Bush and Powell are liars

[chucK]

Cheney is getting 200,000 per year from Haliburton right now! It's his "retirement" package.

[j_b]

From what I can remember the inspectors never did get access to any of the presidential palace complexes. There were somehting like 40 of these sites, most of which were quite large

 

you remember poorly then. moreover a 30 second web search would quickly confirm that palace inspections were conducted by un inspectors.

[allthumbs]

[E-rock]

Fairweather Said:

Since when do all of you think you're entitled to the whole story??

 

I think that a plurality of American people would take it for granted that they are entitled to the whole story, particularly when justifying a war. And if the whole story is not merely a collection of lies and deceit then it will only further convince the American people that our leaders are truly protecting us.

 

It's frightening that people would now give up that entitlement (or at least the conviction that they DESERVE it) because the information that comes out makes their beloved leaders look like liars and thieves.

Edited May 28, 2003 by E-rock

[j_b]

Rumsfeld concedes banned Iraqi weapons may not exist

 

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington

29 May 2003

 

 

After seven weeks of fruitless search, the Bush administration has come the closest so far to conceding that, contrary to its pre-invasion scaremongering, there may not have been any chemical or biological weapons in Iraq.

 

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=410468

[CrazyFlattlander]

And if they were a bunch of liars as some of you put it....then I think it would have been real easy to go dump some stuff somewhere and say, "We found it." They would not have even had to do that. They could have just said we found it, but the area is too hot to let the media in for pictures. So really, Liars, no...just politicians.

[allthumbs]

[Gaston_Lagaffe]

I have an honest question for all of you. Can one suppport the US troops, without supporting the war? If so, how?

[allthumbs]

Sure can - once the fighting starts, STFU

[Ursa_Eagle]

Gaston_Lagaffe said:

I have an honest question for all of you. Can one suppport the US troops, without supporting the war? If so, how?

 

Easy, I want our troops to come home safely, and I don't support the war.

To retort, how does one get "leave our troops in the desert to die a horrible death" from "give peace a chance"?

[AlpineK]

Gaston_Lagaffe said:

I have an honest question for all of you. Can one suppport the US troops, without supporting the war? If so, how?

 

You sure can. I hope MtnRanger and Glacierdog among others are safe and doing well. However I would like to see Bush, Cheney, Rumpy, and Asscroft gang raped by the Borax 20 mule team.

[j_b]

Gaston_Lagaffe said:

I have an honest question for all of you. Can one suppport the US troops, without supporting the war? If so, how?

 

Arthur Schlesinger takes a different tack on this issue:

 

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/134840741_schlesinger29.html

[Gaston_Lagaffe]

n98947 said:

And if they were a bunch of liars as some of you put it....then I think it would have been real easy to go dump some stuff somewhere and say, "We found it." They would not have even had to do that. They could have just said we found it, but the area is too hot to let the media in for pictures. So really, Liars, no...just politicians.

 

It's been said that the likeliness of a secret getting out gets multiplied by a factor of two with every person. Imagine the number of people involved in dumping even half of the WMDs that Bush said are there. Furthermore, the area would never be too hot, because I'm sure that if they did find WMD then they would 1)provide PLENTY of troups to guard it, and 2) be anxious to prove it wasn't a lie by allowing the UN to inspect it. Have you asked yourselves how long you're going to give the US to find those WMD before you too will call it a lie? Don't get me wrong, we KNOW they used to be there, but perhaps, just perhaps, the Iraqis didn't keep good records when they destroyed the WMD. Still, US said it had proof of existing WMD before it went in. Some of you say the Iraqis moved them, well what the hell are all those spy satelites good for then, if they can't even track a fraction of all the stuff GW said was there?

[Jim]

Here's some latest news: Paul Wolfiwitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense and main architect of the war plans is interviewed in the latest Vanity Fair. He says he's not suprised that WMDs have not been found in Iraq. He is quoted as saying that this was the bureaucratic justification and was used because (get this) no one could agree on a reason (!!!). It was the only reason the power guys and PR people could agree on. Wolfiwitz goes on to state that the real reason to wage war was to get our troops out of Saudia Arabia.

 

[climbher]

The real reason to go to war was the OIL. Iraq was no threat to the US. It did not take long to whip them. A couple years ago Sadam stopped selling oil (in the oil for food program) in dollars and started to sell in Euros. Probably made some of Bush's friends mad.

This is why the troops were careful to protect the oil ministry, while the hospitals, museums, banks were left to the looters.

 

We are so dependent on oil; we need to have control over there. Without control of our foreign oil supply our economy will be in worse shape that it is already.

 

I recently heard an interview with former Governor Vic Atiyeh. He made the same conclusion.

 

Check out the site web page

[Fence_Sitter]

The real reason to go to war was the OIL

 

[Fence_Sitter]

oh and nice website... since when has a repub been attacked by a liberal for taking money from the milary? hmm... sonds like he likes to whip the horse form both ends... "bush is spenidign too much on miltary!" "bush is taking money away from our military!" wah wah bullshit site...

[climbher]

STOP THE PRESSES by Eric Alterman

Bush Lies, Media Swallows

 

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he more things change... Roughly ten years ago, I celebrated the criminal indictment of Elliott Abrams for lying to Congress by writing an Op-Ed in the New York Times on the increasing acceptance of official deception. (I was just starting my dissertation on the topic back then.) The piece got bogged down, however, when an editor refused to allow me even to imply that then-President Bush was also lying to the country. I noted that such reticence made the entire exercise feel a bit absurd. He did not dispute this point but explained that Times policy simply would not allow it. I asked for a compromise. I was offered the following: "Either take it out and a million people will read you tomorrow, or leave it in and send it around to your friends." (It was a better line before e-mail.) Anyway, I took it out, but I think it was the last time I've appeared on that page.

 

President Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media won't. Liberal pundits Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman and Richard Cohen have addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost all news pages and network broadcasts pretend not to notice. In the one significant effort by a national daily to deal with Bush's consistent pattern of mendacity, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank could not bring himself (or was not allowed) to utter the crucial words. Instead, readers were treated to such complicated linguistic circumlocutions as: Bush's statements represented "embroidering key assertions" and were clearly "dubious, if not wrong." The President's "rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy," he has "taken some liberties," "omitted qualifiers" and "simply outpace[d] the facts." But "Bush lied"? Never.

 

Ben Bradlee explains, "Even the very best newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face. No editor would dare print this version of Nixon's first comments on Watergate for instance. 'The Watergate break-in involved matters of national security, President Nixon told a national TV audience last night, and for that reason he would be unable to comment on the bizarre burglary. That is a lie.'"

 

Part of the reason is deference to the office and the belief that the American public will not accept a mere reporter calling the President a liar. Part of the reason is the culture of Washington--where it is somehow worse to call a person a liar in public than to be one. A final reason is political. Some reporters are just political activists with columns who prefer useful lies to the truth. For instance, Robert Novak once told me that he "admired" Elliott Abrams for lying to him in a television interview about illegal US acts of war against Nicaragua because he agreed with the cause.

 

Let us note, moreover, that Bradlee's observation, offered in 1997, did not apply to President Clinton. Reporters were positively eager to call Clinton a liar, although his lies were about private matters about which many of us, including many reporters, lie all the time. "I'd like to be able to tell my children, 'You should tell the truth,'" Stuart Taylor Jr. of the National Journal said on Meet the Press. "I'd like to be able to tell them, 'You should respect the President.' And I'd like to be able to tell them both things at the same time." David Gergen, who had worked for both Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon as well as Clinton and therefore could not claim to be a stranger to official dishonesty, decried what he termed "the deep and searing violation [that] took place when he not only lied to the country, but co-opted his friends and lied to them." Chris Matthews kvetched, "Clinton lies knowing that you know he's lying. It's brutal and it subjugates the person who's being lied to. I resent deeply being constantly lied to." George Will, a frequent apologist for the lies of Reagan and now Bush, went so far as to insist that Clinton's "calculated, sustained lying has involved an extraordinarily corrupting assault on language, which is the uniquely human capacity that makes persuasion, and hence popular government, possible."

 

George W. Bush does not lie about sex, I suppose--merely about war and peace. Most particularly he has consistently lied about Iraq's nuclear capabilities as well as its missile-delivery capabilities. Take a look at Milbank's gingerly worded page-one October 22 Post story if you doubt me. To cite just two particularly egregious examples, Bush tried to frighten Americans by claiming that Iraq possesses a fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used "for missions targeting the United States." Previously he insisted that a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed the Iraqis to be "six months away from developing a weapon." Both of these statements are false, but they are working. Nearly three-quarters of Americans surveyed think that Saddam is currently helping Al Qaeda; 71 percent think it is likely he was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.

 

What I want to know is why this kind of lying is apparently OK. Isn't it worse to refer "repeatedly to intelligence...that remains largely unverified"--as the Wall Street Journal puts it--in order to trick the nation into war, as Bush and other top US officials have done, than to lie about a blowjob? Isn't it worse to put "pressure...on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates," as USA Today worded its report? Isn't it more damaging to offer "cooked information," in the words of the CIA's former chief of counterterrorism, when you are asking young men and women to die for your lies? Don't we revile Lyndon Johnson for having done just that with his dishonest Gulf of Tonkin resolution?

 

Here's Bradlee again: "Just think for a minute how history might have changed if Americans had known then that their leaders felt the war was going to hell in a handbasket. In the next seven years, thousands of American lives and more thousands of Asian lives would have been saved. The country might never have lost faith in its leaders."

 

Reporters and editors who "protect" their readers and viewers from the truth about Bush's lies are doing the nation--and ultimately George W. Bush--no favors. Take a look at the names at that long black wall on the Mall. Consider the tragic legacy of LBJ's failed presidency. Ask yourself just who is being served when the media allow Bush to lie, repeatedly, with impunity, in order to take the nation into war.