Posted on 11/02/2005 10:09:28 AM PST by Xanadu2112
The indictment of Lewis Libby on charges of lying to a grand jury about the outing of Valerie Wilson has focused attention on the lengths to which the Bush administration went in 2003 to try to distract the public from this central fact: American soldiers found a lot of things in Iraq, including a well-armed insurgency their bosses never anticipated, but they did not find weapons of mass destruction.
It's clear from the indictment that Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff formed the command bunker for this misdirection campaign. But there is a much larger issue than the question of what administration officials said about Iraq after the invasion - it's what they said about Iraq before the invasion. Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader, may have been grandstanding yesterday when he forced the Senate to hold a closed session on the Iraqi intelligence, but at least he gave the issue a much-needed push. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and George Tenet, to name a few leading figures, built support for the war by telling the world that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons, feverishly developing germ warfare devices and racing to build a nuclear bomb. Some of them, notably Mr. Cheney, the administration's doomsayer in chief, said Iraq had conspired with Al Qaeda and implied that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11.
Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee did a good bipartisan job of explaining that the intelligence in general was dubious, old and even faked by foreign sources. The panel said the analysts had suffered from groupthink. At the time, the highest-ranking officials in Washington were demanding evidence against Iraq.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3872201.stm
Also of interest:
http://www.iraqwatch.org/suppliers/update.htm
Hey the mushroom cloud went the way of cakewalk, oil will pay for everything and the road map to Israel/Palestine peace went through Baghdad.
The Times is full of BS, as usual. First they posit an Administration campaign to distract attention from WMDs - a theory they make up out of their own heads - then they put Cheney at the head of the campaign. Then they say Libby's indictment proves Cheney was at the head of this campaign. I say the Times is fantasizing.
When will Kristof acknowledge publically that Wilson didn't debunk the Niger documents - because Wilson never saw them?
Rock on!
Allah Snackbar!
Well said!
(insert additional kudos here)
"You might as well talk to the wall."
The Times is thicker than most walls.
You have to take the fight to their doorstep! They are openly pushing false statements as the truth and that is getting real old!
BTTT!
Go to Volume 3, page 97 and read about the 53 they found.
Annex F is titled Detailed Preliminary Assessment of Chemical Weapons Findings)
The 53 weapons are all considered pre 1991 weapons but still there were Chemical WMD weapons.
Suppose the NYT would print that in the "Letters to Editor" section? NOT.
Iraq Buries Warplanes To Hide Them From U.S. Aviation Week & Space Technology 08/11/2003, page 30 David A. Fulghum Washington Iraq buried Su-25s and MiG-25s to hide them from U.S. technical exploitation teams Underground Air Force U.S. teams from the Iraqi Survey Group still haven't found any Scud tactical ballistic missiles or obvious weapons of mass destruction, but they have uncovered a number of Su-25 ground attack and MiG-25 high-speed interceptor and reconnaissance aircraft (this Foxbat B was specialized for reconnaissance and electronic-intelligence gathering) buried at Taqqadum airfield west of Baghdad. Pictures of the discovery and excavation of this MiG-25 in July were recently shown during a Defense Intelligence Agency briefing at the Pentagon and then quickly made their way onto the Internet. Commenting on the pictures last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that U.S. investigators and technology exploitation teams had heard rumors that a "great many things had been buried, but we had not known where." It apparently took some time to find Iraqis who knew specifics about the hidden aircraft. "We'd been operating in that immediate vicinity for . . . 12-13 weeks and didn't know they were [there]," he said. Rumsfeld called the discovery a classic example of how easy it is to hide even something quite large. "Until you find somebody who tells you where to look, or until nature clears some sand away and exposes something over time, we're simply not going to know" all that the Iraqis hid before the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, he said. The photos, by U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. T. Collins are now posted on the Defense Dept.'s Internet news page. In a sequence of 13 photographs, the MiG25 emerges from underground with key areas wrapped in plastic coating to preserve them, and the twin vertical stabilizers covered in what appears to be camouflage netting. The aircraft apparently was buried after the wings were removed, but otherwise it looked in remarkably good condition prior to being towed away by a U.S. recovery team. Credit: USAF MSGT. T. COLLINS ========ps - I have two photos but do not know how to post jpg - can you tell me how?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5129314/
"At one of those [House] sessions in December 2002, the CIA listed evidence of Iraqs weapons of mass destruction. Unsure that Americans would find the information compelling, Bush turned to [CIA Director] Tenet. Its a slam-dunk case, Tenet replied, according to a recent book by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward."
Bump.
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