Tuesdays with Sadaam
If you really wanted to get the truth out of Sadaam Hussein, probably the best way would be to spend months and months talking and just hanging out with him, psychologically manipulating him and his being in captivity to ingratiate yourself on a personal basis and get him to open up, even if accidentally.
Well, that's what a Lebanese born FBI agent did.
CBS's "60 Minutes" aired a segment last Sunday that was of monumental importance, but which receieved relatively little notice. It's worth your time to see or read what was revealed.
It was important because the FBI agent revealed many truths that "far-left liberals and America-haters" have been explaining for years now and being routinely ignored by the press.
The U.S. invasion had destroyed most of Sadaam's WMDs... the rest he voluntarily destroyed. He refused to reveal this fact because he felt that the thought that he possessed them was the only thing protecting his country from another war with Iran.
He allowed the U.S. to launch an attack because he simply thought that we'd never actually INVADE the country, but would most likely launch a massive bombing campaign, something which he'd survived before and was confident he could survive again.
There were many other interesting revelations as well. Such as the fact, reported over and over by reporters and others and utterly dismissed and ignored for the most part, that Sadaam Hussein hated Osama bin Laden, considered him a religious fanatic who couldn't be trusted, and wanted nothing to do with him.
While Bush/Cheney tried mightily to infer that bin Laden and Sadaam were sworn allies, the fact is that they were sworn enemies. That fact is a bit important, don't you think? Despite this being common knowledge, it was barely mentioned in the press and willfully ignored by Bush in his drive to start a war.
A factually challenged commenter recently argued long and long attempting to say that Bush and gang didn't lie to the country in a desire to whip up support for a war of choice. (I know, I know... sad, but true.)
For them and for all the rest of my fine readers, I urge you read this piece by Robert Parry, one of the few journalists who have consistently attempted to get these facts out, to little avail.
Parry feels that even the CBS report didn't go far enough.
This is a sneak-preview of this decidedly shameful page in America's history. Despite unprecidented efforts to hide, destroy, or deny access to, records of this most secretive administration in history, I feel confident that with the passage of time, all the people who couragiously tried to inform the American people and fight against the obvious campaign of lies and distortions used to cynically manipulate them into war will be vindicated, not as some sort of crazed "Bush haters" or traitors, but true patriotic citizens who struggled in a losing battle to get to the truth and share it with the American people.
posted by The Inside Dope @ 1/29/2008
15 comments
15 Comments:
I do not know where you keep coming up with the statement that 'Bush/ Cheney tried to tie bin-Laden and sadam to justify the invasion.'
The invasion was a stand alone deal based on the WMD's, Sadam's aggressive posturing against the US, his paying the families of suicide bombers and the (aparent) next step in the 'War On Terror.'
A statement or two was made specific to some of the 9-11 terrorists meeting with Iraqi leadership, but Bush/ Cheney did not push this thought to a great degree.
Care to provide evidence?
Dope, please help me understand the Democrat perspective.
The Republican understanding of National Security is - 'Peace through Strength.'
And I am serious when I ask this, what is the Democrat thinking on this, as they clearly do not believe in Peace through Strength.
- Peace through Appeasement?
- Peace through increased Foreign Aid?
- Peace through negotiation?
- Peace through not telling our enemies that they are wrong?
- Peace through isolationism?
Please understand, yes, I am indeed being a bit of a smart-ass, but how would you fill in the blank (from a Democrat perspective)?
Peace through ____________________.
(And please refrain from your hate-filled, "well, I will tell you what it is not!"
Mowen 7:40
Are you simply an idiot, or just pretending to be one? Either way, aren't you embarassed?
Anyone on the planet could clearly tell that Bush/Cheny and their minions were trying to associate Sadaam and bin Laden. How do you explain polls that showed that a huge majority of moron Fox News viewers were convinced that Sadaam had something to do with 9-11?
I shouldn't have to dredge up the hundreds of times Bush and gang mentioned Sadaam and 9-11 or al Queda almost in the same breath.
While they were slimy enough to studiously avoid telling the truth, they still did everything BUT flatly state there was a connection.
You're trying to tell us that there was no effort to link Sadaam with al Queda and 9-11?
You've got to be the only boob on earth that still tries to suggest that.
Don't pretend to be an ignorant out-to-lunch fool here just because you still can't psychologically handle the fact that you backed perhaps the worst president in U.S. history. It really makes you look bad. (not that that's a big reach.)
You sound exactly like an addict who will go to any lengths to try to rationalize and deny reality.
Hope you get over your psychosis. It won't be easy to finally believe your eyes and ears and accept the facts. But it's possible.
Mowen 8:39
You write,
"And I am serious when I ask this, what is the Democrat thinking on this, as they clearly do not believe in Peace through Strength."
No, you can't be taken remotely serious and neither can your "question".
And your flat statement that Dems don't believe in "peace through strength" is nothing but inflamatory, false, bullshit.
You'd make a perfect poster child of how the right wing has screwed up our entire politics.
You, personally, represent the screwy divisive and destructive way of thinking that makes nearly the entire country electrified by the message of hope and change.
It's your kind of anti-fact, anti-reason, anti-science, bigotted, fearful, intolerant, beligerant, selfish ideology that people are literally sick to death of and desperately want a clean break from.
Your entire mind-set is driving people in massive droves to Obama and the Dems. And that includes other Republicans sick of this perversion of conservatism as well.
Yet here you go again, exactly as I've pointed out so many times in the past.
You come out of the box trying to APPEAR to be oh-so reasonable and pretending to be asking a fair and serious question.
But you don't even come close.
Unfortunately, you have this really slimy habit of first slipping in some dumb-ass premise that you then base your entire "reasonable" question upon.
You've done this more times than I can count. It's predictable.
And this false premise is routinely either flat out wrong, or simply a rather out there right-wing opinion you got from Limbaugh or some other right-wing loon, which you then rightously state as if it were fact. (must be that authoritarian thing about feeling like you have sole possession of the truth as if it's handed down from on high. What dangerous poppy-cock.)
If you can't even ask a question without resorting to laying out some wing-nut view as if I have to stipulate it as fact, don't bother.
You're not fooling anyone.
By the way, only a brain-dead right-wing tool would consider the response, "well, I will tell you what it is not!" as "hate-filled" as you so ridiculously did.
And even sadder yet is the fact it's a blatant straw man you had to invent to begin with.
And really, what the hell would be so horrible if I HAD responded that way? Were you afraid I could easily counter your drivel that way and you wanted to cut it off "premptively", just like you prefer your wars?
You're a beut. A real credit to your party.
Seriously, get a freaking grip and if you aren't able to even pose a question without resorting to bullshit, PLEASE don't waste our time.
Dope, would you please, since I am apparently intellectually-challenged, would you please tell me what the Democrats believe about National Security.
You say that it is "false, bullshit" to say that Democrats do not believe in 'Peace Through Strength', but the facts would tell otherwise,
The last two Democrat Presidents trashed military spending, Carter and Clinton. In fact, Clinton cut the Defense Department by almost 50%.
When Reagan rebuilt the Defense department, our own Lane Evans, who had the RI Arsenal in his backyard, voted against spending increases EVERY SINGLE time.
As a block, the Democrats in Congress have fought defense spending at every opportunity.
So, I will ask again, (1) how is the statement that Democrats do not believe in 'Peace Through Strength' - "false and bullshit" - and (2) what do the Democrats believe is the proper manner to deal with National Security?
It's not a tough question.
Are the Democrats so unable to make a specific statement on this issue?
Are you?
Why do you deflect such a simple question with your anti-Republican tirade?
It really is a simple subject - no?
I've checked my "in" basket but I seem to have missed the memo. You know, the one that says "believing in Peace Through Strength" and attacking some dipwad bedouin who actually KILLS terrorists in his country are the same thing.
I guess your commentator missed the whole forty some odd years of Mutually Assured Destruction, where the purpose of having horrific weapons was to actually NOT HAVE TO USE THEM PROMISCUOUSLY.
Perhaps a few sessions with Dr. Strangelove would bring him up to speed.
Continued Success
I think that the Robert Parry piece is doing something other than saying that CBS should have "gone further". Parry is showing, with evidence, that the CBS story itself was propagating Bush propaganda by saying that Saddam had not come clean on the destruction of his WMDs, and that he somehow "chose war" by hiding the fact that he didn't have WMDs anymore. In fact, Saddam REPEATEDLY publicly delcared that his government had destroyed its WMDs. They DID let weapons inspectors into Iraq before the war, and the weapons inpectors, and most others on the security council, wanted more time to inspect. This was reported in all of the mainstream even here in the US news sources in 2002 and Jan-Feb 2003, as was the fact that on December 7, 2002, Iraq produced a 12,000 page document detailing how they had been destroyed.
How Saddam's repeated declarations were treated by the government and the mainstream press, however, is another story. Here's a representative article on how Iraq's declarations were treated:
"Dec 8, 2002
Saddam Hussein risked a devastating US-led war yesterday when he delivered a 12,000-page declaration on Iraq's arms capability, which he insists proves his regime 'retains no weapons of mass destruction'."
What? How could openly declaring that he had no weapons of mass destruction be a way of "risking war"? Here's how:
"The insistence that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction, however, appears to set the country on a collision course with the US - and its closest ally, Britain - both of which claim they have 'solid evidence' that it retains banned weapons systems."
So by admitting that he had no weapons of mass destruction, Saddam "chose" war, because the US KNEW he had WMDs. That's right, the US knew, because it had "solid evidence". The question raised by everyone in the media became who to believe--who was more "trustworthy", Saddam or Colin Powell? Well guess what, who turned out to be more trustworthy?
So what was the evidence that supposedly convinced the US and "every other intelligence agency on Earth" (as Donald Rumsfeld claimed--a claim that was patently untrue and for which he could never provide evidence, but which has been endlessly parroted by dittoheads since the WMDs were not found) that Saddam had WMDs? Was it the drunken pathalogical liar named "Curveball" that the Germans told the US not to believe? Was it the "intelligence dossier" supposedly produced by the British spy agency, which turned out to be plagiarized word for word from a 12 year old MA thesis they copied from the internet? (Not quite word for word--a few adjectives were changed to make the supposed Iraqi threat seem more "immanent"). Was it the lie that Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Africa, which even the CIA knew was false at the time that Bush told the nation?
Was there any other "solid evidence" produced? Has Sorry, no "solid evidence" was ever produced, because THERE COULD NOT HAVE BEEN ANY "SOLID EVIDENCE" because there were no WMDs! The claim of "solid evidence", solid enough to GO TO WAR on, was an absolute LIE. No ifs, ands or buts. The lie was the claim of "certainty."
One other lie, painfully transparent even at the time, was that Bush was treating war as a "last resort", or that he wanted to resolve the situation peacefully. This lie, repeated by Bush and Ari Fleischer over and over up until the invasion started, was exposed years ago. Numerous insiders, reporters, former cabinet members have all revealed that Bush wanted to go to war to oust Saddam from day one of entering the White House. He stacked his government with people who publicly called for going to war to oust Saddam even before Bush was elected. This was so obviously a lie at the time that I don't even need to put up evidence, but here's an article from before the war exposing the "last resort" lie.
Blockhead 10:40
First of all, I've asked you repeatedly to desist from another of your weird habits, that of expecting ME to somehow speak for all Democrats everywhere and the entire Democratic party by clearly deliniating impossibly complex policy positions.
Stop it. Or I'll start demanding that you explain the Republican stance on abortion and why, despite complete dominence of government from clear majorities in both houses of congress, to the White House, to the Supreme Court, nothing has ever been done towards outlawing abortion.
Democrats have always been "strong on defense" and have led during nearly all victorious wars. They did not "slash" defences spending, unless you count reducing the literally mind-bogglingly inflated defense budget by a few points "slashing".
Again, you simply can't hold up an argument without demanding that your opponent somehow agree to one false premise or another before you even begin.
The Democrats have sought to trim defense spending, which consumes more of our budget than anything else, and contains more waste, fraud, and abuse than all of your hated social programs put together.
You wing-nuts constantly yammer about how steamed you are at the thought that some poor single mother might be getting $5 more than she's entitled to, yet rush to suggest that our massively bloated defense budget is being short-changed if anyone dares try to bring it under control.
Considering we spend more on defense than literally EVERY OTHER COUNTRY ON EARTH COMBINED, your howling indignation seems a bit misplaced.
Your boys Rumsfeld and Cheney, to their credit, were actually reaponsible for spear-heading most of the defense cuts in the name of making our forces more lean and mobile. This is clearly documented. Rumsfeld's entire philosophy of defense was to do more with less, and it wasn't because he had less to work with. He was THE champion of the "defense realignment" school of thought that sought to trim down our forces to make it more versitile, agile and mobile.
Cheney too worked very hard as SOD to cut the budget and eliminate many projects, making many needed deep cuts.
I don't recall you howling about that.
The fact remains that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld were certainly satisfied that we had more than enough strength and capability to engage in multiple wars at the same time, and still do.
How could that be if your preposterous claim that Clinton "slashed" the military to the point they couldn't whip Lichtenstein was remotely true?
Your entire bogus argument amounts to you regurgitating yet another right wing talking point, purposely designed to divert even more of our country's wealth into the hands of defense contractors.
That's already our biggest export... war and the machinery of war, and you're crying that it's not enough?
So in short, yes, Democrats have always been "strong on defense", Republicans under Bush have infamously tried to skimp on Veteran's care once they return home, cutting the VA budget several times, they've infamously sent troops into battle without enough armor on vehicles and without adequate body armor, which has directly led to hundreds of deaths. Yet they refused to correct the situation, forcing the indefensible situation of family members having to buy body armor to send to their sons and daughters.
And you're still repeating the tired old B.S. about Clinton "destroying" the military?
Sorry Jimbo, but that's another myth you're laboring under.
Come back when you can make an argument based on facts, not tired old right-wing talking points.
Your day is over.
And sorry if you had to read too many words. I know that hurts your brain.
Saul,
My appologies for mistating the point of Parry's article. Indeed, he was proving that the notion of Sadaam hiding the fact that he no longer possessed WMDs is false.
This of course puts in stark relief just how horribly Bush and Co. deceived and mislead this country into an incredibly costly and largely futile conflict, one from which there is no easy resolution.
I just don't understand what came over me, the absurdity of thinking that the Dem's are not strong on defense.
I am certain that I got it wrong that Lane Evans, with the RIA in his backyard, voted against EVERY military speding bill in 24-years.
I bet I have that entirely turned around, he likely voted FOR every military spending bill in 24-years.
Again, I am sorry if I got my facts mixed up.
And Democrat POTUS candidates usually lose the White House bid because the public fears that they will do too good a job on National Defense - likely be too strong on Defense issues.
Thank you for clearing this up for me.
And thank you for your foolishness, it keeps the Republicans in the White House far more than they likely deserve. If you guys did not live in la-la land of revisionist history and dealt with reality more often, you'd actually be able to win more often (how else can you explain Bush winning twice - you guys are brain-dead and nominate the most un-electable candidates).
Again, thanks! and keep your head where its at - it at least keeps taxes lower.
Dope, I don't see Conservatives trying to kick military recruiters out of their cities (Berkeley) and schools.
Tough to have 'Peace through Strength' or suggest that one is for Peace through Strength - if you don't even support a military!
Don't be so hard on yourself Skippy. Your facts aren't messed up, your entire reasoning process is.
Your craving for simplistic thought has once again made you into an impicile.
Take a look... in your tiny black and white world view, you simply MUST vote for every multi-billion dollar spending measure that comes down the pike, or .... you're "weak on defense".
That, my friend, is a blatant false choice argument.
Obviously, one can favor and vote for defense spending increases and still be very strong on defense.
Evans was a marine corp vet... while somehow I doubt you've ever worn a uniform that wasn't Cub Scouts.
The idea that he's "weak on defense" is absolutely laughable.
No, Chip, it's just you being trapped by the BS you swallow by the gigantic corporations, filtered through your right wing mouthpieces, in order to convince suckers like you that anyone that stands in the way of their carving off an ever increasing slice of our country's wealth is somehow a traitor.
That's patent bull, and you ought to be smart enough to realize it.
The fact that you're reduced to nothing but grade school snarkiness shows you're simply out of ammo. It's you who's weak on defense when it comes to this argument.
Dingus 1:38.
I see you're glued to FOX or some other outlet that makes you dumber.
So.... let me understand you here.
Because some far left members of a city council votes to not allow Marine recruiters to use city property to recruit kids into potentially serving in what they believe to be an unjust and immoral war.... you .. what? Assume that's the views shared by each and every Democrat?
Again, please try to at least make a even semi-valid argument. Otherwise, you truly look silly.
Far Left City Council members.
Liberal college administrators.
Lane Evans.
The Democrat Congress.
Democrat Presidents.
There seems to be a parttern here partner!
Dufus 11:22
Only in your addled brain partner.
You leap from 3 or 4 city council members in one city in California to indicting the entire Democratic congress and every Democratic president.
Frankly, you're nuts. Go away.
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