This is very serious stuff and I am surprised it does not seem to trigger more debate. Any reason not to believe O'Neill?
again...do you honestly believe that was the first time we he intelligence that planes MIGHT be used as terrorist weapons?? come on...we had been hearing about that for many years before...like during the Reagan administration.
I remember following the new of the WTC bombings of 1993 (?), one of the talking heads made a remark akin to this: "It's not that long before some terrorist hijacks a plane and tries to fly it into one of these buildings...." 9/11 did not change everything. As you can see, the idea that Saddam needs to be gone has been around since the end of Gulf War I. Anyone ever see "3 Days of the Condor?" Remember Cliff Robertson's line about the games-playing contingency planning by the Intel Community for ever imaginable scenario? It's part of their ever-preparedness. This one just always sat on the top of the stack.
maybe i'm missing something..but i don't see a problem with this. the concerns we had about saddam predated 9/11. this president acted to take him out instead of lobbing over the occasional cruise missile like his predecessors.
You should see the Jon Stewart clip. People have concerns about this and Bush because he did a complete 180 from the debates to apparently right after he got elected. Any time it was brought up, many of his supporters gave critics the all-encompassing "9/11 changed everything" line.
I guess some people were not paying attention... "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." Condoleeza Rice on May 16, 2002.
Those concerns were certainly there, but it is a huge leap from having concerns to engaging in war. Even if you are a die-hard supporter of Bush you have to loook at our history and look at the world and admit that something beyond the norm drove the decision. And don't come back with 9-11 because it's becoming clear that the decision was made beforehand and 9-11 was the means.
that's absolutely what i was missing...the criticism directly regarding that. i get it now..and the argument is well-founded, I think.
Bush was never serious about invading Iraq until after 9/11. Remember ****non launched missile strikes on Iraq. He probably had some plans for invasion as well.
Why not have contingency plans just in case? Isn't that the type of stuff the government should be ready for? It sounds absurd to say he wanted to invade Iraq all along when he wasn't actively pursuing that policy before 9/11.
You are ignoring how detailed the Adminstrations planning was as well as the fact they used 9/11 lies to boost their position. Please continue to defend Bush at all costs...
con·tin·gen·cy n., 1.a. An event that may occur but that is not likely or intended; a possibility. b. A possibility that must be prepared for; a future emergency. 2. The condition of being dependent on chance; uncertainty. 3. Something incidental to something else. - American Heritage Dictionary This was not a contingency plan, but a plan of action. In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill in the book. " That was in the first 100 days of the administration.
So the NSC didn't think anything of it...more evidence that there wasn't really anything strange about the plans.
Their non-surprise was not related to "contingency plans" but to war plans. Read carefully. This just hit the wires... ________________ US Treasury Seeks Probe into papers taken by O'Neill WASHINGTON, Jan 12 (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury has asked the U.S. inspector general's office to investigate how a possibly classified document appeared on Sunday in a televised interview of ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, a department spokesman said on Monday. "It's based on the (CBS program) '60 Minutes' segment, and I'll be even more clear -- the document as shown on '60 Minutes' that said 'secret,"' Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols told reporters at a weekly briefing. In a new book about his term as Treasury chief, O'Neill, who left the job in December 2002 in a shake-up of President George W. Bush's economic team, criticized White House policies and provided author Ron Suskind with thousands of administration documents. While Nichols said it is customary for departing officials to take documents when they leave, this probe will focus on how possibly classified information appeared on a television interview as one of O'Neill's papers. _______________ I admit, the documents with security markings gave me pause for concern and if O'Neill lifted them, he broke the law... they are not personal papers, but Federal records. What gets me is the capricious enforcement... No investigation was requested after the Providence Journal reported that "Bob Woodward said the president gave reporters 90 minutes, often speaking candidly about classified information. 'Certainly Richard Nixon would not have allowed reporters to question him [about classified information] like that. Bush's father wouldn't allow it. Clinton wouldn't allow it." - Providence Journal, 4/10/02 And let's not forget about Plame.
Interesting piece from The New Yorker dated January, 2001... ___________ THE IRAQ FACTOR by NICHOLAS LEMANN Will the new Bush team's old memories shape its foreign policy? Issue of 2001-01-22 Posted 2001-01-15 Let's assume, just for argument's sake, that George W. Bush's Presidency will have certain similarities to his father's—even that it will be a continuation of his father's, with the added elements of a surer political touch (especially in dealing with the conservative wing of the Republican Party) and a predilection for settling scores with people who did the old man wrong. The Presidential term limit has automatically taken care of Bill Clinton, the dethroner of George H. W. Bush. So who else might there be who was a major enemy to Bush Administration One, and could be given a comeuppance in Bush Administration Two? Might not the first name on the list be Saddam Hussein? It is true that Bush One administered a swift and splendid thrashing to Saddam in the Gulf War, but he is still defiantly in power in Iraq. His longevity rivals Fidel Castro's—Saddam has effectively been running Iraq since the Nixon Administration. In 1993, a year when Saddam was supposed to be history and Bush was supposed to be President, Saddam tried to have Bush assassinated. For almost ten years, the Bush One team has had to endure the accusation, rich in retrospective wisdom, that it could have nailed Saddam if only it had been willing to prosecute the Gulf War for a few more days. Now two of the leading accusees, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, are assuming positions at the very top of the American government, subordinate only to the firstborn son of another of the leading accusees. Lots of other, lesser known Gulf War planners will probably be high-level officials in the new Bush Administration. The idea of overthrowing Saddam is not an idle fantasy—or, if it is, it's one that has lately occupied the minds of many American officials, including people close to George W. Bush. In 1998, during the period when Saddam was resisting the international inspection team that was trying to make sure he wasn't manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, the Iraq Liberation Act, which made available ninety-seven million dollars in government aid to organizations dedicated to the overthrow of Saddam. Two of the act's co-sponsors were Senators Trent Lott and Joseph Lieberman—not peripheral figures on Capitol Hill. Clinton was unenthusiastic about the Iraq Liberation Act and has spent almost none of the money it provides, but Al Gore, during the Presidential campaign, put some distance between himself and Clinton on the issue of removing Saddam. In the second Presidential debate, after defending his Administration's Iraq record, he said, "I want to go further. I want to give robust support to the groups that are trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein." Bush, back in his swaggering, boy-meets-world phase, early in the campaign, said that if as President he found that Saddam was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction he would "take him out." Since then, he has toned down his rhetoric, but he has stuck to the basic position. Last winter, on the "News Hour with Jim Lehrer," he said, "I will tell you this: If we catch him developing weapons of mass destruction in any way, shape, or form, I'll deal with that in a way that he won't like." In the Vice-Presidential debate, Bernard Shaw ran the "take him out" quote by Cheney and asked, "Would you agree with such a deadly policy?" Cheney said, "We might have no other choice. We'll have to see if that happens." And a little later: "If in fact Saddam Hussein were taking steps to try to rebuild nuclear capacity or weapons of mass destruction, we'd have to give very serious consideration to military action to stop that activity." There is a strong case to be made that Saddam has already stepped across the line that the new Bush Administration has drawn. The international inspection agency UNSCOM has said he is in possession of a large, stable supply of the nerve agent VX, tiny amounts of which can kill people through skin contact. VX seems to meet most people's definition of a weapon of mass destruction, and therefore to require an American military response. Saddam also has active programs to develop biological and nuclear weapons. The most prominent proponent of the argument that we should oust Saddam is probably Paul Wolfowitz, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who may have spent more time with Bush during the campaign than any other foreign-policy adviser except Condoleezza Rice, the new national-security adviser. Wolfowitz was evidently the runner-up for Secretary of Defense in the Bush Administration, and everybody thinks he'll get another important job, not just because Bush owes it to him but because he was Cheney's Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy in the first Bush Administration and so has a very powerful friend at court. Wolfowitz was one of the few high officials in the first Bush Administration who advocated American support for rebellions against Saddam when the war was over; just after the fighting ended, he gave a speech comparing Saddam to "Hulagu Khan, the infamous thirteenth century Mongol chief who murdered prisoners of war, slaughtered women and children, plundered and burned cities, hospitals, and universities . . . the original Butcher of Baghdad." Cheney himself, just before being chosen as Bush's Vice-Presidential nominee, had a long meeting in Colorado with Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, which is based in London. Chalabi is the presumptive leader of the opposition to Saddam. The Colorado meeting was merely the latest of several that Cheney has had with Chalabi. Donald Rumsfeld, the new Secretary of Defense, has met with Chalabi, too. Zalmay Khalilzad, a Rand Corporation expert who is head of the Bush defense-transition team—in other words, in charge of staffing the Pentagon—has been a vocal advocate of overthrowing Saddam, and has testified with Chalabi on Capitol Hill. This year's Republican platform contained a strong endorsement of the Iraq Liberation Act. It would be too much to say that Bush's agenda includes the goal of going after Saddam. What seems quite likely, though, is that the new President will hear different opinions from his foreign-policy advisers. In that sense, the question of Saddam makes for an especially interesting test case of the new Administration's foreign policy, for the differences of opinion represent well-established splits in the Republican foreign-policy world, and are likely to reappear in other areas. Because Bush's total government experience is one and a half terms as a governor, he is as unknown a quantity on foreign affairs as it is possible for a new President to be. He will inevitably wind up gravitating toward one or another of the Republican camps. We can't know yet which it will be—Bush probably doesn't know himself. But the camps themselves, and their leaders and their views, are in plain sight. ____________ The article (a long one) continues here and goes on to discuss Condi, North Korea and a host of other issues... http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?010122fa_fact
