M14 Shooter said:
So for this to be true, yuou have to show that Bush knew the information he had was wrong, and that he deliberatly disseminated it to the public.
Been there done that.
http://www.debatepolitics.com/showthread.php?t=6425
CONGRESS DID NOT HAVE ACCESS TO THE SAME INTELLIGENCE TEAM BUSH HAD
Example 1:
Presidential Daily Briefs.
Example 2:
Team Bush began making claims about the Iraqi threat several months before Congress received any substantial, updated intelligence analysis.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200511080006
Example 3:
Team Bush received information directly from alternative intelligence sources, specifically the since-discredited Office of Special Plans and Iraqi National Congress. The CIA and the State Department were highly skeptical of the intelligence provided by these agencies, yet the information was used by Team Bush to sell the war anyway.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story...999737,00.html
TEAM BUSH KNOWINGLY EXAGGERATED THE LINK BETWEEN AL'QAEDA AND IRAQ
Example 1:
Dick Cheney told NBC's Meet the Press that Mohammed Atta's trip to Prague was "pretty well confirmed."
RUSSERT: Do you still believe there is no evidence that Iraq was involved in September 11?
CHENEY: Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that's been pretty well confirmed, that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresid...p20011209.html
The CIA, FBI, and the Czeck government have questioned the report's credibility from the beginning. Cheney denied his own words on CNBC's Capital Report:
BORGER: Well, let's get to Mohammad Atta for a minute, because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was, quote, "pretty well confirmed."
CHENEY: No, I never said that.
BORGER: OK.
CHENEY: Never said that.
BORGER: I think that is...
CHENEY: Absolutely not. What I said was the Czech intelligence service reported after 9/11 that Atta had been in Prague on April 9th of 2001, where he allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence official. We have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down.
BORGER: Well, now this report says it didn't happen.
CHENEY: No. This report says they haven't found any evidence.
BORGER: That it happened.
CHENEY: Right.
BORGER: But you haven't found the evidence that it happened either, have you?
CHENEY: No. All we have is that one report from the Czechs. We just don't know.
http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/...404_flash3.htm
Example 2:
The 9/11 Commission Report found "no collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al'Qaeda. When the New York Times reported that there was a fundamental split between the Commission and the President, Dick Cheney called the article "outrageous," but then went on to confirm that there is a split between the Commission and the President:
BORGER: But you say you disagree with the commission...
CHENEY:CHENEY: On this question of whether or not there was a general relationship.
BORGER: Yes.
CHENEY: Yeah.
BORGER: And they say that there was not one forged and you were saying yes, that there was. Do you know things that the commission does not know?
CHENEY: Probably.
BORGER: And do you think the commission needs to know them?
CHENEY: I don't have any--I don't know what they know. I do know they didn't talk with any original sources on this subject that say that in their report.
BORGER: They did talk with people who had interrogated sources.
CHENEY: Right.
BORGER: So they do have good sources.
CHENEY: Gloria, the notion that there is no relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida just simply is not true.
Directly contradicting the 9/11 Commission Report, President Bush himself has said "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/17/Bush.alqaeda/
Sounds like Team Bush has information the 9/11 Commission doesn't. Just as quickly, however, a spokesman also said the administration "cooperated fully with the commission," and "the president wants the commission to have the information it needs to do its job." Yeah, right.
Example 3:
In June 2004, Dick Cheney said evidence of a link was "overwhelming."
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/...iraq.al.qaeda/
About that time, bin Laden was denouncing Hussein's Baath party as "infedels." Some collaborative link.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/...aq.Qaeda.link/
Example 4:
Bush said in an October 2002 speech, "Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases."
But the individual who made this claim has retracted it. Since his capture sparked the first debates among the U.S. government over the harsh treatment of prisoners, this allegation was probably made while he was being tortured.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Jul31.html
Just about every intelligence agency in the world contends that bin Laden and Sadaam Hussein don't trust each other, and don't even like each other. The only thing they have in common is their resent of America, and even that is for different reasons.
TEAM BUSH KNOWINGLY EXAGGERATED THE THREAT POSED BY IRAQ
Example 1:
The supposed Iraqi defector named "Curveball" told German intelligence agencies about mobile chemical weapons factories in Iraq. German officials said that they had warned American colleagues well before the Iraq war that Curveball's information was not credible - but the warning was ignored. Colin Powell told the UN that the information came from a "solid source."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story...184172,00.html
The U.S. has since admitted that Curveball's information was total bullshit.
Example 2:
Condoleeza Rice repeatedly warned about the dangers of waiting for a "smoking gun" to evolve into a "mushroom cloud." But in 2002, CIA director George Tenent told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the probability of Sadaam Hussein initiating an attack on the U.S. was low.
http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2002/10/dci100702.html
Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief nuclear inspector, told the U.N. Security Council in January 2003 that they still have no "smoking gun" and need more time, perhaps months, to complete their inspections. Obviously they were denied this request and removed by the U.S. two months later.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/01/10/wbr.smoking.gun/
Example 3:
Colin Powell told the UN, "Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, a collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants." and, "When our coalition ousted the Taliban, the Zarqawi network helped establish another poison and explosive training center camp. And this camp is located in northeastern Iraq."
The training camp is run by a dissident Kurdish Islamic militant group called Ansar al-Islam. This group does have connections to al'Qaeda, but they are utterly opposed to the Iraqi regime under Hussein and has no connection to it whatsoever.
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Ant...ral_Powell.htm
Example 4:
Bush said in October 2002, "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist or individual terrorists"
But declassified portions of a National Intelligence Estimate released by the White House show that at the time of the president's speech, the U.S. intelligence community judged that possibility to be unlikely.
In fact, the estimate shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al'Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his regime were collapsing after a military attack by the United States.
"Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al'Qaeda, . . . already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the United States, could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct," said one key judgment of the estimate. It went on to say that Hussein might decide to take the "extreme step" of assisting al Qaeda in a terrorist attack against the United States if it "would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...1/MN105561.DTL