Harry is just goose stepping to the party line......

"Those who say Bush "lied us into war" based on "manufactured"
intelligence are either ignorant or malicious. Either way, they are
dangerously undermining whatever chance we still have of rescuing Iraq from
chaos and catastrophe"

by Allan H. Ryskind
Posted Nov 4, 2005

President Bush lied us into war and the revelations produced by the
Scooter Libby indictment only confirm this terrible scandal.

That's the essence of the vicious slur Democrats are hurling at the GOP
these days, with Minority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) shutting down the U.S.
Senate to dramatize the charge.

The White House, as the Democrats would now have it, had virtually no
evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, but the
President, Dick Cheney and their gang were so intent on removing Saddam from
power they invented facts. And when critics such as Joe Wilson spoke truth
to power, the "Scooters" in the administration slimed their reputations.

Unpatriotic Mud-Slinging

The episode involving Libby and Wilson, summed up Reid, "is about how the
Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to
bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to
challenge the President."

This is unpatriotic mud-slinging, with a touch of Black Helicopter
looniness tossed in. To believe that the White House concocted a fable about
WMD in Iraq, you would have to believe in a massive conspiracy involving not
only the Bush people, but both Bill Clinton's and George Bush's CIA
director, George Tenet; Bush's first term secretary of state, Colin Powell;
Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright; Clinton's key NSC Persian
Gulf adviser, Kenneth Pollack; and numerous WMD experts at the United
Nations.

How many people, for instance, know that Wilson himself, the Democrats'
big stick to beat up on Bush, believed that when the war began Saddam had
weapons of mass destruction?

Here is what he wrote in his now infamous July 6, 2003, column in the New
York Times, attempting to disprove, unsuccessfully, that the Bush
Administration was wrong when it insisted Iraq had been seeking nuclear
materials in Niger:

"I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass
destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained
international response to disarm him. Iraq possessed and had used chemical
weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a
nuclear research program-all of which were in violation of U.N.
resolutions."

What Wilson said in this column, of course, contained the core rationale
the administration gave as to why this country went to war. Was Wilson in on
the White House conspiracy, too?

Even though Wilson argued that his oral report to the CIA refuted Bush's
claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger-the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence forcefully asserted quite the opposite-he did believe what
virtually the whole world believed: that Saddam Hussein had plenty of WMD
and was energetically attempting to acquire more.

Madeleine Albright, appearing on the Sept. 21, 2003, edition of NBC's
"Meet the Press," had been certain that Saddam had stockpiled those terrible
weapons. She admitted she was very "surprised" that they hadn't yet been
discovered, adding: "But what worries me most now," is "where is it [WMD],
and could it be in the hands of terrorists?"

From 1995 to 1996 and from 1999 to 2001, Kenneth M. Pollack served as
director for Gulf affairs at the National Security Council, where he was the
principal working-level official responsible for implementation of Clinton's
policy toward Iraq.

Prior to serving Clinton, he spent seven years in the CIA as a Persian
Gulf military analyst.

Was Clinton's seasoned expert on the Gulf also in on the Bush plan to
fabricate evidence? The conspiracy buffs may think so, for in 2002, when
Bush was in office and worrying about what to do about Saddam, Pollack wrote
a book titled The Threatening Storm. The subtitle was more provocative: The
Case for Invading Iraq.

After analyzing all the WMD evidence at his command, and Saddam Hussein's
career as an aggressor, a mass murderer and a political thug who could not
be trusted to keep his word, Pollack concluded: "Unfortunately, the only
prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States is to mount
a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces."

When the WMD weren't found, Pollack wrote an article for the Atlantic
Monthly for its first issue in 2004.

He was critical of the Bush Administration's handling of the war, but he
made several informative observations in his critique. Among them:

a.. "The U.S. intelligence community's belief that Saddam was
aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction pre-dated Bush's
inauguration and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure."
b.. "In October of 2002, the National Intelligence Council, the highest
analytical body in the U.S. intelligence community, issued a classified
National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's WMD representing the consensus of
the intelligence community. Although after the war some complained that the
NIE had been a rush job and that the NIE should have been more careful in
its choice of language, in fact, the report accurately reflected what
intelligence analysts had been telling Clinton Administration officials like
me for years in verbal briefings."
'Manufactured' Intellligence

A declassified version of the 2002 NIE was released to the public in July
2003. Among its findings:

a.. "Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs
in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions."
b.. "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles
with ranges in excess of UN restrictions. . . ."
c.. "Since inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its chemical
weapons effort, energized its missile program and invested more heavily in
biological weapons; most analysts assess [that] Iraq is reconstituting its
nuclear weapons program."
Pollack, citing this crucial report, then said: "U.S. government analysts
were not alone in these views. In the late spring of 2002, I participated in
a Washington meeting about Iraq WMD. Those present included nearly 20 former
inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force
established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq.

"One of the senior people put a question to the group. Did anyone in the
room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No
one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a
secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes.)

"Other nations' intelligence services were similarly aligned with U.S.
views. Somewhat remarkably, given how adamantly Germany would oppose the
war, the German Federal Intelligence Service held the bleakest view of all,
arguing that Iraq might be able to build a nuclear weapon within three years
[without outside fissile material]. Israel, Russia, Britain, China and even
France held positions similar to that of the United States."

Pollack's account alone puts the lie to the charge that Bush took us to
war on "manufactured" intelligence.

And does anyone seriously believe that Bush's then-Secretary of State
Colin Powell was deliberately deceiving the American people when he made his
spectacularly convincing speech against Saddam before the United Nations on
Feb. 5, 2003, just weeks prior to the war?

Powell's major accusation, that Iraq was awash in WMD, came from CIA
Director George Tenet, who had also served as Bill Clinton's CIA director in
the last four years of the Clinton presidency.

George Bush had been assured by Tenet that there was "slam dunk" evidence
against Saddam, so the secretary of State descended upon the CIA in Mclean,
Va., spending four difficult days sifting through the intelligence,
sometimes with his deputy, Richard Armitage.

After the final rehearsal in Washington, Tenet, according to Bob Woodward's
most thorough report, "announced that he thought their case was ironclad and
he believed that they had vetted each sentence."

Powell then informed Tenet that the CIA director would have to sit behind
him at the UN, a visible sign that he was backing the secretary of State's
findings.

Powell's presentation on Feb. 5, 2003, was a tour de force, with even
ultra-liberal Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory succumbing. "I can
only say," she wrote, "that he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to
convince."

History will determine whether the Bush Administration did the right thing
in invading Iraq and we may yet discover definitively why so many experts
appeared to have misjudged the WMD threat. But we can conclude that the
President took us to war based on convincing, uncooked data compiled by
intelligence analysts in both the Clinton and Bush Administrations.

Those who say Bush "lied us into war" based on "manufactured" intelligence
are either ignorant or malicious. Either way, they are dangerously
undermining whatever chance we still have of rescuing Iraq from chaos and
catastrophe.

Mr. Ryskind, HUMAN EVENTS Editor at large, is writing a book on Communism
in Hollywood.

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=10090

"Jeff Rigby" wrote in message
. ..

"Harry Krause" wrote in message
...
Lying's just the tip of the iceberg

November 4, 2005

BY ANDREW GREELEY

Since it is apparently not a crime to deceive the American people into
supporting a foolish and unjust war, one must be content with the
indictment of I. Lewis Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice.
The
indictment is an example of a mountain laboring two years to bring
forth a
molehill. Libby will have the best trial lawyers money can buy and
stands
a good chance of acquittal. If he is convicted, the president will
surely
grant him a pardon before he leaves office.

We are unlikely ever to learn who ''outed'' Valerie Plame and thus
ruined
her career.

I'd like to know why some reporter didn't follow Mrs. Plame to her
office in
the CIA building and discovered that she worked there independent of any
insider information. Or is it assumed that no-one does any research.