Whistle Ass / George Bush 2004

?ANOTHER BIG LIE Revealed? Was Saddam Captured in a Hole...or on the day US stated? Maybe Not...

..."I was among the 20-man unit, including eight of Arab descent, who searched for Saddam for three days in the area of Dour near Tikrit, and we found him in a modest home in a small village and not in a hole as announced," Abou Rabeh said.
"We captured him after fierce resistance during which a Marine of Sudanese origin was killed," he said.
He said Saddam himself fired at them with a gun from the window of a room on the second floor. Then they shouted at him in Arabic: "You have to surrender. ... There is no point in resisting."
"Later on, a military production team fabricated the film of Saddam's capture in a hole, which was in fact a deserted well," Abou Rabeh said.
http://www.wokr13.tv/news/national/story.aspx?content_id=422B960A-26BA-4891-9E60-21C8818788D4

chalabi admits he lied

...Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. "We are heroes in error," he told the Telegraph in Baghdad.

"As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants..."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$5RM3YWKKUZDFXQFIQMGSFFOAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2004/02/19/wirq19.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/02/19/ixworld.html

Iraq is 1 messed up situation and, with no proof of WMD, Bush has a lot of explaining to do

Published on Monday, January 12, 2004 by The Progressive
O'Neill, Powell Expose the Iraq Ruse
by Matthew Rothschild
 
The credibility of the Bush Administration's Iraq policy took several hits in the last few days.

First, there was the "WMD in Iraq" report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which concludes: "Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat" that Iraq posed.

Point by point, this report refutes the Administration's rationales and dissects its distortions.

Here are a few of the findings: "Iraq's nuclear program had been dismantled and there was no convincing evidence of its reconstitution."

"Iraqi nerve agents had lost most of their lethality as early as1991." (Italics in original.)

"There was and is no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam's government and Al Qaeda."

"There was no evidence to support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD to Al Qaeda, and much evidence to counter it."

"The intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002."

As damaging as this report was to Bush, more blows were to follow.

Colin Powell began to come clean, saying on January 8, "I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection" between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Contrast that, as The New York Times did, with what Powell said at the United Nations in February 2002: "Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials are simply not credible."

It's a little late for candor from the Secretary of State, who did his part in hoodwinking the American people.

Also tardy but telling is the revelation from Bush's former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who told Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes that Bush always wanted to find a way to get rid of Saddam Hussein, though Bush claimed that September 11 is what initiated the move. "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill said.

O'Neill is also quoted in a new book as saying that the National Security Council failed to question Bush on this. "It was all about finding a way to do it," O'Neill says in Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty, according to CBS. "That was the tone of it," O'Neill continued. "The President saying, 'Go find me a way to do this.' "

These revelations should not come as a surprise, however.

Bush's obsession with going to war against Iraq was never about Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction or his alleged ties to Al Qaeda. Instead, it was about Bush's desire to "finish the job" that his dad left incomplete; to control the oil of Iraq, which has the second-largest reserves in the world; to vanquish an enemy of U.S. ally Israel; to flex American muscle; and to act on what the President considers his divinely inspired mission to rid the world of evil.

For these ulterior motives, 500 U.S. soldiers have been killed and thousands more injured. Bush's false-pretenses war has also killed between 7,900 and 9,800 Iraqi civilians and wounded 20,000 more, according to iraqbodycount.net. And it is draining our treasury, depriving us of funds for the social programs that are so vitally needed in this country to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and provide health care for all Americans.

Bush has a lot of explaining to do.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0112-09.htm

Scott Ritter: The search for Iraqi WMD has become a public joke. But I, for one, am not laughing

Hutton stopped far short of a real investigation into the Blair government's abysmal abuse of power
04 January 2004

President George Bush, in his State of the Union address in January last year, told the world that Saddam Hussein had promised he would disarm his weapons of mass destruction, and that this promise had not been fulfilled. Bush spoke of the Iraqi president retaining massive stocks of chemical and biological agent, as well as an ongoing nuclear weapons programme.

On 20 March 2003, Bush ordered American military forces, accompanied by the armed forces of Great Britain, to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. In hiding since the fall of Baghdad, Saddam was finally run to ground in December. On his capture, he is reported to have said that WMD was an issue created by George Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. This is a claim that has increasing validity.

Tony Blair had already been embarrassed by a growing recognition that his own intelligence-based estimates regarding Iraqi WMD were every bit as cooked up as the American president's. He faced further ignominy when Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, publicly mocked his assertions that David Kay, the former UN weapons inspector turned CIA agent who headed the so-far futile search for WMD in occupied Iraq, had found "massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories". Dismissed by Bremer as a "red herring", Blair's discredited comments only underscore the sad fact that the issue of Iraqi WMD, and the entire concept of disarmament, has become a public joke.

The misrepresentation and distortion of fact carried out by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair is no joke, but rather represent an assault on the very fabric of the concept of a free and democratic society which they espouse to serve. The people of the United States are still waiting for a heavily divided Congress to break free of partisan politics and launch a genuine investigation. This should certainly look at the massive intelligence failure surrounding the gross distortion of the Iraqi WMD threat put forward by the US intelligence community. But perhaps more importantly, the investigation should focus on the actions of the White House in shaping the intelligence estimates so that they dovetailed nicely with the political goals and objectives of the Bush administration's Iraq policy-makers.

Many in Great Britain might take some pride in knowing that their democracy, at least, has had an airing of the pre-war Iraq intelligence which has been denied their American cousins.

The Hutton inquiry has been viewed by many as an investigation into the politicisation, or "sexing up", of intelligence information by the British government to help strengthen its case for war. It stopped far short of any real investigation into the abysmal abuse of power that occurred when Blair's government lied to Parliament, and the electorate, about the threat posed by Iraq's WMD. There was no effort to dig deep into the systematic politicisation of

the British intelligence system, to untangle

the web of deceit and misinformation concerning Iraq peddled over the years by the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and British intelligence.

The damage done goes well beyond the borders of the US and Britain. One must also calculate the irreparable harm done to the precepts of international law, the viability of multilateral organisations such as the United Nations, and the concepts of diplomacy and arms control which kept the world from destroying itself during the last century.

Iran, faced with 130,000 American soldiers on its border, has opened its nuclear facilities to inspection. North Korea has done the same. Libya, in a surprise move, has traded in its own overblown WMD aspirations in exchange for diplomatic recognition and economic interaction with the West. But none of these moves, as welcome as they are, have the depth and reach to compare with the decision by South Africa or the former republics of the Soviet Union to get rid of their respective nuclear weapons. The latter represented actions taken freely, wrapped in the principles of international law. The former are merely coerced concessions, given more as a means of buying time than through any spirit of true co-operation. Sold by George Bush and Tony Blair as diplomatic triumphs derived from the Iraq experience, the sad reality is that these steps towards disarmament are every bit as illusory as Saddam's WMD arsenal. They are all the more dangerous, too, because the safety net of international law that the world could once have turned to when these compelled concessions inevitably collapse no longer exists.

Scott Ritter was a UN weapons inspector from 1991-98. He is the author of 'Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America'

http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=477860

Senators were told Iraqi weapons could hit U.S.

Dec 15, 10:17 PM
Nelson said claim made during classified briefing
By John McCarthy
FLORIDA TODAY

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities.

Nelson, D-Tallahassee, said about 75 senators got that news during a classified briefing before last October's congressional vote authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nelson voted in favor of using military force.

Nelson said he couldn't reveal who in the administration gave the briefing.

The White House directed questions about the matter to the Department of Defense. Defense officials had no comment on Nelson's claim.

Nelson said the senators were told Iraq had both biological and chemical weapons, notably anthrax, and it could deliver them to cities along the Eastern seaboard via unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones.

"They have not found anything that resembles an UAV that has that capability," Nelson said.

Nelson delivered the news during a half-hour conference call with reporters Monday afternoon. The senator, who is on a seven-nation trade mission to South America, was calling from an airport in Santiago, Chile.

"That's news," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington, D.C.-area military and intelligence think tank. "I had not heard that that was the assessment of the intelligence community. I had not heard that the Congress had been briefed on this..."

http://www.floridatoday.com/!NEWSROOM/localstoryN1216NELSON.htm

No WMD in Iraq, source claims

No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq by the group looking for them, according to a Bush administration source who has spoken to the BBC.

This will be the conclusion of the Iraq Survey Group's interim report, the source told the presenter of BBC television's Daily Politics show, Andrew Neil.

Downing Street branded the story "speculation about an unfinished draft of an interim report".

Mr Neil said the draft report - which the source said is due to be published next month - concludes that it is highly unlikely that weapons of mass destruction were shipped out of the country to places like Syria before the US-led war on Iraq...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3135932.stm

CIA weapons expert to quit after uranium scandal

"...Alan Foley, who heads the Weapons Intelligence, Non-proliferation and Arms Control Centre, became enmeshed in the row over inclusion of a bogus reference to Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium in Niger, in President George Bush's State of the Union address...."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1039787,00.html