| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Politix |
| Of 'Lies' and WMD |
| 2004-07-12 |
The Senate vindicates President Bush and exposes Joe Wilson as a partisan fraud. "The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities."So reads Conclusion 83 of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar intelligence on Iraq. The Committee likewise found no evidence of pressure to link Iraq to al Qaeda. So it appears that some of the claims about WMD used by the Bush Administration and others to argue for war in Iraq were mistaken because they were based on erroneous information provided by the CIA. A few apologies would seem to be in order. Allegations of lying or misleading the nation to war are about the most serious charge that can be leveled against a President. But according to this unanimous study, signed by Jay Rockefeller and seven other Democrats, those frequent charges from prominent Democrats and the media are without merit. Or to put it more directly, if President Bush was "lying" about WMD, then so was Mr. Rockefeller when he relied on CIA evidence to claim in October 2002 that Saddam Hussein's weapons "pose a very real threat to America." Also lying at the time were John Kerry, John Edwards, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and so on. Yet Mr. Rockefeller is still suggesting on the talk shows, based on nothing but inference and innuendo, that there was undue political Bush "pressure" on CIA analysts. The West Virginia Democrat also asserted on Friday that Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith has been running a rogue intelligence operation that is "not lawful." Mr. Feith's shop has spent more than 1,800 hours responding to queries from the Senate and has submitted thousands of pages of documents--none of which supports such a charge. Shouldn't even hyper-partisan Senators have to meet some minimum standard of honesty? In fact, the report shows that one of the first allegations of false intelligence was itself a distortion: Mr. Bush's allegedly misleading claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had been seeking uranium ore from Africa. The Senate report notes that Presidential accuser and former CIA consultant Joe Wilson returned from his trip to Africa with no information that cast serious doubt on such a claim; and that, contrary to Mr. Wilson's public claims, his wife (a CIA employee) was involved in helping arrange his mission. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #4 I tried to post an article (actually just comments) about a Fox News interview with John Loftus. He said that Khadafi will speak in front of the IAEA in September and give evidence/information about Khan's Nuclear Black Market. Loftus then went on the say that the Intelligence buzz is that Khadafi will also state that Saddam outsourced his WMD programs to Libya in order to avoid scrutiny. Did anyone else catch this show yesterday? I can't find a transcript. |
| Posted by: danking70 2004-07-12 3:10:32 PM |
| #3 If the Senator from West Virginia proposes an amendment to an Intelligence appropriations bill for heavy duty aluminum foil, I'll be even more worried than I am now. Which conclusion held the Senate Committee on Intelligence liable for hearing the same briefings but apparently sitting on any concerns until it was politically convenient to raise them? Must be in here somewhere...flip, flip... |
| Posted by: eLarson 2004-07-12 2:16:14 PM |
| #2 When Sen. Rockerfeller talks about pressure, he's talking about the mental telepathy kind. Bush is pressuring these agencies with his patented Mind Beam from that big antenna we have on the moon. |
| Posted by: danking70 2004-07-12 12:39:45 PM |
| #1 between Byrd and Jay "dumb as a bag of" Rocks, West Virginia has a lot to apologize for....Now if we could only get rid of "rail accident" Boxer here in CA |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-07-12 12:33:02 PM |