ShadesOfGrey
Golden Member
It seems that some people here have jumped on the bandwagon of the latest leftists who types up a tirade against Bush. This month's "journalist" is Murray[EDIT from Peter] Waas and his latests rant claiming Bush hid stuff from a Hill panel. While I give Waas credit for carrying the water for the fringe left, he should probably stick to be a political hack instead of trying to pretend to be a "journalist" or some sort of historian because he does neither very well at all. I think between his rapid response job for Kerry, his UN sposored propaganda blog, and his revisionist tirades, he has been shown to be the hack he is.
The debunking begins in the link.
A rather sound debunking of Waas' revisionism.
The debunking begins in the link.
A rather sound debunking of Waas' revisionism.
I was going to wait with this until tomorrow, but the most recent Murray Waas article has gotten such play in the blogosphere that it needed to get what was coming to it sooner rather than later. Waas with this article reconfirms the media's push to revise history in order to take down the Bush administration for "lying". Oddly enough, his toying with history strongly resembles Joshua Marshall's earlier gig in this tour. Throw in a little Shusterism and we have a recycled propaganda piece. I sure feel like a broken record, having to debunk the same spin and historical revisions time and time again. As a faithful servant to the truth, which is so painfully obvious here, I must carry on. Let's get started.
I was originally going to have a wider focus with this post, but I will keep it to blatant historical revisionism. Waas repeats this Shusterism:
"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002.
This was supposedly evidence of:
But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.
The quote from Bush came from a photo-op with the president of Colombia. How many Americans saw this? Besides that, the full context of the quote is this:
Both of them need to be dealt with. The war on terror, you can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror. And so it's a comparison that is -- I can't make because I can't distinguish between the two, because they're both equally as bad, and equally as evil, and equally as destructive.
Leaving out this context, you'd think that Bush was saying they were indistinguishable because they were "one in the same" as Shuster earlier claimed. The full quote shows this to be wholly false, as Bush said they were indistinguishable because they were both threats that needed to be dealt with, and were equally nefarious. Bush makes no attempt to claim that al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were in fact collaborating, and preceded that quote with the following:
They're both risks, they're both dangerous. The difference, of course, is that al Qaeda likes to hijack governments. Saddam Hussein is a dictator of a government. Al Qaeda hides, Saddam doesn't, but the danger is, is that they work in concert. The danger is, is that al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world.
So I'd like to ask Shuster and Waas and Marshall: how can you become something you already supposedly are? Bush here expresses their view that it was a danger that al Qaeda would become a partner of Saddam, not that he was. If that's all Waas can dig up on Bush to make his case, I am seriously worried about his general theme?
Let's move on to Cheney, shall we?
The most explosive of allegations came from Cheney, who said that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, had met in Prague, in the Czech Republic, with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, five months before the attacks. On December 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press: "t's pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in [the Czech Republic] last April, several months before the attack."
Cheney continued to make the charge, even after he was briefed, according to government records and officials, that both the CIA and the FBI discounted the possibility of such a meeting.
Waas is channeling Marshall here. They are riding on The Less You Know?. Both the 9/11 Commission and the SSCI report did not discount the possibility of the meeting, and I have shown the timeline of Cheney's statements versus what the FBI, the CIA, and the Czechs assessed. The conclusion is that Cheney kept his statements in line with what they assessed, changing his rhetoric accordingly. So who or what are these "government records and officials" Waas is referring to?
The conclusions and reporting of the various commissions and intelligence reports don't matter, I guess, since Waas only cherry-picks information from them:
Credit card and phone records appear to demonstrate that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va., at the time of the alleged meeting, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials.
Yet the SSCI report says:
Committee staff also interviewed FBI analysts regarding these alleged meetings, and the analysts stated that they agreed with the CIA assessment and had no further information suggesting or disproving that the meetings had taken place.
Those phone calls, yet again, Mr. Waas, I show you the 9/11 Commission Report:
On April 6, 9, 10, and 11, Atta?s cellular telephone was used numerous times to call various lodging establishments in Florida from cell sites within Florida. We cannot confirm that he placed those calls.
Well, we can't have any of that hanging out there for Waas to get discredited, he has to repeat this canard:
Regarding the alleged meeting in Prague, the commission concluded: "We do not believe that such a meeting occurred."
The 9/11 Commission Report never states this. A 9/11 Commission statement prior its release, however, does:
Based on the evidence available?including investigation by Czech and U.S. authorities plus detainee reporting?we do not believe that such a meeting occurred. The FBI?s investigation places him in Virginia as of April 4, as evidenced by this bank surveillance camera shot of Atta withdrawing $8,000 from his account. Atta was back in Florida by April 11, if not before. Indeed, investigation has established that, on April 6, 9, 10, and 11, Atta?s cellular telephone was used numerous times to call Florida phone numbers from cell sites within Florida.
This staff statement was made June 16, 2004. The 9/11 Commission Report was released the next month, and it no longer concluded that the meeting did not happen. Essentially, Waas is cherry-picking outdated information to make his case, even when newer information contradicts it. Why? Well, if he didn't, he couldn't have said:
Still, Cheney did not concede the point. "We have never been able to prove that there was a connection to 9/11," Cheney said after the commission announced it could not find significant links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. But the vice president again pointed out the existence of a Czech intelligence service report that Atta and the Iraqi agent had met in Prague. "That's never been proved. But it's never been disproved," Cheney said.
Cheney's statement is exactly the same as that of the CIA, the FBI, the 9/11 Commission, the SSCI, and even Democratic 9/11 Commission Vice Chair Lee Hamilton:
This meeting is simply not proven one way or the other.
So Waas, what exactly is Cheney supposed to be conceding? To your personal opinion on the issue that is contradicted by everyone else including the Democratic Vice Chair of the 9/11 Commission? It should be Waas conceding that he is wrong and that Cheney's statements are reflected by the very sources he claims contradict him.
Next Marshall, I mean Waas (gee, how do I get them confused?) rearranges the historical timeline to play Gotcha with Cheney and his aides:
On September 16, 2002, two days before the CIA produced a major assessment of Iraq's ties to terrorism, the Naval Reserve officers conducted a briefing for Libby and Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser to President Bush.
In a memorandum to Wolfowitz, Feith wrote: "The briefing went very well and generated further interest from Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby." Both men, the memo went on, requested follow-up material, most notably a "chronology of Atta's travels," a reference to the discredited allegation of an Atta-Iraqi meeting in Prague.
Discredited allegation? Waas, it still isn't discredited, and most certainly was not by September 16, 2002. If it was "discredited", why did George Tenet, Director of the CIA at the time, say the following in October 2002:
As you may have read in the press, Atta allegedly traveled outside the US in early April 2001 to meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, we are still working to confirm or deny this allegation.
But Waas says it was "discredited". The Czech government envoy to the UN in November 2002:
"The meeting took place," Hynek Kmonicek, a former deputy foreign minister, told The Prague Post flatly in a New York City interview.
Oh yes, it was "discredited" all right, in the minds of Marshall, Shuster, Waas, and everyone who believes their remixing of history. The danger with this is that their remixes are more popular than the master of the remix, Sean "Puffy" Combs, the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy, formerly known as P. Diddy, now known as Diddy?
Think Waas is done trying to play games with September 16, 2002? Oh, you'd be so wrong:
In their presentation, the naval reserve briefers excluded the fact that the FBI and CIA had developed evidence that the alleged meeting had never taken place, and that even the Czechs had disavowed it.
So that's why the director of the CIA, and the Czechs were still saying months afterwards that they were either still looking into it, or asserting it as a fact! Apparently the Czechs were playing a months-long game of the Upside Down Game. Silly, silly Czechs. I'm glad Waas is here to tell me the truth. The Democratic Vice Chair of the 9/11 Commission? Obviously playing the Upside Down Game years later, along with the 9/11 Commission Report, the SSCI report, and everything else.
Does Waas want me to take him seriously? I can use Google, you know? I cannot take the jugglers of history seriously, the Marshalls, the Shusters, the Waases. I will repeat again my thoughts on what this all means: if these journalists and reporters have to remix history to such a ridiculous degree to get their storylines plausibility, what does that say about the underlying message?
Waas concludes with this:
Those grievances were also perhaps illustrated by comments that Vice President Cheney himself wrote on one of Feith's reports detailing purported evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In barely legible handwriting, Cheney wrote in the margin of the report:
"This is very good indeed ? Encouraging ? Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."
Was Cheney wrong?
