Evelyn Pringle July 16, 2004
Bin Laden must be laughing his you know what off. By calling off the hunt in Afghanistan, to launch a preemptive war against a country that posed no threat to the US, Bush not only sabotaged the capture of bin Laden; he destroyed our credibility, and undermined American security at home and abroad.
By grossly overextending our troops, he has lessened our military readiness to respond to a real threat of terror should one arise. Osama bin Laden himself could not have created the disaster in Iraq any better if he had tried.
Here's a political riddle to solve. Who made the following comments and whom did the comments refer to?
* "Sending our military on vague, aimless, and endless missions rapidly saps morale. Even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, inadequate training, and rapidly declining readiness."
* "A comprehensive strategy for combating the new dangers posed by weapons of mass destruction must include a variety of other measures to contain and prevent the spread of such weapons. We need the cooperation of friends and allies."
* "Nor should the intelligence community be made the scapegoat for political misjudgments."
Source: The year 2000 Republican Party Platform.
So just look at what has happened between then and now. The Republican prophets who posted those comments were absolutely correct. Endless missions, back-to-back deployments, inadequate training, no cooperation of friends and allies, blaming the CIA for political misjudgments, and on and on. It all came true all right, but democrats caused none of it.
Bush's so-called war on terror is a miserable failure, any way you look at it. Retired General Anthony Zinni, former commander of the US Central Command, got it right when he said that by manufacturing a false rationale for war, abandoning traditional allies, propping up and trusting Iraqi exiles, and failing to plan for post-war Iraq, Bush has made the US less secure, instead of safer.
Bush thinks that Iraqi citizens should have welcomed us into the country and thanked us for getting rid of Saddam. Right before the war started, in a March 16, 2003 interview, Cheney said, "I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators."
As we now know, he was dead wrong, that did not happen.
But then why would Iraqis thank us? For what? Saddam may be gone, but innocent Iraqis have suffered the same human rights violations at the hands of the occupying forces that they did while Saddam was in power. In addition to the degradation and inexcusable abuse of prisoners, the deaths of at least 34 Iraqi detainees are currently being investigated.
Iraqis still live in fear of torture every day; in fact probably more so. Incidents of murder, rape, and kidnapping have skyrocketed since the war began. Violent deaths rose from an average of 14 per month in 2002 to 357 a month in 2003.
Come to think about it, I don't hear about any good news coming out of Iraq. Its about 120 degrees over there and they don't even have the basic necessities that they had under Saddam. According to a recent report by the GAO, basic services like water and electricity are still operating at lower levels than they were before the war.
Over the past year, joblessness has doubled. According to the Boston Globe, using recent US data, more than half the workers in the country are either without job or making less than a living wage. Only 1% of Iraq's workforce (7 million people) is involved in reconstruction projects.
Bush and his gang of war profiteers made sure the reconstruction contracts went to US companies, rather than experienced Iraqi firms. Democratic Rep Martin Meehan, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, sees what is going on and explains, how "the American taxpayer is spending billions of dollars on no-bid contracts to companies like Halliburton. Not only has this money often been poorly spent or outright wasted, but in many cases it is paying the salaries of foreign workers to do jobs in Iraq that are well within the skill sets of Iraqis," said Meehan.
Again, why in the world would Iraqis thank us?
BIG LIES
In the months leading up to the war, Bush told American citizens and Congress, that the US had to wage a preemptive war against Iraq, not only to get rid of Saddam's WMDs, but also because there were links between Saddam and Osama Bin Laden, who is believed to be the mastermind behind 911.
However, the Bush Administration now claims that it never said that Saddam and his WMDs posed an "imminent" threat, and so therefore, Bush cannot be accused of exaggerating the case for war or misleading Congress and the American people.
How soon they forget. Some officials did too use the word "imminent" and others used phrases and words that had the exact same meaning. Yet, during a press conference shortly after the war began, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, "Some in the media have chosen to use the word 'imminent'. Those were not words we used."
Oh really? Is that so? Well, Scott must have a pretty bad memory, because on 2/10/03, he himself used the "I" word when he specifically said, "This is about imminent threat."
He must have also forgotten the statement made by Bush Communications Director Dan Bartlett, on 1/26/03, when he answered, "Well, of course he is," in response to a reporter's direct question, "is Saddam an imminent threat to US interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home?"
And how could Scott forget the comment made by his predecessor, White House Press Secretary, Ari Fliescher, on 5/7/03? Ari was asked whether or not Iraq was an "imminent threat," and his answer was, "Absolutely."
And how about Bush, himself. Lets do a little review statements made by the star of the war profiteering scheme:
"The Iraqi regime is a threat to any American. ... Iraq is a threat, a real threat." Bush 1/3/03
"Saddam Hussein is a threat to America." Bush 11/3/02
"I see a significant threat to the security of the United States in Iraq." Bush 11/1/02
"There is real threat, in my judgment, a real and dangerous threat to America in Iraq in the form of Saddam Hussein." Bush 10/28/02
"There are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place. Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists." Bush 10/7/02
"The Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency." Bush 10/2/02
"There's a grave threat in Iraq. There just is." Bush 10/2/02
"This man poses a much graver threat than anybody could have possibly imagined." Bush 9/26/02
And lets review a few of the lines uttered by Chief Cheney over a period of 2 days:
Iraq is "a serious threat to our country, to our friends and to our allies." 1/31/03.
Iraq poses "terrible threats to the civilized world." 1/30/03.
Iraq "threatens the United States of America." 1/30/03
Rumsfeld is really a trip. Here's where he uses statements about 9/11 (peppered with the "I" word), as part of the ploy to scare us into war:
"I would look you in the eye and I would say, go back before September 11 and ask yourself this question: Was the attack that took place on September 11 an imminent threat the month before or two months before or three months before or six months before? When did the attack on September 11 become an imminent threat? Now, transport yourself forward a year, two years or a week or a month...So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you must do something?" 11/14/03
Here's where Rumsfeld used the ultimate threat of nuclear weapons (and the "I" word again), to scare us some more, complete with the bogus, and now infamous, line about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa:
"Iraq poses a serious and mounting threat to our country. His regime has the design for a nuclear weapon, was working on several different methods of enriching uranium, and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa." 1/30/03.
"Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent - that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain. And we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons. Iraq has these weapons." 9/18/02.
Here's where Rummy warns us about Saddam being an "immediate threat:"
"No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq." 9/19/02
While we're at it, lets take a look back at what Colin Powell said to the world about the threat posed by Saddam and WMDs in his speech before the UN. Colin even brought photos of the evidence to back up his statements.
"My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources."
"We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities."
"Let's look at one. This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji (ph). This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. In fact, this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapon shells."
"Here, you see 15 munitions bunkers in yellow and red outlines. The four that are in red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers."
"Ladies and gentlemen, these are not assertions. These are facts, corroborated by many sources, some of them sources of the intelligence services of other countries."
I would say this to Colin Powell, OK Colin, fair enough. Here's your chance to redeem yourself. For starters, lets see those photos again, and then explain to the world, exactly what happened to those yellow and red bunkers in the photos. And after that, give us the names of all those solid human sources.
Here's where Powell tells the UN all about the ties and meetings between Al Qaida, Osama and Saddam, that according to Colin, had been going on for years.
"Going back to the early and mid-1990s, when bin Laden was based in Sudan, an Al Qaida source tells us that Saddam and bin Laden reached an understanding that Al Qaida would no longer support activities against Baghdad. Early Al Qaida ties were forged by secret, high-level intelligence service contacts with Al Qaida, secret Iraqi intelligence high-level contacts with Al Qaida."
"We know members of both organizations met repeatedly (oh yea? How about dates and locations), and have met at least eight times at very senior levels since the early 1990s. In 1996, a foreign security service tells us, that bin Laden met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Khartoum, and later met the director of the Iraqi intelligence service."
"Saddam became more interested as he saw Al Qaida's appalling attacks. A detained Al Qaida member tells us that Saddam was more willing to assist Al Qaida after the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Saddam was also impressed by Al Qaida's attacks on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000."
OK Colin, how about introducing us to this "detained" Al Qaida member that gave you all this info. That should be easy enough.
Here's where he makes it sound like the Iraqis, Al Qaida, Saddam and Osama were best buddies, even houseguests of one another, supposedly backed by yet another "human source." Who by the way, I am eager to meet.
"Iraqis continued to visit bin Laden in his new home in Afghanistan. A senior defector, one of Saddam's former intelligence chiefs in Europe, says Saddam sent his agents to Afghanistan sometime in the mid-1990s to provide training to Al Qaida members on document forgery."
Gosh, do you think that they had tea together in Osama's new cave?
Funny thing, the only forgeries I've ever heard about are the ones used by Bush and his gang of thugs in their reports to Congress and the UN. What were they again? A student's term paper and some documents purporting to show that Saddam was seeking uranium from Africa? I think that's right. As I recall, they were easily identified as fakes. Maybe the Bush gang should enroll in the forgery training camp in Afghanistan.
Get this, here's Colin with another photo. This one shows a poison and explosive training camp, specifically located in northeastern Iraq.
"You see a picture of this camp. The network is teaching its operatives how to produce ricin and other poisons. Let me remind you how ricin works. Less than a pinch--image a pinch of salt--less than a pinch of ricin, eating just this amount in your food, would cause shock followed by circulatory failure. Death comes within 72 hours and there is no antidote, there is no cure. It is fatal."
OK Colin, lets see that photo again, and then tell us what happened to this dangerous chemical training camp, with its pinches of deadly ricin, after it apparently disappeared off the face of the earth.
As long as we're parsing words, lets take a closer look at a few of the other words they used to convince us that we needed to go to war. As noted above, they did use the "I" word, but beyond that, they claim the other words used did not mean "imminent."
Well I beg to differ. They described the threat of Saddam's and his WMDs as: "mortal," "urgent," "immediate", "serious and mounting", "unique," and they even claimed that Iraq was actively seeking to "strike the United States with weapons of mass destruction."
Now I know that the Bush gang is convinced that we lowly citizens are all really stupid, but can't they give us just a little more credit? I think there are at least a few Americans out here who might know the meaning of some of those words.
While we're on the subject of lies, how about the one where they said the war would be a cakewalk. In February 2003, Rumsfeld predicted that the war "could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." That was either a pipe dream or pure BS. I say BS.
And what about the costs? Every last one of them lied to Congress and taxpayers about what the war would cost. On April 23, 2003, Andrew Natsios, head of the US Agency for International Development, gave a televised interview and outlined the costs to the taxpayers of rebuilding Iraq, "the American part of this will be $1.7 billion," he said. "We have no plans for any further-on funding for this."
That estimate turned out to be a little bit off -- by about $149 billion --- so far.
A March 2003 report by the White House Office of Management and Budget said: "Iraq will not require sustained aid." In testimony to Congress on March 27, 2003, Wolfowitz said Iraq "can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." I wonder when will relatively soon is going to get here.
And remember when they all said that Iraqi oil would pay for its reconstruction? What a joke. In 2003 oil production dropped to 1.33 million barrels a day, from 2.04 million in 2002.
The fact is, Bush and his gang of chickenhawks lied to Congress, to taxpayers, and to the world, in order to wage an illegal war. The whole damn bunch should be tried as war criminals.
John Kerry Did Not Vote to Go to War
Bush is always saying Kerry voted for the war. Let's get one thing straight once and for all. He did not vote to go to war. He voted for a resolution that gave Bush the authority to use force as a last resort, if it became absolutely necessary to protect us from an imminent threat from WMDs (and yes he used the "I" word many times).
If Kerry is guilty of anything, its of being gullible enough to believe the lies told by the President of the United State, and his gang of fellow liars, on the world stage.
In a speech on the Senate Floor on the day of the vote, Kerry made it clear that he was not voting to go to war when he said, "approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable." It means "America speaks with one voice."
Kerry had no reason to think Bush was set to go to war. As he pointed out, any threat posed by Saddam and his WMDs, was "not imminent, and no one in the CIA, no intelligence briefing ... suggests it is imminent. None of our intelligence reports suggest that he is about to launch an attack," Kerry said. "Every nation has the right to act preemptively, if it faces an imminent and grave threat, for its self-defense ... The threat we face today with Iraq does not meet that test yet."
Kerry said that he would only agree to go to war for one reason, to rid Saddam of WMDs. He emphatically warned Bush that if he did take the country to war for any other reason than an imminent threat to the US by Saddam and his WMDs, that he would be the first to speak out and demand that Bush be held accountable.
As we know now, there never were any WMDs and so therefore, as Kerry made clear, he would have never voted to go to war.
He clarified what his vote meant when he said, "let me be clear, the vote I will give ... is for one reason and one reason only: To disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, if we cannot accomplish that objective through new, tough weapons inspections in joint concert with our allies," he said.
"In giving the President this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitments ... to work with the United Nations ... to adopt a new resolution setting out tough and immediate inspection requirements, and to act with our allies at our side if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. If he fails to do so, I will be among the first to speak out."
"If we do wind up going to war with Iraq, it is imperative that we do so with others in the international community, unless there is a showing of a grave, imminent--and I emphasize "imminent"--threat to this country which requires the President to respond in a way that protects our immediate national security needs."
In my opinion, the day for demanding accountability from Bush has long passed. It should have happened the day he took the country to war in Iraq. That said, I look forward to watching the first Bush-Kerry debate when Kerry will have the opportunity to demand accountability from that greedy thug living in the WH illegally.
Kerry warned us about what would happen if Bush took us to war without just cause, and without our allies. He speech on the Senate floor on the day of the vote almost seems prophetic in hindsight. Here are a few excerpts from his October 9, 2002 Senate speech:
"The President needs to give the American people a fairer and fuller, clearer understanding of the magnitude and long-term financial cost of that effort."
"The international community's support will be critical because we will not be able to rebuild Iraq single-handedly. We will lack the credibility and the expertise and the capacity."
"The administration may not be in the habit of building coalitions, but that is what they need to do. ... If we go it alone without reason, we risk inflaming an entire region, breeding a new generation of terrorists, a new cadre of anti-American zealots, and we will be less secure, not more secure, at the end of the day, even with Saddam Hussein disarmed."
Everything Kerry said would happen, happened. The skyrocketing costs of the war, both in lives lost, and tax dollars spent blow Americans away. The country was not prepared to sustain such a drastic drain on its resources. Nor were we prepared for the hatred that has been directed at Americans, not only in Iraq, but also throughout the Middle East.
Just like Kerry predicted, the region has become a magnet for terrorists that hate Americans. And he's right; Saddam's capture provides no consolation when weighed against the mess Bush got us into.
A scheme that turned Iraq into a boomtown for Bush and his fellow war profiteers, has turned into a never-ending nightmare for the rest of the country. First thing we see each morning, when we turn on the TV or pick up a newspaper, is the number of soldiers killed or injured the day before. And there is no end in sight.
John Kerry bears no responsibility whatsoever for the war in Iraq. If he had been president we never would have ended up there to begin with. But as it stands now, Kerry will be the one stuck with cleaning up the mess when he inherits it come November.
Showing posts with label Colin Powell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Colin Powell. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Monday, August 2, 2010
Bush Gang Swore Saddam Was Behind 9/11 In Lawsuit
Evelyn Pringle November 2005
Much to the dismay of the Bush administration, Americans can remember all on their own, without any help from Democrats, that in the run up to the war in Iraq, it was top White House officials who were making the claim that Saddam was in cahoots with bin Laden and secretly involved to 9/11.
The fact that the administration's disinformation campaign was entirely successful is evidenced by an October 2004, Harris Poll, taken three weeks before the last presidential election, which reported that 62% of all voters, and 84% of those planning to vote for Bush, still believed that Saddam had "strong links" to Al Qaeda, and that 41% of all voters, and 52% of Bush backers, believed that Saddam had "helped plan and support the hijackers" who had attacked the country on 9/11.
As we now know, the basis for these allegations were false but the saddest part of the situation is that many Americans are just now beginning to realize that Bush knew the stories were false for more than a year when he cited them as justification for taking the country to war.
Documents recently declassified and made public show that the administration was warned by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February 2002, that the tale about a trip to Prague by the leader of the 9/11 highjacker, Mohamed Atta, had come from an unreliable drunk, and that the story about Iraq training members of al Qaeda on the use of chemical and biological weapons was deliberately fabricated by an Iraqi defector.
A recent poll conducted by NBC and the Wall Street Journal, indicates that Americans recognize the significance of this revelation, where 57% of Americans now believe that Bush misled the country about prewar intelligence; a 52% majority of those polled say the war was not worth it; and by a 58% to 38% margin, Americans believe that Bush has not given good enough reasons to keep our troops in Iraq.
The debate over who was most responsible for convincing the nation that there was a link between Saddam and 9/11 will probably continue for years but an important piece of the puzzle can be found by zeroing in on a woman by the name of Laurie Mylroie, that most people have probably never heard.
Mylroie had been pushing for an all-out war against Iraq for a decade. In the run-up to the first Gulf war, Mylroie, along with the recently fired New York Times reporter Judith Miller, wrote a book titled, "Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf."
The original Iraq war obsession originated at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think-tank that served as a home base for the many neocons who were rendered powerless during the Clinton years such as Richard Perle, who became chairman of the Defense Policy Board under Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz, who moved into the number-2 position at the Pentagon, and Newt Gingrich and John Bolton, to name just a few.
In 2000, at a time when Dick Cheney sat on AEI's board, the group's publishing arm put out a book by Mylroie titled, "A Study in Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America."
In the author's acknowledgement section of the book, Mylroie thanked a familiar case of characters, including John Bolton and the staff of AEI, for their assistance. She also wrote thanks to Scooter Libby for his "generous and timely assistance."
Mylroie noted that Paul Wolfowitz was instrumental to her in writing the book and said, "At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult." She said that Wolfowitz's wife (at the time), had "fundamentally shaped the book."
Neocon, Richard Perle, described the book as "splendid and wholly convincing,"
If Mylroie is to be believed, Saddam was involved in every anti-American terrorist event that took place since the early 1990s, from the bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which she says may have been "the work of both bin Laden and Iraq," to the federal building in Oklahoma City.
She also accuses Saddam of involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center even though the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the US Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, the CIA, the National Security Council, and the State Department, all determined that there was no evidence of the Iraq's involvement in the attack back in the mid-1990s.
Mylroie has also claimed that the TWA flight 800 which crashed into Long Island Sound is a likely Iraqi plot even after a lengthily investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board determined that it was an accident.
She maintains that in 2000, Saddam provided the expertise for the bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 sailors, even though no law enforcement agency has ever made such a claim. She even blames Saddam for the anthrax sent through the mail shortly after 9/11.
Once Bush became president, the neocons were brought back into power as either members of the administration or members of the influential Defense Policy Board and war against Iraq became the administration's obsession, with Mylroie and the hawks working hand and hand to promote the theory that Saddam was involved in every terrorist act against the US over the past decade.
After the attacks on 9/11, the race towards Iraq was on, and Mylroie's book was reissued by Harper Collins under the new title, "The War Against America." The foreword for the second edition was written by Woolsey, who described her work as "brilliant and brave."
The book's cover displayed an endorsement from Paul Wolfowitz which stated: "Provocative and disturbing ... argues powerfully that the shadowy mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing ... was in fact an agent of Iraqi intelligence."
In the book's acknowledgment, Mylroie thanks Wolfowitz for being "kind enough to listen to this work presented orally and later to read the manuscript. At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult." She also praised the assistance of John Bolton.
Now, a nutcase like Mylroie, if left to her own devices, would probably have been harmless. But when the neocons made her a consultant to the Pentagon, the position granted grossly misplaced credibility to her hair-brained conspiracy theories.
There is no doubt that she was hired to convince the world that Saddam played a role in 9/11 and although I don't know how much she was paid, its plenty obvious that the Bush team got a lot of bang for the buck.
In February 2003, Mylroie was featured for an interview on Canadian television where she discussed why Bush was going to war against Iraq and at the same time, emphasized the certainty of a Saddam-9/11 link. Shortly after the interview got underway, she stated:
"Listen, we're going to war because President Bush believes Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Al Qaeda is a front for Iraqi intelligence…[the U.S.] bureaucracy made a tremendous blunder that refused to acknowledge these links … the people responsible for gathering this information, say in the C.I.A., are also the same people who contributed to the blunder on 9/11 and the deaths of 3,000 Americans, and so whenever this information emerges they move to discredit it."
Contrary to what the Bush team is saying today, if Mylroie is to be believed during this Februar 2003 interview, it doesn't sound like the CIA was claiming that there was a link between Saddam and bin Laden a month before the war began.
On March 12, 2003, Mylroie wrote an article in the New York Sun titled, "Blind to Saddam's 9-11 Role," in which she wrote:
"Iraq, along with Al Qaeda, was most probably involved in the September 11 attacks, and President Bush understands that. Already on September 17, six days later, Mr. Bush affirmed, "I believe Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to strike them now," as Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" discloses."
"Indeed, at Thursday's press conference, Mr. Bush said that Iraq has financed and trained Al Qaeda and similar terrorist groups," Mylroie added. "That is why Mr. Bush is willing to take the risk entailed in war against Iraq," she said.
At one point, Mylroie attempted to convince the 9/11 Commission that, "there is substantial reason to believe that these masterminds [of both the '93 and 9/11 Trade Center attacks] are Iraqi intelligence agents."
However, her testimony was apparently not persuasive, because in regard to the 9/11 attacks, the Commission's final report states that the “Intelligence Community has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al-Qaida strike.”
One of Mylroie's more recent ventures included writing a book titled, "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department tried to Stop the War on Terror." This title is somewhat baffling in light of the speeches in recent days by Bush himself stating that everyone was in agreement with his assessment of the need to go to war and that it was the evidence produced by the intelligence agencies and not his White House that led to the war against Iraq.
The fact is that in the run up to war, Mylroie wore a wide variety of hats. But one of her most important jobs by far came when she testified as an expert witness in lawsuit against a group of defendants that included the Taliban, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, bin Laden, Saddam and the Republic of Iraq.
The suit was filed by two families on behalf of the estates of 9/11 victims, George Eric Smith, a senior business analyst for Sun Gard Asset Management, and Timothy Soulas, a senior managing director and partner at Cantor Fitzgerald Securities.
The lawsuit represents the one and only time that the truth or falsity of the Saddam-9/11 connection has ever been tested. In the end, the Judge in the case delivered a verdict in favor of the families based on specific claims by Mylroie and top administration officials, that a definite link between Saddam and 9/11 did in fact exist.
US District Court Judge, Harold Baer, entered a default judgment for the plaintiffs in January 2003, because the time allowed for a response had passed, and the defendants had failed to file an answer to the plaintiff's complaint.
In March 2003, Judge Baer held 2 days of hearings to determine the amount of damages that should be awarded to the families. The lawyers for the plaintiff's presented evidence to establish what they considered a "conclusive link" between Saddam and 9/11, which included declassified interviews with Iraqi defectors who appeared on a television news show and said that Saddam used a jet airplane in a remote area of Iraq to train hijackers.
The most convincing evidence came from testimony by former CIA Director, R James Woolsey, a member of the administration's Defense Policy Board, and statements made by Colin Powell and George Tenet.
On May 8, 2003, Judge Baer released his written findings in the case and awarded damages to the plaintiffs in the amount of $104 million, to be paid by defendants, Saddam, bin Laden, al-Qaida, the Taliban, and the former Iraqi government.
In his written findings, Judge Baer acknowledged that he based his decision on the statements of Woolsey, Powell, Tenet, and Mylroie, all of whom he considered experts on the Saddam-9/11 connection, and said: "The opinion testimony of the plaintiffs' experts is sufficient to meet plaintiffs' burden that Iraq collaborated in or supported bin Laden/al Qaeda's terrorist acts of September 11. . ."
"Their opinions, coupled with their qualifications as experts on this issue," Jude Baer wrote, "provide a sufficient basis for a reasonable jury to draw inferences which could lead to the conclusion that Iraq provided material support to al Qaeda and that it did so with knowledge and intent to further al Qaeda's criminal acts."
He cited some specific statements that he relied upon in formulating a believe that there was a link between Saddam and 9/11, and included the following from Tenet and Powell:
"Both Director Tenet and Secretary Powell mentioned 'senior level contacts' between Iraq and al Qaeda going back to the early 1990s [although both acknowledged that part of the interactions in the early to mid-1990s pertained to achieving a mutual non-aggression understanding];" Baer noted, "both mentioned that al Qaeda sought to acquire poison gas and training in its use from Iraq; both mentioned that al Qaeda members have been in Iraq, including Baghdad, after September 2001. . . ."
"Director Tenet's carefully worded letter included in substance the same allegations," he said, "but with less detail, that Secretary of State Colin Powell made before the U.N. Security Counsel on Feb. 5, 2003, in his remarks about 'the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network. . . .' ," Judge Baer wrote.
He also outlined the testimony provided by Woolsey. "[Former CIA] Director [James] Woolsey," the Judge said, "reviewed several facts that tended in his view to show Iraq's involvement in acts of terrorism against the United States in general and likely in the events of September 11 specifically."
Judge Baer discussed specific portions of Woolsey's testimony that led to his ruling against the defendants, and stated in part: "First, Director Woolsey described the existence of a highly secure military facility in Iraq where non-Iraqi fundamentalists [e.g., Egyptians and Saudis] are trained in airplane hijacking and other forms of terrorism."
"Through satellite imagery and the testimony of three Iraqi defectors, [he] demonstrated the existence of this facility, called Salman Pak, which has an airplane but no runway," the decision noted. "The defectors also stated that these fundamentalists were taught methods of hijacking using utensils or short knives," Judge Baer wrote.
"Second," Baer continued, "Director Woolsey mentioned a meeting that allegedly occurred in Prague in April 2001 between Mohammad Atta, the apparent leader of the hijackings, and a high-level Iraqi intelligence agent."
"According to James Woolsey," the Judge said, "the evidence indicates that this was an 'operational meeting' because Atta flew to the Czech Republic and then returned to the United States shortly afterwards."
"Third," Baer explained, "Woolsey noted that his conclusion was also based on 'contacts,' which refer to interactions between Hussein/Iraq and bin Laden/al Qaeda that are described in a letter from George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, to Senator Bob Graham on October 7, 2002."
In his findings, Judge Baer next referred to the testimony of Laurie Mylroie, on which he based his conclusion that Saddam was involved in 9/11. It is apparent that he believed her claims that Saddam was involved in all the terrorist attacks.
"Dr. Mylroie described Iraq's covert involvement in acts of terrorism against the United States in the past, including the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993," Baer stated in his opinion.
"Dr. Mylroie testified to at least four events that served as the basis for her conclusion that Iraq played a role in the September 11 tragedy," he explained. "First, she claimed that Iraq provided and continues to provide support to two of the main perpetrators of the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993," he said.
"Second, she noted bin Laden's fatwah against the United States, which was motivated by the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia to fight the Gulf War against Iraq," his findings explained.
"Third," he wrote, "she noted that threats by bin Laden in late 1997 and early 1998 which led up to the bombing of the U.S. embassies [on August 7, 1998] were 'in lockstep' with Hussein's threats about ousting the U.N. weapons inspectors, which he eventually did on August 5, 1998."
Judge Baer also quoted other portions of her testimony and said, "Dr. Mylroie concluded that 'Iraq, I believe, did provide support and resources for the September 11 attacks. I agree with [Iraqi defector] Captain [Sabah] Khodada when he said that ... it took a state like Iraq to carry out an attack as really sophisticated, massive and deadly as what happened on September 11'."
After hearing the assertions of these top administration officials, Judge Baer concluded that: "Plaintiffs have shown, albeit barely, 'by evidence satisfactory to the court' that Iraq provided material support to bin Laden and al Qaeda."
The judge's decision is proof of the fact that the White House is home to the guilty parties who deliberately mislead Americans. His written findings document the fraud perpetrated on the country by top administration officials in taking the country to war based on the false claim that Saddam was involved in 9/11.
For those Americans still wondering about a motive, the first and foremost goal of the neocons was to gain control of the world's oil supply and the number two goal, was to set up an elaborate profiteering scheme to funnel billions of tax dollars into their own bank accounts for many years to come. It really is that simple.
My advice to any disbelievers, is to go on the internet and do a google search on each of the top administration officials and policy makers to find out who stood to benefit off a war in Iraq, and who has benefited the most so far financially.
To make sure this advice would produce results, I just went and typed 3 words in quotes, "Bush" "war" "profit" and did a google search of the world wide web. The first article on the top of the list was published by the Observer, a well-known newspaper in the UK, and this is what it said in part:
Bush ally set to profit from the war on terror
Antony Barnett and Solomon Hughes
Sunday May 11, 2003
James Woolsey, former CIA boss and influential adviser to President George Bush, is a director of a US firm aiming to make millions of dollars from the 'war on terror', The Observer can reveal.
Further down in the article it said:
Woolsey is not alone among the members of the Pentagon's highly influential Defence Policy Board to profit from America's war on terror.
The American watchdog, the Centre for Public Integrity, showed that nine of the board's members have ties to defence contractors that won more than $76bn in defence contracts in 2001 and 2002. Woolsey's fellow neo-conservative, Richard Perle, had to resign his chairmanship of the board because of conflicts of interest, although he remains a board member.
(Link to actual article – Guardian.co.uk)
Next I scrolled down and clicked on an article published in the December 2, 2001, San Francisco Chronicle, and this is what it said in part:
As America's military involvement abroad deepens, profits are increasing for the Carlyle Group -- and, it turns out, for thousands of California civil servants.
The Carlyle who, you ask?
The Carlyle Group, as in a secretive Washington, D.C., investment firm managing some $14 billion in assets, including stakes in a number of defense- related companies.
Carlyle counts among its chieftains former Defense Secretary (and deputy CIA Director) Frank Carlucci, former Secretary of State James Baker and, most notably, former President George Bush.
Until October, the Carlyle Group also maintained financial ties with none other than the family of Osama bin Laden, but those links were severed when it was agreed that the relationship was becoming a tad embarrassing for all concerned.
Critics of the Carlyle Group have grown increasingly vocal in recent weeks, particularly over the perception that a private organization with unmistakable links to the White House is benefiting from America's military action in Afghanistan.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/12/02/BU172807.DTL
The roots of the Iraq profiteering scheme are deeply planted in the back yard of the White House, and as I demonstrated above, it requires very little effort to verify the allegation that the fruits of the scheme do not far from the tree.
Much to the dismay of the Bush administration, Americans can remember all on their own, without any help from Democrats, that in the run up to the war in Iraq, it was top White House officials who were making the claim that Saddam was in cahoots with bin Laden and secretly involved to 9/11.
The fact that the administration's disinformation campaign was entirely successful is evidenced by an October 2004, Harris Poll, taken three weeks before the last presidential election, which reported that 62% of all voters, and 84% of those planning to vote for Bush, still believed that Saddam had "strong links" to Al Qaeda, and that 41% of all voters, and 52% of Bush backers, believed that Saddam had "helped plan and support the hijackers" who had attacked the country on 9/11.
As we now know, the basis for these allegations were false but the saddest part of the situation is that many Americans are just now beginning to realize that Bush knew the stories were false for more than a year when he cited them as justification for taking the country to war.
Documents recently declassified and made public show that the administration was warned by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February 2002, that the tale about a trip to Prague by the leader of the 9/11 highjacker, Mohamed Atta, had come from an unreliable drunk, and that the story about Iraq training members of al Qaeda on the use of chemical and biological weapons was deliberately fabricated by an Iraqi defector.
A recent poll conducted by NBC and the Wall Street Journal, indicates that Americans recognize the significance of this revelation, where 57% of Americans now believe that Bush misled the country about prewar intelligence; a 52% majority of those polled say the war was not worth it; and by a 58% to 38% margin, Americans believe that Bush has not given good enough reasons to keep our troops in Iraq.
The debate over who was most responsible for convincing the nation that there was a link between Saddam and 9/11 will probably continue for years but an important piece of the puzzle can be found by zeroing in on a woman by the name of Laurie Mylroie, that most people have probably never heard.
Mylroie had been pushing for an all-out war against Iraq for a decade. In the run-up to the first Gulf war, Mylroie, along with the recently fired New York Times reporter Judith Miller, wrote a book titled, "Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf."
The original Iraq war obsession originated at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think-tank that served as a home base for the many neocons who were rendered powerless during the Clinton years such as Richard Perle, who became chairman of the Defense Policy Board under Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz, who moved into the number-2 position at the Pentagon, and Newt Gingrich and John Bolton, to name just a few.
In 2000, at a time when Dick Cheney sat on AEI's board, the group's publishing arm put out a book by Mylroie titled, "A Study in Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America."
In the author's acknowledgement section of the book, Mylroie thanked a familiar case of characters, including John Bolton and the staff of AEI, for their assistance. She also wrote thanks to Scooter Libby for his "generous and timely assistance."
Mylroie noted that Paul Wolfowitz was instrumental to her in writing the book and said, "At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult." She said that Wolfowitz's wife (at the time), had "fundamentally shaped the book."
Neocon, Richard Perle, described the book as "splendid and wholly convincing,"
If Mylroie is to be believed, Saddam was involved in every anti-American terrorist event that took place since the early 1990s, from the bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which she says may have been "the work of both bin Laden and Iraq," to the federal building in Oklahoma City.
She also accuses Saddam of involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center even though the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the US Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, the CIA, the National Security Council, and the State Department, all determined that there was no evidence of the Iraq's involvement in the attack back in the mid-1990s.
Mylroie has also claimed that the TWA flight 800 which crashed into Long Island Sound is a likely Iraqi plot even after a lengthily investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board determined that it was an accident.
She maintains that in 2000, Saddam provided the expertise for the bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 sailors, even though no law enforcement agency has ever made such a claim. She even blames Saddam for the anthrax sent through the mail shortly after 9/11.
Once Bush became president, the neocons were brought back into power as either members of the administration or members of the influential Defense Policy Board and war against Iraq became the administration's obsession, with Mylroie and the hawks working hand and hand to promote the theory that Saddam was involved in every terrorist act against the US over the past decade.
After the attacks on 9/11, the race towards Iraq was on, and Mylroie's book was reissued by Harper Collins under the new title, "The War Against America." The foreword for the second edition was written by Woolsey, who described her work as "brilliant and brave."
The book's cover displayed an endorsement from Paul Wolfowitz which stated: "Provocative and disturbing ... argues powerfully that the shadowy mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing ... was in fact an agent of Iraqi intelligence."
In the book's acknowledgment, Mylroie thanks Wolfowitz for being "kind enough to listen to this work presented orally and later to read the manuscript. At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult." She also praised the assistance of John Bolton.
Now, a nutcase like Mylroie, if left to her own devices, would probably have been harmless. But when the neocons made her a consultant to the Pentagon, the position granted grossly misplaced credibility to her hair-brained conspiracy theories.
There is no doubt that she was hired to convince the world that Saddam played a role in 9/11 and although I don't know how much she was paid, its plenty obvious that the Bush team got a lot of bang for the buck.
In February 2003, Mylroie was featured for an interview on Canadian television where she discussed why Bush was going to war against Iraq and at the same time, emphasized the certainty of a Saddam-9/11 link. Shortly after the interview got underway, she stated:
"Listen, we're going to war because President Bush believes Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Al Qaeda is a front for Iraqi intelligence…[the U.S.] bureaucracy made a tremendous blunder that refused to acknowledge these links … the people responsible for gathering this information, say in the C.I.A., are also the same people who contributed to the blunder on 9/11 and the deaths of 3,000 Americans, and so whenever this information emerges they move to discredit it."
Contrary to what the Bush team is saying today, if Mylroie is to be believed during this Februar 2003 interview, it doesn't sound like the CIA was claiming that there was a link between Saddam and bin Laden a month before the war began.
On March 12, 2003, Mylroie wrote an article in the New York Sun titled, "Blind to Saddam's 9-11 Role," in which she wrote:
"Iraq, along with Al Qaeda, was most probably involved in the September 11 attacks, and President Bush understands that. Already on September 17, six days later, Mr. Bush affirmed, "I believe Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to strike them now," as Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" discloses."
"Indeed, at Thursday's press conference, Mr. Bush said that Iraq has financed and trained Al Qaeda and similar terrorist groups," Mylroie added. "That is why Mr. Bush is willing to take the risk entailed in war against Iraq," she said.
At one point, Mylroie attempted to convince the 9/11 Commission that, "there is substantial reason to believe that these masterminds [of both the '93 and 9/11 Trade Center attacks] are Iraqi intelligence agents."
However, her testimony was apparently not persuasive, because in regard to the 9/11 attacks, the Commission's final report states that the “Intelligence Community has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al-Qaida strike.”
One of Mylroie's more recent ventures included writing a book titled, "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department tried to Stop the War on Terror." This title is somewhat baffling in light of the speeches in recent days by Bush himself stating that everyone was in agreement with his assessment of the need to go to war and that it was the evidence produced by the intelligence agencies and not his White House that led to the war against Iraq.
The fact is that in the run up to war, Mylroie wore a wide variety of hats. But one of her most important jobs by far came when she testified as an expert witness in lawsuit against a group of defendants that included the Taliban, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, bin Laden, Saddam and the Republic of Iraq.
The suit was filed by two families on behalf of the estates of 9/11 victims, George Eric Smith, a senior business analyst for Sun Gard Asset Management, and Timothy Soulas, a senior managing director and partner at Cantor Fitzgerald Securities.
The lawsuit represents the one and only time that the truth or falsity of the Saddam-9/11 connection has ever been tested. In the end, the Judge in the case delivered a verdict in favor of the families based on specific claims by Mylroie and top administration officials, that a definite link between Saddam and 9/11 did in fact exist.
US District Court Judge, Harold Baer, entered a default judgment for the plaintiffs in January 2003, because the time allowed for a response had passed, and the defendants had failed to file an answer to the plaintiff's complaint.
In March 2003, Judge Baer held 2 days of hearings to determine the amount of damages that should be awarded to the families. The lawyers for the plaintiff's presented evidence to establish what they considered a "conclusive link" between Saddam and 9/11, which included declassified interviews with Iraqi defectors who appeared on a television news show and said that Saddam used a jet airplane in a remote area of Iraq to train hijackers.
The most convincing evidence came from testimony by former CIA Director, R James Woolsey, a member of the administration's Defense Policy Board, and statements made by Colin Powell and George Tenet.
On May 8, 2003, Judge Baer released his written findings in the case and awarded damages to the plaintiffs in the amount of $104 million, to be paid by defendants, Saddam, bin Laden, al-Qaida, the Taliban, and the former Iraqi government.
In his written findings, Judge Baer acknowledged that he based his decision on the statements of Woolsey, Powell, Tenet, and Mylroie, all of whom he considered experts on the Saddam-9/11 connection, and said: "The opinion testimony of the plaintiffs' experts is sufficient to meet plaintiffs' burden that Iraq collaborated in or supported bin Laden/al Qaeda's terrorist acts of September 11. . ."
"Their opinions, coupled with their qualifications as experts on this issue," Jude Baer wrote, "provide a sufficient basis for a reasonable jury to draw inferences which could lead to the conclusion that Iraq provided material support to al Qaeda and that it did so with knowledge and intent to further al Qaeda's criminal acts."
He cited some specific statements that he relied upon in formulating a believe that there was a link between Saddam and 9/11, and included the following from Tenet and Powell:
"Both Director Tenet and Secretary Powell mentioned 'senior level contacts' between Iraq and al Qaeda going back to the early 1990s [although both acknowledged that part of the interactions in the early to mid-1990s pertained to achieving a mutual non-aggression understanding];" Baer noted, "both mentioned that al Qaeda sought to acquire poison gas and training in its use from Iraq; both mentioned that al Qaeda members have been in Iraq, including Baghdad, after September 2001. . . ."
"Director Tenet's carefully worded letter included in substance the same allegations," he said, "but with less detail, that Secretary of State Colin Powell made before the U.N. Security Counsel on Feb. 5, 2003, in his remarks about 'the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network. . . .' ," Judge Baer wrote.
He also outlined the testimony provided by Woolsey. "[Former CIA] Director [James] Woolsey," the Judge said, "reviewed several facts that tended in his view to show Iraq's involvement in acts of terrorism against the United States in general and likely in the events of September 11 specifically."
Judge Baer discussed specific portions of Woolsey's testimony that led to his ruling against the defendants, and stated in part: "First, Director Woolsey described the existence of a highly secure military facility in Iraq where non-Iraqi fundamentalists [e.g., Egyptians and Saudis] are trained in airplane hijacking and other forms of terrorism."
"Through satellite imagery and the testimony of three Iraqi defectors, [he] demonstrated the existence of this facility, called Salman Pak, which has an airplane but no runway," the decision noted. "The defectors also stated that these fundamentalists were taught methods of hijacking using utensils or short knives," Judge Baer wrote.
"Second," Baer continued, "Director Woolsey mentioned a meeting that allegedly occurred in Prague in April 2001 between Mohammad Atta, the apparent leader of the hijackings, and a high-level Iraqi intelligence agent."
"According to James Woolsey," the Judge said, "the evidence indicates that this was an 'operational meeting' because Atta flew to the Czech Republic and then returned to the United States shortly afterwards."
"Third," Baer explained, "Woolsey noted that his conclusion was also based on 'contacts,' which refer to interactions between Hussein/Iraq and bin Laden/al Qaeda that are described in a letter from George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, to Senator Bob Graham on October 7, 2002."
In his findings, Judge Baer next referred to the testimony of Laurie Mylroie, on which he based his conclusion that Saddam was involved in 9/11. It is apparent that he believed her claims that Saddam was involved in all the terrorist attacks.
"Dr. Mylroie described Iraq's covert involvement in acts of terrorism against the United States in the past, including the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993," Baer stated in his opinion.
"Dr. Mylroie testified to at least four events that served as the basis for her conclusion that Iraq played a role in the September 11 tragedy," he explained. "First, she claimed that Iraq provided and continues to provide support to two of the main perpetrators of the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993," he said.
"Second, she noted bin Laden's fatwah against the United States, which was motivated by the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia to fight the Gulf War against Iraq," his findings explained.
"Third," he wrote, "she noted that threats by bin Laden in late 1997 and early 1998 which led up to the bombing of the U.S. embassies [on August 7, 1998] were 'in lockstep' with Hussein's threats about ousting the U.N. weapons inspectors, which he eventually did on August 5, 1998."
Judge Baer also quoted other portions of her testimony and said, "Dr. Mylroie concluded that 'Iraq, I believe, did provide support and resources for the September 11 attacks. I agree with [Iraqi defector] Captain [Sabah] Khodada when he said that ... it took a state like Iraq to carry out an attack as really sophisticated, massive and deadly as what happened on September 11'."
After hearing the assertions of these top administration officials, Judge Baer concluded that: "Plaintiffs have shown, albeit barely, 'by evidence satisfactory to the court' that Iraq provided material support to bin Laden and al Qaeda."
The judge's decision is proof of the fact that the White House is home to the guilty parties who deliberately mislead Americans. His written findings document the fraud perpetrated on the country by top administration officials in taking the country to war based on the false claim that Saddam was involved in 9/11.
For those Americans still wondering about a motive, the first and foremost goal of the neocons was to gain control of the world's oil supply and the number two goal, was to set up an elaborate profiteering scheme to funnel billions of tax dollars into their own bank accounts for many years to come. It really is that simple.
My advice to any disbelievers, is to go on the internet and do a google search on each of the top administration officials and policy makers to find out who stood to benefit off a war in Iraq, and who has benefited the most so far financially.
To make sure this advice would produce results, I just went and typed 3 words in quotes, "Bush" "war" "profit" and did a google search of the world wide web. The first article on the top of the list was published by the Observer, a well-known newspaper in the UK, and this is what it said in part:
Bush ally set to profit from the war on terror
Antony Barnett and Solomon Hughes
Sunday May 11, 2003
James Woolsey, former CIA boss and influential adviser to President George Bush, is a director of a US firm aiming to make millions of dollars from the 'war on terror', The Observer can reveal.
Further down in the article it said:
Woolsey is not alone among the members of the Pentagon's highly influential Defence Policy Board to profit from America's war on terror.
The American watchdog, the Centre for Public Integrity, showed that nine of the board's members have ties to defence contractors that won more than $76bn in defence contracts in 2001 and 2002. Woolsey's fellow neo-conservative, Richard Perle, had to resign his chairmanship of the board because of conflicts of interest, although he remains a board member.
(Link to actual article – Guardian.co.uk)
Next I scrolled down and clicked on an article published in the December 2, 2001, San Francisco Chronicle, and this is what it said in part:
As America's military involvement abroad deepens, profits are increasing for the Carlyle Group -- and, it turns out, for thousands of California civil servants.
The Carlyle who, you ask?
The Carlyle Group, as in a secretive Washington, D.C., investment firm managing some $14 billion in assets, including stakes in a number of defense- related companies.
Carlyle counts among its chieftains former Defense Secretary (and deputy CIA Director) Frank Carlucci, former Secretary of State James Baker and, most notably, former President George Bush.
Until October, the Carlyle Group also maintained financial ties with none other than the family of Osama bin Laden, but those links were severed when it was agreed that the relationship was becoming a tad embarrassing for all concerned.
Critics of the Carlyle Group have grown increasingly vocal in recent weeks, particularly over the perception that a private organization with unmistakable links to the White House is benefiting from America's military action in Afghanistan.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/12/02/BU172807.DTL
The roots of the Iraq profiteering scheme are deeply planted in the back yard of the White House, and as I demonstrated above, it requires very little effort to verify the allegation that the fruits of the scheme do not far from the tree.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Which Soldier Will Be The Last To Die For Bush?
Evelyn Pringle March 31, 2006
The war in Iraq is a mistake. No it's worse than a mistake. Lets quit pussy-footing around and call it like it is. The war in Iraq is a grand profiteering scheme gone awry and Americans need to take off their blinders and face the truth.
As the cost of the war leaves a deeper black hole of debt for our great-grandchildren, people need to ask themselves whether the hundreds of billions spent thus far have helped anyone other than reconstruction companies and defense contractors. It takes no thought, the answer is no.
And after that, to paraphrase a powerful John Kerry comment from the Viet Nam era, Americans need think about which soldier will be the last to die for this mistake.
Day in and day out, Bush is on TV saying we will not withdraw from Iraq. How much longer will Americans put up with this bumbling idiot?
The rumblings for impeachment are getting louder and for good reason. The British memo released this week on Bush's conversation with Tony Blair in January 2003, not only proves that Bush planned to take the country to war using whatever lies he deemed necessary, it also proves that there was no plan for post-war Iraq.
Bush is throwing good money after bad like a compulsive gambler, as our troops get sucked deeper and deeper into a bloody quagmire. The situation in Iraq has elevated beyond a disaster and all Bush wants to do is sink more tax dollars into the same failed policies that brought us to this point.
Over the past 6 months, we have heard a lot of accusations about "revisionist history" from Bush and his minions in answer to those who dare to question whether there ever was a real threat from Iraq.
However, there is an abundance of evidence that administration officials sought to portray Iraq as a deadly threat to the American people in the run-up to war. But as we now know, there is a great difference between the hand-picked intelligence that was presented to Congress and the American people when compared to what was actually in Iraq.
Americans were fed a fairy tale about fighting a war of liberation that would be short, cheap, and bloodless. The Bush administration was like a pied piper as it lead the nation into the Iraq disaster.
In hindsight, what is particularly troublesome is how naively the nation followed.
Looking back, there were countless examples of provocative rhetoric as they lead the country to war in Iraq. In his 2002 State of the Union Address, Bush coined the phrase "Axis of Evil," while pointing at Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
In October 2002, the White House Press Secretary said regime change in Iraq could be accomplished with "the cost of one bullet."
On March 17, in his final speech to the American people before the invasion, Bush took one last opportunity to bolster his case for war. The centerpiece of his argument was the same message he brought to the UN months before, and the same message he hammered home at every opportunity in the intervening months, namely that Saddam had failed to destroy the WMDs and presented an imminent danger to the American people.
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments," he said, "leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
In a public address on March 19, 2003, Bush told the world: "Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."
Three years have passed, and the US has yet to find a single shred of evidence to confirm the official reason that our country was sent to war; namely, that Iraq's WMDs constituted a grave threat to the US.
On January 28, 2003, Bush said in his State of the Union Address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
We now know that the CIA said that claim was false as early as March 2002 and that the International Atomic Energy Agency had also discredited the allegation. But they just went ahead and used it anyways.
On February 5, Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets."
In a radio address on February 8, 2003, Bush told the nation: "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons – the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."
The fact is, after 3 years, we have not found any of these items, nor have we found those thousands of rockets loaded with chemical weapons.
On March 30, 2003, Rumsfeld said in an interview on This Week, of the search for WMDs: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat."
However, Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, and Tikrit on April 14, 2003, and the intelligence Rumsfeld spoke of has not led to any WMDs.
Whether or not intelligence reports were bent, stretched, or fabricated to make Iraq look like an imminent threat, it is clear that the administration's rhetoric played upon the fear of the American people about future terrorism attacks.
But, under close scrutiny, most of the statements had nothing to do with intelligence; the were merely designed to prey on public fear. Through smoke and mirrors, the face of bin Laden was morphed into that of Saddam. Bush himself blurred the image in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union Address when he said:
"Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans – this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."
Not only did the administration warn about more hijackers carrying deadly chemicals, it even went so far as to say that in the time it would take for UN inspectors to find 'smoking gun' evidence of Saddam's illegal weapons, the US was at risk of a nuclear attack.
Condoleeza Rice by the Los Angeles Times, was quoted as saying on September 9, 2002: "We don't want the 'smoking gun' to be a mushroom cloud."
Talk about fabrication, where did the term mushroom cloud come from? What was this statement based on?
On September 26, 2002, just two weeks before Congress voted on a resolution, Bush himself pushed the case that Iraq was plotting to attack the US. After meeting with members of Congress that day, Bush said:
"The danger to our country is grave. The danger to our country is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons.... The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material, could build one within a year."
These are his words. Bush said Saddam is "seeking a nuclear bomb." Has he ever produced any evidence to back up this allegation? No. And, his rhetoric continued that day in the Rose Garden, where he said:
"The dangers we face will only worsen from month to month and from year to year. To ignore these threats is to encourage them. And when they have fully materialized it may be too late to protect ourselves and our friends and our allies. By then the Iraqi dictator would have the means to terrorize and dominate the region. Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX – nerve gas – or some day a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally."
And yet, 3 years later, we have not seen a shred of evidence to support this claim of grave dangers, chemical weapons, links to al Qaeda, or nuclear weapons.
Four days before a vote on the resolution, on October 7, 2002, Bush ramped up the scare tactics and stated: "We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy – the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade."
Bush then went even further by saying: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses.... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."
During his speech at the Cincinnati Museum Center, he also elaborated on Iraq's nuclear program and said:
"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his 'nuclear mujahideen' - his nuclear holy warriors.... If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year."
This is the kind of outrageous rhetoric that was given to the American people to justify war with Iraq. This is the same kind of hyped fabricated evidence that was given to Congress to sway its vote on October 11, 2002.
And most importantly these are examples of the same kind charges that the Bush administration now tries to say were never made, like we're deluded idiots.
Saddam is no longer in power. But in reality, so what? The Iraqis are worse off. They still don't even have the basic necessities of life like clean water, sanitation provisions, and electricity. They've had to watch family members imprisoned, tortured, and killed for 3 years without Saddam in charge.
And our soldiers are still dying in record numbers. Not a day goes by that there is not another attack on the troops who are saddled with trying to restore order to a country on the brink of anarchy.
Bush told the American people that we were compelled to go to war to secure our country from a grave threat. Are we safer today than we were on March 18, 2003?
For the first time in history, the US went to war because of intelligence reports claiming that a country posed a grave threat to our nation. We should accept nothing less than a full-scale, wide-open Congressional investigation into the issue of pre-war intelligence on the threat from Iraq.
It is in the compelling national interest to examine what we were told about the threat from Iraq to determine once and for all whether the intelligence was faulty or distorted.
The purpose of such an investigation is not to engage in "revisionist history." It is to get at the truth. The American people have valid questions that deserve to be answered.
The war in Iraq is a mistake. No it's worse than a mistake. Lets quit pussy-footing around and call it like it is. The war in Iraq is a grand profiteering scheme gone awry and Americans need to take off their blinders and face the truth.
As the cost of the war leaves a deeper black hole of debt for our great-grandchildren, people need to ask themselves whether the hundreds of billions spent thus far have helped anyone other than reconstruction companies and defense contractors. It takes no thought, the answer is no.
And after that, to paraphrase a powerful John Kerry comment from the Viet Nam era, Americans need think about which soldier will be the last to die for this mistake.
Day in and day out, Bush is on TV saying we will not withdraw from Iraq. How much longer will Americans put up with this bumbling idiot?
The rumblings for impeachment are getting louder and for good reason. The British memo released this week on Bush's conversation with Tony Blair in January 2003, not only proves that Bush planned to take the country to war using whatever lies he deemed necessary, it also proves that there was no plan for post-war Iraq.
Bush is throwing good money after bad like a compulsive gambler, as our troops get sucked deeper and deeper into a bloody quagmire. The situation in Iraq has elevated beyond a disaster and all Bush wants to do is sink more tax dollars into the same failed policies that brought us to this point.
Over the past 6 months, we have heard a lot of accusations about "revisionist history" from Bush and his minions in answer to those who dare to question whether there ever was a real threat from Iraq.
However, there is an abundance of evidence that administration officials sought to portray Iraq as a deadly threat to the American people in the run-up to war. But as we now know, there is a great difference between the hand-picked intelligence that was presented to Congress and the American people when compared to what was actually in Iraq.
Americans were fed a fairy tale about fighting a war of liberation that would be short, cheap, and bloodless. The Bush administration was like a pied piper as it lead the nation into the Iraq disaster.
In hindsight, what is particularly troublesome is how naively the nation followed.
Looking back, there were countless examples of provocative rhetoric as they lead the country to war in Iraq. In his 2002 State of the Union Address, Bush coined the phrase "Axis of Evil," while pointing at Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
In October 2002, the White House Press Secretary said regime change in Iraq could be accomplished with "the cost of one bullet."
On March 17, in his final speech to the American people before the invasion, Bush took one last opportunity to bolster his case for war. The centerpiece of his argument was the same message he brought to the UN months before, and the same message he hammered home at every opportunity in the intervening months, namely that Saddam had failed to destroy the WMDs and presented an imminent danger to the American people.
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments," he said, "leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
In a public address on March 19, 2003, Bush told the world: "Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."
Three years have passed, and the US has yet to find a single shred of evidence to confirm the official reason that our country was sent to war; namely, that Iraq's WMDs constituted a grave threat to the US.
On January 28, 2003, Bush said in his State of the Union Address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
We now know that the CIA said that claim was false as early as March 2002 and that the International Atomic Energy Agency had also discredited the allegation. But they just went ahead and used it anyways.
On February 5, Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets."
In a radio address on February 8, 2003, Bush told the nation: "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons – the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."
The fact is, after 3 years, we have not found any of these items, nor have we found those thousands of rockets loaded with chemical weapons.
On March 30, 2003, Rumsfeld said in an interview on This Week, of the search for WMDs: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat."
However, Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, and Tikrit on April 14, 2003, and the intelligence Rumsfeld spoke of has not led to any WMDs.
Whether or not intelligence reports were bent, stretched, or fabricated to make Iraq look like an imminent threat, it is clear that the administration's rhetoric played upon the fear of the American people about future terrorism attacks.
But, under close scrutiny, most of the statements had nothing to do with intelligence; the were merely designed to prey on public fear. Through smoke and mirrors, the face of bin Laden was morphed into that of Saddam. Bush himself blurred the image in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union Address when he said:
"Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans – this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."
Not only did the administration warn about more hijackers carrying deadly chemicals, it even went so far as to say that in the time it would take for UN inspectors to find 'smoking gun' evidence of Saddam's illegal weapons, the US was at risk of a nuclear attack.
Condoleeza Rice by the Los Angeles Times, was quoted as saying on September 9, 2002: "We don't want the 'smoking gun' to be a mushroom cloud."
Talk about fabrication, where did the term mushroom cloud come from? What was this statement based on?
On September 26, 2002, just two weeks before Congress voted on a resolution, Bush himself pushed the case that Iraq was plotting to attack the US. After meeting with members of Congress that day, Bush said:
"The danger to our country is grave. The danger to our country is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons.... The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material, could build one within a year."
These are his words. Bush said Saddam is "seeking a nuclear bomb." Has he ever produced any evidence to back up this allegation? No. And, his rhetoric continued that day in the Rose Garden, where he said:
"The dangers we face will only worsen from month to month and from year to year. To ignore these threats is to encourage them. And when they have fully materialized it may be too late to protect ourselves and our friends and our allies. By then the Iraqi dictator would have the means to terrorize and dominate the region. Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX – nerve gas – or some day a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally."
And yet, 3 years later, we have not seen a shred of evidence to support this claim of grave dangers, chemical weapons, links to al Qaeda, or nuclear weapons.
Four days before a vote on the resolution, on October 7, 2002, Bush ramped up the scare tactics and stated: "We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy – the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade."
Bush then went even further by saying: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses.... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."
During his speech at the Cincinnati Museum Center, he also elaborated on Iraq's nuclear program and said:
"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his 'nuclear mujahideen' - his nuclear holy warriors.... If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year."
This is the kind of outrageous rhetoric that was given to the American people to justify war with Iraq. This is the same kind of hyped fabricated evidence that was given to Congress to sway its vote on October 11, 2002.
And most importantly these are examples of the same kind charges that the Bush administration now tries to say were never made, like we're deluded idiots.
Saddam is no longer in power. But in reality, so what? The Iraqis are worse off. They still don't even have the basic necessities of life like clean water, sanitation provisions, and electricity. They've had to watch family members imprisoned, tortured, and killed for 3 years without Saddam in charge.
And our soldiers are still dying in record numbers. Not a day goes by that there is not another attack on the troops who are saddled with trying to restore order to a country on the brink of anarchy.
Bush told the American people that we were compelled to go to war to secure our country from a grave threat. Are we safer today than we were on March 18, 2003?
For the first time in history, the US went to war because of intelligence reports claiming that a country posed a grave threat to our nation. We should accept nothing less than a full-scale, wide-open Congressional investigation into the issue of pre-war intelligence on the threat from Iraq.
It is in the compelling national interest to examine what we were told about the threat from Iraq to determine once and for all whether the intelligence was faulty or distorted.
The purpose of such an investigation is not to engage in "revisionist history." It is to get at the truth. The American people have valid questions that deserve to be answered.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Bin Laden Sitting In A Cave Laughing
Evelyn Pringle November 14, 2005
The war in Iraq is a miserable failure, any way you look at it. Retired General Anthony Zinni, former commander of the US Central Command, had it right when he said that by manufacturing a false rationale for war, abandoning traditional allies, propping up and trusting Iraqi exiles, and failing to plan for post-war Iraq, Bush has made the US less secure, instead of safer.
Osama himself could not have created the mess that Bush got us into, even if he had tried and he's probably sitting in his cave laughing his fool head off as we speak.
By launching a war against a country that posed no real threat to anyone, Bush not only sabotaged bin Laden's capture, he destroyed our credibility all over the world. As we recently witnessed with Katrina, by over-extending our forces, Bush has lessened our ability to respond to emergencies at home which means we can logically assume that he has lessened our ability to respond to an actual threat of terror should one arise.
How Did We End Up With Bush Anyways?
During the 2000 presidential campaign, the Republican platform contained the following statements:
* Sending our military on vague, aimless, and endless missions rapidly saps morale. Even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, inadequate training, and rapidly declining readiness.
* A comprehensive strategy for combating the new dangers posed by weapons of mass destruction must include a variety of other measures to contain and prevent the spread of such weapons. We need the cooperation of friends and allies."
* Nor should the intelligence community be made the scapegoat for political misjudgments.
The Republican prophets who wrote those comments should get a job in a circus because they were able to predict exactly what would happen in the Iraq war under the Bush administration, with its endless missions, back-to-back deployments, inadequate training, poor pay, shortage of equipment, no cooperation of friends and allies, and blaming the CIA for misjudgments, and on and on and on.
We were told us that Iraqis would welcome us and thank us for getting rid of Saddam. Immediately before the war, in a March 16, 2003, interview, Dick Cheney said, "I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators."
I am still waiting for someone to tell me why the Iraqis would thank us. Saddam may be gone, but innocent Iraqis have suffered the same human rights violations at the hands of the occupying forces that they did years ago under Saddam.
They live in fear of torture every day; in fact more so than when Saddam was in power. Incidents of rape, murder and kidnapping have skyrocketed since we arrived to "save" them. The number of violent deaths went from an average of 14 a month in 2002, to 357 a month in 2003, the year we went to "save" them.
Iraqis still don’t even have the basic necessities that they had with Saddam in power. Water and electricity continue to operate at lower levels than they did before the war.
Joblessness is at a record high. Over half the workers in the country are either without a job or working for less than a living wage, due to the fact that the gang of profiteers made sure the reconstruction contracts went to US companies, rather than Iraqi firms.
Why would Iraqis thank us? Or the lucky ones that have managed to stay alive that is.
A Year Of Big Lies
In the months leading up to the war, Bush told the world, that the US had to wage a preemptive war against Iraq, not only due to the imminent threat of WMDs, but also because there were links between Saddam and bin Laden.
However, the administration has since said that it never claimed that Saddam posed an "imminent" threat, and therefore, Bush cannot be accused of misleading anyone.
How soon they forget. First of all, many officials did use the word “imminent” and others used words that had the exact same meaning, like "mortal," "urgent," "immediate", "serious and mounting," and "unique." They even went so far as to say that Iraq was actively seeking to "strike the United States with weapons of mass destruction."
Yet during a press conference a few months after the war began, when reporters started to question why we were in Iraq, White House spokesman, Scott McClellan said, "Some in the media have chosen to use the word 'imminent'. Those were not words we used."
Could that be true? Am I a poor listener? No. It means that either Scott lied, or he has a poor memory, because on February 10, 2003, Scott himself used the "I" word and said, "This is about imminent threat."
He apparently also forgot about the statement made by then, Bush Communications Director, Dan Bartlett, on January 26, 2003, when he said, "Well, of course he is," in response to a reporter's question, "is Saddam an imminent threat to US interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home?"
Hands down, it is Scott who is the poor listener because he even forgot the comment made by his old boss on May 7, 2003. When then Press Secretary, Ari Fliescher, was asked whether or not Iraq was an “imminent threat,” he responded, “Absolutely.”
Let's review some of the lies told in speeches and press conferences and cable news shows, to convince Americans and Congress that we had to go to war, beginning with the most masterful liar of all time, Dick Cheney, who said 3 times over a period of only 2 days:
Iraq is "a serious threat to our country, to our friends and to our allies." 1/31/03.
Iraq poses "terrible threats to the civilized world." 1/30/03.
Iraq "threatens the United States of America." 1/30/03
Before that, on August 29, 2002, Cheney elaborated fully: "Iraq is busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue an aggressive nuclear weapons program," he said.
"These are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale, developed," Cheney advised, "so that Saddam Hussein can hold the threat over the head of any one he chooses."
"What we must not do in the face of this mortal threat," he warned, "is to give in to wishful thinking or to willful blindness."
According my computer's Thesaures, "mortal" means "deadly." Is that kinda like "imminent?"
Lets move on to the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, whose comments were always over the top. On November 14, 2002, Rummy used the ever present fear over 9/11 to sell the war:
"I would look you in the eye and I would say, go back before September 11 and ask yourself this question: Was the attack that took place on September 11 an imminent threat the month before or two months before or three months before or six months before?" he asked. "When did the attack on September 11 become an imminent threat?"
"Now," Rummy said, "transport yourself forward a year, two years or a week or a month ... So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you must do something?" he asked reporters.
Here’s where Rumsfeld used the nuclear mantra, complete with the now infamous line about Saddam seeking uranium from Africa:
"Iraq poses a serious and mounting threat to our country. His regime has the design for a nuclear weapon, was working on several different methods of enriching uranium, and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa," Rumsfeld claimed on January 1, 2003.
"Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent - that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons," Rumsfeld said, "I would not be so certain."
There's that pesky "imminent" word again.
"And we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons," Rummy warned on September 18, 2002. "Iraq has these weapons," he added.
Here’s where he claims Saddam is the worst threat on earth. "No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq," he said on September 19, 2002.
Colin Powell Plays The Starring Role
While we're at it, lets take some time to review the many statements made by Colin Powell when he landed the starring role on the world stage, with his speech at the UN. Colin knew it would be no easy sell, so he brought photographs along to show where the WMD sites were, and informed the world that he had "human sources," to back up all of his assertions.
“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions," he stated. "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Colin went on to say, "I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources."
He then introduced the pictures and said, “We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities."
Next he proceeded to hone in on specific photos and explained what each one showed.
“Let's look at one," Colin said, "This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji."
Of another, he said, "This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions." In fact, Colin told the audience, "this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapon shells."
“Here, you see 15 munitions bunkers in yellow and red outlines," he said of another. "The four that are in red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers," he added.
For some reason, everyone always seems to want to give Colin Powell a pass on whatever he does. I don't.
By now, I would say this to Mr Powell: here’s your chance to redeem yourself. For starters, lets see those photos again, and then explain exactly what happened to those yellow and red bunkers you pointed out in the pictures. After that, I want to meet the photographers who claimed to have taken the pictures.
And one more thing, I would request that Colin list the names and whereabouts of each and every one of those solid "human" sources he kept referring to.
In his speech, Colin described the relationships between Al Qaida, Osama and Saddam, that according to his account, had been strong for many years.
"Early Al Qaida ties were forged by secret, high-level intelligence service contacts with Al Qaida, secret Iraqi intelligence high-level contacts with Al Qaida," he told the audience.
“Going back to the early and mid-1990s, when bin Laden was based in Sudan," Colin said, "an Al Qaida source tells us that Saddam and bin Laden reached an understanding that Al Qaida would no longer support activities against Baghdad."
“We know members of both organizations met repeatedly," he said. In fact, Colin claimed to know that they "have met at least eight times at very senior levels since the early 1990s."
"In 1996," Colin continued, "a foreign security service tells us, that bin Laden met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Khartoum, and later met the director of the Iraqi intelligence service."
He obviously was trying to convince the world that Saddam was ecstatic about all of the terrorist attacks against the US, when he said, “Saddam became more interested as he saw Al Qaida's appalling attacks."
"A detained Al Qaida member tells us that Saddam was more willing to assist Al Qaida after the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania," Colin said. "Saddam was also impressed by Al Qaida's attacks on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000," he added.
I say its time for Congress to instruct Powell to produce this “detained" Al Qaida member who gave the administration all of this valuable information. That should be easy enough if the guy is "detained."
Later in his speech, Colin made it sound like the Iraqis, Al Qaida, Saddam and Osama were the best of buddies, even houseguests of one another, backed up no less, by another "human source."
“Iraqis continued to visit bin Laden in his new home in Afghanistan," Colin said.
So if true, this means that the Iraqis got to visit Osama's "new home" but the world's superpower couldn't find a damn cave. Osama must have really had a good laugh when he heard that line.
But in hindsight, it was even more comical when Colin said, "A senior defector, one of Saddam's former intelligence chiefs in Europe, says Saddam sent his agents to Afghanistan sometime in the mid-1990s to provide training to Al Qaida members on document forgery."
Think about that, a forgery college in Afghanistan. Funny thing, the only forgeries I've ever heard about were the ones used by the Bush administration to convince Americans we had to go to war.
What were those again? A college student's term paper from many years ago and the documents purporting to show that Saddam was seeking uranium from Africa? As I recall, all were easily identified as fake, but we still have never learned who exactly forged the Africa-uranium documents or why they ended up at the White House.
When the truth finally comes out, I suspect that a few members of the Bush gang may wish that they had attended the "forgery training" college in Afghanistan.
Next, Colin held up a photo and told the audience that it showed a poison and explosive training camp, located in northeastern Iraq.
“You see a picture of this camp," he said, "The network is teaching its operatives how to produce ricin and other poisons."
Colin then proceeded to give the world a chemistry lesson, complete with hand gestures, and said: "Let me remind you how ricin works. Less than a pinch--image a pinch of salt--less than a pinch of ricin, eating just this amount in your food, would cause shock followed by circulatory failure," he explained.
He followed up with the dire warning: "Death comes within 72 hours and there is no antidote, there is no cure," he said, "It is fatal.”
If he wants to clear his name, Colin needs to hold a televised press conference and explain to the world exactly what happened to the training camp in that photo, with its pinches of deadly ricin, because it has apparently vanished off the face of the planet.
Or being that I'm just a lowly tax payer funding this disaster, would that be too much to ask?
The Puppet In The White House
Last but certainly not least (except IQ-wise), lets review a few statements made by the puppet orchestrating the scheme, President Bush himself Here are a few of the lines that he threw out there to us in the run-up to the war:
"The Iraqi regime is a threat to any American. ... Iraq is a threat, a real threat." 1/3/03
"Saddam Hussein is a threat to America." 11/3/02
"I see a significant threat to the security of the United States in Iraq." 11/1/02.
"There is real threat, in my judgment, a real and dangerous threat to America in Iraq in the form of Saddam Hussein." 10/28/02
"There are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place. Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists." 10/7/02
"The Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency." 10/2/02
"There's a grave threat in Iraq. There just is." 10/2/02
"This man poses a much graver threat than anybody could have possibly imagined." 9/26/02
Looking at the above comments with 20/20 hindsight, they may have provided a sign that Bush was back on the bottle. As anyone who has spent time around a drunk knows, drunks have a habit of repeating themselves over and over and over. And that goes double for all that Cheney said, because even after 2 drunk driving tickets, he remained on the sauce, bad ticker and all.
Four months into the war, on July 2, 2003, Bush showed signs of being drunk again now that I think about it, when he stated: "Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States because we removed him, but he was a threat," and then said, "He was a threat. He's not a threat now."
This from a guy who swears who he's been on the wagon since age 40.
Tax Payers Left Holding The Bag
In the months leading up to the war, we were told that Iraqi oil would pay for the country's reconstruction after we destroyed it. A March 2003, report by the White House Office of Management and Budget said: "Iraq will not require sustained aid."
In testimony before Congress on March 27, 2003, Paul Wolfowitz said Iraq "can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
As a tax payer, I demand to know when "relatively soon" is going to get here.
On April 23, 2003, Andrew Natsios, head of the US Agency for International Development, gave a televised interview and outlined the costs of rebuilding Iraq to the taxpayers, "the American part of this will be $1.7 billion," he said. "We have no plans for any further-on funding for this."
Within 5 months of Natsios' assessment, Bush was back asking Congress for another $20 billion.
And being that he has probably never had to balance a check book in his life, Bush obviously has never heard the term "in the red." But then again, why should he care, its only our money.
Never mind that Bush has not received a single flower or thank-you note from the Iraqis, the good-hearted fellow that he's known to be, he just keeps telling Congress to go ahead and write out another check to fund a war which he now says is for "freedom."
In February 2003, Rumsfeld predicted that the war "could last six days, six weeks," but "I doubt six months," he said. Well here we sit, 31 months into the war, with an endless stream of casualties day after day, and our country headed towards bankruptcy, and there is no end in sight.
On October, 2002, the day the senate voted on the resolution, John Kerry took to the floor of the senate and during a speech, gave the nation a prophetic forecast of what would happen if Bush attacked Iraq without good cause and without other countries.
"If we go it alone without reason," Kerry warned, "we risk inflaming an entire region, breeding a new generation of terrorists, a new cadre of anti-American zealots, and we will be less secure, not more secure, at the end of the day, even with Saddam Hussein disarmed."
In closing, Kerry stated: "When I vote to give ... the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security and that of our allies in the Persian Gulf region."
The fact is, there was no arsenal of weapons and Saddam was no threat, imminent or otherwise. Bush and his band of chickenhawks lied to Kerry, to other members of Congress, to taxpayers, and the world, in order to pull off their grand profiteering scheme.
Now that we know the truth, the whole damn bunch should be tried as war criminals, and once they are convicted and sent to prison, they should be treated every bit as well as they have treated prisoners jailed under their watch over the past 5 years.
The war in Iraq is a miserable failure, any way you look at it. Retired General Anthony Zinni, former commander of the US Central Command, had it right when he said that by manufacturing a false rationale for war, abandoning traditional allies, propping up and trusting Iraqi exiles, and failing to plan for post-war Iraq, Bush has made the US less secure, instead of safer.
Osama himself could not have created the mess that Bush got us into, even if he had tried and he's probably sitting in his cave laughing his fool head off as we speak.
By launching a war against a country that posed no real threat to anyone, Bush not only sabotaged bin Laden's capture, he destroyed our credibility all over the world. As we recently witnessed with Katrina, by over-extending our forces, Bush has lessened our ability to respond to emergencies at home which means we can logically assume that he has lessened our ability to respond to an actual threat of terror should one arise.
How Did We End Up With Bush Anyways?
During the 2000 presidential campaign, the Republican platform contained the following statements:
* Sending our military on vague, aimless, and endless missions rapidly saps morale. Even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, inadequate training, and rapidly declining readiness.
* A comprehensive strategy for combating the new dangers posed by weapons of mass destruction must include a variety of other measures to contain and prevent the spread of such weapons. We need the cooperation of friends and allies."
* Nor should the intelligence community be made the scapegoat for political misjudgments.
The Republican prophets who wrote those comments should get a job in a circus because they were able to predict exactly what would happen in the Iraq war under the Bush administration, with its endless missions, back-to-back deployments, inadequate training, poor pay, shortage of equipment, no cooperation of friends and allies, and blaming the CIA for misjudgments, and on and on and on.
We were told us that Iraqis would welcome us and thank us for getting rid of Saddam. Immediately before the war, in a March 16, 2003, interview, Dick Cheney said, "I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators."
I am still waiting for someone to tell me why the Iraqis would thank us. Saddam may be gone, but innocent Iraqis have suffered the same human rights violations at the hands of the occupying forces that they did years ago under Saddam.
They live in fear of torture every day; in fact more so than when Saddam was in power. Incidents of rape, murder and kidnapping have skyrocketed since we arrived to "save" them. The number of violent deaths went from an average of 14 a month in 2002, to 357 a month in 2003, the year we went to "save" them.
Iraqis still don’t even have the basic necessities that they had with Saddam in power. Water and electricity continue to operate at lower levels than they did before the war.
Joblessness is at a record high. Over half the workers in the country are either without a job or working for less than a living wage, due to the fact that the gang of profiteers made sure the reconstruction contracts went to US companies, rather than Iraqi firms.
Why would Iraqis thank us? Or the lucky ones that have managed to stay alive that is.
A Year Of Big Lies
In the months leading up to the war, Bush told the world, that the US had to wage a preemptive war against Iraq, not only due to the imminent threat of WMDs, but also because there were links between Saddam and bin Laden.
However, the administration has since said that it never claimed that Saddam posed an "imminent" threat, and therefore, Bush cannot be accused of misleading anyone.
How soon they forget. First of all, many officials did use the word “imminent” and others used words that had the exact same meaning, like "mortal," "urgent," "immediate", "serious and mounting," and "unique." They even went so far as to say that Iraq was actively seeking to "strike the United States with weapons of mass destruction."
Yet during a press conference a few months after the war began, when reporters started to question why we were in Iraq, White House spokesman, Scott McClellan said, "Some in the media have chosen to use the word 'imminent'. Those were not words we used."
Could that be true? Am I a poor listener? No. It means that either Scott lied, or he has a poor memory, because on February 10, 2003, Scott himself used the "I" word and said, "This is about imminent threat."
He apparently also forgot about the statement made by then, Bush Communications Director, Dan Bartlett, on January 26, 2003, when he said, "Well, of course he is," in response to a reporter's question, "is Saddam an imminent threat to US interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home?"
Hands down, it is Scott who is the poor listener because he even forgot the comment made by his old boss on May 7, 2003. When then Press Secretary, Ari Fliescher, was asked whether or not Iraq was an “imminent threat,” he responded, “Absolutely.”
Let's review some of the lies told in speeches and press conferences and cable news shows, to convince Americans and Congress that we had to go to war, beginning with the most masterful liar of all time, Dick Cheney, who said 3 times over a period of only 2 days:
Iraq is "a serious threat to our country, to our friends and to our allies." 1/31/03.
Iraq poses "terrible threats to the civilized world." 1/30/03.
Iraq "threatens the United States of America." 1/30/03
Before that, on August 29, 2002, Cheney elaborated fully: "Iraq is busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue an aggressive nuclear weapons program," he said.
"These are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale, developed," Cheney advised, "so that Saddam Hussein can hold the threat over the head of any one he chooses."
"What we must not do in the face of this mortal threat," he warned, "is to give in to wishful thinking or to willful blindness."
According my computer's Thesaures, "mortal" means "deadly." Is that kinda like "imminent?"
Lets move on to the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, whose comments were always over the top. On November 14, 2002, Rummy used the ever present fear over 9/11 to sell the war:
"I would look you in the eye and I would say, go back before September 11 and ask yourself this question: Was the attack that took place on September 11 an imminent threat the month before or two months before or three months before or six months before?" he asked. "When did the attack on September 11 become an imminent threat?"
"Now," Rummy said, "transport yourself forward a year, two years or a week or a month ... So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you must do something?" he asked reporters.
Here’s where Rumsfeld used the nuclear mantra, complete with the now infamous line about Saddam seeking uranium from Africa:
"Iraq poses a serious and mounting threat to our country. His regime has the design for a nuclear weapon, was working on several different methods of enriching uranium, and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa," Rumsfeld claimed on January 1, 2003.
"Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent - that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons," Rumsfeld said, "I would not be so certain."
There's that pesky "imminent" word again.
"And we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons," Rummy warned on September 18, 2002. "Iraq has these weapons," he added.
Here’s where he claims Saddam is the worst threat on earth. "No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq," he said on September 19, 2002.
Colin Powell Plays The Starring Role
While we're at it, lets take some time to review the many statements made by Colin Powell when he landed the starring role on the world stage, with his speech at the UN. Colin knew it would be no easy sell, so he brought photographs along to show where the WMD sites were, and informed the world that he had "human sources," to back up all of his assertions.
“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions," he stated. "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Colin went on to say, "I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources."
He then introduced the pictures and said, “We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities."
Next he proceeded to hone in on specific photos and explained what each one showed.
“Let's look at one," Colin said, "This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji."
Of another, he said, "This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions." In fact, Colin told the audience, "this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapon shells."
“Here, you see 15 munitions bunkers in yellow and red outlines," he said of another. "The four that are in red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers," he added.
For some reason, everyone always seems to want to give Colin Powell a pass on whatever he does. I don't.
By now, I would say this to Mr Powell: here’s your chance to redeem yourself. For starters, lets see those photos again, and then explain exactly what happened to those yellow and red bunkers you pointed out in the pictures. After that, I want to meet the photographers who claimed to have taken the pictures.
And one more thing, I would request that Colin list the names and whereabouts of each and every one of those solid "human" sources he kept referring to.
In his speech, Colin described the relationships between Al Qaida, Osama and Saddam, that according to his account, had been strong for many years.
"Early Al Qaida ties were forged by secret, high-level intelligence service contacts with Al Qaida, secret Iraqi intelligence high-level contacts with Al Qaida," he told the audience.
“Going back to the early and mid-1990s, when bin Laden was based in Sudan," Colin said, "an Al Qaida source tells us that Saddam and bin Laden reached an understanding that Al Qaida would no longer support activities against Baghdad."
“We know members of both organizations met repeatedly," he said. In fact, Colin claimed to know that they "have met at least eight times at very senior levels since the early 1990s."
"In 1996," Colin continued, "a foreign security service tells us, that bin Laden met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Khartoum, and later met the director of the Iraqi intelligence service."
He obviously was trying to convince the world that Saddam was ecstatic about all of the terrorist attacks against the US, when he said, “Saddam became more interested as he saw Al Qaida's appalling attacks."
"A detained Al Qaida member tells us that Saddam was more willing to assist Al Qaida after the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania," Colin said. "Saddam was also impressed by Al Qaida's attacks on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000," he added.
I say its time for Congress to instruct Powell to produce this “detained" Al Qaida member who gave the administration all of this valuable information. That should be easy enough if the guy is "detained."
Later in his speech, Colin made it sound like the Iraqis, Al Qaida, Saddam and Osama were the best of buddies, even houseguests of one another, backed up no less, by another "human source."
“Iraqis continued to visit bin Laden in his new home in Afghanistan," Colin said.
So if true, this means that the Iraqis got to visit Osama's "new home" but the world's superpower couldn't find a damn cave. Osama must have really had a good laugh when he heard that line.
But in hindsight, it was even more comical when Colin said, "A senior defector, one of Saddam's former intelligence chiefs in Europe, says Saddam sent his agents to Afghanistan sometime in the mid-1990s to provide training to Al Qaida members on document forgery."
Think about that, a forgery college in Afghanistan. Funny thing, the only forgeries I've ever heard about were the ones used by the Bush administration to convince Americans we had to go to war.
What were those again? A college student's term paper from many years ago and the documents purporting to show that Saddam was seeking uranium from Africa? As I recall, all were easily identified as fake, but we still have never learned who exactly forged the Africa-uranium documents or why they ended up at the White House.
When the truth finally comes out, I suspect that a few members of the Bush gang may wish that they had attended the "forgery training" college in Afghanistan.
Next, Colin held up a photo and told the audience that it showed a poison and explosive training camp, located in northeastern Iraq.
“You see a picture of this camp," he said, "The network is teaching its operatives how to produce ricin and other poisons."
Colin then proceeded to give the world a chemistry lesson, complete with hand gestures, and said: "Let me remind you how ricin works. Less than a pinch--image a pinch of salt--less than a pinch of ricin, eating just this amount in your food, would cause shock followed by circulatory failure," he explained.
He followed up with the dire warning: "Death comes within 72 hours and there is no antidote, there is no cure," he said, "It is fatal.”
If he wants to clear his name, Colin needs to hold a televised press conference and explain to the world exactly what happened to the training camp in that photo, with its pinches of deadly ricin, because it has apparently vanished off the face of the planet.
Or being that I'm just a lowly tax payer funding this disaster, would that be too much to ask?
The Puppet In The White House
Last but certainly not least (except IQ-wise), lets review a few statements made by the puppet orchestrating the scheme, President Bush himself Here are a few of the lines that he threw out there to us in the run-up to the war:
"The Iraqi regime is a threat to any American. ... Iraq is a threat, a real threat." 1/3/03
"Saddam Hussein is a threat to America." 11/3/02
"I see a significant threat to the security of the United States in Iraq." 11/1/02.
"There is real threat, in my judgment, a real and dangerous threat to America in Iraq in the form of Saddam Hussein." 10/28/02
"There are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place. Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists." 10/7/02
"The Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency." 10/2/02
"There's a grave threat in Iraq. There just is." 10/2/02
"This man poses a much graver threat than anybody could have possibly imagined." 9/26/02
Looking at the above comments with 20/20 hindsight, they may have provided a sign that Bush was back on the bottle. As anyone who has spent time around a drunk knows, drunks have a habit of repeating themselves over and over and over. And that goes double for all that Cheney said, because even after 2 drunk driving tickets, he remained on the sauce, bad ticker and all.
Four months into the war, on July 2, 2003, Bush showed signs of being drunk again now that I think about it, when he stated: "Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States because we removed him, but he was a threat," and then said, "He was a threat. He's not a threat now."
This from a guy who swears who he's been on the wagon since age 40.
Tax Payers Left Holding The Bag
In the months leading up to the war, we were told that Iraqi oil would pay for the country's reconstruction after we destroyed it. A March 2003, report by the White House Office of Management and Budget said: "Iraq will not require sustained aid."
In testimony before Congress on March 27, 2003, Paul Wolfowitz said Iraq "can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
As a tax payer, I demand to know when "relatively soon" is going to get here.
On April 23, 2003, Andrew Natsios, head of the US Agency for International Development, gave a televised interview and outlined the costs of rebuilding Iraq to the taxpayers, "the American part of this will be $1.7 billion," he said. "We have no plans for any further-on funding for this."
Within 5 months of Natsios' assessment, Bush was back asking Congress for another $20 billion.
And being that he has probably never had to balance a check book in his life, Bush obviously has never heard the term "in the red." But then again, why should he care, its only our money.
Never mind that Bush has not received a single flower or thank-you note from the Iraqis, the good-hearted fellow that he's known to be, he just keeps telling Congress to go ahead and write out another check to fund a war which he now says is for "freedom."
In February 2003, Rumsfeld predicted that the war "could last six days, six weeks," but "I doubt six months," he said. Well here we sit, 31 months into the war, with an endless stream of casualties day after day, and our country headed towards bankruptcy, and there is no end in sight.
On October, 2002, the day the senate voted on the resolution, John Kerry took to the floor of the senate and during a speech, gave the nation a prophetic forecast of what would happen if Bush attacked Iraq without good cause and without other countries.
"If we go it alone without reason," Kerry warned, "we risk inflaming an entire region, breeding a new generation of terrorists, a new cadre of anti-American zealots, and we will be less secure, not more secure, at the end of the day, even with Saddam Hussein disarmed."
In closing, Kerry stated: "When I vote to give ... the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security and that of our allies in the Persian Gulf region."
The fact is, there was no arsenal of weapons and Saddam was no threat, imminent or otherwise. Bush and his band of chickenhawks lied to Kerry, to other members of Congress, to taxpayers, and the world, in order to pull off their grand profiteering scheme.
Now that we know the truth, the whole damn bunch should be tried as war criminals, and once they are convicted and sent to prison, they should be treated every bit as well as they have treated prisoners jailed under their watch over the past 5 years.
Bush Team Has Good Reason To Worry
Evelyn Pringle November 15, 2005
In its systematic and concerted effort to portray a link between Saddam and bin Laden, the White House propaganda team was so successful, that a poll conducted in late 2002, showed that over half of the people polled believed that Saddam was connected to 9/11.
While that may have been great news for the home team back then, the problem for Bush today, is that he is never going to get 50% of Americans to erase their memory of all the statements that were made and believe the line that members of the administration never said anything to make people think that Saddam was involved in 9/11.
The truth is that the story about Saddam supporting al Qaeda was a key component in case for war and the administration worked non-stop to promote it even though the basis for the story was debunked early on by intelligence officials.
When making public remarks and speeches indicating a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Candy Rice consistently failed to mention the fact that intelligence agencies had dismissed it as false.
According to the March 16, 2004, report, “Iraq On The Record: The Bush Administration's Public Statements On Iraq,” from the Committee on Government Reform, together the above 5 top officials “made 61 misleading statements about the strength of the Iraq-al Qaeda alliance in 52 public appearances.”
The new Senate investigation hasn't even got off the ground and already, the future is looking grim for the Bush team. It has now been revealed that US military intelligence specifically warned the administration in February 2002, that the key source of information about Al-Qaeda's ties to Iraq had provided "intentionally misleading" data, in a newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document made public this month.
While this is clear evidence that they should have known better, over the following year, top officials continued to make false claims that the Iraqi government was training and supporting members of bin Laden's terrorist group to bolster their rationale for war.
For instance, eight months later, in a speech on November 7, 2002, Bush told the audience: Saddam Hussein is “a threat because he is dealing with Al Qaida. . . . [A] true threat facing our country is that an Al Qaida-type network trained and armed by Saddam could attack America and not leave one fingerprint.”
In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, Bush said, “Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.”
On January 26, 2003, when speaking at the World Economic Forum, Colin Powell stated, “The more we wait, the more chance there is for this dictator with clear ties to terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, more time for him to pass a weapon, share a technology, or use these weapons again.
In his February 5, 2003 speech at the UN, Powell told the audience: “what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder."
"Iraq today," Powell said, "harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi an associate and collaborator of Usama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants.”
To intentionally play on the public's emotions, around the second anniversary of 9/11, Dick Cheney told Tim Russert on Meet the Press, that Iraq was "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
Cheney also told the Heritage Foundation on October 10, 2003, that Saddam Hussein “had an established relationship with al Qaeda.”
The Bush Team Should Be Worried
The administration has good reason to worry about the investigation. Last year, it got a glimpse of the kind of information that will likely come out, on March 9, 2004, during then CIA Director, George Tenet's testimony before the Armed Services Committee, when Democrats revealed that Scooter Libby, had received secret intelligence briefings in August 2002, on Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda, from then Assistant Secretary of Defense, Douglas Feith.
Prior to that hearing, Feith had already said that he never gave any such briefings, which in turn supported the theory that a private secret intelligence group in the White House was set up to manufacture the case for war. Tenet, himself told the committee that he had only first learned of Feith's private briefings "last week."
Feith better not be too comfortable in his retirement because he is definitely going to be spending some time up on the Hill. Virtually everything that went wrong in Iraq, relating to matters that Congress will be investigating, can be traced back to Feith's door. He played a leading role in the run-up to war.
The buck stops with Feith on its way to Cheney and Bush. Who knows, maybe Feith will agree to take the hit and he and Libby can bunk together in prison.
The Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans (OSP), were both established under Feith's authority and will in all likelihood garner particular interest during the investigation.
The OSP, with the help of Ahmed Chalabi and his band of defectors, is believed to have cooked up the most alarming pre-war intelligence and "stovepiped" it to Bush through Rumsfeld and Cheney, without the vetting of any intelligence offical, in order to establish the existence of a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
The content of Feith's August 2002, private briefings have been described as a cherry-picked collection of raw, uncorroborated pieces of information, which painted a false picture of a link between Saddam and 9/11
The investigation will surely focus on October 2003, when Feith sent a memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing proof of a definite relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it somehow got published in the November 2003, Weekly Standard, complete with the memo’s classified annex claiming that its list of Iraq–al Qaeda contacts proved “an operational relationship from the early 1990s” and that “there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans.”
The Defense Department immediately ran for cover and issued a statement saying that “[t]he classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions.”
And on March 9, 2004, when Tenet again testified before the Armed Services Committee, he made sure to tell the committee that the CIA “did not agree with the way the data was characterized in that document.”
The investigation team will no doubt want to interview the neocon's best friend, Ahmed Chalabi, but he has already demonstrated that he could care less if he's accused of deliberately misleading the US in making the case for war, being he got what he wanted.
"We are heroes in error," he told the News Telegraph on February 19, 2004. "As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad," he said, "What was said before is not important."
In its systematic and concerted effort to portray a link between Saddam and bin Laden, the White House propaganda team was so successful, that a poll conducted in late 2002, showed that over half of the people polled believed that Saddam was connected to 9/11.
While that may have been great news for the home team back then, the problem for Bush today, is that he is never going to get 50% of Americans to erase their memory of all the statements that were made and believe the line that members of the administration never said anything to make people think that Saddam was involved in 9/11.
The truth is that the story about Saddam supporting al Qaeda was a key component in case for war and the administration worked non-stop to promote it even though the basis for the story was debunked early on by intelligence officials.
When making public remarks and speeches indicating a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Candy Rice consistently failed to mention the fact that intelligence agencies had dismissed it as false.
According to the March 16, 2004, report, “Iraq On The Record: The Bush Administration's Public Statements On Iraq,” from the Committee on Government Reform, together the above 5 top officials “made 61 misleading statements about the strength of the Iraq-al Qaeda alliance in 52 public appearances.”
The new Senate investigation hasn't even got off the ground and already, the future is looking grim for the Bush team. It has now been revealed that US military intelligence specifically warned the administration in February 2002, that the key source of information about Al-Qaeda's ties to Iraq had provided "intentionally misleading" data, in a newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document made public this month.
While this is clear evidence that they should have known better, over the following year, top officials continued to make false claims that the Iraqi government was training and supporting members of bin Laden's terrorist group to bolster their rationale for war.
For instance, eight months later, in a speech on November 7, 2002, Bush told the audience: Saddam Hussein is “a threat because he is dealing with Al Qaida. . . . [A] true threat facing our country is that an Al Qaida-type network trained and armed by Saddam could attack America and not leave one fingerprint.”
In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, Bush said, “Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.”
On January 26, 2003, when speaking at the World Economic Forum, Colin Powell stated, “The more we wait, the more chance there is for this dictator with clear ties to terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, more time for him to pass a weapon, share a technology, or use these weapons again.
In his February 5, 2003 speech at the UN, Powell told the audience: “what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder."
"Iraq today," Powell said, "harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi an associate and collaborator of Usama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants.”
To intentionally play on the public's emotions, around the second anniversary of 9/11, Dick Cheney told Tim Russert on Meet the Press, that Iraq was "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
Cheney also told the Heritage Foundation on October 10, 2003, that Saddam Hussein “had an established relationship with al Qaeda.”
The Bush Team Should Be Worried
The administration has good reason to worry about the investigation. Last year, it got a glimpse of the kind of information that will likely come out, on March 9, 2004, during then CIA Director, George Tenet's testimony before the Armed Services Committee, when Democrats revealed that Scooter Libby, had received secret intelligence briefings in August 2002, on Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda, from then Assistant Secretary of Defense, Douglas Feith.
Prior to that hearing, Feith had already said that he never gave any such briefings, which in turn supported the theory that a private secret intelligence group in the White House was set up to manufacture the case for war. Tenet, himself told the committee that he had only first learned of Feith's private briefings "last week."
Feith better not be too comfortable in his retirement because he is definitely going to be spending some time up on the Hill. Virtually everything that went wrong in Iraq, relating to matters that Congress will be investigating, can be traced back to Feith's door. He played a leading role in the run-up to war.
The buck stops with Feith on its way to Cheney and Bush. Who knows, maybe Feith will agree to take the hit and he and Libby can bunk together in prison.
The Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans (OSP), were both established under Feith's authority and will in all likelihood garner particular interest during the investigation.
The OSP, with the help of Ahmed Chalabi and his band of defectors, is believed to have cooked up the most alarming pre-war intelligence and "stovepiped" it to Bush through Rumsfeld and Cheney, without the vetting of any intelligence offical, in order to establish the existence of a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
The content of Feith's August 2002, private briefings have been described as a cherry-picked collection of raw, uncorroborated pieces of information, which painted a false picture of a link between Saddam and 9/11
The investigation will surely focus on October 2003, when Feith sent a memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing proof of a definite relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it somehow got published in the November 2003, Weekly Standard, complete with the memo’s classified annex claiming that its list of Iraq–al Qaeda contacts proved “an operational relationship from the early 1990s” and that “there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans.”
The Defense Department immediately ran for cover and issued a statement saying that “[t]he classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions.”
And on March 9, 2004, when Tenet again testified before the Armed Services Committee, he made sure to tell the committee that the CIA “did not agree with the way the data was characterized in that document.”
The investigation team will no doubt want to interview the neocon's best friend, Ahmed Chalabi, but he has already demonstrated that he could care less if he's accused of deliberately misleading the US in making the case for war, being he got what he wanted.
"We are heroes in error," he told the News Telegraph on February 19, 2004. "As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad," he said, "What was said before is not important."
Thursday, July 29, 2010
About Iraq - Not So Fast Colin Powell
January 4, 2007
Evelyn Pringle
This week I read an article by Robert Sheer, that said former Secretary of State Colin Powell now says that he and his department’s top experts never believed that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat, but that Bush followed misleading advice from Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim.
To that I say, not so fast Mr. Powell, the time to come clean has long passed. In fact, the window of truth-telling time for you ended when the first US soldier was killed in Iraq.
This admission proves that Colin knew the truth and could have stopped the freight train long before it made it to Iraq.
Picture this. The day before Congress is to vote on the resolution, Colin Powell, the only Bush administration official with any hands-on experience with war, schedules a public news conference on all the major television networks, and says, "Saddam does not pose an imminent threat. I do not believe we need to go to war in Iraq, and I am quitting my job today because the administration is about to engage us in a war I cannot support."
Think about that for a minute. And then think about how many members of Congress would have voted differently if Colin Powell had stepped up to the plate.
But no, he just kept right on lying. For whatever reason, it matters not.
Mr. Sheer asked Colin about the Niger statement in Bush’s State of the Union speech.
"That was a big mistake," Colin said. "It should never have been in the speech."
"I didn’t need Wilson to tell me that there wasn’t a Niger connection," he told Mr. Sheer.
"He didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know," Colin said. "I never believed it."
When Mr. Sheer asked why Bush played up the nuclear threat, he responded like a little kid tattling on another kid to save his own butt, and pointed the finger at the vice president. "That was all Cheney," he said.
That dog won't hunt. The fact is, of the liars who worked the hardest at selling the case for war, Colin Powell holds the title for giving the longest sales pitch on record when it comes to the nuclear threat, and for that matter, for all WMD.
Who among us can forget the tune Powell was singing when he took center stage at the UN on February 5, 2003, and started his speech by swearing to the truth of the evidence he was about to present.
"My colleagues," he told the world on live TV, "every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources."
"These are not assertions," he continued.
"What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence," he said, "I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources."
Here's where Colin tells us about a big find by intelligence officials in Iraq at the home of a nuclear scientist.
"When they searched the home of an Iraqi nuclear scientist," he said, "they uncovered roughly 2,000 pages of documents."
To prove this "fact" Colin pulled out a few visuals. "You see them here being brought out of the home and placed in U.N. hands," he told the audience.
"Some of the material is classified and related to Iraq's nuclear program," he added.
Next, Colin presented a litany of "facts" about Saddam's nuclear threat. "Let me turn now to nuclear weapons," he said.
"We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons program," he warned.
"On the contrary," he continued, "we have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons."
"To fully appreciate the challenge that we face today," he said, "remember that, in 1991, the inspectors searched Iraq's primary nuclear weapons facilities for the first time."
"And they found nothing to conclude that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program," he added.
"But based on defector information in May of 1991," he advised, "Saddam Hussein's lie was exposed."
The next comment is particularly amusing as Colin inserts the word "truth."
"In truth," he said, "Saddam Hussein had a massive clandestine nuclear weapons program that covered several different techniques to enrich uranium, including electromagnetic isotope separation, gas centrifuge, and gas diffusion."
"Saddam Hussein already possesses two out of the three key components needed to build a nuclear bomb," he said.
"He has a cadre of nuclear scientists with the expertise," he added, "and he has a bomb design."
"Since 1998, his efforts to reconstitute his nuclear program have been focused on acquiring the third and last component," Colin said, "sufficient fissile material to produce a nuclear explosion."
"To make the fissile material," Colin explained, "he needs to develop an ability to enrich uranium."
"Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb," he said.
And here's where Colin swings into the "aluminum tubes" fairy tale and briefly brushes up against the truth before getting back on message.
Saddam is so determined, he told the audience, "that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries, even after inspections resumed."
"By now," Colin said, "just about everyone has heard of these tubes, and we all know that there are differences of opinion."
"There is controversy about what these tubes are for," he admitted.
"Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium," he said.
"Other experts and the Iraqis themselves," he said, "argue that they are really to produce the rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket launcher."
"Let me tell you what is not controversial about these tubes," Colin told the audience.
"First, all the experts who have analyzed the tubes in our possession agree that they can be adapted for centrifuge use," he said.
"Second," he continued, "Iraq had no business buying them for any purpose.
"They are banned for Iraq," he said.
"I am no expert on centrifuge tubes," Colin said, "but just as an old Army trooper, I can tell you a couple of things: First, it strikes me as quite odd that these tubes are manufactured to a tolerance that far exceeds U.S. requirements for comparable rockets," he said.
"Maybe Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than we do," he advised. "But I don't think so," he added.
"Second," Colin continued, "we actually have examined tubes from several different batches that were seized clandestinely before they reached Baghdad."
"What we notice," he said, "in these different batches is a progression to higher and higher levels of specification, including, in the latest batch, an anodized coating on extremely smooth inner and outer surfaces."
"Why would they continue refining the specifications?" he asked. "Go to all that trouble for something that, if it was a rocket, would soon be blown into shrapnel when it went off?"
And here once again, it gets worse as he goes along, because the high tolerance aluminum tubes are only part of the story, according to Colin.
"We also have intelligence from multiple sources that Iraq is attempting to acquire magnets and high-speed balancing machines;" he said. "Both items can be used in a gas centrifuge program to enrich uranium."
"In 1999 and 2000," he noted, "Iraqi officials negotiated with firms in Romania, India, Russia and Slovenia for the purchase of a magnet production plant."
"Iraq wanted the plant," he said, "to produce magnets weighing 20 to 30 grams."
"That's the same weight as the magnets used in Iraq's gas centrifuge program before the Gulf War," he explained.
"This incident linked with the tubes," he warned, "is another indicator of Iraq's attempt to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program."
"Intercepted communications from mid-2000 through last summer," Colin said, "show that Iraq front companies sought to buy machines that can be used to balance gas centrifuge rotors."
"One of these companies also had been involved in a failed effort in 2001," he said, "to smuggle aluminum tubes into Iraq."
Now correct me if I am wrong, but the next statement does not indicate to me that Colin never believed Saddam posed a nuclear threat.
"People will continue to debate this issue," he said, "but there is no doubt in my mind, these elicit procurement efforts show that Saddam Hussein is very much focused on putting in place the key missing piece from his nuclear weapons program, the ability to produce fissile material."
"He also has been busy trying to maintain the other key parts of his nuclear program," he advised, "particularly his cadre of key nuclear scientists," he said
"It is noteworthy that, over the last 18 months," Colin continued, "Saddam Hussein has paid increasing personal attention to Iraq's top nuclear scientists, a group that the governmental-controlled press calls openly, his nuclear mujahedeen."
"He regularly exhorts them and praises their progress," he added, "Progress toward what end?"
And then there is the little matter of the infamous trailers. Colin had a lot to say on this topic during his presentation at the UN.
"One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons," he said, "is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents."
Next, he went on to share what they had learned about the trailers from "eye witness accounts."
"We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," he advised.
"The trucks and train cars are easily moved," he said, "and are designed to evade detection by inspectors."
"In a matter of months," he explained, "they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War."
Had I been watching this speech live, I know I would have thought, "Wow."
According to Colin, four eyewitness sources confirmed that Saddam had these mobile biological research laboratories.
Here he used the word "know" again.
"We know," he said, "that Iraq has at lest seven of these mobile biological agent factories."
"The truck-mounted ones have at least two or three trucks each," he said. "That means that the mobile production facilities are very few, perhaps 18 trucks that we know of--there may be more--but perhaps 18 that we know of," he advised.
A month after the war began, the administration announced that two weapons vans had been found in Iraq.
On May 21, 2003, in remarks after a meeting with Bahrain's Crown Prince Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, Colin was still rambling on about the damn trailers.
"The intelligence community has really looked hard at these vans," he said, "and we can find no other purpose for them."
"Although you can’t find actual germs on them, they have been cleaned and we don’t know whether they have been used for that purpose or not, but they were certainly designed and constructed for that purpose," he assured his audience.
"And we have taken our time on this one because we wanted to make sure we got it right," he said.
"And the intelligence community, I think," he said, "is convinced now that that’s the purpose they served."
The next day (May 22, 2003), during an Interview with French television, Colin elaborated further on the great discovery of the "weapons vans."
"So far," he said, "we have found the biological weapons vans that I spoke about when I presented the case to the United Nations on the 5th of February, and there is no doubt in our minds," he said, "that those vans were designed for only one purpose, and that was to make biological weapons."
Remember that, there was no doubt in Colin's mind when it came to the trailers.
And who can forget Bush's remarks to Polish television on May 30, 2003, when he said, "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."
Bush said in an interview before leaving today on a seven-day trip to Europe and the Middle East, "They're illegal."
"They're against the United Nations resolutions," he continued, "and we've so far discovered two."
"And we'll find more weapons as time goes on," he said on live TV.
"But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons," he claimed, "they're wrong. We found them."
Throughout the summer of 2003, the Bush administration held up the trailers as trophies and called them "mobile biological laboratories." In late June 2003, Colin declared that the "confidence level is increasing" that the trailers were intended for biowarfare.
However, in the end, the "truth" emerged when the Iraqi Survey Group, which conducted the fruitless search for WMD, issued a report in September 2004 that said the trailers were "impractical for biological agent production," lacking 11 components that would be crucial for making bioweapons. Instead, the report said, the trailers were "almost certainly designed and built for the generation of hydrogen."
But here we come to find out, the administration knew the trailer tale was a big lie, and Bush knew it while he was running his mouth in Poland.
On April 12, 2006, the Washington Post reported that a "secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons."
"Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission," the Post said, "transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement."
But getting back to Colin's speech at the UN, when trying to sell the war, Colin went so far as to tell the world exactly what Saddam was up to with the "weapons vans."
"Ladies and gentlemen," he told the audience, "these are sophisticated facilities."
They can produce anthrax and botulinum toxin, he said. "In fact," he advised, "they can produce enough dry biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people."
"We know from Iraq's past admissions," he said, "that it has successfully weaponized not only anthrax, but also other biological agents, including botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and ricin."
But Iraq's research efforts did not stop there, Colin warned the world.
"Saddam Hussein has investigated dozens of biological agents," he said, "causing diseases such as gas gangrene, plague, typhus, tetanus, cholera, camelpox and hemorrhagic fever, and he also has the wherewithal to develop smallpox."
As it turns out, the next line was a big selling point according to some members of Congress.
"The Iraqi regime has also developed ways to disburse lethal biological agents," he warned, "widely and discriminately into the water supply, into the air."
"For example," he said, "Iraq had a program to modify aerial fuel tanks for Mirage jets."
And he even had a video of an Iraqi test flight obtained by UNSCOM some years ago, he said, that showed an Iraqi F-1 Mirage jet aircraft.
"Note the spray coming from beneath the Mirage;" he pointed out, "that is 2,000 liters of simulated anthrax that a jet is spraying."
"There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons," he said, "and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more."
"And," Colin warned, "he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction."
The next line was another hit with the crowd, when it came to selling the war.
"If biological weapons seem too terrible to contemplate," Colin said, "chemical weapons are equally chilling."
He said, "Saddam Hussein has never accounted for vast amounts of chemical weaponry: 550 artillery shells with mustard gas, 30,000 empty munitions and enough precursors to increase his stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents."
Colin then pulled out photos and said, "I'm going to show you a small part of a chemical complex called al-Moussaid, a site that Iraq has used for at least three years to transship chemical weapons from production facilities out to the field."
"In May 2002," he said, "our satellites photographed the unusual activity in this picture."
"Here we see cargo vehicles are again at this transshipment point, and we can see that they are accompanied by a decontamination vehicle associated with biological or chemical weapons activity," he pointed out
"What makes this picture significant," he explained, "is that we have a human source who has corroborated that movement of chemical weapons occurred at this site at that time."
"So it's not just the photo," he said, "and it's not an individual seeing the photo."
It's the photo and then the knowledge of an individual being brought together to make the case, he advised.
I have to admit that this story sounds believable, and it would be easy to prove as well. Colin can simply produce the photographer and then follow up with the "human source."
Next, he told the world about all the chemical weapons Saddam was hoarding.
"Our conservative estimate," Colin said, "is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent."
"That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets," he advised.
"Even the low end of 100 tons of agent," he continued, "would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan."
And on top of that, Colin said, "We have sources who tell us that he recently has authorized his field commanders to use them."
"He wouldn't be passing out the orders," he informed the world, "if he didn't have the weapons or the intent to use them."
A thought just occurred to me, I wonder if Saddam was watching this dog and pony show live as Colin was performing. If he was, he no doubt told anybody within ear shot, that the Bush administration sure had a lot of gall calling him a liar.
Evelyn Pringle
This week I read an article by Robert Sheer, that said former Secretary of State Colin Powell now says that he and his department’s top experts never believed that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat, but that Bush followed misleading advice from Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim.
To that I say, not so fast Mr. Powell, the time to come clean has long passed. In fact, the window of truth-telling time for you ended when the first US soldier was killed in Iraq.
This admission proves that Colin knew the truth and could have stopped the freight train long before it made it to Iraq.
Picture this. The day before Congress is to vote on the resolution, Colin Powell, the only Bush administration official with any hands-on experience with war, schedules a public news conference on all the major television networks, and says, "Saddam does not pose an imminent threat. I do not believe we need to go to war in Iraq, and I am quitting my job today because the administration is about to engage us in a war I cannot support."
Think about that for a minute. And then think about how many members of Congress would have voted differently if Colin Powell had stepped up to the plate.
But no, he just kept right on lying. For whatever reason, it matters not.
Mr. Sheer asked Colin about the Niger statement in Bush’s State of the Union speech.
"That was a big mistake," Colin said. "It should never have been in the speech."
"I didn’t need Wilson to tell me that there wasn’t a Niger connection," he told Mr. Sheer.
"He didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know," Colin said. "I never believed it."
When Mr. Sheer asked why Bush played up the nuclear threat, he responded like a little kid tattling on another kid to save his own butt, and pointed the finger at the vice president. "That was all Cheney," he said.
That dog won't hunt. The fact is, of the liars who worked the hardest at selling the case for war, Colin Powell holds the title for giving the longest sales pitch on record when it comes to the nuclear threat, and for that matter, for all WMD.
Who among us can forget the tune Powell was singing when he took center stage at the UN on February 5, 2003, and started his speech by swearing to the truth of the evidence he was about to present.
"My colleagues," he told the world on live TV, "every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources."
"These are not assertions," he continued.
"What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence," he said, "I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources."
Here's where Colin tells us about a big find by intelligence officials in Iraq at the home of a nuclear scientist.
"When they searched the home of an Iraqi nuclear scientist," he said, "they uncovered roughly 2,000 pages of documents."
To prove this "fact" Colin pulled out a few visuals. "You see them here being brought out of the home and placed in U.N. hands," he told the audience.
"Some of the material is classified and related to Iraq's nuclear program," he added.
Next, Colin presented a litany of "facts" about Saddam's nuclear threat. "Let me turn now to nuclear weapons," he said.
"We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons program," he warned.
"On the contrary," he continued, "we have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons."
"To fully appreciate the challenge that we face today," he said, "remember that, in 1991, the inspectors searched Iraq's primary nuclear weapons facilities for the first time."
"And they found nothing to conclude that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program," he added.
"But based on defector information in May of 1991," he advised, "Saddam Hussein's lie was exposed."
The next comment is particularly amusing as Colin inserts the word "truth."
"In truth," he said, "Saddam Hussein had a massive clandestine nuclear weapons program that covered several different techniques to enrich uranium, including electromagnetic isotope separation, gas centrifuge, and gas diffusion."
"Saddam Hussein already possesses two out of the three key components needed to build a nuclear bomb," he said.
"He has a cadre of nuclear scientists with the expertise," he added, "and he has a bomb design."
"Since 1998, his efforts to reconstitute his nuclear program have been focused on acquiring the third and last component," Colin said, "sufficient fissile material to produce a nuclear explosion."
"To make the fissile material," Colin explained, "he needs to develop an ability to enrich uranium."
"Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb," he said.
And here's where Colin swings into the "aluminum tubes" fairy tale and briefly brushes up against the truth before getting back on message.
Saddam is so determined, he told the audience, "that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries, even after inspections resumed."
"By now," Colin said, "just about everyone has heard of these tubes, and we all know that there are differences of opinion."
"There is controversy about what these tubes are for," he admitted.
"Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium," he said.
"Other experts and the Iraqis themselves," he said, "argue that they are really to produce the rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket launcher."
"Let me tell you what is not controversial about these tubes," Colin told the audience.
"First, all the experts who have analyzed the tubes in our possession agree that they can be adapted for centrifuge use," he said.
"Second," he continued, "Iraq had no business buying them for any purpose.
"They are banned for Iraq," he said.
"I am no expert on centrifuge tubes," Colin said, "but just as an old Army trooper, I can tell you a couple of things: First, it strikes me as quite odd that these tubes are manufactured to a tolerance that far exceeds U.S. requirements for comparable rockets," he said.
"Maybe Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than we do," he advised. "But I don't think so," he added.
"Second," Colin continued, "we actually have examined tubes from several different batches that were seized clandestinely before they reached Baghdad."
"What we notice," he said, "in these different batches is a progression to higher and higher levels of specification, including, in the latest batch, an anodized coating on extremely smooth inner and outer surfaces."
"Why would they continue refining the specifications?" he asked. "Go to all that trouble for something that, if it was a rocket, would soon be blown into shrapnel when it went off?"
And here once again, it gets worse as he goes along, because the high tolerance aluminum tubes are only part of the story, according to Colin.
"We also have intelligence from multiple sources that Iraq is attempting to acquire magnets and high-speed balancing machines;" he said. "Both items can be used in a gas centrifuge program to enrich uranium."
"In 1999 and 2000," he noted, "Iraqi officials negotiated with firms in Romania, India, Russia and Slovenia for the purchase of a magnet production plant."
"Iraq wanted the plant," he said, "to produce magnets weighing 20 to 30 grams."
"That's the same weight as the magnets used in Iraq's gas centrifuge program before the Gulf War," he explained.
"This incident linked with the tubes," he warned, "is another indicator of Iraq's attempt to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program."
"Intercepted communications from mid-2000 through last summer," Colin said, "show that Iraq front companies sought to buy machines that can be used to balance gas centrifuge rotors."
"One of these companies also had been involved in a failed effort in 2001," he said, "to smuggle aluminum tubes into Iraq."
Now correct me if I am wrong, but the next statement does not indicate to me that Colin never believed Saddam posed a nuclear threat.
"People will continue to debate this issue," he said, "but there is no doubt in my mind, these elicit procurement efforts show that Saddam Hussein is very much focused on putting in place the key missing piece from his nuclear weapons program, the ability to produce fissile material."
"He also has been busy trying to maintain the other key parts of his nuclear program," he advised, "particularly his cadre of key nuclear scientists," he said
"It is noteworthy that, over the last 18 months," Colin continued, "Saddam Hussein has paid increasing personal attention to Iraq's top nuclear scientists, a group that the governmental-controlled press calls openly, his nuclear mujahedeen."
"He regularly exhorts them and praises their progress," he added, "Progress toward what end?"
And then there is the little matter of the infamous trailers. Colin had a lot to say on this topic during his presentation at the UN.
"One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons," he said, "is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents."
Next, he went on to share what they had learned about the trailers from "eye witness accounts."
"We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," he advised.
"The trucks and train cars are easily moved," he said, "and are designed to evade detection by inspectors."
"In a matter of months," he explained, "they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War."
Had I been watching this speech live, I know I would have thought, "Wow."
According to Colin, four eyewitness sources confirmed that Saddam had these mobile biological research laboratories.
Here he used the word "know" again.
"We know," he said, "that Iraq has at lest seven of these mobile biological agent factories."
"The truck-mounted ones have at least two or three trucks each," he said. "That means that the mobile production facilities are very few, perhaps 18 trucks that we know of--there may be more--but perhaps 18 that we know of," he advised.
A month after the war began, the administration announced that two weapons vans had been found in Iraq.
On May 21, 2003, in remarks after a meeting with Bahrain's Crown Prince Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, Colin was still rambling on about the damn trailers.
"The intelligence community has really looked hard at these vans," he said, "and we can find no other purpose for them."
"Although you can’t find actual germs on them, they have been cleaned and we don’t know whether they have been used for that purpose or not, but they were certainly designed and constructed for that purpose," he assured his audience.
"And we have taken our time on this one because we wanted to make sure we got it right," he said.
"And the intelligence community, I think," he said, "is convinced now that that’s the purpose they served."
The next day (May 22, 2003), during an Interview with French television, Colin elaborated further on the great discovery of the "weapons vans."
"So far," he said, "we have found the biological weapons vans that I spoke about when I presented the case to the United Nations on the 5th of February, and there is no doubt in our minds," he said, "that those vans were designed for only one purpose, and that was to make biological weapons."
Remember that, there was no doubt in Colin's mind when it came to the trailers.
And who can forget Bush's remarks to Polish television on May 30, 2003, when he said, "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."
Bush said in an interview before leaving today on a seven-day trip to Europe and the Middle East, "They're illegal."
"They're against the United Nations resolutions," he continued, "and we've so far discovered two."
"And we'll find more weapons as time goes on," he said on live TV.
"But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons," he claimed, "they're wrong. We found them."
Throughout the summer of 2003, the Bush administration held up the trailers as trophies and called them "mobile biological laboratories." In late June 2003, Colin declared that the "confidence level is increasing" that the trailers were intended for biowarfare.
However, in the end, the "truth" emerged when the Iraqi Survey Group, which conducted the fruitless search for WMD, issued a report in September 2004 that said the trailers were "impractical for biological agent production," lacking 11 components that would be crucial for making bioweapons. Instead, the report said, the trailers were "almost certainly designed and built for the generation of hydrogen."
But here we come to find out, the administration knew the trailer tale was a big lie, and Bush knew it while he was running his mouth in Poland.
On April 12, 2006, the Washington Post reported that a "secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons."
"Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission," the Post said, "transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement."
But getting back to Colin's speech at the UN, when trying to sell the war, Colin went so far as to tell the world exactly what Saddam was up to with the "weapons vans."
"Ladies and gentlemen," he told the audience, "these are sophisticated facilities."
They can produce anthrax and botulinum toxin, he said. "In fact," he advised, "they can produce enough dry biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people."
"We know from Iraq's past admissions," he said, "that it has successfully weaponized not only anthrax, but also other biological agents, including botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and ricin."
But Iraq's research efforts did not stop there, Colin warned the world.
"Saddam Hussein has investigated dozens of biological agents," he said, "causing diseases such as gas gangrene, plague, typhus, tetanus, cholera, camelpox and hemorrhagic fever, and he also has the wherewithal to develop smallpox."
As it turns out, the next line was a big selling point according to some members of Congress.
"The Iraqi regime has also developed ways to disburse lethal biological agents," he warned, "widely and discriminately into the water supply, into the air."
"For example," he said, "Iraq had a program to modify aerial fuel tanks for Mirage jets."
And he even had a video of an Iraqi test flight obtained by UNSCOM some years ago, he said, that showed an Iraqi F-1 Mirage jet aircraft.
"Note the spray coming from beneath the Mirage;" he pointed out, "that is 2,000 liters of simulated anthrax that a jet is spraying."
"There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons," he said, "and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more."
"And," Colin warned, "he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction."
The next line was another hit with the crowd, when it came to selling the war.
"If biological weapons seem too terrible to contemplate," Colin said, "chemical weapons are equally chilling."
He said, "Saddam Hussein has never accounted for vast amounts of chemical weaponry: 550 artillery shells with mustard gas, 30,000 empty munitions and enough precursors to increase his stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents."
Colin then pulled out photos and said, "I'm going to show you a small part of a chemical complex called al-Moussaid, a site that Iraq has used for at least three years to transship chemical weapons from production facilities out to the field."
"In May 2002," he said, "our satellites photographed the unusual activity in this picture."
"Here we see cargo vehicles are again at this transshipment point, and we can see that they are accompanied by a decontamination vehicle associated with biological or chemical weapons activity," he pointed out
"What makes this picture significant," he explained, "is that we have a human source who has corroborated that movement of chemical weapons occurred at this site at that time."
"So it's not just the photo," he said, "and it's not an individual seeing the photo."
It's the photo and then the knowledge of an individual being brought together to make the case, he advised.
I have to admit that this story sounds believable, and it would be easy to prove as well. Colin can simply produce the photographer and then follow up with the "human source."
Next, he told the world about all the chemical weapons Saddam was hoarding.
"Our conservative estimate," Colin said, "is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent."
"That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets," he advised.
"Even the low end of 100 tons of agent," he continued, "would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan."
And on top of that, Colin said, "We have sources who tell us that he recently has authorized his field commanders to use them."
"He wouldn't be passing out the orders," he informed the world, "if he didn't have the weapons or the intent to use them."
A thought just occurred to me, I wonder if Saddam was watching this dog and pony show live as Colin was performing. If he was, he no doubt told anybody within ear shot, that the Bush administration sure had a lot of gall calling him a liar.
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