Originally Posted by April15

Here are a list of international statutes Bush has violated. His actions constitute criminal behavior punishable under international law.

What kind of penalty is appropriate for such crimes?

Originally Posted by Still Dizzy

Why by golly you are right! GWB should be given the EXACT same punishment that B.J. got for bombing a asprin factory in Sudan. What you think sport?

Originally Posted by Obama's Empty Suit

Nice copy and paste spam job April. I think your commune leader is calling you to cook dinner for the tribe. Run along now...

Originally Posted by wow

I'm glad this report did not mention the source of this intelligence information, George Tenet.
That would have meant this report may have had some credibility.

Originally Posted by Jetblast

A bipartisan panel formed by the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence concluded that Bush exaggerated available intelligence and ignored disagreements among spy agencies about Saddam's weapons programs and links to Al Qaeda. The report also accused Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of 9-11.

"The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein."

Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, called the report a "selective view" (Jetblast: Pretty ballsy considering how selective Bush's view was) and said the the Bush administration's public statements were based on the same faulty intelligence given to Congress and endorsed by Foreign intelligence services. (Jetblast: Perino is using a transparently false blame-placing excuse here trying to pose Bush as an innocent victim instead of the deliberate information-distorter he was).

The report on the pre-war statements found that on some important issues, most notably on what was believed to be Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, the public statements from Mr Bush, Mr Cheney and other senior officialswere generally "substantiated" by the best estimates at the time from American intelligence agencies. (Jetblast: Bullshit. The panel is helping their own crooks here) But it found that the administration official's statements did not reflect the intelligence agencies' uncertainties about the evidence or the disputes amongst them. (Jetblast: An internal committee's diplomatic way of saying they lied)

Pentagon officials met with Iraqi dissidents in clandestine meetings in 2001 and 2003. The meetings included discussions about possible covert actions to destabilize the government in Tehran, and were used by the Pentagon officials to glean information about rivalries in Iran and what was thought to be an Iranian "hit" team intending to attack American troops in Afghanistan, the report said. (Jetblast: Iran was very helpful in eliminating the Taliban in western Afghanistan. It offered to help the US but US declined. The sum total of this is reduced to "Iran planned to attack US in Afghanistan." Our media is inherently dishonest) The report concluded, though Wolfowitz, and national security adviser Hadley acted within their authority to send Pentagon officials to that meeting it was ill advised and accused them of keeping the State Department in the dark about those meetings which the report portrayed as part of a rogue intelligence operation. This report was the second part of a first report that identified "grave faults" in the CIA's analysis of the threat posed by Mr Hussein.

The report on Iraq was especially critical of statements by the president and vice president linking Iraq to Al Qaeda and raising the possibility that Mr Hussein might supply the terrorist group with unconventional weapons. "Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and lead the nation to war on false premises" Mr Rockefeller wrote. (Jetblast: So now we have the legal basis for a war crime. Where are those sophist phonies who argue 1441 now?)

Mr Bond and four other Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from the report's findings and suggested that the investigation was a partisan smoke screen to obscure the real story: That the CIA failed the Bush administration by delivering intelligence assessments to policy makers that have since been discredited (Jetblast: More Republican balls and trying to pose Bush as a victim. No consideration that CIA was working with Bush to distort)

In a detailed minority report four of those Republicans accused Democrats of hypocrisy and cherry picking, namely by refusing to include misleading public statements by top Democrats like Senator Hillary Clinton and Mr Rockefeller (Jetblast: More ballsy shifting of blame).

As an example,they pointed to an October 2002 speech by Mr Rockefeller, who declared to his Senate colleagues that he had arrived at the "inescapable conclusion that the threat posed to America by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is so serious that despite the risks, and we should not minimize the risks, we must authorize the president to take the necessary steps to deal with the threat (Jetblast: Republican devils don't afford Rockefeller the same excuse as being a victim of bad intelligence. The same bad intelligence the report cites Bush for)"

The report about the Bush administration's public statements offers some new details about the intelligence information that was available to policy makers as they built a case for war. For instance, in September 2002 Donald Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that "the Iraq problem cannot be solved by airstrikes alone," because Iraqi chemical and biological weapons were so deeply buried that they could not be penetrated by American bombs.

Two months later, however, the National Intelligence Council wrote an assessment for Mr Rumsfeld concluding that the Iraqi underground weapons facilities identified by the intelligence agencies "are vulnerable to conventional, precision-guided, penetrating munitions because they are not deeply buried." (Jetblast: It would be hard to describe this as anything other than a direct lie. Aside from the fact those weapons did not exist)

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democratic member of the intelligence committee, said that Congress had never been told about the national Intelligence Council's assessment. (Jetblast: Criminal concealment of determining information)


Jetblast: So how would we have used this exact same indicting information against Saddam? We have a full case for a war crime here. This is where America proves its sanctimonious claim of "rule of law".

Originally Posted by Jetblast

Now we are either a rogue state in contempt of international law with a cowboy republican rogue government, corrupt and invalid media, and feckless public, or a Constitutional democracy with the rule of law.

Originally Posted by Jetblast

Sorry, we have a Constitution and we practice democracy so we are a Constitutional democracy.

Iraq wasn't worth destroying our credibility and way of government over as we have done.