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Here is a very different perspective than we are used to, from Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga Colonel Salahdin Ahmad Ameen. The whole interview is totally worth reading.
Quote:
A big number of people criticize Mr. Bush that he attacked Iraq without reason, that there are no weapons of mass destruction here. Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction.
Mass destruction…what does a nuclear weapon do when it hits a country? Of course it kills hundreds of thousands of people, ruins the country, and makes the wilderness obliterated.
Saddam Hussein destroyed 5,000 villages in our country. He filled up the water springs and the wells with concrete. He even deprived the birds and wild animals from drinking water in our mountains. He dried the marshes and swamplands in the south of Iraq which was the source of life for the people of that area. I am not just talking about Halabja, I am talking about thousands of villages in the south and north of Iraq which were destroyed by Saddam. The infrastructure of the area was destroyed by Saddam Hussein. It was worse than a nuclear weapon. Saddam Hussein himself was a WMD.
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__________________
oderint dum metuant (Latin for 'let them hate, so long as they fear').
Well, in truth I'm actually not a total hawk, but I'm not a dove either -- I'm more like an angry pigeon flying over the political arena after a really big meal. -Abba Gav
Here is a very different perspective than we are used to, from Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga Colonel Salahdin Ahmad Ameen. The whole interview is totally worth reading.
Great report from Totten once again... I shouldn't be, but I am still amazed how this war has been so twisted and politicized... I saw an interview on CNN the other with two reporters who have spent years in Iraq covering the war... Both, who were against the war, said how catostrophic it would be should America pull out.
So many people around the world and certainly within Iraq feel this way. Certainly, Bush and the administration have been trumpeting this tune consistently since day one... Yet, somehow, Dems have been able to shrug off these grotesque realities and reconcile a premature withdrawel... I just don't get it...
Great report from Totten once again... I shouldn't be, but I am still amazed how this war has been so twisted and politicized... I saw an interview on CNN the other with two reporters who have spent years in Iraq covering the war... Both, who were against the war, said how catostrophic it would be should America pull out.
So many people around the world and certainly within Iraq feel this way. Certainly, Bush and the administration have been trumpeting this tune consistently since day one... Yet, somehow, Dems have been able to shrug off these grotesque realities and reconcile a premature withdrawel... I just don't get it...
Dems are good at a lot of things starting with the word "premature".
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“So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldn’t find honest employment.” —Mark Twain
That's WHY it's better reporting. He lives totally off of blog donations and the occasional stories and photos he sells to various media -- often business-type journals, sometimes Christian, a couple times to the Jerusalem Post. He's very up front about his personal biases, too, so there's no need to wonder if there's a hidden agenda.
Actually, he's in an amusing 'sponsors applying pressure' situation right now. he has a brand new high-end video camera he's playing with, and his regular readers (like me) are divided on whether we want him to pursue video or stick with written interviews and great photos.
__________________
oderint dum metuant (Latin for 'let them hate, so long as they fear').
Well, in truth I'm actually not a total hawk, but I'm not a dove either -- I'm more like an angry pigeon flying over the political arena after a really big meal. -Abba Gav
Waxman to Rice: Step Back
By Paul Kiel - May 4, 2007, 12:55 PM
Here's the latest volley in the ongoing battle between Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Waxman, the chairman of the House committee on oversight, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice today to complain that State Department officials had attempted to prevent a nuclear weapons anaylst at the department from speaking with his staff. This comes after Waxman's committee issued a subpoena last week for Rice's testimony on how she dealt with claims before the war that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. Rice has said that she won't comply with the subpoena.
Waxman said that when his staff sought to meet with Simon Dodge, a nuclear weapons analyst at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, a State Department official called and objected. According to Waxman, the official "informed Committee staff that you [Rice] were prohibiting Mr. Dodge from meeting with Committee investigators. This official claimed that allowing Mr. Dodge to speak with Committee staff would be 'inappropriate' because the Committee voted to issue a subpoena to compel your attendance at a hearing on your knowledge of the fabricated evidence."
Waxman wants to speak to Dodge because he raised alarms about the Niger evidence two weeks before President Bush cited it in his State of the Union address in 2003.
Waxman said he was giving Rice the benefit of the doubt:
Quote:
I assume that your legislative staff was acting without your authorization in this matter. It would be a matter of great concern - as well as an obvious conflict of interest - if vou had directed your staff to impede a congressional investigation into matter that may implicate your conduct as National Security Advisor.
Waxman informed Rice that the committee would be interviewing Dodge next week.
And he also requested several documents from Rice "relating to the claim that Iraq sought uranium from Africa."
Fresh Fuel for Iraq Debate
Democrats Probe
Initial White House
Case for Invasion
By YOCHI J. DREAZEN
May 4, 2007; Page A4
WASHINGTON -- Democrats have begun to use their control of Congress to investigate the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq, adding fuel to the intensifying political battle over the war.
Democratic leaders are using subpoenas, hearings and other legislative measures to look into the White House's use of faulty intelligence in 2002 and 2003, including its claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger for a nuclear program. The Democrats are also examining how administration officials' prewar comments compared with the information they actually had at the time.
The investigations are part of the party's attempt to capitalize on the growing public opposition to the Iraq war and further weaken President Bush's hand in his current showdown with Congress.
Mr. Bush this week vetoed a Democratic bill setting a timetable for a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, even though a recent Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll showed that a majority of Americans support the idea. With the political fight over the war intensifying, Democrats hope their probes will further isolate the White House and its Republican allies on Capitol Hill.
"The country needs to finally have an accounting of how we ended up in Iraq," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.), whose House Oversight and Government Reform Committee issued a subpoena to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "It's a broader question than one speech or one issue alone. Why was it that we went to war over false pretenses?"
Still, the probes could prove politically perilous for the Democrats. In January, a poll found 50% of the country opposed congressional hearings into whether Mr. Bush had deliberately misled the public to build public support for the invasion, with 44% supporting the idea.
Democratic pollsters say public support could slip further if people were to view the inquiries as partisan fishing expeditions or attempts to simply embarrass White House officials. "If the investigations come across as sticking a finger into the Bush administration's eye for no broader purpose, there could be dangers for the Democrats," said Peter Hart, the Democratic pollster who helps lead the Journal/NBC survey.
Democrats want to question Ms. Rice about how the unfounded uranium allegation made it into Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. The panel has also asked former Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet to testify voluntarily about the claim in his new memoir that the administration took the nation to war without "serious debate." The publication of Mr. Tenet's book, "At the Center of the Storm," has bolstered the Democrats by questioning several aspects of the White House's case for war.
In the Senate, Democrats are wrapping up two reports on the administration's use of prewar intelligence concerning Iraq, with the first to be released within weeks.
Democratic leaders say the party is trying to resolve longstanding questions about whether the Bush administration knowingly exaggerated the threat posed by late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, in order to build public support for the 2003 invasion that toppled him.
The new push is infuriating many Republicans, who say Democrats should focus instead on finding a constructive solution to the crisis gripping Iraq, where sectarian violence and terrorist killings are causing mass dislocations and stifling development in much of the country.
"Congressional investigations, the 9/11 Commission, Secretary Rice's testimony, and a series of responsive letters have all addressed the very prewar intelligence issues [Mr. Waxman] says he wants to address yet again," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said in an interview this week. "This is an old story in Washington. If you can't legislate, investigate."
In 2004, then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R., Kan.) agreed to open a five-part study of prewar intelligence about Iraq. Two sections of the ensuing report were made public in September, including a section that criticized Bush administration efforts to link Mr. Hussein to al Qaeda. But the most politically sensitive investigations -- looking into how the White House used flawed intelligence to build its case for war -- were never completed.
The new Democratic chairman of the Senate panel, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, has promised to finish those remaining two investigations into the administration's use of Iraq intelligence.
Aides say the first report, about the intelligence community's faulty predictions about post-invasion Iraq, will be released this month. The second report, which looks at senior officials' public comments in the run-up to the war, is expected to be released this summer, said people familiar with the matter. Both reports are likely to be highly critical of the administration, these people said.
The White House has acknowledged that its dire prewar assessments of Mr. Hussein's programs to make weapons of mass destruction proved to be unfounded, but blamed U.S. intelligence agencies for providing the flawed information. Administration officials deny charges of intentionally misleading the country into war.
Mr. Waxman is leading the probes in the House. A fierce critic of the war, Mr. Waxman has spent years pressing the administration to explain how the faulty uranium claim wound up in the State of the Union address. In the 2003 speech, Mr. Bush wrongly told the nation that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Mr. Waxman began questioning the White House about the speech in June 2003.
Mr. Waxman now has sweeping powers and he has placed Ms. Rice, the president's national security adviser at the time of the speech, in his crosshairs. In an interview, Mr. Waxman said he wants to question her about why the administration made the claim even though the CIA had earlier told White House officials it was unfounded.
"If the administration knew it was false at the time of the speech, they misled the country into war," he said.
Last week, his panel voted along party lines to subpoena Ms. Rice. The committee's ranking Republican, Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, accused Mr. Waxman of "bundling a number of old issues and grievances in an effort to get high-profile administration figures under oath, before the cameras, for the sake of political theatrics."
Ms. Rice has so far refused to appear before the panel. She has argued that her interactions with the president as national-security adviser are off limits to Congress because of the doctrine of executive privilege. She has offered to answer the questions in writing -- which Mr. Waxman dismissed as insufficient. Democratic aides said they will seek a full House vote to find Ms. Rice in contempt of Congress if she fails to testify.
"I don't want a confrontation with her, but a subpoena is not a request," Mr. Waxman said. "It is an insistence."
The only chance this blow back against the Dems, as is the claim, is if nothing comes of it. If the truth that many believe to be hidden actually does surface, this won't be a partisan issue anymore. If the truth is exactly as we have been told, the Dems will have effectively fallen on their sword. I'll take that. Country over party....
Damn! CNN is interviewing a British ex-diplomat who is asserting that the WMD claims were patently false and the evidence was grossly exagerrated! Let's see how this unfolds!!!
Friday, May 04, 2007
Waxman: State Department Gags Analyst Who Warned Of Niger Forgery
Think Progress
Three months before President Bush uttered his infamous 16 words, claiming there was evidence that Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear weapon, a State Department analyst named Simon Dodge had determined that the evidence for the claim was likely fraudulent.
Dodge emailed his assessment to fellow intelligence analysts in October 2002, and then again in January 2003 (two weeks before Bush’s State of the Union), saying the documents supposedly from Niger were “probably a hoax” and “clearly a forgery.”
According to Oversight and Goverment Reform Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA), the State Department is now refusing to let Dodge speak to Waxman’s staff, despite the fact that Dodge has indicated he is “willing to cooperate fully” with the investigation.
In a letter to Condoleezza Rice today, Waxman charges that the State Department is “imped[ing] the Committee’s investigation into why President Bush and other senior Administration officials, including yourself, cited forged evidence in building a case for war against lraq.”
Quote:
[A] member of your legislative office informed Committee staff that you were prohibiting Mr. Dodge from meeting with Committee investigators. This official claimed that allowing Mr. Dodge to speak with Committee staff would be “inappropriate” because the Committee voted to issue a subpoena to compel your attendance at a hearing on your knowledge of the fabricated evidence.
I assume that your legislative staff was acting without your authorization in this matter. It would be a matter of great concern - as well as an obvious conflict of interest - if you had directed your staff to impede a congressional investigation into matter that may implicate your conduct as National Security Advisor.
The key question, Waxman writes, is whether Rice or any other senior officials “were aware of, or should have been aware of, Mr. Dodge’s assessment.” Apparently Rice doesn’t want us to know the answer.
Apparently Rice doesn’t want us to know the answer.
Ummmm... I don't get it. Why not?
__________________
oderint dum metuant (Latin for 'let them hate, so long as they fear').
Well, in truth I'm actually not a total hawk, but I'm not a dove either -- I'm more like an angry pigeon flying over the political arena after a really big meal. -Abba Gav
IF, as J.F.K. had it, victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan, the defeat in Iraq is the most pitiful orphan imaginable. Its parents have not only tossed it to the wolves but are also trying to pin its mutant DNA on any patsy they can find.
George Tenet is just the latest to join this blame game, which began more than three years ago when his fellow Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Tommy Franks told Bob Woodward that Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s intelligence bozo, was the “stupidest guy on the face of the earth” (that’s the expurgated version). Last fall, Kenneth Adelman, the neocon cheerleader who foresaw a “cakewalk” in Iraq, told Vanity Fair that Mr. Tenet, General Franks and Paul Bremer were “three of the most incompetent people who’ve ever served in such key spots.” Richard Perle chimed in that the “huge mistakes” were “not made by neoconservatives” and instead took a shot at President Bush. Ahmad Chalabi, the neocons’ former darling, told Dexter Filkins of The Times “the real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz.”
And of course nearly everyone blames Rumsfeld.
This would be a Three Stooges routine were there only three stooges. The good news is that Mr. Tenet’s book rollout may be the last gasp of this farcical round robin of recrimination. Republicans and Democrats have at last found some common ground by condemning his effort to position himself as the war’s innocent scapegoat. Some former C.I.A. colleagues are rougher still. Michael Scheuer, who ran the agency’s bin Laden unit, has accused Mr. Tenet of lacking “the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss.” Even after Mr. Tenet did leave office, he maintained a Robert McNamara silence until he cashed in.
Satisfying though it is to watch a circular firing squad of the war’s enablers, unfinished business awaits. Unlike Vietnam, Iraq is not in the past: the war escalates even as all this finger-pointing continues. Very little has changed between the fourth anniversary of “Mission Accomplished” this year and the last. Back then, President Bush cheered an Iraqi “turning point” precipitated by “the emergence of a unity government.” Since then, what’s emerged is more Iraqi disunity and a major leap in the death toll. That’s why Americans voted in November to get out.
The only White House figure to take any responsibility for the fiasco is the former Bush-Cheney pollster Matthew Dowd, who in March expressed remorse for furthering a war he now deems a mistake. For his belated act of conscience, he was promptly patronized as an incipient basket case by an administration flack, who attributed Mr. Dowd’s defection to “personal turmoil.” If that is what this vicious gang would do to a pollster, imagine what would befall Colin Powell if he spoke out. Nonetheless, Mr. Powell should summon the guts to do so. Until there is accountability for the major architects and perpetrators of the Iraq war, the quagmire will deepen. A tragedy of this scale demands a full accounting, not to mention a catharsis.
That accounting might well begin with Mr. Powell’s successor, Condoleezza Rice. Of all the top-tier policy players who were beside the president and vice president at the war’s creation, she is the highest still in power and still on the taxpayers’ payroll. She is also the only one who can still get a free pass from the press. The current groupthink Beltway narrative has it that the secretary of state’s recidivist foreign-policy realism and latent shuttle diplomacy have happily banished the Cheney-Rumsfeld cowboy arrogance that rode America into a ditch.
Thus Ms. Rice was dispatched to three Sunday shows last weekend to bat away Mr. Tenet’s book before “60 Minutes” broadcast its interview with him that night. But in each appearance her statements raised more questions than they answered. She was persistently at odds with the record, not just the record as spun by Mr. Tenet but also the public record. She must be held to a higher standard — a k a the truth — before she too jumps ship.
It’s now been nearly five years since Ms. Rice did her part to sell the Iraq war on a Sept. 8, 2002, Sunday show with her rendition of “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Yet there she was last Sunday on ABC, claiming that she never meant to imply then that Saddam was an imminent threat. “The question of imminence isn’t whether or not somebody is going to strike tomorrow” is how she put it. In other words, she is still covering up the war’s origins. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” she claimed that intelligence errors before the war were “worldwide” even though the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Mohamed ElBaradei publicly stated there was “no evidence” of an Iraqi nuclear program and even though Germany’s intelligence service sent strenuous prewar warnings that the C.I.A.’s principal informant on Saddam’s supposed biological weapons was a fraud.
Quote:
Of the Sunday interviewers, it was George Stephanopoulos who went for the jugular by returning to that nonexistent uranium from Africa. He forced Ms. Rice to watch a clip of her appearance on his show in June 2003, when she claimed she did not know of any serious questions about the uranium evidence before the war. Then he came as close as any Sunday host ever has to calling a guest a liar. “But that statement wasn’t true,” Mr. Stephanopoulos said. Ms. Rice pleaded memory loss, but the facts remain. She received a memo raising serious questions about the uranium in October 2002, three months before the president included the infamous 16 words on the subject in his State of the Union address. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, received two memos as well as a phone call of warning from Mr. Tenet.
Apologists for Ms. Rice, particularly those in the press who are embarrassed by their own early cheerleading for the war, like to say that this is ancient history, just as they said of the C.I.A. leak case. We’re all supposed to move on and just worry about what happens next. Try telling that to families whose children went to Iraq to stop Saddam’s nukes. Besides, there’s a continuum between past deceptions and present ones, as the secretary of state seamlessly demonstrated last Sunday.
On ABC, she pushed the administration’s line portraying Iraq’s current violence as a Qaeda plot hatched by the Samarra bombing of February 2006. But that Qaeda isn’t the Qaeda of 9/11; it’s a largely Iraqi group fighting on one side of a civil war. And by February 2006, sectarian violence had already been gathering steam for 15 months — in part because Ms. Rice and company ignored the genuine imminence of that civil war just as they had ignored the alarms about bin Laden’s Qaeda in August 2001.
Ms. Rice’s latest canard wasn’t an improvisation; it was a scripted set-up for the president’s outrageous statement three days later. “The decision we face in Iraq,” Mr. Bush said Wednesday, “is not whether we ought to take sides in a civil war, it’s whether we stay in the fight against the same international terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11.” Such statements about the present in Iraq are no less deceptive — and no less damaging to our national interest — than the lies about uranium and Qaeda- 9/11 connections told in 2002-3. This country needs facts, not fiction, to make its decisions about the endgame of the war, just as it needed (but didn’t get) facts when we went to war in the first place. To settle for less is to make the same tragic error twice.
That Ms. Rice feels scant responsibility for any of this was evident in her repeated assertions on Sunday that all the questions about prewar intelligence had been answered by the Robb-Silberman and Senate committee inquiries, neither of which even addressed how the administration used the intelligence it received. Now she risks being held in contempt of Congress by ducking a subpoena authorized by the House’s Oversight Committee, whose chairman, Henry Waxman, has been trying to get direct answers from her about the uranium hoax since 2003.
Ms. Rice is stonewalling his investigation by rambling on about separation of powers and claiming she answered all relevant questions in writing, to Senator Carl Levin, during her confirmation to the cabinet in January 2005. If former or incumbent national security advisers like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski could testify before Congress without defiling the Constitution, so can she. As for her answers to Senator Levin’s questions, five of eight were pure Alberto Gonzales: she either didn’t recall or didn’t know.
No wonder the most galling part of Ms. Rice’s Sunday spin was her aside to Wolf Blitzer that she would get around to reflecting on these issues “when I have a chance to write my book.” Another book! As long as American troops are dying in Iraq, the secretary of state has an obligation to answer questions about how they got there and why they stay. If accountability is ever to begin, it would be best if those questions are answered not on “60 Minutes” but under oath.
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In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." --Voltaire
Ummmm... I don't get it. Why not?
