CHENEY: Criticize me and you don't support the troops - Page 3

??? Where did I say anything remotely close to what you are saying? I am talking about my experience with certain posters who are showing consistent behaviour in thread after thread after thread... If you look close you will see I am not exactly among the 90% most Bush-positive here...


Yes I am. If the goal is an open discussion where arguments are more important than positions then both are equal bad.


Go pick on powerdoc instead. I hope my english isn´t as bad as his

So that Clinton transcript was explaining what again... oh yeah, an ATTACK on Iraq.

Also again you claim alone for Bush what others followed as well. Bush cited the British intelligence and Blair also used it as a justification for war.

Why do you hold different criteria for Bush than for Blair or Clinton? All three came to the same conclusions. Why is only Bush the liar in your book?


1) Clinton also ordered strikes in Sudan that same year. We are talking about multiple preemptive strikes on multiple countries. You are right that they were not full scale invasions but then we didn't have a pile of debris sitting in the middle of New York affirming the true nature of the previous threats either.

2. It wasn't just that. As Clinton cited himself, the difference wasn't just that Saddam had WMD's, it was his willingness to use them.

3. The Bush administration did not need, nor did they ultimately get the U.N. strength of resolution they wanted. However there had also been 16 previous resolutions including resolution 1441. That resolution was called "one last chance for Iraq" which was the exact language Clinton spoke and used to justified action.

Powell was briefed for that speech by the same CIA run by the same man, Tenet, as was the case when Clinton was president.

We can say that Iraq had no WMD's and that Bush was wrong for declaring a preemptive war. We can argue all sort of points. However it just doesn't ring true to me that Bush knew and lied when every other party previously involved both in our own government and in Blair's government as well drew the same conclusions and took similar actions before Bush was even in power.

Nick

I really don't care about the fact that you do the same stupid actions over and over 3,000 times.

You add nothing, so why read your posts anymore?

/ignore.

Nick

Dude, I wasn´t picking on your English. I was talking about the many different explanation-s- and reason-s- Cheney administration supporters throw out depending on the tone and direction of the discussions.

Well, I certainly can't argue with you when you say that posting here is stupid. But as for all of us, somehow this vice satisfies something.

And there's yet another false statement. I understand why you'd like to believe that a list of points proving your other statement false would constitute as "add[ing] nothing," but unfortunately you can't wish something into being.

And speaking of adding nothing, what have you added other than attacks on me for pointing out that you made an obviously and flagrantly false statement?

Because the yellow cake suspicion started in US, was cleared up to be false, took a round to GB and ended up in Powells speech again.

You think the secretary is screwing the boss and tells it to your coworker, You then learn that she is lesbian and hate all men, especially the boss. The next day another coworker tells you that he heard that the secretary is crewing the boss. What should you assume happened?


I don´t understand what you are talking about here. 911?


...If not supervised by the weapon inspectors. The same inspectors blablabla...


I´m not discussing the legal side of things here. Powell was allowed to the UN by the top because 1) he really thought you needed to make your case there and 2) because your allied wanted him to do so.


Only in James Bond are MI6 able to make as detailed intelligence gathering as CIA. Everybody relied on your people.

I won´t argue against that everybody in the community thought Iraq had WoMDs, that some intelligence pointed in that direction and yet other could be interpreted like proof (but also not as proof if you wanted to). But some was NOT proof, like yellow cake, buildings in Kurd controlled areas and aluminum tubes and those including it would have known. Yellow cake must have been known at the top. And the active attempt to discredit Blix shows dishonest attempt to present a case for war honestly.

On top of that, we can look at many individual statements made by administration officials and compare against what was known and see that they said things that simply weren't true and claimed that the inspectors made conclusions that the inspectors never made.

The problem with these discussions about the intel on Iraq is that people always try to make vague meta arguments and aren't willing to check out individual statements and see that there's clear exaggeration and straight up lies. And for those who claim we can't know where the intelligence came from, go back and look at the admin statements. They explicitly stated time and time again "UN inspectors concluded x y z."

For example:

And the list goes on and on and on.

Some of the most numerous exaggerations were of the kind that ignored the shelf life of unaccounted for chemicals and biological agents. They would say "the UN says Iraq hasn't accounted for x, y, z" knowing full well that the UN also stated in the next sentence that x, y, z was no longer viable.

So people can continue with this vague discussion about who knew what at which point, but it's perfectly and unquestionably clear that administration officials made a massive number of obviously and knowingly false statements during the build-up to the war.

Threat, WoMD, attack.

Those are the terms that war apologists want us repeat. "Everyone agreed" that Saddam was a "threat", that he had "WoMD". Even Clinton was willing to "attack". Everyone had "the same intelligence".

But a threat, which can be regional, strategic or long term, is different from "able to attack the United States immediately", which is what the Bush administration was pushing. A threat is different from "aided and abetted al Qaeda, willing to provide al Qaeda with WoMD", which is what the Bush administration was pushing. A threat is different from "can deliver chemical agents via drones to the US soil", which is what the Bush administration was pushing.

All untrue. All specifically points where the Bush administration ignored or suppressed the multiple caveats or outright contradictions there own intelligence agencies were providing. And yet because this new, false, and much scarier version of the kind of threat Saddam represented, the version that was used by the Bush administration to stampede the country into war, can also be called by the same word, "threat", the apologists want to confuse the two, and make if seem as if that term meant the same when previous administrations used it. it did not.

WoMD are different from "a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud", which is what the Bush administration was pushing. Again, a specific point of Bush administration exaggeration and cherry picking. Again, much scarier than just "WoMD". The weapons inspectors were on their way to proving Saddam had no such cabability. The aluminum tubes and Niger yellowcake were given little credence inside our own intelligence apparatus, but the apologists pretend that "it's all the same", that suspecting that Saddam had chemical weapons in 1999 gives cover to the specifically refuted scenario that he had rebuilt his nuclear capability in 2002.

"Attack", as in targeted air strikes, is different from a full scale invasion that has cost 2100 American lives and counting, which is what the Bush administration did. Pretending that Clinton air strikes give legitimacy to Bush's invasion in ridiculous on the face of it.

Twist the words. Blur the distinctions. The jig is up. Americans are waking up to the magnitude of the deception, and the best you can do is call them suckers for following their leader.

Three things:

1) Could someone please provide some evidence for the claim that the congress didn't get the same intelligence as the White House?

2) Could someone please provide some evidence that the congress got the same intel as the White House?

3) If this thread were a picture, it would look like this:

Congress' main sources were the NIE and statements by executive officials. The NIE had caveats and all, but how many studied it?

In addition, look at joint resolution 114 in oct 02 and note that a number of senators (23 total), including senate intel committee folks like graham and durbin, voted against authorization to use force against Iraq. Saying that legislators who actually saw the intel fully backed what the administration was doing is a myth.

In the end, the executive officials were the primary source of information for everyone, including legislators. Executive offices (like Feith's and Cheney's) received and disseminated info outside of the scope of official material presented to congress, and congress was subjected to the same propaganda machine that everyone else was. Congress wasn't producing information, a variety of executive offices were.

I downloaded the Senate intelligence Committee's report here -- it's big:

http://intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf

I OCR'd it in Acrobat -- take a look at this from page 559 (actual #):

I looks like, if the SIC thinks it's getting hornswoggled, it has a way to deal with that. (?)

Oh, and it turns out that the cool new "torture is OK because terrorists are the worst threat in the history of the universe" mentality (say, doesn't Cheney spend a lot of time explaining why that makes sense?) was partially responsible for some of that key intel "everybody had access to":


Well, at least the entire operation is of a piece. Horrible policies, horrible techniques, horrible results, horrible rationalizations.

page 277, not 559.

The question wasn't about the senate intelligence committee's back and forth with executive agencies (of which this was just one relatively uneventful piece), it was about whether "congress got the same intel" as the executive branch. The answer is clearly no, and even a cursory overview of the structure of the government, even disregarding all of the many important specifics of the situation surrounding the Iraq war, shows why.

Brilliant!
Not only did the whitehouse cook the books, they left to stove on and now were all burned with Iraq.

That does tidy things up doesn't it? Especially the name Al Libbi.

I thought I might toss this into the discussion.

You can draw your own conclusions but from this, I take away that the parties voting yes or no knew exactly what we thought Iraq capable of doing and the reservations and objections to that information. He shows his agenda in complaining that Bush was somehow not truthful in drawing his conclusions that Iraq was a threat. He complains that is collegues did not practice caveat emptor. This is where I see the double standard. If Bush didn't buy the objections witin the intelligence and acted, and the Democratic colleges also voted for action, then whatever label they wear has to be the same for both parties. People are responsible for their votes.

Nick

sorry about that, that should have been 359

I don't know giant, check what starts on page 489, which is Dianne Feinstien's "Additional Views" and while --- and let's remember this is Feinstien saying this -- she says the administration sexed up the imminent threat to the American people, she spends the bulk of her time ripping the Intelligence process, and admits that the analysts who were questioned repeatedly on Iraq, did not change their analysis.

What is clear to me, is that two years on, the reasons have now changed: now, we're hearing essentially the opposite of what's in this report: two years ago, even for the far left of the Democratic party there was a huge problem with the intelligence apparatus and a lesser problem with the administration hyping it, now were are back to 'Bush lied, people died'.

That sounds suspiciously like a campaign slogan.

Thanks for the link. I hold those in Congress who voted for the war in low esteem. They were doing so for political reasons - Dems who voted against the first Gulf War in 1991 were embarrassed by its overwhelming success, and they probably didn't want to be in that position again. And I'm not at all impressed by people like Kerry who voted for it but gave an equivocal Senate speech about it.

But let's say all of the current White House arguments are correct. Dems had access to the same intelligence. Everyone believed there were WMDs. The intelligence was honestly just mistaken and not manipulated at all. I don't believe that, but let's say that's right, just for argument's sake.

This is still one of the biggest fuck-ups in US history, and it is still Bush's fuck-up. This was his war. This wasn't initiated by others. He wanted to do this. Just because he was able to get others to go along with it doesn't change that fact. If the CEO has a plan and convinces a majority of the board of directors to vote for the plan, it's still the CEO's plan.

Furthermore, even though a lot of Dems voted for the war resolution, many voted against it. More Dems in the Senate voted for it than against it (c. 30-20), but in the house the vast majority of Dems voted against it (c. 120-80). This was a Bush plan that was approved with the support of his own party over significant objections by the other party.

Another Rovian insult to what it means to be human takes flight: did the rationales for invading Iraq change and change again as each in turn were discredited? Was the Iraqi "link" to 9/11 craftily implied, over and over, as an expedient cudgel to drive the political debate? Did bin Laden somehow drop off the map as his political usefulness was supplanted by a new vision of Saddam as Hitler? Did Bush claim that the inspectors were "thrown out by Saddam"? Did Bush assure us that an "authorization to use force" was a powerful tool to force transparency from Iraq? Did Bush assure us that every possible avenue short of war would be fully exploited, and that he very much wanted to avoid war?

Were the intelligence agencies ridiculed on the right for being "soft on Iraq"? Did Cheney set up a parallel intelligence apparatus in the White House because the CIA was to full of "maybe yes, maybe no" when what they wanted was "Yes! Yes! Yes!"? Did they relentlessly promulgate any scrap of intel that seemed to make the case for war while suppressing or de-emphasizing caveats, ambiguities and contradictions? Did they relentlessly build the case, for Saddam as a post 9/11, al Qeada connected madman with his finger on the nuclear button? Did they make this case in the very low standard court of public opinion, to make it politically difficult for the Democrats to deny the President his willingness to "protect the American people"? Did the Republicans remind the American people at every opportunity of the Democratic "weakness" on Gulf War I to further increase political pressure?

Were we to be greeted as liberators? Was the entire operation going to take only a few tens of thousands of American soldiers? Was the entire operation to be paid for by Iraqi oil? Was Iraq to blossom as a vibrant democracy that would transform the middle east? Were Iraqi women to be rescued from the bondage of Islam? Was the "mission accomplished"?

Did Congress invade Iraq? Was it Congress that had no occupation plan, no exit strategy, dissolved the army, failed to secure the infrastructure, and staged the "toppling of Saddam's statue" and assorted other photo ops instead of understanding the political reality of the country they had just taken over? Did Congress undertake a nuance blind "De-Ba'athification" policy that left the civil infrastructure in shambles? Did Congress give no bid contracts to huge, politically connected American firms and exclude ready willing and able Iraqis whose unemployment numbers now hover around 60%?

Has the Bush administration and its Republican cohorts systematically thwarted any real investigation into the means and justifications of the Iraqi war by limiting the mandate of what little window dressing a Republican controlled Senate is allowed hang? Say, how is that "Phase 2" Senate investigation coming along, anyhow?

Never mind. Noticing any of that hates America and abets terrorism and hurts the troops.

No, the important thing now is that Democrats want to rewrite history!

Breathtaking, really. Let's focus on what Dianne Feinstein said with a level of detail and accountability we would never expect from the architects of this debacle, because there is where the truth lies.

Is Cheney in the habit of lying through his teeth about things that get young men and women killed? That's not the problem.

The problem is that now that the whole thing is crashing down around our ears those filthy Democrats actually want to get some political mileage out of a disaster that completely belongs to the current administration, when everyone know the appropriate response would be to hang their heads and intone "there is blood on all of our hands, brother" and politely await further instructions.

Because, wonder of wonders, after years of being demonized and vilified and attacked and slurred for being "soft on national security" and being "appeasers" and "traitors" it's really all the Democrats fault for not sticking to their guns.

Addabox, get the SIC report and at least read/scan the first 'hundred pages. I think you will get a sense of why this it is disingenuous to for the same people who voted for the War to be changing their tune. Remember, this is the same intelligence apparatus that allowed the towers to fall, the pentagon to be partially wrecked, and, without the help of some very brave people, probably the white house or Capitol building destroyed as well.

At least try to read some of it.

See, my point is that I don't care if they're being disengenuous. At all. It is utterly and completely beside the point, and it's utterly and completely beside the point in exactly the way this White House's subject changing smear campaigns are always utterly and completely beside the point.

It's simple. Dems got stampeded into voting for a stupid, dishonest resolution by a relentless political campaign that cynically exploited the trauma of 9/11 to deny them cover for doing the right thing.

Do I think that that brings honor to their cause? Of course not. I wish we had had a Democratic Party that would have rejected the logic of war and the necon's bellicosity out of hand, insisted that the inspections take their course and demanded a real world accounting for the the cost and consequences of committing American troops. I can hope that one day soon the Democratic party will once again become a true opposition party, and put aside the cautious triangulation of Clinton and the beltway consultants. Of course, if they ever do, the same people who fault them now for being inconsistent will be full of reprobation for their "radicalism and divisiveness", for their appeals to the "politics of destruction" and for the death of "comity".

I fully understand that many apologists for the war (Dick Cheney among them), would rather talk about intelligence shortcomings and Democratic inconsistency than what has actually happened and is happening in Iraq. They would rather probe the record to exactly parse the tone of Democratic remarks prior to the war than ever interrogate what the people responsible for the war said and did not say. They would rather cluck their tongue at "disingenuousness" than ever muster outrage at the overt and ongoing distortions and manipulation that have killed so many thousands and cost so many billions. They would rather trouble themselves with "consistency" only as it applies to a few powerless, minority party congress people and never as it applies to the ever changing rationales for why, exactly, we find ourselves in this quagmire and how we intend to extricate ourselves.

Lie about what's happening, and if that doesn't work, change the subject. Hell, do both at the same time. It's worked so far.

(edited for excessive bitter invective)

I hate the form these self-righteous press conferences the democrats excel in take. But here you get some democrats take on the level of detail of intelligence they got up to the vote for war:

rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/iraq/iraq111805_harman.rm?mode=compact

I've read through that during these debates over the war, and basically what it says is that the conclusions that Iraq had all these WMDs and nukes and the like were not supported by the existing intelligence of the time. Not that the CIA believed it and so everyone believed it, but that the intelligence to believe it wasn't there. Here's the primary quote: "Conclusion 1. Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting." And remember that this committee did not investigate the reason the intelligence was wrong. They were supposed to do it but didn't, which is why the Senate Dems shut down business a while back.


Who are the same people? The people that told the president in August 2001 that bin Laden was determined to strike inside the US? Richard Clarke who was demoted after raising a ruckus about bin Laden? The people who stopped the millennium bombing plot in 1999? The people who were said by Cheney et al. to be too soft on Saddam?

Like I said :


They'll never admit it of course.

Not only will they not admit it, it really wouldn't matter if the Dems had risen up as one and flatly rejected the war resolution.

You think any war apologist would now be saying, "well, I guess they were right all along"?.

Of course not. They would be belittling the Dems for being wrong on the merits at the time, claiming that whatever might have come to to light subsequently, the Democrats still had to "answer to the American people" for refusing to step up to help defend their country when the case for war "still seemed to have so much merit".

Can't you just hear it? "Sure, now we know the whole thing was a sham, but when "everybody" thought Saddam was about to attack us the turncoat liberals wanted to hide their heads in the sand! Being right in hindsight doesn't get you off the hook for being pussies".

Trying to make nice and second guess this crowd is a sucker's game. The ironic result of the "damned if you do, damed if you don't, the important thing is that liberals are traitorous scum" school of spin is that it may hasten the arrival of a genuinely partisan, genuinely willing to fight Democratic party, because they realize they have absolutely nothing to lose in going their own way.

Brussel, addabox, what other explanation is there? The NIEs were consistent for more than ten years. I don't understand this insistence that the group-think over Iraq was not full full blown. This is a textbook case of group-think.

Look at this: (you guys have to forgive Acrobat's OCR heuristics, which are not that good)


Exhibit 2: (has to do with the NIE demanded, IIRC, in the WaPost article trumptman linked to)

and Exhibit 3:

1) Could someone please provide some evidence for the claim that the congress didn't get the same intelligence as the White House?

2) Could someone please provide some evidence that the congress got the same intel as the White House?

I hear you, midwinter


here is another quote from page 21:


From Scott Adams' blog:

And I don't understand why you fail to grasp the distinction between "thought Saddam had a WMD program" and "made repeated, forceful and unsubstantiated claims, most certainly not supported by intelligence community consensus, that Saddam was a direct threat to the "homeland" via nuclear weapons or providing al Qaeda with weapons".

I also don't know why anyone can't grasp the distinction between "regard Saddam as a problem, consider options" and "launch a full scale goddamn preemptive invasion with a stunning lack of planning and fuck it up beyond all reason".

It's as if there were a drug dealing criminal syndicate that a out of control police department decided to deal with by first claiming the syndicate was also eating babies and then setting fire to an entire neighborhood, and in the aftermath kept whining that "everybody agreed that they were a drug dealing crime syndicate".

What other explanation? How about: This administration wanted to go to war with Iraq and so they trumped up their case.

Yes it is. And one of the key features of groupthink is that the leaders make their opinions known and dissent gets stifled in favor of sucking up. Groupthink would not happen with impartial leaders who wanted the truth.

but addabox, it was more than "oh, he was WOMD" these people had completely psyched themselves out -- that Saddam had multiple programs, intentions, etc., etc., -- to the point that the entire bureaucracy was invested, a la Scott Adams' example.

yes, they did, they played the intelligence that they had for maximum effect, no doubt. But with a cornicopia of textbook paranioa and latency to draw on -- can you blame them?

Here's a report on that issue. As I read it, there are a few key issues: 1) that there were other intelligence papers, like the Presidential Daily Briefings, that Congress does not see, 2) that there were other intelligence sources being used by the White House outside of the traditional channels (again, not available to Congress), 3) that the administration "owns" the intelligence and gives Congress what it wants to give Congress, 4) that dissents were made available but not declassified, so Democrats couldn't discuss them, and 5) that the administration was making claims about Iraq's WMDs and nukes long before the NIE, which was the primary document available to Congress, and which was requested by Democrats after these claims were made, and which was released only a few days before the Iraq war vote.

Hmm. What grade would you give a student who wrote THAT paragraph.

Well, to be completely fair, Feinstein mentioned the PDBs when she criticized the intelligence that they had [not] been receiving.

Although, I am working on a "Saddam had really bad Karma" theory.

While it's true that the democrats could have been less supportive of Bush's plan before the war that still doesn't shift the blame or make it right. Also what about after it was apparent that the intel was bad and there wasn't any threat? We knew that before it was over. How come Bush and Cheney were still pushing this ( and still are today )?

Why are we going through this again? Why are some pretending that some people DIDN'T say before the war that the evidence was bullshit?

Here's a thread andhere's another one 'after' the war where the lie is given.

The first one is great -- it's people saying 'this evidence is bullshit' and the usual hawks saying 'You morons! Why do you hate Bush and love Saddam?'.

The only difference is that the democrats have now realised they were lied to. The fact that some of us, like the WEAPONS INSPECTORS said that Bush was lying remains loud and proud. And we're accused of rewriting history.

The one bright thing here is that the argument has been won and the trust has been lost, as it should have been years ago.

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" Why are we going through this again? Why are some pretending that some people DIDN'T say before the war that the evidence was bullshit? "
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Because Harald old boy it's the old rewrite history ( or pretend it didn't happen or " You've forgotten about that now right ? " ) trick that's so much a favorite of certain factions ( Bush supporters ).

OH! But it's just all so complicated! I'll just trust the leader rather than try to separate the wheat from all the chaff, if that's OK.