Suddenly, it becomes imminently clear

my demented brain | 10/11/2003 | dirtboy

[dirtboy]

Krugman used the line in a June 3rd column:

"It is long past time for this administration to be held accountable. The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history - worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-Contra."

[cwb]

According to Kay, he has only searched 10 out of the 130 reported depots. Yet within the 10 he has searched we already know that Saddam was in violation of 1441. What amazes me is how 1441 has been totally ignored by the media when reporting about WMDs and Saddams clear violations. The media has deliberately mislead the American people on what has already been found and how that relates to the actions taken against Saddam. Do these peole honestly believe that had we left Saddam alone that he would've went upon his merry-way promising not to engage in WMD research? He was in violation all along, with his extended-range missiles, hidden centrifuges and bio-labs. And the fact that the media is trying to convince people to the contrary is contemptuous.

Krauthammer from the Kay Report:

"Kay's list is chilling. It includes a secret network of labs and safe houses within the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service; bioorganisms kept in scientists' homes, including a vial of live botulinum; and my favorite, ``new research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin´´ -- all ``not declared to the U.N."

[dirtboy]

From a Newsmax article of a year ago, about the Congressional Black Caucaus' refusal to vote to support Bush over Iraq when they supported Clinton and Desert Fox:

The CBC statement, she said, makes clear the group's opposition to any military strike against Iraq "without a clearly demonstrated and imminent threat of attack on the United States." And, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said there has seen "no evidence nor intelligence that suggests that Iraq poses an imminent threat to our nation."

So we can see why Bush raised the issue in SOTU - he was saying we shouldn't wait until the threat was imminent. And if Dems want to say that the threat wasn't imminent and we shouldn't have acted, that's fine. But when did Dem politicians start bleating in unision that Bush claimed the threat was imminent? Krugman did it in June 03, when did the politicians pick it up and run with it?

[Dog]

Robin Cook and Clare Short were the first to use the term "imminent threat" in the dossier matter in England

I found a quote by our buddy Greg Thielemabb using it in the run up to the war.

[Dog]

Greg Thielmann...

[dirtboy]

Bryd was also setting the threshhold at "imminent threat" back in September 2002:

"Does Saddam Hussein pose an imminent threat to the United States?" Byrd asked.

[dirtboy]

Ah, Helen Thomas was pulling this crap back on July 17, 2003 - she also was trying to discredit Kay before the fact:

Recent published reports tell of unhappy CIA analysts who fear their intelligence reports on Iraq's arsenal was compromised for political reasons, that higher-ups tilted intelligence to fit the administration's need to find an excuse to attack Iraq.

The intelligence hierarchy might become the scapegoat if no weapons are found.

In a parting shot, Hans Blix, the retiring chief U.N. weapons inspector, claims the Bush administration "leaned on us" to produce certain findings in their weapons search.

In the run up to the war, Bush and his team spent months contending that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that were a "direct and imminent" threat to the United States.

I guess it wasn't enough for Helen to use just "imminent", she had to falsely throw in "direct" as well. There really seemed to be a tremendous amount of this kind of stuff in the press about July 17th or so - looks like that's when the DNC fax machine fired up. Still looking for Dem politicians who claimed that Bush stated that the threat was imminent.

[dirtboy]

It looks to me like they argued even before the SOTU address that the standard for going to war was "imminent threat" and that Bush was responding to this argument in the SOTU. Realizing they lost that argument, they switched to the lie that Bush did claim it was imminent, and that he lied about it. Still looking for when they switched.

Agreed. Looks like they led with Krugman on June 3rd, and then there was a commentary barrage about July 17th- or a couple of weeks before Kay gave his preliminary briefing. Kinda like softeninig up the other side with an artillery barrage before attacking...

[Miss Marple]

Mike, do you have the timeline for the Wilson fiasco? Seems to me that the Wilson thing broke on or about this date, along with the Kelly/BBC thing in Britain.

[dirtboy]

Here's a real interesting one from the AP - this is from October 4th, 2003, and relates to Pelosi's comments:

By JIM ABRAMS Associated Press writer WASHINGTON -- President Bush said Friday that the Iraq war was justified despite the lack of evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Congressional Democrats countered that a report from chief weapons hunter David Kay shows that administration claims Iraq posed an imminent threat were unfounded.

The president also shrugged off polls showing rising doubts about whether the war was worth the costs. "Sometimes the American people like the decisions I make, sometimes they don't," he told reporters. "But they need to know I make tough decisions, based upon what I think is right, given the intelligence I know."

Democrats, already hammering the president over his $87 billion request for military and rebuilding operations in Iraq, quickly latched onto Kay's interim report as further proof that the attack on Iraq was ill-advised.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, emerging from a briefing with Kay, said it was "clear to me that there was no imminence of a threat for weapons of mass destruction," as the White House had claimed.

Note that it isn't clear if Pelosi said "as the White House had claimed" - that very well could have been the AP adding that to the story. I think we're going to see a lot of media manipulation with only a few Dems (from safe, hard-core liberal districts) saying that Bush stated that the threat was imminent.

[dirtboy]

BINGO!

Reality Check: Anti-Bush Ad

Jul 30, 2003 5:51 pm US/Central (WCCO-TV) National Democrats are test marketing a controversial political ad in Madison, Wisconsin...the capitol city of a battleground state.

"In his State Of The Union Address, George W. Bush told us of an imminent threat. 'Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,'" says the commercial.

Damn, nothing I like better than finding a smoking gun...

[1rudeboy]

Yup, that was the one.

[dirtboy]

Damn, that's the DNC itself promulgating that lie:

Read His Lips: President Bush Deceives the American People

[dirtboy]

So we have DNC friendly columnists setting off a barrage of columns in mid-to-late July, claiming that Bush stated that the threat was imminent. And the DNC then ran a commercial claiming that Bush said the threat was imminent.

Yep, they were laying the ground here to shift the debate away from Kay's findings. They had to have known that he was findign weapons programs but not weapons, and had to make it seem that Bush claimed that the threat was imminent.

[dirtboy]

Check out reply #34, including the date...

[cwb]

It is amazing how the media gets right on message once they recieve their talking-points from the DNC. From everything from "Bush's gravitas," to this charade, to the Davis recall and how it was a referendum against Bush, the media all sings the same tune.