Hayden admits Bush political leaders trumped up WMD Intel

The main focus on today's confirmation hearings for Gen. Michael Hayden as Director of Central Intelligence have ostensibly been on the various and sundry NSA Scandals which have recently emerged, but Thinkprogress points out one section of his testimony which apparently cuts the Bush Admin to the quick on pre-Iraq War WMD claims.

Ever since AG Gonzales hinted during his Senate testimony that Bush may indeed have spied on domestic calls, the NSA have been an explosion waiting to go off. But Hayden's testimony today shows that the fuse has been quite a bit longer than previously foreseen.

Transcript:

Sen. LEVIN: Secretary of Defense for Policy, Mr. Feith, established an intelligence analysis, so within his policy office at the Defense Department. While the intelligence community was consistently dubious about links between Iraq and al Qaeda, Mr. Feith produced an alternative analysis asserting that there was a strong connection. Were you comfortable with Mr. Feith's office approach to intelligence analysis?

HAYDEN: No, sir, I wasn't. I wasn't aware of a lot of the activity going on, you know, when it was contemporaneous with running up to the war. No, sir, I wasn't comfortable.

Further commentary by Thinkprogress

What Hayden makes clear is that, despite Bush's assertion that the pre-war intelligence process "broke down," the false intelligence about Iraq's connection to al Qaeda was intentionally fabricated by political leaders, not intelligence analysts. Feith, Wolfowitz, and others in the Pentagon set up a stovepipe "to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership" to make the case for war. Hayden and other intelligence experts got steamrolled when it mattered most.

As has been repeatedly noted it was not a case where intelligence analyst had to be "intimidated" into changing their view -- people like Feith were running their own independent intelligence operation through the Defense Intelligence Agency and portions of the State Department. These people were intent to find the evidence they wanted and use each an every scrap they located - no matter how dubious it might have been - to promote the story that Iraq was an imminent threat.

This yet again shows why Sen. Pat Roberts has been delaying the Phase II portion of the WMD/intelligence investigation for over two years. It's why both the Robb-Silberman Commission and previous Senate investigations were prohibited from asking this very question -- the Administration already knows the answer.

Whether the various and sundries Special Access NSA programs currently underway are legal or not remain a hot topic. AT&T's attorney argues that they received a Special Letter from the Attorney General which legally authorized their cooperation in lieu of a Warrant. This is quite interesting since it appears the NSA refused to do exactly the same thing for QWEST when they asked for it.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. Attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events

This diary here points out how the NSA actually already had a more effective and much more responsible Clinton era program in place prior to 9/11, but that program was shutdown by -- General Michael Hayden.

As reported by the Baltimore Sun

WASHINGTON // The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project -- not because it failed to work -- but because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency's surveillance powers, according to several intelligence officials.

The program the NSA rejected, called ThinThread, was developed to handle greater volumes of information, partly in expectation of threats surrounding the millennium celebrations. Sources say it bundled together four cutting-edge surveillance tools. ThinThread would have:

* Used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.

* Identified U.S. Phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy.

* Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency.

* Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records.

An agency spokesman declined to discuss NSA operations.

Feel free to send any wingnut acquaintances you have this Baltimore Sun story whenever they claim - "We can't abide by the strict letter of the law and fight al Qaeda at the same time" or "Clinton did nothing to fight terrorism".

It may be very well that Hayden was "uncomfortable" with this decision just as he was with the actions of Feith et al in the pre-Iraq War run-up - but being a good little soldier, he did what he was ordered to do by his superiors (i.e. Cheney and Bush) He may be fairly candid now during his confirmation hearings, but he's also made it quite clear that he will do whatever it is that the Commander-in-Chief requires of him.

A pure "Yes, man" through and through - just like (General) Colin Powell who permanently shredded his own credibility for all time with his command performance before the UN in 2002.

Let us recall just another reason why Qwest was reluctant to participate in this program:

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information -- known as "product" in intelligence circles, -- with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

This naturally explains the thousands of bogus leads that the FBI was complaining about in January.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

FBI officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency, which was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of foreign-related phone and Internet traffic, that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. Some FBI officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

So we have the scenario that prior to the Iraq War the Bush Administration threw out good intelligence (such as Joe Wilson's) in favor of bad intelligence, a fact that has also been confirmed by 27 Year CIA vet Ray McGovern, former Colin Powell Chief of Staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, State Dept Intelligence Analyst Greg Theilman, former Pentagon Special Plans Aid Lt. Col Karen Kwaitkowski, former European CIA chief Tyler Drumheller and former CIA intelligence Officer Paul Pillar.

This is a clear and obvious pattern of behavior on their part and there no reasonable indication that it's going to end anytime soon. These issues (poor WMD intel and the avoidance of FISA) are linked by the same dangerous extralegal pathology.

In his response to the Hayden hearings so far, Christy at Firedoglake points to comments by Bruce Fein which seem to bear repeating.

The Bush Administration is doing everything it can to prevent any of the illegally collected data and information from being used in any courtroom context, because they do not want to have to face the consequences of a constitutional challenge to their failure to obtain a lawful warrant. Think about that for a moment -- Bruce Fein is no liberal, he is a very conservative Reagan Republican, having worked in the DoJ as Deputy Attorney General in the Reagan Administration.

And he is saying, out loud, that the Bush White House is avoiding constitutional scrutiny because they know -- they KNOW -- they will be shown to be what they are. Lawbreakers.

They realize that everything they've done to skirt the law and bypass judicial scrutiny would present them with a massive fruits of the poison tree catastrophe in a court of law. If the NSA is sharing it's data with the FBI - and we know damn well they are - they can not present that evidence in court, or even acknowledge that they used illegally gathered evidence to target a specific individual without that case being tossed out of the court on it's ear.

This road only leads one direction.

They simply aren't going to take these cases to court, except for "show trials" like Moussuaoui. They're going to use the FBI to do surveillance - then if they decide on a whim that the situation is serious enough, perform a rendition followed by indefinite detention of that subject - even if they happen to be an American Citizen - to the secret military gulag of their worst nightmare for a little bit of the ole' waterboarding. Without judicial review. Without trial. Without appeal. Without oversight. Without hope.

This is not a hypothetical, there are strong indications that it's already been happening -- and if it did, the last thing that would happen would be a paper trail.

The likelihood of them doing this to the "right" person is about as strong as the possibility that we're going to finally find those mobile labs "North, South, East and West somewhat of Tikrit and Baghdad" almost three years after the fact.

They invaded the Wrong Fucking Country for Christ sake... you think they're really going to care if they capture the wrong terrorist suspects?

The sad part is that this is pretty much common knowledge at this point -- and the resulting outrage (outside of highly Democratic circles) is practically nonexistent. This is how the Wingnut Brigade fights terrorism - no holds barred and wiping their ass with the Constitution as they storm through, Jackboots akimbo.

What and who are they going to mistake for an imminent threat next?

And how many more innocent people will suffer for it while the real terrorist laugh at our continued ineptitude?

[Update: Even short of my admittedly worst case scenario of unchecked renditions of American Citizens above, there is also the very real danger of thousands of FBI Files that have been generated from this practice. Remember when the Clinton White House inadvertently gained access to a several hundred FBI files due to a Secret Service Screwup? (They had used an out of date White House Access List) Magnify that situation by the order of thousands! Filegate: dogged the Clinton's for years with allegations that they planned to use these files against their political rivals - well guess whose got the files now, and just who are their rivals? That's right kiddies - Quakers, Peace-Mongers, Greenpeace, War Protestors, Journalist, Congress, and y'know - US!)

Vyan

TPM : Whitewashing the Intelligence

If you didn't see it, you need to stop now and go the CBS Website to review the interview with ex-CIA Europe Chief Tyler Drumheller from yesterday's 60 Minutes.

"It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it's an intelligence failure. It's an intelligence failure. This was a policy failure," Drumheller tells Bradley.

Drumheller was the CIA's top man in Europe, the head of covert operations there, until he retired a year ago. He says he saw firsthand how the White House promoted intelligence it liked and ignored intelligence it didn't:

"The idea of going after Iraq was U.S. policy. It was going to happen one way or the other," says Drumheller.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has apparently done a follow-up interview with Drumheller and in it he asked the oh-so-obvious questions, did you talk to the Robb-Silberman Commission and the Senate Select Committee about what you saw the White House doing?

And he answered - "Yes."

From TPM

(snip)

I just got off the phone with Drumheller. But before we get to that, let's run down the key points in the story.

(snip)

The White House, as Drumheller relates it, was really excited to hear what Sabri would reveal about the inner-workings of Saddam's regime, and particularly about any WMD programs. That is, before Sabri admitted that Saddam didn't have any active programs. Then they lost interest. Now, if you didn't see the episode you can catch most of the key facts in this story at the 60 Minutes website. But here's an angle I'm not sure we're going to hear much about.

Drumheller's account is pretty probative evidence on the question of whether the White House politicized and cherry-picked the Iraq intelligence. So why didn't we hear about any of this in the reports of those Iraq intel commissions that have given the White House a clean bill of health on distorting the intel and misleading the country about what we knew about Iraq's alleged WMD programs? Think about it. It's devastating evidence against their credibility on a slew of levels. Did you read in any of those reports -- even in a way that would protect sources and methods -- that the CIA had turned a key member of the Iraqi regime, that that guy had said there weren't any active weapons programs, and that the White House lost interest in what he was saying as soon as they realized it didn't help the case for war?

What about what he said about the Niger story? Did the Robb-Silverman Commission not hear about what Drumheller had to say? What about the Roberts Committee? I asked Drumheller just those questions when I spoke to him early this evening. He was quite clear. He was interviewed by the Robb-Silverman Commission. Three times apparently. Did he tell them everything he revealed on tonight's 60 Minutes segment. Absolutely. Drumheller was also interviewed twice by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Roberts Committee) but apparently only after they released their summer 2004 report.

(snip)

"I was stunned," Drumheller told me, when so little of the stuff he had told the commission's and the committee's investigators ended up in their reports. His colleagues, he said, were equally "in shock" that so little of what they related ended up in the reports either.

Although we've already heard about this exact same scenario from the Downing Street Memos for nearly a year. Although we've already had confirmation via Downing Street II (Where Bush told Tony Blair that the lack of WMD Evidence "Didn't matter").

[Updated: This IMO is even worse than Downing Street, because it shows the complicit actions of the Republican Controlled Rubber-Stamp Senate, with strong implications for 2006, and even 2008.]

Current Republican Presidential Front-Runner, Senator John McCain, who was a member of the Robb-Silberman commission has repeatedly said that he "Looked those CIA analysts in the eye and asked if they felt pressure from the White House - and they said, 'No'" - is apparently a God-Damn Liar.

[Update II From Comments: And let's not forget that the question of "Pressure" is a strong-man argument in the first place. The analysts weren't pressured to change their assesments - their assessment were simply ignored if they didn't fit the WH Spin. "The facts were being shaped around the policy"... and the Policy was War and Regime Change.]

So how's that next shot at the Presidency going to look for McCain now that he's been shown to have been involved in a cover-up to protect the Bush Administration from the consquences of manipulating intelligence information that led us into an unjust and unwarranted war?

Vyan

Bush's most famous Flip-Flops

The Center for American Progress has compiled a list of Bush's most famous position flip-flops.

1. Social Security Surplus

BUSH PLEDGES NOT TO TOUCH SOCIAL SECURITY SURPLUS... "We're going to keep the promise of Social Security and keep the government from raiding the Social Security surplus." [President Bush, 3/3/01]

...BUSH SPENDS SOCIAL SECURITY SURPLUS The New York Times reported that "the president's new budget uses Social Security surpluses to pay for other programs every year through 2013, ultimately diverting more than $1.4 trillion in Social Security funds to other purposes." [The New York Times, 2/6/02]

2. Patient's Right to Sue

GOVERNOR BUSH VETOES PATIENTS' RIGHT TO SUE... "Despite his campaign rhetoric in favor of a patients' bill of rights, Bush fought such a bill tooth and nail as Texas governor, vetoing a bill coauthored by Republican state Rep. John Smithee in 1995. He... constantly opposed a patient's right to sue an HMO over coverage denied that resulted in adverse health effects." [Salon, 2/7/01]

...CANDIDATE BUSH PRAISES TEXAS PATIENTS' RIGHT TO SUE... "We're one of the first states that said you can sue an HMO for denying you proper coverage... It's time for our nation to come together and do what's right for the people. And I think this is right for the people. You know, I support a national patients' bill of rights, Mr. Vice President. And I want all people covered. I don't want the law to supersede good law like we've got in Texas." [Governor Bush, 10/17/00]

...PRESIDENT BUSH'S ADMINISTRATION ARGUES AGAINST RIGHT TO SUE "To let two Texas consumers, Juan Davila and Ruby R. Calad, sue their managed-care companies for wrongful denials of medical benefits ‘would be to completely undermine' federal law regulating employee benefits, Assistant Solicitor General James A. Feldman said at oral argument March 23. Moreover, the administration's brief attacked the policy rationale for Texas's law, which is similar to statutes on the books in nine other states." [Washington Post, 4/5/04]

3. Tobacco Buyout

BUSH SUPPORTS CURRENT TOBACCO FARMERS' QUOTA SYSTEM... "They've got the quota system in place -- the allotment system -- and I don't think that needs to be changed." [President Bush, 5/04]

...BUSH ADMINISTRATION WILL SUPPORT FEDERAL BUYOUT OF TOBACCO QUOTAS "The administration is open to a buyout." [White House spokeswoman Jeanie Mamo, 6/18/04]

4. North Korea

BUSH WILL NOT OFFER NUCLEAR NORTH KOREA INCENTIVES TO DISARM... "We developed a bold approach under which, if the North addressed our long-standing concerns, the United States was prepared to take important steps that would have significantly improved the lives of the North Korean people. Now that North Korea's covert nuclear weapons program has come to light, we are unable to pursue this approach." [President's Statement, 11/15/02]

...BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFERS NORTH KOREA INCENTIVES TO DISARM"Well, we will work to take steps to ease their political and economic isolation. So there would be -- what you would see would be some provisional or temporary proposals that would only lead to lasting benefit after North Korea dismantles its nuclear programs. So there would be some provisional or temporary efforts of that nature." [White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, 6/23/04]

5. Abortion

BUSH SUPPORTS A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO CHOOSE... "Bush said he...favors leaving up to a woman and her doctor the abortion question." [The Nation, 6/15/00, quoting the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, 5/78]

...BUSH OPPOSES A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO CHOOSE "I am pro-life." [Governor Bush, 10/3/00]

6. OPEC

BUSH PROMISES TO FORCE OPEC TO LOWER PRICES... "What I think the president ought to do [when gas prices spike] is he ought to get on the phone with the OPEC cartel and say we expect you to open your spigots...And the president of the United States must jawbone OPEC members to lower the price." [President Bush, 1/26/00]

...BUSH REFUSES TO LOBBY OPEC LEADERS With gas prices soaring in the United States at the beginning of 2004, the Miami Herald reported the president refused to "personally lobby oil cartel leaders to change their minds." [Miami Herald, 4/1/04]

7. Iraq Funding

BUSH SPOKESMAN DENIES NEED FOR ADDITIONAL FUNDS FOR THE REST OF 2004... "We do not anticipate requesting supplemental funding for '04" [White House Budget Director Joshua Bolton, 2/2/04]

...BUSH REQUESTS ADDITIONAL FUNDS FOR IRAQ FOR 2004 "I am requesting that Congress establish a $25 billion contingency reserve fund for the coming fiscal year to meet all commitments to our troops." [President Bush, Statement by President, 5/5/04]

8. Condoleeza Rice Testimony

BUSH SPOKESMAN SAYS RICE WON'T TESTIFY AS 'A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE'... "Again, this is not her personal preference; this goes back to a matter of principle. There is a separation of powers issue involved here. Historically, White House staffers do not testify before legislative bodies. So it's a matter of principle, not a matter of preference." [White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, 3/9/04]

...BUSH ORDERS RICE TO TESTIFY: "Today I have informed the Commission on Terrorist Attacks Against the United States that my National Security Advisor, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, will provide public testimony." [President Bush, 3/30/04]

9. Science

BUSH PLEDGES TO ISSUE REGULATIONS BASED ON SCIENCE..."I think we ought to have high standards set by agencies that rely upon science, not by what may feel good or what sounds good." [then-Governor George W. Bush, 1/15/00]

...BUSH ADMINISTRATION REGULATIONS IGNORE SCIENCE "60 leading scientists—including Nobel laureates, leading medical experts, former federal agency directors and university chairs and presidents—issued a statement calling for regulatory and legislative action to restore scientific integrity to federal policymaking. According to the scientists, the Bush administration has, among other abuses, suppressed and distorted scientific analysis from federal agencies, and taken actions that have undermined the quality of scientific advisory panels." [Union of Concerned Scientists, 2/18/04]

10. Ahmed Chalabi

BUSH INVITES CHALABI TO STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS...President Bush also met with Chalabi during his brief trip to Iraq last Thanksgiving [White House Documents 1/20/04, 11/27/03]

...BUSH MILITARY ASSISTS IN RAID OF CHALABI'S HOUSE "U.S. soldiers raided the home of America's one-time ally Ahmad Chalabi on Thursday and seized documents and computers." [Washington Post, 5/20/04]

11. Department of Homeland Security

BUSH OPPOSES THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY..."So, creating a Cabinet office doesn't solve the problem. You still will have agencies within the federal government that have to be coordinated. So the answer is that creating a Cabinet post doesn't solve anything." [White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, 3/19/02]

...BUSH SUPPORTS THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY "So tonight, I ask the Congress to join me in creating a single, permanent department with an overriding and urgent mission: securing the homeland of America and protecting the American people." [President Bush, Address to the Nation, 6/6/02]

12. Weapons of Mass Destruction

BUSH SAYS WE FOUND THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION..."We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories...for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them." [President Bush, Interview in Poland, 5/29/03]

...BUSH SAYS WE HAVEN'T FOUND WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION "David Kay has found the capacity to produce weapons.And when David Kay goes in and says we haven't found stockpiles yet, and there's theories as to where the weapons went. They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country, and we'll find out." [President Bush, Meet the Press, 2/7/04]

13. Free Trade

BUSH SUPPORTS FREE TRADE... "I believe strongly that if we promote trade, and when we promote trade, it will help workers on both sides of this issue." [President Bush in Peru, 3/23/02]

...BUSH SUPPORTS RESTRICTIONS ON TRADE "In a decision largely driven by his political advisers, President Bush set aside his free-trade principles last year and imposed heavy tariffs on imported steel to help out struggling mills in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, two states crucial for his reelection." [Washington Post, 9/19/03]

14. Osama Bin Laden

BUSH WANTS OSAMA DEAD OR ALIVE... "I want justice. And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'" [President Bush, on Osama Bin Laden, 09/17/01]

...BUSH DOESN'T CARE ABOUT OSAMA "I don't know where he is.You know, I just don't spend that much time on him... I truly am not that concerned about him."[President Bush, Press Conference, 3/13/02]

15. The Environment

BUSH SUPPORTS MANDATORY CAPS ON CARBON DIOXIDE... "[If elected], Governor Bush will work to...establish mandatory reduction targets for emissions of four main pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and carbon dioxide." [Bush Environmental Plan, 9/29/00]

...BUSH OPPOSES MANDATORY CAPS ON CARBON DIOXIDE "I do not believe, however, that the government should impose on power plants mandatory emissions reductions for carbon dioxide, which is not a 'pollutant' under the Clean Air Act." [President Bush, Letter to Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), 3/13/03]

16. WMD Commission

BUSH RESISTS AN OUTSIDE INVESTIGATION ON WMD INTELLIGENCE FAILURE... "The White House immediately turned aside the calls from Kay and many Democrats for an immediate outside investigation, seeking to head off any new wide-ranging election-year inquiry that might go beyond reports already being assembled by congressional committees and the Central Intelligence Agency." [NY Times, 1/29/04]

...BUSH SUPPORTS AN OUTSIDE INVESTIGATION ON WMD INTELLIGENCE FAILURE "Today, by executive order, I am creating an independent commission, chaired by Governor and former Senator Chuck Robb, Judge Laurence Silberman, to look at American intelligence capabilities, especially our intelligence about weapons of mass destruction." [President Bush, 2/6/04]

17. Creation of the 9/11 Commission

BUSH OPPOSES CREATION OF INDEPENDENT 9/11 COMMISSION... "President Bush took a few minutes during his trip to Europe Thursday to voice his opposition to establishing a special commission to probe how the government dealt with terror warnings before Sept. 11." [CBS News, 5/23/02]

...BUSH SUPPORTS CREATION OF INDEPENDENT 9/11 COMMISSION "President Bush said today he now supports establishing an independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks." [ABC News, 09/20/02]

18. Time Extension for 9/11 Commission

BUSH OPPOSES TIME EXTENSION FOR 9/11 COMMISSION... "President Bush and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) have decided to oppose granting more time to an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." [Washington Post, 1/19/04]

...BUSH SUPPORTS TIME EXTENSION FOR 9/11 COMMISSION "The White House announced Wednesday its support for a request from the commission investigating the September 11, 2001 attacks for more time to complete its work." [CNN, 2/4/04]

19. One Hour Limit for 9/11 Commission Testimony

BUSH LIMITS TESTIMONY IN FRONT OF 9/11 COMMISSION TO ONE HOUR... "President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have placed strict limits on the private interviews they will grant to the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that they will meet only with the panel's top two officials and that Mr. Bush will submit to only a single hour of questioning, commission members said Wednesday." [NY Times, 2/26/04]

...BUSH SETS NO TIMELIMIT FOR TESTIMONY "The president's going to answer all of the questions they want to raise. Nobody's watching the clock." [White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 3/10/04]

20. Gay Marriage

BUSH SAYS GAY MARRIAGE IS A STATE ISSUE... "The state can do what they want to do. Don't try to trap me in this state's issue like you're trying to get me into." [Gov. George W. Bush on Gay Marriage, Larry King Live, 2/15/00]

...BUSH SUPPORTS CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT BANNING GAY MARRIAGE "Today I call upon the Congress to promptly pass, and to send to the states for ratification, an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of man and woman as husband and wife." [President Bush, 2/24/04]

21. Nation Building

BUSH OPPOSES NATION BUILDING... "If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road." [Gov. George W. Bush, 10/3/00]

...BUSH SUPPORTS NATION BUILDING "We will be changing the regime of Iraq, for the good of the Iraqi people." [President Bush, 3/6/03]

22. Saddam/al Qaeda Link

BUSH SAYS IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEEN AL QAEDA AND SADDAM... "You can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror." [President Bush, 9/25/02]

...BUSH SAYS SADDAM HAD NO ROLE IN AL QAEDA PLOT "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11." [President Bush, 9/17/03]

23. U.N. Resolution

BUSH VOWS TO HAVE A UN VOTE NO MATTER WHAT... "No matter what the whip count is, we're calling for the vote. We want to see people stand up and say what their opinion is about Saddam Hussein and the utility of the United Nations Security Council. And so, you bet. It's time for people to show their cards, to let the world know where they stand when it comes to Saddam." [President Bush 3/6/03]

...BUSH WITHDRAWS REQUEST FOR VOTE "At a National Security Council meeting convened at the White House at 8:55 a.m., Bush finalized the decision to withdraw the resolution from consideration and prepared to deliver an address to the nation that had already been written." [Washington Post, 3/18/03]

24. Involvement in the Palestinian Conflict

BUSH OPPOSES SUMMITS... "Well, we've tried summits in the past, as you may remember. It wasn't all that long ago where a summit was called and nothing happened, and as a result we had significant intifada in the area." [President Bush, 04/05/02]

...BUSH SUPPORTS SUMMITS "If a meeting advances progress toward two states living side by side in peace, I will strongly consider such a meeting. I'm committed to working toward peace in the Middle East." [President Bush, 5/23/03]

25. Campaign Finance

BUSH OPPOSES MCCAIN-FEINGOLD... "George W. Bush opposes McCain-Feingold...as an infringement on free expression." [Washington Post, 3/28/2000]

...BUSH SIGNS MCCAIN-FEINGOLD INTO LAW "[T]his bill improves the current system of financing for Federal campaigns, and therefore I have signed it into law." [President Bush, at the McCain-Feingold signing ceremony, 03/27/02]

26. 527s

Bush opposes restrictions on 527s: "I also have reservations about the constitutionality of the broad ban on issue advertising [in McCain Feingold], which restrains the speech of a wide variety of groups on issues of public import." [President Bush, 3/27/02]

…Bush says 527s bad for system: "I don't think we ought to have 527s. I can't be more plain about it…I think they're bad for the system. That's why I signed the bill, McCain-Feingold." [President Bush, 8/23/04]

27. Medical Records

Bush says medical records must remain private: "I believe that we must protect…the right of every American to have confidence that his or her personal medical records will remain private." [President Bush, 4/12/01]

…Bush says patients' histories are not confidntial: The Justice Department…asserts that patients "no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential." [BusinessWeek, 4/30/04]

28. Timelines For Dictators

Bush sets timeline for Saddam: "If Iraq does not accept the terms within a week of passage or fails to disclose required information within 30 days, the resolution authorizes 'all necessary means' to force compliance--in other words, a military attack." [LA Times, 10/3/02]

…Bush says he's against timelines: "I don't think you give timelines to dictators." [President Bush, 8/27/04]

29. The Great Lakes

Bush wants to divert great lakes: "Even though experts say 'diverting any water from the Great Lakes region sets a bad precedent' Bush 'said he wants to talk to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien about piping water to parched states in the west and southwest.'– [AP, 7/19/01]

Bush says he'll never divert Great Lakes: "We've got to use our resources wisely, like water. It starts with keeping the Great Lakes water in the Great Lakes Basin...My position is clear: We're never going to allow diversion of Great Lakes water." [President Bush, 8/16/04]

30. Winning The War On Terror

Bush claims he can win the war on terror: "One of the interesting things people ask me, now that we're asking questions, is, can you ever win the war on terror? Of course, you can." [President Bush, 4/13/04]

…Bush says war on terror is unwinnable: "I don't think you can win [the war on terror]." [President Bush, 8/30/04]

…Bush says he will win the war on terror: "Make no mistake about it, we are winning and we will win [the war on terror]." [President Bush, 8/31/04

Posted in it's entirety because it's only by listing it all that the impact can truly sink in. Now, I don't begrudge anyone honestly changing their mind, or finding a better arguement more compelling - but for someone who claims to be "stedfast and resolute" this record is stunningly flaccid and flexible.

Vyan

Bush Re-Lying on Iraq

Last Friday on Veteran's Day and again yesterday the President fired his harshes attacks ever on critics of the Iraq War and Intelligence failures which lead us into this conflict. On Meet the Press, the President has been supported by John McCain "I don't think the President lied"...

"While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," the president said in a Veterans Day speech in Pennsylvania.

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges," he said. "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will."

But was it the truth?

Bush: "Some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war," he said. "These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs. They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein."

Well, that's isn't entirely true now is it? The Washington Post on Saturday responded to the Presidents claims:

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered "the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence." He said that "those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen."

But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."

In the same speech, Bush asserted that "more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power." Giving a preview of Bush's speech, Hadley had said that "we all looked at the same intelligence."

But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President's Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community's views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.

The New York Times on the issue of "Pressure applied to analysts".

Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. . . . Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was "significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration's "hammering" on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency. . . .

Further the Senate Report included information which was later revealed as Under Secretary of State John Bolton attempting to bolster reports of Cuban Wmd's.

(U)When Chairman Roberts asked whether analysts had been pressured to change their assessments at a Committee hearing on June 19,2003,one [INR] analyst stood up and said that he had some encounters involving some pressure ”but noted that he had not changed his assessments as a result of that pressure.The analyst agreed to meet with Committee staff following the hearing to discuss the issue.

(U)The analyst told Committee staff that his concerns about being pressured were not related to Iraq,but rather to an incident that had occurred with the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security concerning Cuba ’s BW program.The analyst had received a routine request to declassify language concerning Cuba ’s BW program for a speech that the Under Secretary intended to give in an open forum.The analyst told Committee staff that the text of the Under Secretary ’s speech contained a sentence which said that the U.S. believes Cuba has a developmental,offensive biological warfare program and is providing assistance to other rogue state programs.The text also called for international observers of
Cuba ’s biological facilities.The analyst said the portion of the speech he was given contained top secret codeword information.

There was also a report on a Pentagon "Desk Officer" in the Office of Special Plans who I strongly suspect is actually Lt. Col Karen Kwaitkowski who has been extremely vocal in her criticism of the Iraq War and Bush Administration.

(U)Committee staff contacted a former desk officer in the Office of the Deputy Under
Secretary of Defense for Special Plans and NESA who had come to the Committee ’s attention through press accounts of the desk officer ’s experiences.

(U)The desk officer told Committee staff that she never worked the Iraq issue and had no direct knowledge of any attempts to pressure or coerce intelligence analysts. She obtained the information that she provided to Committee staff based on looking at the secret level intranet in the Pentagon and through discussions with colleagues.

(U)The desk officer told Committee staff that a DIA senior intelligence analyst had told her that he had been pressured by the Deputy Under Secretary to change a briefing he was giving on Iraq and that he refused to change the briefing because the intelligence did not support the Deputy Under Secretary ’s conclusion.She said that after this incident the senior analyst was excluded from bilateral exchange visits.Committee staff interviewed the DIA senior intelligence analyst (See page 280)who said that he had not been asked to change any briefings on Iraq, but said he was asked not to use the word “assassinations ”when giving a brief on the Israeli Defense Force.He provided no information to show that he had been excluded from the bilateral visits because of his analysis.

It's interesting to note that the "Desk Officer" heard one thing, but when the person she heard it from was brought before the commitee - he denied everything. If there was in fact pressure, one of the key elements of that pressure would have been to "deny the pressure". It's the cornerstone of any cover-up.

"First Rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club. Second Rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club".

What the British Government felt according to the Downing Street Minutes:

It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.

And then you have other countries such as France, Russia and Germany who voted in the UN against the invasion of Iraq and were accused by Bush's supporters of doing so because they'd received kick-backs from Saddam Hussein via the Oil-for-Food program. An allegation that has proved uniformly false.

Bush says now that Congress received the same intellegence, but there are many reasons to doubt that claim.

Media Matters: It should be further noted, that the Bush Whitehouse initially refused to supply any Intelligence Information to the Congress -- the White House reportedly objected to the production of such a [National Intelligence Estimate] at the time. An article in the September 22, 2003, edition of The New Republic described how the then-chairman of the committee, Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), and Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-IL) pushed for the NIE after reviewing a classified CIA assessment of the Iraqi threat that reportedly took "the most aggressive view of all available information":

Stunned by what they read, Graham, Durbin and others on the committee intensified their demands for [then-director of central intelligence George J.] Tenet to produce an NIE on the Iraq threat. It was not a request that Tenet could easily fulfill. "The White House didn't want it," says a source with direct knowledge of the effort. "They wanted to draw their own analytical conclusions

In short, Bush's claim that Congress received the same information as the White House is simply false. They don't get the same information, and even what they did get they had to beg in order to get. But all of this back and forth sometimes obscures the core issue -- why was the intelligence so wrong?

Well it turns out that if you looked closely at it - it wasn't wrong. What started this entire hullabaloo with the President is the recent declassification of a DIA report concerning an detainee who repeatedly claimed that Iraq was working with Al-Qaeda - who simply "wasn't credible".

On November 6, both the Post and the Times reported on a newly declassified document proving that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had voiced strong doubts about the credibility of an Al Qaeda operative whose statements provided the basis for many of the administration's prewar claims regarding Iraqi training of terrorists. The DIA report -- produced and distributed in February 2002 -- raised serious questions about the first interrogation report on the operative and determined that "it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers." Both newspapers noted that administration officials, in late 2002 and early 2003, repeatedly cited the alleged chemical and biological training as proof of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection but never noted that the DIA considered this intelligence suspect. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), who released the new materials, stated "that he could not be certain that White House officials read the DIA report, but his 'presumption' was that someone at the National Security Council saw it because it was sent there," according to the Post

More on this Detainee from William Rivers Pitt.

The operative, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, was exposed as a liar by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February of 2002. Their report bluntly stated that al-Libi was deliberately misleading interrogators, and any information he provided was not to be trusted. By 2004, al-Libi had completely recanted all of his testimony.

"The (Defense Intelligence Agency) document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility," reported the Times. "Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as 'credible' evidence that Iraq was training al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons. Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that 'we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.'"

This is information that the Administration possessed, but certainly didn't share either with the American people or Congress. Even when you look at the information that was eventually provided to the Congress via the NIE - there was a substantial section questioning the conclusions on Iraq's Nuclear Threat supplied by the State Departmentt.

NIE "key judgments" had included a lengthy dissent on behalf of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) regarding the claim that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.

That dissent had included the likelyhood that the Niger Uranium documents were forgeries.

Other information provided in that report was found by the Senate Intelligence Committee to be "totally wrong", particularly when the informant Curveball was relied upon.

In a scathing report released Thursday, President Bush's intelligence commission found that the CIA "failed to convey to policy-makers new information casting serious doubt on the reliability of a human intelligence source known as 'Curveball."' The commission found that several agency officers said they had doubts about the source and raised those doubts with senior leadership, including then-CIA Director George Tenet. In separate statements Friday, Tenet and former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin denied the accounts. "It is deeply troubling to me that there was information apparently available within CIA as of late September or October of 2002 indicating that Curveball may have been a fabricator," Tenet said in a detailed seven-page rebuttal. "There is nothing more serious or galvanizing in the intelligence business than associating the word fabricator with a human source." McLaughlin said "unequivocally" that he wouldn't have allowed Curveball's information to be used "if someone had made these doubts clear".

Despite the apparent concerns, the commission found that information from Curveball remained a centerpiece of former Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations about the need to attack Iraq, as well as in an authoritative intelligence estimate prepared for policy-makers in the run-up to the Iraq war.

From the Dulfer Report on Curveball.

...the Dulfer Report showed... that many key allegations of WMD activity by Saddam all came from a single source, code-named Curveball. A source that his own German intelligence handlers found "not credible", yet his claims of mobile laboratories and imminent mushroom clouds still managed to find their way into Presidential Speeches and public comments by Secretary Powell, then-NSA Chief Condoleeza Rice and even Clinton Admin hold-over George Tenet, Director of the CIA.

So we have one liar in Guantanemo (al-Libi), another liar in Germany (Curveball) and a set of forged documents from Niger that apparently no one noticed except for members of the INR. Only the DIA had noted al-Libi's fabrications and only the DIA had even bothered to actually go visit Curveball "face-to-face" - the result of that meeting was a complete loss in confidence in that source by those who took the trip to Germany. CIA had no clue, and apparently neither did Congress.

Meanwhile the President and his chief Adversers ignored (or were blocked from learning) of warnings coming from the DIA in Feb 2002, the INR and Joe Wilson's report to the CIA on uranium sales - and continued making wildly inaccurate claims:

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

- Dick Cheney, 8/26/2002

There is already a mountain of evidence that Saddam Hussein is gathering weapons for the purpose of using them. And adding additional information is like adding a foot to Mount Everest.

- Ari Fleischer, 9/6/2002

We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

- Condoleeza Rice, 9/8/2002

Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.

- George W. Bush, 9/12/2002

Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons. We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons - the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.

- George W. Bush, 10/5/2002

And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons.

- George W. Bush, 10/7/2002

After eleven years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more. And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.

- George W. Bush, 10/7/2002

We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas.

- George W. Bush, 10/7/2002

Iraq could decide on any given day to provide biological or chemical weapons to a terrorist group or to individual terrorists ...The war on terror will not be won until Iraq is completely and verifiably deprived of weapons of mass destruction.

- Dick Cheney, 12/1/2002

If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world.

- Ari Fleischer, 12/2/2002

We know for a fact that there are weapons there.

- Ari Fleischer, 1/9/2003

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

- George W. Bush, 1/28/2003

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.

- George W. Bush, 1/28/2003

We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more.

- Colin Powell, 2/5/2003

There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction. If biological weapons seem too terrible to contemplate, chemical weapons are equally chilling.

- Colin Powell, 2/5/2003

If Iraq had disarmed itself, gotten rid of its weapons of mass destruction over the past 12 years, or over the last several months since (UN Resolution) 1441 was enacted, we would not be facing the crisis that we now have before us ... But the suggestion that we are doing this because we want to go to every country in the Middle East and rearrange all of its pieces is not correct.

- Colin Powell, 2/28/2003

Let's talk about the nuclear proposition for a minute. We know that based on intelligence, that has been very, very good at hiding these kinds of efforts. He's had years to get good at it and we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.

- Dick Cheney, 3/16/2003

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

- George W. Bush, 3/17/2003

Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly ... all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes.

- Ari Fleischer, 3/21/2003

We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

- Donald Rumsfeld, 3/30/2003

Yet, when UN Inspectors re-entered Iraq in the Winter of 2002 following the passage of HJ 141 (The Iraq War Resolution) and UN Security Council Resolution 1441 -- they found nothing (except a few missles whose range was 15 miles beyond sanctioned limits).

CBS News - Inspectors Call U.S. Tips 'Garbage'

Feb. 20, 2003
U.N. weapons inspectors prepare to investigate a
private battery acid plant outside of Baghdad.  (AP)

So frustrated have the inspectors become that one
source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they've
been getting as "garbage after garbage after garbage."

(CBS) While diplomatic maneuvering continues over
Turkish bases and a new United Nations resolution,
inside Iraq, U.N. arms inspectors are privately
complaining about the quality of U.S. intelligence and
accusing the United States of sending them on
wild-goose chases. 

CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips reports the U.N.
has been taking a precise inventory of Iraq's
al-Samoud 2 missile arsenal, determining how many
there are and where they are.

Discovering that the al-Samoud 2 has been flying too
far in tests has been one of the inspectors' major
successes. But the missile has only been exceeding its
93-mile limit by about 15 miles and that, the Iraqis
say, is because it isn't yet loaded down with its
guidance system. The al-Samoud 2 is not the
800-mile-plus range missile that Secretary of State
Colin Powell insists Iraq is developing.

In fact, the U.S. claim that Iraq is developing
missiles that could hit its neighbors – or U.S. troops
in the region, or even Israel – is just one of the
claims coming from Washington that inspectors here are
finding increasingly unbelievable. The inspectors have
become so frustrated trying to chase down unspecific
or ambiguous U.S. leads that they've begun to express
that anger privately in no uncertain terms.

U.N. sources have told CBS News that American tips
have lead to one dead end after another.

Normally Senior Advisers such as Tenet and Powell would be relied upon to provide information to Congress directly, either in report format or via testimony. Although the full investigation of how or why intelligence information may have been manipulated within the Bush Administration has yet to take place -- it seems clear based on many reports and most obviously the treatment of Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame as well as comment by the CIA ombudsman that in the cases of Tenet and Powell, their were mid-level politcal appointees who were prioritizing, de-prioritizing and coloring certain reports which fit their own agenda and preeferred opinion - rather than the facts.

Bush argues "Garbage in - Garbage out", but it's not really that simple. It's common today to sort your garbage prior to simply throwing it into the can -- and apparently it was the sifting, filtering and vetting process to seperate the credible information from the flat-out incredible that broke down -- or was deliberately subverted.

How much Bush was involved or aware of this at the time remains an open question -- but his comments now, in the face of such overwhelming amounts of information show that whether or not he was deliberately lying then - he's definately lying now.

Vyan

Bush World : Faith before Fact

Tommorrow may be a Historic Day, and then again it may not.

At 2:30 pm Eastern, a hearing on the Downing Street Minutes, by the Democratic members of the House questioning when the Bush Administration decided to begin the Iraq War and on what basis, will be convened. Expectations from both sides of the political spectrum are quite extreme. The "Far-Left", including those who hate the very idea of George W. Bush in the White House may be hoping that this will be the first serious salvo in the march toward eventual impeachment hearings - while those with a right-ward bent are sure to insist that this is just another example of how those "whiny Loser-crats" refuse to accept that their defeats in the 2000/2004 elections, and simply can't resist blaming everyone else but themselves.

As usual, my position is toward the Center as I suspect that both sets of expetations will fall far short of the reality.

Did President Bush Lie us into a War? I think not. At least - not exactly. Was the President merely the innocent victim of a broken intelligence apparatas that failed to warn us of 9/11, and then continued to fail when it came to Iraq's involvment in the event, ties to al-Qaeda and possession of WMD's? Again, I think, not exactly.

I think if you look at the facts honestly and squarely, you will begin to see a pattern that has led us to where we are now - and it's not neccesarily a pattern of deliberate deception, it's a pattern of paradigm, a pattern of received wisdom, and fervent belief. A pattern of faith before fact.

In 1998, the often noted PNAC (Project of the New American Century) penned it's letter to then President Clinton urging that he commit American energy and forces to removing Saddam Hussein as leader of Iraq. Signatories on this letter including Donald Rumseld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, William Bennet, Richard Armatage, Dick Cheney and others. This document outlines a strategy which would, thought it's authors, lead to greater world security and a new renaissance of Democracy in the Arab world and beyond. It was clear that Saddam was our enemy, although many of the left often gloss over it, Saddam's Intelligence Agency did conspire to assasinate President George H.W. Bush with a car-bomb in Kuwait in 1993. The plan failed, but the animous lingered - at least among many who felt that President Clinton by bombing the Iraqi Intelligence Headquarters, simply didn't do enough.

We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.

...

We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.

I see little reason to assume that those who penned this letter, didn't believe thier own words - in fact I feel confident that they absolutely and devoutly believed every sentence, as they've done nothing if not remained true to the goals outlined then. And there in, lies the beginning of our saga and the problem we find ourself living in today.

After the 2000 Election, there was a not just a change in the Chief Executive, there was also a major shift among key positions througout the Administration. Besides Dick Cheney as Vice-President, many other PNAC supporters and signatories - people who hold an ideological fervor the likes of which this country has rarely seen - were given Deputy and Undersecratary positions in Defense (Wolfowitz), the State Department (Bolton) and others. For example, Bush's Deputy in the Labor Department is Eugene Scalia, son of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and a former business lobbyist against workers compensation claims. Mr. Scalia has been known to claim that Repetitve Motion Injuries are simply "Junk Science" being used as an excuse for lazy workers to soak their employers. This person is now the Socitor of Labor, the primary legal representative for workers in the United States. A rather sad irony some would say.

The question on Downing Street has been framed as how much did the President and Administration know about Iraq WMD's and when did they know it? But the question should be, knowing that they believed Saddam himself was an imminent threat what did they do to verify that belief and most importantly did they ignore or downplay evidence which defied that belief?

The record is repleat with examples.

Following 9/11, the fear of international terrorism was at a fever pitch. It's clear that Saddam did at one time possess significant stockpiles of WMD's. He had used them against Iran and had used them against the Kurds following the first Gulf War in 1991. According to Richard Clarke's "Against all Enemies", contrary to credible evidence Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz continued to posit theories of Iraqi involvement not only in 9/11, but also in the first World Trace Center Bombing in 1993. Some of the lastest Post-Downing British Memos that have been released also confirm this view of Wolfowitz's. Against all evidence, Saddam was still the ultimate Boogey Man.

As it stands now, there have been several investigations into the Iraq WMD intelligence and indeed many failures have been found, but none have found that the intelligence was "fixed around [a specific] policy" - but that may be simply because one of these investigations were never tasked with answering that question. The 9/11 Committee didn't addressed the issue. The President's Robb-Silberman Commision on WMD's didn't bring the subject up.

"(W)e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community

The Senate Intelligence Committee Investigation was split into two sections, the second which was to address Administration influence on intelligence has be indefinately postponed. Senator Harry Reid responded to the announcement in a Press Release:

Last year, the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee committed to investigate whether Bush Administration officials misused intelligence. The failure of the report issued today to examine this important issue only serves to increase the need for the chairman to keep that commitment.”

All of which indicates all the more need for the core question to be answered - how did America screw up this badly?

Some would argue that there was no evidence against the presumption of guilt by Saddam, and of course, it's better "safe than sorry". That's all well and good, except for the fact that there was quite a bit of evidence indicating that Saddam had no more WMD's, and that this information may indeed have been systematically ignored by those with a shared fervent belief - including the PNAC Deputies - who then proceeded to block positive news about Saddam from their bosses, Rumfeld, Powell and by extension, the President.

When the U.S. Energy Commision stated that the aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were the wrong type for Uranium enrichment, this information didn't reach Colin Powell before he testified before the UN. When his own State Department's intelligence service stated that they had doubts about Saddam's continued possess of WMD's. Those doubts were ignored, many strongly suspect, by well position Deputies such as John Bolton - who himself already had a reputation for intimidating and threatening analyists who he felt were understating the dangers of WMD's in Cuba.

When Joe Wilson went to Niger to investigate whether Iraq could find a way to aquire Uranium, he returned stating that it simply wasn't possible - and was promptly trashed by a Robert Novak, who reported based info from a unamed Adminstration source (someone in the "middle"?) stating that his wife, CIA Operative Valarie Plame, had been instrumental in his being sent to Africa. A year ago the Washington Post reported that Wilson's claims that Plame "had nothing to do with" his trip were contradicted by a Senate Intelligence Report, even with this blow to his credibility his core claim that Iraq didn't have Uranium remains strong as it is clearly supported by the Dulfer Report.

ISG has not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material—activities that we believe would have constituted an Iraqi effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program.

The other key factor that the Dulfer Report showed, was that many key allegations of WMD activity by Saddam all came from a single source, code-named Curveball. A source that his own German intelligence handlers found "not credible", yet his claims of mobile laboratories and imminent mushroom clouds still managed to find their way into Presidential Speeches and public comments by Secretary Powell, then-NSA Chief Condoleeza Rice and even Clinton Admin hold-over George Tenet, Director of the CIA.

Subordinates have claimed that they passed information up the chain concerning Curveball's lack of credibility, yet Tenet, for one, continues to state they he was unaware of this:

"It is deeply troubling to me that there was information apparently available within CIA as of late September or October of 2002 indicating that Curveball may have been a fabricator," Tenet said in a detailed seven-page rebuttal. "There is nothing more serious or galvanizing in the intelligence business than associating the word fabricator with a human source.

Once again, the failure wasn't at the analyst level - the inteligence wasn't "Dead Wrong" - nor was it (allegedly) with the leadership (Tenet, Powell) - the disconnect was apparently somewhere in the middle. Somewhere among the middle management or at the Administration appointed deputy level were PNACers such as Wolfowitz and Bolton who in all likelhood, simply refused to believe or to promote ideas and facts that deviated from their predetermined agenda.

This view is further supported by information and experience provided by Lt. Col Karen Kwaitkowski, a former Aide to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, who has been quite outspoken and direct concerning on this issue. In her experience working directly with high-level Bush appointees during the lead-up to the Iraq War she has written that "the pressure of the intelligence community to conform, the rejection of it when it failed to produce intelligence suitable for supporting the 'Iraq is an imminent threat to the United States' agenda, and the amazing things I was hearing in both Bush and Cheney speeches told me that not only do neoconservatives hold a theory based on ideas not embraced by the American mainstream, but they also have a collective contempt for fact." Particularly, it seems when those facts are inconviently opposed to their shared beliefs.

For these Deputies and Undersecretaries, it's not simply a matter of them deliberately lying to their superiors - it's an issue of which facts did they choose to highlight in their reports, and which did they choose to de-emphasize or omit? This might mean that the longed-for independant investigation of President Bush may find that he was simply the victim of misguided and overzealous aids, not a deliberate prefabricator or liar per se.

Or then again, was he a willing victim of this paradigmatic group-think?

The most telling answer to this question comes from former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who said the Bush was like ""a blind man in a room full of deaf people", and that he whole-heartedly belives his decisions are the right ones, regardless of all nay-sayers and in many cases - clear and raw evidence to the contrary.

This is why he [Bush] dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts," Bartlett [a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance] went on to say. "He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.

This reliance on belief and conviction over fact, may indeed be a common trait among the PNAC/neo-conservative movement, and has gradually influenced the President. Where once he opening took input from many source, according to a extensive report by Ron Suskind for the New York Times, today he has closed himself into the tightest circle of "happy-talking" insiders and confidents of any President in modern history.

To lie is to state as fact, something that you yourself don't believe is true - but I strongly suspect that the aswer to the perennial question of "How did we get here?" may be something both far greater and far smaller than simply a set of repeated lies, it may indeed involve quite a bit of blind self-deception as well.

If the nation is to truly learn something valuable from this process, it will not be achieved simply by toppling the Bush Adminstration in the midst a highly-partisan conflagration in the rush to the third impeachment trial in our nation's history. We need to learn what really did and what did not occur in our intelligence assesment process, and what may be continuing to occur in all of our government decision making in order to truly prevent anything like this from happening again.

And if we fail in this, we ensure - whether the right remains in power, or the left regains it - that we remain quite ilkely, if not certain, to repeat this type of failure sometime in future.

It may happen later rather than sooner, with luck, but it's clear that without genuine understanding and a national commitment to a true paradigm shift away from pure belief to verifiable fact in governing - we will again ask and wonder in frustration, "How did we get here?"

Vyan

RNC Chair Mehlman on Meet the Press

Media Matters response to Ken Mehlman's appearance this weekend on Meet the Press, points out the latest strategy of obfuscation by the Right-wing on the Downing Street Minutes.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200506060008

On the June 5 edition of NBC's Meet the Press, moderator Tim Russert questioned but failed to correct Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman's claim that the "findings" of the Downing Street Memo, a secret British intelligence memo suggesting that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to support its case for war in Iraq, "have been totally discredited by everyone who's looked at it," including the 9-11 Commission and the Senate.

In fact, neither the 9-11 Commission nor the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence addressed the Bush administration's use of pre-war intelligence.

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When Russert raised the issue of the Downing Street Memo's contention that, in the Bush administration's push for war in Iraq, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," Mehlman replied: "Tim, that report has been discredited by everyone else who's looked at it since then. Whether it's the 9-11 Commission, whether it's the Senate, whoever's looked at this has said there was no effort to change the intelligence at all." When Russert noted "I don't believe that the authenticity of this report has been discredited," Mehlman reiterated: "I believe that the findings of the report, the fact that the intelligence was somehow fixed, have been totally discredited by everyone who's looked at it."

The Senate Intelligence committee's report examined the creation of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was the intelligence community's most comprehensive and authoritative statement about Iraq. But the committee decided at the outset not to investigate the Bush administration's use of intelligence, including public statements by administration officials, in the first phase of its investigation.

Though the committee initially planned to conduct the second phase of its investigation following the 2004 election, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) indicated in March that the committee's investigation into whether the administration misrepresented intelligence judgments in its public statements would be indefinitely postponed, because of administration officials' insistence that "they believed the intelligence, and the intelligence was wrong." "e sort of came to a crossroads, and that is basically on the back burner," Roberts said.

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The 9-11 Commission report said even less about the Bush administration's use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. The 567-page report focuses entirely on issues surrounding the September 11 terrorist attacks, addresses Iraq only in the context of Al Qaeda and September 11, and does not assess the accuracy or honesty of the Bush's public statements about the Iraqi threat.

Other official reports have similarly avoided the question of whether the Bush administration politicized intelligence. The Robb-Silberman commission's report on intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction noted: "(W)e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community." The Duelfer report presented the results of the Iraq Survey Group's hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq following the invasion but did not compare these findings either with Bush's prewar statements to the public or with the prewar assessments of the intelligence community.

Vyan

The Smoking Gun Appears

Secret US/British Plan to Attack Iraq Revealed

This week reports have arisen in the British Press of a Classified 2002 memo which details a Downing Street meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his senior staff that outlines a plot to manufacture WMD evidence in order to persue a regime change in Iraq.

Excerpts from the Downing Street Memo.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

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The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

The release of this memo has prompted a rather strongly worded letter to the President from Ranking Minority Judiciary Committe member John Conyers (D) and a scathing editorial by Greg Palast.

Conyers wrote on Dailykos:

Dear Mr. President:

We write because of troubling revelations in the Sunday London Times apparently confirming that the United States and Great Britain had secretly agreed to attack Iraq in the summer of 2002, well before the invasion and before you even sought Congressional authority to engage in military action. While various individuals have asserted this to be the case before, including Paul O'Neill, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, and Richard Clarke, a former National Security Council official, they have been previously dismissed by your Administration. However, when this story was divulged last weekend, Prime Minister Blair's representative claimed the document contained "nothing new." If the disclosure is accurate, it raises troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war as well as the integrity of your own Administration.

So far, Conyers has 50 signatures on his letter. Palast made the case in far stronger terms on Buzzflash:

The memo, uncovered this week by the Times, goes on to describe an elaborate plan by George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to hoodwink the planet into supporting an attack on Iraq knowing full well the evidence for war was a phony.

A conspiracy to commit serial fraud is, under federal law, racketeering. However, the Mob's schemes never cost so many lives.

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A month ago, the Silberman-Robb Commission issued its report on WMD intelligence before the war, dismissing claims that Bush fixed the facts with this snotty, condescending conclusion written directly to the President, "After a thorough review, the Commission found no indication that the Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons."

We now know the report was a bogus 618 pages of thick whitewash aimed to let Bush off the hook for his murderous mendacity.

Read on: The invasion build-up was then set, says the memo, "beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections." Mission accomplished.

You should parse the entire memo and see if you can make it through its three pages without losing your lunch.

The sad truth is most Americans have been so blase and accepting of each new horrific revelation concerning their government, I suspect they'll have no trouble swallowing this at all - then moving easily on to desert.

Most people forget that Saddam actually did allow the inspectors back into Iraq prior to the start of the war in 2003. They forget that in 1998 when he originally kicked the inspectors out, President Clinton responded with a massive bombing campaign that targeted each and every suspected WMD factory or storage facility. Wonder we're the WMD's went? They were already destroyed in 1998 - that's where.

Vyan