As the war mongering core keeps being chipped away at and the polls show a 2 to 1 that the war was not "worth it" we can expect more folks to come forward with the evidence of how they deceived us.
Clinton didn't use the data the same way Bush used it at all. He may have known that it wasn't good enough to start a war with and acted appropriately. Also nobody is saying that all the intel was misleading, some was mistaken. Clinton also never presented information that was questionable as being confirmed. The Bush administration did. It's that simple.
Clinton didn't use the data to drum up support for a war. Bush hyped inaccuarte data to the American people for the purpose of drumming up support for action against Saddam. Bush misled us. He may have been misled himself, but if that is the case then I would love an investigation into how it happened.
did clinton and the democrats sell the war on iraq to the american public?? did they order it?? hmmmm.....
I once asked a college age group how many of them were thieves... none responded! Then I asked them how many had pirated a copyrighted software without paying as the manufacturer required... they all raised their hands. Moral- if you steal you're a thief, if you deceive, mislead, or cover-up you are a liar. Clinton, Bush, Cheney, Kerry, Kennedy, DeLay, Dean- what do these men have in common? They are all politicians.
While their is a certain simplitic truth to what you say, it doesn't help us toward a better society. It might even provide some comfort for the Bush or war and torture supporters, though that is probably not your motivation. Not all lies are equal. Lying about a blow jub is not morally equivalent to lying us into war. Not all politicians are equally bad. If we want to have a good society is necessary to choose the better ones.
I believe the most important truths are simple. Any lie reveals something about a leader that many Americans don't understand anymore. You shouldn't trust a liar. Lying us into war, Chinagate, Watergate, Whitewater, Enron, Monica, Jennifer, Iran-Contra, murder, treason, adultery... Yes, we are a reflection of our politicians... those good ones who lie and those bad ones who lie.
As long as you see the difference between the good liars and the bad ones. Happy Thanksgiving! Keep D&D Civil.
More from the Waas story posted by no worries. Why won't the no exit strategy president release documents about this report?
http://www.slate.com/id/2130884/ The Misleaders Who is Dick Cheney kidding? By Jacob Weisberg Posted Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, at 7:05 PM ET Dick Cheney calls it "dishonest," "reprehensible" and "not legitimate" to claim that the administration misled the public about prewar intelligence. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Nov. 21, the vice president added for good measure that "any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false." Most Democrats in Congress think that prewar intelligence was indeed distorted and hyped—though not "fabricated," which, like the accusation that they have accused Bush of "lying," is a straw man of Cheney's. Democrats believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and others misrepresented what our government knew about Saddam Hussein's WMD capacity and his links to terrorists in order to make a stronger case for invading Iraq. So, who's right? Did Bush officials mislead us, or didn't they? Continue Article Because the Republicans who control Congress have prevented any investigation into the administration's use of prewar intelligence (as opposed to the gathering and formulation of that intelligence), there's a lot we still don't know. Officials haven't yet had to answer questions about what they knew or did not know when they advanced various spurious claims. And even the kind of investigation that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is demanding could prove frustratingly inconclusive, because proof of deception requires knowing someone else's state of mind. In the president's case, it may be possible to show that he should have known enough to avoid some inaccurate assertions, including the notorious "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address about Saddam seeking to buy significant quantities of uranium from Africa. But as with Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal, Bush's combination of self-delusion, disengagement, and sheer mush-headedness nearly precludes the possibility of willful deception. More cartoons from Auth More cartoons on the Bush Administration Here's what we do know already, without a congressional inquiry: Members of the Bush Administration were dishonest with the public and with Congress about prewar intelligence. We've known this for some time—see, for example, the comprehensive and damning story Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus wrote in the Washington Post in August 2003 ("Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence"). Over the past two years, several incidents of executive-branch dishonesty in the run-up to the war have turned into subscandals of their own: the aluminum tubes that Iraq used for missiles and not gas centrifuges, the yellowcake uranium that Saddam didn't try to buy from Niger, the mobile biological warfare laboratories that turned out to be hydrogen generators for balloons, the al-Qaida chemical warfare training that was based on a false confession, the meeting with Mohamed Atta that didn't happen in Prague. If you examine these and other pillars of the administration's case for invading Iraq, a clear pattern emerges. Bush officials first put clear pressure on the intelligence community to support their assumptions that Saddam was developing WMD and cooperating with al-Qaida. Nonetheless, significant contrary evidence emerged. Bush hawks then overlooked, suppressed, or willfully ignored whatever cut against their views. In public, they depicted unsettled questions as dead certainties. Then, when they were caught out and proven wrong, they resisted the obvious and refused to correct the record. Finally, when their positions became utterly untenable, they claimed that they were misinformed or not told. Call this behavior what you will, but you can't describe it as either "honest" or "truthful." Many of the White House's most serious misrepresentations involve the case that Saddam was trying to build nuclear weapons, which he had in fact stopped trying to do in 1991. "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," Cheney said in August 2002, in one of his conclusive comments on the subject. This position was echoed by Bush and Rice, who both conjured the specter of a mushroom cloud, as well as by Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, who went into more detail about aluminum tubes and uranium. If you were on the inside and read even the now notorious National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, you at least knew that such statements were at the very least overdrawn. Analysts at the departments of Energy and State weren't buying the aluminum tubes and yellowcake theory that formed the basis of the nuclear case. Or consider another component of that case that has gotten less attention, the description of fresh "activity" at Saddam's known nuclear sites. A draft paper produced by Andrew Card's White House working group on Iraq, and cited in the 2003 Post article, was characteristically distorted. The document inaccurately attributed to U.N. arms inspectors the claim that satellite photographs showed signs of reconstruction and acceleration of Iraq's nuclear program. It went on to quote something chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix told Time: "You can see hundreds of new roofs in these photos." But the White House paper left out the second half of Blix's quote: "ut you don't know what's under them." In February 2003, American inspectors visited those sites as part of U.N. teams and saw that nuclear bombs weren't being made at them. But Bush officials acted as if such counterevidence didn't exist. In retrospect, Cheney casts himself and his colleagues as uncritical consumers of what the CIA and DIA spoon-fed them. Bad intel, he gives us to understand, is like lousy weather—a shame, but nothing policymakers can do anything about. In fact, the Bush hawks were anything but victims of the intelligence community. They challenged any evidence that cut against their assumptions about Saddam, going so far as to set up their own unit within the Pentagon to reanalyze raw data and draw harsher conclusions. And remember that the trigger for the Valerie Plame scandal was the vice president's mistrust of the CIA. Another giveaway is the administration's lack of outrage over the bad intelligence they now claim to have been victimized by. Only Colin Powell, before his U.N. speech, seems to have pushed back with any skepticism about charges he was being asked to retail. And only Powell has expressed any outrage after it became evident that his U.N. speech had been a case of garbage in, garbage out. Powell's old colleagues now defend themselves by saying they didn't know their claims about Iraq weren't true. But the truth is most of them didn't care whether their assertions were true or not, and they still don't.
George W. Bush has been given everything in this life and failed at it, including the Presidency of the United States of America and leader of what used to be the free world. O'Neill the former Treasury Secretary reported that Iraq was the target of the Bush administration from the get-go. 9/11 gave the excuse to launch our war against Saddam, even if the two were not linked. Make the case, and the American people will follow. Revenge for attempting to kill his daddy. One-upping Daddy; petulant and starved for attention. Eager to pay back all those buddies across the oil business. See also, California rolling energy blackouts; see also Cheney, DICK. Religious fundamentalism. Seeing everything through the rosy haze of hard-core born-again bulls**t. Christians good. Muslims evil. When he campaigned as a compassionate conservative, that told me straight away that he was full of it. Because the more you assert yourself to be one certain thing, the more it smells. Ever read the neocons' literature? They place no value on human life, U.S. or elsewhere. It's all a matter of geopolitical control. Control the worlds' resources and everyone will come to us with their hats in hand. Etc.
Speaking of Turkey! Happy Thanksgiving Freaks! Even you Texxx! mc mark signing off untill Monday! Going to the country! Baby you wanna go!
Hope everyone had a great turkey day! Say what you want about Frank Rich (and I have), his writing over the last couple of years in regards to the war has been excellent! From Yesterday's Times... Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ... By Frank Rich The New York Times Sunday 27 November 2005 George W. Bush is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate. The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator. The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics. Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe. The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium). Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda." The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran. What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration. The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' " If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars. Sooner or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full. No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s. "We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.
IMHO- I voted- He lied.- I believe the truth could have been told upfront and honest with the American people. I think he should have stood up and said we have planned to invade Iraq and we feel this is a good time to do it. All the terrorist, WMD, Democracy stuff could have been left out. If the justification was we want to put a democratic government of our choosing in place then just say so. Whatever the justification really is I don't think it would hurt any president whatsoever to be absolutely honest. And that 'sinners' thing is not a good excuse for lying. How about, all liars are sinners before God. I guess everyone has an opinion, since I don't have any absolute proof (only God knows) I will just leave my opinion as that. I have grown skeptical of many politicians. Either some politicians don't want to speak the honest truth or they don't think we are intelligent and mature enough to hear it, or they are trying their best to keep their power and position and don't mind a little 'white' lie here and there if it serves that purpose. - Another of my own opinions. Unless it jeopardizes security or lives, why withhold the truth. And if you can't tell the truth- keep silent. I think honesty is the basis of trust.
you mean this poll? still love the troops? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/26/AR2005112600745.html -- Sympathetic Vibrations By Chris Cillizza and Peter Slevin Sunday, November 27, 2005; Page A04 Democrats fumed last week at Vice President Cheney's suggestion that criticism of the administration's war policies was itself becoming a hindrance to the war effort. But a new poll indicates most Americans are sympathetic to Cheney's point. Seventy percent of people surveyed said that criticism of the war by Democratic senators hurts troop morale -- with 44 percent saying morale is hurt "a lot," according to a poll taken by RT Strategies. Even self-identified Democrats agree: 55 percent believe criticism hurts morale, while 21 percent say it helps morale. The results surely will rankle many Democrats, who argue that it is patriotic and supportive of the troops to call attention to what they believe are deep flaws in President Bush's Iraq strategy. But the survey itself cannot be dismissed as a partisan attack. The RTs in RT Strategies are Thomas Riehle, a Democrat, and Lance Tarrance, a veteran GOP pollster. Their poll also indicates many Americans are skeptical of Democratic complaints about the war. Just three of 10 adults accept that Democrats are leveling criticism because they believe this will help U.S. efforts in Iraq. A majority believes the motive is really to "gain a partisan political advantage." This poll is one of the few pieces of supportive news the administration has had lately on Iraq. Most surveys have shown significant majorities believe it was a mistake to go to war, as well as rising sentiment that Bush misled Americans in making the case for it. Even so, there is still support for Bush's policy going forward. A plurality, 49 percent, believe that troops should come home only when the Iraqi government can provide for its own security, while 16 percent support immediate withdrawal, regardless of the circumstances.
