US Intelligence About Iraq Didn't Really Fail, It Was Manipulated

"Never -- not once -- did it say, 'He has WMD.'" - General Zinni

"General Zinni was alarmed that day to hear Cheney make the argument for attacking Iraq on grounds that Zinni found questionable at best:

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney said. "There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

Cheney's certitude bewildered Zinni. As chief of the Central Command, Zinni had been immersed in U.S. intelligence about Iraq. He was all too familiar with the intelligence analysts' doubts about Iraq's programs to acquire weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. "In my time at Centcom, I watched the intelligence, and never -- not once -- did it say, 'He has WMD.'"

Though retired for nearly two years, Zinni says, he remained current on the intelligence through his consulting with the CIA and the military. "I did consulting work for the agency, right up to the beginning of the war. I never saw anything. I'd say to analysts, 'Where's the threat?' " Their response, he recalls, was, "Silence."

Zinni's concern deepened as Cheney pressed on that day at the Opryland Hotel. "Time is not on our side," the vice president said. "The risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action."

Zinni's conclusion as he slowly walked off the stage that day was that the Bush administration was determined to go to war. A moment later, he had another, equally chilling thought: "These guys don't understand what they are getting into." - For Vietnam Vet Anthony Zinni, Another War on Shaky Territory (washingtonpost.com)

The Bush Administration didn't care, they wanted their War on Iraq, they ignored CIA warnings. C.I.A. Warns That a U.S. Attack May Ignite Terror  WOW like blowback or creating future terrorist bent on revenge for family members killed

"There have also been questions about the public portrayal of intelligence by senior policymakers. Preliminary reviews indicate that public statements did not always portray the detailed caveats about Iraqi WMD that intelligence reports generally provided. In addition, questions about possible pressure on analysts to alter their judgments and about possible suppression of alternative assessments must be a central part of a thorough and detailed review."- Opinion from Congresswoman Jane Harman representative from California, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. WMD: What Went Wrong?

"Nuances, qualifications and caveats were dropped; a slam-dunk was the assessment relative to the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The CIA was telling the Administration and the American people what it thought the Administration wanted to hear." - Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich

bush laughs at no wmds in iraq

bush wanted iraq invasion day one

General Wesley Clark tells of how Middle East destabilization was planned as far back as 1991

Enough information is presented in this short video to bring the entire Bush Administration up on charges of a criminal conspiracy to deceive the American Congress into allowing an unprovoked invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq.

Features interviews with Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, Robert Jensen, Chief U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, William Hartung (World Policy Institute), Author Tariq Ali, Yale Professor Immanuel Wallerstein, and author of "The Pentagon Papers" Daniel Ellsberg.

This clip is from a documentary that aired on BBC in 2005.

 

Let's take a moment to remember the damage Bush, Cheney, and their slimeball cronies did to America and the world in their eight years.
America will need to take a turn hard-left for three decades to undue the disasters created by actual design, incompetence, and arrogant cowardice since the scumbag idiot Reagan took office and started things going in 1980.

 

Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?

A Nuremberg chief prosecutor says there is a case for trying Bush for the 'supreme crime against humanity, an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.'

July 10, 2006

The extent to which American exceptionalism is embedded in the national psyche is awesome to behold.

While the United States is a country like any other, its citizens no more special than any others on the planet, Americans still react with surprise at the suggestion that their country could be held responsible for something as heinous as a war crime.

From the massacre of more than 100,000 people in the Philippines to the first nuclear attack ever at Hiroshima to the unprovoked invasion of Baghdad, U.S.-sponsored violence doesn't feel as wrong and worthy of prosecution in internationally sanctioned criminal courts as the gory, bload-soaked atrocities of Congo, Darfur, Rwanda, and most certainly not the Nazis -- most certainly not. Howard Zinn recently described this as our "inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior."

 

Most Americans firmly believe there is nothing the United States or its political leadership could possibly do that could equate to the crimes of Hitler's Third Reich. The Nazis are our "gold standard of evil," as author John Dolan once put it.

But the truth is that we can, and we have -- most recently and significantly in Iraq. Perhaps no person on the planet is better equipped to identify and describe our crimes in Iraq than Benjamin Ferencz, a former chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials who successfully convicted 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating death squads that killed more than one million people in the famous Einsatzgruppen Case. Ferencz, now 87, has gone on to become a founding father of the basis behind international law regarding war crimes, and his essays and legal work drawing from the Nuremberg trials and later the commission that established the International Criminal Court remain a lasting influence in that realm.

Ferencz's biggest contribution to the war crimes field is his assertion that an unprovoked or "aggressive" war is the highest crime against mankind. It was the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 that made possible the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the destruction of Fallouja and Ramadi, the tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, civilian massacres like Haditha, and on and on. Ferencz believes that a "prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation."

Interviewed from his home in New York, Ferencz laid out a simple summary of the case:

"The United Nations charter has a provision which was agreed to by the United States, formulated by the United States, in fact, after World War II. It says that from now on, no nation can use armed force without the permission of the U.N. Security Council. They can use force in connection with self-defense, but a country can't use force in anticipation of self-defense. Regarding Iraq, the last Security Council resolution essentially said, 'Look, send the weapons inspectors out to Iraq, have them come back and tell us what they've found -- then we'll figure out what we're going to do. The U.S. was impatient, and decided to invade Iraq -- which was all pre-arranged of course. So, the United States went to war, in violation of the charter."

It's that simple. Ferencz called the invasion a "clear breach of law," and dismissed the Bush administration's legal defense that previous U.N. Security Council resolutions dating back to the first Gulf War justified an invasion in 2003. Ferencz notes that the first Bush president believed that the United States didn't have a U.N. mandate to go into Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein; that authorization was simply to eject Hussein from Kuwait. Ferencz asked, "So how do we get authorization more than a decade later to finish the job? The arguments made to defend this are not persuasive."

 

 

Charge George W. Bush with war crimes?

TORTURE

 

February 14, 2011|By David Frum, CNN Contributor

• 

Charge George W. Bush with war crimes?

Some Bush critics have for years demanded a prosecution of the former president. They had hoped that the incoming Obama administration would put Bush on trial. No luck.

Now they have changed their focus, filing actions in foreign courts. Last week, these Bush opponents filed an action in Switzerland in advance of a Bush appearance at a charity fundraiser in Geneva.

Shortly after the filing, the Bush appearance was canceled. Bush is in no danger of going to a Swiss jail, obviously. But it's important that all Americans understand: This use of law as a weapon of politics is an assault upon the basic norms of American constitutional democracy.

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American presidents are subject to law, of course: American law.

In the case of torture -- the offense of which Bush's critics accuse the president -- the relevant law is the War Crimes Act of 1996, which provides penalties up to the death penalty for abuse of military detainees.

This law was adopted in conformity with U.S. obligations under the 1986 Convention Against Torture, which called upon all signatory states to "ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law." (It's often said that the convention "bans" torture, but that is not correct: It creates an obligation on member states to ban torture by their own nationals.)

In 2001, Bush asked government lawyers: What exactly constitutes "torture" under U.S. law? Is isolation torture? Sleep deprivation? What about putting an insect in the cell of a prisoner frightened of insects? How about waterboarding?

Bush asked those questions precisely because he wanted to comply with the law. He wanted to go up to the limit of the law, but not beyond. That's why he wished to know where the limits were found.

The legal answers Bush got -- and the methods his administration used -- have divided Americans for almost a decade. Republicans lost the 2008 election, and the Obama administration changed policy. Which is how we decide policy questions in the United States: by elections and alterations of government.

When it entered office, the Obama administration considered prosecuting the CIA officers who had done the interrogations. It seems to have considered legal action against higher-ranking officials, too. The Obama administration rejected both options.

Mobay!  check the binnacle!  drifting.....drifting....

Right you were. I think that further looking into the whole yellow cake scandal was warrented. I have yet to see it, but I'm told there is a good film outlining just how the entire yellow cake lie came to pass. Of course that led to libby's demise and the whole mess that tied it to the cause for war hubub. I cannot see how Cheney and rove got off scott free. Ya know, libby was given the go ahead and that's all there is to it. He must have some solid integrity to take the heat for the boss. But he did do some time and a little cash lost. but who knows how much they might have offered him to shut up. That *wide paintbrush, we sometimes use is as good or bad for the other guys too.

Reason America Is Bombing Africa, Christians & Muslims United For Truth & Justice 2011 Update HD

WHY OBAMA/AMERICA CONTROLLED BY ILLUMINATI WORLD BANKERS IS BOMBING AFRICA.....Some believe it is about protecting civilians, others say it is about oil, but some are convinced intervention in Libya is all about Gaddafi's plan to introduce the gold dinar, a single African currency made from gold, a true sharing of the wealth. Gaddafi did not give up. In the months leading up to the military intervention, he called on African and Muslim nations to join together to create this new currency that would rival the dollar and euro. They would sell oil and other resources around the world only for gold dinars. It is an idea that would shift the economic balance of the world. ... And it has happened before. In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced Iraqi oil would be traded in euros, not dollars. Some say sanctions and an invasion followed because the Americans were desperate to prevent OPEC from transferring oil trading in all its member countries to the euro. A gold dinar would have had serious consequences for the world financial system, but may also have empowered the people of Africa, something black activists say the US wants to avoid at all costs......In 1999 Moammar Qadaffi decided to foster the ideas of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt for a United States of Africa. This created great concern, among whom? America, England, France, Italy, Germany Canada - all of you that have sucked the blood and continue to suck the blood of the poor and weak of this earth. What was your concern about that? If there were a United States of Africa, with one central bank backed by gold unlike America's phony money system; with a transport system that tied all these nations together; with one language that they would adopt as the official lang of all 53 countries; with trade between the states and those outside of America; with one great army and their getting a decent price on the world market for their tremendous resources. Then there would never be a poor Africa, an uneducated Africa, an African living in the bush when that African would now be able to live in a decent home having a decent quality of life. This is what Moammar Qadaffi was trying to do.......the first 24 hours of the war on Libya, dozens of bombs and cruise missiles were launched by US, British, and French forces — all with depleted uranium warheads. US B-2 aircraft dropped forty-five 2,000-pound bombs on key Libyan cities, it added.DU munitions are controversial because they raise long-term health concerns like kidney damage, cancer, skin disorders and genetic defects."[Depleted uranium tipped missiles] fit the description of a dirty bomb in every way... I would say that it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people," said Marion Falk, chemical physicist (retd.), Lawrence Livermore Lab in California........Embroiled in wars of aggression throughout the Middle East, it's hard to imagine that anyone would accept the standard rhetoric about protecting human rights and promoting democracy as motivation for our latest war in Libya. But judging by the absence of protest in the United States, and the sheer lack of meaningful coverage in the MSM, it would appear that most Americans have bought the fictional narrative.