On 02-12-15 02:13, The Curmudgeon wrote to Bill McGarrity <=-
For reasons unknown to us Bill McGarrity said thus to Hustler:
I would think the people who sent 4,000+ men to die would be a
little higher up on the fraud ladder. But c'est la vie...
Hmmm, I'm afraid you missed the New York times article that admitted there were WMDS, but in typical fashion they reported that they were
left over from the Desert Storm war. :) Missed that one eh? :)
I didn't miss it in the least. They were actually from the 80's, most were decaying. Here's an except from my reply with dealing with the Duelfer Report Bush put so much weight on...
Cheney knew this report would cause great concern over their initial
reasons to go to war with Iraq. Funny how when the report hit the streets it was no longer WMD's that were the reason but the oil for food program. It was well documented the CIA forced Duelfer to censor any mention of Americans (Cheney) leaving only the Europeans and the UN holding the bag so to speak.
CIA analyst Charles A. Duelfer's report on Iraq's weapons programs included lists of governments, political parties, companies and individuals from at least 44 nations who received vouchers to buy oil -- both legally and otherwise -- from the Iraqi government during Saddam Hussein's reign.
The names on the politically explosive list are French, Russian, Chinese, Canadian and Japanese; if Duelfer had had his way, U.S. companies and individuals would have been included, too. But he was overruled by CIA lawyers. The report instead lists some voucher recipients only as "U.S. person" and "U.S. company's bahe basis for keeping the names of U.S. individuals secret is supposedly the 1974 Privacy Act. But that act only shields individuals. To justify hiding the names of the companies that were in cahoots with Saddam Hussein, the CIA's lawyers had to rely on an obscure executive order made by Ronald Reagan in 1981. Damn, look who's back stirring the shitpot. Of course, since the names of the Americans and American companies that Duelfer's survey team found were involved in the oil-for-food corruption have been kept classified, we have no idea who else might have been involved. Need we ask whether Dick Cheney, Halliburton, and its subsidiaries were whited-out of Duelfer's report?
But back to WMD's.
Paul Pillar, the CIA officer who led the hurried effort to provide Congress with a National Intelligence Estimate on IraqÆs WMD programs û an estimate that ultimately contained falsities that the administration retroactively used to justify their incorrect assessments û said, ôThe atmosphere in which they were working, in which a policy decision clearly had already been made, in which intelligence was being looked to to support that decision rather to inform decisions yet to be made, was a very important part of the atmosphere.ö Otherwise, data was falsified to suit the administrations needs. One of those Machiavellian fuckups.
ôGiven SaddamÆs history,ö Duelfer writes in defense of his theory, ôit wasnÆt crazy for the intelligence community to believe that he would reconstitute his WMD programs.ö So the war was started on a hunch?
So even if Duelfer is correct and the Bush administration truly believed their own assessments of Iraqi WMDs, the most authoritative intelligence concluded they were not an imminent threat to the United States. The administration went to war anyways. That makes the war a preventive war, which falls into the category of war crimes and incriminates the Bush administration regardless of what they truly believed about IraqÆs WMDs.
In his 2003 book Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky pointed to three prerequisites for preventive war. ôThe target of preventive war must have several characteristics,ö he wrote....
1: It must be virtually defenseless.
2: It must be important enough to be worth the trouble
3: There must be a way to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.
ôIraq qualified on all counts,ö Chomsky concluded.
BTW, do you remember the leaked minutes of a conversation between British intelligence officials and Prime Minister at the time Tony Blair, referred to as the Downing Street memo, Let me refresh your memory...
ôBush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD,ö the secret memo reads. ôBut the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.ö What's a three letter word for Deception?
Getting back to your mention of George Tenet.... the head of BritainÆs spy service at the time, Richard Dearlove, had met with Tenet days before the memo was written. From that meeting, Dearlove concluded: ôIt 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.ö
Conclusion.... a LIE.
Happy reading...
--
Bill
Telnet: tequilamockingbirdonline.net
Web: bbs.tequilamockingbirdonline.net
FTP: ftp.tequilamockingbirdonline.net:2121
IRC: irc.tequilamockingbirdonline.net Ports: 6661-6670 SSL: +6697
Radio: radio.tequilamockingbirdonline.net:8010/live
... Look Twice... Save a Life!!! Motorcycles are Everywhere!!!
--- MultiMail/Win32 v0.50
þ Synchronet þ TequilaMockingbird Online - TELNET: tequilamockingbirdonline.net