Lay your cards on the table...

[kentuck]

There is a bit of obfuscation going on.

The Bush Administration only acted on the intelligence they received, they say.

The Bush Administration did not "receive" the intelligence - they created the "intelligence". Folks still remember the aluminum tubes, the yellow cake, mushroom clouds, and lies too numerous to mention. Even Colin Powell folded under the charms of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and all the other liars, too numerous to mention.

And now, they cannot even admit that it was a "mistake"? In a way, they are right - it was more than a "mistake". It was a blunder of the highest magnitude.

[immoderate]

1. I'll go further. It was a scam and a con game that blew up.

--imm

[JDPriestly]

2. Yes. And Hillary fell for it. So did all the news media, or almost all.

[Hoppy]

7. Somehow, I doubt Hillary fell for it.

But she wasn't gonna be president if she appeared weak on defense and soft on terrorists.


She fuckin' knew!

She ain't stupid. If millions of people marching in the streets could figure it out, she knew.

[SusanCalvin]

16. Probably true.

And smart politically. At the time.

Hopefully that calculus is changing.

[bvar22]

53. Politically smart...

..to sign the Death Warrant for a MILLION Iraqis, many of them innocent women & children,
displace another 5 million,
create a Failed State out of one of the most secular and open states in the Middle East,
and take a TRILLION Dollars from our children to pay for it all.

Yeah, thats really "smart".
Thanks for your brave stand, Hillary!

[SusanCalvin]

56. Oh. I didn't say it was good. nt

[Enthusiast]

32. Hillary for sure knew it was bullshit right from the start.

You have it nailed.

She couldn't afford to give the GOP a meme to use against her in a future presidential contest.

It's perfectly obvious.

[uponit7771]

49. Hillary killed Abe Lincoln too... she's the evil and we know it!! :rolleyes:

Fuck the fact that Bush had some prerequisites for going to war that he never meet ...

That's Hillary's fault too

She lost some wisdom points believing the stupid but no need to call her a murderer by proxy

[Hoppy]

50. Hans Blix reports there is no evidence of material for weapons build-up.

He asks for more time. Bush refuses the extension of time and invades.

I read that at the time. You read it at the time.

Where was St. Hillary? She ain't stupid but she is a manipulative politician. The war vote should have been a win. Unfortunately, it backfired on her.

So, if another reason for war pops up when she's president, is she going to buy the stupid or make the morally right decision.

[uponit7771]

52. Killing MLK, that's what she was doing :more rolleyes:, again.. .she loses wisdom points on ...

... believing anything from the stupid... that's her fault.

I'm not going call her or anyone else on the dem side who voted for the Bush to meet prerequisites before going into war a murderer by inference or implication.

Come on people, the FUD here is already thick enough .... no use helping them....

The dem base isn't going peel away from Hillary by throwing winger-ish attacks at her... that'll have the opposite effect

[TheKentuckian]

57. Why are you comparing her actual vote and support for the war to complete and heinous fantasy of

killing Lincoln and King?

At some point hyperbole turns into wholesale dishonesty and I think that train is pulling into the station on this one.

On one side you have incontrovertible fact and on the other utter nonsense, that is not honest debate at all.

[rocktivity]

23. The news media got a lot of help believing it -- in the form of envelopes

containing either white powder or pink slips.


rocktivity

[Enthusiast]

33. Hillary did not fall for it.

If we knew, she for certain knew.

[JDPriestly]

55. Then she voted against her conscience and that is a terrible thing to think about.

She needs to explain how she could have lived in the White House for eight years and not learned how to assess an intelligence report. I understand that she probably did not have a security clearance, but she had worked as a lawyer. She could read and ask questions. She is intelligent. She has a lot of explaining to do. An apology is not enough.

This is especially true because there is a video of her listening to the women from Code Pink who warned her about the error of going into Iraq. It was a rather ugly encounter. Hillary was rude in a snobbish, arrogant way to those women. I am not a member of Code Pink and probably don't know any of them (not to my knowledge), but that video is very revealing about Hillary's decision-making process. I'm not going to vote for her even if she is the Democratic candidate. She does not have the strength of character and good judgment we need in our president.

[TBF]

5. ^ I doubt many at higher levels really fell for it -

but they either felt powerless to stop it and/or became complicit. It seems like that is going on at many levels in our "democracy".

[Jackpine Radical]

15. I will say this--My wife met Ron Kind, our Turd-wayish Dem Representative

not long before the vote. She said that he had a deer-in-the-headlights look when pressed on the vote. He was clearly scared, and from the way he talked, the Bushies had made a True Believer out of him. He was convinced he was privy to information that showed it was necessary to go into Iraq.

Kind never was very smart, and is just another useful idiot they keep around because he votes like the power boys tell him. I'm not sure he has even yet caught on to the fact that he was had.

So I wouldn't exactly call him "higher-level," but it's also pretty clear they had him buffaloed.

[Enthusiast]

31. Most of them had to know better.

The lid could blow off this whole thing. It's like a continuation of Iran—Contra on a larger scale.

[Enthusiast]

30. They started to believe their own propaganda.

They started to believe their own lies. Like, "They'll greet us a liberators! The oil will pay for the war!"

It didn't blow clear up. Assholes made out like bandits in Iraq. It was the big reward for Dubya supporters. And it paid off huge.

[TBF]

42. Although the $$$ (oil) is always a big part

of anything in the middle east, I've always felt it was a little more than that. While PNAC (or whatever it's called in present form) wants to spread the "beauty" of capitalism (aka "FREEDOM&quot all over the globe, I did think there was a very willing George Bush at the helm in that he wanted to get Saddam. I've always had a "LIHOP" feeling about 911, at the very least, because W seemed to really want to get him (succeed where his father had not), and that he was hell-bent on this no matter what anyone else told him..

The Old Guard of the republican party may have welcomed the profits, but even they feared Bush' methods. In an August 2002 Op-ed to the NYT James Baker, for example, opined about "the right way to change a regime" (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/25/opinion/the-right-way-to-change-a-regime.html).

Honestly all of this should have been evidence in a trial at the Hague for war crimes. The fact that it's not, and that we now have Jeb Bush pondering whether he should be president, underscores how ridiculous this country has gotten.

[spanone]

3. k&r...

The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly Saddam can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

Condoleezza Rice

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/c/condoleezz164877.html#oQbKjDr6pbRpfo37.99

[grasswire]

4. the narrative is a bit like that old nursery rhyme "The House That Jack Built"

In this case, it goes like this:

They stole the election
To install a thug
Who would crack the egg that was Iraq.

He was cruel and brutal enough to do the bidding of Poppy and Cheney and the profiteers and bloodthirsty, and psychopathic enough to never, ever show weakness.

Once that egg was broken, it could not be put together again.

[SusanCalvin]

17. Not cruel and brutal.

Just privileged, selfish, and stupid. Did the job, though.

[Xipe Totec]

6. A Chain of Lies - Original Post from Aug-31-2004

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x70903

[kentuck]

8. Thanks...

for the link:

[JEB]

58. Thanks for the link. Excellent info.

[delrem]

9. I think the warmongers got exactly what they wanted.

Then, after destroying Iraq and slaughtering Iraq's people they got Libya, they got Syria, they got Yemen,... and the slaughter continues to escalate.

Nothing can be clearer than that this is a planned and now fully bipartisan continuation of the program laid out by PNAC.
Else why did Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State under Barack Obama, immediately hire Dick Cheney's (PNAC) principal deputy foreign policy adviser, Victoria Nuland? And why did Dick Cheney immediately hire Bill Clinton's chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs, namely Victoria Nuland? Why is John Kerry a Victoria Nuland supporter and enabler?
Continuity like that is no accident, and with a Hillary Clinton presidency only an idiot would suppose anything different.

[FrankAB]

10. It was clear that Dick Cheney was running the show.

It goes without saying that Bush was a monkey of the highest order, but this goes back much further. The groundwork for Iraq was laid in the 1980s with Richard Perle, Eliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, and company. Yes, they concocted a lie, but nobody even cares. People like to have ticker tape parades for heroes and cheer at football games. Kids play video games depicting war and think it's cool. They grow up to become police and play out their fantasies. What a country.

[Thespian2]

11. K & R

I am sure the war-hawks, set to rake in tons of money, had the plan they wanted and the president they wanted...all they needed was their Pearl Harbor...

[SoapBox]

12. I forgot about the "aluminum tubes"...the horrors!

And the mobile "labs".

[Enthusiast]

37. I'm sure that fooled Hillary.

[URL=.html][IMG][/IMG][/URL]

[BeanMusical]

13. Kick and R.

[Jackpine Radical]

14. OK.

And it wasn't a blunder. It was a monstrous set of criminal acts.

[SusanCalvin]

18. True dat. nt

[Oilwellian]

44. I agree, it wasn't a blunder

Blunder suggests it was accidental, and it certainly wasn't.

[kentuck]

45. Your definition is better.

"It was a monstrous set of criminal acts."

[Solly Mack]

51. Yep

[TM99]

19. Lies about incubators from the first Bush Administration

sent me and my friends to war in Iraq the first time.

I sure as hell wasn't going to fall for that shit a second time. And anyone old enough and smart enough saw the parallels and knew the truth even as the lies flowed out of their mouths.

Clinton made the decision to ignore the lies for one or both of these reasons. She is a hawk and a Neo-con and agrees with that agenda, as her tenure at State does demonstrate. She has been focused on becoming president for decades and every move is calculated. She did not want to look weak on terror or be one of those damned anti-war peacenik hippy leftists!

It is cognitive dissonance and willful self-delusion. If they admit the truth, then they admit she is not the anointed one.

[Enthusiast]

38. Precisely.

agrees with that agenda

[thecrow]

20. Remember that British document. too..

where they said the US was shaping the facts around the WMD, in other words, manufacturing the facts they wanted to get the outcome of a war they wanted.

[Gore1FL]

21. It wasn't a mistake. It was quite deliberate, I assure you. n/t

[Jack Rabbit]

22. They didn't act on the intelligence they got

Instead, they fixed the facts to support the policy.

On the other hand, politicians are great equivocators, and few were better than Bush the Frat Boy. There are two possible sense of the word intelligence.

The Frat Boy didn't act on the intelligence he got from the CIA (assuming Cheney ever let him see it) after September 11, 2001 He acted on the intelligence that God gave him prior to July 6, 1946.

[Raine1967]

24. I am gonna disagree with you in part. (mostly agree. btw)

They got good intelligence. They chose to ignore the Central intelligence Agency as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency and instead relied on the Office of Special Plans.

When they say they acted on the intelligence they received, they were being truthful.

What they are not saying is that they ignored the GOOD intelligence they got.

You know, like there were no weapons of mass destruction. They key to all of this revision of history is that they are ignoring the BS agency set up by neo-cons to lie this nation into war.

Douglas Feith called the office's report a much-needed critique of the CIA's intelligence. "It's healthy to criticize the CIA's intelligence", Feith said. "What the people in the Pentagon were doing was right. It was good government." Feith also rejected accusations he attempted to link Iraq to a formal relationship with Al Qaeda. "No one in my office ever claimed there was an operational relationship", Feith said. "There was a relationship."

In another instance, an "Iraqi intelligence cell" briefing to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in August 2002 condemned the CIA's intelligence assessment techniques and denounced the CIA's "consistent underestimation" of matters dealing with the alleged Iraq-al-Qaeda co-operation. In September 2002, two days before the CIA's final assessment of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, Feith briefed senior advisers to Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, undercutting the CIA's credibility and alleging "fundamental problems" with CIA intelligence-gathering. As reported in the conservative British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, "Senator Jay Rockefeller, senior Democrat on the [Senate] committee, said that Mr Feith's cell may even have undertaken 'unlawful' intelligence-gathering initiatives."

In February 2007, the Pentagon's inspector general issued a report that concluded that Feith's office "developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers." The report found that these actions were "inappropriate" though not "illegal." Senator Carl Levin, Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, stated that "The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration's decision to invade Iraq. The inspector general's report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war." At Senator Levin's insistence, on April 6, 2007, the Pentagon's Inspector General's Report was declassified and released to the public.

They keep saying this bullshit line of what we we know now -- blah blah — When they KNEW the intelligence coming from OSP was BS —

THEY IGNORED THE GOOD INTELLIGENCE (sorry for the caps) that would have prevented us from going to war. That is straight up on the entire Bush administration and EVERY SINGLE damn person who defends that war and still defends it.

They can't admit it was a mistake because they probably don;t know about the OSP. and that makes them even worse than the Bush administration.

Truth is, we had good intelligence. That administration knew it. Instead of acknowledging it, they outed a CIA agent to create a distraction.

OSP was shut down after a year an a half. It served its purpose. There was no mistake. This was intentional.

I cannot stand these people.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

25. It wasn't a "blunder" or a "mistake". It was the PNAC plan all along.

[Enthusiast]

39. Precisely.

[MADem]

26. Now, now, now--you're being UNFAIR!!!!!

The Bush Administration only acted on the intelligence they received, they say.


They most certainly DID "receive" that information!!!!!!


The fact that they also CREATED it is a separate issue altogether!!! Someone in their little club ginned it up, and sent it along for action!!! And someone in their little club had to "receive" it in order for that to happen!

Now, golly, what could be wrong with that???

for those who just don't get it....

[joshcryer]

27. Bush was invading without AUMF.

[Doctor_J]

28. I think that agreeing not to look into 9/11 got Obama adopted into the Bush family

Which is the goal of every politician these days

[Enthusiast]

29. It is perfectly obvious that the Bush Administration fabricated the intelligence

necessary to convince the American people it was vital to invade Iraq. An act of treason for certain.

[Enthusiast]

34. K&R! This post deserves hundreds of recommendations!

Where are you, people?

[johnnyreb]

35. Sorry was sleeping, is it my turn on watch already?

Yeh we had a whole music revolution about all this. Just never could pick any of it up on the radio. They lied.mp3

[Enthusiast]

36. That is awesome!

Sort of in the spirit of Country Joe and the Fish.

[johnnyreb]

41. Yep! Lucky we don't hafta see that stuff on tv no more. 'Cawz we love freedom.

Well lemme finish my nightmare: I can't wake up.mp3

[MerryBlooms]

43. Every time I see you posts of, "100's of recommendations!",

I crack up.
That schtick just never gets old for me.

[LeftOfWest]

40. The 'Born to It' then 'anointed president' military deserting terrorist bush

was determined to do whatever the fuck he wanted to do to this world after being installed into the Oval Office by right wing self serving supremes, instead of his born to it deserting lying ass being parked where it still belongs in Leavenworth.

Rot to anyone who believed anything out of his anointed terrorist constitution hating murdering born to it mouth.

He wiped his ass on the Constitution. Still does.

[JEB]

59. Confiscate all their assets including

that fucking pretend "ranch" and turn it into a free home for Veterans of his phony war of aggression.

[kentuck]

46. Furthermore...

Most of the people that voted for the war did it for purely political reasons.

They did not want to look "weak on defense".

Especially those that had bigger ambitions.

[awoke_in_2003]

47. It was not a mistake or blunder

It was a coldly crafted and calculated plan to make certain people wealthier.

[lonestarnot]

48. It was fucking criminal. Making up shit to kill people for no damned good reason, but that they

could.

[Corey_Baker08]

54. It Wasn't A Blunder, It Was A Crime...