Originally Posted By patrickegan These guy’s always trot out the same old tired who’s on first era witticisms about the source or semantics topped off with a little back patting and some self adulation. Whatever you have it’s not the gospel according to Franken so it’s of little value
Originally Posted By DlandDug >>Hmmm... not a single quote from any of those people saying "therefore, we need to invade and occupy that country." That's the big leap that always gets ignored.<< This is not a flip flop, Beau. It's a prime example of moving the goalposts. The charge is "Bush lied about WMDs." Massive information clearly illustrates that, far from lying, Bush was merely stating what was widely accepted as conventional wisdom. So, rather than acknowledge this, the criticism is changed to "not a single quote from any of those people saying 'therefore, we need to invade and occupy that country.'" It's SOP for partisans who have made up their minds and will not listen to anything that contradicts their beliefs.
Originally Posted By DlandDug >>Also, note that the Congress does not operate its own intelligence agency. They rely on information collected, analyzed, and filtered by executive branch agencies. If these agencies are biasing the intelligence or releasing stuff that's true but only half the truth, then it's no wonder that members of Congress might come away with misinformed opinions.<< This is not entirely accurate. The Congress has its own intelligence committees, who do rely on much of the same information sources as the White House. The notion that all intel is filtered by the White House first is fubdamentally wrong.
Originally Posted By DlandDug >>Why don't we hear what people have to say about WMDs in 2005...?<< This is a specious question. The charge that is being answered in these quotes is that Bush lied during the build up to the Iraq war. The Democrats made a big fuss on the floor of the Senate on this very charge. The quotes are all contemporaneous with the build up to the war, and clearly illustrate that, far from lying, Bush's position was well within the conventional wisdom of the time. >>Now that we know the intelligence from 2002 that most of those quotes were based on was dead wrong.<< Whether they were dead wrong or not, the build up to war took place prior to 2005. Introducing the notion that Bush should take retroactive responsibility for his informed opinion c. 2002 is grasping at straws.
Originally Posted By DlandDug RE: Post #11: It would have been helpful to have identified the subject of the interview. Karen Kwiatkowski (she who assures us she has no ties to Lyndon LaRouche at all) would issue statements like this. Her regular material on Lew Rockwell's blog (he who advocates the overthrow of the government) is in a similar vein, and just as slanted. That Kwiatkowski would disagree with the Silberman-Robb Report, which reached the conclusion that allegations that pre-war intelligence was manipulated are false, is no surprise. But it should be understood that she has an agenda, which makes her assertions less than entirely factual.
Originally Posted By SuperDry <<< This is not entirely accurate. The Congress has its own intelligence committees, who do rely on much of the same information sources as the White House. The notion that all intel is filtered by the White House first is fubdamentally wrong. >>> I didn't say White House. I said executive branch agency, meaning all of them collectively (White House, CIA, DOD, etc.). I don't mean to pick a nit at what you said, because I'm not sure if you meant to make the distiction on purpose. In any event, the intelligence information that Congress gets all comes from executive branch agencies. For example, the information that comes from the Dept of Defense can be highly influenced by the Secretary of Defense, either directly or implicitly through the choice of people that he's placed in charge of certain things. It's very apparent that this White House in particular has chosen to put people in charge of various things that are on the same page so to speak. Look at all of the people involved with the Project for a New American Century in the late 90's, what they stood for, and where they are now: in the White House, in the Pentagon, and various other places. All of these people held very strong beliefs that America should invade Iraq long before 9/11 and even long before Election 2000, and they were in a position to jockey the intelligence used internally within the executive branch and provided to Congress so that it encouraged this pre-determined conclusion.
Originally Posted By SuperDry <<< SuperDry, you are absolutley obsessed with rush and hannity, get over it man. >>> Well, I am passionate over the matter - glad you noticed <<< Some of us like to listen to them, not to be brainwashed, but we feel that we get information that is consistantly lefty out of network news reports. >>> I never claimed that the reason you're listening was because you like to be brainwashed. That's one of the things that's so insidious about the whole thing. One example I'd like to give is Rush's subscription-based website. Here's what his website says about it: "The Essential Stack of Stuff: Hundreds of articles and hours of Rush audio - essential information for defeating liberals" He is quite literally offering a library of articles and other information for his subscribers to be accessed for the purpose of "defeating liberals." Does a liberal have a point and you don't know quite how to respond? Well just access the online library of ready-made responses for any situation. Considering what the online library of Rush material is and especially considering the exact words used on his website to market it, I'd be interested in someone explaining how I'm off-base on this (I wonder if this question is answered in Rush's library? ) Another example is what happened over in the evolution/creation thread. We were having a discussion that seemed to be mostly on how to interpret the description of creation in the Bible, and whether a belief in evolution was consistent with a general belief in the Bible. Then someone comes in from left field with a blanket statement equating evolution with Atheism, acting as if that's what the whole thread is about, even though we were several pages into it and that wasn't even being discussed. Not really a big deal in the big scheme of things, but when I see stuff like that happened, I ask myself "Where did THAT come from?" But know I know. When I turn on the radio, I'll catch snippets of very angry people repeating over and over "evolution = atheism" in not so many words. And in my personal life, when having a discussion on current events, I've noticed that certain people are prone to doing this sort of thing: we'll be having a discussion, then there will be some very odd sudden shift in the conversation from them, along with the notion that that's what we've been discussing all along (such as discussing evolution/creation that ends up being "Why do you support atheism?"). Then I noticed that there was a striking correlation between these sudden shifts and what I would hear on the radio when I occasionally tune into the noise machine. And finally I noticed that of the people I know whose conversations are prone to make these sudden, odd shifts or whose thinking has these highly unusual conclusions, ALL of them listen to the noise machine. And of the people that one can just have a conversation with where what is being responded to is what's actually said, none of these people listen to the noise machine. And this is true regardless of whether I agree or disagree with them. To put it another way, there are some people that I can have a lengthy discussion with, totally disagree with, and walk away from the conversation with the notion of "we have difference of opinion, and agree to disagree." But in most cases, you just can't get very far with noise machine listeners, as the conversation gets derailed very quickly, such as in the "evolution = atheism" situation. The conversation from their end turns into not really being a discussion, but just a presentation of the pre-programmed responses. It's very frustrating.
Originally Posted By Beaumandy We have dozens of quotes from democrats who ae now against the war, that if you said Bush made the quotes, nobody would question it. Yet, the democrats and thier liberal followers actually think this doesn't make them look like total hypocites and fools? Meanwhile, the dems have NO IDEAS of their own on how to win the war on terror... but they just gloss over this fact of life. When they lose the next several elections, they will be asking "what happened! " all to our amazement.
Originally Posted By Disneyman55 SuperDry, this certainately isn't the thread for discussing the creation/evolution issue but I do have to admit I enjoy your selective reasoning. As the guilty party for bringing up the atheism issue regarding evolution (which I then went on to elucidate on, but you didn't see fit to bring that up), I can tell you that I did not get that from the radio. I think I have listened to Rush once in the last year, accessed his website maybe twice, and I have never even watched Hannity and Colmes (I am WAY too busy). You really don't have the slightest clue where I get my beliefs, thought processes and ideas, but that doesn't stop you from jumping to conclusions and making assumptions. Sometimes A + B does not = C. The fact of the matter is that your bringing up the "noise machine" and "get an opinion of your own" is an attempt to belittle and marginalize the thoughts of others. Which is fine, if that's what you want to do. God knows, you aren't the first, you won't be the last.
Originally Posted By TomSawyer I don't think anyone thought that the president would be so flat out wrong about the state of Iraq's WMD program. Or, as the case turned out, Iraq's non-existent WMD program. These quotes are really irrelevant due to the absolute failure of the Administration to vet their information before presenting it as fact.
Originally Posted By Darkbeer <a href="http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007495" target="_blank">http://www.opinionjournal.com/ editorial/feature.html?id=110007495</a> >>We are now seeing the spectacle of Bush-hating Democrats adopting a similar slander against the current President regarding the Iraq War. The indictment by Patrick Fitzgerald of Vice Presidential aide I. Lewis Libby has become their latest opening to promote this fiction, notwithstanding the mountains of contrary evidence. To wit: • In July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan 500-page report that found numerous failures of intelligence gathering and analysis. As for the Bush Administration's role, "The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," (our emphasis). • The Butler Report, published by the British in July 2004, similarly found no evidence of "deliberate distortion," although it too found much to criticize in the quality of prewar intelligence. • The March 2005 Robb-Silberman report on WMD intelligence was equally categorical, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . .analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments." • Finally, last Friday, there was Mr. Fitzgerald: "This indictment's not about the propriety of the war, and people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who are--have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel." In short, everyone who has looked into the question of whether the Bush Administration lied about intelligence, distorted intelligence, or pressured intelligence agencies to produce assessments that would support a supposedly pre-baked decision to invade Iraq has come up with the same answer: No, no, no and no.<< >>The scandal here isn't what happened before the war. The scandal is that the same Democrats who saw the same intelligence that Mr. Bush saw, who drew the same conclusions, and who voted to go to war are now using the difficulties we've encountered in that conflict as an excuse to rewrite history. Are Republicans really going to let them get away with it? <<
Originally Posted By TomSawyer >>The scandal is that the same Democrats who saw the same intelligence that Mr. Bush saw<< The scandal, as I've maintained for a while, is that the intelligence that Mr. Bush saw was not complete. We needed to see all of the intelligence, not just the intelligence hand picked for the President's review.
Originally Posted By DouglasDubh And just because Democrats were saying the same in 1998-2000 doesn't mean that it's still not President Bush's fault, right?
Originally Posted By TomSawyer They didn't start a war based on incomplete and inaccurate information, did they? They didn't pull a trigger that so far has caused the loss over 2000 American lives and at least 30,000 civilian deaths.
Originally Posted By Spree What of the comments made by Clinton and others back in 98'? Are we to accuse Bush of going back in time and doctoring inteligence before he was even President?? C'mon, reality check time Bush haters!
Originally Posted By DouglasDubh <They didn't start a war based on incomplete and inaccurate information, did they?> Actually, they did. Remember how we bombed Bosnia largely because of reports of mass graves, and how later those graves failed to materialize? Remember how outraged everyone was about these "lies" and demanded that Madeline Albright step down for reporting them? Oh yeah, that last part didn't happen. <They didn't pull a trigger that so far has caused the loss over 2000 American lives and at least 30,000 civilian deaths.> And freed 25 million people and made the middle east safer for the whole globe.
Originally Posted By TomSawyer >>Are we to accuse Bush of going back in time and doctoring inteligence before he was even President?? << Before 2000, Saddam was a problem. After 9/11, Saddam was an imminent threat with nukes and other WMDs. But nothing changed in Iraq during that time. The rhetoric in the US is what changed.
Originally Posted By Spree So when clinton unleashed a barrage of Cruise Missles at Iraq.............?
Originally Posted By TomSawyer >>Remember how we bombed Bosnia largely because of reports of mass graves, and how later those graves failed to materialize?<< Let me put on my wizard hat and make them materialize for you: <a href="http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/berserk/graves_65.html" target="_blank">http://www.haverford.edu/relg/ sells/berserk/graves_65.html</a> (from 1996) U.N. war crimes investigators in Bosnia unearthed a second mass grave on Wednesday, apparently of Muslims killed by Serb forces in the conquest of Srebrenica in mid-1995. <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1511100.stm" target="_blank">http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wor ld/europe/1511100.stm</a> (from 2001) Forensic investigators in Bosnia-Hercegovina have uncovered a mass grave believed to contain the remains of 19 people killed by Serb forces in the first month of the Bosnian war. The bodies were lying at the bottom of a deep pit near the southern town of Nevesinje, around 20 km from Mostar. The mass grave near Nevesinje is believed to contain the bodies of 19 Muslims executed by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1992, shortly after they took control of the area around the southern city of Mostar. <a href="http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/07/23/bosnia.grave/" target="_blank">http://archives.cnn.com/2002/W ORLD/europe/07/23/bosnia.grave/</a> Forensic experts discovered a mass grave in northeastern Bosnia that may contain up to 100 bodies of Muslims killed in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. Murat Hurtic, a member of the Muslim Commission for Missing Persons, said the mass grave was found Monday near the Serb-held village of Kamenica, 45 miles northeast of Sarajevo. <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200409/s1196941.htm" target="_blank">http://www.abc.net.au/news/new sitems/200409/s1196941.htm</a> Forensic experts say they have found the remains of dozens of Muslims massacred at Srebrenica during Bosnia's ethnic war in a mass grave near the eastern town. Team member Ismet Music said 103 complete or incomplete bodies had so far been exhumed from the grave on a hill above the village of Bljecevo, with clothes and other belongings of the victims scattered on the surface. Documents found at the site showed they were from Srebrenica. <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0" target="_blank">http://www.foxnews.com/story/0</a>,2933,171209,00.html Forensic experts have recovered the remains of 213 victims of Europe's worst massacre since World War II (search), an official said Tuesday. The mass grave in the northeastern Bosnia village of Liplje has so far been found to contain "212 incomplete (bodies) and one complete body," said Murat Hurtic, the head of the forensic team. <a href="http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWitness/Sreb1.htm" target="_blank">http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWit ness/Sreb1.htm</a> Bulldozers unearthed the remains of dozens of people yesterday as investigators searched for about 700 missing Muslims in what is believed to be the biggest mass grave in Bosnia. The bones, dug up from an area the size of a tennis court, are thought to include some of the 7,000 men and boys who were slaughtered by Bosnian Serb forces at Srebrenica eight years ago - Europe's worst massacre since the Second World War. "We believe the grave contains several hundred bodies of 1995 Srebrenica massacre victims and those of Zvornik civilians killed at the start of the war," said Murat Hurtic, a member of the Bosnian Commission for Missing People. "It could be the largest mass grave ever found in Bosnia." The grave was found at Crni Vrh, near the town of Zvornik, north of Srebrenica, and is believed to be a site to which the bodies were moved from their original burial places near Srebrenica. Bosnian Serbs reburied victims to hide evidence of massacres from the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, which is prosecuting those accused of atrocities in Balkan wars of the 1990s. Ta daa!
Originally Posted By TomSawyer >>And freed 25 million people and made the middle east safer for the whole globe. << I don't think we'll know that for several years. Iraq isn't even safer for Iraqis at the moment.
