Bush team united Iraq front unravels

Bush team united Iraq front unravels

The familiar drip, drip, drip of a brewing political scandal echoes through the power centers of Washington and London these days as the Bush administration and the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair are pelted daily with increasingly pointed questions about the case they made for going to war against Iraq. The admission that the president made an apparently false allegation against Iraq in his State of the Union address was supposed to help put the issue to rest. Instead, it reopened fissures inside the administration and in Blair’s government over the validity of their case for war.

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Greg Thielmann, who ran military assessments at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research until October, said intelligence clearly was manipulated to make the most hawkish case possible for war. He told Congress at the same hearing Rumsfeld attended that data on the Iraqi threat was “misrepresented on the part of the administration.”

<snip>

The infighting, and the admission that a key allegation is probably incorrect, also has emboldened those who have argued all along that the war was fought for reasons other than those stated. Even Democrats who have been tremendously wary of criticizing a popular president while troops are in the field are beginning to stir, though most, like Connecticut Democrat and presidential hopeful Joseph Lieberman, prefer to view it as a case of intelligence agencies misleading the president, rather than the president misleading the nation.

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http://www.msnbc.com/news/937576.asp?0cv=NA01


DRIP, DRIP, DRIP!

!!!!!!!!!!

A 9/11 report is coming out next week, and investigations into the reasons for the Iraq war are taking place on several fronts.

that are also bogus, and you can bet there are people going over that speech with a fine tooth comb.

because that's the only place we've been getting coverage critical of the Bush WH. To see this on MSNBC, of all places, is exciting. BTW, check out this quote from a Bush family friend:

“They have to get by this, and they have to do that very soon,” says a source close to the Bush family, who requested anonymity. “The GOP can bottle up inquiries in Congress, but they can’t bottle up public opinion.”

Very soon? That explains the attempt to have Tenet take the blame and end this now. This is very serious stuff, folks. If the Tenet statement doesn't kill it, and I'm not so sure it will, this could get very bad very fast.

"it creates more questions than answers"

I also liked how Loserman is blaming the intelligence agencies, not Junior.

A few more days of this stinker in the headlines and support for Operation Quagmire is going to be at 40%.

More leaks are sure to follow, God Bless the career intelligence people.

OSP....thats where all the gold is. OSP.......start shouting it Mr Dean.

Even if they are successful at passing this off as an intelligence failure, the whole premise of the Iraq invasion is wrecked. People will begin to question why we are spending 3,5 billion per month on this, especially when there's no WMD's. Even if chimp can dodge war criminal status he still is the guy who got us into this mess.

It is an indication of things to come! Pay attention to the last paragraph:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=9327&mesg_id=9327&page=

because sooner or later someone's going to ask why the CIA's standard for inclusion of intelligence in the SOTU was reduced from "accurate" to "factually correct." The CIA would not, of its own volition, decide to play "Clintonesque" word games by couching the lie as "factually correct." Tenet's dramatics this afternoon raise far more questions than they answer. Will be nice to see him in front of the Intel. Committee on C-SPAN next week.

The intel committee will be broadcast? Or at least parts of it? This is encouraging.

Yes, Tenet--for those who bother reading the actual statement--certainly does raise a lot of questions.

I could be tired or tripping, but I don't think so. It looks as if Tenet may have agreed to include certain points in his statement, but that he worded it in such a way that people with fair to good critical faculties can see it for what it is. On one hand, he says, in effect, that he and only he can take the blame, but on the other hand, he gives a critical reader a lot more information.-

Although the documents related to the alleged Niger-Iraqi uranium deal had not yet been determined to be forgeries

I thought they were completely debunked as forgeries in March 02...Why aren't the "journalists" calling them on this? <rhetorical question>

If you haven't read it already, please read it. It's in LBN but nobody seems to be paying much attention.

The WP article by Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank mentions that Tenet has been working on the statement for the last two days. The article came right out and stated that this was a coordinated effort between the White House and Tenet.

It does look to me like Tenet left plenty of Easter Eggs in the statemnet to be investigated. In a statement like this, every last word has been double-checked, for meaning, nuance. It makes me wonder why he said everything that he did.

I think the White House had certain demands, and I think that Tenet and his lawyers had others. And in addition, it looks as if Tenet was trying to get a message across to people who bothered to read his statement. That's why I posted it in LBN--but people are so taken up with spin that they don't seem to care.

at the time of the SOTU vetting process the forgery had not been discovered. But the whole issue had been publicly debunked in the European press by Dec. 02. I remember watching the SOTU and screaming at my wife that Bush was outright lying. Or was it a later speach where i screamed that he was lying...I think I scream that during all of his speaches.

Again I ask: are these people that stupid, or that evil? They seriously think they can get away with this sort of crap indefinitely?

Do I hear the ghost of Nixon moaning in purgatory?

lying about a lie does not mean that they're telling the truth.

difference anymore, Pikku.

:( n/t

He's a couple of lightyears deeper in the shit than that!

Something smells rotten when Lieberman pats Bush on the
Back 24/7!!!!

Connecticut????
What the hell is wrong y'all?????

You need to get that damn turkey out of office.

He is really rotten to the core!!!!

"Even before the African uranium charge was withdrawn, leaks from U.S. and British intelligence agencies had raised questions about whether the administration jury-rigged prewar intelligence to paint a far more threatening picture of Iraq’s arsenal than data otherwise suggested. Washington wits have coined the phrase “crying Wolfowitz” to describe the phenomenon, a reference to the deputy defense secretary who was perhaps the administration’s leading Iraq hawk."

He'll be one of the first to fall, IMHO.

Another CHICKENHAWK