Leaves down
They all came off early Monday morning.
Tasty surprise–very late broccoli shoots
A brief, windy rainstorm early Monday morning took off all of the leaves in one quick drop. In the garden, surprise broccoli shoots came out during a few milder days. There are still a few carrots left to dig as well. Time to plant next year’s garlic….
Note: I have adjusted post times to allow my dad’s piece to float to the top.
President Bush, in Pananma, November 7, 2005: “Anything we do to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law,….We do not torture. And therefore we’re working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible, more possible to do our job.”
Headline, Washington Post, November 5, 2005: ”Cheney Seeks CIA Exemption to Torture Ban”:
Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to Republican senators this week to allow CIA exemptions to a proposed ban on the torture of terror suspects in U.S. custody, according to participants in a closed-door session….“It was clear to me there that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field,” Lawrence Wilkerson, a former colonel who was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff during President Bush’s first term, said Thursday.
Wilkerson said the view of Cheney’s office was put in “carefully couched” terms but that to a soldier in the field it meant sometimes using interrogation techniques that “were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.” He said he no longer has access to the paperwork.
What else do we need to know in order to conclude that there is a major cover-up here? They say they don’t torture, but they need an exemption so that they can torture??
If such an exemption were to be written into the McCain-sponsored anti-torture language recently passed by the US Senate, that provision would then do exactly the opposite of outlawing “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” by codifying an approved exception.
Response received
Professor McAdams replies that I “do not seem to seriously challenge the notion that virtually everybody fully believed that Saddam had WMDs,” and that I “talk around” his points.
Okay, I see how I could be more direct.
What I do examine in the previous post is what “fully believed” means. When did Saddam have weapons? How did he get them? What shape were they in in 2002-3? Sure, we can find a point in history where everybody thinks Saddam had some weapons. I have a whitepaper posted here that traces Saddam’s bioweapons to a UK cow. But the litany of items I cite reveal a great deal of fraud that officials communicated to the public.
I want to show that tracing these frauds is not a product of someone who is “just completely heedless of any standards of telling the truth or making a plausible argument.”
And I did point out that the Germans certainly did not buy the story told them by Curveball. So there is a counterexample to “everybody fully believed.” Again, I certainly could be more direct.
And what about Kamel? The secret UN debriefings that Rangwala and Newsweek’s John Barry revealed clearly show something less than “full belief” that the weapons were extant. Beyond that, by reading through Rangwala’s site, as I recommend, you find a whole lot of just the opposite of “full belief.”
Furthermore, though I did not reach back to the Clinton years in any detail in my piece, I do challenge Khidir Hamza, “Saddam’s Bombmaker.” A lot of people were fooled by that guy, including the very knowledgeable and thorough David Albright, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. So it’s not surprising that a lot of stories like “Iraqi Work Toward A-Bomb Reported”, cited by Kagan, were around in 1998.
Tim Russert: “George W. Bush said there were. Bill and Hillary Clinton said there were. The Russians, French and Germans, who opposed the war, said there were. Hans Blix of the U.N. said there were.”
This quote from Meet the Press on September 25, 2005 during a gaggle with New York Times columnists illustrates how water for the Bush-absolving notion that “everybody” in the pre-Iraq-war period thought that Iraqi WMD were real and a genuine threat to the US and the UK is being carried by mainstream media.
Lately this has become quite an epidemic. Even administration dissident Lawrence Wilkerson — who Deep Blade discussed here — re-laid out the winter 2003 case, as cited by Max Boot (in a piece also discussed by Deep Blade here):
Wilkerson said on Oct. 19 that “the consensus of the intelligence community was overwhelming” that Hussein was building illicit weapons. This view was endorsed by “the French, the Germans, the Brits.” The French, of all people, even offered “proof positive” that Hussein was buying aluminum tubes “for centrifuges.” Wilkerson also recalled seeing satellite photos “that would lead me to believe that Saddam Hussein, at least on occasion, was giving us disinformation.”
Boot left out the part where Wilkerson said in a series of obviously conflicted and troubled statements concerning Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 appearance before the United Nations Security Council, “I wasn’t all that convinced by the evidence I’d seen that he had a nuclear program other than the software.”
So the story from many quarters on the right is that we cannot accuse the Bush Administration of lying us into war because it was just common knowledge that what Bush, Cheney, Blair, and other officials said in the war run-up was based on their sincere and widely-shared beliefs.
Some days ago, I heard a prime example of this kind of water carrying on a Wisconsin Public Radio talk program featuring an interview with John C. McAdams, associate professor of political science at Marquette University. (Click here and find the audio links for October 26, 2005)
A caller to the program with Professor McAdams cited a Democracy Now! interview with former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman and asked McAdams to comment about the notion that the Plame investigation is not so much about revealing the name of a CIA operative as it is about the forged documents associated with the vice president’s office and the Pentagon Office of Special Plans — the lie factory, often cited in Deep Blade Journal — and hence the lies that led to war.
A fair question? Not to the professor, who gave this surprisingly harsh reply,
McAdams: [snickers] People who, who, who use the “Bush lied” argument, it seems to me, are, are just completely heedless of any standards of, of, of telling the truth or making a plausible argument… um, you know, Let’s make a list of those who believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction: Russian intelligence, French intelligence, British intelligence, Tony Blair, the CIA, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, John Kerry. And somehow we’re supposed to believe… ah, oh, oh, and the mainstream media, excellent article by Robert Kagan yesterday in the Washington Post where he talks about how the mainstream media, particularly the New York Times but also the Washington Post in the late 1990s and in 2000, before George Bush took office, were hyping the notion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and he has a long list of articles,… [see Kagan quoted below],… [UN chief inspector Hans Blix], who clearly told the United Nations that Saddam had had weapons of mass destruction in the 1990s, was under an obligation to have destroyed them, and to explain to his investigators, to document the destruction, but refused to document the destruction. Were supposed to believe that among all these people, George Bush was the only person who was so brilliant, ah, who was so wonderfully perceptive, that he knew Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction when virtually everyone else who was paying attention did. Remember, the disagreement about going to war between say us and the French was not whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, it was what the appropriate strategy for dealing with that would be. Ah, so, it’s, ah simply ahistorical, to make that argument that “Bush lied” about weapons of mass destruction. Everybody was making that argument.
McAdams then follows up with a pro forma thrashing of Joseph Wilson, who McAdams says was “discredited.” (See previous post on this matter.)
The October 25 piece by Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan that McAdams cites is quite interesting. It expands the view of what media sources beyond New York Times WMD maven Judith Miller were saying about Iraq, and over a much longer time frame:
Many critics outside the Times suggest that Miller’s eagerness to publish the Bush administration’s line was the primary reason Americans went to war. The Times itself is edging closer to this version of events.There is a big problem with this simple narrative. It is that the Times, along with The Post and other news organizations, ran many alarming stories about Iraq’s weapons programs before the election of George W. Bush. A quick search through the Times archives before 2001 produces such headlines as “Iraq Has Network of Outside Help on Arms, Experts Say”(November 1998), “U.S. Says Iraq Aided Production of Chemical Weapons in Sudan”(August 1998), “Iraq Suspected of Secret Germ War Effort” (February 2000), “Signs of Iraqi Arms Buildup Bedevil U.S. Administration” (February 2000), “Flight Tests Show Iraq Has Resumed a Missile Program” (July 2000). (A somewhat shorter list can be compiled from The Post’s archives, including a September 1998 headline: “Iraqi Work Toward A-Bomb Reported.”) The Times stories were written by Barbara Crossette, Tim Weiner and Steven Lee Myers; Miller shared a byline on one.
Sure, fine, Kagan is on to something here to the extent that he correctly describes what mainstream reporters did throughout pretty much the last decade when reporting on Iraq.
But what McAdams and other rightists do, though, is latch onto this history of mainstream thought as they hurl charges that people interested in getting to the bottom of just how intelligence support for bellicose administration rhetoric during late 2002 and early 2003 was created and disseminated are “ahistorical.”
I take that personally. When the professor says that very reasonable concern about the forgeries that swirled around vice presidential operatives and the unnecessarily alarmist rhetoric whipping up a public drumbeat for war that emanated from the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (OSP) are “just completely heedless of any standards of, of, of telling the truth or making a plausible argument,” I take offense. I have covered these issues here. This blog prides itself on plausible, well-supported arguments. (Please note that Professor McAdams totally failed to address the document forgeries or the Pentagon’s rogue intelligence shop, which I believe are key.)
Saying “Bush lied” not the truth? Depends on what “lie” we are talking about. I will grant that President Bush and other administration spokespeople were careful about not telling outright whoppers in the lead-up to the war. They created fallacies by omitting important details, they created hysteria by drawing worst-case conclusions over shaky intelligence (all of which turned out to be false), and they did outright lie about how much doubt existed concerning these facts about Iraq’s weapons.
For example, Vice President Cheney addressed the VFW with this unqualified certainty on August 26, 2002:
Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors — confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth. [emphasis added]
If there is any one brazen whopper in Cheney’s presentation, it is this conveyance of lack of doubt.
Here follows an example of how the president himself omitted facts about the then-known unreliability of the “Iraqi nuclear engineer” cited, and twisted even-then-shaky facts into a worst-case near certainty very obviously designed to strike maximum fear into the hearts of a 911-jittery public.
President Bush (October 7, 2002): Before being barred from Iraq in 1998, the International Atomic Energy Agency dismantled extensive nuclear weapons-related facilities, including three uranium enrichment sites. That same year, information from a high-ranking Iraqi nuclear engineer who had defected revealed that despite his public promises, Saddam Hussein had ordered his nuclear program to continue.The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his “nuclear mujahideen” — his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression. He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East. He would be in a position to threaten America. And Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists.
These are the “lies” we refer to. They are lies if it is considered lying to hide the truth from the public about the extent of doubt, and to draw the most extreme conclusions (ie. we needed to attack, invade, conquer, and permanently occupy and dominate Iraq) from the doubtful data.
Beyond that, the degree to which Cheney’s office and OSP actually concocted pre-war Iraq weapons intelligence is not yet known, but it has been my belief for a long time that they in fact did make up a lot of it through clandestine channels. Much of this information was scooped up by Judy Miller and was disseminated exclusively by her (and a few co-authors) on front pages of editions of the New York Times. Alexander Cockburn posted an excellent summary of Miller’s role on August 18, 2003. Cockburn just followed the trail of an “an entire Noah’s Ark of scam-artists” that underbedded Miller’s reporting:
We don’t have full 20/20 hindsight yet, but we do know for certain that all the sensational disclosures in Miller’s major stories between late 2001 and early summer, 2003, promoted disingenuous lies. There were no secret biolabs under Saddam’s palaces; no nuclear factories across Iraq secretly working at full tilt. A huge percentage of what Miller wrote was garbage, garbage that powered the Bush administration’s propaganda drive towards invasion.…
December 20, 2001, Headline, “Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites For Chemical and Nuclear Arms”.
Miller rolls out a new Iraqi defector, in the ripe tradition of her favorite, Khidir Hamza, the utter fraud who called himself Saddam’s Bombmaker.
Story:
“An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago.
“The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, gave details of the projects he said he worked on for President Saddam Hussein’s government in an extensive interview last week in Bangkok. The interview with Mr. Saeed was arranged by the Iraqi National Congress, the main Iraqi opposition group, which seeks the overthrow of Mr. Hussein.
“If verified, Mr. Saeed’s allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction.”
Notice the sedate phrase “if verified”. It never was verified. But the story served its purpose.
September 7, 2002: Headline: “US says Hussein intensifies quest for a-bomb parts”.
This one was by Miller and Michael Gordon, promoting the aluminum tube nonsense: “In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.” All lies of course. Miller and Gordon emphasize “Mr. Hussein’s dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq’s push to improve and expand Baghdad’s chemical and biological arsenals”.
Another of Miller’s defectors takes a bow:
“Speaking on the condition that neither he nor the country in which he was interviewed be identified, Ahmed al-Shemri, his pseudonym, said Iraq had continued developing, producing and storing chemical agents at many mobile and fixed secret sites throughout the country, many of them underground.
“All of Iraq is one large storage facility,” said Mr. Shemri. Asked about his allegations, American officials said they believed these reports were accurate.”
A final bit of brazen chicanery from Gordon and Miller:
“Iraq denied the existence of a germ warfare program entirely until 1995, when United Nations inspectors forced Baghdad to acknowledge it had such an effort. Then, after insisting that it had never weaponized bacteria or filled warheads, it again belatedly acknowledged having done so after Hussein Kamel, Mr. Hussein’s brother-in-law, defected to Jordan with evidence about the scale of the germ warfare program.”
What Gordon and Miller leave out (or lacked the enterprise or desire to find out) is that Hussein Kamel told UN Inspectors that he had destroyed all Iraq’s WMDs, on Saddam Hussein’s orders.
September 13, 2002, headline: “White House Lists Iraq Steps To Build Banned Weapons”.
And on and on…
So then, what of the notion that the French, the Germans, the UK, the UN, Democrats, and so on all “knew” Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? “Everybody” did not “know” Saddam had WMD ready to use. The WMD America helped Saddam to acquire had long-since been destroyed, as the Hussein Kamel debriefing showed eight years earlier (and as was known to the CIA). Most of the rest of the intelligence had collapsed or was collapsing by early 2003, and all of these countries and the UN knew that and warned US officials about it. And the UK? That’s funny, Tony Blair’s own intel-PR shop had created the famous “WMD attack in 45 minutes”, and MI6 had cribbed a supposed fresh intelligence assessment on Iraq WMD directly off of the internet from a decade-old graduate student’s paper.
Democrats, except maybe for the likes of no-WMD converts like Henry Waxman or, on the left of the spectrum, Dennis Kucinich, were rather useless, so citing John Kerry as proof of WMD is rather a joke.
It became known that the defectors and suppliers of the intelligence were frauds often turned out by Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, like Khidir Hamza, the person who was the basis for 1998 stories like “Iraqi Work Toward A-Bomb Reported”; and “Curveball”, the defector who formed the basis for scare-mongering stories about “Winnebagoes of Death” — mobile bioweapons labs — described extensively here in Deep Blade Journal.
The initial LA Times story reporting Curveball stated that
Curveball’s story has since crumbled under doubts raised by the Germans and the scrutiny of U.S. weapons hunters, who have come to see his code name as particularly apt, given the problems that beset much of the prewar intelligence collection and analysis.
Deep Blade Journal has had from the beginning a general editorial position that while a local tyrant, Saddam in no way was a threat that required war during 2003 and beyond. Even so, I could not guarantee in late-2002/early-2003 that Saddam Hussein did not have some unconventional weapons. Instead, my editorial position since the beginning has been to depend honest analysis, the most important of which in the war buildup was that of Glen Rangwala from Cambridge University, “Claims and evaluations of Iraq’s proscribed weapons”.
A brief examination of this document will demonstrate thoroughly that there was no clear agreement that Saddam Hussein was any sort of threat to the US, UK, or even any of his immediate neighbors. It shows truly without doubt that Iraq had already been substantially disarmed.
Were there gaps in accounting? Yes. This is a point with which I must agree with Professor McAdams. But that in no way suggests that war was or is the answer, nor does it absolve the US administration for creating a false premise for the war.
Here is how I put this in March 2003:
Yes, there are officially unresolved issues concerning chemical and biological agents that could be locally very dangerous. And full credence should be given to the possibility that Hussein Kamel correctly reported the destruction of these agents. Above all, there is no way these issues add up to war in the absence of a direct threat from Iraq….a solution short of war has always been possible—lifting of sanctions and permanent in-country inspections coupled with region-wide peace initiatives. We probably will never know if present day Iraq can cooperate with the international community and heal itself from decades of tyrannical rule because the U.S. will not allow it.Administration officials are now well-rehearsed in delivering lines like, “Saddam Hussein is a practiced liar, there is no doubt about it. We should take everything he says very skeptically.”
Apparently, the same holds true for Colin Powell and our own administration. Other countries see this clearly as their citizens line up at 80%+ rates against the war. Notwithstanding posturing of the U.S. administration that failure to vote along lines of U.S. will renders the U.N. “irrelevant,” the U.S. still faces three likely vetoes of a war resolution from China, France, and Russia; teetering of the Blair government in the U.K. as it desperately seeks cover for war; even withdrawal of support for the U.S. position in third-world countries like Pakistan and Cameroon. These are no small measures of how badly Powell’s diplomatic disaster has turned out.
This is history Professor McAdams and other rightists should review before attacking anti-war analysis with an “ahistorical” tag. It seems to me that such attacks serve the administration’s program to deflect the highly damaging Plame matter into a spurious discussion of the honesty of Joseph Wilson and others who would question the motives behind the conquest of Iraq.
Document collection: Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 80. The administration’s pre-war intelligence papers are available here.
Normal fall
Maple tree finally changing and dropping, one week late
A small patch of warm weather inspired some more broccoli shoots
After weeks of rollicking crazy rainstorms in October, things have settled down the last week. Bangor in October 2005 recorded the single wettest month (ever, of any month) since records have been kept. The previous all-time wettest month was just two years ago in October 2003:
PRECIPITATION (INCHES)
RECORD
MAXIMUM 8.96 2003
MINIMUM 0.99 1986
TOTALS 13.32R
As you can see, the old record month was bested by nearly 5 inches in 2005.
Smears of Joseph Wilson, misrepresentation of 2004 SSCI report par for the course
A quick perusal of Media Matters for America reveals that right wing attack dogs have been unleashed to counter the now very obvious truth that the United States has attacked, invaded, conquered, occupied, dominated, and ravaged Iraq based upon false notions about weapons of mass destruction.
Try this from an oped by the jingoist foreign policy writer Max Boot in the November 2 edition of the LA Times, and discussed on Media Matters:
Pretty much all of the claims that the administration doctored evidence about Iraq have been euthanized, not only by the Senate committee but also by the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission.
Or this exchange involving Fox’s kind-hearted rightist radio host Tony Snow, heard on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday (October 28):
SNOW: Yeah, that’s right. [laughter] [applause] The wife is the one who arranged for Joe Wilson to go over to Niger. What’s interesting is that the people that really smeared Joe Wilson were the people who looked into his charges, the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said, “You know what, Joe? All that stuff you said in the New York Times, was lies. You’re wrong!”
CONNOLLY: No, let me tell you something—
SNOW: No, whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa. Wait a minute.
CONNOLLY: When you guys – when you—
SNOW: [to audience] Read the Senate Intelligence Committee Report. I know it’s uncomfortable, because it’s a view you don’t want to hear. But if you’re going to call “bullshit,” at least read it, and then get back to me. Sorry, go ahead.
MAHER: Wait a second. I’m sorry, what bullshit are we reading? [laughter]
SNOW: No, they’re screaming “bullshit†for me.
MAHER: I know. [to audience] And you shouldn’t. And please don’t.
SNOW: Yeah, I’m talking about the Senate Intelligence Committee Report—
MAHER: But, but – said what?
SNOW: What they said is that Joe Wilson’s account in the New York Times of his trip to Niger, sipping spiced tea and trying to investigate charges of yellow-cake uranium sales on the part of Niger—
MAHER: Yes.
SNOW: –that, basically, his account was misleading. That he did, in fact, find evidence, that the report that he filed with the CIA, later forwarded to the White House, indicated that such sales exist.
MAHER: Well, that I don’t know to be true, and I would doubt it is.
SNOW: [overlapping] Well, but-but-but—
MAHER: [overlapping] But also, Valerie—
SNOW: [overlapping] Just read it. I’ll send it to you.
Let’s see, this whole thing is about the truthfulness of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson? Keeps the eye off of the document forgeries that undergirded the president’s January 2003 State of the Union Message.
But what no one seems to call to the attention of Snow, Boot, and others peddling this tripe is that what they are waving comes from a highly partisan addendum of the July 7, 2004 “Phase I” Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report tacked onto to the end by committee Chairman Pat Roberts, and fellow Republican whitewashers Orrin Hatch and Kit Bond. On page 452 of the report, the whitewashers write,
Despite our hard and successful work to deliver a unanimous report, however, there were two issues on which the Republicans and Democrats could not agree: 1) whether the Committee should conclude that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s public statements were not based on knowledge he actually possessed, and 2) whether the Committee should conclude that it was the former ambassador’s wife who recommended him for his trip to Niger.
Go ahead and take up Snow’s challenge to read the Republican “bullshit” that follows. Hardly seems like a solid conclusion of the committee that Wilson lied in his NY Times piece of July 2003. Unfortunately neither Maher nor his other guests were prepared to point this out.
Wilson himself addressed these matters in great detail in a letter available here. This link points to one entry in a series of smashing deconstructions of the Republican attacks by Larry Johnson at TPM Cafe. (Johnson is a former CIA and State Department official.)
And the case against the Whitehouse for lying us into war is hardly “euthanized”, considering that neither the SSCI Phase I report nor the Silbermann-Robb whitewash examine the questions of Whitehouse use of intelligence at all, as Media Matters points out.
The right itself is so full of bullshit on prewar use of the Iraq WMD concept. They just can’t get their heads around the fact they were used to push a phony weapons case to falsely anoint an illegal, and predictably failed policy with legality and public acquiescence in late 2002 and early 2003. They can’t even say the words, “Office of Special Plans” (as did neither SSCI nor Silbermann-Robb).
But if Mr. Snow actually did look into the meat of that SSC report, by the way, he might find plenty of evidence that administration fitted up its case, as explained in a July 2004 piece by former CIA briefer, Ray McGovern:
Although it was clear to us that much of the intelligence on Iraq had been cooked to the recipe of policy, not until the Senate report did we know that the skewing included outright lies. We had heard of “Joe,” the nuclear weapons analyst in CIA’s Center for Weapons Intelligence and Arms Control, and it was abundantly clear that his agenda was to “prove” that the infamous aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were to be used for developing a nuclear weapon. We did not know that he and his CIA associates falsified the data-including rotor testing ironically called “spin tests.”The Senate committee determined that “Joe” deliberately skewed data to fit preconceptions regarding an Iraqi nuclear threat. “Who could have believed that about our intelligence community, that the system could be so dishonest?” wondered the normally soft-spoken David Albright, a widely respected veteran expert on Iraq’s work toward developing a nuclear weapon.
Gosh, Tony, you just ought to read that report you’re waving around.
And we haven’t even begun to discuss the Downing Street memos, that famously report from the bowels of officialdom, that “intelligence was being fixed around policy.”
To further see why Boot, Snow, and the rest of the Republican flack machine is dealing in little more than childish slurs, check out an excellent span of postings at Talking Points Memo. Go here, and here for many postings giving a very detailed examination of the Republican frauds and chicanery that preceded the war. TPM makes these Republican flacksters look like sophomores whose dogs ate their homework.
US uses Soviet-era Eastern Bloc prison “compound” in its Terror War
US Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Fox News Sunday, June 12, 2005:
So we have the legend that there is so-called gulag-like treatment and the reality is honey glazed chicken on Sunday, and we give them honey and dates to break the fast on Ramadan.
Wednesday November 2 Dana Priest story in the Washington Post:
The CIA has been interrogating al-Qaida prisoners at a Soviet era compound in eastern Europe as part of a covert jail system set up after the September 11 attacks, according to the Washington Post. The secret facility is part of a network of “black sites” spanning eight countries, the existence and locations of which are known only to a handful of US officials and usually only the president and a few top intelligence officers in the host countries.…
In late 2002 or early 2003, the CIA brokered deals with other countries to establish black-site prisons. One of these sites — which sources said they believed to be the CIA’s biggest facility now — became particularly important when the agency realized it would have a growing number of prisoners and a shrinking number of prisons.
Thailand was closed, and sometime in 2004 the CIA decided it had to give up its small site at Guantanamo Bay. The CIA had planned to convert that into a state-of-the-art facility, operated independently of the military. The CIA pulled out when U.S. courts began to exercise greater control over the military detainees, and agency officials feared judges would soon extend the same type of supervision over their detainees.
Looks like Amnesty International was dead on when it invoked the term “gulag” to describe the holes US global police have established to disappear their detainees. Evidence piles high about who are the real “dissemblers” in Bush time.