investigation by competent investigators.
The facts are already documented, and could be backed up by credible, valid testimony.
Pinning down a lie is not an easy thing to do in this case because investigations into this matter were deliberately prevented from considering all the evidence:
Senate report cites CIA for ‘failures’ on Iraq
'Mischaracterization' of data on weapons of mass destruction
NBC, MSNBC and news services
Updated: 2:10 p.m. ET July 09, 2004
snip----
The Senate report is the first part of a two-phase review, which at times polarized the usually bipartisan Intelligence Committee.
Democrats wanted to see the investigation handled in a broad, single phase that would include other issues such as whether senior Bush administration officials misrepresented the analysis provided by the nation’s intelligence apparatus as they made the case for war.Democratic senators reflected that concern in “alternative views” attached to the report. In one, Rockefeller, Levin and Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., claimed the report "paints an incomplete picture of what occurred during this period of time."http://msnbc.msn.com/ID/5395999Rumsfeld, Cheney and other neo-cons set up their own "Intelligence" agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP) that worked somewhat independently of established, trustworthy intelligence agencies such as the CIA, in order to manufacture and or manipulate information so that they could present (false) evidence to Congress and the American People in order to justify and gain support for the invasion of Iraq:SEPTEMBER 2001 – WHITE HOUSE CREATES OFFICE TO CIRCUMVENT INTEL AGENCIES: The Pentagon creates the Office of Special Plans "in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true-that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States…The rising influence of the Office of Special Plans was accompanied by a decline in the influence of the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. bringing about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community." The office, hand-picked by the Administration, specifically "cherry-picked intelligence that supported its pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest" while officials deliberately "bypassed the government's customary procedures for vetting intelligence."
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=24889OSP:
The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was created by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to help create a case to invade Iraq. OSP evolved from the Northern Gulf Affairs Office, which fell under the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia policy office. It was renamed and expanded to the Office of Special Plans in October 2002 to to handle prewar and postwar planning. The name change was done to 'mask' its true mission."
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Office_of_Special_PlansThe OSP, under the direction of Cheney, Rumsfeld and the neogoons, deliberately requested and accepted manufactured information that was not credible, despite warnings from the CIA and other intelligence agencies that the information was erroneous:White House 'Exaggerating Iraqi Threat'
Bush's Televised Address Attacked by US Intelligence
by Julian Borger in Washington
Officials in the CIA, FBI and energy department are being put under intense pressure to produce reports which back the administration's line, the Guardian has learned. In response, some are complying, some are resisting and some are choosing to remain silent.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence.
In his address, the president reassured Americans that military action was not "imminent or unavoidable", but he made the most detailed case to date for the use of force, should it become necessary.
But some of the key allegations against the Iraqi regime were not supported by intelligence currently available to the administration. Mr Bush repeated a claim already made by senior members of his administration that Iraq has attempted to import hardened aluminum tubes "for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons". The tubes were also mentioned by Tony Blair in his dossier of evidence presented to parliament last month.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1009-01.htm(Video: Uncovered: The Truth About The Iraq War)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6423.htmSUMMER, 2002 – CIA WARNINGS TO WHITE HOUSE EXPOSED: "In the late summer of 2002, Sen. Graham had requested from Tenet an analysis of the Iraqi threat. According to knowledgeable sources, he received a 25-page classified response reflecting the balanced view that had prevailed earlier among the intelligence agencies--noting, for example, that evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program or a link to Al Qaeda was inconclusive. Early that September, the committee also received the DIA's classified analysis, which reflected the same cautious assessments. But committee members became worried when, midway through the month, they received a new CIA analysis of the threat that highlighted the Bush administration's claims and consigned skepticism to footnotes."
LATE 2002-EARLY 2003 – CHENEY PRESSURES CIA TO CHANGE INTELLIGENCE: "Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated trips to CIA headquarters in the run-up to the war for unusual, face-to-face sessions with intelligence analysts poring over Iraqi data. The pressure on the intelligence community to document the administration's claims that the Iraqi regime had ties to al-Qaida and was pursuing a nuclear weapons capacity was ‘unremitting,’ said former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro, echoing several other intelligence veterans interviewed." Additionally, CIA officials "charged that the hard-liners in the Defense Department and vice president's office had 'pressured' agency analysts to paint a dire picture of Saddam's capabilities and intentions."
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=24889
Bu$h and members of his Administration then used this false information in order to persuade Congress and the American People that America was threatened because, they said, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, with which he was capable of attacking the United States. Bu$h, in his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003, does not mention the CIA as the source of his information on WMD, but refers to entity supplying the information as "our intelligence". By using this type of language, Bu$h could say "our intelligence", (meaning the OSP), and still speak "accurately". An intelligence agency (the OSP) had been set up by the Bu$h administration to provide contrived information to the Bu$h administration. The fact that he does not allude to the CIA in this SOTUA indicates that this information may not have been validated by the CIA, and that the CIA would publically object to being named as a purveyor of false information in Bu$h's SOTUA.
President Delivers "State of the Union"
Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands. He's not accounted for these materials. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.
U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them -- despite Iraq's recent declaration denying their existence. Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them.
From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them.
The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb. 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. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html
At this time, the Bu$h administration (by way of the Senate Select Committe on Intelligence) is attempting to use the CIA as a scapegoat for its own corrupt actions and dishonesty in successfully misleading Congress in order to convince Congress to resolve to allow Bu$h to make a personal executive decision to invade a sovereign nation pre-emptively.
WASHINGTON, July 5 — The Central Intelligence Agency was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, but the C.I.A. failed to give that information to President Bush, even as he publicly warned of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons, according to government officials.
The existence of a secret prewar C.I.A. operation to debrief relatives of Iraqi scientists — and the agency's failure to give their statements to the president and other policymakers — has been uncovered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The panel has been investigating the government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons and plans to release a wide-ranging report this week on the first phase of its inquiry. The report is expected to contain a scathing indictment of the C.I.A. and its leaders for failing to recognize that the evidence they had collected did not justify their assessment that Mr. Hussein had illicit weapons.
C.I.A. officials, saying that only a handful of relatives made claims that the weapons programs were dead, play down the significance of the information collected in the secret debriefing operation. That operation is one of a number of significant disclosures by the Senate investigation. The Senate report, intelligence officials say, concludes that the agency and the rest of the intelligence community did a poor job of collecting information about the status of Iraq's weapons programs, and that analysts at the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies did an even worse job of writing reports that accurately reflected the information they had.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/politics/06INTE.html?ex=1089691200&en=313ade4c60ca9e37&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
There is overwhelming public evidence, provided by current and former intelligence officials and major media sources, some of which is provided in this post, that members of the Bu$h administration refused to accept credible information from intelligence agencies and ordered intelligence officials to provide distorted evidence in order make a case for premptive war.
There is, however, if the information below is accurate, some evidence that a small group of CIA analysts and officials were willing to cooperate with the Bu$h administrations desire to find or create evidence, credible or not, to justify pre-emptively invading Iraq. However, other intelligence analysts and scientific experts, from several different agencies, consistently warned the Bu$h administration that it was accepting bogus evidence despite the opinions of a small minority of intelligence experts. Clearly, the Bu$h administration willingly used false, discredited information to suit its own desire - to pre-emptively invade Iraq despite the fact that Iraq was neither an imminent threat nor a clear and present danger to the safety and security of the People of the US. The Bu$h administration's (by way of the Senate Select Committe on Intelligence) recent attempts to cast the blame on the CIA for providing erroneous information is a maneuver designed to circumvent the factual bottom line: That the Bu$h administration itself, and not a handful of intelligence agents and analysts, is fully responsible for the unjustifiable invasion of Iraq. It's a Whitewash.
July 2001 and later
Almost immediately after Joe T.'s theory is circulated through US intelligence and science circles, centrifuge physicists at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other similar institutions express doubt that the tubes are meant for centrifuges. They provide several reasons why: (1) The size of the tubes makes them ill-suited to be used as rotors in a centrifuge. They have thick walls and are too long and narrow. (2) Since the 1950s, aluminum has no longer been used for rotors. (3) Iraq is known to have had the blueprints for a more efficient centrifuge, which used maraging steel and carbon fiber, not aluminum. Not withstanding these criticisms, Joe T. sticks with his theory. His position is backed by CIA director George Tenet.
People and organizations involved: Joe T.
Fall 2001
Joe T., an analyst for the CIA, gives a presentation in Room 6526 of the State Department's Office of Strategic Proliferation on his theory that a confiscated shipment of aluminum tubes destined for Iraq (see July 2001) had been intended for use in a gas centrifuge program. Present at the meeting is Greg Theilmann, head of the nuclear proliferation monitoring division at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, who is not at all impressed with Joe T.'s argument. “I found the presentation to be unpersuasive,” Thielmann later explains to Vanity Fair. “He seemed far more a man on a mission than an objective analyst. He had something to sell.” Also in attendance is a scientist from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory who also disagrees with Joe T.'s conclusions.
People and organizations involved: Joe T., Greg Thielmann
Late 2001
A small group of CIA agents, among them Joe T., flies to Canberra, Australia and meets with Australian intelligence officers from the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), Defense Intelligence Organization (DIO) and the Office of National Assessments (ONA) at ASIO headquarters. The team of CIA officers presents what is later described as a compelling case that the aluminum tubes, which in July had been intercepted by the US in Jordan on their way to Iraq (see July 2001), had been intended for use as rotors in a gas centrifuge program.
July 2002
Houston G. Wood III, a retired Oak Ridge physicist considered to be “among the most eminent living experts” on centrifuges, reviews the tube controversy and concludes that it is very unlikely that the tubes were imported to be used for centrifuges. He says the aluminum tubes are too thick to be used as rotors. He sends a report of his analysis to US authorities. He later tells The Washington Post in mid-2003 that “it would have been extremely difficult to make these tubes into centrifuges,” adding that it stretched “the imagination to come up with a way.” He also adds that other centrifuge experts whom he knows share his assessment of the tubes.
People and organizations involved: Houston G. Wood III
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_timeline_of_the_2003_invasion_of_iraq&iraq_themes=aluminumTubes#complete_timeline_of_the_2003_invasion_of_iraq_43
A lie is a lie, and a rose by any other name is still arose. Calling someone a liar that has lied does not make you into a liar. It makes you accurate, despite how public perception is manipulated. The truth of this matter could be proven in a court, and I hope that someday it is.
I wasn't saying that you were spinning something. I was saying that Bu$h spun information.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
