Mr. Speaker! We Need To Get Back To Benghazi

[unregistered]

 

[RobDownSouth]

This message is hidden because RubDownSow is on your ignore list.

Note:

Rob swings along with the rest of Lit's libs, but his extreme weight, requiring handfuls to stay airborne, has all but denuded the Obama old growth rectal forest, threatening the future of a favored form of lib fealty.

Like most Vietnam-era marines here, Vettebigot hides in the safety of the ignore bunker.

 

[unregistered]

 

[dan_c00000]

Looks like you bitches till have nothing on Benghazi.

I Was Promised a Cover-Up
The White House Benghazi emails reveal a smoking gun. But it wasn’t the one that Republicans set out to find.
By John Dickerson|Posted Thursday, May 16, 2013, at 12:54 PM

1363Share on Facebook Followed by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney (R), U.S. President Barack Obama (L) approaches to the podium at the James Brady Press Briefing Room for a press conference at the White House on April 30, 2013 in Washington, DC.
The White House Benghazi emails show little evidence of a concerted effort to cover up what happened in Libya last September

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

I was told there was going to be a cover-up. After reading the 100 pages of emails related to the Benghazi media talking points, I’m hard-pressed to find evidence for the most damning accusations against the president and his staff. If they were involved, they were once again leading from behind.

The most incendiary charge aimed at the president is that, in order to insulate himself in an election year, he and his team made up a fake story about a "spontaneous uprising" in Benghazi and downplayed intelligence that it could have been a premeditated attack by known terrorist organizations. There has been so much spinning from the president and his staff in the aftermath of the attack, this storyline seems possible—when the public spin is this bad it is easy to imagine deeper rot. The emails help your imagination along. They destroy the impression left last November by White House spokesman Jay Carney that only a single word was changed in the process, which can get your adrenaline up. But when you pull on the thread in search of evidence for the Big Story, your heartbeat slows. The emails show a lot of CIA and State Department action, but comparatively little White House meddling, and certainly nothing near the level of meddling that would be required to put in the big fix.

One of the challenges of figuring out what's a cover-up, what's a lie, and what's just spin in this Benghazi drama is that this entire discussion is about media talking points. Talking points produced to guide members of Congress in their conversations with the media are not the product of sodium pentothal. They are created to put the best face on an event and to coordinate spin so that everyone in the administration, campaign, or party caucus has the story straight. That means if you don't see bureaucratic ass-covering and efforts to make the interesting appear bland, you're not reading talking points. So, for example, when House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama have a contentious meeting, their aides agree on talking points in which they tell the media the two men had a "frank exchange." Not a lie, but not an expletive-laden transcript either. In this case, the talking points were being created on the fly as information was coming in about the attack and an investigation was underway. So, in addition to the normal massaging of language, there was a good deal of imprecision, too.

Given that context, what do the emails tell us about the Obama election-season cover-up story? First there is the matter of the "spontaneous demonstration" that ignited the violence. The president’s critics contend that the Obama team put United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice on the Sunday talk shows to promote a false story about a link between the violence in Benghazi and the demonstrations in Cairo over an anti-Islamic video. If this were true, it would indeed make the whole business a cover-up. Talking points may not be suitable for stone tablets, but you're not supposed to actually lie. But the one thing that is consistent throughout the talking-point editing process is the very first sentence of the CIA assessment: "The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo."

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There is no mention of a video in the talking points, which Rice brought up on television that Sunday, but the video was the pretext for the Cairo protests. (You may remember that before the State Department was covering its behind about the Benghazi attack, it was doing so over the Cairo embassy apology for the video.) In 1992, if you'd talked about the riots in Los Angeles it would have been reasonable to refer to them as the riots that were based on the Rodney King video.

Let’s not fixate too much on the video, though. It's less important to the cover-up narrative than the idea that the attack was a spontaneous event. What administration critics find risible about the reliance on the video is the thinking behind it: that this level of violence could ever be considered spontaneous. Fair point, but that's a problem with the CIA's first assessment, not evidence that supports a White House cover-up.

The cover-up story relies on the premise that Obama administration officials pushed the idea of spontaneity in order to obscure the fact that they had missed warnings of planned terrorist attack. It's plausible that someone was pushing that story for parochial reasons in these email exchanges. Perhaps the CIA put that idea in its first assessment and kept it there in every subsequent version to cover for its failure to stay on top of the al-Qaida affiliates in Benghazi, even though there was a CIA outpost there. It's also obvious that the State Department wanted to shift blame away from its failure to protect its people in Benghazi. But there's no evidence in the emails that the idea of spontaneity was initiated by anyone associated with Obama, the White House, or the president's wider political fortunes. Did Obama benefit from the spontaneity narrative? Yes. But to embrace intelligence from your CIA that is favorable to you—when you have no reason to doubt your intelligence service—is not the same as making up a false story. It’s not even a sin.

Next we come to the claim that the president and his team removed the references to al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations as well as references to prior warnings about terrorist activity. If this were the case, you would expect to see some effort by the White House voices in the email traffic toward this goal. It’s not there. The opposite is the case. In the initial round of emails, one CIA official reports that the White House signed off right away on the full initial CIA assessment. "The White House cleared quickly, but State has major concerns," reads an email that a CIA official sent to CIA director David Petraeus. So rather than being the authors of the bowdlerizing effort, the White House was just fine with the fully caffeinated version that mentions Ansar al-Sharia, al-Qaida, and that the CIA had produced numerous warnings about extremists in Benghazi. White House aides reviewed the talking points, made no substantive changes, and moved them along.

When the language does eventually change in the talking points, it is clear that it is at the behest of State Department officials, not anyone in the White House. When Obama’s aides do come on stage, it’s pretty far in the background. One State Department official writes, "Talked to [NSC spokesman] Tommy [Vietor], we can make edits.” This is hardly the vision of a campaign-obsessed Obama operation pushing a storyline. There have been some sloppy Nixon analogies thrown around this week, so let's remind ourselves for a moment of what a real cover-up sounds like. "I don't give a shit what happens,” President Nixon was recorded saying. “I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else if it'll save it—save the plan. That's the whole point. … We're going to protect our people, if we can."

Aides to Republicans pushing for additional investigations concede that the leaked emails don’t show much White House involvement. That takes the heat off of Obama and puts it on Hillary Clinton—who was always an ancillary target of the Benghazi inquest. In congressional testimony, Secretary of State Clinton said, “It was an intelligence product,” referring to the talking points and adding later that the “intelligence community was the principal decider about what went into talking points.” That doesn’t stand up now that we can see how thoroughly the State Department was reworking the language.

The original talking points authored by the CIA were wrong about the spontaneity of the uprising, but they substantiated the idea that there was a broader terrorist threat on the ground. The final product that informed Susan Rice's talk show appearances was both wrong and bland. What's clear from the email exchanges is that the State Department insisted on the changes for a mix of ass-covering and self-defense reasons. Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokesperson, didn't want to give Congressional critics talking points that could be used against the State Department. That would no doubt please her former boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, who had a very stingy view about what Congress had a right to hear when it came to national security matters.

Cheney was among those this week pushing the idea that the president concocted the story of a spontaneous riot to protect his election chances. That the CIA analysts fed the president intelligence that turned out to be imprecise would no doubt be insufficient for the former vice president, though Cheney had a similar experience. He cites the CIA as the source of his long-held incorrect view that Iraq played a role in the 9/11 attacks. (If he weren't on the other side of the ideological divide, perhaps he and the president could commiserate over how hard it is to get a story straight.)

Just because there's no real evidence of the grand White House conspiracy doesn't absolve the president of responsibility for the underlying failures and the shoddy efforts to explain the whole affair. From his first remarks in the Rose Garden, to the exchanges in the debates with Mitt Romney, to the present day, the president has been shading and back-dating what he said shortly after the attack to make it seem like he was aware it was a planned attack when at the time he was encouraging the view that it was a spontaneous one. That's spin and it's lame, but it's a present-day failing unconnected with White House actions last fall. So the president and his aides are guilty—guilty of doing a bad and misleading job of explaining why there was no cover-up. But that’s not the smoking gun Republicans set out to find.

 

[RobDownSouth]

~View Post~

I thought I was on IGGY, clown.

I was asked to come back and begin correcting your multitude of lies, half-truths and distortions.

 

[landslider2000]

It wasn't just Democrats out to get Nixon.

Presidential lies matter.

They matter re the Watergate breakin, and they matter with nonsense about a video catalyzing Benghazi.

The Benghazi timeline is not merely a matter of partisan interest.

 

[Wrong Element]

Cheney was among those this week pushing the idea that the president concocted the story of a spontaneous riot to protect his election chances. That the CIA analysts fed the president intelligence that turned out to be imprecise would no doubt be insufficient for the former vice president, though Cheney had a similar experience. He cites the CIA as the source of his long-held incorrect view that Iraq played a role in the 9/11 attacks. (If he weren't on the other side of the ideological divide, perhaps he and the president could commiserate over how hard it is to get a story straight.)

I still shake my head over the idea that Benghazi could have somehow ended Obama's bid for reelection, when it was the terrorist attack that occurred during Cheney's tenure as vice president that was the single biggest reason he and his boss won reelection.

Where is the evidence of a president's approval rating dropping after a terrorist attack?

 

[Busybody]

I still shake my head over the idea that Benghazi could have somehow ended Obama's bid for reelection, when it was the terrorist attack that occurred during Cheney's tenure as vice president that was the single biggest reason he and his boss won reelection.

Where is the evidence of a president's approval rating dropping after a terrorist attack?

It wasn't the attack

BUT YOU KNOW THAT

 

[dan_c00000]

It wasn't the attack

BUT YOU KNOW THAT

That was probably the dumbest thing you've ever posted.

Fear is very important in selling fake wars to people. Just ask Bush II he did a great job at it.

How the White House Set Out to “Educate the Public”
According to Richard Clarke, then national coordinator for counterterrorism, at a
cabinet meeting the day after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld talked about “getting Iraq,” arguing that there were “no decent targets
for bombing in Afghanistan” and proposed “we should consider bombing Iraq instead.”
This suggestion was not rejected by President Bush, who “noted that what we needed to
do with Iraq was to change the government, not just hit it with more cruise missiles.”3
The early positions within the government were described by a senior Bush
administration official in an interview:
Before September 11th, there wasn’t a consensus Administration view about Iraq… There were
those who preferred regime change, and they were largely residing in the Pentagon, and
probably in the Vice-president’s office… Then, in the immediate aftermath of the eleventh, not
that much changed… Some initial attempts by [Deputy Secretary of Defense] Wolfowitz and
others to draw Iraq in never went anywhere, because the link between Iraq and September 11th
was, as far as we knew, nebulous at most—nonexistent, for all intents and purposes.4
President Bush’s speechwriters were asked at the end of 2001 to make a case for war
against Iraq to be included in the forthcoming State of the Union Address.5 In the
January 2002 speech, Bush declared that the US confronted an “axis of evil,” naming
North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. North Korea and Iran received one sentence each in the
speech; the real focus was Iraq.6 The problem, President Bush declared, was that “Iraq
continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime
has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade.”7
He went on to say, “By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a
grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the
Buy book at http://www.interlinkbooks.com/
Chapter from Achin Vanaik (editor), Selling US Wars (Interlink Publishing, 2007)
means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the
United States.” These arguments were to be repeated over the next year with ever
greater force and detail.
Vice President Dick Cheney returned from the Middle East and on March 24, 2002,
appeared on three major Sunday public affairs television programs, bearing similar
messages on each. On CNN’s Late Edition he offered the following comment on
Saddam: “This is a man of great evil, as the president said. And he is actively pursuing
nuclear weapons at this time.” On NBC’s Meet the Press he said, “[T]here’s good
reason to believe that he continues to aggressively pursue the development of a nuclear
weapon. Now will he have one in a year, five years? I can’t be that precise.” And on
CBS’s Face the Nation: “The notion of a Saddam Hussein with his great oil wealth,
with his inventory that he already has of biological and chemical weapons, that he might
actually acquire a nuclear weapon is, I think, a frightening proposition for anybody who
thinks about it.”8
A few months later, speaking at the United States Military Academy at West Point,
President Bush made a more general point that revealed the real fears of the United
States:
When the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile
technology—when that occurs, even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic
power to strike great nations. Our enemies have declared this very intention, and have been
caught seeking these terrible weapons. They want the capability to blackmail us, or to harm us,
or to harm our friends.9
The reason why proliferation must be prevented, for President Bush and leaders before
him, is that “even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to
strike great nations.” Left unsaid here, of course, is that some “great nations,” most
notably the United States, have long had the “catastrophic power” to destroy weak
nations, and the goal is to keep it that way.
The fear that the spread of WMDs and especially nuclear weapons might allow “weak
states” to counter the ambitions and interests of “great nations” is almost as old as the
atomic bomb. President’s Bush words echo an argument advanced 50 years ago in one
of the earliest studies about how coming of the atomic bomb might affect international
relations. It was argued that the atomic weapons were a grave danger to the United
States not just because “regular rivals on the same level” might acquire these “absolute
weapons” (as the Soviet Union and Britain had already done by then) but that “possibly
some of the nations lower down in the power scale might get hold of atomic weapons
and change the whole relationship of great and small states.”10 To prevent this has been
an important goal of US policy, and that of the other nuclear weapons states as each has
developed its weapons.
In late July 2002, Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, the British Secret Service, upon
returning home from Washington explained at a meeting of British Prime Minister Tony
Blair and his top advisers, that the Bush administration had decided to attack Iraq and
Buy book at http://www.interlinkbooks.com/
Chapter from Achin Vanaik (editor), Selling US Wars (Interlink Publishing, 2007)
“military action was now seen as inevitable.” In what has come to be known as the
Downing Street memo, Dearlove explained that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam
through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.” He
continued: “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”11
This plan was to unfold over the next several months, with leaders in the US and UK
emphasizing what Dearlove called a “conjunction of terrorism and WMD threat” from
Iraq. Britain joined the US drive to war despite the recognition at that meeting by the
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw that “the case was thin. Saddam was not
threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North
Korea or Iran.” This reflected the assessment by the British Foreign Office in early 2002
that there was no hard evidence that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
To coordinate the case for war in the United States, in August 2002, White House Chief
of Staff Andrew Card set up the White House Iraq Group; the members included Karl
Rove (senior political advisor to Bush), Condoleezza Rice and her deputy (now
National Security Adviser) Stephen Hadley, Lewis Libby (chief of staff to Dick
Cheney), and communications strategist Karen Hughes, among others. Its mission was
to organize US strategy on Iraq, and according to one participant to “educate the public”
about the danger posed by the Saddam Hussein regime.12
This group of key officials planned the speeches on Iraq by the administration and the
reports and papers laying out policy. The focus was to be the threat of WMDs. How this
came about was explained later by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz when
he revealed that “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the US
government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which
was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.”13
The first major speech was on August 26, 2002, by Vice-President Cheney, to a
conference of the US military veterans: “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now
has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against
our friends, against our allies, and against us.” It was a question of when, not if, such an
attack would come, Cheney seemed to say as he summoned up the vision of the
Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, claiming “Only then did we recognize
the magnitude of the danger to our country.” Now, he argued, “time is not on our side.
Deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network, or a
murderous dictator, or the two working together, constitutes as grave a threat as can be
imagined.”14
On September 8, 2002, the New York Times ran a story under the headline “US Says
Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts”:
More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq
has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a world wide hunt for
materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said.15
Buy book at http://www.interlinkbooks.com/
Chapter from Achin Vanaik (editor), Selling US Wars (Interlink Publishing, 2007)
The report went on that “hardliners” in the administration were afraid that “the first sign
of a ‘smoking gun’ … may be a mushroom cloud.”
The hardliners went on major news and current affairs television programs that day and
conjured up what is perhaps the most fearful image of our times, the mushroom cloud
produced by an exploding atomic bomb. Condoleezza Rice argued on CNN that “We do
know that he [Saddam Hussein] is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon… there will
always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we
don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”16 On CBS, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld explicitly linked Iraq, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and
9/11, arguing that
Iraq is a terrorist state on the terrorist list. It is a—a state that is developing and has developed
and possessed and, in fact, used weapons of mass destruction already… If you go back to
September 11th, we lost 3,000 innocent men, women and children. Well, if—if you think that’s
a problem, imagine— imagine a September 11th with weapons of mass destruction.17
In early October 2002, the same images and language were deployed by President Bush.
In a nationally televised speech from Cincinnati, Ohio, President Bush claiming that
“America must not ignore the threat gathering against us… we cannot wait for the final
proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”18
This view was propounded not just in interviews and speeches on major television
stations by leading figures; it also figured large in official policy documents. In
September 2002, the National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States was
released. It announced that “We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist
clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the
United States and our allies and friends.”19 The message of threat and pre-emption
before the threat was realized was repeated again and again; the report claiming that
“We must deter and defend against the threat before it is unleashed” and “We cannot let
our enemies strike first.”
American public opinion responded to this determined effort to portray an imminent
nuclear threat from Iraq to the United States. A poll in late September 2002 found that
80 percent of Americans thought Iraq already had the capability to use weapons of mass
destruction against US targets.20
There was some dissent from within government but it failed to make the major media.
An October 2002 report based on extensive interviews with officials claimed
a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats ... have deep
misgivings about the administration’s double-time march toward war [and] charge
that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein poses—including distorting his links to the al-Qaeda terrorist network—have
overstated the amount of international support for attacking Iraq and have downplayed the
potential repercussions of a new war in the Middle East.21
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Chapter from Achin Vanaik (editor), Selling US Wars (Interlink Publishing, 2007)
These officials were categorical that “the US government has no dramatic new
knowledge about the Iraqi leader that justifies Bush’s urgent call to arms.” They took
issue in particular statements by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Rice.
This assessment was subsequently confirmed publicly by Paul Pillar, the US National
Intelligence Officer for the Middle East from 2000–2005, the person responsible for
coordinating US intelligence assessments on Iraq. In 2006, he observed that
“intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made” by the Bush
administration. Pillar has described the claims by senior officials and the administration
as being “at odds” with the intelligence community’s judgments. He revealed in
particular that “the greatest discrepancy between the administration’s public statements
and the intelligence community’s judgments concerned … the relationship between
Saddam and al-Qaeda,” and was categorical that “the intelligence community never
offered analysis that supported the notion of an alliance between Saddam and al-
Qaeda.”22According to Pillar:
Well before March 2003, intelligence analysts and their managers knew that the United States
was heading for war with Iraq. It was clear that the Bush administration would frown on or
ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that
supported such a decision.23
Tyler Drumhellar, a senior CIA officer, has confirmed and added to Pillar’s account. He
has revealed that in September 2002, CIA chief George Tenet told President Bush and
Vice President Cheney that they had good reason to believe Iraq had no ongoing rogram
for weapons of mass destruction. The source for this information was the foreign
minister of Iraq, a paid CIA agent. Three days later, according to Drumhellar, the White
House told the CIA that “this isn’t about intel[ligence] anymore. This is about regime
change.”24
As Pillar makes clear, the intelligence community chose to bend with the wind.25 It did
not take a stand against the Bush administration’s pressure, or ensure that Congress and
the public understood what was happening. No senior intelligence official chose to
follow the example set 35 years by Daniel Ellsberg, who revealed the Pentagon Papers
showing that successive US officials had been lying in public about US policy in
Vietnam. This disclosure helped end the Vietnam War. If they had been made public,
the intelligence assessments on Iraq could have allowed for a more informed public
debate about the Bush admini-stration’s claims about WMDs in Iraq and its policy of
choosing war.
On October 11, Congress passed a resolution that cited
Iraq’s demonstrated capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction, the risk that
the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the
United States or its armed forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so
Buy book at http://www.interlinkbooks.com/
Chapter from Achin Vanaik (editor), Selling US Wars (Interlink Publishing, 2007)
and authorized President Bush to “use the armed forces of the United States as he
determines to be necessary … to defend the national security of the United States
against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.”26
In his State of the Union speech in January 2003, President Bush summoned the same
fears:
Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in
custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al-
Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to
terrorists, or help them develop their own. Before September the 11th, many in the world
believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and
shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other
weapons and other plans—this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one
canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever
known.27
Lest anyone doubt that Saddam Hussein was capable of using weapons of mass
destruction, President Bush recalled that “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.”28
Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran in the Iran–Iraq War, and against Iraqi
Kurds in the late 1980s, was a recurring argument used by President Bush and other
policymakers in their drive to scare people into a war. They did not mention, of course,
the US–Iraq relationship at the time these weapons were being used. A Washington
Post investigation revealed that during the 1980s “the administrations of Ronald Reagan
and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both
military
and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses,
such as anthrax and bubonic plague.”29
They did not explain (nor were asked to explain) why when Iraq had been making
“almost daily use” of chemical weapons against Iran, the United States, according to a
National Security Council official, “actively supported the Iraqi war effort,” with
billions of dollars and “by providing military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis.”30
As the New York Times reported,
American military officers said President Reagan, Vice President George Bush and senior
national security aides never withdrew their support for the highly classified program in which
more than 60 officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency were secretly providing detailed
information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for air strikes and bombdamage
assessments for Iraq
while at the same time “the C.I.A. provided Iraq with satellite photography of the war
front.”31 Similarly, Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against the Kurds, most notoriously
in 1988 against the town of Halabjah, was met with increased US military assistance.
Buy book at http://www.interlinkbooks.com/
Chapter from Achin Vanaik (editor), Selling US Wars (Interlink Publishing, 2007)
On January 31, 2003, President Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and
according to an official memo of the meeting, Bush explained that “the military
campaign was now penciled in for March 10. This was when the bombing would
start.”32 Bush also discussed with Blair ways of provoking a confrontation with Iraq;
the memo records President Bush suggesting “flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with
fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colors” and then “if Saddam fired on them, he
would be in breach.” The memo notes that Bush also proposed bringing out a defector
who could talk about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and even raised the possibility
of assassinating Saddam Hussein.
The decision to go to war was kept secret as the US and UK sought and failed to get UN
Security Council support for an attack on Iraq. The process of educating the public
about the threat from WMDs, and especially nuclear weapons, from Iraq and the need to
pre-empt any possible threat continued. It culminated in Bush’s March 17, 2003 address
to the nation announcing the war on Iraq. He said:
the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever
devised… it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al-Qaeda…using
chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists
could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent
people in our country, or any other… With these capabilities, Saddam Hussein and his terrorist
allies could choose the moment of deadly conflict when they are strongest. We choose to meet
that threat now, where it arises, before it can appear suddenly in our skies and cities.33
The United States brought war to Iraq. Despite the certainties displayed by President
Bush, a year of direct US occupation and the efforts of 1,400 experts from the
Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, national weapons laboratories, and
intelligence agencies turned up no weapons of mass destruction.34
Subsequent investigative reporting by the Washington Post found
a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates—in public and
behind the scenes—made allegations depicting Iraq’s nuclear weapons program as more active,
more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support.
There was also the sin of omission, according to the Post: “on occasion administration
advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views.”35

 

[unregistered]

 

[dan_c00000]

Wile E. Coyote shakes his head a lot too, so you're in good stead:

http://theawesomer.com/photos/2011/03/032011_wile_e_coyote_in_127_hours_t.jpg

Looks like your thread is getting pretty shitty.

https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/2625152768/hB925A025/

 

[Busybody]

Report: Congressional Investigators Interview “Dozens” Of Benghazi Witnesses, Including USMC Colonel George Bristol…




Update to this story.

Via CBS News:


In recent weeks, members of the House and Senate and their staffers have held two classified hearings on the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya; conducted more than 25 hours of formal, transcribed interviews with witnesses; and spoken informally with several dozen additional witnesses, including some who are being called “whistleblowers.”

Among those who have recently spoken to Congress is Marine Corps Col. George Bristol who was in the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) chain of command on Sept. 11. Earlier this month, CBS News reported that the Pentagon declined Republican congressional requests to produce Bristol for interviews. At the time, the Pentagon said Bristol had retired and that they “cannot compel retired members to testify before Congress.”

However, after that report about Congress’ search for Bristol, the Pentagon contacted CBS News to say their original assessment was in error and that Bristol is not retired, after all. Instead, he’s on “terminal leave.” The Pentagon added: “In response to a request from [South Carolina Republican] Senator [Lindsey] Graham’s office earlier this month, Colonel George Bristol (USMC) will be available to meet with House and Senate members and their staffs.”

Bristol has since met with Graham and is set to testify Tuesday behind closed doors in front of the House Armed Services Committee. [...]

Graham tells CBS News that his office is now hearing from frustrated officials within military special forces and intelligence communities who say they have good leads on the whereabouts of suspects in the attacks but can’t get approval to take action.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Busybody]

no

one

cares

 

[unregistered]

 

[phrodeau]

Keep the investigations moving, it erodes the President's phony facade.

The one you gave him, you mean?

 

[Busybody]

Keep the investigations moving, it erodes the President's phony facade.

no

one

cares

 

[KingOrfeo]

Drip...drip...drip

No need to sign your posts.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

No need to sign your posts.

I think that's the sound of the fluid running from his nose hitting the keyboard.

 

[unregistered]

 

[dan_c00000]

I think that's the sound of the fluid running from his nose hitting the keyboard.

I picture vette more as foaming at the mouth. Busy body? Well I think he gets his dog to type his posts.

 

[Busybody]

Graham: Special Ops, Intel Personnel Telling Him They Have Benghazi Leads, But Not Allowed to Chase Them


Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said today that military and intelligence personnel are not receiving permission to chase down solid leads in bringing the perpetrators of the Benghazi attack to justice.

Graham noted that CNN recently interview Ahmed Abu Khattala, head of Ansar al-Sharia, and asked him about the attack on-camera, “but nobody from the FBI, the Libyan government has ever talked to him and he’s a person of high interest, according to our government.”




“CNN found him within two hours. Apparently we can’t find him. Maybe we need to contract out to the media to go get these suspects. But this is a pathetic effort to bring people to justice,” Graham said this morning on Fox.

The senator said he’s had “special forces operatives and intelligence community personnel come up to me over the last two months and say they’ve got great leads, know where other members who planned the attacks are located in Libya and can’t get approval to go after them.”

“This is not a phony scandal. This is a pathetic effort to bring people to justice. I think if you’ve got these folks, you would find out how terrorist-centered this attack was. It was not based on a video. Maybe they’re still looking for the guy from the video and that’s why they can’t find these folks. I don’t know. But my belief is the people who killed our folks are wandering around Libya in the wide open and we aren’t doing a damn thing about it,” he said.

Graham called the administration policy of calling Benghazi a phony scandal a case of “attack the critic.”

“At the end of the day, we’re almost a year out from Benghazi, not one person has been put in jail, but CNN was able to find the leader of the organization responsible for the attack after a two-hour effort in Benghazi, no one has been brought to jail. We still don’t know if Hillary Clinton approved the consulate to be opened after it failed the security inspection. We still have no idea who changed the talking points to start this lie that it was a video — riot caused by a video,” he said.

“The basics of what happened in Benghazi are unknown and the Congress has never been able to interview one survivor. They’re writing books, they’re appearing on TV. This has to stop. This is not a scandal. This is a national security failure where four brave Americans died and we’re doing nothing to bring the people to justice, to understand how it failed.”

 

[unregistered]

 

[Busybody]

http://moonbattery.com/Phony-Scandals.jpg

 

[mercury14]

The war on terror is over, Obama doesn't give a shit. He promised to bring to justi.....fart...crap...fart...you know the rest of the shit spreading machine he commands.

There should be no War on Terror because it's a stupid idea. Every damn time America goes to war against an idea we spend decades spending crazy money just to get our own asses kicked.