IMPEACHMENT TIME: "FACTS WERE FIXED."

[JRob]

Sorry if this is a dup., I looked but did not see a previous post of this article.

IMPEACHMENT TIME: "FACTS WERE FIXED."
Special to BuzzFlash

Thursday, May 5, 2005

By Greg Palast

Here it is. The smoking gun. The memo that has "IMPEACH HIM" written all over it.

The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Read that again: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed...."

Entire article:

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=426&row=0

[UCLA Dem]

1. I feel ill. Recommended.

[spooked911]

2. Yes, indeed. Can we FINALLY impeach the asshole now????

[louis-t]

3. This is a dupe, however...

If this were duped in the MSM every day, every hour, every minute, the way the runaway bride was, maybe the fundie sheep in this country would wake up. Nah, that will never happen.

[kysrsoze]

4. I certainly hope so. I'm amazed 88 congressmen signed the letter

yet it's not in the US news at all. Secondly, where are the rest of the Democratic reps and all the Dem senators on this?

[Bandit]

9. Exactly, only eighty eight Democrats willing to stand up

Where is Kerry and Dean and Clark and Reid and Poloisi? Where is truth and sanity?

[AP]

However, if you keep reading the memo, the UK apparently believed there

were WMD.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html

[sandnsea]

16. I know

I'm trying to see what's different in here that we didn't already know. Didn't Woodward's book outline a war plan from way back in Nov 2001?

"But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Isn't that basically what Wolfowitz already admitted when he said WMD was the bureaucratic excuse for the war?

Not sure this is all that much of a smoking gun.

[JRob]

17. Even so, we need to keep it out there...

[AP]

25. I think the WMD issue is more of a question not of whether they existed

but whether they were enough of a justification. As the British memo shows, if WMD are the only reason for invading a country, then Libya, Iran and NK should be much higher on the list of countries to invade.

I suspect Iraq did have WMD. I think the US gave Iraq enough time to move them out. I believe Edwards and Kerry when the said that there was convincing evidence presented to them. I believe that the intelligence was filled with both good and bad evidence. I think Bush didn't find WMD because of a combination of the US not looking for them and the Iraqis having enough time to move them. I think the reason they did this was because they knew it would keep people talking only about Iraq and because they knew they could turn the tables and make it look like Kerry and Edwards abandoned anti-war Democrats by voting yes on IWR based on clearly flawed information.

I think if it ever came down to a situation where either the Democrats were running a 100% anti-war candidate or where the public somehow blamed Bush for the bad intelligence, they would have trotted out the good evidence, and they would have found the WMD.

As for whether this memo is new information, you're right. It isn't new. Bush had plans to invade Iraq from way back. That the British government was thinking about how to deal with what the memo describes as almost an inevitability brings little that's new to the table.

In retrospect, it looks like the US had no interest in even doing UN inspections, so that it happened suggested that the UK insisted on it. The memo I want to see is what the UK government thought around the time the inspectors were pulled out. Since they saw the invasion as an inevitablity, they couldn't have been surprised. But they must have wondered how the inspections were going to come to an end. And I don't doubt that Blair was waiting until that moment to make a decision about what the next step would be.

As for Bush: people voted for him because he was willing to shoot first and ask questions later. I think people know that he wanted Sadaam gone, and he looked for excuses later. The only thing that could make people see that as bad is if they understood his motivations for doing that. Most people honestly believe his motivation was to protect Americans. I think his motivation was to make Halliburton and some other companies wealthy.

I think people would forgive Bush if they knew that he was overeager in order to keep Americans safe. I don't think they'd forgive him if he lied to make a lot of money for his friends. Yet, you never see criticisms of Bush try to put it into that second context.

[Amonester]

22. My father bombed the "Policy Fixers" between 1942 and 1945.

As a WWII RCAF (decorated) Hero, I wonder what he'd think of these "Neo Policy Fixers" PNACer$ if he was still alive today.

I guess it wouldn't take him "45 minutes" to answer the question...

[AP]

5. ...

...

[Xenotime]

6. One big coverup

This whole administration is one big coverup after another. And when they are caught, they try to divert attention to somwhere else.

[HereSince1628]

7. This should be huge, but I fear, it can be defused as nothing new

and as a practical matter, there aren't enough votes in the House to even get started.

[JRob]

8. Everyone should bombard Congress and the MSM with this article

[CatWoman]

12. JRob

check "General Discussion" forum for more info about this story.

The author of the thread in GD is Will Pitt.

Representative Conyers is all over this.

And welcome to DU!!

:hi:

[Gothmog]

10. MSM is ignoring the story

This memo needs to get out.

[The_Casual_Observer]

11. The "government" in Iraq is going to collapse.

The finger pointing that will occur after will be absolutely astounding.

[Chicago Democrat]

13. IMPEACH HIM 07(wont happen now, remember to impeach, one must control

congress in our new a-moral partisan era)


TAKE BACK THE PEOPLES HOUSE 06


Support your Democratic Candidates!!!

[natrat]

14. runaway bride way more important dontyaknow

[demo dutch]

15. This is the same memo that was published in the London Sunday Times

on May3rd just before the UK elections, it was posted on DU and of course MSM didn't pay any attention to it!

You can read the letter signed by 88 members of congress calling for answers discussed in Rawstory

http://www.rawstory.com/aexternal/conyers_iraq_letter_502

[pnutchuck]

18. So what happened to the Iraqi (?) who supposedly fed the US the "bad"

intel? His home and offices were raided, ransacked, and seized and he was thrown in jail.

[pnutchuck]

19. Anyone try posting this on the Freeper site?

could be fun to see how they respond.....:evilgrin: :evilgrin: :evilgrin: :evilgrin:

[progressoid]

23. They're calling the memo a fraud - - go figure

Of course they don't actually cite any proof of that.

[pnutchuck]

24. And the yet the British govt is acknowledging it as fact. eom

[pnutchuck]

20. Anyone try posting this on the Freeper site?

could be fun to see how they respond.....:evilgrin: :evilgrin: :evilgrin: :evilgrin:

[understandinglife]

21. "MNA 1608"

www.missionnotaccomplished.us - STOP THE ATROCITIES; INDICT AND PROSECUTE BU$H AND ALL THE OTHER WAR CRIMINALS

[cassandra uprising]

26. I saw Palast speak last year.

He explained the mysterious phenomenon of how news stories that get reported on everywhere else in the world don't get picked up in the States. It's as though there's an "electronic Berlin Wall" that news stories seem to bounce off of -shielding America from any kind of real news story.

It makes me me sick. Thanks for posting this.

[pnutchuck]

27. I lived in Paris for 2 yrs and just recently returned. I used to live on

CNN and BBC in France, but now I don't even turn them on. You make a good analogy, it's dead on.

[pnutchuck]

28. When the insurgency started, didn't Bush say something about it being

unforseen? But in the memo, it lists those as a concern of preemptive strike. "The military were continuing to ask lots of questions. ...or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began?"

[understandinglife]

29. Support this PDAmerica effort. Spread the press release far and wide.

http://www.pdamerica.org/field/Press-Release-Bush-Blair.php

In case you want to provide some context when you send the press release to someone requesting they cover it or distribute it, just send them this photo:



What you get from illegitimate president -- an illegal war and countless crimes against humanity


www.missionnotaccomplished.us - STOP THE ATROCITIES; INDICT AND PROSECUTE BU$H AND ALL THE OTHER WAR CRIMINALS