[Vision2020] Bush, et al. before a Grand Jury

[Andreas Schou]

On 12/1/06, Tony <tonytime at clearwire.net> wrote:
> Oh Andreas, you are so cynical.  Do you really think that the president was
> just beside himself to start a war?

Yeah, Tony. I think he was. Now, I don't believe that he wanted to
start a war in order to just bust some heads (or, as Jonah Goldberg
wrote in the National Review, "throw some crappy little country up
against the wall, just to show the world we mean business"). I believe
he believes in the power of violence, and violence alone, to achieve
good ends. This is misinformed.

> The record clearly shows to fair minded people that the consensus prior to
> our invasion was that Iraq posed a grave threat to the U.S.  This assessment
> was shared by BOTH sides of the isle, your revisionist efforts
> notwithstanding.  You blithely assert that "no one" thought Iraq had either
> nuclear capability OR links to Al Qaeda.  Andreas, are you given to such
> categorical assertions, or are you just having a bad day?  To say that not
> even ONE American had such concerns is ludicrous my friend -- sheer
> revisionist fantasy.

Tony --

Yes, I suppose that a number of clueless political appointees and
reformed Trotskyite True Believers at the Office of Special Plans
believed that Iraq was just! this! close! to having a nuclear weapon.
Those people were lunatics exiled from the Reagan administration or
indicted for Iran/Contra. They had made their careers making
incompetent, unprofessional, and hysterical intelligence judgements,
and continued to do so once the reasons they had been exiled to
right-wing think tanks and AIPAC had been forgotten.

To clarify, judgements about Iraq's capabilities were guided by Doug
Feith, whom Tommy Franks once called 'the fucking stupidest guy on the
face of the Earth.'; Paul Wolfowitz, who is responsible for producing
the "Team B" intelligence analysis that overestimated Soviet nuclear
strength by a factor of ten; Richard Perle, who resigned from the
Defense Policy board after making investments in companies that stood
to benefit from the Iraq war; and John Bolton, who had State
Department employees fired in 2002 for objecting to his theory that
the Cubans were trying to spread bird flu into the United States by
infecting migratory birds.

It was being reported back to the Bush administration that the idiotic
theories these amateurs were feeding them were incorrect. They chose
to go ahead with theories, like the "yellowcake" lie, that they new to
be questionable, if not false, and they chose to present the evidence
as though it were unambiguous. The evidence was ambiguous. Oh, yeah.
And then it turned out (big surprise) that these jokers were wrong yet
again.

How about this, Tony? You find me a quote from a prominent liberal
that claimed that Iraq had a productive nuclear weapons program in
2002, one that isn't just regurgitating information fed them by the
Bush Administration, and I'll shut up.

-- ACS

> Apparently on a roll, you then blurt that the administration "knew" the Iraq
> intel was cooked all along.  Unfortunately for your credibility, you fail to
> provide even a single scrap of evidence in support of what thus stands as a
> gratuitous assertion.  You are obviously a bright guy, so I trust you will
> be more thorough in your next missive.

How about the Senate Report on Pre-War Intelligence? With regard to
the intelligence assessments being produced for public consumption,
especially the selectively declassified October 2002 assessment, it
found that the evidence was "not substantially in accord with the
underlying intelligence." In fact, the minority report, produced by
the State Department's INR, was entirely correct: Iraq did not have
centrifuges, it did not have fissile material, and even if it did, it
was incapable of doing more than building an accidental radiological
weapon.

> After wading through your thicket of false premises, I am instructed that I
> must conclude that this war was entirely unjustified.  But for reasons which
> I have pointed out, I remain unconvinced.   Do try again though.
>
> Best wishes,    -T
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Andreas Schou" <ophite at gmail.com>
> To: "Tony" <tonytime at clearwire.net>
> Cc: "Pat Kraut" <pkraut at moscow.com>; <vision2020 at moscow.com>
> Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 11:00 PM
> Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Bush, et al. before a Grand Jury
>
>
> > On 11/30/06, Tony <tonytime at clearwire.net> wrote:
> >> Precisely Pat.  The left conveniently ignores the inconvenient truth that
> >> they were just as convinced as anyone regarding the question of WMDs.  I
> >> watched a documentary last night that quoted Hillary, Kerry and Ted
> >> Kennedy
> >> ALL saying Hussein's-WMDs were a grave threat and something needed to be
> >> done to stop him.  Now they are clammoring for his head as punishment for
> >> doing what THEY SAID he should do.
> >
> > Tony --
> >
> > Everybody believed that Iraq had chemical weapons, which they had used
> > against Iran during the Iran/Iraq war. Chemical weapons are, frankly,
> > no more destructive than, say, a fertilizser bomb. Some people
> > believed that Iraq had biological weapons. These can kill a lot of
> > people, but end up often killing the wrong people. Nobody believed
> > that Iraq had, or was anywhere near having, a nuclear weapon. Oh, and
> > no one believed that they had links to al-Qaida, either -- Zarqawi was
> > in the Kurdish autonomous zone with Ansar al-Islam, not anywhere where
> > Saddam had access to him.
> >
> > This includes the Bush administration. They knew the information they
> > were spreading about Iraq's nuclear weapons program was cooked, and
> > they chose to tell everyone anyway. Saying that "everyone believed
> > they had WMDs" is obfuscation, because everyone, including me,
> > actually believed that they did. The question of whether they had WMDs
> > which were an imminent danger to the United States had a clear answer:
> > no, they didn't. The question of whether sanctions worked to end an
> > active WMD program is clear: yes, they did. And the question of
> > whether they would let inspectors back in when pressure was applied is
> > clear: yes, they would.
> >
> > Given those conditions, Tony, there's no reason we should've gone to
> > war. Except that Bush wanted a war, so he pressured the intelligence
> > community to make shit up so he could have one. That's the problem we
> > have.
> >
> > -- ACS
> >
> >
>
>
>