:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 7.17.2003 ::

:: Son of a Bush & the WMD deception ::

From MoveOn.org:

Three weeks ago, MoveOn launched a petition asking Congress to create an independent commission to investigate whether the Bush Administration manipulated and distorted evidence to take the country to war in Iraq. Over 190,000 of us joined the effort. Now Congress is literally taking up our call: Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has written a bill that would create just such a commission, and it's already co-sponsored by a wide array of moderate Democrats -- including many who voted for the war.

This commission can really happen -- and the truth about the Bush Administration's manipulation of evidence can really come out -- but we'll need your help. We're launching a drive to get every member of Congress to personally pledge to support and vote for the independent commission. Please take a moment to ask Congressman Bartlett to pledge today.

Tell Congress to Do Its Job!

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of citizens are asking their Members of Congress to pledge to support an independent investigative commission on WMD evidence.

If you sign right now, your comment may be among those read on the House floor by some of the Representatives pushing this resolution. Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), George Miller (D-CA), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), and a number of others are looking forward to hearing what you have to say and reading some of the messages into the Congressional Record on the House floor.

It's hardly a secret that members of the Bush Administration used misleading and scanty evidence to bolster their case. As US News and World Report noted in early June, even Colin Powell became alarmed at the level of intelligence distortion. When he read the first draft of his speech to the UN -- prepared for Powell by Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff -- he was so upset at the weakness of some of the evidence that he lost his temper, throwing several pages in the air and declaring, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit." (US News and World Report, 6/9/03)

ALSO:
Truth and Consequences
By Bruce B. Auster, Mark Mazzetti and Edward T. Pound
US News & World Report

Monday 02 June 2003

New questions about U.S. intelligence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass terror

On the evening of February 1, two dozen American officials gathered in a spacious conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va.

The time had come to make the public case for war against Iraq. For six hours that Saturday, the men and women of the Bush administration argued about what Secretary of State Colin Powell should--and should not--say at the United Nations Security Council four days later. Not all the secret intelligence about Saddam Hussein's misdeeds, they found, stood up to close scrutiny. At one point during the rehearsal, Powell tossed several pages in the air. "I'm not reading this," he declared. "This is bulls- - -."

Just how good was America's intelligence on Iraq? Seven weeks after the end of the war, no hard evidence has been turned up on the ground to support the charge that Iraq posed an imminent threat to U.S. national security--no chemical weapons in the field, no Scud missiles in the western desert, no biological agents. At least not yet. As a result, questions are being raised about whether the Bush administration overstated the case against Saddam Hussein. History shows that the Iraqi regime used weapons of mass terror against Iraqi Kurds and during the war against Iran in the 1980s. But it now appears that American intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs was sometimes sketchy, occasionally politicized, and frequently the subject of passionate disputes inside the government. Today, the CIA is conducting a review of its prewar intelligence, at the request of the House Intelligence Committee, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has conceded that Iraq may have destroyed its chemical weapons months before the war.

posted by me

:: 10:28:00 PM [+] ::
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