ThePresence
Elite Member
You're gonna have to do more than that. 🙂
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Bush Lied
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ThePresence
Elite Member
Okay. 🙂
However, I don't know where in the world you can possibly get links showing CIA documents saying that there is doubt... But I don't know what kind of security clearance you have. 🙂
ThePresence
Elite Member
Of course not. There's not a government agency in the world that will publicly say 100% about anything, they have to cover their collective arses in case they are wrong. If you are trying to prove him a liar, you need to know what HE was told, not what WE were told. Of course, it's impossible to know what he was told.
ThePresence
Elite Member
I already said I can't prove it, but I don't have to. I'm not the one accusing him of lying. For someone to make an accusation, they should really have proof to back them up. The burden of proof rests with the accuser. I said that before just to refute what someone else was saying, I wanted them to prove me wrong. They can't. 🙂
ThePresence
Elite Member
No, not at all. But why should I believe that he lied until I can see that he did? Doesn't it seem stranger to you to believe that someone lied without any proof, than to believe he's saying the truth until shown otherwise?
Spencer278
Diamond Member
Bush made a claim that Iraq had WMD and they didn't I feel that it is bush responisbilty to show why he made that claim and I have yet to see such evidence so it is resonible to believe that he pulled it out of his ass.
InfectedMushroom
Golden Member
That is true ThePresence, however in this situation there are only two possibilities, either he lied or he received bad information. Correct?
I find it much either to believe that a politician would lie and strech the truth than to believe an information agency (CIA) would provide completly wrong information.
ThePresence
Elite Member
Well, first of all, we don't know that it was completely wrong, we know that we have not found any. There's a difference. But regardless, just because you find it easier to believe that Bush is lying does not make it so.
ThePresence
Elite Member
I don't know if Bush lied, but there is no reason for me to believe that he did until I see proof that he lied. If that's faith, then fine. Like I said before, the burden of proof is on those who are accusing him of lying.
ThePresence
Elite Member
That's not faith, that's almost fact. Do you really think that the CIA tells us the same thing it tells the President? Of course not. Nor should they.
I feel I have made my position on this issue quite clear. All further questions should be directed to my Press Secretary. 🙂
link
The garbage intelligence that helped to unleash a war
June 21 2003
Western intelligence agencies knew that some of the evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was false, reports Marian Wilkinson.
A forged document was used to support claims by George Bush, John Howard and Tony Blair about Iraq's nuclear weapons program - even though the CIA and the State Department in the United States had dismissed it months earlier as "garbage", as one analyst said.
A defector managed by Iraq's leading opposition group supported the most extravagant claims by the same Western leaders about biological weapons even though United Nations inspectors could not corroborate his allegations.
Before the war, Mr Howard repeated the claims of Mr Blair and Mr Bush that "Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons and that Iraq wants to develop nuclear weapons". He cited "the published detailed dossiers of British and American intelligence" as "compelling evidence".
But as three legislative bodies in the US, Britain and Australia review that intelligence, some of it is becoming shaky. In one instance it was manufactured. In others, the intelligence was hedged with qualifications that were somehow dumped once it appeared in political speeches or declassified reports.
Much of this was known before the war. A more sober analysis of Iraq's prohibited weapons programs was continually offered by the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed El Baradei.
As Dr Blix said in a US interview this week: "Is the United Nations on a different planet? Are reports from here totally unread south of the Hudson [River]?"
There are hard questions facing the Australian Senate inquiry. Did the intelligence reporting from Australia's missions at the UN in New York, the Washington embassy, the London high commission and the Australian representative at the International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna fail to provide a critical analysis of the US claims? Or did Howard and his ministers hype the intelligence reports to justify the war?
"There's more and more evidence that public opinion in our three countries was manipulated by the Bush Administration with the fragments of intelligence that they had," said Jonathan Dean, a security analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.
Two case studies, both under scrutiny in the US, raise serious questions about whether the intelligence was just hyped or knowingly distorted. The first is the claim that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program that had been dismantled after the first Gulf War in 1991.
For the past three months, Congressman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, has been trying to unravel how forged documents were used by Mr Bush to support the charge that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger for use in a nuclear program. Mr Howard repeated this claim just weeks before the war after a meeting with the President.
Mr Waxman's inquiries and a number of US reports indicate that the Niger documents were identified as forged long before Mr Bush said in his State of the Union address on January 28: "The British Government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Mr Bush's speech, says the White House, was "closely vetted by the intelligence agencies", including the CIA. Yet nearly a year earlier the CIA and the State Department knew that the documents were forgeries.
Several accounts cited by Mr Waxman say the CIA was asked to investigate the documents by the office of the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, in February 2002.
A senior diplomat, an experienced African hand, was sent to Niger to investigate. Within weeks he told the CIA and State Department the documents were obvious forgeries.
The CIA told the White House of the results. About the same time, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research concluded that the claims were "garbage".
Greg Thielmann, a former senior official with the bureau, told The New Republic that until 2002 "we never assessed that there was good evidence that Iraq was reconstituting or getting really serious about its nuclear weapons program".
Yet by September 2002, the phoney Niger documents resurfaced in the famous British intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Neither the CIA nor the State Department publicly challenged the British dossier. Indeed, two months later they approved a State Department document that repeated the Niger claim.
By late January, after Mr Bush repeated the charge, the IAEA was asking for evidence. The Iraqi Government had denied the claim to the agency's weapons inspectors.
In February, the US finally handed over the Niger documents. It took the IAEA a day to establish they were false. Within weeks it had also dismissed the other US claims, including charges that Iraq was importing special aluminium tubes to process uranium, and that satellite photos showed Iraq rebuilding its nuclear facilities.
On March 7, the IAEA chief, Dr El Baradei, reported his findings to the UN Security Council, saying: "We have to date found no evidence or plausible indications of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq."
By this stage, UN weapons inspectors were also raising doubts about other US intelligence, including defector claims that Iraq had reconstituted its biological warfare program.
From January 2002, US intelligence, and the White House, had repeatedly referred to claims by an Iraqi defector, Saeed al-Haideri, who had escaped aided by Dr Ahmed Chalabi's opposition party, the INC. His claims were widely reported in the US and British media, including one version that Iraq was working on the deadly "Blue Nile" virus. The claims were the first hard evidence that Saddam was rebuilding a biological program and were soon supported by other defectors. UN sources say that when inspectors went back into Iraq they searched for some of the sites nominated by al-Haideri but nothing was found.
The arguments about Iraq's biological program had vexed weapons inspectors since August 1995 when Iraq's most famous defector, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, General Kamal Hussein, fled to Jordan. He had been closely involved with Iraq's WMD programs.
He told the then chief UN weapons inspector, Rolf Ekeus, and his team, that Iraq had destroyed all WMD programs. Soon after, he returned to Iraq, and was shot.
The UN inspectors had uncovered Iraq's hidden biological program before the general's defection. But what he disclosed for the first time was that Iraq had put biological material into actual weapons. He also told them where to find records of the program.
After the general's death, inspectors could never be sure the weapons programs had been destroyed as he claimed or whether Saddam had countered his orders.
The only way to resolve the issue was for inspectors to force Iraq to account for all the stockpiles of chemical and biological agents that it claimed to have destroyed.
US intelligence, and some UN inspectors, never believed Iraq had destroyed the programs despite General Kamal's account. Mr Bush and Mr Powell would repeatedly refer to Iraq's anthrax and mustard gas as if they were still in weapons ready to be used. Dr Blix told the Herald last year: "There is a good deal of capability in the chemical and biological sphere, but for a [weapons] program you need to have a will and a plan. We don't have evidence of that, we don't exclude it".
Significantly, the US Defence Intelligence Agency was also more qualified about Iraq's weapons program than Mr Bush's public statements. In a then secret report on Iraq's chemical programs last September, it said: "Although we lack any direct information, Iraq probably possesses [chemical warfare] in chemical munitions, possibly including artillery rockets, artillery shells, aerial bombs and ballistic missile warheads."
But by using defectors, the White House, the DIA and the CIA could bolster their belief that Iraq had revived its weapons programs with evidence.
Meanwhile, of the 1200-strong search team in Iraq, only a few hundred are in the field. Most are putting together documents and interviews with Iraqi scientists and officials.
They have little to hinder them. Most of the key Iraqis involved are in custody, including, the DIA says, Saddam's adviser on the prohibited weapons, Amir al-Saadi. At the time of his arrest in April, al-Saadi was still insisting Iraq had no concealed WMD programs.
This week, the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said deals were being offered to Iraqi POWs who give information on the elusive weapons.
He is optimistic.
The garbage intelligence that helped to unleash a war
June 21 2003
Western intelligence agencies knew that some of the evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was false, reports Marian Wilkinson.
A forged document was used to support claims by George Bush, John Howard and Tony Blair about Iraq's nuclear weapons program - even though the CIA and the State Department in the United States had dismissed it months earlier as "garbage", as one analyst said.
A defector managed by Iraq's leading opposition group supported the most extravagant claims by the same Western leaders about biological weapons even though United Nations inspectors could not corroborate his allegations.
Before the war, Mr Howard repeated the claims of Mr Blair and Mr Bush that "Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons and that Iraq wants to develop nuclear weapons". He cited "the published detailed dossiers of British and American intelligence" as "compelling evidence".
But as three legislative bodies in the US, Britain and Australia review that intelligence, some of it is becoming shaky. In one instance it was manufactured. In others, the intelligence was hedged with qualifications that were somehow dumped once it appeared in political speeches or declassified reports.
Much of this was known before the war. A more sober analysis of Iraq's prohibited weapons programs was continually offered by the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed El Baradei.
As Dr Blix said in a US interview this week: "Is the United Nations on a different planet? Are reports from here totally unread south of the Hudson [River]?"
There are hard questions facing the Australian Senate inquiry. Did the intelligence reporting from Australia's missions at the UN in New York, the Washington embassy, the London high commission and the Australian representative at the International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna fail to provide a critical analysis of the US claims? Or did Howard and his ministers hype the intelligence reports to justify the war?
"There's more and more evidence that public opinion in our three countries was manipulated by the Bush Administration with the fragments of intelligence that they had," said Jonathan Dean, a security analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.
Two case studies, both under scrutiny in the US, raise serious questions about whether the intelligence was just hyped or knowingly distorted. The first is the claim that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program that had been dismantled after the first Gulf War in 1991.
For the past three months, Congressman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, has been trying to unravel how forged documents were used by Mr Bush to support the charge that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger for use in a nuclear program. Mr Howard repeated this claim just weeks before the war after a meeting with the President.
Mr Waxman's inquiries and a number of US reports indicate that the Niger documents were identified as forged long before Mr Bush said in his State of the Union address on January 28: "The British Government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Mr Bush's speech, says the White House, was "closely vetted by the intelligence agencies", including the CIA. Yet nearly a year earlier the CIA and the State Department knew that the documents were forgeries.
Several accounts cited by Mr Waxman say the CIA was asked to investigate the documents by the office of the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, in February 2002.
A senior diplomat, an experienced African hand, was sent to Niger to investigate. Within weeks he told the CIA and State Department the documents were obvious forgeries.
The CIA told the White House of the results. About the same time, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research concluded that the claims were "garbage".
Greg Thielmann, a former senior official with the bureau, told The New Republic that until 2002 "we never assessed that there was good evidence that Iraq was reconstituting or getting really serious about its nuclear weapons program".
Yet by September 2002, the phoney Niger documents resurfaced in the famous British intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Neither the CIA nor the State Department publicly challenged the British dossier. Indeed, two months later they approved a State Department document that repeated the Niger claim.
By late January, after Mr Bush repeated the charge, the IAEA was asking for evidence. The Iraqi Government had denied the claim to the agency's weapons inspectors.
In February, the US finally handed over the Niger documents. It took the IAEA a day to establish they were false. Within weeks it had also dismissed the other US claims, including charges that Iraq was importing special aluminium tubes to process uranium, and that satellite photos showed Iraq rebuilding its nuclear facilities.
On March 7, the IAEA chief, Dr El Baradei, reported his findings to the UN Security Council, saying: "We have to date found no evidence or plausible indications of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq."
By this stage, UN weapons inspectors were also raising doubts about other US intelligence, including defector claims that Iraq had reconstituted its biological warfare program.
From January 2002, US intelligence, and the White House, had repeatedly referred to claims by an Iraqi defector, Saeed al-Haideri, who had escaped aided by Dr Ahmed Chalabi's opposition party, the INC. His claims were widely reported in the US and British media, including one version that Iraq was working on the deadly "Blue Nile" virus. The claims were the first hard evidence that Saddam was rebuilding a biological program and were soon supported by other defectors. UN sources say that when inspectors went back into Iraq they searched for some of the sites nominated by al-Haideri but nothing was found.
The arguments about Iraq's biological program had vexed weapons inspectors since August 1995 when Iraq's most famous defector, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, General Kamal Hussein, fled to Jordan. He had been closely involved with Iraq's WMD programs.
He told the then chief UN weapons inspector, Rolf Ekeus, and his team, that Iraq had destroyed all WMD programs. Soon after, he returned to Iraq, and was shot.
The UN inspectors had uncovered Iraq's hidden biological program before the general's defection. But what he disclosed for the first time was that Iraq had put biological material into actual weapons. He also told them where to find records of the program.
After the general's death, inspectors could never be sure the weapons programs had been destroyed as he claimed or whether Saddam had countered his orders.
The only way to resolve the issue was for inspectors to force Iraq to account for all the stockpiles of chemical and biological agents that it claimed to have destroyed.
US intelligence, and some UN inspectors, never believed Iraq had destroyed the programs despite General Kamal's account. Mr Bush and Mr Powell would repeatedly refer to Iraq's anthrax and mustard gas as if they were still in weapons ready to be used. Dr Blix told the Herald last year: "There is a good deal of capability in the chemical and biological sphere, but for a [weapons] program you need to have a will and a plan. We don't have evidence of that, we don't exclude it".
Significantly, the US Defence Intelligence Agency was also more qualified about Iraq's weapons program than Mr Bush's public statements. In a then secret report on Iraq's chemical programs last September, it said: "Although we lack any direct information, Iraq probably possesses [chemical warfare] in chemical munitions, possibly including artillery rockets, artillery shells, aerial bombs and ballistic missile warheads."
But by using defectors, the White House, the DIA and the CIA could bolster their belief that Iraq had revived its weapons programs with evidence.
Meanwhile, of the 1200-strong search team in Iraq, only a few hundred are in the field. Most are putting together documents and interviews with Iraqi scientists and officials.
They have little to hinder them. Most of the key Iraqis involved are in custody, including, the DIA says, Saddam's adviser on the prohibited weapons, Amir al-Saadi. At the time of his arrest in April, al-Saadi was still insisting Iraq had no concealed WMD programs.
This week, the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said deals were being offered to Iraqi POWs who give information on the elusive weapons.
He is optimistic.
link
Weapons claims fitted US plans, says Wilkie
By Peter Fray, Herald Correspondent in London
June 20 2003
Warnings ignored . . . Andrew Wilkie in London, where he gave evidence criticising coalition governments to a British parliamentary inquiry. Photo: Julian Andrews
The Australian and British governments grossly exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction to stay in step with the United States' plan to invade Iraq, a former senior Australian defence analyst has told a British parliamentary inquiry.
Andrew Wilkie, formerly with the Office of National Assessment, also accused John Howard of repeating false claims about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger so that he could be a player on the world stage.
Mr Wilkie said both governments had ignored warnings from their own intelligence agencies that the US was intent on deposing Saddam Hussein for "strategic and domestic reasons".
Deliberately distorted and doctored evidence about Iraq's weapons program had backed up a series of "ridiculous", "preposterous" and "fundamentally flawed" claims before the war.
"The British and Australian governments were deliberately intent on using WMD to exaggerate the Iraq threat so as to stay in step with the US . . .
"It was a rare opportunity for the Australian Prime Minister to be a player given the involvement of Australian agencies in this matter."
Mr Wilkie was invited to give evidence to the foreign affairs select committee - one of two British parliamentary inquiries examining the Blair Government's justification for war.
He said the heavily qualified language from intelligence agencies about the reliability of information from Iraqi dissidents was ignored.
"The apparent direct political interference with intelligence agencies in the United States and the more subtle political pressure applied in London and Canberra, meant that the rules were different with Iraq," he said.
"Intelligence that once would have been discarded was now useable, with qualification. The problem was that the juicy bits of intelligence most in accord with governments' position were being latched on to and the qualifications were being dropped."
He told the Herald outside the hearing that US interests in Iraq included gaining access to Iraq's oil reserves and trying to restart the Middle East peace process.
Mr Wilkie, an analyst who had worked on weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, resigned on March 11 in protest against the Government's war stance.
While he did not deny Saddam had a weapons program or was a "horrid" ruler, it was obvious several claims made by the Australian, British and US governments were exaggerated and in some cases "simply wrong".
These included the "ridiculous" suggestion in the Blair Government's first dossier released last September that Saddam had extensive stockpiles from the 1980s and 1990s of unaccounted-for chemical or biological weapons - including 360 tonnes of bulk chemical agent and 3000 tonnes of precursor chemicals.
He said it was impossible to make such claims when not even the Iraqis themselves knew how much had ever been produced, how much had been used against Iran in the 1980s or how much had been destroyed outside the UN's gaze in the 1990s.
"Most chemical and biological agents soon break down unless produced to a very high level of purity and then effectively stabilised," he said.
Claims about Iraq's weapons build-up between 1998 and 2002, when UN weapons inspectors were absent, were also "unconvincing" as Iraq had neither the technical nor practical abilities to rebuild its program so quickly.
"For the Iraqis to have rebuilt their WMD program since 1998, virtually from scratch, would have been an enormous undertaking."
Weapons claims fitted US plans, says Wilkie
By Peter Fray, Herald Correspondent in London
June 20 2003
Warnings ignored . . . Andrew Wilkie in London, where he gave evidence criticising coalition governments to a British parliamentary inquiry. Photo: Julian Andrews
The Australian and British governments grossly exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction to stay in step with the United States' plan to invade Iraq, a former senior Australian defence analyst has told a British parliamentary inquiry.
Andrew Wilkie, formerly with the Office of National Assessment, also accused John Howard of repeating false claims about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger so that he could be a player on the world stage.
Mr Wilkie said both governments had ignored warnings from their own intelligence agencies that the US was intent on deposing Saddam Hussein for "strategic and domestic reasons".
Deliberately distorted and doctored evidence about Iraq's weapons program had backed up a series of "ridiculous", "preposterous" and "fundamentally flawed" claims before the war.
"The British and Australian governments were deliberately intent on using WMD to exaggerate the Iraq threat so as to stay in step with the US . . .
"It was a rare opportunity for the Australian Prime Minister to be a player given the involvement of Australian agencies in this matter."
Mr Wilkie was invited to give evidence to the foreign affairs select committee - one of two British parliamentary inquiries examining the Blair Government's justification for war.
He said the heavily qualified language from intelligence agencies about the reliability of information from Iraqi dissidents was ignored.
"The apparent direct political interference with intelligence agencies in the United States and the more subtle political pressure applied in London and Canberra, meant that the rules were different with Iraq," he said.
"Intelligence that once would have been discarded was now useable, with qualification. The problem was that the juicy bits of intelligence most in accord with governments' position were being latched on to and the qualifications were being dropped."
He told the Herald outside the hearing that US interests in Iraq included gaining access to Iraq's oil reserves and trying to restart the Middle East peace process.
Mr Wilkie, an analyst who had worked on weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, resigned on March 11 in protest against the Government's war stance.
While he did not deny Saddam had a weapons program or was a "horrid" ruler, it was obvious several claims made by the Australian, British and US governments were exaggerated and in some cases "simply wrong".
These included the "ridiculous" suggestion in the Blair Government's first dossier released last September that Saddam had extensive stockpiles from the 1980s and 1990s of unaccounted-for chemical or biological weapons - including 360 tonnes of bulk chemical agent and 3000 tonnes of precursor chemicals.
He said it was impossible to make such claims when not even the Iraqis themselves knew how much had ever been produced, how much had been used against Iran in the 1980s or how much had been destroyed outside the UN's gaze in the 1990s.
"Most chemical and biological agents soon break down unless produced to a very high level of purity and then effectively stabilised," he said.
Claims about Iraq's weapons build-up between 1998 and 2002, when UN weapons inspectors were absent, were also "unconvincing" as Iraq had neither the technical nor practical abilities to rebuild its program so quickly.
"For the Iraqis to have rebuilt their WMD program since 1998, virtually from scratch, would have been an enormous undertaking."
link
Report Cast Doubt on Iraq-Al Qaeda Connection
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 22, 2003; Page A01
In a nationally televised address last October in which he sought to rally congressional support for a resolution authorizing war against Iraq, President Bush declared that the government of Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat to the United States by outlining what he said was evidence pointing to its ongoing ties with al Qaeda.
A still-classified national intelligence report circulating within the Bush administration at the time, however, portrayed a far less clear picture about the link between Iraq and al Qaeda than the one presented by the president, according to U.S. intelligence analysts and congressional sources who have read the report.
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which represented the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community, contained cautionary language about Iraq's connections with al Qaeda and warnings about the reliability of conflicting reports by Iraqi defectors and captured al Qaeda members about the ties, the sources said.
"There has always been an internal argument within the intelligence community about the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda," said a senior intelligence official, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. "The NIE had alternative views."
Similar questions have been raised about Bush's statement in his State of the Union address last January that the British had reported Iraq was attempting to buy uranium in Africa, which the president used to back up his assertion that Iraq had a reconstituted nuclear weapons program. In that case, senior U.S. officials said, the CIA 10 months earlier sent a former senior American diplomat to visit Niger who reported that country's officials said they had not made any agreement to aid the sale of uranium to Iraq and indicated documents alleging that were forged. Details of that CIA Niger inquiry were not shared with the White House, although the agency succeeded in deleting that allegation from other administration statements.
Bush, in his speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, made his case that Iraq had ties with al Qaeda, by mentioning several items such as high-level contacts that "go back a decade." He said "we've learned" that Iraq trained al Qaeda members "in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." Although the president offered essentially circumstantial evidence, his remarks contained none of the caveats about the reliability of this information as contained in the national intelligence document, sources said.
The presidential address crystallized the assertion that had been made by senior administration officials for months that the combination of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons and a terrorist organization, such as al Qaeda, committed to attacking the United States posed a grave and imminent threat. Within four days, the House and Senate overwhelmingly endorsed a resolution granting the president authority to go to war.
The handling of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programs and its links to al Qaeda has come under increased scrutiny on Capitol Hill, with some leading Democrats charging that the administration exaggerated the case against Hussein by publicizing intelligence that supported its policy and keeping contradictory information under wraps. The House intelligence committee opened a closed-door review into the matter last week; its Senate counterpart is planning similar hearings. The Senate Armed Services Committee is also investigating the issue.
Bush has defended his handling of intelligence before the war, calling his critics "revisionist historians."
"The intelligence services of many nations concluded that he had illegal weapons, and the regime refused to provide evidence they had been destroyed," Bush said in his weekly radio address yesterday. He vowed to search for "the true extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, no matter how long it takes."
Questions about the reliability of the intelligence that Bush cited in his Cincinnati address were raised shortly after the speech by ranking Democrats on the Senate intelligence and armed services panel. They pressed the CIA to declassify more of the 90-page National Intelligence Estimate than a 28-page "white paper" on Iraq distributed on Capitol Hill on Oct. 4.
In one of the more notable statements made by the president, Bush said that "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," and added: "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."
Bush did not indicate that the consensus of U.S. intelligence analysts was that Hussein would launch a terrorist attack against the United States only if he thought he could not stop the United States from invading Iraq. The intelligence report had said that the Iraqi president might decide to give chemical or biological agents to terrorists, such as al Qaeda, for use against the United States only as a "last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him." And it said this would be an "extreme step" by Hussein.
These conclusions in the report were contained in a letter CIA Director George J. Tenet sent to Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), then the chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, the day of Bush's speech.
While Bush also spoke of Iraq and al Qaeda having had "high-level contacts that go back a decade," the president did not say -- as the classified intelligence report asserted -- that the contacts occurred in the early 1990s, when Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, was living in Sudan and his organization was in its infancy. At the time, the report said, bin Laden and Hussein were united primarily by their common hostility to the Saudi Arabian monarchy, according to sources. Bush also did not refer to the report's conclusion that those early contacts had not led to any known continuing high-level relationships between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda, the sources said.
The president said some al Qaeda leaders had fled Afghanistan to Iraq and referred to one "very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year." It was a reference to Abu Mussab Zarqawi, a Jordanian. U.S. intelligence already had concluded that Zarqawi was not an al Qaeda member but the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al Qaeda adherents, the sources said.
As for Bush's claim that Iraq had trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and use of poisons and deadly gases, sources with knowledge of the classified intelligence estimate said the report's conclusion was that this had not been satisfactorily confirmed.
"We've learned," Bush said in his speech, "that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." But the president did not mention that when national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had referred the previous month to such training, she had said the source was al Qaeda captives.
The CIA briefed congressional committees about the National Intelligence Estimate but did not deliver the classified version until the evening of Oct. 1, just before a Senate intelligence committee hearing the next day, congressional sources said. At that closed-door session, several senators raised questions about qualifying statements made in the report, which was circulated only among senior national security officials.
On Oct. 4, three days before the president's speech, at the urging of members of Congress, the CIA released its declassified excerpts from the intelligence report as a "white paper" on Iraq's weapons programs and al Qaeda links. The members wanted a public document to which they could refer during floor debates on the Iraq war resolution.
The white paper did contain passages that hinted at the intelligence community's lack of certitude about Iraq's weapons programs and al Qaeda ties, but it omitted some qualifiers contained in the classified version. It also did not include qualifiers made at the Oct. 2 hearing by an unidentified senior intelligence official who, during his testimony, challenged some of the administration's public statements on Iraq.
"Senator Graham felt that they declassified only things that supported their position and left classified what did not support that policy," said Bob Filippone, Graham's deputy chief of staff. Graham, now a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, opposed the war resolution.
When the white paper appeared, Graham and Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), an intelligence panel member and at that time chairman of the Armed Services Committee, asked to have additional portions of the intelligence estimate as well as portions of the testimony at the Oct. 2 hearing made public.
On the day of Bush's speech, Tenet sent a letter to Graham with some of the additional information. The letter drew attention because it seemed to contradict Bush's statements that Hussein would give weapons to al Qaeda.
Tenet released a statement on Oct. 8 that said, "There is no inconsistency between our view of Saddam's growing threat and the view as expressed by the president in his speech." He went on to say, however, that the chance that the Iraqi leader would turn weapons over to al Qaeda was "low, in part because it would constitute an admission that he possesses" weapons of mass destruction.
On Oct. 9, the CIA sent a letter to Graham and Levin informing them that no additional portions of the intelligence report would be made public.
Report Cast Doubt on Iraq-Al Qaeda Connection
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 22, 2003; Page A01
In a nationally televised address last October in which he sought to rally congressional support for a resolution authorizing war against Iraq, President Bush declared that the government of Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat to the United States by outlining what he said was evidence pointing to its ongoing ties with al Qaeda.
A still-classified national intelligence report circulating within the Bush administration at the time, however, portrayed a far less clear picture about the link between Iraq and al Qaeda than the one presented by the president, according to U.S. intelligence analysts and congressional sources who have read the report.
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which represented the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community, contained cautionary language about Iraq's connections with al Qaeda and warnings about the reliability of conflicting reports by Iraqi defectors and captured al Qaeda members about the ties, the sources said.
"There has always been an internal argument within the intelligence community about the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda," said a senior intelligence official, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. "The NIE had alternative views."
Similar questions have been raised about Bush's statement in his State of the Union address last January that the British had reported Iraq was attempting to buy uranium in Africa, which the president used to back up his assertion that Iraq had a reconstituted nuclear weapons program. In that case, senior U.S. officials said, the CIA 10 months earlier sent a former senior American diplomat to visit Niger who reported that country's officials said they had not made any agreement to aid the sale of uranium to Iraq and indicated documents alleging that were forged. Details of that CIA Niger inquiry were not shared with the White House, although the agency succeeded in deleting that allegation from other administration statements.
Bush, in his speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, made his case that Iraq had ties with al Qaeda, by mentioning several items such as high-level contacts that "go back a decade." He said "we've learned" that Iraq trained al Qaeda members "in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." Although the president offered essentially circumstantial evidence, his remarks contained none of the caveats about the reliability of this information as contained in the national intelligence document, sources said.
The presidential address crystallized the assertion that had been made by senior administration officials for months that the combination of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons and a terrorist organization, such as al Qaeda, committed to attacking the United States posed a grave and imminent threat. Within four days, the House and Senate overwhelmingly endorsed a resolution granting the president authority to go to war.
The handling of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programs and its links to al Qaeda has come under increased scrutiny on Capitol Hill, with some leading Democrats charging that the administration exaggerated the case against Hussein by publicizing intelligence that supported its policy and keeping contradictory information under wraps. The House intelligence committee opened a closed-door review into the matter last week; its Senate counterpart is planning similar hearings. The Senate Armed Services Committee is also investigating the issue.
Bush has defended his handling of intelligence before the war, calling his critics "revisionist historians."
"The intelligence services of many nations concluded that he had illegal weapons, and the regime refused to provide evidence they had been destroyed," Bush said in his weekly radio address yesterday. He vowed to search for "the true extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, no matter how long it takes."
Questions about the reliability of the intelligence that Bush cited in his Cincinnati address were raised shortly after the speech by ranking Democrats on the Senate intelligence and armed services panel. They pressed the CIA to declassify more of the 90-page National Intelligence Estimate than a 28-page "white paper" on Iraq distributed on Capitol Hill on Oct. 4.
In one of the more notable statements made by the president, Bush said that "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," and added: "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."
Bush did not indicate that the consensus of U.S. intelligence analysts was that Hussein would launch a terrorist attack against the United States only if he thought he could not stop the United States from invading Iraq. The intelligence report had said that the Iraqi president might decide to give chemical or biological agents to terrorists, such as al Qaeda, for use against the United States only as a "last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him." And it said this would be an "extreme step" by Hussein.
These conclusions in the report were contained in a letter CIA Director George J. Tenet sent to Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), then the chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, the day of Bush's speech.
While Bush also spoke of Iraq and al Qaeda having had "high-level contacts that go back a decade," the president did not say -- as the classified intelligence report asserted -- that the contacts occurred in the early 1990s, when Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, was living in Sudan and his organization was in its infancy. At the time, the report said, bin Laden and Hussein were united primarily by their common hostility to the Saudi Arabian monarchy, according to sources. Bush also did not refer to the report's conclusion that those early contacts had not led to any known continuing high-level relationships between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda, the sources said.
The president said some al Qaeda leaders had fled Afghanistan to Iraq and referred to one "very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year." It was a reference to Abu Mussab Zarqawi, a Jordanian. U.S. intelligence already had concluded that Zarqawi was not an al Qaeda member but the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al Qaeda adherents, the sources said.
As for Bush's claim that Iraq had trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and use of poisons and deadly gases, sources with knowledge of the classified intelligence estimate said the report's conclusion was that this had not been satisfactorily confirmed.
"We've learned," Bush said in his speech, "that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." But the president did not mention that when national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had referred the previous month to such training, she had said the source was al Qaeda captives.
The CIA briefed congressional committees about the National Intelligence Estimate but did not deliver the classified version until the evening of Oct. 1, just before a Senate intelligence committee hearing the next day, congressional sources said. At that closed-door session, several senators raised questions about qualifying statements made in the report, which was circulated only among senior national security officials.
On Oct. 4, three days before the president's speech, at the urging of members of Congress, the CIA released its declassified excerpts from the intelligence report as a "white paper" on Iraq's weapons programs and al Qaeda links. The members wanted a public document to which they could refer during floor debates on the Iraq war resolution.
The white paper did contain passages that hinted at the intelligence community's lack of certitude about Iraq's weapons programs and al Qaeda ties, but it omitted some qualifiers contained in the classified version. It also did not include qualifiers made at the Oct. 2 hearing by an unidentified senior intelligence official who, during his testimony, challenged some of the administration's public statements on Iraq.
"Senator Graham felt that they declassified only things that supported their position and left classified what did not support that policy," said Bob Filippone, Graham's deputy chief of staff. Graham, now a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, opposed the war resolution.
When the white paper appeared, Graham and Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), an intelligence panel member and at that time chairman of the Armed Services Committee, asked to have additional portions of the intelligence estimate as well as portions of the testimony at the Oct. 2 hearing made public.
On the day of Bush's speech, Tenet sent a letter to Graham with some of the additional information. The letter drew attention because it seemed to contradict Bush's statements that Hussein would give weapons to al Qaeda.
Tenet released a statement on Oct. 8 that said, "There is no inconsistency between our view of Saddam's growing threat and the view as expressed by the president in his speech." He went on to say, however, that the chance that the Iraqi leader would turn weapons over to al Qaeda was "low, in part because it would constitute an admission that he possesses" weapons of mass destruction.
On Oct. 9, the CIA sent a letter to Graham and Levin informing them that no additional portions of the intelligence report would be made public.
link
Bush Faced Dwindling Data on Iraq Nuclear Bid
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 16, 2003; Page A01
In recent days, as the Bush administration has defended its assertion in the president's State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy African uranium, officials have said it was only one bit of intelligence that indicated former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.
But a review of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggests that between Oct. 7, when President Bush made a speech laying out the case for military action against Hussein, and Jan. 28, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq.
By Jan. 28, in fact, the intelligence report concerning Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa -- although now almost entirely disproved -- was the only publicly unchallenged element of the administration's case that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program. That may explain why the administration strived to keep the information in the speech and attribute it to the British, even though the CIA had challenged it earlier.
For example, in his Oct. 7 speech, Bush said that "satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at [past nuclear] sites." He also cited Hussein's "numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists" as further evidence that the program was being reconstituted, along with Iraq's attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes "needed" for centrifuges used to enrich uranium.
But on Jan. 27 -- the day before the State of the Union address -- the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported to the U.N. Security Council that two months of inspections in Iraq had found that no prohibited nuclear activities had taken place at former Iraqi nuclear sites. As for Iraqi nuclear scientists, Mohamed ElBaradei told the Security Council, U.N. inspectors had "useful" interviews with some of them, though not in private. And preliminary analysis, he said, suggested that the aluminum tubes, "unless modified, would not be suitable for manufacturing centrifuges."
The next night, Bush delivered his speech, including the now-controversial 16-word sentence, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Of his October examples, only the aluminum tubes charge remained in January, but that allegation had a subtle caveat -- he described the tubes as merely "suitable" for nuclear weapons production. Without the statement on uranium, the allegation concerning aluminum tubes would have been the only nuclear-related action ascribed to Hussein since the early 1990s.
And the tubes had already been questioned not only by IAEA, but also by analysts in U.S. and British intelligence agencies.
The idea that Iraq was acquiring tubes for a nuclear program became public in September, shortly after the Bush administration began a campaign to marshal public, congressional and U.N. support for authority to attack Iraq if it did not disarm.
On Aug. 26, Vice President Cheney, the official most publicly vocal about Iraq as a nuclear threat, began the campaign when he told a Veterans of Foreign Wars audience: "Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon. Just how soon we cannot gauge."
On Sept. 8, the New York Times disclosed that intelligence showed that Iraq had "embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb" by trying to purchase "specially designed aluminum tubes" that unidentified administration sources believed were for centrifuges to enrich uranium.
The story referred to Bush "hardliners" who argued that action should be taken because if they waited for proof that Hussein had a nuclear weapon, "the first sign of a smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud."
That day, Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on CNN's "Late Edition" and confirmed the Times story. She said the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." She also said, "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons, but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Cheney also confirmed the Times story that day, on NBC's "Meet the Press," saying that "we don't have all the evidence," but enough of a picture "that tells us that he [Hussein] is in fact actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."
What neither Rice nor Cheney said at the time was that Baghdad's first attempts to purchase the aluminum tubes, more than a year earlier, had by Sept. 8 led to a fairly open disagreement in the U.S. intelligence community on whether the tubes were for centrifuges or for artillery rockets in Iraq's military program.
Analysts from the State and Energy departments said the tubes were too long and too thick for centrifuges; CIA and Pentagon analysts said they could be cut down and reamed out. Their debate was continuing as the agencies were putting together the still-classified national intelligence estimate on Hussein's weapons program.
In July, the United States had intercepted one shipment and obtained a tube; it was coated with a protective chemical that would have had to be removed if it were to be put to a nuclear purpose.
The intelligence estimate, completed in mid-September, reflected the different views, but the final judgment said that "most" analysts leaned toward the view that the tubes had a nuclear purpose. When the British dossier on Iraq's weapons program was published on Sept. 24, it referred to the tubes, but noted that "there is no definitive intelligence that it is destined for a nuclear program."
In his State of the Union address, Bush did not indicate any disagreement over the use of the tubes. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, however, outlined the arguments involved when he spoke eight days later before the Security Council, where inspectors already had challenged the U.S. position on them.
On March 7, ElBaradei gave his final report to the Security Council before his inspectors were removed from Iraq on March 18. His conclusion was that "the IAEA had found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq." He also said the documents that gave rise to the allegation that Iraq had tried to buy African uranium were forged.
On March 16, Cheney appeared again on "Meet the Press" and reiterated his views of the previous August about Hussein's nuclear program. "We know he's been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." The war began three days later.
Bush Faced Dwindling Data on Iraq Nuclear Bid
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 16, 2003; Page A01
In recent days, as the Bush administration has defended its assertion in the president's State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy African uranium, officials have said it was only one bit of intelligence that indicated former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.
But a review of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggests that between Oct. 7, when President Bush made a speech laying out the case for military action against Hussein, and Jan. 28, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq.
By Jan. 28, in fact, the intelligence report concerning Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa -- although now almost entirely disproved -- was the only publicly unchallenged element of the administration's case that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program. That may explain why the administration strived to keep the information in the speech and attribute it to the British, even though the CIA had challenged it earlier.
For example, in his Oct. 7 speech, Bush said that "satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at [past nuclear] sites." He also cited Hussein's "numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists" as further evidence that the program was being reconstituted, along with Iraq's attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes "needed" for centrifuges used to enrich uranium.
But on Jan. 27 -- the day before the State of the Union address -- the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported to the U.N. Security Council that two months of inspections in Iraq had found that no prohibited nuclear activities had taken place at former Iraqi nuclear sites. As for Iraqi nuclear scientists, Mohamed ElBaradei told the Security Council, U.N. inspectors had "useful" interviews with some of them, though not in private. And preliminary analysis, he said, suggested that the aluminum tubes, "unless modified, would not be suitable for manufacturing centrifuges."
The next night, Bush delivered his speech, including the now-controversial 16-word sentence, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Of his October examples, only the aluminum tubes charge remained in January, but that allegation had a subtle caveat -- he described the tubes as merely "suitable" for nuclear weapons production. Without the statement on uranium, the allegation concerning aluminum tubes would have been the only nuclear-related action ascribed to Hussein since the early 1990s.
And the tubes had already been questioned not only by IAEA, but also by analysts in U.S. and British intelligence agencies.
The idea that Iraq was acquiring tubes for a nuclear program became public in September, shortly after the Bush administration began a campaign to marshal public, congressional and U.N. support for authority to attack Iraq if it did not disarm.
On Aug. 26, Vice President Cheney, the official most publicly vocal about Iraq as a nuclear threat, began the campaign when he told a Veterans of Foreign Wars audience: "Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon. Just how soon we cannot gauge."
On Sept. 8, the New York Times disclosed that intelligence showed that Iraq had "embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb" by trying to purchase "specially designed aluminum tubes" that unidentified administration sources believed were for centrifuges to enrich uranium.
The story referred to Bush "hardliners" who argued that action should be taken because if they waited for proof that Hussein had a nuclear weapon, "the first sign of a smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud."
That day, Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on CNN's "Late Edition" and confirmed the Times story. She said the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." She also said, "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons, but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Cheney also confirmed the Times story that day, on NBC's "Meet the Press," saying that "we don't have all the evidence," but enough of a picture "that tells us that he [Hussein] is in fact actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."
What neither Rice nor Cheney said at the time was that Baghdad's first attempts to purchase the aluminum tubes, more than a year earlier, had by Sept. 8 led to a fairly open disagreement in the U.S. intelligence community on whether the tubes were for centrifuges or for artillery rockets in Iraq's military program.
Analysts from the State and Energy departments said the tubes were too long and too thick for centrifuges; CIA and Pentagon analysts said they could be cut down and reamed out. Their debate was continuing as the agencies were putting together the still-classified national intelligence estimate on Hussein's weapons program.
In July, the United States had intercepted one shipment and obtained a tube; it was coated with a protective chemical that would have had to be removed if it were to be put to a nuclear purpose.
The intelligence estimate, completed in mid-September, reflected the different views, but the final judgment said that "most" analysts leaned toward the view that the tubes had a nuclear purpose. When the British dossier on Iraq's weapons program was published on Sept. 24, it referred to the tubes, but noted that "there is no definitive intelligence that it is destined for a nuclear program."
In his State of the Union address, Bush did not indicate any disagreement over the use of the tubes. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, however, outlined the arguments involved when he spoke eight days later before the Security Council, where inspectors already had challenged the U.S. position on them.
On March 7, ElBaradei gave his final report to the Security Council before his inspectors were removed from Iraq on March 18. His conclusion was that "the IAEA had found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq." He also said the documents that gave rise to the allegation that Iraq had tried to buy African uranium were forged.
On March 16, Cheney appeared again on "Meet the Press" and reiterated his views of the previous August about Hussein's nuclear program. "We know he's been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." The war began three days later.
Do you really think in the 4 years of not having the UN there Saddam wasnt trying to get a nuke program up and running? What motivation would he have to kickout the UN if he didnt have a grander plan?
So we have a question call on Bushs part. Still doesnt look like a lie.
So where is the flood of lies we should be expecting?
So we have a question call on Bushs part. Still doesnt look like a lie.
So where is the flood of lies we should be expecting?
A random sampling of outright LIES by Geroge Bush:
1. From the 2000 Presidential debate with Al Gore:
Bush: "There's only been one governor ever elected to back-to-back four year terms and that was me."
Fact: The governors who served two consecutive four-year terms (meeting Bush's statement criteria are): Coke R. Stevenson (2 consecutive 4-year terms) August 4, 1941-January 21, 1947. Allan Shivers (2 consecutive four-year terms) July 11, 1949-January 15, 1957. Price Daniel (2 consecutive four-year terms) January 15, 1957-January 15, 1963. John Connally (2 consecutive four-year terms) January 15, 1963-January 21, 1969. Dolph Briscoe (2 consecutive four-year terms) January 16, 1973-January 16, 1979. George W. Bush (2 consecutive four-year terms) January 17, 1995 to present. Source: Texas State Libraries and Archives Commission.
2. Veterans Health Care, 1/17/03:
Bush: ?Having been here and seeing the care that these troops get is comforting for me and Laura. We are -- should and must provide the best care for anybody who is willing to put their life in harm's way.?
Bush's visit came on the same day that the Administration announced it is immediately cutting off access to its health care system approximately 164,000 veterans [W. Post, 1/17/03].
3. Lying about Ken Lay, 1/10.2002:
"First of all, Ken Lay is a supporter, and I got to know Ken Lay when he was a head of the -- what they call the Governor's Business Council in Texas. He was a supporter of Ann Richards (former Texas governor) in my run against her in 1994, and she named him head of the Governor's Business Council and I decided to leave him in place, for the sake of continuity. And that's when I first got to know Ken and worked with Ken, and he supported my candidacy . . . "
The truth
In fact GWBush knew and associated with Ken Lay long before 1994 and Bush was much closer to Lay than just re-appointing him to a business council.
In the summer of 1991, Lay told the Dallas Morning News that in 1989, when he was spearheading a project to locate the Bush Presidential Library in Houston (Bush I), "That's when I probably spent more quality time with George W. Bush." 1989 -- not 1994.
Lay headed the local host committee for the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston where, according to what he told the Houston Chronicle he "worked closely with George W. Bush." 1992 -- not 1994.
In a March 2001 interview with PBS, Lay told a much different story from the lie told by GWBush. Lay stated that he had been "a strong financial and political supporter of, first, President Bush, Sr., when he was running for president in 1980. . . I'm very close to the family. . . I was very close to George W. and had a lot of respect for him . . . " 1980 -- not 1994.
In a video of an October 2000 meeting of Enron employees, Lay stated "I strongly supported Bush when he ran for governor of Texas both times." In fact, Bush sent Lay a letter in 1997 in which he referred to Lay as one of his "old friends."
What about Bush's claim that Lay had supported Ann Richards, former Texas governor? Lay and his wife contributed $12,500 to Richards. They gave $47,500 to Bush and Enron's political action committee gave Bush $146,500 (the PAC gave Richards $19,500).
From 1994 on, Lay and his wife gave: $122,500 for the two Bush gubernatorial campaigns; $100,000 for his inauguration; $250,000 for the Bush I presidential library. Enron and Enron executives gave $736,680 to Bush for his political campaigns, his election recount, and his inauguration.
And there you go, three direct and fully documented LIES by George W. Bush, just a random sample from a history of his lying and lying and lying. That man's pants are on fire!
1. From the 2000 Presidential debate with Al Gore:
Bush: "There's only been one governor ever elected to back-to-back four year terms and that was me."
Fact: The governors who served two consecutive four-year terms (meeting Bush's statement criteria are): Coke R. Stevenson (2 consecutive 4-year terms) August 4, 1941-January 21, 1947. Allan Shivers (2 consecutive four-year terms) July 11, 1949-January 15, 1957. Price Daniel (2 consecutive four-year terms) January 15, 1957-January 15, 1963. John Connally (2 consecutive four-year terms) January 15, 1963-January 21, 1969. Dolph Briscoe (2 consecutive four-year terms) January 16, 1973-January 16, 1979. George W. Bush (2 consecutive four-year terms) January 17, 1995 to present. Source: Texas State Libraries and Archives Commission.
2. Veterans Health Care, 1/17/03:
Bush: ?Having been here and seeing the care that these troops get is comforting for me and Laura. We are -- should and must provide the best care for anybody who is willing to put their life in harm's way.?
Bush's visit came on the same day that the Administration announced it is immediately cutting off access to its health care system approximately 164,000 veterans [W. Post, 1/17/03].
3. Lying about Ken Lay, 1/10.2002:
"First of all, Ken Lay is a supporter, and I got to know Ken Lay when he was a head of the -- what they call the Governor's Business Council in Texas. He was a supporter of Ann Richards (former Texas governor) in my run against her in 1994, and she named him head of the Governor's Business Council and I decided to leave him in place, for the sake of continuity. And that's when I first got to know Ken and worked with Ken, and he supported my candidacy . . . "
The truth
In fact GWBush knew and associated with Ken Lay long before 1994 and Bush was much closer to Lay than just re-appointing him to a business council.
In the summer of 1991, Lay told the Dallas Morning News that in 1989, when he was spearheading a project to locate the Bush Presidential Library in Houston (Bush I), "That's when I probably spent more quality time with George W. Bush." 1989 -- not 1994.
Lay headed the local host committee for the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston where, according to what he told the Houston Chronicle he "worked closely with George W. Bush." 1992 -- not 1994.
In a March 2001 interview with PBS, Lay told a much different story from the lie told by GWBush. Lay stated that he had been "a strong financial and political supporter of, first, President Bush, Sr., when he was running for president in 1980. . . I'm very close to the family. . . I was very close to George W. and had a lot of respect for him . . . " 1980 -- not 1994.
In a video of an October 2000 meeting of Enron employees, Lay stated "I strongly supported Bush when he ran for governor of Texas both times." In fact, Bush sent Lay a letter in 1997 in which he referred to Lay as one of his "old friends."
What about Bush's claim that Lay had supported Ann Richards, former Texas governor? Lay and his wife contributed $12,500 to Richards. They gave $47,500 to Bush and Enron's political action committee gave Bush $146,500 (the PAC gave Richards $19,500).
From 1994 on, Lay and his wife gave: $122,500 for the two Bush gubernatorial campaigns; $100,000 for his inauguration; $250,000 for the Bush I presidential library. Enron and Enron executives gave $736,680 to Bush for his political campaigns, his election recount, and his inauguration.
And there you go, three direct and fully documented LIES by George W. Bush, just a random sample from a history of his lying and lying and lying. That man's pants are on fire!
We understand you're pissed your Mom confiscated your magazines. Being 13 isn't easy. But posting the warning your Mom hung over your custom Speedracer bed is just a tragic cry for help, and reflects poorly on you. Now put your jammies on, douse that light, and suppress that urge to touch yourself.
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