jamiroguy1

This is silly.

Cue the music.... "I'm coming out... I want the world to know... I've got to let it show!!"

I don't think we can blame it on funding problems. Were they cutting funds as our troops were invading Iraq? Didn't our congress give the military full financial support and grant them whatever the pentagon requested, (money wise that is) to invade Iraq?

Cheney Designs Commission to Evaluate Cheney When I heard that Bush was succumbing to the pressure to name an independent commission to look into the mysterious case of Iraq's vanishing weapons, I joked that he might appoint Dick Cheney to head it, since Cheney was probably the biggest hormswaggler of all. Turns out that Cheney, while not heading the commission, is playing an instrumental role in its creation, membership, and mandate, according to The New York Times. Perhaps that's why this panel will not release its results till after the November election. God forbid the voters know who is culpable before they cast their ballots. And perhaps that's why this panel will look well beyond Iraq to some broader issues of intelligence failures. The more the commission broadens its focus, the less implicated Bush and Cheney may appear. At least that seems to be the White House's hope. So, too, the hope that people will buy the claim that, at bottom, this was an intelligence failure, rather than the result of heavy-handed pressure by the Bush Administration. Though David Kay denied that such pressure existed, that is not the conclusion the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reached in its recent report "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications." The evidence "suggests, but does not prove, that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002," the report says. "Although such situations are not unusual, in this case, the pressure appears to have been unusually intense." It noted Cheney's own repeated, and extraordinary, visits to CIA headquarters, a fact The Washington Post disclosed on June 5, 2003, in an article by Walter Pincus and Dana Priest. "Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to Al Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush Administration's policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials," the Post article said. The article quoted a senior CIA official who said the visits "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here." The Carnegie report also mentions that "political appointees in the Department of Defense set up their own intelligence operations reportedly out of dissatisfaction" with the work of the CIA. And, as Seymour Hersh has reported for The New Yorker, Cheney and Rumsfeld insisted on getting raw intelligence reports unevaluated by the experts at the CIA. "It strains credibility," the Carnegie report says, to believe individuals and agencies did not feel pressure "to reach more threatening judgments of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs than many analysts felt were warranted." It's too easy, and too convenient, to blame the intelligence agencies for screwing up. Here is a more plausible theory: Bush wanted this war from day one, as did Cheney and Rumsfeld, and their deputies Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz, respectively. All four of those men were part of the Project for the New American Century, which had long advocated the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein as a top U.S. foreign policy priority. To get their way, the President's men breathed heavily on the backs of the intelligence gatherers to come up with anything that could make the President's war wish--and their own war wish--come true. Now to have Cheney appoint his own interrogator is a laughable cover-up. -- Matthew Rothschild http://www.progressive.org/webex04/wx020204.html

This is pretty shocking, actually. The impression anyone would have gotten from the press corp was an effortless invasion. In fact it looks sloppy in hind sight. ******************************* US war machine nearly fell apart, army reveals February 4, 2004 The first official army history of the Iraq war reveals that United States forces were plagued by supply shortages, radios that could not reach far-flung troops and virtually no reliable intelligence on how Saddam Hussein would defend Baghdad. While it is well known that many army units ran low on fuel and water as fast-moving armoured forces raced towards the Iraqi capital, the study offers vivid new details of a supply system nearing collapse. Tank engines sat on warehouse shelves in Kuwait with no truck drivers to carry them north. Broken-down trucks were scavenged for usable parts and left by the roadside. Artillery units cannibalised parts from captured Iraqi guns to keep their howitzers operating. In most cases, soldiers improvised solutions to keep the offensive rolling. "The morass of problems that confounded delivering parts and supplies - running the gamut of paper clips to tank engines - stems from the lack of a means to assign responsibility clearly," the report concluded. The unclassified study was ordered last year by the former army chief-of-staff General Eric Shinseki, who clashed with the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, over troop strength for postwar Iraq. It draws on interviews with 2300 people, 68,000 photographs and nearly 120,000 documents. Full article http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/03/1075776064461.html

Divided government holds spending, warmongering in check By Steve Chapman Originally published February 3, 2004 CHICAGO - Back in the mid-1960s, the nation was mired in a war with no end in sight, our leaders were creating entitlements with reckless abandon and critics were accusing the president of deceiving the public. Today, the Army says it may keep troops in Iraq through 2006, the price of the new Medicare drug benefit is already soaring and the administration is trying to explain all the things it said about Saddam Hussein that weren't true. It's no accident that the era of Lyndon Johnson, a liberal Democrat, parallels that of George W. Bush, a conservative Republican. The two men have one crucial thing in common: presiding over a government controlled by one party. LBJ was able to push through his legislative program, enjoy a free hand in Southeast Asia and get away with misleading the public about the war because Republicans provided only a puny counterbalance. Besides occupying the White House and holding a majority in both houses of Congress, Democrats had the upper hand on the Supreme Court. Now it's the Democrats who are shut out of power in all three branches, leaving the GOP with an open field. United government calls to mind the old axiom that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Both parties have their flaws and excesses. But divide power between them, and those shortcomings shrink. One-party dominance usually means too much of a bad thing. That's what we're getting today. The pattern represents a sharp reversal from the recent past. During the Clinton years, the United States stayed out of major wars, the federal budget went from big deficits to big surpluses and the most notable presidential deceptions were about matters that didn't involve life and death. This is not because Bill Clinton was innately conservative and cautious. It's because for most of his time in office, Republicans controlled Congress. Full Article http://www.sunspot.net/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.chapman03feb03,0,4826917.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines

Good links, normal. RNC is shitting it's pants right now of all shit storm they have to pull themselves through this year to win the election.

I haven't any ideas at the moment but I'm open for whatever. Wait... here's one...How bout a "current events" dunking maching where we can set someone up from here and toss balls to dunk him/her. That's my only suggestion right now.

Get over it. Football season is over.

Ok.. Just don't mention anything about the easter bunny that's my last sacred cow.

What grade did you get on this paper?

Touching story.

That would explain this... China's ambitious space plane: http://www.iht.com/articles/114009.html China's space program timelined: http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/10/03/china.space.timeline/

No what I'm getting at is where is this made. Honestly, I don't know shit about Ricin. Is this something that can be made in someone basement or backyard or is this something that has to be reproduced in a lab. Educate me, my boy.

WAIT... Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy don't exist???

I think the language justin timberfake used was a "wardrobe malfunction"

Hopefully for Bush. But why should the investigation be completed after the election and not before to let the american people decide where the blame belongs?

Posted on Mon, Feb. 02, 2004 Iraq intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified errors, officials say BY JONATHAN S. LANDAY, WARREN P. STROBEL AND JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON - - (KRT) - What went wrong with intelligence on Iraq will never be known unless the inquiry proposed by President Bush examines secret intelligence efforts led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon hawks, current and former U.S officials said Monday. The officials said they feared that Bush, gearing up his fight for re-election, would try to limit the inquiry's scope to the CIA and other agencies, and ignore the key role the administration's own internal intelligence efforts played in making the case for war. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, didn't dispute that the CIA failed to accurately assess the state of Iraq's weapons programs. But they said that the intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified the errors through exaggeration, oversights and mistaken deductions. Those efforts bypassed normal channels, used Iraqi exiles and defectors of questionable reliability, and produced findings on former dictator Saddam Hussein's links to al-Qaida and his illicit arms programs that were disputed by analysts at the CIA, the State Department and other agencies, the officials said. "There were more agencies than CIA providing intelligence ... that are worth scrutiny, including the (Pentagon's now-disbanded) Office of Special Plans and the office of the vice president," said a former senior military official who was involved in planning the Iraq invasion. Some of the disputed findings were presented as facts to Americans as Bush drummed up his case for war. Full article http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/news/politics/7859310.htm

These were classified as credible civil rights violations by the internal watchdog of the justice department so for you to suggest that some of these people may be dellusional is irresponsible and sick. The fact is, people's rights are still being violated whether it's 1 or 1,000 cases of abuse of power it's too many cases. What if you or your family were accidentally detained and abused as far fetched in your mind as that may be. Consider the anguish that you or your family would be put through. Obviously, we all want to end terrorism but this isn't the way to do it. The patriot act is terrorism.

I wonder if this Ricin is "weaponized" as was the anthrax that was sent to Daschle and Leahy or if they can be a link to the previous biological attack on senate offices or is it made in some douche bags home lab. Is that possible? We at least we know that the anthrax came from Ft. Detrich, MD. This story really disturbs me because it's more than likely someone in our goverment or at least someone close to our chemical or biological weapons program that may be responsible for this.

I'm going to have to agree with simons here. I don't see how adding more nuclear missle systems, ready to fire at an instant makes this world safer. We all agree that the nuclear problem is a global problem not just a problem for our enemies.

lol You asked me this before and I still have the same answer: Policy change

Here's another quote you left out: For the period of December 16 to June 15, 34 allegations were deemed credible and are being investigated by various officials within the department. Those 34 were among 1,073 complaints received during the period that suggested a Patriot Act-related civil rights or civil liberties connection