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Powell Aide Says Case for War a 'Hoax'
PBS recently aired an interview with Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson (Ret), Chief of Staff at the Department of State from Aug 2002 - January 2005, addressing some of the skepticism surrounding the pre-war claims made by the Bush administration. Wilkerson claims in no uncertain terms that he "participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council." This is not the first time that Wilkerson has spoken out against the administration and intelligence community.
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Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 - June 21, 1940), nicknamed "the fighting Quaker" and "Old Gimlet Eye," was a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps and, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. Butler was awarded the Medal of Honor twice during his career, one of only 19 people to be so decorated. He was noted for his outspoken left-wing views and his book War is a Racket, one of the first works describing the military-industrial complex. After retiring from service, Butler became a popular speaker at meetings organized by veterans, communists, pacifists and church groups in the 1930s. Butler came forward to the U.S. Congress in 1934 to report that a proposed coup had been plotted by wealthy industrialists to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
The problem is that politicians could lie and get away with it. Before the war Bush & Co were pretending that we were in danger from Iraq, and now that they've been proven wrong no one called them on the original claims. If I call the police and falsely claim there's a robbery when there isn't, I will be fined for false call. Bush made a false call which caused 2,000+ Americans and unknown number of Iraqis to die - and he just got away with it.
We need some sort of accountability system that would force politicians to pay for their mistakes. Require them to publicly estimate cost of war and take all outstanding costs from their personal bank accounts. Wolfowitz estimated war to cost around half a billion, and so far we ended up with more than $200 billion (yes, two hundreen billion US dollars) of extra costs. If Bush & Co were forced to pay all outstanding costs, they would've estimated the cost of war honestly, and people wouldn't be misled into supporting war.
Same thing for human cost. Require pro-war politicians to gather signatures. It's way too easy to say "I support a war" while sitting at home in front of TV. Make a law that starting a war would require million or so legally binding signatures from people to cover in case we run out of troops. There's always so many vocal pro-war supporters, but when it comes to actually fighting the war we always seem to run out of people. Make war supporters actually carry the cost of war, and they will actually start using their brains first.
Obama 2012: our incompetent asshole is slightly less of an incompetent asshole than the other incompetent asshole !
Here are some current "facts" from the Bush administration that are being accepted without question by the media and most of the US population:
If we withdraw from Iraq the terrorists will win.
This statement seems to imply that unless the USA maintains 100,000+ troops in Iraq for many years then the insurgents will overrun Iraq and set up Bin Laden as a dictator of Iraq. This is obviously false at a number of levels. At a most basic level, the insurgents lack the capability to defeat the Shiite militias. In the broader picture, even if the USA sets up a stable democracy after many year of occupation, there is no guarantee that the Iraqi people will not elect a government with strong ties to organizations that the USA considers to be terrorist organizations. Whether it is a good idea for the USA to maintain substantial trooop levels in Iraq for many years to come is unclear without substantial impartial detailed study. If these studies have been done at all, the results have certainly not been presented to the American people. Instead, we are merely given some simplistic message about how the terrorists will win unless we do what the Bush administration wants.
Social security is broken.
The way social security works is that people who are working pay into the system and that money is used to pay benefits for people who are retired. Strictly speaking, it's not possible for the system to break. The government just transfers the money that is collected from the workers to those receiving retirement benefits. In order to cushion the effect of the baby boom generation, however, the government was collecting more than it was paying out. The problem is that the rest of the government started borrowing against this surplus and now the Bush administration is looking to avoid having to pay it back. Whether the current system is optimal is certainly open to debate but the idea that the system is "broken" is obviously false.
The Bush administrion did nothing illegal in order the NSA to listen in on American phone conversations
From the Bill of Rights in the US constitution:
I'm not a constitutional scholar but that seems to rather clearly state that some kind of warrant is required. Maybe there's a loop hole and maybe there isn't but it is certainly not factual to blatantly assert that it is legal for the US government to listen in on American phone conversations without a warrant.Maybe you should have read the story. You see, he responded that -- until 6 months ago -- he did not know there was dissent among the intelligence community that gave him the information he relied on to make his case. You can argue that he was stupid, or anything else you like, but he relied on his staff, and the intelligence community, to let him know what was fact and what was in dispute. According to him, this was not presented. He was told the information was "rock solid."
Give the man credit for speaking out once he found out that the system was broken. He makes a very strong argument against the way the Bush administration works.
First, and with respect to your service, impugning the character of Jack Murtha is beneath you. It's little better than when "Mean" Jean Schmidt did so on the house floor, and is disrespectful of the Representative's service and, even more importantly, his dedication to the well-being of our troops.
Second, you mischaracterize Rep. Murtha's proposal. Should you care to read it, it's available here. It calls for large-scale redeployment at "the earliest practicable date," which Murtha has in the past estimated as requiring about six months. This is hardly equivalent to "leaving right now."
Third: rather than debate the "immediacy" of the representatives plan, many supporters of the administration have chosen to take issue with the notion of an "artificial timetable." Obviously you're free to agree or disagree with the idea, but keep in mind that a sizeable portion of the Iraqi National Assembly recently released a statement in which they called for that very timetable. Even more recently, they repeated that demand: tellingly, they condemned terrorism, but defined terrorism in such a way that excludes insurgents who attack the US Military.
So, respectfully, I would suggest that the Iraqis that you fought to "liberate" have spoken, and what they're saying is, "Thank you. Now get out."
I don't think most rational humans want to see Iraq become a terrorist state. This is why we need to stay the course at this point and why playing politics with the Iraqi war is going to do more damage than good to a potential presidential canidate.
Would you personally be willing to die to "stay the course"? Would you ask your children to die for this cause? You're assuming that we can win the war in Iraq. If we can't win, then letting more of our bravest and most patriotic citizens die needlessly is equivalent to murdering them.
If anyone in this administration, including the president, lied or ignored evidence in order to push this war on the people, then they should be executed for treason.
The strikes against Afghanistan were legitimate, if largely ineffective; the strikes the same night against Sudan were not.
Depends on how you define ineffective. Opium production came out of a slump after the attacks.
Seriously, I almost agree that the attack on Afghanistan could be deemed legitimate. I have no conflicting evidence.
Any person that can think and read that does not believe that the "War on Terror" and the Iraq war are made up is a moron. I flipped off Rumsfeld the other day while watching TV in a store. He was crying wolf again about the "War on Terror".
Just last week or so, a tunnel was discovered that went from Mexico to the US. It was 2400 feet long, had a cement floor, took over a year to build, and some chump got caught with 1 ton of Mexican swag.
Now, that was one operation. I forget the estimated tonnage of pot that comes from British Columbia every year (not much better than Mexican swag, but I digress). But its a bunch.
Oh, and sometimes people bring in tons of cocaine. And other stuff.
Now, how difficult would it be to replace the multi-ton cargo with say a few tons of explosives, poisons, or whatever nasty stuff a "terrorist" can think of? Zero.
The "War on Terror" is such a joke, that a few weeks ago, CNN broadcasted that there were "confirmed" bin Laden tapes saying that he was planning to attack the US or something. Read the disinformation here: http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/01/19/binladen.tape/
Nothing happened. No response. The terror "threat level" did not raise up from "elevated" than it has in years. Remember that Bush used to jack up the terror threat level during his reelection campaign for the fun of it.
The American people are being lied to and they simply accept it.
There is nothing you can do to stop a well funded suicidally driven person. Period.
Just ask Ireland when they really had issues with terrorism.
I always get modded all over the place with posts like this from insightful, informative, overrated, and flamebait. So here we go again.
The war in Iraq is about profit, inflation prevention, and basic economics. Or was it really about WMDs? Or was it really for 9/11/01? Well, WMDs were a farce, and Saddam didn't have anything to do with the plane thing.
Oh, but North Korea is next, right?