Where are the WMD? US changes its strategy

So now looting is the excuse?

<i> "For more than a decade, Saddam Hussein went to great lengths to hide his weapons from the world. And in the regime's final days, documents and suspected weapons sites were looted and burned," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

It is believed to be the first time Bush has cited looting to explain the inability of U.S. forces to uncover chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, a U.S. official said. </i>

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030621/ts_nm/iraq_usa_bush_dc&cid=564&ncid=1480

 

I'm waiting for them to explain why on MArch 30th Donald Rumsfeld said he knew where the WMD were, and pointed out where they were being gathered outside of Tikrit.

 

<i>The magazine quoted White House chief of staff Andy Card as defending the administration's use of intelligence, while admitting that some of the information turned out to be wrong.

"It would be great if I, or the president, or the vice president could be all-knowing. But we're not," Card said.

"I am not as spun up over this as other people suggest we should be. It's hard for me to keep track of everything that's going on at the White House -- let alone what's happening at the CIA," he said. </i>

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...pl_afp/us_iraq_weapons_cia&cid=1521&ncid=1473

 

The WMD are in ponds in Maryland. No wonder we could not find them in Iraq.


http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$MSOG5LL10YIRTQFIQMFCFFOAVCBQYIV0?xml=/news/2003/06/23/wmd23.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/06/23/ixnewstop.html

Bush backtracks on Iraq's banned weapons
By David Rennie in Washington
(Filed: 23/06/2003)


President George W Bush has retreated from predictions that banned Iraqi weapons would be found, promising only to discover the "true extent" of Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes.

In his weekly radio address, Mr Bush stressed Saddam's record of building and concealing weapons and said "all who know the dictator's history agree" that he had previously possessed and used banned weapons.


President Bush
"The intelligence services of many nations concluded that he had illegal weapons and the regime refused to provide evidence they had been destroyed. We are determined to discover the true extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes, no matter how long it takes," he said.

His comments contrast with earlier declarations. In March he said: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
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I respect McCain a great deal but that article is really disappointing to read. I guess he's lost my vote if he ever decides to run.

 

http://www.empoweramerica.org/stories/storyReader$695
Thank you Rush...
Good investigative journalism is not dead: Thanks to Rush Limbaugh in his column today in the Wall Street Journal. He points out that when Democratic spokesmen and politicians point a gun at President Bush for the "shading of intelligence," over claims of Iraq's possession of WMDs, they are "pointing three fingers" at themselves. Citing the Congressional Record, Rush points out that Senator Carl Levin (one of the loudest condemnifiers of President Bush over the "shading of intelligence"), has at various times over a recent period said things like:
-"I support President Clinton's decision to undertake military operations against Iraq. President Clinton had no alternative because Saddam Hussein has left the world no alternative."

-"He [Hussein] has ignored the mandates of the U.N. and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them."

And, of course, let's not forget President Clinton's own statement: "What if he [Hussein] fails to comply with disarmament and we fail to act? He will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then go right on building up his arsenal. Someday, someway, I guarantee you, he’ll use that arsenal."

And let's not forget what Al Gore said at the Commonwealth Club in 2002: "We know that he [Hussein] has stored away secret supplies of biological weapons and chemical weapons throughout his country."

What we can all be assured of is the following: the lead WMD, Hussein, himself, will soon be found--dead or alive. And soon, too, his other weapons will be found, or found to have been recently destroyed, secreted elsewhere, or sold.

For President Bush, President Clinton, and Al Gore to have concluded that Hussein had such weapons--when he truly did not--would constitute a conspiracy so vast that we would be forced to merely admit that we took out one of the world's most brutal dictators. We will not have to admit to that alone, but if we did, it would be nothing to be ashamed of.

 

Rush logic:

If WMDs had not been found by now, Dems get castigated for not believing what the Clinton Admin had previously said.

If WMDs had been found by now, Dems get castigated for not believing what the Bush Admin had previously said.

Of course Rush is building the Dem opinion in his own image, so it is no BFD if he does not any sense.

 

It's only because those Dems have tried to become chirping political opportunists by keeping up this harangue about the WMD finds or lack thereof.

America first, please.

 

Here is part of what McCain wrote: "It is too early to declare final victory in Iraq. But we're well past the point of knowing that our war to liberate Iraq was right and just. The discovery of mass graves filled with the bodies of murdered children should have convinced even the greatest skeptic. We made America more secure, liberated millions from a reign of terror and helped create the prospect for the establishment of the first Arab democracy. That should make Americans proud -- and critics of the administration's decision to go to war a little more circumspect."

Here is my part: OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM

 

Where are you getting your insider information which (conveniently) spares Gore (or Clinton) the same criticism that you are wanting to harpoon Bush with?

You just compared them yourself-- or more accurately contrasted them. What you are calling foolish is the possibility that Gore (or Clinton) would have approved of OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM. Talk about stacking the deck!

 

Who give's a rats ass about Clinton or Gore, they are out of office. If they messed up too then shame on them:


Can Bush Be Both Ignorant and a Liar?
Yes. There's no reason for Bush-bashers to choose between the two.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, June 23, 2003, at 2:31 PM PT


Is President Bush a liar? The New York Times' David Rosenbaum examined this question with a surfeit of post-Howell-Raines fair-mindedness in the June 22 "Week in Review" section. His bottom line: "[A] review of the president's public statements found little that could lead to a conclusion that the president actually lied" in two particular instances. The first was when Bush claimed he knew Saddam Hussein to possess large quantities of chemical and biological weapons. The second was when Bush claimed that his tax cut would provide tax relief for everyone who pays income taxes. In both instances, Chatterbox is baffled by Rosenbaum's doubt.

Let's address Bush's tax claim first. Its falsity is not in dispute. Chatterbox has written elsewhere that Bush lied when he said, "My jobs and growth plan would reduce tax rates for everyone who pays income tax." (The Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center found 8.1 million people who pay taxes but will receive no tax cuts.) Rosenbaum recognized that Bush's statement was untrue but expressed doubt that Bush knew it to be untrue. Can a false statement be a lie if the speaker is unaware it is a lie?

That leads us immediately to a second question, one that Rosenbaum dared not address: Why is the speaker unaware that his statement is a lie? In Bush's case, the answer is painfully obvious. It's because Bush is a functionally not-bright man. As Chatterbox has explained elsewhere, it's impossible to tell—and, ultimately, of little interest—whether Bush lacks the necessary mental equipment, or whether he's simply incurious. The end result is the same. Even Bush's allies concede that Bush is strikingly ignorant. In the July Vanity Fair, Sam Tanenhaus quoted Richard Perle as saying that when he first met Bush, it was "clear" that "he didn't know very much." Perle went on to argue (with what he failed to recognize as condescension) that Bush is an eager pupil. But there isn't much evidence to support even that.

It's often said that Bush has the virtue of self-awareness, that he knows what he doesn't know. That's probably true. But if it is true, then Bush really oughtn't to go around making sweeping statements that he hasn't made any effort to verify. When these statements turn out to be untrue, Bush's feigned certainty alone justifies calling these statements lies. They may not be the sort of lies a clever person (say, Bill Clinton) would tell. Indeed, many left-of-center commentators (Paul Krugman and Eric Alterman come to mind) refuse to admit that Bush is dumb, presumably because they fear that would make it impossible to hold him accountable for terrible things that he and his administration do. (Many felt the same way about Reagan.) But there's no reason Bush can't be thought of as both stupid and a liar. As Slate's Michael Kinsley has noted, Bush's lies are typically lies of laziness: "If telling the truth was less bother, [he'd] try that too."

Saying that Bush lacks much on the ball does not mean that he never lies the way clever people do. Surely, for instance, Bush is aware on some level that it has yet to be proved that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons stashed away prior to the war. In addressing this question, Rosenbaum let Bush off the hook by focusing on what he said before the war began, e.g., "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Like Rosenbaum, Chatterbox is eager to cut Bush some slack on this, if only because Chatterbox, too, was convinced prior to the war that the presence of biological and chemical weapons had been proved. (Click here and here to read two columns Chatterbox now wishes he'd never written.) But Rosenbaum never considered what Bush said on Polish television after the war ended:

We've found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world and he said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations' resolutions and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on.


In fact, it has yet to be proved that the two mobile labs were used (or even designed to be used) to build biological weapons. It isn't possible that Bush fails to grasp that. So, why did he say something so obviously untrue? Chatterbox posed the question to The Nation's David Corn, who has written extensively on the question of Bush's veracity. In Corn's view, the key to Bush's lies isn't necessarily that he doesn't know any better, but that he doesn't care. "He mischaracterizes situations to fit his pattern of thinking," Corn explained. "Does he believe he's lying? I don't know." But "he still should be held accountable, whether he made a mistake of this nature in good faith or in bad faith." Amen.

 

That "insider information" remark on my part was pure tongue-in-cheek. You were just expressing your retrospective preference to imply that a Democratic administration would not have gone forth with Operation Iraqi Freedom while the war-mongering, money-hungry Republicans would and did. This was more than just Presidential will.

 

Can Bush Be Both Ignorant and a Liar?

Sort of reminds me of Reagan with Iran Contra. At the time I thought it was a copout to let Reagan slide when he said he couldn't remember what he had been told when etc.

Now we realize that he had Alzheimers and probably did deserve to use the "I can't remember defense".

Bush doesn't have this excuse and should not be allowed to use his overall ignorance of issues and facts to wiggle out of making definite statement after statement that is not true. Even if his neocon handlers are feeding him a false script to read, too bad.