Posted on 01/28/2008 3:33:59 PM PST by Graybeard58
"Bush lied, people died," has been the loopy left's mantra since 2003: The president fabricated evidence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaida's ties to Iraq to inflame support for invading Iraq.
These claims have been refuted countless times, but refuse to die. The evidence of Hussein's WMDs was so convincing that Congress overwhelmingly approved the use of military force against Iraq and more than three dozen countries joined the United States in liberating Iraq. Intelligence agencies had it wrong, but stating information he had no reason to believe is false doesn't make President Bush a liar. Meanwhile, even most left-wing groups now acknowledge the Iraq-al-Qaida pre-war connection, though disagreement persists over how close those ties were.
Yet the news media still take it on faith that "Bush lied, people died." Last week, The New York Times and Associated Press ran bylined articles about the latest "proof": a report by "two nonprofit journalism organizations" about the administration's 935 "lies." What neither article confessed is the authors, the ironically named Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, are bankrolled by George Soros.
Mr. Soros is a left-wing extremist billionaire and arch foe of the Bush administration who also is the sugar daddy of Moveon.org and the Open Society Institute, which in 2006 accused the United States killing 650,000 Iraqis. It was a lie. The news media knew it was a lie but repeated it because it conformed to their political agenda.
Journalists do this constantly and then are shocked to learn the public doesn't trust them and that their duplicity is driving the decline in newspaper subscriptions and TV news viewership. One day, their epitaph may read: Journalists lied, the media died.
Ping to a Republican-American Editorial.
If you want on or off this list, let me know.
Yeah, yeah. And the inability to find Jimmy Hoffa’s body is proof that he never existed.
The Waterbury paper is a refreshing voice of reason in a sea of drama queens (Connecticut). I know. I live here.
Because they are irresponsibly (and almost certainly with ulterior motives) propagated in the public forum by media that carry (for reasons more the realm of inertia than of provenance) some measure of credibility. However, that credibility is a finite account, and is being squandered like a sailor's pay on shore leave.
Anyone who is going to base his estimation of this war effort on reason has already weighed the evidence and exonerated Bush. Anyone who hasn't done the latter isn't interested in the former.
I don't live there but I have been reading and posting their editorials for a long time now. They are one of the most consistently conservative on line newspapers I've found. I have more than 60 people on my ping list who think so too.
Follow the money.
C’mon.
Everyone said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The mushroom cloud was about to appear. Well, everyone who drank from the same koolaid bottle believed, the inspectors who actually looked did not. This was the greatest story ever sold. It looks like it will GOP this election and who knows how many more.
Prior to the war, Bush's speeches were very clear, we were trying to stop Saddam from getting nukes, not that he already had them. Several months later after the invasion, Cheney got cornered into making the imminent threat argument, which the liberals have eaten up ever since.
Cheney never said imminent threat, it was a Democrat Senator. And then got pinned on Cheney. This too is an example of a lie repeated often enough is the truth to most who don’t know better.
Do you have a citable link you can give where you believed this, pre Iraq war? Do you have some insider knowledge that every intellegence agency in the free world didn't have? Bush didn't lie. If there were no WMDs and I don't even buy that, he was misinformed by the most reliable intel available. Even Hillary, slick willy and John Kerry believed it.
It goes beyond that. The 60 Minutes segment yesterday on the FBI agent who spent months with Saddam after his capture was enlightening.
He stated that Saddam not only fully intended to restart his WMD programs the minute we left or lifted sanctions, but that Saddam purposefully continued his ruse to maintain his “power”. Saddam did not believe the US would actually invade, and would do more what Clinton did - bomb him for 4 to 5 days.
The fact this was directly reported by 60 Minutes was shocking enough; the fact they would report that Saddam wanted to restart his WMDs AND purposefully kept the world believing he had them pretty much blows the whole “Bush lied people died!” chant out of the water...
If you can catch the episode, or read the transcript, I really recommend you do so. Very enlightening!
Then 60 Minutes has, in this one segment, done more than the Bush administration has done all along to defend its actions.
Which has bugged me for years.
Inspectors are not detectives, and should not be playing as such. They did "look" at a potential big find in a barn wherein their sulfur detectors were set off by pigeons and/or their poop.
Iraqi bloggers did write that Saddam's soldiers emptied out buildings into trucks and drove off under the cover of darkness. These Iraqi citizens would often sit on their rooftops at night to escape the heat and report on these uncommon pre-war actions taken by Saddam.
However,
Symposium: Saddam’s Files
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, December 05, 2007
"...volunteers at the IntelligenceSummit.org have been examining the secret documents captured from Saddam -- and it appears that they have solved a large part of the mystery of Saddam’s missing WMDs. Correct? Loftus (John Loftus, President of IntelligenceSummit.org): Yes, now the truth is beginning to emerge. Saddam's own secret files show that he was lying to the UN, year after year. He told the UN that Iraq had no more WMD after 1991, and would never start those WMD programs again. But his own secret records show that in 2001, 2002, and 2003, Saddam was repeatedly purchasing banned chemicals, covering up radiation leaks, and generally orchestrating a cover-up.
Are the records genuine? We had NSA check the audiotapes to make sure it was Saddam's own voiceprint. It is. Now, why would Saddam and his top aides record all those tapes year after year and hide the forgeries in secret vaults? There are three shelf miles of paper records. What is the point? These are secret internal records, it is not as if he was using them in public to fool the Iranians into thinking he had WMD. These records almost did not even make it onto the light of day. They were buried amid a forest of documents that might not have been reviewed for decades, if ever. I cannot think of any explanation but these are genuine secret archives of Saddam's innermost feelings at his innermost meetings.
Moreover, at the time people like Dave Gaubatz and John Shaw were putting their statements on the record about how the WMD ended up in Syria, they did not know that we would get circumstantial corroboration from Saddam's own files.
SNIP
As for the chemical and biological programs, numerous documents refer to "prohibited materials," "prohibited equipment" and "prohibited programs," including illegally produced precursor chemicals. Many documents refer to actions being taken to eliminate traces of WMD programs by destroying documents, cleaning up labs, and wiping computers clean.
The documents are also embarrassing for other countries. We learn that the Russians provided key elements of our war plan to the Iraqis, and that Saddam looked to Russia for help in the UN. A 2001 document describes using "economical agreements" with Russia, France, China and Japan to undermine sanctions.
If such incriminating material can be found in just a small, small fraction of the documents, what other revelations are we missing out on?
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