"Who Lied?" Bush did!

[ElliotR]

From TAPPED (comment in italics added [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img])

FOOL'S GOLD. Folks may remember the newly declassified discoveries of WMDs being touted by Rick Santorum, Curt Weldon, and others {including our very own Copernicus}. The haul amounts to about 500 munitions which include sarin and mustard gas components and they are very, very scary. At least if you're a common household insect. That, at least, is the opinion of folks who actually know what they're talking about. Salon's Michael Scherer went by the congressional hearings meant to ascertain the potency of these armaments. The testimony, if it weren’t disproving the lies that led us into war, would've been funny. David Kay, the nation's top weapons inspector, explained that:

[ QUOTE ]
As far back as September 2004, the CIA had disclosed the discovery of the old chemical munitions from Iraq's war with Iran. The CIA also explained that these weapons were not the ones the Bush administration had used to justify the invasion of Iraq. What's more, Kay said, the decades-old sarin nerve gas was probably no more dangerous than household pesticides -- and far more likely to degrade at room temperature. "In terms of toxicity, sir," Kay told Weldon at one point, "I suspect in your house, and I know in my house, I have things that are more toxic than sarin produced from 1984 to 1988."

[/ QUOTE ]


True to form, Weldon yelled at him. And the hearings got no better from there. Two Defense Intelligence Agency experts came to testify, explaining that the munitions were too corroded to be of use, and their embedded chemical weaponry was probably inextricable. The Committee's Republicans, somewhat pathetically, were reduced to protesting that these weapons do, indeed, fit the "category" of chemical weapons, even if they were no longer useable. Watching all this, Ike Skelton, the ranking Democrat, mocked his colleagues by comparing them to prospectors who come across a shiny nugget of fool's gold. "Well, old-timer," Skelton said, "that's a piece of pyrite." He then read aloud "a list of the vast quantities of chemical weapons that the CIA, and the Bush administration, had expected to find in Iraq. This laundry list, as described in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, included between 100 and 500 metric tons of chemical weapons agents, most of which had been allegedly produced after 1991. As Skelton put it, 'The goalposts seem to have been moved.'"

[Copernicus]

[ QUOTE ]
From TAPPED (comment in italics added [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img])

FOOL'S GOLD. Folks may remember the newly declassified discoveries of WMDs being touted by Rick Santorum, Curt Weldon, and others {including our very own Copernicus}. The haul amounts to about 500 munitions which include sarin and mustard gas components and they are very, very scary. At least if you're a common household insect. That, at least, is the opinion of folks who actually know what they're talking about. Salon's Michael Scherer went by the congressional hearings meant to ascertain the potency of these armaments. The testimony, if it weren’t disproving the lies that led us into war, would've been funny. David Kay, the nation's top weapons inspector, explained that:

[ QUOTE ]
As far back as September 2004, the CIA had disclosed the discovery of the old chemical munitions from Iraq's war with Iran. The CIA also explained that these weapons were not the ones the Bush administration had used to justify the invasion of Iraq. What's more, Kay said, the decades-old sarin nerve gas was probably no more dangerous than household pesticides -- and far more likely to degrade at room temperature. "In terms of toxicity, sir," Kay told Weldon at one point, "I suspect in your house, and I know in my house, I have things that are more toxic than sarin produced from 1984 to 1988."

[/ QUOTE ]


True to form, Weldon yelled at him. And the hearings got no better from there. Two Defense Intelligence Agency experts came to testify, explaining that the munitions were too corroded to be of use, and their embedded chemical weaponry was probably inextricable. The Committee's Republicans, somewhat pathetically, were reduced to protesting that these weapons do, indeed, fit the "category" of chemical weapons, even if they were no longer useable. Watching all this, Ike Skelton, the ranking Democrat, mocked his colleagues by comparing them to prospectors who come across a shiny nugget of fool's gold. "Well, old-timer," Skelton said, "that's a piece of pyrite." He then read aloud "a list of the vast quantities of chemical weapons that the CIA, and the Bush administration, had expected to find in Iraq. This laundry list, as described in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, included between 100 and 500 metric tons of chemical weapons agents, most of which had been allegedly produced after 1991. As Skelton put it, 'The goalposts seem to have been moved.'"

[/ QUOTE ]

cool..then im sure you wont mind if the us buries its stockpiles of chemical weapons from the 60s and 70s in your backyard, since they are too degraded to be any cause for concern.

[ElliotR]

[ QUOTE ]
cool..then im sure you wont mind if the us buries its stockpiles of chemical weapons from the 60s and 70s in your backyard, since they are too degraded to be any cause for concern.

[/ QUOTE ]

lol! Yes, I clearly remember the Bush administration telling us that it was imperative to invade Iraq because of the envionmental concerns raised by decades-old, degraded and inoperable weapons. That's what they were referring to when they said "mushroom cloud", right?

[Copernicus]

by the way, I am still wondering why you chose as your name someone who was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom for defending an impeached President in a law suit he had to settle, was found in contempt of court for evasive answers and gave up his law license to avoid further prosecution?

[ElliotR]

[ QUOTE ]
by the way, I am still wondering why you chose as your name someone who was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom for defending an impeached President in a law suit he had to settle, was found in contempt of court for evasive answers and gave up his law license to avoid further prosecution?

oh, i know why, pond scum coagulates.

[/ QUOTE ]

lol! Don't like getting called out on nonsensical posts, do you?

For the record, Elliot Richardson was never found in contempt of court and never gave up his law license. Nor did he "defend" Clinton in the way your are implying (representation). He added his name as a trustee of Clinton's legal defense fund, no doubt due to his longstanding opposition to abuse of the Independent Counsel statute (which statute has since been permitted to lapse).

He certainly had more integrity than just about anyone in the Bush administration.

[Copernicus]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
by the way, I am still wondering why you chose as your name someone who was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom for defending an impeached President in a law suit he had to settle, was found in contempt of court for evasive answers and gave up his law license to avoid further prosecution?

oh, i know why, pond scum coagulates.

[/ QUOTE ]

lol! Don't like getting called out on nonsensical posts, do you?

For the record, Elliot Richardson was never found in contempt of court and never gave up his law license. Nor did he "defend" Clinton in the way your are implying (representation). He added his name as a trustee of Clinton's legal defense fund, no doubt due to his longstanding opposition to abuse of the Independent Counsel statute (which statute has since been permitted to lapse).

Based on your posts, I have little doubt that Richardson had more integrity in his left pinky than you have ever had in your entire body. He certainly had more integrity than just about anyone in the Bush administration.

[/ QUOTE ]

No, I ignore "calling outs" by nonsensical posters

I didnt say ER, I said Clinton, and the medal was direct payback for his assistance in the Paula Jones case.

You can ask Nixon about how much integrity ER had.

[Brainwalter]

What's all this have to do with your title?

[ElliotR]

[ QUOTE ]
What's all this have to do with your title?

[/ QUOTE ]

See this gleeful Copernicus post

[BluffTHIS!]

No one has offered any conclusive proof that Bush lied, but rather that he assigned a higher probability to intel being correct than it should have been given. But why was that?

Let's say the intel properly analyzed would only lead one to conclude that there was only a 25% probability of Saddam having an ongoing chem weapons program or stockpile of useable weapons. But you have to add two other probabilities to that. The first is that Saddam would lie about same, and the second is that weapons inspections wouldn't be good enough to tell if he did. When you add those 3 probabilities together, it is very reasonable indeed to conclude a greater than 50/50 chance that Saddam has useable chem weapons, and to conlude as well that given his proclivity for using same on his own people, that such a combined probability was too great to go unanswered during a war against terrorism when rogue nations and bad actors like Saddam would be the biggest threats to supplying terrorists with such weapons.

And the true importance of the old and unusable chem weapons found (and one also has to look at how long they had been unusable to make any determination as well), is that Saddam did lie and the weapons inspectors did fail to find those old weapons. Thus the 2 other probablistic assumptions in the equation were valid and justified acting on intel that by itself wouldn't be credible enough.

[Cyrus]

[ QUOTE ]
No one has offered any conclusive proof that Bush lied, but rather that he assigned a higher probability to intel being correct than it should have been given.

[/ QUOTE ]You would be correct if Bush had used at any time any of the terms "probably" or "possibly". As it is, I do not recall Bush being anything other than absolutely certain about the WMDs. And I remember Powell, in his U.N. show-and-tell, trying to present to the world "conclusive proof" that Iraq possessed WMDs.