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#1
06-16-2005, 12:50 PM
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the poor Democrats
THIS is the best they can do?
_________________________________________________________ Democratic forum focuses on 'Downing Street memo' WASHINGTON (AP) -- Some congressional Democrats, brandishing a document known as the "Downing Street memo," are insisting that the White House provide more information about what led to the decision to go to war in Iraq. Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, and other Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee were conducting a public forum Thursday afternoon, prompted by documents that have surfaced from inside the British government about pre-war planning. The Downing Street memo says the Bush administration believed that war was inevitable and was determined to use intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the ouster of Saddam. The "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," says the memo, recounting a July 23, 2002 meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his national security team. The meeting took place just after British officials returned from Washington. U.S. officials and Blair deny the assertion about intelligence and facts being "fixed," a comment that the memo attributes to the chief of British intelligence at the time. The meeting took place eight months before the invasion of Iraq. Conyers pointed to past statements by Bush in the run-up to invasion that war would be a last resort. "The veracity of those statements has -- to put it mildly -- come into question," he said. The London Sunday Times disclosed the contents of the memo May 1. Bush should respond to questions raised by the Downing Street memo, says a letter signed by Conyers and over 90 other members of Congress, as well as a half-million Americans. The Sunday Times also reported on an eight-page briefing paper prepared for Blair which concludes that the U.S. military has given "little thought" to the aftermath of a war in Iraq. The briefing paper of July 21, 2002 says that a postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise and that "as already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden." Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/06/....ap/index.html ______________________________________________ I mean though everyone and their brother knew W was hell bent on going to war, W's use of the UN, and his building of coalition (such as it is), W's reliance on essentially the same WMD intelligence Clinton relied on to kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (missle strikes and Oil for Food) , and the UN's consistent finding of SH in breach of his duty to account for the WMD - will all exonerate W from any statement I have heard. It pains me to say that because I do not like W, but thems the facts.
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 save the cheerleader - save the world 
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#2
06-16-2005, 11:18 PM
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"Provide more information"!!! F***, it was the White House that made up the reasons to go to war and...
 . More proof that there is only one party in this wonderful country.
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#3
06-17-2005, 12:56 AM
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I agree because most of the D's went right along with them hand in hand - Again, Clinton with the urging of Kerry bombed Iraq, killing many, and then during his eight years killed hundreds of thousands with the Oil for Food program - all based on the same BS intelligence. So, I think the R and D party are equally as culpable in this. It is not like W woke up on day and said, Iraq is no longer our friend - let's invade them 
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save the cheerleader - save the world
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#4
06-18-2005, 02:00 PM
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 Whaddya want, treason? Do you know that the Republicans weren't even going to let them have this hearing on the Capital Grounds? Do you have any idea how hard they fought just to get this out there? I'll ask you again, have you read the DSM and accompanying documents that were summarized in the article published last Sunday? Conyers didn't vote for this war. The majority in both the House and Senate are REPUBLICAN. Remember, Watergate was just a third rate burglary.
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#5
06-20-2005, 07:48 AM
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#6
06-20-2005, 07:52 AM
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by the way, as far as Im concerned, W's misuse of his office (squandering $$, lying to the WORLD etc,) is FAR more deserving of Impeachment than Clinton's dalliance with Monica EVER was. And before you start talking about "having others lie for Clinton" Jason, just add up in yer noggin all the freakin LIES Bush had told by persons in this county and BEYOND. FAR more deserving of impeachment is our disgusting old BushyPOO.
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06-20-2005, 08:58 AM
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| strandinthewind |
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This message has been deleted by strandinthewind.
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#7
06-20-2005, 09:09 AM
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save the cheerleader - save the world
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#9
06-20-2005, 11:27 AM
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I'm sure I could look up a bunch more but those are the ones I can rattle off of the top of my head. Edit: Apparently there are enough for an entire book. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...93710?v=glance This Google search brought up a ton of pages: George W. Bush lies list
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~Suzy Last edited by SuzeQuze; 06-20-2005 at 11:55 AM..
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#10
06-20-2005, 12:33 PM
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 Seriously, both parties have killed hundreds of thousands in the name of the WMD and SH's refusal to account for them as he agreed to do in the treaty that ended the first Gulf War. Thus, my point earlier that W will never be impeached on acting on SH'd refusal, however disingenuous W was. BTW - W never used the word connection, he used the word contacts, which there were, though they were mostly insignificant - thus, he also will never be impeached on that. In the end, I reassert that the Downing Street Memo carries no teeth in it. Here is an article on the connection vs. contact argument: Bush Reasserts Hussein-Al Qaeda Link President Draws Distinction Between Involvement in 9/11 Attacks, Other Contact By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, June 17, 2004; 3:00 PM President Bush insisted today that "numerous contacts" between the ousted government of Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorist network showed that the former Iraqi leader was a threat to the United States, despite a report by the Sept. 11 commission that found no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda. "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda [is] because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," Bush told reporters after a Cabinet meeting at the White House. Bush said the contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda provided proof of a relationship. The report, issued yesterday by the bipartisan commission investigating the 2001 terrorist attack on the United States, said that all relevant classified information that it reviewed showed that the contacts that took place between Iraq and al Qaeda officials never led to actual cooperation. In yesterday's hearing of the panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, a senior FBI official and a senior CIA analyst concurred with the finding. The report challenged one of the Bush administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq. Along with the contention that Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials have often asserted that there were extensive ties between Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. Earlier this year, Cheney said evidence of a link was "overwhelming." Asked about the commission's findings on an Iraq-al Qaeda link, Bush said, "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. For example, Iraqi intelligence officers met with bin Laden, the head of al Qaeda, in the Sudan. There's numerous contacts between the two." Bush said he had called Saddam Hussein a threat "because he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. He was a threat because he was a sworn enemy to the United States of America, just like al Qaeda. Now, he was a threat because he had terrorist connections, not only al Qaeda connections but other connections to terrorist organizations." Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean, asked at a news conference about Bush's comments, said the panel did not dispute that there were contacts between Hussein's government and al Qaeda. But Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said the panel's staff found "that there is no credible evidence that we can discover, after a long investigation, that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were in any way part of the attack on the United States." Vice chairman Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman, said, "I must say, I have trouble understanding the flap over this." The commission's position, he said, is that "we don't have any evidence of a cooperative . . . relationship between Saddam Hussein's government and these al Qaeda operatives with regard to the attacks on the United States." The commission's staff report said that bin Laden "explored possible cooperation with Iraq" while in Sudan through 1996, but that "Iraq apparently never responded" to a bin Laden request for help in 1994. The commission cited reports of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda after bin Laden went to Afghanistan in 1996, adding, "but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." The finding challenges a belief held by large numbers of Americans about al Qaeda's ties to Hussein. According to a Harris poll in late April, a plurality of Americans, 49 percent to 36 percent, believe "clear evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda has been found." As recently as Monday, Cheney said in a speech that Hussein "had long-established ties with al Qaeda." Bush, asked on Tuesday to verify or qualify that claim, defended it by pointing to Abu Musab Zarqawi, who has taken credit for a wave of attacks in Iraq. In his remarks today, Bush again mentioned Zarqawi, a Palestinian born in Jordan who runs the al Tawhid terrorist network. Bush said Hussein had "provided safe haven for a terrorist like Zarqawi, who is still killing innocents inside of Iraq." Bush also cited Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, whose Fatah Revolutionary Council was active in the 1970s and 1980s, as another example of Hussein's terrorist ties. Nidal died under mysterious circumstances in Baghdad a few months before the Iraq war. Bush's Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), sought to profit from the commission's finding. "The administration misled America, and the administration reached too far," Kerry told Michigan Public Radio yesterday. "I believe that the 9/11 report, the early evidence, is that they're going to indicate that we didn't have the kind of terrorists links that this administration was asserting. I think that's a very, very serious finding." A Bush campaign spokesman countered that Kerry himself has said Hussein "supported and harbored terrorist groups." And Cheney's spokesman pointed to a 2002 letter written by CIA Director George J. Tenet stating that "we have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade" and "credible information indicates that Iraq and al Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression." Cheney's office also pointed to a 2003 Tenet statement calling Zarqawi "a senior al Qaeda terrorist associate." White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the commission finding of long-standing high-level contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq justified the administration's earlier assertions. "We stand behind what was said publicly," he said. Bush, speaking to troops in Tampa yesterday, did not mention an Iraq-al Qaeda link, saying only that Iraq "sheltered terrorist groups." That was a significantly milder version of the allegations administration officials have made since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In late 2001, Cheney said it was "pretty well confirmed" that Sept. 11 mastermind Mohamed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official before the attacks, in April 2000 in Prague; Cheney later said the meeting could not be proved or disproved. Bush, in his speech aboard an aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003, asserted: "The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda and cut off a source of terrorist funding." In September, Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press": "If we're successful in Iraq . . . then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11." Speaking about Iraq's alleged links to al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney connected Iraq to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing by saying that newly found Iraqi intelligence files in Baghdad showed that a participant in the bombing returned to Iraq and "probably also received financing from the Iraqi government as well as safe haven." He added: "The Iraqi government or the Iraqi intelligence service had a relationship with al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s." Shortly after Cheney asserted these links, Bush contradicted him, saying: "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th." But Bush added: "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties." In January, Cheney repeated his view that Iraq was tied to al Qaeda, saying that "there's overwhelming evidence" of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. He said he was "very confident there was an established relationship there." The commission staff, in yesterday's report, said that while bin Laden was in Sudan between 1991 and 1996, a senior Iraqi intelligence officer made three visits to Sudan, and that he had a meeting with bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden was reported to have sought training camps and assistance in getting weapons, "but Iraq never responded," the staff said. The report said that bin Laden "at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan." As for the Atta meeting in Prague mentioned by Cheney, the commission staff concluded: "We do not believe that such a meeting occurred." It cited FBI photographic and telephone evidence, along with Czech and U.S. investigations, as well as reports from detainees, including the Iraqi official with whom Atta was alleged to have met. On the 1993 trade center bombing, the staff found "substantial uncertainty" about whether bin Laden and al Qaeda were involved. At yesterday's hearing, commissioner Fred F. Fielding questioned the staff's finding of no apparent cooperation between bin Laden and Hussein. He pointed to a sentence in the first sealed indictment in 2001 of the al Qaeda members accused of the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; that sentence said al Qaeda reached an understanding with Iraq that they would not work against each other and would cooperate on acquiring arms. Patrick J. Fitzgerald, now a U.S. attorney in Illinois, who oversaw the African bombing case, told the commission that reference was dropped in a superceding indictment because investigators could not confirm al Qaeda's relationship with Iraq as they had done with its ties to Iran, Sudan and Hezbollah. The original material came from an al Qaeda defector who told prosecutors that what he had heard was secondhand. The staff report on Iraq was brief. Though not confirming any Iraqi collaboration with al Qaeda, it did not specifically address two of the other pieces of evidence the administration has offered to link Iraq to al Qaeda: Zarqawi's al Tawhid organization and the Ansar al-Islam group. In October 2002, Bush described Zarqawi as "one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks." Zarqawi wrote a January 2003 letter to bin Laden's lieutenants, intercepted at the Iraqi border, saying that if al Qaeda adopted his approach in Iraq, he would swear "fealty to you [bin Laden] publicly and in the news media." In March, in a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Tenet described Zarqawi's network as among groups having "links" to al Qaeda but with its own "autonomous leadership . . . own targets [and] they plan their own attacks." Although Zarqawi may have cooperated with al Qaeda in the past, officials said it is increasingly clear that he has been operating independently of bin Laden's group and has his own network of operatives. The other group, Ansar al-Islam, began in 2001 among Kurdish Sunni Islamic fundamentalists in northern Iraq, fighting against the two secular Kurdish groups that operated under the protection of the United States. At one point, bin Laden supported Ansar, as did Zarqawi, who is believed to have visited their area more than once. Tenet referred to Ansar as one of the Sunni groups that had benefited from al Qaeda links. © 2004 The Washington Post Company ____________________________________________________ In the end, W will assert that after 9/11 - SH was too variable a threat to leave unaccounted for. After all, SH was repeatedly found in violation of the deal he struck with the UN and he was a terrorist who invaded an ally of the US. Thus, no one will impeach him for the Iraqi War, esp. given that the Clinton Adminstration used essentially the same WMD evidence to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi's. The D's are not about to delve into that too deeply and they would be fools to do so considering most of them gleefully went along with W.
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save the cheerleader - save the world Last edited by strandinthewind; 06-20-2005 at 12:38 PM..
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#11
06-20-2005, 12:35 PM
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Bush lied about Iraq many times, although he responds to that by saying it was the intelligence, yadyada, of course never taking the blame for anything..
He claimed Iraq had 500 tons of chemicals weapons, none were found. He said Iraq has a growing fleet of planes capable of dispersing chemical weapons almost anywhere in the world, and again not true. He said Iraq aids and protects terrorists including members of Al Qaeda, that was never proved. Bush said Saddam had attempted to purchase metal tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production, it was found that the tubes were not suitable for nuclear weapons production. He told us Iraq has specifically sought large amounts of uranium from Africa, not true. In 2003 Bush claimed Saddam had been refusing to let weapons inspectors in Iraq, but in fact they had been let in from Dec 02 till the begin of the war.. Chris
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CHRIS M.
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#12
06-20-2005, 12:40 PM
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But shouldn't it be said that the President makes the decision to go to War, and consults with Congress of course...I don't think it's fair to blame the Senators, D or R who voted to give him the authority to use force if necessary. I don't think they ever thought he would use it as misguided and freely as he did. I think they just felt like they should give him that option if necessary, because lets not forget he said it would be a last resort...Now why did they believe him? Who knows... Chris
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CHRIS M.
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#13
06-20-2005, 12:40 PM
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save the cheerleader - save the world
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#14
06-20-2005, 12:42 PM
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I think anyone who voted to give W the authority to go to war should be judged accordingly. I mean you would have had to have been a horse's ass not to know that W was hell bent on going to war in Iraq and to say you voted to give him that authority thinking he was not so is laughable. I mean I knew it and I am not in politics
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save the cheerleader - save the world
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#15
06-20-2005, 12:49 PM
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There are still 22 Democratic Senators who voted NO don't forget. I agree though, nothing will come out of this memo except talk and more debate--which is good though I think. Even if there are no consequences, the people will understand more what a mistake this was I think Chris
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CHRIS M.
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