April 24th, 2006
I watched 60 Minutes last night and I’ve been reading all of the related articles on Yahoo!News, The Washington Post, CNN, and Reuters. O.K. It’s all the same article. They all say the same thing. And really for those of us liberals who’ve been paying attention since 2002, it’s nothing new. In fact, there wasn’t anything in that report I hadn’t heard before, so it’s hard to get excited.
And I know none of the conservative right-wingers were paying attention anyway so it was just preaching to the choir. In fact, I stopped by Fox News and there’s no mention of the story on their website, not even something to refute Tyler Drumheller’s claims that the White House flat out ignored CIA intelligence that conflicted with what they needed to make the case for war in Iraq.
“The (White House) group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested,” he was quoted as saying in interview excerpts released by CBS on Friday.
“We said: ‘Well, what about the intel?’ And they said: ‘Well, this isn’t about intel anymore. This is about regime change’,” added Drumheller, whose CIA operation was assigned the task of debriefing the Iraqi official. [“Ex-CIA agent says WMD intelligence ignored” (Reuters)]
Tags: WMD, Tyler Drumheller, Fox News, Yahoo!News, Washington Post, CNN, Reuters, White House, CIA, Intelligence, Iraq, 60 Minutes
April 12th, 2006
So, back to those missing WMD we never found…remember when Bush told us that we found evidence of mobile biological laboratories in Iraq which further proved Sadaam was up to no good? Apparently they were just “the biggest sand toilets in the world” and Bush knew it and yet he like the incorrect “evidence” he had Libby leak to Judy Miller, he pushed the “find” of the trailers on the media as a victory of the war.
On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.
A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.
The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped “secret” and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories. [“Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case For War” (The Washington Post)]
Tags: George W. Bush, WMD, Saddam Hussein, Washington Post, lie, Conspiracy Theories, Iraq
