New York Times: Hillary Clinton illegally used private email for all State Dept. business

Ah the way you try to twist and cover-up the lie. The same article debunks your claim. Yet of course you don't read the whole article, you just read the part that let's you scream and jump up and down - that sliver you can hold on to to justify the loss of a trillion dollars, the creation of ISIS, and the many American and Iraqi lives destroyed from a senseless stupid war.

Bush knew the intelligence was weak and questionable. He knew that - all of his admin knew that. They wanted war with Iraq, and they invented their justification, and led the country to war based on half-truths and flimsy evidence. They lead us to war on hunches and hearsay.

That is a crime against humanity. A traitorous thing to do also.

And yet you defend it still. It makes me sick to my stomach that there are people who still think what Bush did in invading Iraq wasn't the most immoral act committed by an American leader in her history.

 

You have yet to show a single shred of evidence that he didn't deceive the country. Put up or shut up.

 

I like how you just have no facts and ignore the facts that other people address. You really just are here to insult people and waste time aren't you?

 

Facts are that WMD's were found in Iraq, despite the efforts to get everything out of the country before the invasion. You cannot dispute that yet you still think that there were no WMD's in Iraq....it's pretty weird.

 

This is simply not true. There is no report or documentation that they were trying to get them out of the country. That's made up. And what they did find was just left over crap from the Iran/Iraq war that wasn't even usable.

Stop this ridiculous joke.

 

You seem angry with me. I'm not completely sure why since all I did was simply post a NYT article that proved there was approximately 5,000 WMD's discovered in Iraq to dispute your claim that very few WMD's were found. Perhaps you are embarrassed your claim was so easily disproven? You tell me, I prefer not to speculate.

Moreover, you don't know my thoughts about the lead up to the Iraq war or any of the subsequent events (since I've never once stated my views which are frankly none of your business) and therefore most of your post above is speculation and angry bombast. I will admit though that it is amusing to read.

Perhaps in the future you could be more careful with your comments and wording of your thoughts. Like Hillary Clinton, it is important to remember being honest about what you know and don't know is preferable to spouting off at the mouth only to have to backtrack later. Thanks for the discourse though. It has been entertaining.

 

Don't sweat it Lou. Daggger's kind will never admit they were suckered into an illegal war. History will not look kindly on the war. That's why the GOP is doing everything they can to bury the criminal bush's presidency into the dustbin of history

 

No... Jut no...

You are being disingenuous as ***. You know that the pretense for the invasion was WMDS that were a threat to the Untied States as in nuclear warheads capable of reaching our borders possibly through ICBMs which Sweet Lou was referring to, not old as munitions that aren't operational from a previous war.

And now you have the audacity to be an ******* on your false high horse because you want to be overly pedantic with Sweet Lou? **** off.

 

Republicans Can't Face the Truth About Iraq
http://www.unz.com/emargolis/republicans-cant-face-the-truth-about-iraq/

Gov. Jeb Bush repeated one of the biggest falsehoods of our time during the recent presidential candidate debate: “we were misled (into the Iraq War) by faulty intelligence.”

US intelligence was not “misled.” It was ordered by the real, de facto president, Dick Cheney, to provide excuses for a war of aggression against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

PM Tony Blair, forced British intelligence services to “sex up” reports that Iraq had nuclear weapons; he purged the government and the venerable broadcaster BBC of journalists who failed to amplify Blair’s lies. Bush and Blair reportedly discussed painting a US Air Force plane in UN colors and getting it to buzz Iraqi anti-aircraft sites in hope the Iraqis would fire on it. Bush told Blair that after conquering Iraq, he intended to invade Iran, Syria, Libya and Pakistan.

In fact, Iraq had no “weapons of mass destruction,” save some rusty barrels of mustard and nerve gas that had been supplied by the US and Britain for use against Iran. I broke this story from Baghdad back in late 1990.

Tyler Drumheller, who died last week, was the former chief of CIA’s European division. He was the highest-ranking intelligence officer to go public and accuse the Bush administration of hyping fabricated evidence to justify invading Iraq.

Drumheller was particularly forceful in denouncing the Iraqi defector codenamed “Curveball,” whose ludicrous claims about mobile Iraqi germ laboratories were trumpeted before the UN by former Secretary of State Colin Powell. “Curveball’s” claims were outright lies and Powell, whose career was ruined by parroting these absurd allegations, should have known better.

“Curveball” was an ‘agent provocateur’ clearly sent by a neighbor of Iraq to help promote a US attack on that nation. Whether it was Kuwait, Saudi Arabia or Israel that sent Curveball,” we still don’t know. All three fabricated “evidence” against Iraq and passed it to Washington. That is where US intelligence was indeed misled. But that’s only a minor part of the story.

A Washington cabal of pro-Israel neocons, oil men, and old-fashioned imperialists joined to promote a grossly illegal invasion of oil-rich Iraq. One of its senior members, former Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz, admitted that weapons of mass destruction was chosen as the most convenient and emotive pretext for war. Orders went out to CIA and NSA to find information linking Iraq to 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction.

Some of the worst torture inflicted on suspects kidnapped by CIA’s action teams was designed to make them admit to a link between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. There was, of course, none. But administration officials, like the odious Condoleeza Rice, kept broadly hinting at a nuclear threat to America.

Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, polls showed a majority of Americans believed Iraq was threatening the US with nuclear attack and was behind 9/11. Amazingly, a poll taken of self-professed evangelical Christians just before the US attacked Iraq showed that over 80% supported war against Iraq. So much for turning the other cheek.

Most of the US media, notably the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, amplified the lies of the Bush administration. TV networks were ordered never to show American military casualties or civilian dead. Those, like this writer, who questioned the rational for war, or who wouldn’t go along with the party line, were blanked out from print and TV.

For example, I was immediately dropped from a major TV network after daring mention that Israel supported the 2003 Iraq war and would benefit from it. I was blacklisted by another major US TV network at the direct demand of the Bush White House for repeatedly insisting that Iraq had no nuclear capability.

Very few analysts, journalists, or politicians took time to ask: even if Iraq had nuclear weapons, how could they be delivered to North America? Iraq had no long-range bombers and no missiles with range greater than 100kms. Perhaps by FedEx? No one asked, why would Iraq invite national suicide by trying to hit the US with a nuclear weapon?

The most original answer came from George W. Bush: nefarious Iraqi freighters were lurking in the North Atlantic carrying “drones of death” that would attack sleeping America. This hallucination was based on a single report that the bumbling Iraqis were working a children’s model airplane that, in the end, broke and never flew. What inspired such a phantasmagoria? Pot, too much bourbon, LSD, or thundering orders from Dick Cheney to find a damned good excuse for invading Iraq.

For Cheney and his oil pals, conquering Iraq would secure the Arab world’s biggest oil reserves for Uncle Sam and offer a central military base in the region. For Washington’s bloodthirsty neocons, pulverizing Iraq would remove one of Israel’s most determined enemies, crush the only Arab nation that might challenge Israel’s nuclear monopoly, and cost Israel nothing. Invading Iraq produced the slow disintegration of the Mideast so long sought by militant Zionists.

It all worked brilliantly, at least from Israel’s viewpoint. Not, however for the US. Bush’s invasion shattered Iraq, led to al-Qaida and ISIS, and left Washington saddled with a $1 trillion-dollar bill instead of the $60 million cost estimated by Wolfowitz. The Mideast is in a tailspin, Palestinians are totally isolated, and Egypt, the region’s key nation, run by an Arab-fascist military dictatorship.

Tyler Drumheller was the only senior CIA officer to stand up and tell Americans they were lied into an unnecessary, illegal war. Today, we have Iraqi déjà vu anew as the lie factories and fear mongers work overtime to promote war with Iran.

 

If you believe you were mislead by claims of WMD's, that makes you the fool.
If you believe we did it for oil, that makes you the fool.
If you believe we went to make the military complex rich, that makes you the fool.

These arguments fail the same basic litmus test as the 9/11 truthers. The motives makes absolutely no sense.

Now that its 10 years later, look back and see what we have gained.
-A strong presence in the middle east
-Our means of gathering intelligence have drastically gone up
-Our first full on invasion in over fifty years with modern equipment

As opposed to:
-No significant WMD's found
-Oil prices have tripled
-Cheney isn't swimming in a vault of gold coins, Scrooge McDuck style

 

I would add to this:
If you don't believe that congress (including Clinton, Biden, etc.) voted to go to war on the same evidence that makes you the fool. Especially if you want Bush to own that he knew the evidence was weak and not the congress members who voted for it.

You are spouting party divisional BS and it doesn't help our country.

 

We went to war so that we can gather intelligent and have a full invasion with modern equipment? Those are two reasons that aren't at all foolish in the face of thousands of lives lost and trillions spent?

 

Not really. A fair comparison would be Capone. Everyone knew he was guilty has sin and needed to go. They found a much less serious charge and threw the max penalty at him.

WMD's was the excuse. Whether the "intel" was legit or not is debatable. Even if Iraq had WMD's, invading Iraq was unnecessary. There were more practical ways to deal with this issue.

Whatever you want to believe, there was a bigger reason to invade. And oil and "get rich" was not one of them.

 

I was for the war as the beginning of a new age where the Free World worked together to end tyranny everywhere; wasn't worried about WMD's, didn't care about oil. Bremmer just blew the chance the world had with miscalculation.
But Cheney did have the CIA and his PR minions shape the information given to Congress and the People.

Jon Stewart to Judith Miller: Intel community was ‘feeding you’ on Iraq WMD
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blog...-intel-community-was-feeding-you-on-iraq-wmd/

Former New York Times reporter and Fox News contributor Judith Miller has been on the book-talk circuit for weeks, defending “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey,” which recounts her reporting on the run-up to the Iraq war. Not all of Miller’s interviewers have cornered her on the impact that her stories — often written with other New York Times reporters — had on the George W. Bush administration’s terribly flawed case for an invasion of Saddam Hussein’s fiefdom. In a chat with Bill Maher, for example, Miller said, “I couldn’t have been more skeptical.”

In a massive sit-down with Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” last night, Miller didn’t dare repeat that line. But she said some other stuff that approached this spirit of revisionism. At one point in the tete-a-tete, Miller said this: “What I am afraid of is people who change a narrative to create facts that aren’t true.” No, she wasn’t referring to the Bush administration’s case that Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction (WMD); she was referring to people who have allegedly misconstrued her record.

The crowd chuckled at the dual-usage of her remark, however.

Time aided this exchange: Stewart and Miller talked for two extensive sessions, which enabled the host to dig into one emblematic piece of Judith Miller’s journalism. On Sept. 8, 2002, she and Michael Gordon teamed up on a story headlined “U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS.” This was the famous story on the aluminum tubes that Iraq was supposedly acquiring for its nuclear weapons program. “The diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq’s nuclear program, officials said, and that the latest attempt to ship the material had taken place in recent months,” noted the reporters.

Wrong, as it turned out. Those tubes were likely destined for a conventional missile program — and not long after the Sept. 8 piece, Miller and the Times were forced to walk back the reporting and note that there was some disagreement about the tubes’ intended use. But even that piece wasn’t strong enough and was buried deep within the Times’s news pages.

Pushed by Stewart on all this, Miller said she was trying to get sources to talk about their tube doubts; that she pushed for the walk-back piece; and so on. “My newspaper didn’t want to run a story that challenged the aluminum tubes angle,” said Miller.

Whatever the particulars, Stewart noted that there was a disparity in terms of thresholds. “The standard of proof in all this seems much higher on the side of this is not an issue, and they’re not a a threat and much lower on the side of you’re being fed” scary intelligence, said the host.

Miller: “But that’s what the intelligence community believed.”

Stewart: “That’s what they were feeding you.”

At another point, Stewart said, “You don’t believe that you were manipulated?”

Miller replied, “All journalists are manipulated and all politicians lie.”

The reporting that she did on Iraq, said Miller, was “really, really hard.” Not that such difficulty steered Stewart away from his conclusion: “I believe you helped the administration take us to, like, the most devastating mistake in foreign policy that we’ve made in like 100 years, but you seem lovely,” said Stewart, who verily spat at Miller’s defense of Bush and Dick Cheney on the grounds that they were trying to protect the country.

“That is a meaningless statement,” ripped Stewart. “What president hasn’t tried to protect the country?”

At the end, Stewart looked depressed, which is a common feeling upon interfacing with Miller’s exculpatory spiel: “These discussions always make me incredibly sad because I feel like they point to institutional failure at the highest levels and no one will take responsibility for it, and they pass the buck to every individual other than themselves. It’s sad,” he said. There was no question whatsoever that he meant to roll Miller into that group.

There was one point that Stewart failed to prosecute. In talking about “The Story,” Miller claimed that “I went back to [my sources] in this book and I said, ‘What happened, how did you get it wrong? How did I get it wrong?’ And that’s what I’ve tried to do in the book.” The Erik Wemple Blog has read the book, and that’s not the vibe we get. “The Story” is a piece of biographical polemic geared toward the exoneration of its author.

 

You seem angry too. Is it some club liberal folks go to so they can earn their credentials? Is it close to Club Med? How are the beaches?

I'll simply repeat what I said before.

Applies to you as well. Cheers!

 

You are being pedantic for no damn reason other than just to be a prick. You know exactly what Sweet Lou was referring to and it wasn't expired munitions from a previous war that had absolutely no tangible threat to the sovereign borders of the United States and wasn't the claimed WMD pretext for a preemptive invasion. And I don't give a **** about your thoughts 13 years ago.

 

That is not what the article said. You are making that up. I quoted the very same article which shows that they were not the WMD's they were looking for!

 

But you certainly do give a **** about what I type since you respond every time, like a dog at dinnertime.

I would take offense at being called (in order) disingenous, an *******, pedantic, and a prick, but then again its silly to be offended here where monkeys fling poo. So fling it all you want. It's pretty amusing.

 

Correction. That's not ALL the article said. But it most certainly did talk about the 5,000 WMD's that were found which was in direct opposition to your inference that very few WMD's were found. See below:

Beyond that, I have no dispute with your assertion they were different than the WMD's they were originally searching for.