Bush has to go before we can make any sustainable progress in the USA.
Only public opinion and/or a Democratic Congress can stop funds for Iraq.
The new book "Hubris", and the Senate report that just came out, blow
Only public opinion and/or a Democratic Congress can stop funds for Iraq.
The new book "Hubris", and the Senate report that just came out, blow
Bush's Iraq war lies right out of the water. Many more details:
-----------start. Please forward widely. Please register to vote. Emphasis added.----------
September 06, 2006
HUBRIS: The Press Release
HUBRIS: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War starts arriving in bookstores today--though it may take a day or two to reach all the stores (given that the release date was pushed up). Below is a copy of the press release that is being sent out by Crown. It teases just some of the revelations in the book. As for the boilerplate language hailing the book, the Crown PR team is responsible for this. But, of course, it's all true.
******
"Hubris is a bold and provocative book that will quickly become an explosive part of the national debate on how we got involved in Iraq." -- Tom Brokaw
"The selling of
Bush's Iraq debacle is one of the most important-and appalling-stories of the last half-century, and Michael Isikoff and David Corn have reported the hell out of it." -- Hendrik Hertzberg, Senior Editor, The New Yorker
March 2003: The United States invades Iraq.
September 2006: The world finds out why.
HUBRIS
The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War
The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War
by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
What was really behind the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq? As George W. Bush steered the nation to war,
who spoke the truth and who tried to hide it? HUBRIS: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (Crown, September 8, 2006) takes us behind the scenes at the Bush White House, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and Congress to answer all the vital questions about how the Bush administration came to invade Iraq. HUBRIS, a gripping narrative, is filled with new revelations. The book disclosures include:
* President Bush was driven by a visceral hatred of Saddam
Hussein, which he privately demonstrated in expletive-laden tirades against the Iraqi dictator. In May 2002--months before he asked Congress for authority to attack Saddam-Bush bluntly revealed his ultimate game plan in a candid moment with two aides. When told that reporter Helen Thomas was questioning the need to oust Saddam by force, Bush snapped: "Did you tell her I intend to kick his sorry mother fucking ass all over the Mideast?" In a meeting with congressional leaders, the President angrily thrust his middle finger inches in front of the face of Senator Tom Daschle to illustrate Saddam's attitude toward the United States.
* As part of an aggressive prewar covert action program--codenamed Anabasis (after an ancient text about a botched invasion of Babylon)--the CIA was authorized by the White House in the winter of 2002 to blow up targets in Iraq and engage in "direct action" (an agency euphemism for assassination) to weaken Saddam's
regime and to prepare for his ouster by the U.S. military. For Anabasis, the agency smuggled Iraqi exiles to a top-secret site in the Nevada desert and trained them in sabotage and explosives. The Iraqi force, known as the Scorpions, was being trained to seize an isolated Iraqi military post-in order to create a provocation that could trigger a war with Iraq.
* When Bush was first briefed that no WMDs had been found in Iraq, he was totally unfazed and asked few questions. "I'm not sure I've spoken to anyone at that level who seemed less inquisitive," the briefer told the authors.
* Colin Powell remains intensely bitter and angry about his UN Security Council Speech, during which he presented the case for war. After it became clear that much of his speech was wrong, he refused to have anything to do with CIA director George Tenet. "It's annoying to me," Powell told the authors. "Everybody focuses on my
presentation....Well the same goddamn case was presented to the U.S. Senate and the Congress and they voted for [Bush's Iraq] resolution....Why aren't they outraged....The same case was presented to the President. Why isn'' the President outraged? It's always, 'Gee, Powell, you made this speech to the UN.'"
* After the invasion, Dick Cheney's aides desperately sifted through raw intelligence nuggets in search of any evidence that would justify the war. On one occasion they sent the WMD hunters in Iraq a satellite photo that they suspected showed a hiding place for WMDs. But it was only an overhead photo of a watering hole for cows.
* A critical memo in the CIA leak case was based on notes of a State Department official that were (as this official told the authors) inaccurate. This memo reported that former ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife was a CIA employee who played a key role in sending him on his trip to
Niger. Yet the State Department official now acknowledges his notes did not describe Valerie Wilson's role accurately.
* At the time of her outing, Valerie Wilson was an undercover officer in the CIA whose mission had been to gather intelligence about WMDs in Iraq. She was the operations manager of the Joint Task Force on Iraq, a unit in the clandestine service of the CIA. This unit desperately tried to obtain evidence to back up the Bush administration's assertions about Saddam's WMDs, yet it found no such evidence.
* Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, was the original leaker in the CIA leak case. But as he was disclosing information to columnist Robert Novak, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and other top White House aides were engaged in a fierce campaign to discredit Joseph Wilson. Rove even told MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews that the Wilsons "were trying to screw the White House so the White House was
going to screw them back."
* Many of the White House's most dramatic claims about the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction were repeatedly questioned by senior members of the U.S. intelligence community-but these dissents and views were suppressed or ignored by the White House. Admiral Thomas Wilson, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency until May 2002, is quoted in the book as casting doubt on virtually the entire White House case for an invasion of Iraq. "I didn't really think [Iraq] had a nuclear program," retired Admiral Wilson told the authors. "I didn't think [Saddam and Iraq] were an immediate threat on WMD."
* The CIA missed an obvious clue that showed that the infamous Niger documents--the basis for Bush's false statement in a State of the Union speech--were crude forgeries. The clue was a bizarre companion document detailing a supposed global alliance of rogue nations (including Iraq
and Iran)--a notion so unlikely that one State Department intelligence analyst immediately labeled it a hoax. The CIA also blew the call on these documents partly because an officer misplaced the papers.
* U.S. intelligence officials suspected Iranian intelligence was trying to influence U.S. decision-making through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress-yet they felt they could do nothing about it because the INC had support within the White House and Pentagon.
* Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle seriously doubted the case for war-and questioned the top-secret briefings they received directly from Cheney. One senior Republican, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, warned the President in a September 2002 meeting that Bush would be stuck in a "quagmire" if he invaded Iraq. But Armey and others were afraid for political reasons to challenge the White House on the prewar intelligence.
* An obscure academic, derided as a virtual crackpot by U.S. law enforcement and the intelligence community, greatly influenced top Bush administration officials, who adopted her farfetched theory that Saddam was the source of most of the terrorism in the world, including the 9/11 attacks. But, oddly, this researcher, Laurie Mylroie, had once been a Saddam apologist and had engaged in secret, back-door diplomacy aimed at brokering a peace accord between Israel and Iraq. After Saddam invaded Kuwait, Mylroie developed bizarre allegations about Saddam and terrorism. Her theories were debunked by the CIA and FBI, yet Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz embraced them, cited them in official meetings, and repeatedly pressed the agency and bureau to come up with evidence to substantiate Mylroie's work.
* The intelligence community's top nuclear experts were afraid to challenge publicly the Bush administration's claim that
Iraq had obtained aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program, though they disagreed with this assessment. The tubes case was relentlessly pressed by one CIA analyst whose technical expertise did not match those of these scientists and whose name is revealed for the first time in HUBRIS.
* The CIA came close to recruiting Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, to be an American spy. Through a Lebanese journalist, Sabri passed word to the CIA's station chief in Paris that Iraq had no active nuclear or WMD programs. But senior CIA and White House officials dismissed the intelligence and opposed the effort to recruit Sabri, fearing it would undercut the case for an invasion. The chief of the CIA's Iraq Operations Group told the
Paris station chief, "One of these days you're going to get it. This is not about intelligence. This is about regime change."
* Even as colleagues of Judith Miller at The New York Times were suspicious of her reporting on Iraq's WMDs, her editors stubbornly stood by her. HUBRIS details how some of the Times' most significant-and wrong-stories about Saddam's WMDs came to be written.
* CIA analysts, over the objections of other intelligence community analysts, rigged a post-invasion report to show that a trailer found in Iraq was a mobile bioweapons lab.
* Before the invasion, Bush and General Tommy Franks only briefly discussed how Iraq would
be secured after the invasion-and did so in the most general terms. The one idea they discussed--appointing a "lord mayor" in each Iraqi city and town--was not even shared with the military officers in charge of drawing up the plans for a post-invasion Iraq.
* Karl Rove and his lawyer did not turn over a critical piece of evidence in the CIA leak case (a document covered by a subpoena from the special prosecutor) for nearly a year.
HUBRIS connects the dots between George W. Bush's outbursts at Saddam Hussein, the bitter battles between the CIA and the White House, the fights within the intelligence community over Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, the real reason Valerie Plame
was outed, and a top reporter's ties to wily Iraqi exiles trying to start a war. Written by veteran reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn, this is the inside story of how President Bush took the nation to war using faulty and fraudulent intelligence. It is a news-making account of conspiracy, backstabbing, bureaucratic ineptitude, journalistic malfeasance, and, especially, arrogance.
Posted by David Corn at September 6, 2006 11:38 AM
-------------------end------------------
------------next article begins. Emphasis added.-----------
Senate: Saddam saw al-Qaida as threat
By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer
September 8, 2006
WASHINGTON -
Saddam Hussein regarded al-Qaida as a threat rather than a possible ally, a Senate report says, contradicting assertions President Bush has used to build support for the war in Iraq.
Released Friday, the report discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that before the war, Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.
Saddam told U.S. officials after his capture that he had not cooperated with Osama bin Laden even though he acknowledged that officials in his government had met with the al-Qaida leader, according to FBI summaries cited in the Senate report.
"Saddam only expressed negative sentiments about bin Laden," Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi leader's top aide, told the FBI.
The report also faults intelligence gathering in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion.
As recently as an Aug. 21 news conference, Bush said people should "imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein" with the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and "who had relations with Zarqawi."
Democrats contended that the administration continues to use faulty intelligence, including assertions of a link between Saddam's government and the recently killed al-Zarqawi, to justify the war in Iraq.
They also said, in remarks attached to Friday's Senate Intelligence Committee document, that former CIA Director George Tenet had modified his position on the terrorist link at the request of administration policymakers.
Republicans said the document, which compares prewar intelligence with post-invasion findings on Iraq's weapons and on terrorist groups, broke little new ground. And they said Democrats were distorting it for political purposes.
A previous report in 2004 made clear the intelligence agencies' "massive failures," said Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., a member of the committee. "Yet to make a giant leap in logic to claim that the Bush administration intentionally misled the nation or manipulated intelligence is simply not warranted."
White House press secretary Tony Snow said the report was "nothing new."
A second part of the report concluded that false information from the Iraqi National Congress, an anti-Saddam group led by then-exile Ahmed Chalabi, was used to support key U.S. intelligence assessments on Iraq.
It said U.S. intelligence agents put out numerous red flags about the reliability of INC sources but the intelligence community made a "serious error" and used one source who concocted a story that Iraq was building mobile biological weapons laboratories.
The report also said that in 2002 the National Security Council directed that funding for the INC should continue "despite warnings from both the CIA, which terminated its relationship with the INC in December 1996, and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), that the INC was penetrated by hostile intelligence services, including the Iranians."
According to the report, postwar findings indicate that Saddam "was distrustful of al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime."
It said al-Zarqawi was in Baghdad from May until late November 2002. But "postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture al-Zarqawi and that the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi."
In June 2004, Bush defended Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that Saddam had "long-established ties" with al-Qaida. "Zarqawi is the best evidence of connection to al-Qaida affiliates and al-Qaida," the president said.
The report concludes that postwar findings do not support a 2002 intelligence report that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, possessed biological weapons or had ever developed mobile facilities for producing biological warfare agents.
"The report is a devastating indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration's unrelenting, misleading and deceptive attempts to convince the American people that Saddam Hussein was linked with al-Qaida," said Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., a member of the committee.
Levin and Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the panel, said Tenet told the committee last July that in 2002 he had complied with an administration request "to say something about not being inconsistent with what the president had said" about the Saddam-terrorist link.
They said that on Oct. 7, 2002, the same day Bush gave a speech speaking of such a link, the CIA had sent a declassified letter to the committee saying it would be an "extreme step" for Saddam to assist Islamist terrorists in attacking the United States.
They said Tenet acknowledged to the committee that subsequently issuing a statement that there was no inconsistency between the president's speech and the CIA viewpoint was "the wrong thing to do."
Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said the mistakes of prewar intelligence have long been known and "the additional views of the committee's Democrats are little more than a rehashing of the same unfounded allegations they've used for over three years."
The panel report is Phase II of an analysis of prewar intelligence on Iraq. The first phase, issued in July 2004, focused on the CIA's failings in its estimates of Iraq's weapons program.
The second phase had been delayed as Republicans and Democrats fought over what information should be declassified and how far the committee should delve into the question of whether policymakers may have manipulated intelligence to make the case for war.
Committee member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said he planned to ask for an investigation into the amount of information remaining classified. He said, "I am particularly concerned it appears that information may have been classified to shield individuals from accountability."
___
On the Net:
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Runoff voting, consecutive term limits, and paper ballot backups with audits are the cure for fake democracy.
http://corporatism.tripod.com/voting.htm and
http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/y/ratesusa.htm
http://corporatism.tripod.com/voting.htm and
http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/y/ratesusa.htm
Growing fascism under Bush in the USA.
Table 1 from "Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2005". A U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report. According to a 2006 OJJDP (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention) report there were 97,000 held in juvenile facilities as of October 22, 2006. [2] Add those to the total inmates.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/pjim05.htm
http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/nr2006/html/chp7hl.html
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/pjim05.htm
http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/nr2006/html/chp7hl.html
MMM (Global Million Marijuana March):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cannabisaction
Newsweek, Nov. 14, 2005, page 36:
"The most recent evidence comes from autopsies of 44 prisoners who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan in U.S. custody. Most died under circumstances that suggest torture. The reports use words like 'strangulation,' 'asphyxiation' and 'blunt force injuries.' ... A few months before the [Abu Ghraib] scandal broke [spring 2004], Coalition Provisional Authority polls showed Iraqi support at 63 percent. A month after Abu Ghraib, the number was 9 percent. Polls showed that 71 percent of Iraqis were surprised by the revelations."
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