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Jimmy_Reynolds
New Member
USA
47 Posts |
 Posted - 06/07/2003 : 16:35:29
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http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20030606.html
John Dean apparently thinks so, and he knows quite a bit about impeachable offenses, having been Richard Nixon's White House counsel during Watergate. Well, Clinton was impeached for lying about a blow-job, so how bad is this?
Actually, even Watergate is pretty trivial compared to launching a war on bogus evidence.
During the build-up to the Iraq War, I was skeptical about the WMD claim, especially after the UN inspectors returned and failed to find any convincing evidence. Keep in mind that the Administration's claims were very definite and specific, as detailed in Dean's article. The right wing has resorted to something like a conspiracy theory to explain this, with dark hints that the inspections "were not really intended to succeed" as though the UN, admittedly incompetent and craven at times, would willingly set itself up for the rebuttal of the century when the invasion went ahead and the weapons came to light.
Nevertheless, I was willing to give Dubya the benefit of the doubt. It was hard for me to see how he could conceivably get away with lying about it since, if the weapons didn't exist, a successful invasion would make this obvious and Dubya and gang would be spectacularly exposed as liars and war-mongers. I should have remembered that Dubya had already been exposed as a drunk and a Vietnam-era deserter, with little effect on his career.
Alas, US troops have had no better luck than the inspectors did in finding the WMD, and it appears that the administration is, in fact, getting away with it. Check out this string about Dean's article at Free Republic:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/924996/posts
The Freepers condemn Dean for his disloyalty to Nixon and call his wife a whore, but fail completely to address the real issue.
Conspiracy theories to explain the non-appearance of WMD abound, one of the more absurd being that the WMD were spirited away to Syria at the last minute, across a border that was swarming with coalition special forces and allied planes, and without leaving a credible trace of their recent presence in Iraq. This is possible with a few vials of anthrax or a single truckload of nerve gas, but this is not what the Bush administration claimed. Furthermore, no credible evidence has surfaced of recently used production facilities for WMD.
Maybe Saddam hid it in his girlfriend's underwear and has it stashed in a locker at the Marseilles airport.
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Edited by - Jimmy_Reynolds on 06/07/2003 16:43:33
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2003 : 16:57:20 [Permalink]
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Since the Bush regime is not allowing inspectors to be the ones to search for weapons of mass destruction, the Bush regime will have no credibility at all if any are "found" if they ever had any.
Time to run this guy out of town on a rail. |
I know the rent is in arrears
The dog has not been fed in years
It's even worse than it appears
But it's alright-
Jerry Garcia
Robert Hunter
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@tomic
Administrator
USA
4607 Posts |
Posted - 06/07/2003 : 22:53:31 [Permalink]
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It's very interesting that US troops did nothing to secure the sites identified as housing the WMD's. If we were so worried about these weapons, which we supposedly knew the locations of, falling into the wrong hands then these sites would certainly have been secured with the care we secured the oil fields.
Instead, we find that these sites were allowed to be looted. Wouldn't there have been a danger of WMD's falling into terrorist hands? Wouldn't securing sites known to house WMD's have been the primary targets for US forces to secure? It seems the Pentagon wasn't too concerned about our primary reason for going to war.
It really makes you think...
@tomic |
Gravity, not just a good idea...it's the law!
Sportsbettingacumen.com: The science of sports betting |
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Jimmy_Reynolds
New Member
USA
47 Posts |
Posted - 06/08/2003 : 23:45:24 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Gorgo
Time to run this guy out of town on a rail.
Indeed. Except that would mean returning him to West Texas, where I live. You see, the whole Dubya presidential campaign was a plot by Texas-based skeptics to get him out of Austin for a while. It worked, too.
Dubya's duplicity is so extreme and so obvious that it has managed to get me and Gorgo on the same side of a political issue. How bad is that?
On a more serious note; I dislike Vietnam parallels, but this current course of action reminds me a lot of the Johnson adminstration's policy in 1964-65, when large-scale deployment of American ground troops first started. There were 22,000 Americans in Vietnam at the beginning of 1965, 188,000 by the end of the year, and half a million 18 months later. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964 provided the authority for all this, the ground troops were originally sent in to protect American advisors and bases from NLF (Viet Cong) attacks. That resolution had been based on an entirely bogus claim of North Vietnamese attacks against American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. The base protection mission was soon forgotten in a quick series of slippery slope escalations, and the US was eyeball deep in an unwinnable war before most of us knew it.
The parallel here is the series of falsehoods and discredited rationales that are quickly forgotten as new ones are retro-actively developed.
Dubya, of course, supported the Vietnam war, but declined to participate even though it would have been easy for him. As a qualified Air National Guard fighter pilot, he could have requested active duty at any time and won either glory or an early grave (or possibly both) in the skies of Southeast Asia. Many men who doubted the war did exactly that simply because they could not abandon their friends. Dubya, however, could not even stay with his ANG unit in flak-free Texas and went AWOL long enough to qualify as a deserter. During the Civil War, deserters were shot. During World War 2 (with one exception) they were jailed. Today, they are the leaders of government and of mighty corporations. Am I, a non-hero but also not a deserter, annoyed at this? You bet I am.
He lied, his whole gang lied, and thousands are dead because of it. |
| Edited by - Jimmy_Reynolds on 06/08/2003 23:49:30 |
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
Posted - 06/09/2003 : 03:28:36 [Permalink]
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You and most of the world.
With all that money the Repubs and Democrats have you think they'd at least hire good actors.
quote:
Dubya's duplicity is so extreme and so obvious that it has managed to get me and Gorgo on the same side of a political issue.
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I know the rent is in arrears
The dog has not been fed in years
It's even worse than it appears
But it's alright-
Jerry Garcia
Robert Hunter
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 06/09/2003 : 07:49:51 [Permalink]
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Hey Jimmy,
How 'bout we send the lying, little chancre back to Crawford by way of Levenworth? That might come close to making all parties concerned happy.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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Randy
SFN Regular
USA
1990 Posts |
Posted - 06/09/2003 : 14:38:37 [Permalink]
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My crude attempt at cartooning.....
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"We are all connected; to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, to the rest of the universe atomically."
"So you're made of detritus [from exploded stars]. Get over it. Or better yet, celebrate it. After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?"
-Neil DeGrasse Tyson |
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ktesibios
SFN Regular
USA
505 Posts |
Posted - 06/09/2003 : 22:08:16 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by @tomic
It's very interesting that US troops did nothing to secure the sites identified as housing the WMD's. If we were so worried about these weapons, which we supposedly knew the locations of, falling into the wrong hands then these sites would certainly have been secured with the care we secured the oil fields.
Instead, we find that these sites were allowed to be looted. Wouldn't there have been a danger of WMD's falling into terrorist hands? Wouldn't securing sites known to house WMD's have been the primary targets for US forces to secure? It seems the Pentagon wasn't too concerned about our primary reason for going to war.
It really makes you think...
@tomic
Any hands would have been wrong hands. Terrorist, shmerrorist- just think about technically untrained people rummaging around in a lab or a factory containing biological or chemical weapons.
The chances for a catastrophic accident alone should have motivated the military to make securing those sites a high priority; that is, assuming that they actually believed there was something there. |
"The Republican agenda is to turn the United States into a third-world shithole." -P.Z.Myers |
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NubiWan
Skeptic Friend
USA
424 Posts |
Posted - 06/09/2003 : 22:14:33 [Permalink]
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| Really scary, Randy. A Texan that's all hat and no cattle. Afraid the American public is really the victim of "Pys Ops." The only question is, when was the first strike, the ballot count or the supreme count, the WMD count..? |
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Valiant Dancer
Forum Goalie
USA
4826 Posts |
Posted - 06/10/2003 : 07:11:39 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Jimmy_Reynolds
quote:
Originally posted by Gorgo
Time to run this guy out of town on a rail.
Indeed. Except that would mean returning him to West Texas, where I live. You see, the whole Dubya presidential campaign was a plot by Texas-based skeptics to get him out of Austin for a while. It worked, too.
Dubya's duplicity is so extreme and so obvious that it has managed to get me and Gorgo on the same side of a political issue. How bad is that?
On a more serious note; I dislike Vietnam parallels, but this current course of action reminds me a lot of the Johnson adminstration's policy in 1964-65, when large-scale deployment of American ground troops first started. There were 22,000 Americans in Vietnam at the beginning of 1965, 188,000 by the end of the year, and half a million 18 months later. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964 provided the authority for all this, the ground troops were originally sent in to protect American advisors and bases from NLF (Viet Cong) attacks. That resolution had been based on an entirely bogus claim of North Vietnamese attacks against American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. The base protection mission was soon forgotten in a quick series of slippery slope escalations, and the US was eyeball deep in an unwinnable war before most of us knew it.
The parallel here is the series of falsehoods and discredited rationales that are quickly forgotten as new ones are retro-actively developed.
Dubya, of course, supported the Vietnam war, but declined to participate even though it would have been easy for him. As a qualified Air National Guard fighter pilot, he could have requested active duty at any time and won either glory or an early grave (or possibly both) in the skies of Southeast Asia. Many men who doubted the war did exactly that simply because they could not abandon their friends. Dubya, however, could not even stay with his ANG unit in flak-free Texas and went AWOL long enough to qualify as a deserter. During the Civil War, deserters were shot. During World War 2 (with one exception) they were jailed. Today, they are the leaders of government and of mighty corporations. Am I, a non-hero but also not a deserter, annoyed at this? You bet I am.
He lied, his whole gang lied, and thousands are dead because of it.
Well, y'all got the "he needed shootin' law" don't you?
I've already written my Congressman again about impeaching this asshole.
I asked him a question.
What is worse? Lying under oath about a blowjob in the Oval Office or invading a sovreign nation based on comprimised evidence which causes the death of hundreds of servicemen and thousands of civilians.
Extra points will be awarded for explaining what a hummer in the Oval Office has to do with a land deal in Arkansas.
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Cthulhu/Asmodeus when you're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils
Brother Cutlass of Reasoned Discussion |
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Donnie B.
Skeptic Friend
417 Posts |
Posted - 06/10/2003 : 15:13:58 [Permalink]
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Much as I'd love to see Bush tarred and feathered, there's one little logical flaw in WMDgate.
If the claims were really known to be a hoax from the beginning, wouldn't we have "found" them by now? Wouldn't we have been prepared with a full set of "smoking guns" and have smuggled them in to the various "suspected WMD sites", so that we could "discover" them?
As it is, the WMD pretext is either a semi-honest misreading of intelligence, or a badly-botched half-plan. While I can imagine Dubya being that dumb, I don't think his entire administration would have overlooked that little problem.
So at worst, Bush and Co. saw what they wanted to see in the intelligence reports. Right now I don't see anything more sinister than that -- but maybe that's sinister enough right there.
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-- Donnie B.
Brian: "No, no! You have to think for yourselves!" Crowd: "Yes! We have to think for ourselves!" |
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@tomic
Administrator
USA
4607 Posts |
Posted - 06/10/2003 : 15:44:57 [Permalink]
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What I think happened is that reports of WMD's were exagerrated and in some cases made up completely. I think those behind it, whether it was the President or someone else, expected to find them so much that forging evidence and the like was a gamble almost guaranteed to pay out.
I am more than a little sure the evidence presented by Powell was false because he gave exact locations before the UN. These obviously were wrong. I also think there were people feeding the CIA with lies for whatever reason. Maybe they were too free with the cash. Who wouldn't lie to the CIA to keep the paychecks coming?
I think Wolfowitz's displays of hubris demonstrate that perhaps some of them didn't care whether or not it all exploded in their faces after the deed was done. They just wanted to get in there and defeat Saddam any way they could. No matter how big a lie needed to be told. No matter how many innocents had to die.
I think Bush was probably misled himself and that still doesn't let him off the hook. He is responsible for what his subbordinates do. If his ship sinks Bush should go down with it.
@tomic |
Gravity, not just a good idea...it's the law!
Sportsbettingacumen.com: The science of sports betting |
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Valiant Dancer
Forum Goalie
USA
4826 Posts |
Posted - 06/11/2003 : 10:34:21 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Donnie B.
Much as I'd love to see Bush tarred and feathered, there's one little logical flaw in WMDgate.
If the claims were really known to be a hoax from the beginning, wouldn't we have "found" them by now? Wouldn't we have been prepared with a full set of "smoking guns" and have smuggled them in to the various "suspected WMD sites", so that we could "discover" them?
As it is, the WMD pretext is either a semi-honest misreading of intelligence, or a badly-botched half-plan. While I can imagine Dubya being that dumb, I don't think his entire administration would have overlooked that little problem.
So at worst, Bush and Co. saw what they wanted to see in the intelligence reports. Right now I don't see anything more sinister than that -- but maybe that's sinister enough right there.
I'm figuring that the administration thought they could justify it on really flawed intell and get away with it. That the military would echo the line from above without question. Too bad for him that the military only dealt with facts when presenting findings.
At worst, not only dis Bush and Co. see what they wanted, but they also ignored direct refutation of that intell. Sticking ones head in the sand willfully and conducting a war based on it is about as sinister as it comes when dealing with the invasion of a sovreign nation. At least Hitler was honest about wanting the land for himself.
You cannot conduct a war based on comprimised evidence and still cry "self defense". |
Cthulhu/Asmodeus when you're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils
Brother Cutlass of Reasoned Discussion |
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walt fristoe
SFN Regular
USA
505 Posts |
Posted - 06/11/2003 : 13:12:15 [Permalink]
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| And of course they're trying now to make Tenet and the CIA the fall guys, or scapegoats, or whatever. Blair is also trying to do the same in Britain, but the spy guys there have kept records of meetings with the high mucky-mucks who were pressuring them to provide "proof". It will be fun to watch what happens to whom there! |
"If God chose George Bus of all the people in the world, how good could God be?"
Bill Maher |
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NubiWan
Skeptic Friend
USA
424 Posts |
Posted - 06/16/2003 : 16:20:32 [Permalink]
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This may come as a shock, but me don't care for the Republicans and their current figure head, #43, G. Dubya. Their white kuckled clutching of the flag, and at the same time, their earger willingness to govern a "free people" behind closed doors, for our own good am sure. SIC! We have proof of their ideal of patriotism in the act of the same name. What happened to, "If we change our way of life, the terrorist win?" They pass off any criticism as a product of the 'liberal press,' or even worse. Still what troubles me the most, was the timid or absent, outcry for justification for the Iraq war II, from the "people." How quickly we embraced a war of intervention on such thin evidence, if any. At the least, have a new unwelcomed ensight of Germany's history. Wonder if we will ever hold the administration aswerable, as well as it's source, the republican party..?
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=32894
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&ncid=578&e=2&u=/nm/20030616/ts_nm/iraq_usa_bush_dc |
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NubiWan
Skeptic Friend
USA
424 Posts |
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