Discussion: The Iraq War

sinewave · Apr 13, 2006

Okay, who still thinks that Bush didn't lie or distort the facts when trying to make a case for war with Iraq by accusing them of having WMD? Apparently Colin Powell didn't think Iraq posed an imminant nuclear threat while helping the Bush administration make their case for war with them. Check out this article, it's pretty good.

Truthdig.com said:

Robert Scheer: Now Powell Tells Us
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060411_bush_leak_plame_libby_powell/
Posted on Apr. 11, 2006

By Robert Scheer

The president played the scoundrel — even the best of his minions went along with the lies — and when a former ambassador dared to tell the truth, the White House initiated what Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald calls “a plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson.” That is the important story line.

If not for the whistle-blower, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, President Bush’s falsehoods about the Iraq nuclear threat probably would never have been exposed.

On Monday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told me that he and his department’s top experts never believed that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat, but that the president followed the misleading advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim. Now he tells us.

The harsh truth is that this president cherry-picked the intelligence data in making his case for invading Iraq and deliberately kept the public in the dark as to the countervailing analysis at the highest level of the intelligence community. While the president and his top Cabinet officials were fear-mongering with stark images of a “mushroom cloud” over American cities, the leading experts on nuclear weaponry at the Department of Energy (the agency in charge of the U.S. nuclear-weapons program) and the State Department thought the claim of a near-term Iraqi nuclear threat was absurd.

“The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons,” said a dissenting analysis from an assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research (INR) in the now infamous 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was cobbled together for the White House before the war. “Iraq may be doing so but INR considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment.”

The specter of the Iraqi nuclear threat was primarily based on an already-discredited claim that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes for the purpose of making nuclear weapons. In fact, at the time, the INR wrote in the National Intelligence Estimate that it “accepts the judgment of technical experts at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) who have concluded that the tubes Iraq seeks to acquire are poorly suited for use in gas centrifuges to be used for uranium enrichment and finds unpersuasive the arguments advanced by others to make the case that they are intended for that purpose.”

The other major evidence President Bush gave Americans for a revitalized Iraq nuclear program, of course, was his 2003 State of the Union claim — later found to be based on forged documents — that a deal had been made to obtain uranium from Niger. This deal was exposed within the administration as bogus before the president’s speech in January by Ambassador Wilson, who traveled to Niger for the CIA. Wilson only went public with his criticisms in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times a half year later in response to what he charged were the administration’s continued distortions of the evidence. In excerpts later made available to the public, it is clear that the Niger claim doesn’t even appear as a key finding in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, while the INR dissent in that document dismisses it curtly: “[T]he claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR’s assessment highly dubious.”

I queried Powell at a reception following a talk he gave in Los Angeles on Monday. Pointing out that the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate showed that his State Department had gotten it right on the nonexistent Iraq nuclear threat, I asked why did the president ignore that wisdom in his stated case for the invasion?

“The CIA was pushing the aluminum tube argument heavily and Cheney went with that instead of what our guys wrote,” Powell said. And the Niger reference in Bush’s State of the Union speech? “That was a big mistake,” he said. “It should never have been in the speech. I didn’t need Wilson to tell me that there wasn’t a Niger connection. He didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. I never believed it.”

When I pressed further as to why the president played up the Iraq nuclear threat, Powell said it wasn’t the president: “That was all Cheney.” A convenient response for a Bush family loyalist, perhaps, but it raises the question of how the president came to be a captive of his vice president’s fantasies.

More important: Why was this doubt, on the part of the secretary of state and others, about the salient facts justifying the invasion of Iraq kept from the public until we heard the truth from whistle-blower Wilson, whose credibility the president then sought to destroy?

In matters of national security, when a president leaks, he lies.

By selectively releasing classified information to suit his political purposes, as President Bush did in this case, he is denying that there was a valid basis for keeping the intelligence findings secret in the first place. “We ought to get to the bottom of it, so it can be evaluated by the American people,” said Sen. Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. I couldn’t have put it any better.
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sinewave · Apr 13, 2006

bump

Assassin · Apr 13, 2006

well neither did I but nobody listens to me

tomahawk53 · Apr 13, 2006

Has Powell come out and said this yet?

I mean I'm not necessarily doubting that Powell did say it but it seems to me that he's not really quoting Powell per say. He's only saying things like "Powell told me that...” ?

sinewave · Apr 13, 2006

tomahawk53 said:

Has Powell come out and said this yet?

I mean I'm not necessarily doubting that Powell did say it but it seems to me that he's not really quoting Powell per say. He's only saying things like "Powell told me that... ?
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i don't know. i'll have to do some google searches to see if i can find any direct quotes. you'd think someone with their own book and website would be smart enough to know that making up quotes from prominent figures like powell is not a good idea, but who knows.

roach · Apr 13, 2006

Look I hate to bring up the ever response to these type posts but you have to look at the source. Seriously If Powell came out and said "My bad we screwed up and lied about Iraq" you dont think it would be all over tv?????

sinewave · Apr 13, 2006

roach said:

Look I hate to bring up the ever response to these type posts but you have to look at the source. Seriously If Powell came out and said "My bad we screwed up and lied about Iraq" you dont think it would be all over tv?????
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well, i know that it has been discussed on hardball with chris matthews, so i assume it's real.

roach · Apr 13, 2006

can you give me a link please

Addendum · Apr 13, 2006

Um, Hardball is on MSNBC's website. Go from there.

tomahawk53 · Apr 13, 2006

sinewave said:

you'd think someone with their own book and website would be smart enough to know that making up quotes from prominent figures like powell is not a good idea, but who knows.
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Yeah I agree that's why I'm not "poo-pooing" it.

roach · Apr 13, 2006

tomahawk53 said:

Yeah I agree that's why I'm not "poo-pooing" it.
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stranger things have happened

jaguarr · Apr 13, 2006

If this is true and Powell hasn't come forward and blown the lid off things formally, then he's just as much to blame as anyone else.

jag

sinewave · Apr 13, 2006

roach said:

can you give me a link please
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here's a link to an interview powell had with abc news where he clearly states his opinion on the war with iraq:

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Politics/story?id=1105979&page=1

and here's a link to the hardball episode where they discuss powell's stance on the war:

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/04/12.html#a7899

roach · Apr 13, 2006

Addendum said:

Um, Hardball is on MSNBC's website. Go from there.
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From his interview......
He doesn't blame former CIA Director George Tenet for the misleading information he says he pored over for days before delivering his speech; he faults the intelligence system.

"George Tenet did not sit there for five days with me misleading me. He believed what he was giving to me was accurate. The intelligence system did not work well," he said.

Nonetheless, Powell said, some lower-level personnel in the intelligence community failed him and the country. "There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn't be relied upon, and they didn't speak up. That devastated me," he said.

While Powell ultimately supported the president's decision to invade Iraq, he acknowledges that he was hesitant about waging war. "I'm always a reluctant warrior. And I don't resent the term, I admire the term, but when the president decided that it was not tolerable for this regime to remain in violation of all these U.N. resolutions, I'm right there with him with the use of force," he said.

sinewave · Apr 13, 2006

roach said:

From his interview......
He doesn't blame former CIA Director George Tenet for the misleading information he says he pored over for days before delivering his speech; he faults the intelligence system.

"George Tenet did not sit there for five days with me misleading me. He believed what he was giving to me was accurate. The intelligence system did not work well," he said.

Nonetheless, Powell said, some lower-level personnel in the intelligence community failed him and the country. "There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn't be relied upon, and they didn't speak up. That devastated me," he said.

While Powell ultimately supported the president's decision to invade Iraq, he acknowledges that he was hesitant about waging war. "I'm always a reluctant warrior. And I don't resent the term, I admire the term, but when the president decided that it was not tolerable for this regime to remain in violation of all these U.N. resolutions, I'm right there with him with the use of force," he said.
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does that answer your questions?

Darthphere · Apr 13, 2006

Another lie, its like Christmas every [email protected][email protected][email protected]

roach · Apr 13, 2006

yes it did thank you

sinewave · Apr 13, 2006

roach said:

yes it did thank you
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you're welcome.

Matt · Apr 13, 2006

sigh...I used to respect Powell.

tomahawk53 · Apr 13, 2006

sinewave said:

does that answer your questions?
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But that's not what your original post says at all...?

Your posts says that Powell flat out told the guy that it was Cheney's doing and that the president was in the know as well...While that "actual quote" says that Powell says that it was 'some lower-level personnel in the intelligence community failed him and the country' and doesn't even MENTION the VP....

I'm still curious if he's changed his story about it now?

He very well may have but the second quote contradicts the first one...

sinewave · Apr 13, 2006

tomahawk53 said:

But that's not what your original post says at all...?

Your posts says that Powell flat out told the guy that it was Cheney's doing and that the president was in the know as well...While that "actual quote" says that Powell says that it was 'some lower-level personnel in the intelligence community failed him and the country' and doesn't even MENTION the VP....

I'm still curious if he's changed his story about it now?

He very well may have but the second quote contradicts the first one...
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they aren't the exact same quotes but it clearly expresses his feelings on iraq, pre-war. i thought the article at the beginning of this thread was believable enough.

Spider-Bite · Apr 13, 2006

It turns out that Iraq's prime minister was a spy for the CIA and he confirmed prior to the invasion that Iraq did not have the WMDs. When Bush asked Congress for the authority to got to war he didn't mention that part.

to me that's an obivous distortion and manipulation of intelligence.

Spider-Bite · Apr 13, 2006

for those that don't believe me.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11927856/

tomahawk53 · Apr 13, 2006

sinewave said:

they aren't the exact same quotes but it clearly expresses his feelings on iraq, pre-war. i thought the article at the beginning of this thread was believable enough.
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Right. I'm not arguing or questioning what his views are now. I just think that original story that was posted where the person says that Powell directly told him that it was all Cheney and stuff would be very damning in my eye to the admin (well to Cheney at least) and was wondering if that was true. I'm still not saying it's not true I would just like to 'hear it' from Powell's mouth if you know what I mean.

I do wonder what's taken him so long to come out and say that he was against it though...? No backbone maybe...?

Addendum · Apr 13, 2006

So because he's not a media ****e, he has no backbone?

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