mglenn wrote:Nostradamus wrote:Why not? The last Bush lied about Iraq:
You might wanna reread the my post and the one I was refering to, cause your supporting my argument with your statement and I don't think thats what you entended.
Upon review of the thread, I concur that I was initially confused on the point. My conclusion now is that the administration cannot be trusted, and sometimes produces information that does not support its own agenda. However, some of this unsupportive evidence cannot be trusted either, since it came from an untrustworthy source. I apologize if my earlier post muddled an already convoluted thread.
On a side note: The truth about war site doesn't carry any weight with me as they are still trying to defend Saddam by trying to make the case that he didn't gas his own people. Its a flat out lie and if theres one lie, chances are there are more! Sorry
Here are the sources for the Truth About War articles cited thus far:
Bush administration lied about satellite intel:
The story of this lie is also well established. An investigative reporter from the St. Petersburg Times in Florida was the first person to uncover the lie. The Christian Science Monitor then confirmed the story. "60 Minutes" has also reported on this lie, based on John MacArthur's book The Second Front, about media coverage of the first Gulf War.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p01s02-wosc.html
Shortly before US strikes began in the Gulf War, for example, the St. Petersburg Times asked two experts to examine the satellite images of the Kuwait and Saudi Arabia border area taken in mid-September 1990, a month and a half after the Iraqi invasion. The experts, including a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who specialized in desert warfare, pointed out the US build-up – jet fighters standing wing-tip to wing-tip at Saudi bases – but were surprised to see almost no sign of the Iraqis.
"That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't exist," Ms. Heller says. Three times Heller contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (now vice president) for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis – offering to hold the story if proven wrong.
The official response: "Trust us." To this day, the Pentagon's photographs of the Iraqi troop buildup remain classified.
Selective use of intelligence information is not particular to any one presidential team, says former Congressman Hamilton.
"This is not a problem unique to George Bush. It's every president I've known, and I've worked with seven or eight of them," Hamilton says. "All, at some time or another, used intelligence to support their political objectives.
"Information is power, and the temptation to use information to achieve the results you want is almost overwhelming," he says. "The whole intelligence community knows exactly what the president wants [regarding Iraq], and most are in their jobs because of the president – certainly the people at the top – and they will do everything they can to support the policy.
"I'm always skeptical about intelligence," adds Hamilton, who has been awarded medallions from both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. "It's not as pure as the driven snow."
Saddam did not gas his own people:
Source: Army War College, Stephen Pelletier & colleague
The report of the War College on Halabja is still classified; you can read an article in the New York Times written by the study's head researcher:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/opinion/31PELL.html
Note: The NY Times requires a free, if cumbersome registration to view their online articles. The same story can be read
here. Scroll past the intial commentary to read the article.
A War Crime or an Act of War?
New York Times, January 31, 2003
By STEPHEN C. PELLETIERE
MECHANICSBURG, Pa. — It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."
The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.
But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.
I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.
This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.
And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.
The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent — that is, a cyanide-based gas — which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.
These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.
I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.
You can see that Stephen Pelletiere is listed as a previous researcher employed at the Strategic Studies Institute, a part the United States Army War College:
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/authors.html
You can read about the SSI here:
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/about.html
You can read about the U.S. Army War College here:
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/stratplan.asp#mission
Finally, to the best of my knowledge, the people at TruthAboutWar.org have never used their articles to defend Saddam Hussein or to imply that he is anything other than a wretched tyrant.