Report: more lies from the Bush administration.

Lol! I honestly can't tell which you are:


1) An anti-war liberal who is just trying to win support for his side of the argument by presenting a ridiculously unthinking cartoon depiction of a pro-war arch-conservative, like the Archie Bunker of the BBS.

2) An actual conservative pro-war supporter with a sense of self-depracating humour who makes obviously dellusionairy claims as a send up of himself to note that he doesn't take it all that seriously.

or

3) A guy who might win arguments about the stocks market; I haven't seen it happen, but I don't doubt it, but otherwise loses pretty much every argument about politics, religion, or race, throws insults around as quickly as he cries foul when others respond in kind, and overlooks his own incredible shortcomings to claim 'victory' time after time, but ducks tackling issues with actual argument, by throwing out ad hominems, speculation, and CASE_CLOSED!'s , or ducking them altogether...


BTW...you ducked the issue at hand....again....

 

im sure T_J and other neocons will just attack the messenger and not the message itself..

You would think that a policy or agenda that would require the destoration of *facts* in order to look resonable wouldnt be one worth pursuing in todays information age...


T_J might dominate McB's thoughts, but I wonder what dominate T_J's thoughts?

perhaps...

 

The only thing 'shocking' is that 'Bush supporters' still even post here. This forum is a complete joke- nothing but a big partisan Bush-hating ultra-liberal funer..., er, pep rally. Ever since this Derision & Distortion forum was spawned, I've rarely ventured away from the Hangout. Hopefully you guys will have more to talk about once the West Wing gets out of re-runs in the fall.

You're shocked by the lack of response? LOL. That's a good one FB.

 

Yeah, I agree...What are you guys on about? I mean, why don't you wait until something significant happens, instead of worrying about insignificant crap like the government misleading us into war, avoiding their own intelligence reports, etc. Concentrate on coming in here 10 times a week every time the administration claims to have found WMDs and telling the anti-war people how it's a FACT that WMDs have been found, and how that justifies the war, and laughing at/insulting them...

Keep you eyes on the prize; Helium vans mean much more to this country than the honesty of our leadership with regards to war, and maybe if you guys focus on the proper issues non-partisan folks like the Freak won't get disgusted with Derision & Distortion.

 

Perhaps you should venture out of the hangout a little more often. There have been some really great discussions around here. Read the Hayes/MacBeth posts in the 7 Questions thread. For a while John Heath was posting articles of the Bush side, and TJ, just posted one from FOX. Mr. Clutch, Giddyup, and others regularly discuss things from right of center.

A lot of the news and facts that come out lately don't playout favorably to Bush, so it might appear as Bush bashing, but I think it's just the state of what's going on in the world today. I admit that might just be the way I see it, and even if it's not the extent that I mention, there has been a string bad news events for the President lately. So for us to bring them up and discuss them, doesn't automatically rise to the level of ultra partisan Bush Bashing etc. While some argue here for Bush there was lot more supporting him in the days of victory in Iraq's capitol.

So yes I am surprised at the lack of response by the Bush supporters. I really want to understand their take on these events that happening. That doesn't mean I won't disagree and debate the conservative take. I don't think it's wrong to want to find out why people see things differently than you do.

For the record I don't watch West Wing.

 

Yeah, that's the thing you possibly don't realize, Freak...When there were only a few of us asking these questions, when the government was making all the claims about WMDs and 9-11 links, and we asked to see the proof, or wait for global consensus, we were mocked repeatedly ( I personally was repeatedly called a traitor, a coward, a commie, an idiot, a moron, a Saddam-lover, and one charming poster said he hoped I'd go to Iraq as a human shield and get killed by a US missile)...and we had to wade through daily posts by heath etc. telling us how WMDs were found, and what fools we were, etc. And then, inexplicably, when we were winning the war, for some reason we had to sit through another few weeks of being told how stupid we were, etc.

So then the questions remain unanswered...and more and more people start to ask them...and reports and leaks come out showing that the answers sure aren't what we were told, and the hunt for WMDs proves fruitless...and suddenly those who were here every day mocking us when they thought things were going their way are nowhere to be seen...and even then, Batman will tell you, I was among those who said we should calm down before calling them cowards...but now weeks have gone by, and they continue to duck report after report, thread after thread...and so I post a thread where I don't argue anything, I merely ask them salient questions and afford them the opportunity of responding, and they still duck them, for the most part...while finding the time to post in other threads or post pro-war articles...so I do them the courtesy of responding to their posts, and still nothing. So I'm a little pissed off, and a lot dissapointed. Hayes and I are on opposite sides of the fence, and I feel that he ducked some of the questions, and we are miles apart on others, but at least he had the guts to back up his arguments when things don't look so good for his side, same goes for robbie and giddy and 1 or two others.

But if you had waded through all the pro-war crap we did, and stuck it out, you'd see how the convenience of finding other priorities right now, or the rejection of the forum they themsleves swamped with their argumetns before seems a little gutless, and more than a little dissapointing.


Sorry if my first post to you was a tad strident; this might help explain it.

 

Hell yeah, ditto that.

MacBeth did say to wait to call the cowards cowardly, even though I'd already waited weeks after they'd fallen silent, after their last taunting posts had been proven false as so many others had before.

Freak, I don't know if you're seeing what you want to see or if you've genuinely been gone, but it'll take a hell of a lot of anti-Bush dominance on this board to catch up with what went before. The difference is when public opinion was for the war we stayed and argued and as soon it started turning the other guys cut and ran (giddyup, Mr. Clutch and a very few others excepted, but then none of them were among the loudest shouters in support of the war). And they have the nerve to call the French surrender monkeys.

 

OK, guys let's let up on TJ, Heath and the others for awhile.

If we frighten them off the bbs, it just won't be the same.

I could be wrong, but I think Dubya and the Iraq misadventure was the high point of the conservative onslaught that began after the 1960's. Already we see the neocons having to play nicer with the UN, N. Korea, Iran and Syria as Iraq turns into a quagmire for them.


After the troops keep rotating back from Iraqi ocupation with stories of Iraqi hatred of the occupation and that the troops are tired of being shot at for what, the story of the trail of lies about the wmd etc. will get worse for the conservatives.

It will get increasingly harder to spin how nesessary it all was, to save our country and how much we love those little Iraqis and the other bs they push. Combined with the second go around of the failed lies of supply side economics it will be tough for them to bounce bac. Bush could lose next time like his dad, but another likely scenario is that he will suppress his scandals till after relelction like Nixon with Watergate and then all hell will break lose for him.

 

Way to let up on them, glynch.

 

Batman, I guess you got me there. But let's try to show them some compassion.

Besides they are going to come out with a new report soon.
Here's a story on the preparation of the report.


************
Is Iraqi Intel Still Being Manipulated?

The sad and secretive tale of an Iraqi scientist

By Michael Hirsh
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE

Aug. 8 — His story seemed, in the beginning, a godsend for the Bush administration. In early June, Iraqi nuclear scientist Mahdi Obeidi revealed to CIA investigators that in 1991, just after the Persian Gulf War, he had gone into his backyard to bury gas-centrifuge equipment used to enrich uranium.

IT APPEARED TO be hard evidence backing up what the Bush team had maintained all along: that Saddam Hussein had a secret nuclear-weapons program and had hidden it so well that United Nations inspectors never would have found it on their own. This, after all, was one of the justifications for the war that began in March, and evidence for Vice President Dick Cheney’s charge that the Iraqis were “reconstituting a nuclear program.” Obeidi also turned over to the CIA 180 documents on Iraq’s enrichment program, as well as about 200 blueprints for centrifuges.
Suddenly the Bush administration seemed about to reap one of the windfalls it had long anticipated from the ouster of Saddam. Newly enfranchised Iraqi scientists now felt free to speak the truth. Obeidi himself, when he was interviewed by U.N. inspectors back in the mid-’90s, had lied outright, denying that he had anything to do with the gas-centrifuge program, though in fact he was in charge of it as director-general in Iraq’s Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization. In late June, when Obeidi’s tale of the furtive burial beneath his backyard rosebush broke on CNN, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said “we’re hopeful that this example will lead to other Iraqi scientists stepping forward to provide information.” Among those who led the way in playing up the new revelation was David Kay, the former U.N. inspector who is today heading the Bush administration’s probe into Iraq’s WMD program. “There’s no way that that would have been discovered by normal international inspections,” said Kay, then on his second day on the job as special adviser to the CIA after spending much of the Iraq war as a hawkish TV pundit.
But for the Bush administration, things quickly began to go wrong with the Obeidi story. True, Obeidi said he’d buried the centrifuge equipment, as he’d been ordered to do in 1991 by Saddam’s son Qusay Hussein and son-in-law Hussein Kamel. But he also insisted to the CIA that, in effect, that was that: Saddam had never reconstituted his centrifuge program afterward, in large part because of the Iraqi tyrant’s fear of being discovered under the U.N. sanctions-and-inspections regime. If true, this was a terribly inconvenient fact for the Bush administration, after months in which Secretary of State Colin Powell and other senior officials had alleged that aluminum tubes imported from 11 countries were intended for just such a centrifuge program. Obeidi denied that and added that he would have known about any attempts to restart the program. He also told the CIA that, as the International Atomic Energy Agency and many technical experts have said, the aluminum tubes were intended for rockets, not uranium enrichment or a nuclear-weapons program. And he stuck by his story, despite persistent questioning by CIA investigators who still believed he was not telling the full truth.
Soon, not only was Obeidi no longer a marquee name for the Bush team, he was incommunicado. Whisked off to a safe house in Kuwait, with no access to phones or the Internet, he waited in vain for what he thought had been offered to him: asylum in the United States and green cards granting permanent residency to him and his eight-member family. Former U.N. inspector David Albright, who got to know Obeidi in the mid-’90s in Iraq and acted as middleman in putting him in touch with the CIA in mid-May after Operation Iraqi Freedom, spoke with him on June 29. Albright says Obeidi told him then that he thought his asylum would be granted by early July and was “in the final stages.” But another month passed. As recently as Aug. 5, the last time Albright spoke to him, Obeidi did not know when he would be allowed to leave for the United States, Albright said.
Asked about the Obeidi case, CIA spokesman William Harlow said Friday, “We don’t issue green cards … We never said he was coming here. We never made a promise.” (In fact, the agency does on occasion arrange asylum for useful informants). Later, Harlow called back to say that Obeidi was not “cooling his heels” in Kuwait any longer and that “we’re not unhappy with him.” But Harlow would not say where Obeidi had been sent or whether he had been granted asylum in the United States. “We just don’t discuss asylum cases,” Harlow said.
Albright and others suggest that, with the Obeidi case, the message being sent by the Bush administration to Iraqi scientists being interrogated in Iraq is a troublesome one: if you don’t tell us what we want to hear, you won’t be rewarded. In fact, things might even get a little unpleasant for you. As Albright points out, provisional green cards can be arranged very quickly; among those so favored, for example, was the Iraqi man who tipped off the U.S. military to the whereabouts of Pfc. Jessica Lynch. “I think they’re just keeping him under wraps,” said Albright.
The treatment of Obeidi has in turn raised questions about whether even fresh intelligence from Iraq is being manipulated in advance of the report being prepared by David Kay, which is intended as the definitive account of Iraq’s WMD program. One Capitol Hill legislator told NEWSWEEK that the administration’s plan is to put out a vast compilation of data about Saddam’s decades-long effort to build weapons of mass destruction and “hope the issue will go away.” And several Democrats say they are disturbed by what Sen. Dianne Feinstein told NEWSWEEK was the “very vague and nonprecise” nature of Kay’s testimony when he appeared at closed sessions of two congressional committees last week. “Signs of a weapons program are very different than the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that were a certainty before the war,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “We did not go to war to disrupt Saddam’s weapons program, we went to disarm him.” President Bush himself in late July said Kay would require a long time to analyze “literally the miles of documents that we have uncovered.”
While suggesting that more surprises are to come, especially on biological weapons, Kay also indicated last week that the most “amazing” evidence he was uncovering involved not caches of weapons, but new details of efforts by the Iraqis at deceiving U.N. inspectors. State Department spokesman Philip Reeker, asked Friday about the allegations that the forthcoming Kay report might amount to less than the full story, said that Kay “has been very clear that he’s doing a very thorough and methodical look at all of this.”

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

url

 

I think the problem is that us leftys on this BBS don't act like the pansy/setup wusses like they're used to seeing on Fox news, like that little fop Alan Colmes or that loser Bill whatever from crossfire who used to get pushed around by the wussy Tucker Carlson.

 

Here's another good example of a "lie". The Bushies brought in a guy with no tech background to temporarily head the Department of Energy, gave him a $20,000 bonus. He stayed for 9 mos and overruled the real Energy guys in order to say Iraq was a nuclear threat.

This isn't going away. They pissed off too many people in various intelligence services, the Department of State, here, the Dept of Energy as they cooked the evidence.


************
OPERATION: IRAQI FREEDOM
$20,000 bonus to official
who agreed on nuke claim
Energy Dept. honcho ordered dissenters at Iraq pre-briefing to 'shut up, sit down'

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: August 12, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern


By Paul Sperry
© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com


WASHINGTON – A former Energy Department intelligence chief who agreed with the White House claim that Iraq had reconstituted its defunct nuclear-arms program was awarded a total of $20,500 in bonuses during the build-up to the war, WorldNetDaily has learned.

Thomas Rider, as acting director of Energy's intelligence office, overruled senior intelligence officers on his staff in voting for the position at a National Foreign Intelligence Board meeting at CIA headquarters last September.

His officers argued at a pre-briefing at Energy headquarters that there was no hard evidence to support the alarming Iraq nuclear charge, and asked to join State Department's dissenting opinion, Energy officials say.

Rider ordered them to "shut up and sit down," according to sources familiar with the meeting.

As a result, State was the intelligence community's lone dissenter in the key National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, something the Bush administration is quick to remind critics of its prewar intelligence. So far no banned weapons have been found in Iraq to confirm its charges.

The secret 90-page report, prepared Oct. 1, was rushed to sway members of Congress ahead of a key vote on granting the White House war-making authority. It also formed the underlying evidence for the White House's decision to go to war.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham gave Rider a $13,000 performance bonus after the NIE report was released and just before the war, department sources say. He had received an additional $7,500 before the report.

"That's a hell of a lot of money for an intelligence director who had no experience or background in intelligence, and who'd only been running the office for nine months," said one source who requested anonymity. "Something's fishy."

Rider declined to talk about the payments.

"I'm really not going to talk about my personal life," he told WorldNetDaily.

Rider, a long-time human resources bureaucrat, served nine months as acting director of Energy's intelligence office. He stepped down in February, the month before the war.

Energy officials say Rider rubber-stamped the administration's conclusion that Baghdad was reactivating a nuclear weapons program over the objections of Energy's nuclear weapons research labs and senior members of his own staff.

"He was doing their bidding," asserted an Energy official who also wished to remain nameless.

Oddly, Energy headquarters signed on to the hawkish position on Iraq nukes even though Energy's labs debunked the centerpiece of its evidence – that the thick-walled aluminum tubes it sought were more likely intended for artillery rockets than gas centrifuges used to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs.

With Rider and Energy on board, the vote for the position that Baghdad had restarted its defunct nuclear program was a nearly unanimous 5-1, with the other supporting votes cast by CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. Without Energy, the vote would have been a less-convincing 4-2, which was the vote on the aluminum tubes (both Energy and State dissented).

The difference is not lost on the administration, which is quick to point out Energy's acceptance of the hawkish line. Energy's vote on the nuclear allegation was critical, because the department is viewed as the final arbiter of technical disputes regarding nuclear-proliferation issues.

"It is noteworthy that although DOE [Department of Energy] assessed that the tubes probably were not part of Iraq's nuclear program, DOE agreed that reconstitution was under way [emphasis in the original]," CIA Director George Tenet said in a four-page statement defending the NIE on Iraq. It was published Sunday in the Washington Post.

But officials in Energy's intelligence office were at odds with Rider, and did not agree that the program was being reconstituted, sources say. In fact, they agreed with the State Department's view that the nuclear case against Baghdad was weak.

"Senior folks in the office wanted to join INR on the footnote, and even wanted to write it with them, so the footnote would have read, 'Energy and INR,'" one official said. "But when they were arguing about it at the pre-brief, Rider told them to 'shut up and sit down.'"

INR, State's intelligence office, not only shot down the tubes theory, but called "inadequate" other evidence used to support the view that Baghdad was trying to acquire nuclear arms.

"The activities we have detected do not add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons," it said in its alternative view attached to the end of the NIE report's key findings, which the White House recently declassified to show critics that the nuclear reconstitution position was nearly unanimous among the intelligence agencies.

Rider is said to have brought two scientists to the NIE meeting at Langley to debate the tubing issue, one from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the other from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Though the prevailing view among physicists and engineers at both labs was that the aluminum tubes were more likely intended for Iraq's conventional artillery program, the scientist that Rider brought from Oak Ridge leaned the other way – that they were more likely used for the nuclear program, though he did not rule out artillery use, sources say.

The White House's harder line that the tubes were really suited only for the nuclear program was driven by CIA analyst Joe T. (Langley has asked that his full last name not be disclosed for his protection), though he is said to have received the blessing of senior CIA officials like Robert Walpole and Tenet himself. The former Oak Ridge engineer works in a CIA unit known by the acronym WINPAC, which analyzes intelligence about dual-use technology and export controls.

"He was the spark plug for them on the whole issue," said David Albright, a physicist who helped inspect Iraqi nuclear sites last decade. "But most scientists at the labs disagreed with him," arguing that the tubes Iraq sought were too thick for gas centrifuges, and had a coating that would flake off in the corrosive gases of centrifuges. However, they were ideal for artillery rockets, they argued, and matched ones Iraq had previously used for rockets.

"The debate over whether Baghdad was trying to acquire nuclear weapons pretty much came down to the tubes," said one Energy official. "Yet even though DOE voted against the tubes, Rider still argued that the program was being reconstituted."

"But if the tubes are out, and if the African search for uranium is out, and if all the construction activity at the old nuclear sites turned out to be nothing, then what's the evidence?" he said. "It was just taken on faith."

Rider is said to have earned his second bonus of $13,000 from Abraham in February for exceeding performance expectations as head of the intelligence office.

Sources say the secretary wanted to pay him $20,000, but was informed he'd already received $7,500 just nine months earlier.

Bonuses that big are rare, and Energy insiders say they cannot recall previous intelligence chiefs receiving as much bonus money as Rider, who is said to be close to Abraham.

Energy spokespersons for the secretary, Joe Davis and Jeanne Lopatto, did not return phone calls for this story.

Yet despite Rider's alleged outstanding performance, Abraham didn't keep him in the top position. In February, he was replaced by CIA official John Russak. By July, Rider had been relocated to another department – energy assurance.

cite

 

I had not read that report yet. thanks.


This "oops, it must have been a slip up somewhere" is not going to fly. They made it up because they needed it. This is the legacy of all things Bush: cheat.

 

OK, to make this easier on us, how about a thread: truths from the Bush administration so we wouldn't have to post every time there's a news conference.