Steve, great suggestions...I hope you emailed this to Congressman Conyers. Keep up the good work.
Posted by emal at June 11, 2005 11:22 AMExcellent!
Posted by jillian at June 11, 2005 11:28 AMps I can't get the Gardner link to work anymore...maybe it is just me?????
Posted by at June 11, 2005 11:46 AMhttp://www.kucinich.us/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2959
I should have supported this guy...seems to be the only one in Washington with any balls to question the chimperor. Good luck Dennis.
Posted by at June 11, 2005 11:51 AMNtwthstndng th fct tht th "scrt" mm s smn ls's ssssmnt f wht ws hppnng r th rdcls ssrtns bng md tht ths s ctlly nws, ths nvlvd n plnnng ltmtly fllwd th crrct strtgy n rmvng th mdmn f Bghdd. Ths bjctng strnsly n thr dvtn t dhmmtd shldn't b srprsd tht ppl trly wr f wht's t stk n th wr n slmfscsm dn't cnsdr ths "rvltn" rlvnt.
[Editor: ignore=off]Bendito, You are just plain fucking stupid aren't you?
Posted by Vinnie at June 11, 2005 12:06 PMBendito, on its own terms, as an alleged part of the war on Islamofascist terror, the Iraq effort is entirely the wrong thing, and multiplies our enemies in that category, not lessens them. Our ally Mubarek of Egypt said the Iraqi invasion would creat 10,000 new bin Ladens, and we are facing a number of them there already, all the while creating more.
Posted by sofla at June 11, 2005 12:15 PMBendito, this was a betrayal of the American people. This memo is but exibit A in a case shows how bad the american people's trust was betrayed by the lying of the Bush adminstration. We were told about WMD's:false. Told about links to al Qaeda and terrorism: false. Lies. But even here, people like you will make the case that 'well he THOUGHT it was true' bull.
Here there is no pathetic out for the betrayal of trust: He said he didn't make up his mind about invading, and this memo, along with the testimony of Col. Gardiner, along with other pieces of evidence that can be pilled on: The Richard Clarke account, the Paul O'Neil account, the Bush ghost writers account, the Woodward thing, the implementation of the strategic information campaign to influence the media, and other things all can show how this likely was a lie and betrayal of our trust and that infact they wanted to go to war from the getgo. If Saddam had cooperated, if inspectors had continued and found nothing...he would of still gone to war. This is counter to his words that 'war was a last resort.'
Look at the polls my man: people obviously DONT understand what you mistakenly believe they understand. Tell me, if people really though that this was a central front on the fight against terrorism, do you honestly believe that the polls would show such lack of support or satisfaction with the war? Would majorities really say that the 'war was not worth it' like many do now? If they believed it so, they would definitely see the loss as worth it.
I think Americans are coming to realize how they were duped into this war, how their trust was betrayed by leaders who were looking for ways to succesfully supe their population into wanting this war by using lies and deceptions and scare-tactics.
So my man, do you honestly believe that this invasion has furthered the cause of US national security?
If we ignore the very serious aspect of HOW WE WERE FORCED to go to war, there is also the equally disturbing aspect of how this war has infact hurt the US national security, and made us less safe: Since this post is so long I will save it for a seperate post.
Posted by oyka1 at June 11, 2005 12:29 PMANOTHER TIDBIT, FROM KNIGHT-RIDDER:
Bush has decided to overthrow Hussein
By Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott
Posted on Wed, Feb. 13, 2002
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/special_packages/11809605.htm
WASHINGTON - President Bush has decided to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power and ordered the CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies to devise a combination of military, diplomatic and covert steps to achieve that goal, senior U.S. officials said Tuesday.
No military strike is imminent, but Bush has concluded that Saddam and his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs are such a threat to U.S. security that the Iraqi dictator must be removed, even if U.S. allies do not help, said the officials, who all spoke on condition of anonymity.
"This is not an argument about whether to get rid of Saddam Hussein. That debate is over. This is ... how you do it," a senior administration official said in an interview with Knight Ridder.
Bush also is dispatching Vice President Cheney next month on a tour of 11 Middle East nations, including many of Iraq's neighbors, whose leaders are leery of a U.S. attack on Baghdad.
While the mission's purpose has been portrayed publicly as sounding out Middle Eastern leaders on Iraq policy, Cheney in fact will tell them that the United States intends to get rid of Saddam and his regime, several top Bush aides said.
"He's not going to beg for support. He's going to inform them that the president's decision has been made and will be carried out, and if they want some input into how and when it's carried out, now's the time for them to speak up," one senior official said.
Secretary of State Colin Powell signaled Bush's new approach last Thursday, telling a House of Representatives committee that "regime change" in Iraq "is something the United States might have to do alone."
There's also this memo from the files Paul O'Neill
was allowed to take with him, showing a developed interest in toppling Saddam on 1/31/01:
I'm back.
On why this has hurt our national security
To be brief:
The war diminishes our credibility and the credibility of our intelligence when it comes to having to deal with other problem spots (North Korea, Iran etc..). We've damaged relations with allies who will still be allies but enlisting active support for other things will be infinitely more difficult. Our prestige and role as moral leader rightfully comes into question.
The war has strenghened global terrorism and has put us in even greter risk of terrorist attack. The links between Iraq and al Qaeda were were believed tenuous at the time and known to be bull now; now the presence of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, plus new ones that did not exist previously, is no longer in doubt. Recruitment into terrorist organizations is believed to have increased and given the emnity that has only increased among muslims (who are leaping from moderation to fanaticism at greater rates), that is no surprise. Iraq now IS the new terrorist training ground like Afghanistan was during the 1980's. This new generation of young and battle hardened and experienced terrorist operatives will spread around the world like the mujahadeen trained in Afghanistan (oddly with much US assistance and training) spread to become the Taliban, al Qaeda, and other problems that were or remain problems. That is BLOWBACK and it is happening AGAIN.
Third, we've expended the lives of countless US servicepersons, expened billions and billions of dollars in US taxpayers money, all on an adventure that has not only proved a disaster and distraction on the war on terror but has made us less safe. This is money that we NEED. We are missing billions of dollars that this country needs domestically and that we need to fight the ACTUAL war on terror.
Forth, we have further damaged our ability to defend ourselves, our interests, by empoverishing our treasury, by vastly diminishing the strenght of the US military - through deaths and injuries in the service of this war and by decreasing the number of recruits that ARE joining the military. Recruitment is WAY down: by 20something percent even by standards and quotas that have been lowered. This trend is a DIRECT result of the war in Iraq, I challenge you to tell me what else it could be. In fact all of the above is caused by the Iraq War and Bush's absurd insistence on it. You and Bush and all those who promoted and still sing the praises of this war are irresponsible and are not qualified to lead this country. Your policies are dangerous and cause harm to this country and its people.
Posted by oyka1 at June 11, 2005 01:04 PMSam Gardiner can also speak to the section of the memo that discusses the lack of concern about the aftermath. Afterall he had been asked to help with the post-war planning before the war started and had even been in Iraq in the first months after the invasion.
I think one thing that must be pounded again and again is that this bunch is incompetent as well as outright liars. That's why Iraq is such a mess today.
Posted by Mary at June 11, 2005 01:39 PMDSM or not, it is and has been common knowledge for a long time that Bush had his sights on Saddam/Iraq from the outset of his "presidency". At least half of the American public have known this, and now a fair % of the rest of them understand the false premise of this War. As much as I am outraged by this deception and subsequent loss of American GI life in Iraq, I hold no hope that the GOP Congress and it's handmaiden, the Corporate Media, will turn this latest revelation into what it should rightfully result in......impeachment of George W. Bush.
Posted by T2 at June 11, 2005 01:51 PMFor the lack of nothing much else going on today, I too, wanted to construct a reply to Bendito as others have, but then I figure what a waste of time it would be considering that Vinnie got it right.
Posted by Simp the Biodiesel Pimp at June 11, 2005 01:52 PMI hope this post, as well as some of the above comments, are sent to Conyer's office. They need to be.
Posted by KC at June 11, 2005 01:52 PMthose involved in planning ultimately followed the correct strategy in removing the madman of Baghdad.
..."removing the madman"... as opposed to "selling the madman weapons" like previous Republican administrations did?
Posted by glenstonecottage at June 11, 2005 02:05 PMThe Afghanistan money transfer is dealt with in depth in John Dean's book WORSE THAN WATERGATE. As he points out, much of what Bush did in the run-up to the Iraqi war was much worse than Nixon's Watergate crimes. A must read for all.
Posted by Maureen Hay at June 11, 2005 02:31 PMI hope all those that believe Bush and Co. lied to us about the war in Iraq will stick with Rep Conyers for the long haul. It time to call Bush out and when all the evidence is in call for his impeachment period. We cannot pretend anymore this war was not about Hussein,but about there resources. We must stick with this issue know matter the attacks cause you know they are going to come. We must do whatever is necessary cause now is the time.
Posted by smith9898 at June 11, 2005 02:38 PMmaybe the best approach is to get the repugs to counter the dsm by getting them to try to prove that what they are claiming is true - i.e. that war was the last option.
perhaps we can take a leaf out of the democracts.com playbook and offer $1000 to the person who 'leaks' an internal repug memo which best proves that they really were fighting for peace. that should be pretty easy right? if war really was the last option, then there should be a mile-long paper trail of all their noble efforts.
i know that the administration is notoriously leak-proof, but surely that only pertains to adverse leaks.
i hereby challenge any bush insiders to leak the smoking gun memo which proves that their Dear Leader is actually a peacemonger who had exhausted all other options.
Posted by lukery at June 11, 2005 03:03 PMSo nice to see a Troll dipped in his own pussy puke
keep up the good work
Peter in Oregon
It's doubtful anyone despises the chimp, his cabal, and his war as much as I do. My position established, the very simple defense to everything pointed out in this blog, i.e., establishing the coalition, etc., is that Bushco didn't know if diplomacy would result in neutralizing Hussein, so it was necessary to plan for a military encounter and implement, well in advance, those steps necessary to win. (Whew! Long sentence.) "Would you have us wait until the clock stopped ticking to act on an alternative plan? He who hesitates is lost!"
This blog is barking up the wrong tree. IMO, the concentration must remain on 'the intelligence was fixed to fit' a policy already decided upon.
Posted by Ed in So Calif at June 11, 2005 04:41 PMDon't forget the early memo to Paul O'Neill from Cheney's office that addressed Iraqi oil revenues long before 9/11
Posted by Linda at June 11, 2005 04:49 PMi don't mind being lied to. the president is my moral and intellectual superior so if he says he must kill tens of thousands of men, women and children to erase his oedipal obsession, that's good enough for me. at least he didn't put his pee-pee in a fat girl's mouth.
Posted by bendover at June 11, 2005 05:17 PMgood work, benito; someone has to defend my family.
Posted by king fahd, near death at June 11, 2005 05:22 PMLet's also remember that the National Intelligence Memo on Iraq was not even requested until the marketing campaign for going to war with Iraq was in full swing for months. So the desire to go to war with and a full scale information campaign to pursuade people to go along with it came before the desire to find out what we estimated the threat at. Bush was not the person who requested the NIE. His mind was made up. The NIE was requested by Congress, not the administration.
Also remember that the one physical piece of evidence we had was the aluminum tubes. They were also attempts to get documents that said Iraq was seeking uranium, but the only physical evidence we had was the tubes. BEFORE 9/11 experts at the department of energy were questioning the tubes appicability for nuclear weapons programs. This is why the uranium documents became so critical. Tubes + uranium would be a vastly stronger argument. This is why even after being told not to use the Niger story they did. This is why even though the Niger documents were transparent forgeries, they still used them. Also the cia doesn't know how to build nuclear weapons, but the intelligence experts and scientists in the Energy Department too. There appears to have a been a concerted effort to keep the information the CIA had away from the Energy Department specialists.
When ISIS questioned the purpose of the tubes, the report said
The debate over the purpose of the tubing left some dissenters perplexed. "Always the same answer, no matter what the objections were," one said. Inevitably, this situation led to speculation. Did the CIA have information about the tubes it was not sharing to protect important secrets? Or was the CIA arguing a view not really based in the facts? The recent statements emanating from the CIA suggest that it is not as certain about the intended purpose of this shipment as first stated.
It concluded with:
One hopes that the CIA has special intelligence information supporting its case about the intended use of these tubes. This possibility, however, appears increasingly remote. The British government said recently in its assessment of Iraq's WMD programs that "there is no definitive intelligence evidence that [the specialized aluminum] is destined for a nuclear programme."
The Administration needs to make more information available. The dimensions, specifications, and any other distinctive characteristics of the tubing should be released. Other information tying these tubes to centrifuges should be provided, while adequately protecting intelligence sources and methods. Otherwise, the Administration should accept that many states and members of the public will question both its conclusions and intentions.
Here is the ISIS report
Posted by KevinNYC at June 11, 2005 05:40 PMhttp://www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/aluminumtubes.html
Posted by KevinNYC at June 11, 2005 05:43 PMBush latest news conference with Poodle Blair again blatantly lied. To say he did not wanted to attack Iraq as he would have use war as the last resort, blablabla…..
If he really wanted to go to the UN first, that was a move from Colin Powel; you would not have all our militaries at the Iraqi’s borders. Like he would have return all back home. He does think we are all that stupid.
I saw today “Liberty Bound”, on Free speech TV, that asked all questions that I still have, from his being elected by the Supreme Court that makes him more an fascist than a democratic elected president, his 9/11 knowledge and behavior, The FAA response to the hijacked of 3 planes and bush quick declaration of war on “Terrorism”. The list are there of all the inconsistency of all. The patriot act enact quickly, that had people arrest for just talking to loud on a train, someone question for sending a E-mail or another for turning his back at a college while king george was the speakers.
It also mention that Saddam, the darling of the CIA while he commit the killing of his oppositions, did commit the greatest sin. What Saddam did that our government did not like was that he nationalized the oils fields. This was one of the reasons that he was attacked. As well has king george wanted to finish what his father had started.
They were never WMD’s in Iraq and they knew it.
I hope this memo is the smoking gun. We cannot afford another 3 1/2 years. He has to be impeached. But I have my doubt about it.
Here is part of an interesting article about the ghost writer of a Dubya autobiography (who was taken off the assignment, which was finished by Karen Hughes).
"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade·.if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."
"According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House - ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."
"Bush's circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: "They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches."
Wonder if Herskowitz would testify? You can read the article at:
> http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1028-01.htm
Victoria
Not only had the decision to go to war been made in July 2002, the war had already begun:
=====================================
How U.S. softened Iraq's defenses
Michael R. Gordon NYT
Monday, July 21, 2003
Airstrikes starting in mid-2002 laid the foundation for war
LAS VEGAS U.S. air war commanders carried out a comprehensive plan to disrupt Iraq's military command and control system before the Iraq war, according to an internal briefing on the conflict by the senior allied air war commander.
Known as Southern Focus, the plan called for attacks on the network of fiber-optic cable that Saddam Hussein's government used to transmit military communications, as well as airstrikes on key command centers, radars and other important military assets.
The strikes, which were conducted from mid-2002 into the first few months of 2003, were justified publicly at the time as a reaction to Iraqi violations of a no-flight zone that the United States and Britain established in southern Iraq.
But Lieutenant General Michael Moseley, the chief allied war commander, said the attacks also had laid the foundations for the military campaign against the Baghdad government.
Let the trurh be told to the public in explicit detail, and let it be reported in all media in explicit detail. The bill must be paid.
Posted by patience at June 11, 2005 09:45 PMRecently another leaked British memo from the summer of 2002 referred to the stepped-up bombing reported in the article cited above, characterizing it as an effort to provoke Saddam into retaliating and providing a casus belli for the war. It was probably a bit of both -- softening up Iraq for invasion, with the possible bonus of provoking a response that could justify the war as "self-defense" on the part of the U.S. and Britain.
Posted by Nell at June 11, 2005 09:47 PMNell,
"The strikes, which were conducted from mid-2002 into the first few months of 2003, were justified publicly at the time as a reaction to Iraqi violations of a no-flight zone that the United States and Britain established in southern Iraq."
This is a non-story. Our aircraft were fired upon every day during OSW. In my opinion, we demonstrated restraint every day that we didn't shoot back. We often responded though, in much the same way as you reported - which I think was justified. They were violating what they agreed to, and were properly held accountable for it. Even more than that, any strike we made was done so in order to protect participants in OSW. To not respond would have been irresponsible for several reasons. This sort of thing had been going on for a long time - including well before Bush was even president. The media didn't care about it because it really wasn't news (at least until things with Iraq escalated).
So... even if it was target softening (with the OSW escuse), it still means very little - if anything. Military planning and even target softening was responsible and appropriate. Our military needs to be prepared for what it may be sent to do. This in no way shows that we were on an unavoidable path towards war. At most it shows that we were preparing for it - which everybody knew anyway.
Posted by Andy at June 12, 2005 12:25 AMAndy, when you say "we", were you a pilot doing 'enforcement of the no-fly zones'? What is OSW?
Google and read the New York Times story I clipped. Moseley admits the 'self-defense during no-fly patrols' was just a cover story.
The stepped-up bombing that went on from mid-2002 had nothing to do with self-defense; it was targeted, offensive bombing designed to take out a whole range of facilities with the aim of paving the way for an invasion. An invasion that was not sanctioned by any international law at all, a war of aggression.
The no-fly enforcement to begin with was not UN-sanctioned, but a unilateral campaign by the U.S. and British.
The air campaign of summer and fall 2002 was another level of criminal aggression. "Target softening" is neither responsible nor appropriate, and is very strong evidence that an invasion had already decided on (and that war against Iraq had never really ended).
Posted by Nell at June 12, 2005 04:29 PMSorry about that. I was not a pilot. Did not mean to mislead. I did participate in 2000 and 2001 as an aircraft avionics technician. OSW stands for Operation Southern Watch.
Posted by Andy at June 12, 2005 07:35 PMOk.... I was forced away momentarily. Now to the point. Even if we didn't know if we were going to launch the war, and we really were trying to avoid it (as the public was led to believe), I still don't think that taking some preparatory action means anything. (Especially when we had a legitimate operation going on right there at the time.) It may mean something to someone who already believes that we had made our decision, but it does nothing to prove it.
Posted by Andy at June 12, 2005 07:51 PM