Third Party & Independents: Archives

And what was the single thing that Chalabi told them that made them go all dove-eyed? That as President of Iraq, he would normalize relations and trade with Israel…

How could anyone believe the Iraqi people would allow that? He had been gone for decades, so maybe he really did believe it, but the decision-makers in our government never should have. They do “research,” after all. Once again, this is a situation where reasonable people (like State) said one thing, and the neocons said another. Who did the President agree with? The neocons. That is why this is all his fault: because the President always makes the decisions, he always has a choice, and he has consistently agreed with the people who are largely incompetant.

Wasn’t it also Chalabi who was a big teller of tall tales regarding WMDs in Iraq? I guess at a certain point in time everyone who wanted to be on Bush’s “good side” was talking that talk.

W of Mass Destruction was more like it.

Ouch, will we ever get past this type of foreign policy. When I heard this I immediately thought of bin Laden in Afghanistan. He’s clearly not the same (or as bad). It just reminds me of so many cases where we hand pick people to lead someone else’s country or give them support and it blows up in our face.
I don’t claim to know everything about the situation but that is what it seems to be. Seems like we turn a blind eye to things (human rights, reality) when someone tells us what we want to hear.

Jeff,
“It just reminds me of so many cases where we hand pick people to lead someone else’s country or give them support and it blows up in our face.”

I think it’s what Geroge Washington (the better George W of our history) had in mind when he warned against ‘entangling alliances’ with foreign powers.

I wish a WatchBlog Bush Administration supporter would join this thread and attempt to defend the whole Chalabi thing. That I’d love to read.

-Cf

Okay listen there was a mix-up. see,George was at a fundraiser/cocktail party and met mr. Chalabi and calling him “Chalupa”, but no mind. So Mr. Bush was at the bar eating peanuts and said to him “Don’t my pa’ know you?”

“Yes we’re old friends from The Iraq War.”

Then George said “Well heh we’re goin’ to war in that area in um Afghanistania, ever heard of it?”
“No.”
“Me neither til five weeks ago, tee hee…So does Saddam have weapons of mass destroyin’”
“Yes”
“We should really do some stuff on that and get it back to ya’. How many?”
“Lots”
“Alot like a bunch or alot like a whole bunch?”
“A whole bunch.”
“Wow a stockpile!”

See, it’s just a little misunderstanding.

LOL, WBAS, you make Bush sound like the Dale character from King of the Hill, when we all know Bush is really Boomhauer.

“Dat dum der dib misunderestimatin’ mayun.”

Seriously though, I heard Richard Perle defend Chalabi on the Bill Bennett show this morning, and his line was that CIA hated Chalabi all along because they blamed him for leaks that caused the failure of a coup CIA was orchestrating back in the late ’90s, against Saddam. Perle says the leaks weren’t Chalabi’s fault, though—they were just using him as a scapegoat for their own failures (same thing with the bad intel on WMDs, according to Perle).

And for CIA to say anybody is working too closely with Iran, requires you to suspend your memory of the whole Iran/Contra scandal.

Now, in the Arab world, the example of Chalabi is such that they know if they work with the U.S. at all, they will never know where they stand.

Way to go, CIA. Ever since Paperclip, it’s just been one “gem” after another.

The New York Times is backing away from many of its pre-invasion Iraq coverage, citing shoddy reporting and corrupt and unreliable sources for their information. They are basically saying that a great deal of of their articles supporting the Administration’s arguments about the presence of WMDs, nuclear programs, and terrorist training camps now appear to have had no basis in fact and were based on non-credible, non-corroborated, sources. They also, quite disturbingly, admit to burying or ignoring evidence that contradicted the Bush Administration’s line.

If you read between the lines, you can see that an awful lot of those discredited sources happen to be straight-up Bush Administration officials. Apparently, the New York Times, like many Democratic members of Congress and like millions of regular Americans, made the grave mistake of giving the Bush Administration the benefit of the doubt.

The Times writes, in what is probably intended to be a generous gesture to the Bush Administration, “it looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in”.

It seemingly never ends.

-Cf

If they can lie about WMDs it makes one wonder what else they might lie about.

http://www.thewebfairy.com/killtown/lonegunmen.html

And shockingly, they also believed Bill Clinton and John Kerry who are on the record raising the alarm about Iraq’s WMD’s BEFORE Bush was even governor of Texas, much less president of the United States.

Where does corruption at the New York Times end? Is there no botton to their lies? Clearly it’s not as simple as firing Howard Raines or Jayson Blair.

Yeah, Martin, but Saddam actually had WMDs way back then. Back before ‘98 when Clinton spent a few days bombing the crap out of every suspected WMD site.

“Wag the dog!”

And I almost forgot: The whole time the NYT and “administration officials” were making hay about Saddam’s WMDs, UN inspectors were crawling around Iraq with unfettered access and finding zilch.

Regardless of the NY Times’ pretzel-twists of interoperable political agendas, it’s just plain a bad publication. It should just go full-out tabloid and compete for “alien elvis” stories with the Star/Enquirer, et al.

I wish the Washington Post covered local New York City news and had decent arts, culture, and fashion sections. Until then I am stuck with the Gray Lady.

In any event, the Times’ coverage wasn’t much different than the rest of the media’s coverage - a bunch of Bush Administration regurgitation. Their real crimes were (a) not realizing that much of the American news media takes their stories from the Times, and (b) not realizing that they needed to be especially extra skeptical of the things the White House - and I mean the Bush White House in particular - says.

-Cf

And sometimes they let partisanship get in the way of journalistic responsibility, for example, refusing to print the photos of the individuals on the wanted terrorist list put out by Ashcroft, simply because, well, he’s Ashcroft. If these guys were the 9/11 hijackers on 9/10, the NYT could be sacrificing thousands of lives on the alter of binary fanatical partisanship.