Posted on 01/30/2004 2:22:22 AM PST by kattracks
THIS WEEK two separate investigations have cleared President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair of intentionally deceiving the world about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities. Yet those who have charged Bush and Blair with such duplicity have not even slowed the flow of accusations.
In Britain, Lord Hutton, tasked with investigating the charge that Blair’s government had knowingly inserted false intelligence into its dossier on Iraq, concluded that the charge was entirely false. He found that the intelligence claim — that Iraq could launch a weapons of mass destruction attack within 45 minutes — came from Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service and had been approved by the heads of four British intelligence agencies before it was put into the Iraq dossier.
David Kay, a former United Nations weapons inspector who took over America’s hunt for Iraqi WMD last year, said this week that President Bush’s decision to go to war was based on the same faulty intelligence that had persuaded President Bill Clinton, France, Germany and United Nations weapons inspectors that Saddam Hussein had possessed WMDs.
The CIA fully believed that Saddam had weapons we now know he almost certainly did not have, Kay said, and the CIA had believed this throughout the 1990s. He found no evidence that anyone from the White House pressured anyone at the CIA to exaggerate weapons claims. “And never — not in a single case — was the explanation, ‘I was pressured to do this,’ ” Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. “The explanation was very often, ‘The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there’s another explanation for it.’ ”
He also added, and this is critical, that Iraq was potentially more dangerous before the war than had been believed. “(T)here was little control over Iraq’s weapons capabilities. I think it shows that Iraq was a very dangerous place. The country had the technology, the ability to produce, and there were terrorist groups passing through the country — and no central control.”
Hussein trying to build illegal weapons programs while terrorist groups passed through his country and may have had access to easily available weapons-making infrastructure? It’s not precisely what the intelligence services of the United States, Britain, France, Germany and the United Nations believed. But it proves that Saddam was violating U.N. sanctions and that he had terrorist connections — two perfectly justifiable causes of war.
The bias of the media is represented in silence and spin.
THIS WEEK two separate investigations have cleared President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair of intentionally deceiving the world about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities. Yet those who have charged Bush and Blair with such duplicity have not even slowed the flow of accusations.
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Americans now have access to primary news sources.
Walter Cronkite and Jane Fonda no longer control the "news".
This is not Vietnam.
Truth and justice, bless our troops ~
and Veterans ~ ping!
Bump to that!
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