this one occasion, he neglected to tack on the “attack” clause. Questioned by his aides afterwards, he said he thought it clear from the context that he meant to repeat what he had said already. But of course his political opponents made hay out of his having “broken that pledge” in the 1942 elections.
I think it’s incumbent on Mr. Bush to make clear why he and his senior policy-making associates spoke untruths – but he needs to be allowed a little wiggle room. If clear intelligence, for example, produced results that would force a reaonsable man to the conclusion that Iraq had WMDs, and this turned out to be in error after the war, he was not in fact wilfully lying. But he needs to be upfront with the American people about this, to the extent he can do so without compromising our intelligemnce apparatus.
Suppose all his intentions are good? Suppose he thinks really really hard and decides that its a national security issue that the people not lose faith in the Administration. In time of peril and so on.
And that it would be even worse if the American people should vote into office a bunch of wussy Dem appeasers. How hard do you think it would be for the Bushiviks to convince themselves of this? Any harder than convincing themselves that Saddam was a desperate threat to the US?
Not at all. But I expect folks to be polite. “Link, please” works just fine.
**
Say “please.”
oh, puh-leeeeeze
I would go a little further than that and say that folks who run for office (and win) tend to be Machiavellian.
**
I would settle for folks who are decent (and honest, self-honest, smart, compassionate, and wise). Unfortunately, politics is a game where decency takes a back seat to opportunism.
FYI, FWIW, Here’s the thread on this debate:
Did the Bush Admin Make the Case that Iraq Presented an Imminent Threat?
And here’s the answer to GWB’s question, "Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? " October 7, 2002 when, in the words of GWB, Saddam Hussein’s actions have put us on notice.
Granted, Hussien’s actions didn’t politely put us on notice, but it’s the thought that counts.
There’s a plenty in that thread showing how the “concept of imminent threat” must be adapted to “the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.”
To pretend that the admin didn’t sell the threat to the US from Iraq as imminent is to engage in basest of sophistry.
So you’re saying that since it was Hussein’s action’s that are said to have demonstrated the imminent threat rather than Husein’s words, “The Bush admin never said that Hussein’s words demonstrrated an imminent threat?”
Is that the new bar you’ve established? that trhe Admin never said that Hussein’s words were demonstarble of an imminent threat?
I hope that this is not the case. I hope that I merely have misunderestimated your imprecision.
Sorry for the double posts. Got cut off last night. I just logged in and hit submit. OOPS
In the interest of getting my intended question answered I’ll rephrase:
Bush’s administration presented as fact that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that presented enough of a clear and present danger to the United States that immediate military action was needed. This fact was, in fact, no fact; it was an untruth.
So far we all agree?
Of the big players only the US and Britian were so sure of this fact that they felt immediate action was justified on its basis. Other nations (eg France, Germany, Russia) are on record as having wanted more proof of the statement before acting on the belief. (Cite already provided) Such was competent skepticism. But the US and Britian both presented the case as ironclad and both included evidence to bolster the case that later turned out to be false.
Do we still all accept these as the facts as they stand?
So if it was a knowing lie then would it be a big deal to have lied to Congress about why it was necessary for us to go to war alone if need be?
If not a lie, then what kind of repercussions should there be for getting us into war on the basis of information that was verifiably false?
Isn’t something like having presented false information to Congress and having us gone to war on the basis of false information a big enough deal that an independent inquiry is justified?
Since it is obvious that the information was false, why would an independent inquiry be necessary? The Administration should be called before Congress to explain who is responsible for all of the mistakes in intelligence. Who mislead the President and why? If he cannot provide answers, then an independent inquiry to determine the source of intelligence corruption is justified and the President should resign for his incompetency.
It depends on the circumstances. However, an elected official who lies to Congress on issues of government should be immediately asked to resign. If she or he does not comply, then impeachment proceedings should follow. That includes Presidents who hide behind the shield of “National Security” when the nation’s security is not at stake.
But lucwarm, I was polite! I did say please! It was almost the first word out of my mouth:
How quickly they forget…
Just so I’m clear, when you say “lies to Congress,” are you exclusing statements made to the press and/or public? If so, what is the basis for your distinction?
**
Err, apology accepted.
DSeid:
Of course I remember that other countries, France high on the list, didn’t feel that questionable intelligence warranted immediate action. What does that have to do with my point, which is that the Bush admin is no less competent at getting said intelligence?
Oh, good grief.
First of all: there was plenty of WMD intel aside from that “uranium goof.” The supposed uranium was hardly the only thing holding the causus belli together.
Second of all: the “goof” is referring to the inclusion of that particular tidbit in a very public speech due to the fact that it was questionable, not to the intelligence behind it in the first place (read your own freaking cites!).
Third of all: Bush and Blair never claimed certainty. They may have claimed they had additional, sensitive intelligence, but in the end it was still uncertain. The only difference is, as SimonX so succinctly put it:
Not lesser competence in intelligence-gathering. Just a lower threshhold for action.
(This is notwithstanding the possibility that he may have been dishonest. My point is that if he was not being dishonest, it does not follow that he was incompetent.)
Chaim Mattis Keller