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Saturday, September 30, 2006

Republicans: The Party of Liars
Posted by Jill | 6:43 PM
Oh, it just keeps getting worse for Administration of Liars. The first excerpt from Bob Woodward's new book is now up at Washington Post, and it's a doozy:

1) The lies George W. Bush is telling the American people about the state of affairs in Iraq:

In May, President Bush spoke in Chicago and gave a characteristically upbeat forecast: "Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat."

Two days later, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret intelligence assessment to the White House that contradicted the president's forecast.

Instead of a "long retreat," the report predicted a more violent 2007: "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year."


2) The complete and utter lack of a strategy for Iraq:

In the fall of 2003 and the winter of 2004, officials of the National Security Council became increasingly concerned about the ability of the U.S. military to counter the growing insurgency in Iraq.

Returning from a visit to Iraq, Robert D. Blackwill, the NSC's top official for Iraq, was deeply disturbed by what he considered the inadequate number of troops on the ground there. He told Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, that the NSC needed to do a military review.

"If we have a military strategy, I can't identify it," Hadley said. "I don't know what's worse -- that they have one and won't tell us or that they don't have one."


3) The decision that one of the architects of Nixon's failed Vietnam policy should be the go-to guy on Iraq:

"Of the outside people that I talk to in this job," Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter and I sit down with him." (Scooter is I. Lewis Libby, then Cheney's chief of staff.)

The president met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.

[snip]

Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw the situation through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.


As if this weren't bad enough, don't miss the article linked to from this little sidebar:

As it turns out in the aftermath of Keith Olbermann's devastating indictment of how the Bush Administration dropped the ball on Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda in the leadup to the 9/11 attacks....



...., it's getting more difficult every day for the Bush Administration to continue to blame Bill Clinton for its own failings.

And this equally devastating article linked to in that teensy-weensy sidebar, so small that if you blink you won't even see it, would make it even more difficult -- if we didn't live in a nation of delusional morons:

On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. The mass of fragments made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.

Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director.

[snip]

Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested that something was coming.

He did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one."

Tenet had the National Security Agency review all the intercepts, and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined "Bin Laden Threats Are Real."

Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden.

[snip]

Tenet and Black felt they were not getting though to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies.

As they all knew, a coherent plan for covert action against bin Laden was in the pipeline, but it would take some time. In recent closed-door meetings the entire National Security Council apparatus had considered action against bin Laden, including using a new secret weapon: the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, that could fire missiles to kill him or his lieutenants. It looked like a possible solution, but there was a raging debate between the CIA and the Pentagon about who would pay for it and who would have authority to shoot.

Besides, Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place.


There you have it, folks. The woman that many conservatives want to see run for president blew off warnings about a major Al-Qaeda attack coming because she, like George W. Bush, wanted to play with Really Big Weapons designed to fight a Soviet Union that no longer existed, and couldn't be bothered with the very serious threat that was right under our noses.

The 9/11 attacks happened for any of a number of reasons, NONE of them flattering to the Bush Administration, and none of which should give Americans ANY sense that this fucking moron is going to keep them safe:

Pick your poison, folks:

1) This Administration was too fucking stupid to understand the import of what Tenet was telling them (and this article shows that the medal given to George Tenet was clearly the ceremonial equivalent of hush money)

2) They were so beloved of Big Phallic Weapons that they decided to take the risk rather than tear themselves away from the X-Box-On-Steroids that is the Missile Defense System.

3) They deliberately ignored that information, figuring an attack on the U.S. would give them the excuse they needed to go into Iraq -- a goal that George Bush had had since before taking office.

So which one is it? Stupidity, stubbornness, or malice against the American people. And no, "honest mistake" isn't one of the options.

This is the president who is now promising to wage global war:

The only way to protect our citizens at home is to go on the offense against the enemy across the world


This is the president who is already beginning to frame all criticism of his policies as giving aid and comfort to the enemy, thereby laying the groundwork, on the day after Congress voted to give this lunatic complete, absolute power to decide who is an enemy combatant, to start rounding up dissenters:

But Bush insisted Saturday that claims that the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq was helping foster anti-American terrorism were tantamount to buying "into the enemy's propaganda."


This is the president who blew off warning after warning after warning -- and then sat in an elementary school classroom while people jumped out windows rather than be burnt to death -- because he wanted to play with Really Big Guns rather than listen to the people who were giving information he needed.

And this is the president who STILL -- five years later -- is refusing to listen to the people who know what they are talking about.

And we -- the American people who have never held him to account, and who have allowed our representatives to cravenly feed this lunatic's delusions -- will feel the inevitable result.
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