Post #137,767
1/26/04 7:53:48 AM
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Bad choice RE no WMD
Now that we're all agreed that there were no WMD, we have to understand why 170 odd Democrat reps and all the Republicans voted for war.
1) The current administration is a criminal regime that deliberately manipulated information to get its regime change.
2) Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies are staffed by paranoiac fools, who have had so much success rousting poor blacks and filling prisons with the innocent and those who commit petty crimes, that their actual function has been lost on them. The Hoover legacy.
I submit both, but mostly 2). 9/11 combined with this colossal failure of the intelligence community worldwide suggests that the profession is run by holdovers from the Cold War who do not operate on common sense, and do not make decisions based on objective analysis. Instead, they spend their time in a pissing match with other bureaucracies in order to justify their enormous budgets and far-reaching powers.
Someone among the Democrats needs to harp this issue to death, and steer it away from Bush and toward the entire military-industrial complex.
-drl
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Post #137,772
1/26/04 8:26:12 AM
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Reverse the order
There are too many reports of analysts and administrators in Intelligence complaining of the shortcircuiting done by this admin to get the reports that supported the politics. While your description of the spooks/cops may well be accurate, I don't see them as the driving force behind this illegal war.
It's a PNAC thing.
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.sig pending
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Post #137,774
1/26/04 8:37:09 AM
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Re: Reverse the order
9/11, and indeed all terrorist activity, are criminal matters, not political ones. I don't trust the whining spooks any more than I trust the fascist Republicans. After all, as Phillips points out in his new work, the "Bushysty" and the intelligence community have been in bed together for a long time. It wasn't that long ago that the CIA was running amok around the world. Things like MATRIX and ECHELON are not the creation of the radical right - they are generally endorsed solutions.
-drl
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Post #137,812
1/26/04 11:37:39 AM
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The Dems on the intel committee saw the same material as the
prez, they must be in on it also.
thanx,
bill
same old crap, con artists ripping off fools. Ah, hell, Catholic Church it start off that way. They All do. Jesus probably had three walnut shells one pea, then he's dead and can't be questioned,
Gabriel Dupre
questions, help? [link|mailto:pappas@catholic.org|email pappas at catholic.org]
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Post #137,861
1/26/04 3:00:38 PM
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Not really
The Democrates saw the final versions of the reports after the pressure had been applied to make the case for war.
What upsets me about the Democrates is that so many of them fell for such an obvious pile of crud. The official US intelligence report on Iraq suddenly changed heavily in the direction of Iraq having WMDs when Bush took office and non of the Democrates questioned it at the time.
Jay
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Post #137,868
1/26/04 3:26:47 PM
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Intel commitee see's the same crap as the prez
same old crap, con artists ripping off fools. Ah, hell, Catholic Church it start off that way. They All do. Jesus probably had three walnut shells one pea, then he's dead and can't be questioned,
Gabriel Dupre
questions, help? [link|mailto:pappas@catholic.org|email pappas at catholic.org]
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Post #137,970
1/26/04 5:47:50 PM
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But intel committee's aren't allowed to comment on it.
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Post #137,817
1/26/04 11:53:36 AM
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To use someone else's analogy:
"When Saddam had a Beware of Dog sign, you expect him to have a dog."
I, for one, would not have been surprised if they had found something in the way of WMDs no later than shortly after the dust settled. On the other hand, never for a minute did I think that Iraq was a danger to US. Going to war was based on a fraud.
Alex
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. -- Plutarch
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Post #137,849
1/26/04 2:40:58 PM
8/21/07 12:42:12 PM
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Hard to separate them
[link|http://www.cia.gov/cia/information/bush.html|http://www.cia.gov/c...rmation/bush.html]
After all, daddy used to run the CIA and has his own building named after him.
"I believe that many of the systems we build today in Java would be better built in Smalltalk and Gemstone."
-- Martin Fowler, JAOO 2003
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Post #137,877
1/26/04 3:41:32 PM
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Now there's an oxymoron for you:
"The George Bush Center for Intelligence".
Alex
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. -- Plutarch
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Post #137,881
1/26/04 3:47:12 PM
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"domestic policy" "tax reform" "justice department"
You could fill a book with government doublespeak.
"80% of offenders re-offend." What does that mean? If you fart in an elevator once, you're a menace to society?
-drl
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Post #137,899
1/26/04 4:11:03 PM
8/21/07 12:43:28 PM
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He's not stupid
Just evil.
"I believe that many of the systems we build today in Java would be better built in Smalltalk and Gemstone."
-- Martin Fowler, JAOO 2003
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Post #137,859
1/26/04 2:57:46 PM
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More 1 then 2
From what I have seen it's more 1 then 2. In particular, remember that Cheney setup a seperate intelligence group in the DOD that channeled information to the White House without first putting it through the normal verification process.
This second group contained a lot of PNAC people, and in effect spent it's time looking for reasons to go to war, not carefully evaluating the evidence. This caused them to put way too much trust in Iraqi defectors, and other questionable evidence. These defectors often exaggerated what they knew, both because they wanted the US to attack Saddam and because doing so got them treated better in the US.
As for failure of the intelligence community world wide, it was just US and British intelligence that really got taken. And in both countries, the government took what intelligence provided and exaggerated it further to provide a reason to go to war. The intelligence groups of the other countries generally held the posistion that Saddam wasn't following the letter of the rules, but nor did it appear that he had any significant stocks of WMDs.
Jay
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