PressCoverage

let's see how they spin this one....


Bush misused Iraq intelligence: Senate report

By Randall Mikkelsen
Thu Jun 5, 1:23 PM ET

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080605/...qvAFcR_ssb.3QA

President George W. Bush and his top policymakers misstated Saddam Hussein's links to terrorism and ignored doubts among intelligence agencies about Iraq's arms programs as they made a case for war, the Senate intelligence committee reported on Thursday.

The report shows an administration that "led the nation to war on false premises," said the committee's Democratic Chairman, Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia. Several Republicans on the committee protested its findings as a "partisan exercise."

The committee studied major speeches by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials in advance of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and compared key assertions with intelligence available at the time.

Statements that Iraq had a partnership with al Qaeda were wrong and unsupported by intelligence, the report said. It said that Bush's and Cheney's assertions that Saddam was prepared to arm terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction for attacks on the United States contradicted available intelligence.

Such assertions had a strong resonance with a U.S. public, still reeling after al Qaeda's September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Polls showed that many Americans believed Iraq played a role in the attacks, even long after Bush acknowledged in September 2003 that there was no evidence Saddam was involved.

The report also said administration prewar statements on Iraq's weapons programs were backed up in most cases by available U.S. intelligence, but officials failed to reflect internal debate over those findings, which proved wrong.

... (continued)

PS: The committee voted 10-5 to approve the report, with two Republican lawmakers supporting it.

Harry Boy

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Harry Boy (Genius)

In The Absence Of Law And Order Society Will Surely Destroy Itself

scott c

No shock here....they both belong in jail IMHO......

Holy Diver

George W. Bush : Leagcy of Murder and Fear

You have killed our soldiers, and destroyed our great nations reputation. All for a bunch of lies.

You believed the lies, you retold them. You joked about not finding WMDs.

You have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people, displaced millions more.

You have given away BILLIONS of tax payers' money to contractors and merenaries. They answer to nobody.

You are responsibe for having no strategy, and not following the ones that military experts said you should. Instead, listening to the words of your top military advisors, who had never served in the military.

Your legacy will be of a complete Failure, your grade is an F MINUS. And the people in your cabinet and party have the fukcing BALLZ to cry partisan politics when someone call you and your crime family out. You people are a disgrace to our nation. YOu will have your day in court, just not now. Now you seem to think your power is limitless, and unchecked. We will see what happens when you become a private citizen again, and lose your power to pardon.


I hate you.

otis p. driftwood

From the same article:

"The committee finds itself once again consumed with political gamesmanship," the Republicans said. The effort to produce the report "has indeed resulted in a partisan exercise." They said, however, that the report demonstrated that Bush administration statements were backed by intelligence and "it was the intelligence that was faulty."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said: "We had the intelligence that we had, fully vetted, but it was wrong. We certainly regret that and we've taken measures to fix it."


Given the breakdowns in intelligence (there's a hanging curve for sure), it's not shocking. All this report does is cast blame on the intelligence sources--and it's still the same evidence they all saw.

The only one that really comes out ahead is Obama--which is probably about half of what Rockefeller was up to.

But the intelligence analysis and gathering this country has sucks. There's no pretty way to say it--it's sucked for a long time. We can't use certain people as informants or agents, they don't want to put actual people on the ground, too much reliance on spy satellites and so forth...etc etc.

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Holy Diver

This is the mantra of this administration

"The Buck stops THERE"

these guys accept zero % of the blame for anything.

otis p. driftwood

So...are you going to hold blameless the democrats who voted to authorize and continue to vote to fund?

And I'm not sure they're accepting zero blame. Maybe they are, I don't know...but if the intelligence was faulty....

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Stokes

Their assessment seems pretty on target to me, you (and others) have provided examples of various members of the admin overstating intelligence, or ignoring some possible contradictions in what they had and only stating that part that helped their cause (to drum up support for the war). I agree with this. I would also point out though that this is very different from falsifying intelligence or withholding intelligence from other decision makers, of which there is no evidence. It still sucks, don't get me wrong, and they deserve criticism for what they did.

This quote caught my intention, sums it up in a nutshell:

Also why would this be satisfying to you PC? I know you hate the administration for what they did, and all this is is a useless report. At the end of the day they won re-election, continued their policies until the end of their run (at least to mid-2008) and got away with everything they did scot-free (is that how you write "scot" in scot-free? Weird expression). If anything I would think this would be more frustrating.

otis p. driftwood

Yes, that's how. A play on the scottish people's reputation for being...cheap. Frugal. Thrifty. Cheap.
LOL

Actually, kind of a derogatory statement, and were there a similar one about certain other ethnic groups, it would probably be enough to get one in serious trouble with the PC police.

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Holy Diver

When the administration was 'leaking' stories to teh NY times, then quoting them as fact the next day, and threatening everyone with nuclear and biological attacks by Saddam Hussein....yeah, everyone was afraid. They succesfully played on your fear of 9-11 to invade Iraq with NO EVIDENCE.

I recall when the invasion was being debated, and was on the brink of happening. I talked to my parents (HUGE BUSH supporters, you have no idea) I told my mother that if we don't find WMDs there, it will destroy us. It wil ruin our credibilty on a global scale. I was pretty positive that they would turn up, but here we are......

Bottom line, we fed and overplayed the intel that we had. Heck, the CIA never even met 'curveball' the Germans had him. Rewatching Colin Powel's speech to the UN, its clear that HE was the only source. Anyone who claimed otherwise was outted, or called unamerican. They told you the smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud, and that the republicans were the only people wo could keep you safe.

every ounce of that is BULL$H!T.

NO the democrats are not blameless, they are spineless. They had a chance to stop the funding, and overspending for an endless war to stop a 'tactic'. I stepped off this boat about a year after the invasion, when it was clear that we had searched the country, and captured their leader. Yet nothing turned up.....

I hear you sheep say that truckloads of weapons are in Syria..blah...blah...blah...

Thats a frickin lie too. NOBODY KNOWS! because the CIA had exactly ZERO agents in Iraq, ZERO. How can you possibly know what they are doing when you have no people on the ground. If they are in Syria....why not invade there to get them and grab the evidence for this war? This kind of hearsay intel spin is what got us involved in this in the first place.

Backing the decision making of this administration is treason, and unamerican. YOU are the problem. Throwing blame at a misinformed congress, and american public is defending liars and war mongerers.