The Bush Admin's Top 10 Lies about War and Terrorism

[SquishyDeadBody]

<center> The Bush administration's
Top 10 Lies
about war and terrorism<center>

<center>

<center>
<center>WHO ME?<center>

Note: There is originally 40 but 10 is a long enough read.
You can find the other 30 at http://www.citypages.com/databank/24/1182/article11417.asp
for those of you are brave enough to read all that.

1) The administration was not bent on war with Iraq from 9/11 onward

Throughout the year leading up to war, the White House publicly maintained that the U.S. took weapons inspections seriously, that diplomacy would get its chance, that Saddam had the opportunity to prevent a U.S. invasion. The most pungent and concise evidence to the contrary comes from the president's own mouth. According to Time's March 31 road-to-war story, Bush popped in on national security adviser Condi Rice one day in March 2002, interrupting a meeting on UN sanctions against Iraq. Getting a whiff of the subject matter, W peremptorily waved his hand and told her, "Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out." Clare Short, Tony Blair's former secretary for international development, recently lent further credence to the anecdote. She told the London Guardian that Bush and Blair made a secret pact a few months afterward, in the summer of 2002, to invade Iraq in either February or March of this year.

Last fall CBS News obtained meeting notes taken by a Rumsfeld aide at 2:40 on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The notes indicate that Rumsfeld wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden].... Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the Bushmen's leading intellectual light, has long been rabid on the subject of Iraq. He reportedly told Vanity Fair writer Sam Tanenhaus off the record that he believes Saddam was connected not only to bin Laden and 9/11, but the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

The Bush administration's foreign policy plan was not based on September 11, or terrorism; those events only brought to the forefront a radical plan for U.S. control of the post-Cold War world that had been taking shape since the closing days of the first Bush presidency. Back then a small claque of planners, led by Wolfowitz, generated a draft document known as Defense Planning Guidance, which envisioned a U.S. that took advantage of its lone-superpower status to consolidate American control of the world both militarily and economically, to the point where no other nation could ever reasonably hope to challenge the U.S. Toward that end it envisioned what we now call "preemptive" wars waged to reset the geopolitical table.

After a copy of DPG was leaked to the New York Times, subsequent drafts were rendered a little less frank, but the basic idea never changed. In 1997 Wolfowitz and his true believers--Richard Perle, William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld--formed an organization called Project for the New American Century to carry their cause forward. And though they all flocked around the Bush administration from the start, W never really embraced their plan until the events of September 11 left him casting around for a foreign policy plan.

Hmm Bush embrace a plan other than total carnage without thinking?

2) The invasion of Iraq was based on a reasonable belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to the U.S., a belief supported by available intelligence evidence.

Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair that weapons of mass destruction were not really the main reason for invading Iraq: "The decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for bureaucratic reasons.... [T]here were many other important factors as well." Right. But they did not come under the heading of self-defense.

We now know how the Bushmen gathered their prewar intelligence: They set out to patch together their case for invading Iraq and ignored everything that contradicted it. In the end, this required that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. set aside the findings of analysts from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (the Pentagon's own spy bureau) and stake their claim largely on the basis of isolated, anecdotal testimony from handpicked Iraqi defectors. (See #5, Ahmed Chalabi.) But the administration did not just listen to the defectors; it promoted their claims in the press as a means of enlisting public opinion. The only reason so many Americans thought there was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda in the first place was that the Bushmen trotted out Iraqi defectors making these sorts of claims to every major media outlet that would listen.

Here is the verdict of Gregory Thielman, the recently retired head of the State Department's intelligence office: "I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq. This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude--we know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers." Elsewhere he has been quoted as saying, "The principal reasons that Americans did not understand the nature of the Iraqi threat in my view was the failure of senior administration officials to speak honestly about what the intelligence showed."

The possibility Politicians aren't full of shit=ZERO

3) Saddam tried to buy uranium in Niger.

Lies and distortions tend to beget more lies and distortions, and here is W's most notorious case in point: Once the administration decided to issue a damage-controlling (they hoped) mea culpa in the matter of African uranium, they were obliged to couch it in another, more perilous lie: that the administration, and quite likely Bush himself, thought the uranium claim was true when he made it. But former acting ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6 that exploded the claim. Wilson, who traveled to Niger in 2002 to investigate the uranium claims at the behest of the CIA and Dick Cheney's office and found them to be groundless, describes what followed this way: "Although I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in U.S. government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a CIA report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure."

Create more lies to bad mouth an already bad man, whats the harm in that?

4) The aluminum tubes were proof of a nuclear program.

The very next sentence of Bush's State of the Union address was just as egregious a lie as the uranium claim, though a bit cagier in its formulation. "Our intelligence sources tell us that [Saddam] has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." This is altogether false in its implication (that this is the likeliest use for these materials) and may be untrue in its literal sense as well. As the London Independent summed it up recently, "The U.S. persistently alleged that Baghdad tried to buy high-strength aluminum tubes whose only use could be in gas centrifuges, needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Equally persistently, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the tubes were being used for artillery rockets. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El Baradei, told the UN Security Council in January that the tubes were not even suitable for centrifuges." [emphasis added]

I guess I better hide those remnant aluminum tubes in my basement they might think I am going to blow something up...

5) Iraq's WMDs were sent to Syria for hiding.

Or Iran, or.... "They shipped them out!" was a rallying cry for the administration in the first few nervous weeks of finding no WMDs, but not a bit of supporting evidence has emerged.

Who knew that a country could hide Weapons of Mass Destruction and get them past soo many people.

6) The CIA was primarily responsible for any prewar intelligence errors or distortions regarding Iraq.

Don't be misled by the news that CIA director George Tenet has taken the fall for Bush's falsehoods in the State of the Uranium address. As the journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote shortly before the war, "Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. ... Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the push for war."

In short, Tenet fell on his sword when he vetted Bush's State of the Union yarns. And now he has had to get up and fall on it again.

Hmm kinda sucks to jump on the stick and find out it was more than a stick, it was a tree!

7) An International Atomic Energy Agency report indicated that Iraq could be as little as six months from making nuclear weapons.

Alas: The claim had to be retracted when the IAEA pointed out that no such report existed.

False reports? Hmm thats something new!

8 ) Saddam was involved with bin Laden and al Qaeda in the plotting of 9/11.

One of the most audacious and well-traveled of the Bushmen's fibs, this one hangs by two of the slenderest evidentiary threads imaginable: first, anecdotal testimony by isolated, handpicked Iraqi defectors that there was an al Qaeda training camp in Iraq, a claim CIA analysts did not corroborate and that postwar U.S. military inspectors conceded did not exist; and second, old intelligence accounts of a 1991 meeting in Baghdad between a bin Laden emissary and officers from Saddam's intelligence service, which did not lead to any subsequent contact that U.S. or UK spies have ever managed to turn up. According to former State Department intelligence chief Gregory Thielman, the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies well in advance of the war was that "there was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist operation."

Meh, does it really matter if they were working together, Lets Nuke em and get it over with!

9) The U.S. wants democracy in Iraq and the Middle East.

Democracy is the last thing the U.S. can afford in Iraq, as anyone who has paid attention to the state of Arab popular sentiment already realizes. Representative government in Iraq would mean the rapid expulsion of U.S. interests. Rather, the U.S. wants westernized, secular leadership regimes that will stay in pocket and work to neutralize the politically ambitious anti-Western religious sects popping up everywhere. If a little brutality and graft are required to do the job, it has never troubled the U.S. in the past. Ironically, these standards describe someone more or less like Saddam Hussein. Judging from the state of civil affairs in Iraq now, the Bush administration will no doubt be looking for a strongman again, if and when they are finally compelled to install anyone at all.

Hey we kicked the ass of the Indians to steal their land, Its our duty to take theirs too!!

10) Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress are a homegrown Iraqi political force, not a U.S.-sponsored front.

Chalabi is a more important bit player in the Iraq war than most people realize, and not because he was the U.S.'s failed choice to lead a post-Saddam government. It was Chalabi and his INC that funneled compliant defectors to the Bush administration, where they attested to everything the Bushmen wanted to believe about Saddam and Iraq (meaning, mainly, al Qaeda connections and WMD programs). The administration proceeded to take their dubious word over that of the combined intelligence of the CIA and DIA, which indicated that Saddam was not in the business of sponsoring foreign terrorism and posed no imminent threat to anyone.

Naturally Chalabi is despised nowadays round the halls of Langley, but it wasn't always so. The CIA built the Iraqi National Congress and installed Chalabi at the helm back in the days following Gulf War I, when the thought was to topple Saddam by whipping up and sponsoring an internal opposition. It didn't work; from the start Iraqis have disliked and distrusted Chalabi. Moreover, his erratic and duplicitous ways have alienated practically everyone in the U.S. foreign policy establishment as well--except for Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, and therefore the White House.

Hey its not Chalibabiwhatchamacallys' fault he is an Idiot, not to mention the idiocy of the people who put him in place.


<center>

<center>
Don't worry Bush, It's your daddy's fault you're a dumb ass!


Editor's note: In the interest of relative brevity I've stinted on citing and quoting sources in some of the items below. You can find links to news stories that elaborate on each of these items at my online Bush Wars column, www.bushwarsblog.com

By Steve Perry

 

[Egis]

And here i am wondering why arent the american public in the streets protesting ??? Gues all the stereotipes of americans being inpatient and rash arent much of true ...

 

[SquishyDeadBody]

And here i am wondering why arent the american public in the streets protesting ??? Gues all the stereotipes of americans being inpatient and rash arent much of true ...

Actually the Majority of the American population has other things on their plates to worry about, And in all reality we are actually in protest and their is a vast number of people who are dead set against.
Everywhere you go, there is some anti Bush thing going on.

I wouldn't say its necessary for the American citizens to revoke, Bush is gone after this term, I would be worried on the other hand with the newest candidates running. War is going to be a very very large bargaining chip during the next presidential campaigns.
On top of that Hillary Clinton is running for president. (God help Us!)

If you are a foreign country, Be afraid.
America is like a woman on menopause, She could snap at any minute and kill every person on this planet.


Also Americans aren't actually rash or impatient I don't believe any country really is, The media truly portrays all people in the dark light of things.

Americans are actually just lazy, we are going to take the easy way out, we tend to point the finger to get out of a jam even if that means blaming our next door neighbor for something even if they are innocent.

 

[Brother None]

Actually the Majority of the American population has other things on their plates to worry about,

That didn't seem to be a problem when Clinton stuck his tallywhacker in the wrong hole. So that doesn't cut it as an excuse.

 

[SquishyDeadBody]

Actually the Majority of the American population has other things on their plates to worry about,

That didn't seem to be a problem when Clinton stuck his tallywhacker in the wrong hole. So that doesn't cut it as an excuse.

Well you have to put into account we impeached him since he went against the constitution, Bush is just an idiot, you can't impeach someone just because he is an idiot, even if we could its not like it would do any good this close to the end of his term.
Thats what I mean by the population has other things on their plates.
We cant worry about the Bush admin any more than we already do.
We have to focus on the next moron to take his place.
No matter what though, if someone runs for president of the U. S. of A. they are an Idiot!

 

[DirtyDreamDesigner]

You impeached Clinton? And here I was thinking you, y'know, didn't.

 

[SquishyDeadBody]

You impeached Clinton? And here I was thinking you, y'know, didn't.

Yes indeed we did, we threw him on his butt like last weeks left overs.

 

[DirtyDreamDesigner]

Well, that's exactly it, you didn't throw him on his butt.

 

[SquishyDeadBody]

Well, that's exactly it, you didn't throw him on his butt.

Well not myself per say, he was thrown on his butt since he no longer lives in the white house.
That fits the innuendo I was looking for.

 

[DirtyDreamDesigner]

He no longer lives in the white house because his term ended (some would say successfully), not because he was impeached. Had he been convicted and removed from office, than he would be "thrown on his butt".

EDIT: This is getting too Off-topic so let's just drop it, okay?

 

[SquishyDeadBody]

He no longer lives in the white house because his term ended (some would say successfully), not because he was impeached. Had he been convicted and removed from office, than he would be "thrown on his butt".

He was.

Here read the wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton

 

[DirtyDreamDesigner]

From your link:

After a 21-day trial, the Senate vote fell short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction and removal from office under the Constitution.

 

[SquishyDeadBody]

From your link:

After a 21-day trial, the Senate vote fell short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction and removal from office under the Constitution.

Upon the passage of H. Res. 611, Clinton was impeached on December 19, 1998, by the House of Representatives on grounds of perjury to a grand jury (by a 228-206 vote) and obstruction of justice (by a 221-212 vote), becoming the first elected U.S. president to be impeached, and only the second president to be impeached (the previous one being Andrew Johnson in 1868 who was elected as vice-president and became president after the death of Abraham Lincoln). Two other articles of impeachment failed — a second count of perjury in the Jones case (by a 205-229 vote) and one accusing Clinton of abuse of power (by a 148-285 vote).

 

[Sander]

Yes, but impeachment is *not* the same as removing someone from office.

Also, he never went against the constitution.

 

[Brother None]

Also, he never went against the constitution.

Perjury before a grand jury and obstruction of justice? Hmmm, not sure if it's constitution per se, but it sure is law...

You guys are forgetting the current tack in the US is to blame everything that's going wrong under Bush on Clinton;
It seems to me that our political history has been marked the past 10 years by lurches, reactions and swerves, and I wonder if historians will see the era that started in the mid-'90s as The Long Freakout. First the Clinton era left more than half the country appalled--deeply appalled, and ashamed--by its series of political, financial and personal scandals. I doubt the Democratic Party will ever fully understand the damage done in those days.

 

[SquishyDeadBody]

Yes, but impeachment is *not* the same as removing someone from office.

Yes I understand and agree,
After Billy Bobs Impeachment though, he did resign from the senate and his law license was suspended for over 5 years.
He might as well of no longer been in office.

 

[Custodis]

He was never convicted of anything. He was aquitted of all charges.

Impeachment is only the first stage of removing an official from office.

Think of it as a Trial or an Indictment.

Just because you go to trial for a crime doesn't mean you're guilty.

Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeach for more info.

He was not removed from office. His term ended normally.

As for Bush, "If you talk to God, you're religious. If God talks to you, you're psychotic." - Dr. House

 

[SquishyDeadBody]

He was never convicted of anything. He was aquitted of all charges.

Impeachment is only the first stage of removing an official from office.

Think of it as a Trial or an Indictment.

Just because you go to trial for a crime doesn't mean you're guilty.

Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeach for more info.

He was not removed from office. His term ended normally.

As for Bush, "If you talk to God, you're religious. If God talks to you, you're psychotic." - Dr. House

"Clinton Was Impeached" lets get that out of the way.
We have already established this in the last comment.
I never said he was guilty, but he proved to us he was guilty of something.
When he failed to match prior statements as well as he lied in court under oath. Thats guilty enough for me!

Think about this though.

Do you really believe Billy had the time to gather up his nuts before his term was over?
Having withdrawn from the senate and his wife up his ass over Monica and his law license suspended, do you believe he was able to recover from that stupor?
From there on I think his administration was keeping the ball in play.


As for Bush talking to God or vise versa, Who Cares?!

 

[Custodis]

He was never convicted of anything. He was aquitted of all charges.

Impeachment is only the first stage of removing an official from office.

Think of it as a Trial or an Indictment.

Just because you go to trial for a crime doesn't mean you're guilty.

Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeach for more info.

He was not removed from office. His term ended normally.

As for Bush, "If you talk to God, you're religious. If God talks to you, you're psychotic." - Dr. House

"Clinton Was Impeached" lets get that out of the way.
We have already established this in the last comment.
I never said he was guilty, but he proved to us he was guilty of something.
When he failed to match prior statements as well as he lied in court under oath. Thats guilty enough for me!

Think about this though.

Do you really believe Billy had the time to gather up his nuts before his term was over?
Having withdrawn from the senate and his wife up his ass over Monica and his law license suspended, do you believe he was able to recover from that stupor?
From there on I think his administration was keeping the ball in play.


As for Bush talking to God or vise versa, Who Cares?!

Ah, so one President's personal life is a matter of national interest, but another President who sends Americans off to die, with a clear psychological issue, is not?

*sighs*

 

[Wooz]

i·ro·ny /ˈaɪrəni, ˈaɪər-/ P
–noun, plural -nies.

1. the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning: the irony of her reply, “How nice!” when I said I had to work all weekend.