Hell, its only 16 words, and not even very big words, either, not like “obfuscatory” or “mendacious|” or even “disingenuous”. OK, so he says British Intelligence “learned”…well, that could be true! I once learned that George Washington threw a cherry tree across the Potomac for a dollar. It wasn’t true. But I learned it!
So the guy makes one off-handed remark before both houses of Congress. Is this supposed to be some big deal? So the reasons for invading Iraq were bogus. And the reasons for invading Grenada were compelling? The international drug bust in Panama, this was urgent?
Alright, who kidnaped elucidator? Who ever it was, just bring him back and no questions will be asked. Maybe he was a pain in the neck, but it was in an amusing way.
Don’t change the subject. You want to argue the rest of the evidence, fine. I’m talking specifically about the forged Nigerian documents, which were one part of a larger intel package on Saddam’s activities in Africa, and which the has recently said the president was not aware of.
That’s the dog that won’t hunt. That issue is going nowhere. Feel free to bash Bush about any number of other things. I’m preparing to myself.
How many different explanations for Saddamscam have we seen thus far?
Rice (a couple of months ago): somebody deep in the bowels of the intelligence community might have known, but nobody in the upper levels knew that the Nigerien letter was fraudulent.
Tenet: Tenet knew the letter was fraudulent, and told Bush about it before the address. But, it’s technically accurate if we just say, “the Brits say so,” even though we think the Brits have based their case on questionable intelligence.
Rice (yesterday): Big deal! It’s 16 words! Remember, Saddam was a bloody tyrant trying to “reconstitute” a nuclear program. (Yeah, if I had a nuclear program, I’d be sure to disassemble my apparatus and bury the parts…)
Fleischer: The forged letter was about Niger, but really we have secret evidence showing that it was a different African country that Saddam was dealing with.
And let’s not forget British Intelligence, while we’re at it: The Niger letter we showed you was a fraud, but we haven’t shown you the real Niger letters.
Sorry, but what you are saying directly contradicts what Collounsbury posted, and since he provided a cite…
It was not a “single line” that Tenet objected to; I don’t know where you are getting that information (other than straight out of Condie Rice’s lying mouth). It was in fact the very nature of the evidence itself that was seriously in doubt, and had been LONG before the State of the Union address.
Forget “spin” - I’m just talking facts here:
Fact 1: In October, Tenet successfully had the ENTIRE reference to the uranium deal taken out of the text of a speech, because the underlying evidence was weak.
Fact 2: The reference cropped back up in the January speech.
Fact 3: Tenet has now admitted that he only approved the text in January based on the sophistry of claiming it to be “British intelligence”, even though it was KNOWN that the evidence was weak, and he now admits that was the wrong thing to do.
Fact 4: Condoleezza Rice went on record claiming that Tenet NEVER stated any objections to the allegation itself, only to the specific details of the allegation.
It’s very clear, JUST from what these people have said on record, that Tenet says he objected to the allegation, while the Bush administration says he did not. I don’t see how you can possibly look at all the evidence, and say with a straight face that these people’s stories add up.
Already done. If you go back a page or so, you will see that I quoted the L.A. Times. The opinion of some in the intelligence community seems to be that Tenet caved because he feared for his job. You will no doubt complain that the sources remain anonymous. But the thing is, people aren’t likely to allow their names to be printed when they are giving up dirt on their boss.
At any rate, whether Tenet bowed to pressure is speculation, but not unfounded speculation. The POINT is that his story conflicts with Rice’s, so if you have another explanation for the conflicting stories, I’d like to hear it.
But the flimsy justification for was has been criticized since day one. The fact is that NONE of the claims made have come to fruition. No WMDs were found and no link between Saddam and Osama has been proven. Just as the critics have said all along, it all appears to have been hype. The case against the war is not made on this one issue; it just happens to be important because not only has it been discredited (as much of the other “evidence” has been as well), but this time there’s proof that the administration DELIBERATELY lied about it. A lot of people suspect that Bush lied about a lot of things, but this is the smoking gun that PROVES it.
According to the White House? Oh, well why didn’t you say so? Yeah, presidents never lie about stuff, and Clinton never got a b.j. in the Oval Office, right?
He should at least get on story, further his subsequent claim, in re inspectors, is just… clownish.
Orwellian I would say, or stupid.
However, further to the issue of knowledge:
Ah, the memory hole.
The remainder of the article describes how Gn. Fulford came away convinved that there was nothing to the Niger issue at all.
By the way Sam, there’s only a small universe of African countries with Uranium. As memory serves, Niger, South Africa and Namibia – wait, just checked, add Gabon. The dodgery about “other African nations rather is weak” if one can not pony up some evidence. See http://www.ieer.org/ensec/no-4/bigmines.html
Now, I hate to say, but I would have to say that were Bush a Democrat, Sam et al would be frothing at the mouth with Wag the Dog kind of references.
Also in re backpeddling:
Well this begins to look just… wonderous.
Poor bloody bastards in the Agency, fucked no matter which way they turn by mendacious fucks.
Desmo,
Now, now, thyose are “not-lies”, not lies. If they were lies, they would be untrue. However, they are “not-lies” which are true, technically true. “Recent” is a qualifier of a relative variety. It was geologically recent after all. Astronomically recent even. Get a grip on yourself. If you go around accusing people of lying…
The admin’s quite obviously been “not-lying” which is different than lying or not lying.
GOM,
You’d’ve lost the wager. Even the WND realizes that there’s doubletalk newspeak going on here. The CIA cleared it…ha… This is anopther “not-lie.”
How do you suppose such a cite looks like? The evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of the administration distorting intelligence, quite simply because practically every single piece they presented was distorted, misrepesented, or quite simply invented.
Unfortunately, his claims were found to be just as false.
Sorry, man, but the fact that you consider it ok that the president is a gullible idiot who goes to war on wishful thinking doesn’t mean that anyone else has to share that believe. If you believe this to be a tempest in a teapot, I assume you have a similar assessment of the 1939 invasion in Poland, which happened as a reaction to ‘threats’ which were just as staged as the material presented by the Bush administration.
The president was most certainly aware that the documents were forged before he started the war. As such, he had ample time to qualify his statements or retract them. Instead he is trying to weasel his way out and find ways to claim how he was, indeed, right, even if it doesn’t look that way.
Unless, of course, you want to claim that the President paid no attention whatsoever to the reports brought in by the UN inspectors -which would be perfectly credible, but only another demonstration on how he was never interested in them in the first place.
I think it’s really funny that he wants to make us believe he only learned of the forgery a few days ago, given that the IAEA labeled the documents ‘primitive forgeries’ eons ago.
But don’t you get it? Bush is convinced that he’ll be vindicated. Absolutely certain. Positive. Surer than shit.
:mad: :mad: :mad:
I’m positively fucking sick sick sick of this tactic of the Bush Administration. Believe in it hard enough, and it’ll come true! (Or, more likely, the media will finally drop the story). How many times have I seen Cheney, or Bush, or Rumsfeld quoted as saying, “I’m utterly confident that [our latest pile of steamin’ bullshit] will turn out to be true”? This is politics, not a Born Again revival! I’m an educated adult, dammit! I need more than just your word and your conviction.
<fume> <pant> <deep breath>
Okay, I feel better now. But I reserve the right to go Hulk again once I start thinking about how Bush’s tactic has worked in the past, and will probably work again.
Collounsbury, the info in your latest post is just downright spooky. They’re just stacking lies on top of more lies.
I hate to say it, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he’s re-elected. Sadly, there are enough voters in the U.S. who really don’t care about international law, foreign relations, or even whether the government told lies to start an illegal war - that stuff’s all “fuzzy math” to them. They just get a boner every time the USA “kicks some ass”. Yeeee-haw!:rolleyes:
The Washington Post continues its trend with another helpful article:
“Analysis: Bush Faced Dwindling Data on Iraq Nuclear Bid”
16 July 2003; Page A1
If I may:
The remainder of the article covers this ground in moderate depth.
I find it most useful to highlight this:
This of course contradicts our dear Blog Spotter and others who have backpeddled on the imminent threat issue now that it has turned out to be a crock of shit.
However, it also raises another issue, what is lying versus self delusion.
I am in fact convinced that the Bush Administration is less guilty of lying per se, as self delusion to an almost criminal extent. (criminal in a metaphorical sense)
Personaly, as the extreme cynic that I am, I do not mind a moderate amount of deception in policy making. Frankly people do often have to be lied to, or massaged.
What is far more dangerous is for the policy making community to delude itself to the point of becoming almost irrational in the pursuit of a pre-concieved idea. That is ‘criminal’ and indeed the most disturbing point of this entire farce. The handling of the intelligence and the entire handling of the non-military aspects of the Iraq crisis have been marked by this self-delusion and intense self regard, navel gazing as it were, that has crossed the line from the merely unwise blindness into the dangerously incompetent disregard for inconvenient realities.