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

[Tony]

Andreas, if it is the president's belief that violence and violence ALONE is 
the only way to deal with sociopathic predators, then he is absolutely 
CORRECT!!  How you fail to conclude this is beyond me.

As for the consensus which existed prior to our invasion that Iraq posed a 
grave threat, this was a conclusion held by responsible members of congress 
on BOTH sides of the isle -- yours and mine, and not some right wing boogey 
man existing only in the cynical and paranoid mind of liberals.

While I would trust Tommy franks as far as kicking butt is concerned, my 
faith in his nuanced grasp of international politics is less than ironclad. 
As for Wolfowitz, Pearl and Bolton, I am comfortable that they are honorable 
men who will forget more about politics in the next five minutes than 
Andreas will learn if he lives to 100.

Your gratuitous characterization of Bush's advisors as "jokers," "idiotic" 
and "amateurs" marks you as vicious partisan critic as opposed to a 
reasonable person.

As for your insistence that I provide you with the name of anyone who 
claimed Iraq had a working nuclear capability prior to the invasion, I have 
to clarify once again that I never made the assertion you refer to.  I say 
A, you hear B and demand that I document a claim I NEVER MADE.  Please 
listen carefully Andreas:  I said that MEMBERS ON BOTH SIDES of the isle 
were convinced that Iraq posed a GRAVE THREAT to America.  This is a fact 
Andreas.  You may choose to continue to deny it, but it will remain a fact.

Good morning and have a pleasant afternoon.   -T
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andreas Schou" <ophite at gmail.com>
To: "Tony" <tonytime at clearwire.net>
Cc: <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2006 3:44 PM
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Bush, et al. before a Grand Jury


> 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
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>
>