What is your source for this Joseph Wilson information? It is common knowledge the whole story about the yellowcake wasn’t true and the document the Bush administration used as justification for war was a forgery. Is this not true all of a sudden?

Interesting as well, today, a 5 count indictment on Irving Louis Libby (Cheney’s advisor akin to Karl Rove to Bush), for perjery, obstruction of justice, making false statements, lying to federal agents and lying under oath (with regard to the Joseph Wilson issue). Whooops. The Vice President and Libby withheld several documents against the advice of White House counsel about WMD’s, essentially cherry-picking the info to give to Bush in the run-up to war, not giving him all the information, only the information which made a case for war, much of it (like the centrifuge tubes) turned out not to be true. They often took fabricated info from guys like Chalabi (I’m sure you know who he is) and didn’t pass along the information that showed certain things couldn’t be used for WMD’s.

I think at this point, it’s kind of hard to take the position that the Bush administration had ample justification for a preemptive war.

I love debating this stuff. Getting back to the original topic, we cannot just get out right now. As much as I hate our guys getting picked off left and right, as well as thousands of Iraqi citizens being killed from collateral damage, we have to make sure Iraq can secure its own country and uphold their constitution which is pretty ground-breaking for a country in that region.

The fact remains, the administration fabricated and manipulated intelligence to justify a preemptive war and that is a galactically HUGE deal. When other countries see that our country, wheter we have the backing of the UN or not, can just attack, occupy, and overthrow their governments as we see fit, makes other countries scramble to obtain nuclear weapons. Because we have shown, that if you don’t have nuclear weapons and we don’t like you, we will overthrow your government in a couple weeks. If you have nuclear weapons, we talk to you and give you concessions (i.e. North Korea). So our actions are ironically, actually promoting nuclear proliferation around the world (i.e. Iran). So support Iraq becoming free and democratic (as I do) but don’t support the Bush administration and how they got us into this war. But I guess I shouldn’t tell you what to do hehehe.

Interesting that you quote the Washington Post, as what I’ve recently read points out several specific instances of misreporting the incident on the part of that very newspaper. I think I’ll have to write a full post about this on my own blog to fully explain, but there are cases demonstrated where reporting on the incident by the Washington Post clearly don’t match the record of events released by a Senate review of the CIA briefings on this issue. I refer to the July 7, 2004 report released by the bipartison Senate Select Intelligence Committee — a report specifically on the intelligence that served as the foundation for the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq.

I’m not implying the usual “liberal media bias” stuff, or that the Post deliberately misled anyone (ahem), but it appears that at the very least Washington Post writer Walter Pincus reported versions of events relayed by Joseph Wilson that were simply untrue.

Again, Joseph Wilson, the very man who started the “Bush lied about Iraq/Niger” story, claimed in his own CIA debriefing that Niger’s Mayaki told him personally — face to face — that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger in 1999. In other words, the very man who came back from Niger saying he’d found no evidence of Iraq shopping for yellowcake PROVIDED that evidence in his own debriefing.

Of course, I’m sure Saddam never intended to do anything naughy with that yellowcake he was trying to buy in Africa.

And PJS, you silly goose! I don’t “screen”, so much as “monitor” for spam and stuff. I have NEVER not posted a comment, with the exception of one. That was the day of coming out, and it was hatred. I then used it in the post, so, in essence, I have always posted all comments. Don’t worry about being censored here at duanemoody.com!!! WHOO HOO!!!

I agree. We are there and to leave and let the country fall into civil war would be a mistake.

As far as the mind-numbing littany of reasons before the invasion, there weren’t. Existence of WMD’s and the expulsion of the weapons inspectors and the resulting violation of a previous UN resolution was the reason given to the UN to get their support for the invasion of Iraq. However, the UN gave no such support. The laundry list we have now was collected over a period of time as the invasion continued after the previous reason given were proven untrue, beginning with WMD’s and eventually ending up with Al Qaeda ties and Saddam’s a bad guy reasons (which all but the latter were proven false). These reasons weren’t stated all at once before the invasion, the laundry list was only such long after the invasion and occupation and was the result of a year of spinning it as they went. The only reason left that held true at the end was that Saddam was a bad guy.

As far as the CIA thing there are memos from the CIA expressing strong doubts over the yellow cake claims The CIA most certainly did question the veractiy of the reports long before the forgery was proven. “The CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa, White House officials said Tuesday. - Washington Post, 7/23/03″

The Defense Secretary (Rice) in her testimony to Congress claimed to not have known about these doubts: “So the process is an NIE that is the basis of this, and then if the Agency had reservations about information that was in the NIE, then the DCI — and I think he will tell you that if he had reservations, he did not make those known to the President, to the Vice President, or to me — if he had reservations. [Source: Washington Post]“.

This is one of example of them knowingly and intentionally presenting false information as a reason for war to Congress. But I don’t want to take up Duane’s whole comment section but at least it makes for a fun debate and lots of comments. Sorry

I think that it is time for this thing to finish seeing itself through. It is time to finish it, period.

Jay, I didn’t see anyone suggesting that “it doesn’t matter how we got there”, that’s a straw man. The politics of pragmatism say that, while it can matter a whole heck of a lot how/why we got there, the fact remains that we’re there and need to handle the job we’ve undertaken.

Now, I may be accused of alzheimer’s here, but in my memory of 2002, the administration busily went about providing a laundry list of justifications for regime change in Iraq; there was a mind-numbing litany of reasons, given one after another. The anti-war crowd has (justifiably) siezed on WMD in hindsight, but that doesn’t mean that, as is so often misstated, that was our “only justification for war”.

It is absolutely incorrect and unsubstantiated to assert that the government knowingly, intentionally disseminated false information. If you’re referring to the yellowcake deal, the only person proven to have lied in the Plamegate scandal thus far has been Joseph Wilson himself. In Wilson’s own CIA debriefing, he recounted how Nigeria’s president told him Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from them in 1999. Sounds like a long time ago now, but it didn’t sound so far away in 2002, with the ashes of One World Trade Center still wafting in the air.

The only official reason the CIA has ever given for backing off of the Nigeria assertions was concern over revealing the identity of the source — not of the veracity of the report. The veracity of supporting documents was later questioned, and the documents were proven a forgery, but this came much later, and did not affect the CIA’s opinion of the initial report.