Pundits escalate attacks against Obama

[hrmwrm]

we were working from the stand point iof wmd's. which has been shown to be a lie perpetrated by the bush administration.
and we are talking about bushes time in office, not clinton's, which was a time shortly after the gulf war when saddam was being stripped of weapons.
talk about me cherry picking things.
all your evidence and conclusions from the evidence are pre-bush.

i have given enough evidence to prove it was known that there were no wmd's, which was the premise of going into iraq. you haven't given information contradicting that fact. you've merely tried obfuscating the arguement, which is very rude, dishonest, and deceptive of you.

right from george tenet himself;

In the midst of the al Qaeda threat, Tenet says he was astonished and mystified when the White House turned its aim to Iraq.

Tenet told 60 Minutes the war in Iraq is "a national tragedy." He says he realized it was the end of his career when he picked up The Washington Post and saw that he was being blamed for the decision to go to war. In classic Washington fashion, someone had leaked a story suggesting that the president decided to attack after Tenet said the evidence against Iraq was a "slam dunk."

In our interview, Tenet admits the CIA's mistakes and his own. But what makes him angry now is how the White House ignored CIA warnings, cooked the books on intelligence, and then used "slam dunk" to brand him with the failure.

"The hardest part of all of this has just been listening to this for almost three years. Listening to the vice president go on 'Meet The Press' on the fifth year of 9/11, and say, 'Well, George Tenet said, slam dunk.' As if he needed me to say slam dunk to go to war with Iraq," Tenet tells Pelley. "And they never let it go. I mean, I became campaign talk. I was a talking point. You know, 'Look at what the idiot told us, and we decided to go to war.' Well, let's not be so disingenuous. Let's stand up. This is why we did it. This is why, this is how we did it. And let's tell, let's everybody tell the truth."

The truth of Iraq begins, according to Tenet, the day after the attack of Sept. 11, when he ran into Pentagon advisor Richard Perle at the White House.

"He said to me, 'Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday, they bear responsibility.' It’s September the 12th. I’ve got the manifest with me that tell me al Qaeda did this. Nothing in my head that says there is any Iraqi involvement in this in any way shape or form and I remember thinking to myself, as I'm about to go brief the president, 'What the hell is he talking about?'" Tenet remembers.

"You said Iraq made no sense to you in that moment. Does it make any sense to you today?" Pelley asks.

"In terms of complicity with 9/11, absolutely none," Tenet says. "It never made any sense. We could never verify that there was any Iraqi authority, direction and control, complicity with al Qaeda for 9/11 or any operational act against America. Period."
"The president, in October of 2002, quote: 'We need to think about Saddam Hussein using al Qaeda to do his dirty work.' Is that what you're telling the president?" Pelley asks.

"Well, we didn't believe al Qaeda was gonna do Saddam Hussein's dirty work," Tenet says.

"January '03, the president again, [said] quote: 'Imagine those 19 hijackers this time armed by Saddam Hussein.' Is that what you're telling the president?" Pelley asks.

"No," Tenet says.

The vice president upped the ante, claiming Saddam had nuclear weapons, when the CIA was saying he didn’t.
"What's happening here?" Pelley asks.

"Well, I don't know what's happening here," Tenet says. "The intelligence community's judgment is 'He will not have a nuclear weapon until the year 2007, 2009.'"

"That's not what the vice president's saying," Pelley remarks.

"Well, I can't explain it," Tenet says.

Tenet says he sometimes warned the White House its statements were false, but he admits that he missed a big one in the 2003 State of the Union address, when the president said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
(CBS) The CIA had knocked down that uranium claim months before. The agency even demanded it be taken out of two previous presidential speeches. How did it get through the third time?
"I didn't read the speech. I was involved in a bunch of other things," Tenet says.

"Wait a minute, the president’s State of the Union," Pelley remarks. "You didn't read that?"

"Right, I didn’t, farmed it out, got it at a principal's meeting, brought it down the hall, handed it to my executive assistant. I said, 'You guys go review this, and come back to me if I need to do anything,'" Tenet remembers.

"Nobody comes back to you?" Pelley asks.

"And therein lies why I ultimately have to take my share of responsibility," Tenet says.

"Did anyone at the White House, did anyone in the defense department ever ask you whether we should go to war in Iraq?" Pelley asks.

"The discussions that are on-going in 2002 in the spring and summer of 2002 are 'How you might do this?' Not whether you should do this," Tenet says.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/25/60minutes/main2728375.shtml

 

[shagdrum]

we were working from the stand point iof wmd's. which has been shown to be a lie perpetrated by the bush administration.

It has not been shown to be any such thing. At best, you can say that he had bad intelligence, but a lie is an intentional falsehood. You have yet to show that Bush did such a thing.

All you have offered is proof that Bush was making the case to go into Iraq shortly after 9/11. You cannot prove any intentional deceptions except through hearsay through a document that may well have been forged.

Also, the claim of lies originally comes from Glen in post #19. The lies were never specifically tied to WMD's.

and we are talking about Bush's time in office, not Clinton's, which was a time shortly after the gulf war when Saddam was being stripped of weapons.

You have to evaluate Bush's decision with the info available to him at the time. The info that was available under Clinton was just as valid then as it was in 2001, 2002 and 2003, unless you can give some reason as to why that info was invalidated between the Clinton years and 2001, 2002 and/or 2003. That burden of proof is on you.

I have given enough evidence to prove it was known that there were no wmd's, which was the premise of going into iraq.

You have not given any such info. All you have shown is that Bush was building the case for going into Iraq from shortly after 2001. Then you spin that fact to say that Bush was going into Iraq "come hell or high water" and use hearsay in the form of the downing street memo as "proof".

Also, you are mischaracterizing when you say that WMD's were the premise of going into Iraq. The argument was much more then that. The terrorist ties were a huge part of that argument.

you haven't given information contradicting that fact [that there were no WMD's]

Ahh, you haven't given any info yet that it was known that there were no WMD's in the buildup to Iraq. That burden of proof is still on you.

you've merely tried obfuscating the argument, which is very rude, dishonest, and deceptive of you.

Nice try. But you are the one who is shown a habit (which you are exhibiting in this thread) of typing your rude "wall 'o' text" posts that dishonestly avoid any honest debate. Deception?

And you are trying to claim that the lie originally referred to was in regards to WMD's when it wasn't. Dishonest?

Then there is the "proof" you have offered that Bush lied which doesn't logically prove that Bush lied. All your cherry picked evidence proves, at best, is that he might have lied. I have show evidence that counters that. Obfuscation on your part, maybe?

 

[hrmwrm]

if you read, i also put up evidence bush was planning to invade iraq BEFORE 911. or did you miss post #48. i'll re-cap so you don't have to go back.

Bush decided to remove Saddam 'on day one'Former aide says US president made up his mind to go to war with Iraq long before 9/11, then ordered his staff to find an excuse

In the Bush White House, Paul O'Neill was the bespectacled swot in a class of ideological bullies who eventually kicked him out for raising too many uncomfortable questions. Now, 13 months later at a critical moment for the president, the nerd is having his revenge.
Mr O'Neill's account of his two years as Treasury secretary, told in a book published tomorrow and in a series of interviews over the weekend, is a startling tale of an administration nominally led by a disengaged figurehead president but driven by a "praetorian guard" of hardline rightwingers led by vice president Dick Cheney, ready to bend circumstances and facts to fit their political agenda.

According to the former aluminium mogul and longstanding Republican moderate who was fired from the US Treasury in December 2002, the administration came to office determined to oust Saddam and used the September 11 attacks as a convenient justification.

As Mr O'Neill, who sat in countless national security council meetings, describes the mood: "It was all about finding a way to do it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this'."

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," Mr O'Neill told the CBS network programme, 60 Minutes. In the book, based largely on his recollections and written by an American journalist, Ron Suskind, Mr O'Neill said that even as far back as January 2001, when President Bush took office, no one in the NSC questioned the assumption that Iraq should be invaded.

In the book, The Price of Loyalty: George W Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, the author, Mr Suskind, quotes from memoranda preparing for a war dating to the first days of the administration. "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq,'" he told CBS television.


and it is you who have shown great dishonesty and a lack of integrity very recently in your "vile hatred" thread. it shows that you will stop at nothing to further false arguements from your part.

as for intelligence, you expect me to believe intelligence from clinton's administration and time was still the same years later? next you'll be telling me intelligence gained on germany from the 2nd world war is still applicable to them.

and you shoot your own foot anyways. if you read carefully, it can be garnered that the intelligence faked came from a newer time, and not from a previous administrations time. tenet even talks about it himself. and so has the cia.

bush was looking for a saddam excuse from day 1. and my proof actually has names and affiliations. unlike your 'vile hatred" proof that has no connection at all.

 

[shagdrum]

if you read, i also put up evidence bush was planning to invade iraq BEFORE 911. or did you miss post #48. i'll re-cap so you don't have to go back.

No, I must have missed that because of your sloppy and evasive posts. It is very hard to distinguish between what you write (which isn't much) and what you cut and paste. You post so much that is unnecessary and irrelevant that it is impractical to read and then counter it all. But that is your typical argument; to make rude and inconsiderate posts that frustrate any attempt to counter them.

Paul O'Neill was the former Treasury Secretary under Bush until Bush forced him to resign in December of 2002. Now you are citing his book that he co-wrote with liberal journalist and author Ron Suskind. When it comes to proving Bush lied in making the case for Iraq, again, all you are citing is ultimately hearsay. It doesn't prove anything. You have yet to give the exact quote of Bush that was a provable lie. Can you even do that?

If hearsay is somehow relevant to you, then you should find what Linda Chavez (who was nominated for Secretary of Labor under Bush) had to say in this article on O'Neill's book when discussing meetings with Bush for then potential cabinet jobs:

O'Neill's description of his first meetings with Bush, when he was still being considered for the job of Cabinet secretary, certainly differs from my experiences at roughly the same time.

Bush and O'Neill met at the Madison Hotel, which was also the venue for my interview with the president as well.

Suskind describes, accurately, the cat-and-mouse game of sneaking potential appointees into the hotel through the underground garage and up service elevators, undetected by the press corps keeping watch outside. But the George W. Bush O'Neill met with seems a very different man than the one I encountered just a few days later. O'Neill's Bush is aloof, uninformed and downright unlikable.

O'Neill's account, as Suskind relates it, has Bush ordering chief of staff Andrew Card around like a servant, more interested in securing a cheeseburger than in asking his prospective Treasury secretary any substantive questions.

"Bush looked impatiently at Card, hard eyed. 'You're the chief of staff. You think you're up to getting us some cheeseburgers?' Card nodded. No one laughed. He all but raced out of the room," Suskind writes.

The scene was certainly nothing like what I encountered. Bush and Card displayed an amiable, almost bantering relationship, and Bush was not only personable but well prepared to talk substance on labor policy with me. He asked good questions and had clearly done his homework on me, reciting some of my more controversial positions on everything from minimum wage laws to affirmative action. It was very much a two-way conversation. ​

So, by your standard of hearsay counting as proof, this article shows that O'Neill's book is likely a dishonest hit piece aimed at revenge against the Bush administration and nothing more.

Either way, it is simply hearsay and doesn't prove anything. You have yet to prove that Bush lied. You haven't even given the specific quote by Bush that was a provable lie. All you have done is provide questionable proof and hearsay that he might have lied. But you put it in a manner that is not very practical to read and counter so as to dishonestly avoid any counter of that evidence. That dishonesty and dodging of an honest debate is a habit you have shown throughout this forum.

You have used that dishonest "wall 'o' text" tactic numerous times in this forum instead of actually making the argument yourself. In this thread you are only able to use other peoples arguments as well. When you actually try to make your own arguments, you can only use rudeness, insults and fallacious reasoning. For instance...

as for intelligence, you expect me to believe intelligence from clinton's administration and time was still the same years later? next you'll be telling me intelligence gained on germany from the 2nd world war is still applicable to them.

The first sentence is nothing more then a rude, insulting and dishonest appeal to ridicule.

Appeal to ridicule, also called the Horse Laugh, is a logical fallacy which presents the opponent's argument in a way that appears ridiculous, often to the extent of creating a straw man of the actual argument​

You continue the appeal to ridicule in the second sentence when you grossly exaggerate my argument to reinforce your straw man mischaracterization.

A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position​

You are simply proving, once again, what has been clear for quite a while now. Your arguments (not the cut and pasted arguments of others) hinge on rudeness, insults and dishonesty. When you cut and paste others arguments, it is often irrelevant or, at best, tangential to the debate at hand, and the way you post it makes it hard to read through and refute, let alone distinguish between what you write and what you have cut and pasted. It is a dishonest technique to evade honest criticism and debate. But that is in your best interest because, when you have to actually debate here, as you have habitually shown in this forum, you cannot do it honestly. You can only argue through rudeness, insults, fallacies and lies, as you are doing in this thread.

Even in this thread, you are lying about my actions in another thread. Now, are you gonna do what you did in that thread and call me an @$$hole and a dip$hit as well?

 

[fossten]

Funny how Andy Card was supposedly mistreated by Bush, and yet his last TV appearance recently marked him strongly defending Bush. Something doesn't fit.

 

[04SCTLS]

Hey,
Bush is no longer current and has moved on so maybe we should too.

 

[hrmwrm]

Published on Thursday, October 28, 2004 by GNN.tv
Two Years Before 9/11, Candidate Bush was Already Talking Privately About Attacking Iraq, According to His Former Ghost Writer
by Russ Baker

HOUSTON -- Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade·.if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."

That President Bush and his advisers had Iraq on their minds long before weapons inspectors had finished their work - and long before alleged Iraqi ties with terrorists became a central rationale for war - has been raised elsewhere, including in a book based on recollections of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. However, Herskowitz was in a unique position to hear Bush's unguarded and unfiltered views on Iraq, war and other matters - well before he became president.

In 1999, Herskowitz struck a deal with the campaign of George W. Bush about a ghost-written autobiography, which was ultimately titled A Charge to Keep : My Journey to the White House, and he and Bush signed a contract in which the two would split the proceeds. The publisher was William Morrow. Herskowitz was given unimpeded access to Bush, and the two met approximately 20 times so Bush could share his thoughts. Herskowitz began working on the book in May, 1999, and says that within two months he had completed and submitted some 10 chapters, with a remaining 4-6 chapters still on his computer. Herskowitz was replaced as Bush's ghostwriter after Bush's handlers concluded that the candidate's views and life experiences were not being cast in a sufficiently positive light.

According to Herskowitz, who has authored more than 30 books, many of them jointly written autobiographies of famous Americans in politics, sports and media (including that of Reagan adviser Michael Deaver), Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to accomplish an electoral agenda without the record-high approval numbers that accompany successful if modest wars.

The revelations on Bush's attitude toward Iraq emerged recently during two taped interviews of Herskowitz, which included a discussion of a variety of matters, including his continued closeness with the Bush family, indicated by his subsequent selection to pen an authorized biography of Bush's grandfather, written and published last year with the assistance and blessing of the Bush family.

Herskowitz also revealed the following:


In 2003, Bush's father indicated to him that he disagreed with his son's invasion of Iraq.

Bush admitted that he failed to fulfill his Vietnam-era domestic National Guard service obligation, but claimed that he had been "excused."

Bush revealed that after he left his Texas National Guard unit in 1972 under murky circumstances, he never piloted a plane again. That casts doubt on the carefully-choreographed moment of Bush emerging in pilot's garb from a jet on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 to celebrate "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. The image, instantly telegraphed around the globe, and subsequent hazy White House statements about his capacity in the cockpit, created the impression that a heroic Bush had played a role in landing the craft.

Bush described his own business ventures as "floundering" before campaign officials insisted on recasting them in a positive light.
Throughout the interviews for this article and in subsequent conversations, Herskowitz indicated he was conflicted over revealing information provided by a family with which he has longtime connections, and by how his candor could comport with the undefined operating principles of the as-told-to genre. Well after the interviews-in which he expressed consternation that Bush's true views, experience and basic essence had eluded the American people -Herskowitz communicated growing concern about the consequences for himself of the publication of his remarks, and said that he had been under the impression he would not be quoted by name. However, when conversations began, it was made clear to him that the material was intended for publication and attribution. A tape recorder was present and visible at all times.

Several people who know Herskowitz well addressed his character and the veracity of his recollections. "I don't know anybody that's ever said a bad word about Mickey," said Barry Silverman, a well-known Houston executive and civic figure who worked with him on another book project. An informal survey of Texas journalists turned up uniform confidence that Herskowitz's account as contained in this article could be considered accurate.

One noted Texas journalist who spoke with Herskowitz about the book in 1999 recalls how the author mentioned to him at the time that Bush had revealed things the campaign found embarrassing and did not want in print. He requested anonymity because of the political climate in the state. "I can't go near this," he said.

According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House - ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."

Bush's circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: "They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches."

Republicans, Herskowitz said, felt that Jimmy Carter's political downfall could be attributed largely to his failure to wage a war. He noted that President Reagan and President Bush's father himself had (besides the narrowly-focused Gulf War I) successfully waged limited wars against tiny opponents - Grenada and Panama - and gained politically. But there were successful small wars, and then there were quagmires, and apparently George H.W. Bush and his son did not see eye to eye.

"I know [Bush senior] would not admit this now, but he was opposed to it. I asked him if he had talked to W about invading Iraq. "He said, 'No I haven't, and I won't, but Brent [Scowcroft] has.' Brent would not have talked to him without the old man's okaying it." Scowcroft, national security adviser in the elder Bush's administration, penned a highly publicized warning to George W. Bush about the perils of an invasion.

Herskowitz's revelations are not the sole indicator of Bush's pre-election thinking on Iraq. In December 1999, some six months after his talks with Herskowitz, Bush surprised veteran political chroniclers, including the Boston Globe 's David Nyhan, with his blunt pronouncements about Saddam at a six-way New Hampshire primary event that got little notice: "It was a gaffe-free evening for the rookie front-runner, till he was asked about Saddam's weapons stash," wrote Nyhan. 'I'd take 'em out,' [Bush] grinned cavalierly, 'take out the weapons of mass destruction·I'm surprised he's still there," said Bush of the despot who remains in power after losing the Gulf War to Bush Jr.'s father·It remains to be seen if that offhand declaration of war was just Texas talk, a sort of locker room braggadocio, or whether it was Bush's first big clinker. "

The notion that President Bush held unrealistic or naïve views about the consequences of war was further advanced recently by a Bush supporter, the evangelist Pat Robertson, who revealed that Bush had told him the Iraq invasion would yield no casualties. In addition, in recent days, high-ranking US military officials have complained that the White House did not provide them with adequate resources for the task at hand.

Herskowitz considers himself a friend of the Bush family, and has been a guest at the family vacation home in Kennebunkport. In the late 1960s, Herskowitz, a longtime Houston Chronicle sports columnist designated President Bush's father, then-Congressman George HW Bush, to replace him as a guest columnist, and the two have remained close since then. (Herskowitz was suspended briefly in April without pay for reusing material from one of his own columns, about legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.)

In 1999, when Herskowitz turned in his chapters for Charge to Keep, Bush's staff expressed displeasure -often over Herskowitz's use of language provided by Bush himself. In a chapter on the oil business, Herskowitz included Bush's own words to describe the Texan's unprofitable business ventures, writing: "the companies were floundering". "I got a call from one of the campaign lawyers, he was kind of angry, and he said, 'You've got some wrong information.' I didn't bother to say, 'Well you know where it came from.' [The lawyer] said, 'We do not consider that the governor struggled or floundered in the oil business. We consider him a successful oilman who started up at least two new businesses.' "

In the end, campaign officials decided not to go with Herskowitz's account, and, moreover, demanded everything back. "The lawyer called me and said, 'Delete it. Shred it. Just do it.' "

"They took it and [communications director] Karen [Hughes] rewrote it," he said. A campaign official arrived at his home at seven a.m. on a Monday morning and took his notes and computer files. However, Herskowitz, who is known for his memory of anecdotes from his long history in journalism and book publishing, says he is confident about his recollections.

According to Herskowitz, Bush was reluctant to discuss his time in the Texas Air National Guard - and inconsistent when he did so. Bush, he said, provided conflicting explanations of how he came to bypass a waiting list and obtain a coveted Guard slot as a domestic alternative to being sent to Vietnam. Herskowitz also said that Bush told him that after transferring from his Texas Guard unit two-thirds through his six-year military obligation to work on an Alabama political campaign, he did not attend any Alabama National Guard drills at all, because he was "excused." This directly contradicts his public statements that he participated in obligatory training with the Alabama National Guard. Bush's claim to have fulfilled his military duty has been subject to intense scrutiny; he has insisted in the past that he did show up for monthly drills in Alabama - though commanding officers say they never saw him, and no Guardsmen have come forward to accept substantial "rewards" for anyone who can claim to have seen Bush on base.

Herskowitz said he asked Bush if he ever flew a plane again after leaving the Texas Air National Guard in 1972 - which was two years prior to his contractual obligation to fly jets was due to expire. He said Bush told him he never flew any plane - military or civilian - again. That would contradict published accounts in which Bush talks about his days in 1973 working with inner-city children, when he claimed to have taken some of the children up in a plane.

In 2002, three years after he had been pulled off the George W. Bush biography, Herskowitz was asked by Bush's father to write a book about the current president's grandfather, Prescott Bush, after getting a message that the senior Bush wanted to see him. "Former President Bush just handed it to me. We were sitting there one day, and I was visiting him there in his office·He said, 'I wish somebody would do a book about my dad.' "

"He said to me, 'I know this has been a disappointing time for you, but it's amazing how many times something good will come out of it.' I passed it on to my agent, he jumped all over it. I asked [Bush senior], 'Would you support it and would you give me access to the rest of family?' He said yes."

That book, Duty, Honor, Country: The Life and Legacy of Prescott Bush , was published in 2003 by Routledge. If anything, the book has been criticized for its over-reliance on the Bush family's perspective and rosy interpretation of events. Herskowitz himself is considered the ultimate "as-told-to" author, lending credibility to his account of what George W. Bush told him. Herskowitz's other books run the gamut of public figures, and include the memoirs of Reagan aide Deaver, former Texas Governor and Nixon Treasury Secretary John Connally, newsman Dan Rather, astronaut Walter Cunningham, and baseball greats Mickey Mantle and Nolan Ryan.

After Herskowitz was pulled from the Bush book project, the biographer learned that a scenario was being prepared to explain his departure. "I got a phone call from someone in the Bush campaign, confidentially, saying 'Watch your back.' "

Reporters covering Bush say that when they inquired as to why Herskowitz was no longer on the project, Hughes intimated that Herskowitz had personal habits that interfered with his writing - a claim Herskowitz said is unfounded. Later, the campaign put out the word that Herskowitz had been removed for missing a deadline. Hughes subsequently finished the book herself - it received largely critical reviews for its self-serving qualities and lack of spontaneity or introspection.

So, said Herskowitz, the best material was left on the cutting room floor, including Bush's true feelings.

"He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake," Herskowitz said. "That was one of the keys to being a leader."

Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute .

Russ Baker is an award-winning independent journalist who has been published in The New York Times ,The Nation ,Washington Post ,The Telegraph (UK), Sydney Morning-Herald , and Der Spiegel , among many others

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1028-01.htm


bush lied about wmd's in iraq. there never were any, and he knew it. he wanted to oust saddam no matter what the cost or reason.
so he used unreliable intelligence to create his excuse. he lied about the strength and factuality of that intelligence.

 

[hrmwrm]

and then he denies he pushed a saddam/al-queda link. yet this article shows when he pushed the idea of an alliance, then states there never was an alliance. lies, lies, lies.



On the eve of the sixth anniversary of the Iraq war, Condoleezza Rice joined the long list of Bush White House figures taking to the airwaves to rewrite their boss' tragic legacy. "No one," she told Charlie Rose last night, "was arguing that Saddam Hussein somehow had something to do with 9/11." Of course, Rice was just one of many Bush administration officials making that claim before and after the invasion. And as it turns out, Ari Fleischer and George W. Bush himself among others are continuing to peddle that same mythical link between Iraq and September 11th.
As ThinkProgress noted, then national security adviser Rice argued in September 2002 that Saddam had "links to terrorism [that] would include al-Qaeda." But on Wednesday, the former Secretary of State traveled back in time to whitewash history:

ROSE: But you didn't believe it had anything to do with 9/11.
RICE: No. No one was arguing that Saddam Hussein somehow had something to do with 9/11.

ROSE: No one.

RICE: I was certainly not. The President was certainly not. ... That's right. We were not arguing that.


Of course, Rice wasn't the only one in the Bush White House contending "there were ties going on between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime," as she insisted as late as September 2006. Echoing President Bush's farewell in January, former press secretary Ari Fleischer made the Saddam - September 11 connection just seven days ago.

As I first detailed last week, Fleischer used to an appearance with Chris Matthews on MSNBC's Hardball to display his gift for fiction regarding the Iraq war and 9/11:

"After September 11th having been hit once how could we take a chance that Saddam might strike again? And that's the threat that has been removed and I think we are all safer with that threat removed."
But if Fleischer was butchering history to justify the calamity in Iraq, he was only following George W. Bush's lead.

An unapologetic President Bush made that clear during his final address to the American people on January 15, 2009. Just days before his departure, Bush seamlessly wove the invasion of Iraq into his revisionist history of the aftermath of September 11, 2001:

"As the years passed, most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did. Every morning, I received a briefing on the threats to our nation. I vowed to do everything in my power to keep us safe...
...And with strong allies at our side, we have taken the fight to the terrorists and those who support them. Afghanistan has gone from a nation where the Taliban harbored al Qaeda and stoned women in the streets to a young democracy that is fighting terror and encouraging girls to go to school. Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship and a sworn enemy of America to an Arab democracy at the heart of the Middle East and a friend of the United States."


Of course, Bush's subtlety in January was nowhere on display during his jaw-dropping December 15, 2008 interview with ABC's Martha Raddatz. The President wasn't merely content to ignore the bipartisan 9/11 Commission's conclusion that Al Qaeda and Iraq had no "operational relationship." Boasting that "there have been no attacks since I have been president, since 9/11," the President simply dismissed any criticism that it was only his 2003 invasion which brought Al Qaeda forces to Iraq:

BUSH: One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take -
RADDATZ: But not until after the U.S. invaded.

BUSH: Yeah, that's right. So what? The point is that al Qaeda said they're going to take a stand. Well, first of all in the post-9/11 environment Saddam Hussein posed a threat. And then upon removal, al Qaeda decides to take a stand.


In an address ten days earlier to the Saban Center for Middle East Policy in Washington, DC, President Bush argued on December 5th that the truth should not be the lens through which his decision to invade Iraq should be viewed. Whether Saddam had actual connections to Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the September 11 calamity, he proclaimed, was virtually irrelevant:

"It is true, as I have said many times, that Saddam Hussein was not connected to the 9/11 attacks. But the decision to remove Saddam from power cannot be viewed in isolation from 9/11. In a world where terrorists armed with box cutters had just killed nearly 3,000 people, America had to decide whether we could tolerate a sworn enemy that acted belligerently, that supported terror, and that intelligence agencies around the world believed had weapons of mass destruction. It was clear to me, to members of both political parties, and to many leaders around the world that after 9/11, this was a risk we could not afford to take."
For his part, Dick Cheney (aided and abetted by his biographer and 9/11-Iraq fabulist Stephen Hayes) has continued to proclaim as fact the nonexistent Bin Laden-Hussein connection. (In March 2008, Cheney anticipated Bush's "so what?" response to Martha Raddatz, shrugging off her assertion that "two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting" in Iraq by simply remarking, "So?") And in an interview with Jim Lehrer of the PBS News Hour on January 14, 2009, Vice President Cheney regurgitated his blatantly discredited claim about an Iraq-Al Qaeda nexus. Answering "I think so" when asked whether the 4500 Americans killed in Iraq was worth it, Cheney continued:

"He'd had a nuclear program in the past. He killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and he did have a relationship with al-Qaida. Now, we've had this debate, keeps people trying to conflate those arguments.
That's not to say that Saddam was responsible for 9/11; it is to say - as George Tenet, CIA director testified in open session in the Senate - that there was a relationship there that went back 10 years."


Of course, as ThinkProgress detailed, President Bush and Vice President Cheney throughout 2002 and 2003 warned of the mythical alliance between Saddam and Bin Laden. For example, on October 14, 2002, Bush announced that "We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade." On the eve of the war, the President told Americans that Iraq "has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda." And as hostilities commenced, Cheney on March 21, 2003 decried Iraq as the "geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

As I documented back in June 2005, President Bush continued to nurture the false Iraq connection to 9/11 long after he grudgingly admitted on September 17, 2004 that "we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th." Bush's intentional conflation of the two included the amazing June 18, 2005 statement that "we went to war [with Iraq] because we were attacked." By December 2008, Bush's linkage had morphed into the "risk we could not afford to take."

As it turns out, for George W. Bush the "risk we could not afford to take" was not averting war with Iraq, but the absence of a compelling sales pitch for it. And to be sure, Bush was in that regard quite successful. As an October 2003 PIPA survey showed, even after the invasion of Iraq, majorities of Americans continued to believe Bush administration claims about Saddam (Iraq role in 9/11, an alliance between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and Saddam's WMD) all long since proven false. (Unsurprisingly, viewers of Fox News were the most delusional.) And as late as July 2006, fully 50% of Americans still believed the discredited claim that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

In his predictably self-absorbed farewell address to the nation, President George W. Bush grudgingly acknowledged, "There are things I would do differently if given the chance." But as he demonstrated that night, rejecting his repeated linkage of the 9/11 attacks to his war on Iraq is not among them. As for Condi Rice, she insists the deception never took place.






enough lies from bush yet?

 

[hrmwrm]

a few more contradictive quotes from the cowboy.




"No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th." President Bush, September 17, 2004.

"I would tell them [families of fallen soldiers] the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war against those who caused the deaths on 9/11 is necessary."President Bush, October 22, 2004.

"We went to war [in Iraq] because we were attacked."President Bush, June 18, 2005.

Was There An Al Qaeda Link?


"It [Iraq] has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda." President Bush, March 17, 2003.

"The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding."President Bush, May 1, 2003.

"No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th." President Bush, September 17, 2004.

Have We Prevailed?


"Mission Accomplished."President Bush's Backdrop, May 1, 2003.

"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."President Bush, May 1, 2003.

"This mission isn't easy, and it will not be accomplished overnight."President Bush, June 18, 2005.