On Fri, 19 Sep 2003 19:07:06 GMT, Gunner wrote:
On 19 Sep 2003 08:17:39 -0700, jim rozen
wrote:
;;; Clearly it was not a lie on his
part. Even if the information was later proven to be false, he acted on
it in good faith at the time.

So, hhm. Either he's a liar (not) or a dummy.

So Jim, if the probably best intelligence agency in the world tells you
that something is so.. and you believe it, then you are stupid?

At least four of the best intelligence agencies in the world were saying
it was *not* so (and they were right on all counts).

The Niger uranium buy was known to the CIA to be a fabrication,
the supposed meeting between Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent
in Vienna was *known* by State's intelligence group to be false (the
FBI had proof Atta was in Florida at the time of the supposed "Iraqi
connection"), DIA experts (and British experts) had both correctly
stated that the "mobile biological warfare labs" were no such thing.
Etc, etc, etc.

But Bush was only listening to the cherry picked and spun material
fed to him by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and
their hand picked New American Century ideologues on the Defense
Policy Board.

That group had been advocating invasion of Iraq on any convenient
pretext since the end of Gulf War I, for the neocon fantasy reasons
given by Ed in another post (as well as the less savory reason that
they were all heavily connected to the defense and energy industries).

Bush *could* have known the truth, the real experts were saying
it. But he either chose not to listen, or was hoodwinked into not
listening. (The Cheney-CIA connection, for which Tenet took
the bullet, is a case in point for the latter.)

Not one single claim Bush made in his speeches leading up to
the invasion has turned out to be true, and almost every one of
them was *known* not to be true before he made them.

Donald Kay has been spinning like a dervish trying to cook up
*any* evidence of Iraqi WMD (deliverable on 45 minutes notice
according to Tony Blair) since the invasion. He, and his 1400
man team have still come up empty for any work done later than
1991(when the cease fire required Iraq to give up pursuit or
possession of NBC weapons).

None of this is secret. Blix was saying it before the invasion.
France, Germany, Russia, and pretty much all of the rest of
the world were saying it too. But Bush didn't want to listen.
The call of 225 billion barrels of oil, and a geopolitical fantasy,
were too loud to let him hear the truth.

Gary