In today's print edition of the San Antonio Express News I saw where the Senate Intelligence Committee is going to investigate who leaked the story about offshore CIA torture facilities, rather than who outed a CIA agent and who fed lies to the American public in the leadup to the war.

Is this all Reid's stunt in the Senate earned us?

More of the same shit? Anyone that says anything contrary to the bush administration's preceived version of the truth becomes a target and those that spread lies to support his plan, skate.

I am tired of having the truth bulldozed. And tired of seeing those exposing governmental lies and deceptions branded as traitors and liars.

and not Congress, had the opportunity to review the underlying data for the claims regarding Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical warfare capabilities.

Link to NYT Article

The White House, and not Congress, had the resources, and was in a position to evaluate the truthfulness of "Curveball" and the other Chalabi-ist promoters.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5040831/site/newsweek/

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_03/003564.php

And it was the White House, not Congress, that conducted a whisper campaign to the press to the effect that if we could see the secret stuff the White House knew, but couldn't tell us about (National Security, you understand...) then we'd really see that the case against Saddam was a "slam dunk"....

And it wasn't Congress that created the fear of retribution in the minds of those in the intelligence community who had information contrary to the White House's predisposed position about Iraq.  Wilson, General Shinseki, and the rest of the critics of the White House positions were not attacked by Congress, they were attacked by the Bush anti-dissent machine to send a message from the White House - and it was a message that was received in the intelligence community, the military, the State Department, and beyond.

"But they jumped off the bridge with me...just because it was my idea to jump doesn't mean I'm to blame"

I don't understand this tactic - it basically concedes that point that the war was a wrong decision. It is Bush's war. The public knows that. He can't go sharing the blame for this now.

I think this presidency is in deep sh*t.

Bill Moyers:

"One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts."

John Cusack: On Bush, the Dems, Jon Stewart, Hunter Thompson, Bill Moyers, and King (not Don)

John Cusack

Fri Nov 11,12:07 PM ET

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cusack/on-bush-the-dems-jon-st_b_10485.html

http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/002012.html

From the Eschaton board would be funny if it wasn't so scary.

...if you really get bored of saying the Dems didn't have the same intelligence?

Call the Bush Gang Liars. Don't sashay around it. Don't call it dissembling. Okay, so mendacious might be okay, because it just sounds nasty when you put the right inflection on it. But we have too many functional illiterates out there to use it ubiquitously. So just saying something like, "Bush is still a liar." will do.

Then mix and match as many as desired from the following (and admittedly incomplete) list:

Yellowcake = lie.

Aluminum tubes = lie.

WMDs = lie.

Al-Qaeda connection to Saddam = lie

Iraq behind 9/11 = lie

Mobile weapons labs = lie

Attack using drones to drop nukes on us = lie

Iraq 45 minutes from attacking us = lie

Iraqis will greet us as liberators and throw roses at our feet = BIG LIE.

Okay, so I had to put some extra salsa on that last one. You get the idea. Just keep it simple, and have fun if you see the cognitive dissonance resonating at microwave levels.

The lawmakers are partly to blame for their ignorance. Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002 vote. But, as The Washington Post reported last year, no more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page executive summary.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/11/AR2005111101832.html

Funny how they say "partly to blame for their ignorance" when, in my view, if the information is available and they are just to lazy to go read it for themselves, the blame shifts entirely to them.

It is all Bill Clintons fault.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carol-platt-liebau/who-is-lying-about-iraq_b_10460.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/11/AR2005111101832.html

By Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, November 12, 2005; Page A01

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

The story is also referenced by Rob Kall at OpEdNews

 http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_rob_kall_051112_dems_didn_t_know_wha.htm

The main talking point for the right wing, lately, has been that the Democrats who voted to give Bush permission to go to war knew the same thing as the president. That's a huge lie and they know it.

The Dems did NOT know what Bush knew,as Bush and his propagandists say. The Bush merely lie continues there.

The Dems who voted to give Bush the power to start a war knew what Bush told them. They knew what was filtered by the administration. That's hugely different than knowing the same thing.

It's such a blatantly simple lie it's hard to understand why each and every time a right wing pundit or spokesman utters the lie the news anchor or moderator doesn't get in his face and confront it.

"You mean the Democrats knew what the Bush administration told them, don't you?"

What the Democrats did not know was that the CIA and others had told the Bush administration that the information they were sharing with the Democrats was unreliable or just plain BAD information.

Maybe the Bush administration lied to the Republican Senators too. Maybe the Republican senators also trusted the Bush administration to be telling the truth. Maybe both the Democrats AND Republicans were deceived by the half truths the Bush administration told.

Now we know that the important information was not the details of the threat of WMDs. The important information was that the threats were unsubstantiated. We know that there was a boiler room in the pentagon, the Office of Special Plans, run by Cheney and Libby, where the threats were amplified and cooked into more than they really were. We know that the deceptions was systematic and intentional.

A memory jog from March 2003 via the UK Guardian Observer

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,905936,00.html

The United States is conducting a secret 'dirty tricks' campaign against UN Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of war against Iraq.

Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the emails of UN delegates in New York, are revealed in a document leaked to The Observer.

The disclosures were made in a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency - the US body which intercepts communications around the world - and circulated to both senior agents in his organisation and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency asking for its input.

The memo describes orders to staff at the agency, whose work is clouded in secrecy, to step up its surveillance operations 'particularly directed at... UN Security Council Members (minus US and GBR, of course)' to provide up-to-the-minute intelligence for Bush officials on the voting intentions of UN members regarding the issue of Iraq.

The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the UN headquarters in New York - the so-called 'Middle Six' delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the US and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for UN inspections, led by France, China and Russia.

The memo is directed at senior NSA officials and advises them that the agency is 'mounting a surge' aimed at gleaning information not only on how delegations on the Security Council will vote on any second resolution on Iraq, but also 'policies', 'negotiating positions', 'alliances' and 'dependencies' - the 'whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises'.

Dated 31 January 2003, the memo was circulated four days after the UN's chief weapons inspector Hans Blix produced his interim report on Iraqi compliance with UN resolution 1441.

It was sent by Frank Koza, chief of staff in the 'Regional Targets' section of the NSA, which spies on countries that are viewed as strategically important for United States interests.

Koza specifies that the information will be used for the US's 'QRC' - Quick Response Capability - 'against' the key delegations.

Suggesting the levels of surveillance of both the office and home phones of UN delegation members, Koza also asks regional managers to make sure that their staff also 'pay attention to existing non-UN Security Council Member UN-related and domestic comms [office and home telephones] for anything useful related to Security Council deliberations'.

Koza also addresses himself to the foreign agency, saying: 'We'd appreciate your support in getting the word to your analysts who might have similar more indirect access to valuable information from accesses in your product lines [ie, intelligence sources].' Koza makes clear it is an informal request at this juncture, but adds: 'I suspect that you'll be hearing more along these lines in formal channels.'

Disclosure of the US operation comes in the week that Blix will make what many expect to be his final report to the Security Council.

It also comes amid increasingly threatening noises from the US towards undecided countries on the Security Council who have been warned of the unpleasant economic consequences of standing up to the US.

Sources in Washington familiar with the operation said last week that there had been a division among Bush administration officials over whether to pursue such a high-intensity surveillance campaign with some warning of the serious consequences of discovery.

The existence of the surveillance operation, understood to have been requested by President Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is deeply embarrassing to the Americans in the middle of their efforts to win over the undecided delegations.

The language and content of the memo were judged to be authentic by three former intelligence operatives shown it by The Observer. We were also able to establish that Frank Koza does work for the NSA and could confirm his senior post in the Regional Targets section of the organisation.

The NSA main switchboard put The Observer through to extension 6727 at the agency which was answered by an assistant, who confirmed it was Koza's office. However, when The Observer asked to talk to Koza about the surveillance of diplomatic missions at the United Nations, it was then told 'You have reached the wrong number'.

On protesting that the assistant had just said this was Koza's extension, the assistant repeated that it was an erroneous extension, and hung up.

While many diplomats at the UN assume they are being bugged, the memo reveals for the first time the scope and scale of US communications intercepts targeted against the New York-based missions.

The disclosure comes at a time when diplomats from the countries have been complaining about the outright 'hostility' of US tactics in recent days to persuade then to fall in line, including threats to economic and aid packages.

The operation appears to have been spotted by rival organisations in Europe. 'The Americans are being very purposeful about this,' said a source at a European intelligence agency when asked about the US surveillance efforts.

the Senate Intelligence Committee is going to investigate who leaked the story about offshore CIA torture facilities

Which have been around for years. Why was the information leaked now?

I assume that americans and east europeans are happy to have reinvented concentration camps again.

I don't expect that Brussels has guts to send some east european head of state to Den Haag. And they do  not intend to. The query they made was notoriosly "inofficial".

preceived=preconceived

this is an absolutely ill conceived strategy that is going to go over very poorly in the court of public opinion. They're panicking.

http://agonist.org/story/2005/11/11/194020/70

How long did they have the report before they had to vote?

Yes, the Dems (and many Repubs) were partly to blame for not immediately assuming Bush was lying about the intel,

and they were partly to blame for assuming that Colin Powell wold not successfully be pressured to say things he thought were bullshit.

disgusted. That only SIX of our 100 Senators, REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT did not read the intelligence before they voted for war is reprehensible and an abdication of their constitutional role. No wonder this Senate has no sense of its role as a co-equal branch of government, a bunch of media hungry primadonnnas. Disgusting.

"But the administration's assertions about Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda were not supported by U.S. intelligence agencies.

"

No matter how many NIEs you read or don't read, if the evidence is not supported by the intelligence services, which are an arm of the executive branch of government, and therefore Bush's responsibility, you cannot make a reasonable decision.

My previous argument still stands: The President is misleading the American people. The Democrats did not have the same intelligence as the White House did.

My memory bank may be overdrawn sometimes, but I thought the fine minds of the administration had concluded that a Congressional vote to invade Iraq was unnecessary.  So did they go the "vote" route?  Or am I mixing this up with the tomfoolery associated with the so-called second UN resolution.  Anyway, the point here is that the US president was obviously going to invade Iraq, come hell or high water, vote or no vote.  

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61040-2002Aug25?language=printer

By Mike Allen and Juliet Eilperin

Washington Post Staff Writers

Monday, August 26, 2002; Page A01

Lawyers for President Bush have concluded he can launch an attack on Iraq without new approval from Congress, in part because they say that permission remains in force from the 1991 resolution giving Bush's father authority to wage war in the Persian Gulf, according to administration officials.

At the same time, some administration officials are arguing internally that the president should seek lawmakers' backing anyway to build public support and to avoid souring congressional relations. If Bush took that course, he still would be likely to assert that congressional consent was not legally necessary, the officials said.

Whatever the White House decides about its obligations under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, some House and Senate leaders appear determined to push resolutions of support for ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein when Congress returns after Labor Day because they consider the issue too grave for Congress to be sidestepped. Administration officials say privately that military strikes against Hussein's regime are virtually inevitable, although all the specifics have not been decided and action is not imminent.

Bush has said repeatedly he will consult lawmakers before deciding how to proceed but has pointedly stopped short of saying he will request their approval. The difference between getting legislators' opinions, as opposed to their permission, could lead to a showdown this fall between Congress and the White House.

"We don't want to be in the legal position of asking Congress to authorize the use of force when the president already has that full authority," said a senior administration official involved in setting the strategy. "We don't want, in getting a resolution, to have conceded that one was constitutionally necessary."

What's the amount of pages the lawmakers are supposed to read in a year? 10 000? 100 000? 1 000 000? 10 000 000?

I don't know but I know that it has exceeded their capability to process information. They cope it by reading executive summaries and assuming that executive summaries are consistent with the material they have not read. If the summaries contain discrepancies, don't they have right to suspect that they have been deliberately mislead?

"several days", which is deliberately imprecise. But even given that, considering the significance of the vote at hand, and that it probably only takes 2 to 3 hours to get to a secure reading room, read the document, and get back to the hill, I see several days as plenty of time to accomplish that task.

why are you saying that the president lied when he said that congress had access to the same intel he did.  The NIE was the produced for both the executive and the legislative branches.  It was a follow-up to the previous NIE, which was also available to both branches.  The fact that almost 99% of congress chose to read the executive summary rather than the entire NIE before the vote is on them, not the executive branch.

I remember the time and knowing we were going to war no matter what.

automatically draws a hail of rocks, but do you remember the scene in Fahrenheit 9-11 where he interviewed Senators and Congressmen about the passage of the patriot act?

None read that either.

What exactly is it these guys do for us?

I am to the point where I think it would be appropriate to recreate the gauntlet scene described in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Toll

Or at the very least vote out all imcumbants.

I am sick of just about all of them.

read it at home later by the fire.

All humor aside, there really is no excuse for lawmakers not to have read the FULL NIE. That being said, I don't think the NIE had ALL the same intel that the President and Veep had and/or ommitted. So, as important as the NIE is, I believe there is still a lot more to this issue and alot more blame on Bush's behalf than just Democrats not reading the full NIE. Disgusting that they didn't, but it doesn't make them any where near equally culpable in the war. Full Stop.

have gotten that idea from?  Maybe from documents like the Department of Justice 1998 indictment of bin Laden, which stated that:

Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezballah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.

And that information was provided by the CIA, specifically one Mike Scheuer, head of the bin Laden unit, who takes credit for having "supplied all of the information used in the federal indictment of Osama bin Laden."

So, is it your argument that the view of the CIA changed from 1998 to 2002?

The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.

But I guess you can just skip over that 'graph if you want to make the "Bush lied" argument fly.

watching the situation closely since 1991, and especially by the late 90s.  Containment had failed to force Saddam to comply with the Gulf War Ceasefire (fueling AQ recruiting by killing 5,000 Iraqis a month and by requiring us to keep large military forces in Saudi Arabia).  That left basically two options; lifting sanctions without compliance (capitulation to Saddam) championed by the French and Russians, and transitioning from a war of attrition to a war of decision (invading to remove Saddam)championed by the neo-cons.  9/11 took capitulation off of the table, because any US president who capitulated in that political environment would have been voted out of office at the next election.

that Congress and Bush had the same information is wrong?

I think that argument is a loser for Bush, because it isn't true.

Even the belief that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq would not be adequate justification for the war where weapons inspectors were on the ground with permission to look for them.  If those weapons inspections had been allowed to continue their inspections, we may have had a resolution of the issue without a war.  The problem was that it was April and summer was coming.  The war, which had been planned for the entire year before, had to get started before it got too hot.

Ranger, thanks for bringing these points to our attention.  It's important in this debate that we be very precise with the evidence.  Any deviation from the facts or ignoring of them will end up undercutting the effectiveness of the debate or any position taken in the debate.

But as long as we have all of these fine minds collected together, would there be any benefit to taking the debate one step further?  Since we are in Iraq and the prevailing opinion is that we can't leave without a successful resolution of the conflict, would it be useful to explore what can be done to more effectively fight the war?  Two ideas I've come up with are:  Have a no drive zone in areas of Iraq where there are high concentrations of people, such as markets.  People can be brought there by market buses.  While this would not stop individual suicide bombers, maybe it would reduce the level of lethalness of at least some of the attacks.  The second idea is to have some kind of tractor, like the ones that smooth out asphalt when roads are being built, to go ahead of military convoys.  That way, if any IED's are found, they would be less lethal.

I know I'm talking out of my league with all of the fine military minds around here, but I thought I would throw the idea out if anyone is interested in carrying on a discussion about it.  

The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,

Either CIA is the dumbest intelligence organization on Earth or the statement is not true. A hard choice.

Niger forgery was made to betray who by whom in the USA?

But I guess you can just skip over that 'graph if you want to make the "Bush lied" argument fly.

I would rephrase that: "Who did lie to whom?". It is not excluded that Bush was a small dumb marionette and believed in lies.

The idea of WMDs did not arise from a vacuum. Who did plant it to betray who?

What exactly is it these guys do for us?

I can read the blogs of the members of European Parliament. Where can I read the blogs of Senators or Congressmen?

...the option of smarter, better sanctions. I've read about some of the sanctions stuff that the Clinton administration was doing, and frankly it's pretty clear that it wasn't the "A team" that was working the portfolio [really, I don't think it was even the "B team"]. A lot of very stupid shit went down that significantly contributed to the misery of the Iraqi people without denting Saddam at all. I would very much like to have seen what a smarter, more directed sanctions regime, backed up by a significant int effort that wasn't just large scale technical collection could have done (I remember a quote attributed, I believe to Tenet, saying that during the ramp up to the war against Iraq they started with zero sources on the ground in Iraq - zero. Combine those measures with longer-term operations aimed at destabilizing the regime... might have developed an option there. I don't think one could have transitioned that to regime change, but one might have gotten changed behaviour our of it.

I am arguing that they both had access to the complete NIE.  In that NIE there was broad agreement across the Intel community that Saddam had WMDs.  There was some dissent about which specific WMDs and WMD programs Saddam had, but the question was one of how much, not if.  Everyone in D.C. bought that argument without serious questions.  Even in the late summer of 2004, a year and a half after the war John Kerry was still saying on Meet the Press "We may yet find WMDs in Iraq."  Why would he say that?  Because that's what the Intel people were still saying to both the administrative and legislative branches of government to cover their collective asses over one of the biggest intel failures in recent history.

information from the Office of Special Plans?

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030717-shadow-spies01.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans

I don't think Feith, Rumsfeld, Scooter, and the rest were sharing OPS information - do you think they were?

after the exhaustive investigation of the 9/11 Commission that they still didn't have the information he had on Atta?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/18/cheney.iraq.al.qaeda/

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

In his CNBC interview, Cheney went a bit further. Asked if Iraq was involved in 9/11, he said, "We don't know."

"What the commission says is they can't find evidence of that," he said. "We had one report, which is a famous report on the Czech intelligence service, and we've never been able to confirm or to knock it down."

The uncorroborated Czech report, which has been widely disputed, alleged that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before the attacks.

Asked if he knows information that the 9/11 commission does not know, Cheney replied, "Probably."

How can you claim that Congress and the White House had indentical information, when even the 9/11 Commission, long after the fact, and after an extensive investigation, didn't - according to Cheney - have the information he had?

And having this OSF organization was legal in the USA?

smart sanctions were the French and Russians, who were arguing that if sanctions were to be adjusted, they should just be lifted completely.  Besides, Saddam had already completely circumvented the existing sanctions regime.  What makes anybody think that the corruption of oil for food would not have continued or even been accelerated under a new, less restrictive sanctions regime.  In effect, smart sanctions would have been he equivalent of declaring victory and going home to cover a clear capitulation to Saddam.  Everyone in D.C. knew that.  The reason it was such a low priority for the previous administration was their desire to not have to implement any serious change in the sanction regime because they feared being called out as "weak" on foreign policy for "backing down" on Iraq.

What you are arguing for is a continuation of the war of attrition with some refinement, which would have worked fine (except for all the Iraqis it was killing) if 9/11 hadn't upset the entire US political system and you could have paid off the French and the Russians more than they were getting from Saddam.

Cheney's personal distrust of the CIA (because of the lousy job they did in the run up to the first Gulf War when Cheney was Sec Def).  The purpose of the OSP was to have a second set of eyes checking the questionable work the CIA was doing.  They never gathered their own data, they just took the data the CIA was getting and produced a second analysis of it.

As to the 9/11 commission, I think it has become very clear that they went into that project with a specific narrative they wanted to write, and disregarded any information that might have contradicted that narrative.

(or at least according to CNN.  I haven't checked the actual source documents, if such are available.  However, we learn that an October vote to attack had several strings attached, including a very big IF.  To wit "IF Saddam refuses to give up his weapons" - but we now know, as did the President, that Saddam had none, so this was just trickery.  The wording of the resolution also explains why the puzzling overlay and metamorphasis of Bin Laden's uber-religious El Qaida into the Iraq resistance - a bizarrely improbable mix if there ever was one.  But US the war resolution provided that beating up Iraq mustn't deter the US in pursuit of the El Qaida "network".)

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/11/iraq.us/

dated Friday, October 11, 2002, under the title "Senate approves Iraq war resolution )

In a major victory for the White House, the Senate early Friday voted 77-23 to authorize President Bush to attack Iraq if Saddam Hussein refuses to give up weapons of mass destruction as required by U.N. resolutions.

Hours earlier, the House approved an identical resolution, 296-133.

The president praised the congressional action, declaring "America speaks with one voice."

"The Congress has spoken clearly to the international community and the United Nations Security Council," Bush said in a statement. "Saddam Hussein and his outlaw regime pose a grave threat to the region, the world and the United States. Inaction is not an option, disarmament is a must."

While the outcome of the vote was never in doubt, its passage followed several days of spirited debate in which a small but vocal group of lawmakers charged the resolution was too broad and premature.

The resolution requires Bush to declare to Congress either before or within 48 hours after beginning military action that diplomatic efforts to enforce the U.N. resolutions have failed.

Bush also must certify that action against Iraq would not hinder efforts to pursue the al Qaeda terrorist network that attacked New York and Washington last year. And it requires the administration to report to Congress on the progress of any war with Iraq every 60 days.

The measure passed the Senate and House by wider margins than the 1991 resolution that empowered the current president's father to go to war to expel Iraq from Kuwait. That measure passed 250-183 in the House and 52-47 in the Senate.

The Bush administration and its supporters in Congress say Saddam has kept a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons in violation of U.N. resolutions and has continued efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Bush also has argued that Iraq could give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists.

Iraq has denied having weapons of mass destruction and has offered to allow U.N. weapons inspectors to return for the first time since 1998. Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Tawab Al-Mulah Huwaish called the allegations "lies" Thursday and offered to let U.S. officials inspect plants they say are developing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

"If the American administration is interested in inspecting these sites, then they're welcome to come over and have a look for themselves," he said.

The White House immediately rejected the offer, saying the matter is up to the United Nations, not Iraq.

Resolution sharply divides Democrats

The Senate vote sharply divided Democrats, with 29 voting for the measure and 21 against. All Republicans except Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island voted for passage.

Ahead of the vote, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle announced Thursday morning he would support Bush on Iraq, saying it is important for the country "to speak with one voice at this critical moment."

Daschle, D-South Dakota, said the threat of Iraq's weapons programs "may not be imminent. But it is real. It is growing. And it cannot be ignored." However, he urged Bush to move "in a way that avoids making a dangerous situation even worse."

Daschle had expressed reservations about a possible U.S. attack on Iraq, and he was not part of an agreement between the White House and other congressional leaders framing the resolution last week.

Sen. Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia, attempted Thursday to mount a filibuster against the resolution but was cut off on a 75 to 25 vote.

Byrd had argued the resolution amounted to a "blank check" for the White House.

Sen. Bob Graham of Florida was one of 21 Senate Democrats voting against the resolution.  

"This is the Tonkin Gulf resolution all over again," Byrd said. "Let us stop, look and listen. Let us not give this president or any president unchecked power. Remember the Constitution."

But Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said the United States needs to move before Saddam can develop a more advanced arsenal.

"Giving peace a chance only gives Saddam Hussein more time to prepare for war on his terms, at a time of his choosing, in pursuit of ambitions that will only grow as his power to achieve them grows," McCain said.

In the House, six Republicans -- Ron Paul of Texas; Connie Morella of Maryland; Jim Leach of Iowa; Amo Houghton of New York; John Hostettler of Indiana; and John Duncan of Tennessee -- joined 126 Democrats in voting against the resolution.

Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Missouri, said giving Bush the authority to attack Iraq could avert war by demonstrating the United States is willing to confront Saddam over his obligations to the United Nations.

"I believe we have an obligation to protect the United States by preventing him from getting these weapons and either using them himself or passing them or their components on to terrorists who share his destructive intent," said Gephardt, who helped draft the measure.

But Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, said the 133 votes against the measure were "a very strong message" to the administration.

"All across this land Americans are insisting on a peaceful resolution of matters in Iraq," he said. "All across this land, Americans are looking towards the United States to be a nation among nations, working through the United Nations to help resolve this crisis.

...the G.W. Bush administration, then I am in complete concurrence with you. I specifically mentioned Clinton's administration because I view the lack of strategic options faced by the succeeding Bush administration to be largely his fault. (I know this will piss off a goodly number of folks here, but in my view much of the reason why the French and Russians had traction is because the Clinton administration's policy vis a vis Iraq was somnambulant - they didn't know what to do, other than keep on keepin' on. I saw this indirectly from across the border in Jordan, and it was not the best played strategic gambit I've ever seen.)

I agree that trying smart sanctions in the timeframe you're referring to would have resulted in the scenarios you advance, I just think that things could have been different if everyone had stepped up to the plate early on.

They never gathered their own data, they just took the data the CIA was getting and produced a second analysis of it.

Got a link for that?  I believe that the OSP was in contact with Chalabi-ist information sources, gathering "intelligence information" independently.

Link to Cached Story

The spies who pushed for war

Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force

Thursday July 17, 2003

The Guardian

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The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in part from "report officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job is to sift through reports from agents around the world, filtering out the unsubstantiated and the incredible. Under pressure from the hawks such as Mr Cheney and Mr Gingrich, those officers became reluctant to discard anything, no matter how far-fetched. The OSP also sucked in countless tips from the Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups, which were viewed with far more scepticism by the CIA and the state department.

There was a mountain of documentation to look through and not much time. The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in Afghanistan to deal with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of temporary "consultants". They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in Washington. Few had experience in intelligence.

"Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire individuals, without specifying a job description.

As John Pike, a defence analyst at the thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, put it, the contracts "are basically a way they could pack the room with their little friends".

"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it."

In fact, the OSP's activities were a com plete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon.

"The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."

The civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. "They were a pretty shadowy presence," Mr Thielmann said. "Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."

The purpose of the OSP was to have a second set of eyes checking the questionable work the CIA was doing.

So, in your view, they were the ones asking the tough questions about 'Curveball'?  About the dissenting opinions on suitability of using the aluminum tubes for centrifuges?  About yellow cake?  About the connections between all these Shi'ite exile related sources of WMD information?

Or do you mean they were helping cherry pick the stuff the White House wanted to use to make the case for war with Iraq?

As to the 9/11 commission, I think it has become very clear that they went into that project with a specific narrative they wanted to write, and disregarded any information that might have contradicted that narrative.

Pretty clear where you're coming from with that statement.

options in 2002 if we had made better choices in 91, 92, 96, 98, or 2000.  But we didn't, and the current administration was stuck with the hand they were dealt by both of the previous administrations.  That type of discussion academically intriguing, but practically irrelevant.  The question is; what were the options available at the time (2002) and what were the practical and political constraints on the actors?  There is very strong evidence that the current administration understood that the war of attrition was a total failure and was trying very hard to work out a way to declare victory and come home in the summer of 2001 (see Powell's statement about de facto compliance justifying an adjustment to the sanctions regime).  9/11 took that option off of the table politically.

also what most people don't say is that they truly did not expect to be lied about something as important as war or something that would cost american lives. That may sound lame but I know didn't expect to be lied to about something so important. I think most americans trusted their govt not to do america harm. This administration knew this and used it well. What amazes me is that more rep aren't upset.

Saddam himself and his interactions with the UN in the early 90s.  It was sustained by the Clinton administration, which used it as justification to bomb the hell out of Iraq in 1998.  It was perpetuated by Saddam's refusal to co-operate with the UN from 98 to 2002.