Can we just focus on this for minute. I think it's so insane that it just skimmed off the top of people's conciousness or something. I can't remember when I've ever heard anything so totally insane from a president. I really almost can't digest this. I've been in kind of a daze for much of the day because of this quote.
I guess W's said so much outrageous stuff and gotten away with it, that it's hard for me to get worked up over it. at least till next year.
Is he going to be reelected? Doesn't everybody lie? Oops sorry! Too heated for me. That's one major lie........I wonder what will happen to him..
I understand that, but this has to be the grandaddy of them all. At least with others people could try and claim bad intel, or it was just an exaggeration. This flies in the face of reality itself. How the hell can he claim that Iraq wouldn't let the inspectors in? I think the pressure may be getting to the President.
The reason folks like Mr. Pitt aren't credible sources.. is because they print out-and-out lies. Anyone who took time to read Wilsons piece in the newspaper would know he never saw any documents, forgeries or otherwise. Wilson did not even make a written report of any findings..he only said a sale was "highly unlikely". He never investigated whether Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake...only if a sale had been made.
Good Morning Boys and Girls. From today's NY Daily News... ----------------------------------------------------------- No proof on Iraq, say pols By JAMES GORDON MEEK DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON -There is no evidence Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and the White House relied on "fragmentary information" when it concluded Iraq had an illegal arsenal, <b>leaders of the House Intelligence Committee said yesterday. </b> The startling conclusions by Reps. Porter Goss <b>(R-Fla.)</b> and Jane Harman (D-Calif.) came as President Bush was hit with fresh criticism by Democrats over intelligence he cited on Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction. Goss, a former CIA case officer who is chairman of the committee, and Harman just returned from Iraq, where they were briefed by chief U.S. weapons hunters David Kay and Army Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton. </B> <b>"Thus far, evidence emerging on Iraq's [weapons of mass destruction] programs does not point to the existence of large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons," </b> Goss and Harman said in a joint report. "While such stockpiles may eventually be found, Dr. Kay and Gen. Dayton both noted that the intelligence community's assumptions about Iraq's WMD programs were largely based on fragmentary information collected over the past decade without any particularized insight into that closed society," the committee said. Harman said the Bush administration relied on <b>"circumstantial indicators"</b> of Iraq's weapons programs, adding that prewar intelligence shown to lawmakers didn't <b>"highlight gaps and uncertainties" and "omitted caveats and qualifiers"</b> typically attached to Iraq intelligence assessments. Asked whether he agreed with Harman, Goss said, "She and I are very close on where we see this thing." The committee will hold a public hearing on Iraq next week. In a speech to the Johns Hopkins graduate school in Baltimore, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) said Bush went to war touting "hyped intelligence, shoddy intelligence and false intelligence. It's a disgrace." White House officials had no immediate comment. But House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) dismissed the flap as "incredibly overblown." "When you listen to the rhetoric, you start to wonder which side won," DeLay said. "[Democrats] didn't want to fight in the first place, and they've spewed more rhetoric at President Bush than they ever did at Saddam Hussein." http://www.nydailynews.com/07-16-2003/news/wn_report/story/101229p-91657c.html
So now we have leaders of both the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee( http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...715/pl_afp/us_iraq_weapons&cid=1521&ncid=1473 )refuting white house claims on intelligence. This is only starting…
Bush Faced Dwindling Data on Iraq Nuclear Bid By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, July 16, 2003; Page A01 In recent days, as the Bush administration has defended its assertion in the president's State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy African uranium, officials have said it was only one bit of intelligence that indicated former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program. But a review of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggests that between Oct. 7, when President Bush made a speech laying out the case for military action against Hussein, and Jan. 28, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq. By Jan. 28, in fact, the intelligence report concerning Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa -- although now almost entirely disproved -- was the only publicly unchallenged element of the administration's case that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program. That may explain why the administration strived to keep the information in the speech and attribute it to the British, even though the CIA had challenged it earlier. For example, in his Oct. 7 speech, Bush said that "satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at [past nuclear] sites." He also cited Hussein's "numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists" as further evidence that the program was being reconstituted, along with Iraq's attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes "needed" for centrifuges used to enrich uranium. But on Jan. 27 -- the day before the State of the Union address -- the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported to the U.N. Security Council that two months of inspections in Iraq had found that no prohibited nuclear activities had taken place at former Iraqi nuclear sites. As for Iraqi nuclear scientists, Mohamed ElBaradei told the Security Council, U.N. inspectors had "useful" interviews with some of them, though not in private. And preliminary analysis, he said, suggested that the aluminum tubes, "unless modified, would not be suitable for manufacturing centrifuges." The next night, Bush delivered his speech, including the now-controversial 16-word sentence, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Of his October examples, only the aluminum tubes charge remained in January, but that allegation had a subtle caveat -- he described the tubes as merely "suitable" for nuclear weapons production. Without the statement on uranium, the allegation concerning aluminum tubes would have been the only nuclear-related action ascribed to Hussein since the early 1990s. And the tubes had already been questioned not only by IAEA, but also by analysts in U.S. and British intelligence agencies. The idea that Iraq was acquiring tubes for a nuclear program became public in September, shortly after the Bush administration began a campaign to marshal public, congressional and U.N. support for authority to attack Iraq if it did not disarm. On Aug. 26, Vice President Cheney, the official most publicly vocal about Iraq as a nuclear threat, began the campaign when he told a Veterans of Foreign Wars audience: "Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon. Just how soon we cannot gauge." On Sept. 8, the New York Times disclosed that intelligence showed that Iraq had "embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb" by trying to purchase "specially designed aluminum tubes" that unidentified administration sources believed were for centrifuges to enrich uranium. The story referred to Bush "hardliners" who argued that action should be taken because if they waited for proof that Hussein had a nuclear weapon, "the first sign of a smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud." That day, Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on CNN's "Late Edition" and confirmed the Times story. She said the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." She also said, "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons, but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Cheney also confirmed the Times story that day, on NBC's "Meet the Press," saying that "we don't have all the evidence," but enough of a picture "that tells us that he [Hussein] is in fact actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons." What neither Rice nor Cheney said at the time was that Baghdad's first attempts to purchase the aluminum tubes, more than a year earlier, had by Sept. 8 led to a fairly open disagreement in the U.S. intelligence community on whether the tubes were for centrifuges or for artillery rockets in Iraq's military program. Analysts from the State and Energy departments said the tubes were too long and too thick for centrifuges; CIA and Pentagon analysts said they could be cut down and reamed out. Their debate was continuing as the agencies were putting together the still-classified national intelligence estimate on Hussein's weapons program. In July, the United States had intercepted one shipment and obtained a tube; it was coated with a protective chemical that would have had to be removed if it were to be put to a nuclear purpose. The intelligence estimate, completed in mid-September, reflected the different views, but the final judgment said that "most" analysts leaned toward the view that the tubes had a nuclear purpose. When the British dossier on Iraq's weapons program was published on Sept. 24, it referred to the tubes, but noted that "there is no definitive intelligence that it is destined for a nuclear program." In his State of the Union address, Bush did not indicate any disagreement over the use of the tubes. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, however, outlined the arguments involved when he spoke eight days later before the Security Council, where inspectors already had challenged the U.S. position on them. On March 7, ElBaradei gave his final report to the Security Council before his inspectors were removed from Iraq on March 18. His conclusion was that "the IAEA had found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq." He also said the documents that gave rise to the allegation that Iraq had tried to buy African uranium were forged. On March 16, Cheney appeared again on "Meet the Press" and reiterated his views of the previous August about Hussein's nuclear program. "We know he's been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." The war began three days later.
Wonder what's coming next. http://slate.msn.com/id/2085689/ Why This Bush Lie? Part 1 It wasn't his first. By Timothy Noah Posted Tuesday, July 15, 2003, at 4:01 PM PT Chatterbox is gratified that the country has come to share his enthusiasm for dissecting the lies uttered by or on behalf of President Bush. Or rather, for dissecting one lie: Bush's assertion, in this year's State of the Union address, that Saddam had "recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." This information, the Bushies now concede, was based almost entirely on documents that the CIA and the White House knew to be false. (Pedants' corner: Bush actually said that British intelligence had "learned" about Saddam's yellowcake safari, but the attribution amounted to a lie because you can't "learn" something that isn't true.) But what makes the yellowcake lie so special? That it was a justification for going to war? Then what about Bush's comic insistence in May that "We've found the weapons of mass destruction"? That lie was arguably worse than the yellowcake lie, because it was retrospective rather than speculative, and more demonstrably untrue. What about the cost of the war, which the Bush administration insisted couldn't be estimated in advance? Larry Lindsey reportedly lost his job as chairman of the National Economic Council for blabbing to the Wall Street Journal that the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion. Mitch Daniels, then White House budget director, scoffed at Lindsey's estimate and said the cost would be more like $50 billion or $60 billion. But now the Washington Post is estimating the cost of the war and its aftermath at … $100 billion. Why was there no media frenzy when Bush lied about this year's tax cut? "My jobs and growth plan would reduce tax rates for everyone who pays income tax," Bush said before Congress passed it. Not so! The Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center found 8.1 million taxpayers who would receive no tax cuts. Or what about when Ari Fleischer said the prisoners of war at Guantanamo were "receiving far far better treatment than they received in the life that they were living previously"? This was difficult to square with the fact that there had, at that time, been 27 suicide attempts. Or what about Fleischer's denial (twice!) that Bush had come out against civilian nation-building during the 2000 presidential campaign? Fleischer tried to convince reporters that Bush had criticized only nation-building by the military. But Bush had said, "I don't think so" in response to the following question in the Oct. 11 debate: "Is it time to consider a civil force of some kind, that comes in after the military, that builds nations or all of that?" Or what about the White House fact sheet that insisted the tax cuts hadn't contributed to the deficit ("The budget returned to deficit because of war, recession and emergencies associated with the terrorist attacks of September 11th"), even though, buried inside the White House budget documents, some renegade bureaucrat wrote, "The deterioration in the performance of the economy together with income tax relief … produced a drop in the surplus to $127.1 billion (1.3% of GDP) and a return to deficits"? (Incidentally, the budget deficit is now projected to be $455 billion.) And these lies are all just from this calendar year. They don't include what is probably Bush's most significant lie concerning domestic policy: that his restrictions on stem-cell research left scientists with 64 stem-cell lines to use in their research. "[M]ore than 60 genetically diverse stem cell lines already exist," Bush said in his August 2001 stem-cell speech. "They were created from embryos that have already been destroyed, and they have the ability to regenerate themselves indefinitely, creating ongoing opportunities for research." Not true! Until recently, there was only one stem-cell line that researchers could use. Now there are 11. In this instance, Chatterbox knows why the lie got lost in the shuffle. It's because just about everybody (including Chatterbox) dropped the subject after Osama Bin Laden's major distraction on Sept. 11. So: How is the yellowcake lie different? Why is it the first Bush lie to send the media pack into a feeding frenzy? Why did it prompt David Broder of the Washington Post to see "the shadow of defeat" cross Bush's presidency? Why yellowcake? Why now? Chatterbox will explain all in his next entry.
I smell Chalabi (sp?). _______________ U.S. Had Iraq-Niger Documents from Private Source Thu July 17, 2003 04:09 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States acquired forged documents on Iraq seeking uranium from Niger in October 2002 from a private non-governmental source in Rome, a senior State Department official said on Thursday. The documents are one of the elements in the highly charged debate over whether President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to justify their invasion of Iraq, made exaggerated claims about the extent of Iraqi efforts to resume a nuclear weapons program. An Italian government official said on Wednesday that, contrary to some media suggestions, the Italian military intelligence organization Sismi did not pass on any false documents to U.S. or British secret services. The senior U.S. official, who asked not to be named, appeared to confirm that account of the source. "In October 2002 we acquired these documents in Rome from a private source, non-governmental," he said. "The embassy shared them with all the relevant agencies at post and they were then shared again when they got back to Washington," the official added. The official declined to be more specific about the source and he could not say if the United States ever double-checked with the source when they turned out to be forgeries. Bush said in his annual State of the Union speech in January that the British government had information that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. White House officials have said the claim should not have appeared in the speech because it did not meet the standard of reliability required for a major presidential speech.
