Bush, Blair face heat on Iraq weapons
Pressure Mounting on Bush and Blair As Weapons Hunters Find No Unconventional Arms in Iraq
"The greatest lie told by statesmen in recent years." - the leading French daily Le Monde.
From ABC News - Senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic want answers to what is becoming the most asked question since major combat ended in Iraq: Where are the unconventional weapons the coalition said it went to war to destroy?
pResident Bush lied said this weekend that weapons had already been found. As evidence, though, he pointed to two suspected biological laboratories [Ed.: two rusted, empty trailers] which both the Pentagon and U.S. weapons hunters have said do not constitute arms.
For a war fought without the backing of the international community, evidence of the weapons Iraq claimed it no longer had would bolster U.S. credibility around the world.
Now that 11 weeks have passed without such proof, international pressure is mounting on Bush and his coalition partners. The Pentagon is sending a new group of weapons hunters to Iraq to try to plant some expand the search beginning on Monday.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who visited Iraq this week, said he's certain unconventional weapons will be discovered eventually. But even as he and the president express confidence, members of Bush's Cabinet are offering up alternative theories that have drawn deep concerns both at home and abroad.
May 31, 2003
Questions swirl about dubious intelligence, weapons, troop deaths
Bush aides fear tumult in Iraq rising.
Some of president Bush's top advisers now fear the war in Iraq is becoming a political, diplomatic and military mess, instead of being the centerpiece of the president's re-election campaign that they had hoped for.
"The postwar period in Iraq is messy," said one senior official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "We haven't found what we said we'd find there, and there are unpleasant questions about assumptions we made and intelligence we had.
"If many more months go by and our troops are still there, the Iraqis are still fighting each other and us and we still haven't found any WMD (weapons of mass destruction), there will be hell to pay," the official added.
U.S. troops in Iraq are becoming the targets of anger and ambushes instead of being greeted as liberators, as some Pentagon officials had expected.
"Mission Accomplished," huh? Fucktards.
Smoking guns
Nicholas Kristof writes, On Day 71 of the Hunt for Iraqi W.M.D., yesterday, once again nothing turned up.
Maybe we'll do better on Day 72. But we might have better luck searching for something just as alarming: the growing evidence that the administration grossly manipulated intelligence about those weapons of mass destruction in the runup to the Iraq war.
A column earlier this month on this issue drew a torrent of covert communications from indignant spooks who say that administration officials leaned on them to exaggerate the Iraqi threat and deceive the public.
"The American people were manipulated," bluntly declares one person from the Defense Intelligence Agency who says he was privy to all the intelligence there on Iraq. These people are coming forward because they are fiercely proud of the deepest ethic in the intelligence world - that such work should be nonpolitical - and are disgusted at efforts to turn them into propagandists.
The outrage among the intelligence professionals is so widespread that they have formed a group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, that wrote to 'president' Bush this month to protest what it called "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions."
"While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes," the letter said, "never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize launching a war."
In a related story...
Bush Lied
People Died
Powell was forced to use shaky intelligence on Iraq
Colin 'Baaaaaaa' Powell was under persistent pressure from the Pentagon and the White House to include questionable intelligence in his report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction he delivered at the United Nations in February.
US News and World Report magazine said the first draft of the speech was prepared for Powell by Dick 'Chicanery' Cheney's chief of staff, in late January.
According to the report, the draft contained such questionable material that Powell lost his temper, throwing several pages in the air and declaring, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit."
Cheney's aides wanted Powell to include in his presentation information that Iraq has purchased computer software that would allow it to plan an attack on the United States, an allegation that was not supported by the CIA.
....meanwhile....
Petulant faux-statesman continues to diss real world leaders
Even in the light of all the stories coming out about how he and his cronies lied about Iraq, the Hypocritical Hophead arrived in Poland and made no effort to hide that he still harbors a deep grudge toward France and Germany for opposing his campaign against Saddam Hussein.
Bush defended Poland against criticism of its war support. "I think it's unfortunate that some of the countries in Europe will try to bully Poland for standing up for what you think - what they think is right."
"I'm also going to remind the countries of Europe that we must work together," Bush said in an interview with Polish television. "We don't need divides between us. We need to work together to achieve big objectives, which is to fight terror, to fight global poverty, to fight AIDS and to promote freedom."
The freedom to go along with everything the misadministration tells you, anyway. This idiot is absolutely unbelievable. He is without shame. I guess he figures he can't be touched - and with the gelded Dems and the whore media, he's probably right. God, I need a drink.
Iraqi weapons cloud Bush-Europe relations
The Daily Express of London ran a report Friday on the statements by the two U.S. officials with the headline "Just Complete and Utter Lies." "Claims that the world was lied to about the reasons for going to war in Iraq gathered pace yesterday as fresh doubts were cast on Britain and America's account of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction," the newspaper said.
In Germany, where the war was widely unpopular, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeiting newspaper said the comments showed America is losing the battle for credibility. "The charge of deception is inescapable," the newspaper said.
Opposition parties in Denmark, whose government supported the war, demanded to know if Prime Minister Rasmussen misled the public about Iraq's weapons. "It was not what the Danish prime minister said when he advocated support for the war," said Jeppe Kofod, foreign affairs spokesman for the Social Democrats. "Those who went to war now have a big problem explaining it."
U.S. insiders say Iraq intel deliberately skewed
A growing number of U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq.
A Pentagon team, self-mockingly called the Cabal, "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence.
The DIA was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD," he added in a phone interview. He said the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy.
"There are current intelligence officials who believe it is a scandal," Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of the CIA, said in a telephone interview. They believe the administration, before going to war, had a "moral obligation to use the best information available, not just information that fits your preconceived ideas."
Anger among security professionals appears widespread. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group that says it is made up mostly of CIA intelligence analysts, wrote to Bush May 1 to hit what they called "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions."
"In intelligence there is one unpardonable sin -- cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy," it wrote. "There is ample indication this has been done with respect to Iraq."
Dammit, this is it, guys! This is bigger than Bill Clinton's dick!!!
Where do we start??
How about Lying to Congress is an impeachable offense.
Powell had serious doubts over his Iraqi weapons claims
'Jack Straw and his US counterpart, Colin Powell, privately expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programme at the very time they were publicly trumpeting it to get UN support for a war on Iraq, the Guardian has learned.
'Their deep concerns about the intelligence - and about claims being made by their political bosses, Tony Blair and George Bush - emerged at a private meeting between the two men shortly before a crucial UN security council session on February 5.
The foreign secretary reportedly expressed concern that claims being made by Mr Blair and President Bush could not be proved. The problem, explained Mr Straw, was the lack of corroborative evidence to back up the claims.'Mr Powell told the foreign secretary he hoped the facts, when they came out, would not "explode in their faces".'
Much of the intelligence were assumptions and assessments not supported by hard facts or other sources.
Mr Powell shared the concern about intelligence assessments, especially those being presented by the Pentagon's office of special plans set up by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz.
In other words, Powell knew he was lying. His bosses in the WH knew he was lying. The misadministration itself was lying. You want a weapon of mass destruction? It's RIGHT HERE. This is a bombshell on the verge of blowing up in the Bushies' faces. If the Dems - and the whores of the Washington press corpse - don't jump all over this one, we may as well start building our own gulags now.
May 30, 2003
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Do you approve or disapprove of "President" Bush's handling of international affairs? - give Wolf Blitzer a headache.
Grandson of Nazi sympathizer/money launderer to visit Auschwitz
Coming practically right on the heels of stories of the plans to turn Gitmo into Jesus John Ashcroft's personal death camp comes word that Smirky McCodpiece will visit the Auschwitz Concentration Camp during his stop in Poland later this week.
Grandfather Prescott Bush is alleged to have been involved with Nazi money laundering, and had personal management of operations at a steel company that used Auschwitz slave labor. - the NY Times.
Relief for U.S. troops lacking from "Coalition of the Willing"
The Pentagon's search for troops from other nations to replace U.S. soldiers in the force that is stabilizing postwar Iraq has fallen short of expectations, and U.S. officials face the prospect of keeping more U.S. forces in Iraq than they had hoped, diplomats and military officials say.
But hey, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! - USA Today.
Le merde, c'est moi
Our exhalted, humble statesman Emperor Snippy said Thursday he was ready to move on when it comes to Franco-U.S. ties, but then slammed the French government with one of the 'most damning indictments of an ally possible' by saying it wasn't clear that France cares whether U.S. citizens live in safety and security.
He was also asked directly if he had "forgiven" France, and sidestepped the question.
"I look forward to working with France to achieve common objectives," George of the Bungle said. - link.
'The more the White House spins, the angrier the allies get'
'Since the Iraq war began and no evidence was immediately found to back up Dick Cheney's Aug. 26 pronouncement that "simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," the administration has been back-pedaling.
'This has sufficed for those like Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, of the alleged opposition party, who told NBC on May 11 that he doesn't think the failure to find WMD would be damaging to U.S. credibility. "I think we've got to recognize that there were more than one goal here," Daschle said, as if reading from White House talking points.
'But throughout the corridors of power among the leading "Coalition of the Willing" nations - where opposition to the war was much stronger - such back-pedaling has been received with less than open arms. Former Blair Cabinet Secretary Robin Cook, who resigned in opposition to the war, erupted upon hearing the defense secretary's remarks. Rumsfeld's remarks also set off some heated rhetoric in Denmark and Ireland. According to the Danmarks Radio website on Thursday, opposition forces like the Radical Liberals and the Unity List have issued demands that the government reassess the quality of the intelligence information given to the parliament about Iraq's WMD. Irish politicians took the moment to slam Rumsfeld, one calling him a "war criminal," another saying that "if there were no weapons of mass destruction then the war was fought on a lie."
- Snipped from Jake Tapper's article in Salon.
Sacre merde!
Bush insisted that France's opposition to the invasion of France "wouldn't influence my policies." - actual quote from here.
What they said
"The case for war is blown apart"
"The White House rejected today the Vatican's argument that there is no moral justification for a pre-emptive war in Iraq." - Yahoo News, 3/4/03.
"Intelligence leaves no doubt that Iraq continues to possess and conceal lethal weapons." - George Bush, 18 March, 2003.
"We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd." - Tony Blair, 18 March, 2003.
"Saddam's removal is necessary to eradicate the threat from his weapons of mass destruction." - Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary 2 April, 2003.
"Before people crow about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, I suggest they wait a bit." - Tony Blair, 28 April, 2003.
"It is possible Iraqi leaders decided they would destroy them prior to the conflict." - Donald Rumsfeld, 28 May, 2003.
And is God pissed right about now
"Bush and God - A higher calling: It is his defining journey - from reveler to revelation. A biography of his faith, and how he wields it as he leads a nation on the brink of war." - Howard 'the Whore-monal' Fineman, in the 3/3/03 Newsweek.
And finally:
Bush's "case for war is a sham" based on "untrue, unfounded and disproven allegations." - Rep. Dennis Kucinich, 3/20/03.
Xenophobic moron alert
Nashville's Bastille Day Festivities, celebrating France's independence, have been canceled this year because of the strong anti-French sentiment stemming from the war with Iraq.
Never mind that the French turned out to be right.
MPs react with fury at 'flimsy case' for invasion
"Shattering the trust in the government."
The row over Tony 'Piddles' Blair's case for war with Iraq intensified yesterday after one of his own ministers admitted a key government claim about weapons of mass destruction was based on a uncorroborated information.
Labour MPs voiced their fury....Backbenchers said they were enraged...More than 70 MPs have already signed an early motion calling on the Government to justify its case for war. - Times Online.
.......meanwhile.......
"I feel pretty,
Oh so pretty..."
Congress, White House clash over declassifying 9/11 report
A behind-the-scenes dispute over how much the public should be allowed to see of a report on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks could touch off a constitutional confrontation between Congress and the White House.
The House and Senate intelligence committees spent most of last year investigating why the nation's spy and law enforcement agencies failed to prevent the attacks. The committees filed the approximately 800-page report in December, but it was classified so that intelligence agencies could review it first.
When the agencies recommended censoring more than two-thirds of the report, committee leaders protested.
The White House says material from the briefings should not be made public for security reasons. But some committee members have questioned that argument after it was revealed that Bush invited Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Russian President Vladimir Putin to attend his morning intelligence updates while they were at his Texas ranch. - Usa Today/Yahoo News.
Halliburton's gov't contracts total $600M
It's good to be the king.
Dick 'Chicanery' Cheney's "former" company Halliburton already has garnered more than $600 million in military work related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and potentially could earn billions more without having to compete with other companies.
"The amount Halliburton could receive in the future is virtually limitless," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who disclosed the troop support work orders Thursday. "It is simply remarkable that a single company could earn so much money from the war in Iraq."
- AP/Yahoo News.
"Oh well. Time for my bikini wax!"
Waggy Dog Stories
'An administration hypes the threat posed by a foreign power. It talks of links to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism; it warns about a nuclear weapons program. The news media play along, and the country is swept up in war fever. The war drives everything else - including scandals involving administration officials - from the public's consciousness.
'The 1997 movie Wag the Dog had quite a plot.
'Although the movie's title has entered the language, I don't know how many people have watched it lately. Read the screenplay. If you don't think it bears a resemblance to recent events, you're in denial.
'For the time being, the public doesn't seem to care - or even want to know. A new poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes finds that 41 percent of Americans either believe that WMDs have been found, or aren't sure. The program's director suggests that "some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance." And three-quarters of the public thinks that president Bush showed strong leadership on Iraq.
'So what's the problem? Wars fought to deal with imaginary threats have real consequences. Just as war critics feared, Al Qaeda has been strengthened by the war. Iraq is in chaos, with a rising death toll among American soldiers: "We have reports of skirmishes throughout the central region," a Pentagon official told The Los Angeles Times.
'Meanwhile, the administration has just derived considerable political advantage from a war waged on false premises. At best, that sets a very bad precedent. At worst... "You want to win this election, you better change the subject. You wanna change this subject, you better have a war," explains Robert DeNiro's political operative in Wag the Dog. "It's show business."
- Snipped from Paul Krugman's column in the NY Times. Lying to Congress is an impeachable offense, isn't it?
Shadow administration: WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz
The Bush administration focused on alleged weapons of mass destruction as the primary justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force because it was politically convenient, a top-level official at the Pentagon has acknowledged.
Mr Wolfowitz also discloses that there was one justification that was "almost unnoticed but huge". That was the prospect of the United States being able to withdraw all of its forces from Saudi Arabia once the threat of Saddam had been removed. Since the taking of Baghdad, Washington has said that it is taking its troops out of the kingdom. The presence of the US military in Saudi Arabia has been one of the main grievances of al-Qa'ida and other terrorist groups.
The extraordinary admission comes in an interview with Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary. "For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Mr Wolfowitz said. - The Independant.
May 29, 2003
Our eight years of peace and prosperity are finally over!
Hammerdown dissects the George W. Bush fiasco pResidency.
Quote of the day
And it comes from the Brits, naturally.
"I believe the Prime Minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us. The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain. If you can't believe what you are told by ministers, the whole democratic process is put at risk. You can't be allowed to get away with telling lies for political purposes."
- Tony Benn, former Labour minister.
"My tutu tickles!"
The real reason Paul O'Neill was fired
(AFP) - In the midst of negotiating a steep tax cuts package, the US government shelved a report that showed the United States faces future federal budget deficits of more than 44.2 trillion dollars.
The Unelected Fraud's misadministration chose to keep the findings - commissioned by then-Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill - out of the 2004 annual budget report, London's Financial Times reported.
The Financial Times hinted that the decision not to publish the report may have been because the White House was campaigning for a massive tax-cut package that critics claim will expand future deficits.
The study, according to the same source, said that sharp tax increases, massive spending cuts or both are unavoidable if the US is to meet benefit promises to future generations.
O'Neill, who was fired last December, refused to comment. - From Yahoo News.
The Scott Ritter bitchslapfest
mrsrude over at the BC Forum was kind enough to post part of Bill O'Really's interview of Scott Ritter last night on Fux. Here they're discussing the recently found "mobile labs":
RITTER: They don't have the people who built it. The people who built it have said that this is used to produce hydrogen for meteorological balloons.
O'REILLY: All right, but Mr. Ritter, meteorological balloons?
RITTER: Yes, that's - well, look, I have been in the artillery. I don't know if you have, Bill...
O'REILLY: No, I haven't.
RITTER: ... but I've been in field artillery, and we fly met. balloons. You need to have the weather report at the higher altitudes when you fire artillery shells.
O'REILLY: All right.
RITTER: But the CIA also said that aluminum tubes - back if you recall when I went to Iraq in 2002, September - these aluminum tubes for centrifuges? I said, no, they're used for artillery rockets. The CIA came out and said, no, we believe they're used for enrichment. I was right. They were used for...
O'REILLY: But here, you were wrong about this, and we have a minute left. All right?
RITTER: I haven't been wrong about anything regarding weapons of mass destruction.
O'REILLY: No, you were wrong about the war. You said the United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated.
RITTER: Oh my gosh, we already lost the war, Bill.
O'REILLY: 3/25/03. Well, wait, if you think that we lost that war, then people are going to say - and you are entitled to your opinion - that you are nuts.
RITTER: Really? In 1965, Bill, when the First Cav Division fought the Vietnamese in the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) Valley, did we win that battle? We sure did. We won every battle after that, too, but I believe in 1975, it was an American helicopter flying off the embassy taking the last American out. We're neck deep in a quagmire in Iraq. We lost the war, Bill.
Ummmm, we were just correcting the grammar! Honest!
Britain's dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was rewritten on orders from Prime Minister Tony Blair's government to make it look more dramatic in the months leading up to the U.S.-led war against Baghdad, a top intelligence official said Thursday.
An unidentified expert in Britain's intelligence network told the BBC the 50-page document contained unreliable information and was "transformed" on instructions from Blair's office in the week before its release last September, to make it "sexier."
"The classic example," the BBC quoted the intelligence officer as saying, "was the statement that weapons of mass destruction were ready for use (by Iraq) within 45 minutes." - UPI.
Lynches say they can't discuss POW "rescue"
Jessica Lynch's parents said Thursday they are not permitted to discuss details of their daughter's capture and rescue in Iraq.
Greg and Deadra Lynch also said they couldn't comment on media reports that dispute military information released on Lynch's April 1 rescue from an Iraqi hospital.
"It is still an ongoing investigation," Greg Lynch said. - Uh-huh... link.
Reich-wing bozos
"There is a reason why all the Dumb-Ass Dubya jokes have been drying up lately. It isn't for the reason the Foxadelphians think, either. They believe people have stopped mocking him because he suddenly seems heroic...The fact is that people have stopped laughing at Bush because he's no longer the village idiot. He's the village tyrant now. After what he did to Iraq, after he lied to this country to persuade it to go to war, nothing he ever does will be funny anymore."
- David Vest, here.
Human nightlights illuminate village
Locals find that no power = no problem!
'There are still traces of yellow-brown powder around the side of the big rusty drum where Ali Awad stores gasoline. Ali says he bought it from a looter. His neighbors think he took it himself. The 50 gallon drum had been full of heavy yellow powder, Ali recalled, but the looter emptied it onto the floor of the store at the Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center one day in mid-April when local people literally dismantled Iraq's largest nuclear site. The powder could, however, eventually kill Ali and many other locals. It is mined uranium ready for enrichment. Ali dismisses the talk of danger. "People here use the barrels for drinking water, and they're all right," he says.'
"Hey," said an anonymous soldier, "if they've got radiation poisoning, they're probably too sick to shoot the stuff at us."
Also in the news
Lights...camera...bullshit!
'One of the things pResident Bush knows best is when to turn on the klieg lights, and when to keep them off.
'On Tuesday, with no fanfare, he signed a bill increasing the federal debt limit by nearly a trillion dollars. You don't want a lot of coverage when you're mortgaging the future.
'But yesterday it was high-fives all around as Mr. Bush signed the third-largest campaign contributor give-away tax cut in history at a grand ceremony in the East Room of the White House.
'I suppose if your income is large enough, there is every reason to celebrate. After all, the tax cut could save Dick Cheney $100,000 a year, or more.'
- Read more of Bob Herbert, here.
Ohio students to be fingerprinted
This is how it starts.
Holy Orwell! 'Akron students will be fingerprinted beginning this fall to identify them in school lunch lines.
'School board members voted 5-2 Tuesday to spend $700,000 on a controversial, modernized cafeteria system. Board members Rebecca Heimbaugh and Mary Stormer voted "no," mirroring the concerns of parents about the cost and privacy issue involved with fingerprinting students. "I do not believe that any parent or any student has ever had the expectation that in order to go through the lunch line or to buy a cookie or carton of milk that they or their children would be requested to first be fingerprinted," said Heimbaugh.
'Students' fingerprints will be put into a scanner that will make a template of binary numbers corresponding with the unique swirls and arches of each print. When students go through the lunch line, they will place their finger on a scanner that will identify them.
'School board members received numerous phone calls and e-mails from parents with privacy concerns about their children being fingerprinted. Those opposed to the system will have the option of having their children use an identification card.' - from here, via democrats.com.
Good afternoon, students. On the lunch menu today: Soylent Green....
Stroke me, stroke me
'DeLay's story keeps changing. And his proximity to three separate investigations - two of them potentially criminal - keeps getting closer and closer.'
Josh Marshall writes that back in the old days 'if a House majority leader was directly involved in a scandal that triggered a potentially criminal investigation at one cabinet department, an administrative review at another, and a grand jury investigation in his home state, he'd be in some trouble. Members of the opposition party might even push to get to the bottom of it. Luckily for Tom DeLay, though, times change.'
The Dems are all nutless. WTF is Joe Biden's problem?? Even Nancy Pelosi, who actually showed some promise at the beginning, has turned into a major, flaming, enabling asshat. This is manna from Heaven, dropped into their laps, and still they do nothing. And don't get me started on Tom 'Isadora' Daschle, who doesn't even have the sack to be a diva, for petessake.
"Oooooh, Mr DeLay,
I love your new riding crop! ...giggle!..."
Friedman and Freedom in Iraq
- Snipped from Mike Hersh's piece on his webpage:
"Thomas Friedman of the New York Times - and the mass media in general - cannot be troubled to hold Bush accountable. After tacitly endorsing the series of lies the Bush Administration used to justify the war, they now applaud Bush's continuing circus train of fabrication, distraction and deception.
"Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Where are the links between Iraq and 9/11? What's Bush's latest justification for this unprovoked attack which killed 1000s and wasted $billions? Friedman hasn't found any and he says it doesn't really matter.
"Molly Ivins wrote about what she called 'the weirdest media reaction of all [to] the ongoing nonappearance of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq' singling out Friedman: 'What I cannot believe is that respected journalists, most notably Tom Friedman, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, would simply dismiss the nonexistent WMDs as though it made no difference. Of course it matters if our government lies to us.'
"Ivins makes this point which should be obvious: 'Look, if there are no WMDs in Iraq, it means either our government lied us to us in order to get us into an unnecessary war, or the government itself was disastrously misinformed by an incompetent intelligence apparatus. In either case, it's a terribly serious situation.'"
Next on CNN: is Scott Peterson's lawyer a crackpot? Stay tuned!
Bah.
"We could have avoided this war."
Robin Cook served notice that prime minister Tony 'Piddles' Blair faces a growing crisis over the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction.
Seizing on the "breathtaking" admission by Donald Rumsfeld that Saddam Hussein may have destroyed his weapons before the war, the former foreign secretary issued a blunt warning to the prime minister that he took Britain to war on a false basis."Saying that they can't find the weapons, and they may never find the weapons, blows an enormous gaping hole through the case for war that was made on both sides of the Atlantic," Mr Cook said last night. "That has to be investigated - a [Commons] select committee is one way of pursuing it."
- link. Let's hope the Brits have more balls than our Dems.
"Well, speaking for myself,
being gelded DOES have its advantages!"
May 28, 2003
Cool!
See what your name looks like when it's written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs!
I hate goo. Besides, it's pork fat that rules...
You will sink in a mire. You like to think you're
normal, but deep down you really just want to
strip off your clothes and roll around in chicken fat.
What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
brought to you by Quizilla
(Both via It could just be me)
Bushies' 'terror war' eroding rights
US has lost moral authority.
Amnesty International said in its annual report Wednesday that human rights have been threatened, international laws have been undermined and governments have been shielded from scrutiny - all in the cause of "fighting terrorism." - link.
Drooling, brainwashed public: "Ooooooh, but so what, it's worth it if it keeps my precious children safe!"
WTF editor, administering bitchslaps: "You stupid f*cktard. Wake the hell up and smell the f*cking Kool-Aid. Safe from what??":
Happy place...happy place...happy place.....
Quote of the day
"Why should we give more credence to the BBC, the Guardian and Independent of London, or the Toronto Star, and other foreign sources, than we do to our domestic media? Simply because the US media has squandered its credibility, while the foreign press displays the quality of responsible journalism that we once enjoyed at home and now have lost." - from SmirkingChimp, via skippy.
Busted: investigation links Texas probe to Feds
AG trying to block depositions of 3 DPS officers
A Texas official who answers to Gov. Rick Perry provided state troopers with the information they needed to get a federal terrorism-fighting agency involved in a state political battle, according to a legislator investigating the situation.
The Homeland Security Department is supposed to protect law-abiding citizens from terrorists," said Rep. John Mabry, D-Waco. "We shouldn't have to worry about protecting law-abiding citizens from the Homeland Security Department."
The House General Investigating Committee is looking into how DPS coordinated its search. The committee also wants to know whether anyone associated with U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a supporter of the redistricting plan, helped direct the search and why DPS officials ordered some records on the issue destroyed on May 14.
The Travis County district attorney, the federal Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Aviation Administration also are conducting investigations into the search. - link.
Karl Rove cleans up Bush's image on film
'A copy of the script obtained by The Globe and Mail reveals a prime-time drama starring a nearly infallible, heroic president with little or no dissension in his ranks and a penchant for delivering articulate, stirring, off-the-cuff addresses to colleagues.'
The movie, The Big Dance, was filmed for a two-hour television movie to be broadcast this September in the U.S..
By the sound of it, its meant to be a fantasy film. Or a comedy. - link.
CNN hires media veteran to revamp Zahn
Ho ho ho!
James Miller - news and TV producer and 'political veteran' - will spend the next month or so developing a format for American Evening With another damn vapid blonde bimbo Paula Zahn, the 7-9 p.m. show soon to be launched, though Zahn has been in the time slot since March 31. In a rush to move Zahn into her new spot and Crossfire out during the war, CNN named the show "Live From the the Lap of Karl Rove Headlines."
Zahn's interim program has averaged 593,000 viewers this month, a 32% decline from what Connie Chung and Crossfire delivered in February, the steepest drop-off of the three major cable news networks.
Bushies threatened sanctions if Israel blocked 'roadmap'
My way or the highway: our humble statesman at work -
The Bush misadministration has prepared a list of sanctions against Israel should it refuse to comply with a plan for a Palestinian state by the end of the year.
U.S. government and congressional sources said the list was prepared by the State Department and relayed to the National Security Council in April amid the administration's effort to press Israel to agree to the so-called roadmap, which calls for an end to the Israeli-Palestinian war and the establishment of an interim state in 2003.
"It's hard to overestimate the anger within the administration toward Israel regarding the delays in the roadmap," a congressional source close to the administration said. "The White House doesn't regard the roadmap merely as foreign policy. It sees the roadmap as a major element toward the reelection [sic] of the president." - Snipped from here.
Who lied about the WMDs?
"The failure so far to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the prime justification for an immediate invasion, or definitive links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda has raised serious questions about the quality of American intelligence and even dark hints that the data may have been manipulated to support a pre-emptive war."
Duh - ya think?????
"These are critical issues that require thorough review not only by the CIA, but also by high-level oversight bodies in the administration and Congress. Bush should ask the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, headed by Brent Scowcroft, to assess the record on Iraq, and the Congressional intelligence committees should conduct their own reviews. When Bush and Powell repeatedly assured the world that Iraq's unconventional weapons were a threat to international security, they relied on America's intelligence agencies. The country needs to know if the spy organizations were right or wrong."
- Pissants. It's like banging your head against a brick wall. From the NY Times, via democrats.com.
Who lied about the WMDs? Part 2:
Donald 'Warboner' Rumsfeld suggested publicly for the first time on Tuesday that Iraq might have destroyed its suspected chemical and biological weapons before the start of the Iraq war.
Senior American generals in Iraq and even president Bush have raised this possibility in recent weeks, but until today Mr. Rumsfeld had not offered this as one of the possible explanations why Iraq did not use those weapons or why special military teams had not yet found any that president Bush cited as a reason for attacking Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein's government.The NY Times says the fact that Rumsfeld even raised the possibility that Iraq's suspected weapons were destroyed raises new questions about the intelligence Resident Evil and his handlers got before the war. Excuse me, but what a crock of crappola. Are they trying to Gaslight us? Anyone who had any kind of internet connection knew before the war started the intelligence people were saying the Bushies were way off base with the WMD claims. And what about all those documents Powell used to bolster his case to the UN? They were proven to be false before the war started, and still the misadministration went ahead with their plans to invade.
Yes, there's a question here, but it's not about the quality of our intelligence, unless you're talking about the lack of it in the typical pithed bushmoonie/media whore. It's about why the misadministration lied to us, our servicemen, and the world, and why they were able to get away with it.
"Geraldo Rivera is marrying for the fifth time, and this time he says he's found the right person - someone who's never heard of Geraldo Rivera." - Conan O'Brien.
Stuff
Straight over a cliff
Arianna Huffington's suggestion to the spineless Democrats: take off the damn tutus and put on jockstraps, you f*cking pussies.
'"I a little bit disagree with Chairman Roberts on that."
'That was Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, sorta not taking exception to committee chairman Pat Roberts' assertion that we've turned the corner on keeping the peace in Iraq.
'But it could just as easily serve as the motto for the whole Democratic Party. They are so paralyzed by the fear of doing or saying the wrong thing that they've rendered themselves utterly impotent when it comes to mounting any kind of challenge to president Bush on the two most important issues of the day: tax cuts and Iraq.
'Exhibit A comes from Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, who, when asked on Meet the Press why the Democrats didn't offer a bold alternative to the Bush tax cut plan, including the repeal of the 2001 cuts and a guaranteed balanced budget, timorously explained: "Well, we - you got to take it one step at a time."
'Is this an AA meeting?' - Yeah, Asshole Apologists. My garden slugs have more spine. More here.
"Please don't hurt me, Karl!
I'll be good, I promise!"
