More Bush Religious BS

[ajmccarrell]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

Please find me anything that suports your proposition that W and his cronies did not lie about SH looking to procure the yellow cake.

The best thing to do would be to find something besides a liberal blog that says that they deliberately lied. Your question is a "when did you stop beating you wife" question that assumes a basis that cannot be assumed. It illustrates everything that is wrong with liberals today, which is "the seriousness of the charge" and the need to defend yourself against it, instead of whether or not the charges have any merit to begin with.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

The best thing to do would be to find something besides a liberal blog that says that they deliberately lied. Your question is a "when did you stop beating you wife" question that assumes a basis that cannot be assumed. It illustrates everything that is wrong with liberals today, which is "the seriousness of the charge" and the need to defend yourself against it, instead of whether or not the charges have any merit to begin with.

Um - what liberal blog did I cite to?

Once again, please show me the proof that W did not lie about the yellow cake - I suggest I'll be waiting for a long, long time

But, here is well documented evidence from credible sources of W's lies http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Did_George...e_WMDs_in_Iraq

[ajmccarrell]

Oh, wikipedia?! My professors wouldn't even let me use the site because of credibility issues. It's great for quick answers, but for all I know, you just wrote the article.

You will be waiting a long time. You missed my point entirely. Why defend a purely subjective accusation? You cannot prove or disprove intent. Your whole accusation and expectation of an answer is specious at best. Why defend against a bogus charge?

How about this. You defend Obama against the accusation that he raped my wife. It's the seriousness of the charge that matters and not the source or the merits of the charge, according to you.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

Oh, wikipedia?! My professors wouldn't even let me use the site because of credibility issues. It's great for quick answers, but for all I know, you just wrote the article.

You will be waiting a long time. You missed my point entirely. Why defend a purely subjective accusation? You cannot prove or disprove intent. Your whole accusation and expectation of an answer is specious at best. Why defend against a bogus charge?

How about this. You defend Obama against the accusation that he raped my wife. It's the seriousness of the charge that matters and not the source or the merits of the charge, according to you.

The only reason I cited to it was because it had all the quotes in one place. I think you have way too many issues with the source of things. For future reference, when I cite to something, it usually is for the quotes in it, not the spin put on it.

As for W, all your amateur logic is unconvincing in light of those quotes, which I urge you to read before your foot goes further into your mouth I mean do you actually think every single person is wrong and W is right?

BTW - where is the evidence supporting the yellow cake issue You and I both know it does not exist.

[ajmccarrell]

How could there be evidence for or against a made up charge? You are not understanding anything I said and are insulting me because you don't understand what I said. I'm SO done with you. Weren't you one of those guys who got banned a while back for being a general putz? Leave me alone. I will not give you the power to ruin my day. Insult me all you like, lie about what I have said all you want. It still doesn't change the fact that you are a jerk.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

How could there be evidence for or against a made up charge? You are not understanding anything I said and are insulting me because you don't understand what I said. I'm SO done with you. Weren't you one of those guys who got banned a while back for being a general putz? Leave me alone. I will not give you the power to ruin my day. Insult me all you like, lie about what I have said all you want. It still doesn't change the fact that you are a jerk.

I have never been banned, though I may be a putz.

But, here is the evidence that you are loathe to admit:

Wednesday, Jul. 09, 2003

Bush and Iraq: Follow the Yellow Cake Road

Is a fib really a fib if the teller is unaware that he is uttering an untruth? That question appears to be the basis of the White House defense, having now admitted a falsehood in President Bush's claim, in his State of the Union address, that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa. But that defense is under mounting pressure from a variety of sources claiming that the White House could not have been unaware that the claim was false, because it had been checked out — and debunked — by U.S. intelligence a year before the President repeated it.

So, the White House is not contesting the fact that the President made a false claim — merely whether he, or those who prepared his speech, knew at the time that it was false. And holding the line forces White House press secretary Ari Fleischer into a rhetorical dance that can only be called Clintonesque: conceding on the one hand that the claim made by the President was based on forged evidence that Iraq had tried to buy "yellow cake" refined uranium from Niger, but at the same time maintaining that "I see nothing that goes broader that would indicate that there was no basis to the President's broader statement."

While the Bush administration may have been sweating, just a little during the past two months, over the absence of WMD finds in Iraq, a majority of Americans appear willing to believe that going to war was justified even if no such weapons are ever found. Across the Atlantic, however, Bush's closest ally, Prime Minister Tony Blair, is being roasted daily by Britain's media and legislature, some of the fiercest attacks coming from within his own party. Just this week, a parliamentary inquiry exonerated Blair's government on the charge that it "sexed up" intelligence reports to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam's regime, but nonetheless remained deeply skeptical of the case made by Blair for going to war.

The fact that Blair's and Bush's governments face parallel but separate inquires from their own legislatures operates, in some ways, like the police tactic of interrogating suspects separately in the hope of finding discrepancies in their testimony. The U.S., for example, started a lot earlier than the British conceding that actual weapons of mass destruction may never be found in Iraq. British officials were apoplectic some weeks ago when the President and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld suggested Saddam may have destroyed his banned weapons before the invasion. Blair, after all, has stuck by the promise that WMD will be found in Iraq — at least until this week, when he began the subtle migration to a claim that the coalition may only find evidence that Iraq had maintained weapons programs rather than any actual weapons.

Blair, moreover, appears to be sticking by the Niger uranium allegation despite the White House retraction, insisting that it was based on sources besides the forged letters. U.S. officials had hinted, also, that other sources had pointed to Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium in Africa, but that none of these leads was considered strong enough to include in the President's speech.

Hardly surprisingly, the Democrats are demanding an inquiry. The surging support for antiwar Vermont governor Howard Dean in the Democratic nomination race signals deep discomfort among the party's core supporters over the war, and some of those who voted for the war may be inclined to use the presence of fake intelligence in President Bush's case for war to back away from their own support for the invasion. Still, they may have plenty to work with, because there's plenty of evidence emerging to challenge the White House assertion that it was not informed, before the State of the Union speech, that the Niger claim had been debunked by U.S. intelligence.

Just last weekend, the man sent by the CIA to check out the Niger story broke cover and revealed that he had thoroughly debunked the allegation many months before President Bush repeated it. Ambassador Joseph Wilson emphasized that he had reported back through traditional channels, and asked whether his report had been ignored because it didn't fit with the administration's preconceptions about Iraq.

More troubling questions arise from the claim by IAEA chief Dr Mohammed el-Baradei, who was in charge of the nuclear component of the prewar UN inspection program in Iraq, that he was provided with the Niger "evidence" only in February, despite it having been shared on Capitol Hill the previous October. The U.S. and Britain were publicly committed to sharing intelligence with the UN inspectors in order to help them find a "smoking gun," yet el-Baradei was kept in the dark about evidence that was ostensibly directly relevant to his inquiry. And, of course, almost as soon as he was shown the Niger documents, el-Baradei and his team concluded that they were forgeries. Also, despite U.S. and British claims that "other sources" had indicated Iraqi efforts to buy uranium in Africa, el-Baradei stresses that the Niger forgeries were the only evidence offered to the investigators.

Even more damning are reports that CIA sources insist the Bush administration was made aware some time before the State of the Union address that the Niger allegation was false. If those prove true, it kicks the jams out from under the administration's claim that the presence of a falsehood in the President's case against Iraq was simply the product of ignorance. And it may be expected that the CIA will more and more sharply signal that it passed its findings up the food chain, because on the basis of Ambassador Wilson's revelations, they'd be left to take the blame if they didn't. Then again, the media may turn its attention to the role of the Vice President's office: After all, Ambassador Wilson claims his inquiry was initiated by a request from Dick Cheney's office to check out the allegation. So presumably, Wilson's findings will have been reported back there. If so, the former ambassador is not the only one who will want to know what they, and other top officials, made of, and more importantly did with his information.

And right now, the game in Washington is to pin the blame for the fact that a fib, conscious or unconscious, made it into the State of the Union address. And in a summer news trough, that's bad news for the White House.

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/k...463779,00.html
____________________________________________

[ajmccarrell]

Do you know the difference between an op-ed article and a news story?!

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

Do you know the difference between an op-ed article and a news story?!

Once again, please focus on the quotes. They are valid no matter where they are printed.

Also, do you not know the White House admitted the error in the Nigerian yellow cake issue it asserted as a fact in the SOU address, when it knew it was false before the Address (e.g. a lie) ? -- to wit (emphasis supplied)

White House Admits WMD Error

July 8, 2003

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(CBS/AP) Amid questions about prewar intelligence, the White House is acknowledging that President Bush was incorrect when he said in his State of the Union address that Iraq recently had sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa.

Claims about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were a primary justification for the war, but U.S. forces have yet to find any such weapons. The House and Senate intelligence panels are looking into prewar intelligence on Iraq and how it was used by the Bush administration.

Mr. Bush said in his address to Congress in January that the British government had learned that Saddam recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa.

The president's statement in the State of the Union was incorrect because it was based on forged documents from the African nation of Niger, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Monday.

"The president's statement was based on the predicate of the yellow cake" uranium "from Niger," Fleischer told reporters. "So given the fact that the report on the yellow cake did not turn out to be accurate, that is reflective of the president's broader statement."

Fleischer's remarks follow assertions by an envoy sent by the CIA to Africa to investigate allegations about Iraq's nuclear weapons program. The envoy, Joseph Wilson, said Sunday that the Bush administration manipulated his findings, possibly to strengthen the rationale for war.

Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador to the West African nation of Gabon, was dispatched in February 2002 to explore whether Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger.

Writing in a New York Times op-ed piece, Wilson said it did not take him long "to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place."

In an interview on NBC, Wilson insisted his doubts about the purported Iraq-Niger connection reached the highest levels of government, including Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

In fact, he said, Cheney's office inquired about the purported Niger-Iraq link.

"The question was asked of the CIA by the office of the vice president. The office of the vice president, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked, and that response was based upon my trip out there," Wilson said.

Yet nearly a year after he had returned and briefed CIA officials, the assertion that Saddam was trying to obtain uranium from Africa was included in Mr. Bush's State of the Union address.

The International Atomic Energy Agency told the United Nations in March — after the State of the Union — that the information about the uranium procurement efforts was based on forged documents.

A British parliamentary committee concluded Monday that Prime Minister Tony Blair's government mishandled intelligence material on Iraqi weapons — and said key questions remain about the allegations of an attempted uranium deal with Nigeria.

The committee, however, cleared ministers of deliberately misleading lawmakers.

Blair said Tuesday he had made a valid case for military action.

"I refute any suggestion that we misled Parliament or the people," Blair told the House of Commons Liaison Committee, stressing he stands "totally" behind the case he made for war.

"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat…to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."

On Monday, the Foreign Affairs Committee said Blair "misrepresented" the status of a dossier published in January.

Blair had referred to it as "further intelligence," although he acknowledged later that it contained material from a graduate thesis published on the Internet.

The committee said that another dossier on Iraqi weapons, published in September, gave undue prominence to an uncorroborated claim that Iraq could deploy biological or chemical weapons within 45 minutes of an order being given. It also said the "jury is still out" on the accuracy of the information contained in the intelligence document.

"The jury is not out at all," Blair retorted Tuesday. "There is no doubt that Saddam was developing weapons of mass destruction."

Blair said Tuesday he had no doubts that evidence of weapons of mass destruction programs would be found in Iraq, but said his case would not be weakened if no weapons were found.

Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon that coalition forces needed at least another four months to search for banned arms in Iraq.

The weapons dispute is taking a toll on support for the war in Britain. The Times of London says a poll of 1,000 adults over the weekend find support for the war slipped from 64 percent in April to 47 percent now. Opposition rose from 24 percent in April to 45 percent now.

The poll also found Blair was deemed less trustworthy than rival political leaders.

The dispute is also affecting Australia's government, which will undergo a parliamentary inquiry on the matter next month.

The Australian Broadcasting Company reports Prime Minister John Howard, while continuing to express confidence in the prewar intelligence, is distancing himself from the data passed to him by the United States and Britain.

"I had discussions myself with senior figures in the intelligence community, very senior figures in both countries," Howard said. "I believe that they believed very strongly in their judgments…We had lots of material put to us over a period of months and it built a case, necessarily judgments had to be made by the agencies."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/...in562312.shtml

[ajmccarrell]

Making a mistake is not the same as a lie. There is a material disconnect that you are not able to grasp. If someone is wrong, it makes them human, not necessarily a liar. A lie needs INTENT to deceive, something you are well practiced at. Perhaps your own dishonesty has clouded your judgment, or maybe you're just desperate to justify your anger and hatred. You don't strike me as a happy man.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

. . . The basic assumption that the WMD's was a lie is still highly questionable. No one knew there weren't any. Again, as has been pointed out, the Russians, French, British, Bill Clinton, and even Saddam's own generals believed he had the WMD's. No one lied, there is a difference between a lie and being wrong.

I never said the basic assumption about the alleged WMD was a lie. In fact, I think the Bush Administration was correct in pressing SH's feet to the fire with the renewed inspections. I think after 9-11, the world could not afford to let the possibility that SH had those WMD go unchecked.

I am arguing that once the UN agreed to renewed inspections, the Bush Administration realized the inpections would not allow the US to go to war. So, the Bush Administration lied to the UN about the exigency of threat and lied to the American people3 about the same. The yellow cake and the mushroom cloud lines were all BS and they knew it when they said it. They said it to scare the already scared American people who could readily see a nuclear bomb going off in the US. They were so ready to see that they bought Cheny's lies that SH and Al-Q and OBL were in bed together, then Cheney and co. knew there was no such connection. That is how they sold the concept of the invasion of Iraq as opposed to the renewed inspections for the WMD, which I agree everyone thought were there, save for any kind of nuclear device, which everyone knew SH did not have.

That is the distinction and it is a huge one.

[ajmccarrell]

Wow! Now you're lying about your own statements. This is quite entertaining now. When are you going to say that Bush CAUSED 9/11! This is conspiracy day!

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

Making a mistake is not the same as a lie . . . . .

There was no mistake. They were repeatedly told the Niger story was false and they asserted it anyway. That is a lie on their part. Sadly, it had cost the lives of over 5,000 U.S soldiers, and the body parts of tens of thousands more -- not to mention the arguably hundreds of thousands of casualties in Iraq.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

Wow! Now you're lying about your own statements. This is quite entertaining now.

Please cite one instance when I said I did not think Iraq had WMD. I have consistently and repeatedly said the world though Iraq did. I have also said Clinton killed in the name of those same WMD.

My problem is with the Bush Administration's lying about the exigency of the threat as a springboard to justify an all out invasion.

[ajmccarrell]

Lemme guess! Next you'll be saying that 9/11 was all part of it and Al Qaeda is really the CIA. Boy, I bet this will be good soon. Let me microwave the popcorn.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

. . . When are you going to say that Bush CAUSED 9/11! This is conspiracy day!

I do not think he caused it. I do think, however, his adminstration was warned that Al-Q, not Iraq was the real threat. Sadly, the Bush Adminsitration chose to ignore that warning and focus instead on Iraq. In fact, they were warned that OBL wanted to fly planes into buildings, yet they still chose to concentrate on Iraq, to wit:

What Bush Knew Before Sept. 11

WASHINGTON, May 17, 2002

President Bush was told in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network might hijack U.S. passenger planes - information which prompted the administration to issue an alert to federal agencies - but not the American public.

CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin says the warning was in a document called the President's Daily Brief, which is considered to be the single most important document that the U.S. intelligence community turns out. The document did not, however, mention the possibility of planes being flown into buildings.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that while President Bush was told last summer that bin Laden's al Qaeda network might hijack planes, "until the attack took place, I think it's fair to say that no one envisioned that [using planes as suicide bombs] as a possibility."

However, a federal report issued exactly two years before the Sept. 11 attacks contrasts with that statement.

The report, entitled the "Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?," warned the executive branch that bin Laden's terrorists might hijack an airliner and dive bomb it into the Pentagon or other government building.

It described the suicide hijacking as one of several possible retribution attacks al Qaeda might seek for the 1998 U.S. airstrike against bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.

"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the September 1999 report said.

The report was written by the Federal Research Division, an arm of the Library of Congress that provides research for various federal agencies under contracts.

And it's come out that an agent in the FBI's Arizona office also speculated about using planes as weapons, writing in his case notes about Zacarias Moussaoui that Moussaoui seemed like the type of person who was capable of flying an aircraft into the World Trade Center.

It was the observation of an agent taking notes as he thought about his case - an observation whose significance simply did not register at the time.

Separately, the New York Times reports that an FBI agent in Arizona warned his superiors last summer that bin Laden might be sending students to U.S. flight schools.

The FBI failed to make a connection between that warning and the August arrest of Moussaoui - a French citizen of Moroccan descent detained in Minnesota after raising suspicions among his instructors at a flight school where he said he wanted to know how to fly, but not how to land or take off.

Moussaoui has emerged as the lone defendant charged in the aftermath of the attacks, which killed more than 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. He is charged with conspiring with bin Laden and the 19 suicide hijackers to attack Americans.

FBI Director Robert Mueller has said repeatedly that he wishes the FBI had acted more aggressively in addressing the Arizona and Minnesota leads. Mueller has also said that nothing the FBI possessed before Sept. 11 pointed to the plot.

When hijacked airliners plowed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, Middle Eastern men trained at U.S. flight schools were at the controls.

According to Fleischer, after the information was presented to President Bush in August, the administration put domestic agencies on alert in the summer, just months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

That alert was not announced publicly but Fleischer suggested it may have prompted the hijackers to change their tactics.

"The administration, based on hijackings, notified the appropriate agencies and, I think, that's one of the reasons that you saw that the people who committed the 9-11 attacks used box cutters and plastic knives to get around America's system of protecting against hijackings," he said.

Fleischer did not say which agencies were put on alert and what they did in response.

On Thursday, National security adviser Condoleezza Rice described a series of threats uncovered by intelligence officials, beginning in September of 2000 and reaching a height in the summer of 2001, that dealt mostly with American interests overseas.

Those threats prompted a series of alerts issued by the FBI to law-enforcement agencies and from the Federal Aviation Administration to the nation's airlines and airports, she said. There also were strong warnings to Americans to be careful overseas.

Earlier this month, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham complained that the Justice Department and CIA had not provided congressional investigators with adequate access to documents and witnesses for a probe into intelligence failures related to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Graham said through a spokesman Wednesday that the revelations in the FBI memo mark an important discovery in Congress' investigation into why the FBI, CIA and other U.S. agencies failed to learn of and prevent the Sept. 11 plot.

"It represents a failure to connect the dots," said Graham spokesman Paul Anderson. "This was dismissed rather lightly at FBI headquarters."

On Feb. 6, in his first public comments after the Sept. 11 attacks, CIA Director George Tenet told a congressional hearing that the CIA had seen "spectacular threat reporting about massive casualties against the United States" in the spring and summer last year, but there was no specific information.

A U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the CIA had continuously informed policymakers throughout the summer before Sept. 11 that bin Laden and his network might try to harm U.S. interests and discussed a range of possibilities that included hijackings.

"That was among the many things that we talked about all the time as a potential terrorist threat," said the intelligence official. "But when we talked about hijackings, we talked about that in the traditional sense of hijackings, not in the sense of somebody hijacking an aircraft and flying it into a building. We talked about concern about the general noise level about al Qaeda planning and we were trying to figure out what they would do. We never had specifics about time, place, MO (method of operation)."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/...in509294.shtml