4 BILLION A MONTH!!!! What a worthless waste!

by ashitaka 37 Replies latest social current

  • Mr. Kim
    Mr. Kim

    I agree, what a waste! However, wait and see what is NEXT. Total control is on it's way and the population will give up all freedoms for a false safety.

  • Reborn2002
    Reborn2002

    Yeah Yeru, you tell that to the soldiers who gave their lives for a President who peppers falsehoods in speeches designed to incite the masses to support him. When called on his lies, he arrogantly "considers the matter closed." Although I am sure you will have an excuse for that. Righties always do when it comes to supporting Dubya.

    Bush wanted Saddam. He tried to assassinate his father for crying out loud. To date, after several MONTHS of having total sovereignty over the country, NO WoMD have been found. Coincidence? Did anyone see Rumsfeld this past Sunday on This Week with George Stephanapoulous? He spent the entire session backtracking his lies. On March 30th he stated unequivocally that they "KNEW where WMD were"

    Now it has come into question do they even exist?

    The US government has even been forced into admitting that Bush's claims about Hussein and the Iraqi regime attempting to acquire uranium from Africa as was stated in last January's State of the Union Address was FALSE. A war waged under false pretenses? Deceiving the American public? You can rant and rave all you want in supporting Dubya, if it was not known to be fact, you DO NOT present it as fact. PERIOD. I suppose you and Francois have excuses for that as well?

    Ok, so they removed one tyrannical dictator. If the US is to be fair, then it is the United States' responsibility to engage dictators in every nation of the world and remove them. Liberia, Iran, North Korea, Yemen to name a few.

    Damn the fact that the economy is flailing. Damn the fact that the unemployment rate is the highest in 15 years. Let us be more concerned with policing every other nation on Earth while American citizens starve and go homeless.

    Sounds like grounds for impeachment to me.

  • Yerusalyim
    Yerusalyim

    For those who don't understand my point of view on this I encourage you to actually visit the middle east and see what I've seen. If only for the murder and torture Saddam committed he deserved to be taken out.

    Tell me this my liberal friends...how many of you opposers are supporting the US sending troops to Liberia? Why?

    Reborn:

    Bush didn't lie, The administration tried to make a case for war against saddam, one MINUTE part is that was approved by CIA is now in question, but still not proven false (the Brits are sticking to their story). No grounds for anything but noise making by Democrats who have no real issues.

    The US government has even been forced into admitting that Bush's claims about Hussein and the Iraqi regime attempting to acquire uranium from Africa as was stated in last January's State of the Union Address was FALSE. A war waged under false pretenses? Deceiving the American public? You can rant and rave all you want in supporting Dubya, if it was not known to be fact, you DO NOT present it as fact. PERIOD. I suppose you and Francois have excuses for that as well?

    The attempt to acquisition Uranium from Africa has NOT been proven false...the British are sticking to their guns, and they are the ones that gave us the Intellegence. The American public was not deceived. Finding the Mobile Bio-Weapons labs and the centrafuge PROVE Saddam still had a program of banned weapons.

    You OBVIOUSLY have no understanding of Intellegence. In Intellegence there are no facts, only guesses and suppositions and analysis.

    Hamas,

    I understand YOUR mentality all too well...Hate America, the great Satan!

  • Reborn2002
    Reborn2002

    http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-07-13-bush-intel_x.htm

    Yeru, I love ya man, but you make me laugh when I see how you desperately attempt to support your man even in the face of glaring evidence showing him to be deceptive.

    The fact is, Bush made those statements in a Presidential Address to the world suggesting these comments as FACT to garner support to wage a war, when in fact those comments have now been shown to be up for debate as if they are accurate at all. Making claims based on forged documents?

    I particularly enjoyed this quote.

    Forged documents purported to confirm approaches by Iraq to the West African nation of Niger, the world's third-largest producer of mined uranium. In the address, Bush said "the British government has learned" of the Iraqi approach, but he did not mention that U.S. agencies had questioned the validity of that intelligence.

    Asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" to explain why the statement should have been dumped, Rumsfeld said: "Referencing another country's intelligence, as opposed to your own, probably — according to George Tenet and the president ... it would have been better not to include it."

    Keep backtracking Donald... keep backtracking. Kind of hard to keep track of lies isn't it?

    The article continues:

    A former U.S. ambassador, Joseph Wilson, said a week ago that his CIA-sponsored trip to Niger in February 2002 determined the intelligence could not be verified. A furor then arose in Washington, and Tenet assumed responsibility Friday for not having insisted the statement be removed.

    Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., a member of the Intelligence Committee, said Monday, "I don't think this was an intentional falsehood, but we have to get to the bottom of how this happened to make sure it never happens again."

    Bush affirmed his support for Tenet on Saturday and declared the controversy over. But the administration still sent Rice and Rumsfeld to the Sunday news shows to defend the speech.

    I will be generous, and say perhaps it was not an intentional falsehood. Nevertheless, you DO NOT make assertions in a Presidential Address with comments that are not certain. You DO NOT present opinion or unverified statements as fact. PERIOD. Why is that so hard to understand?

    In the four months since the war in Iraq began, U.S. forces have found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Rumsfeld said Sunday he remains confident such weapons will be found.

    Graham said on NBC that Vice President Dick Cheney personally had asked for a CIA review of the Iraq-Niger link. That he got no response, he said, "I will have to say that stretches belief ...."

    Another Democratic presidential aspirant, Massachusetts. Sen. John Kerry, challenged Bush's contention that the episode is over.

    Instead, he told CNN's "Late Edition, there remain "enormous questions still about the overall intelligence given to the Congress, the quality of that intelligence and even about the politics that entered into the judgment of taking that famous phrase out of one speech (in Cincinnati) but leaving it in another."

  • Reborn2002
  • Mr. Kim
    Mr. Kim

    Who can be trusted? Who has earned our trust?

  • SheilaM
    SheilaM
    George W wasted those young men's lives

    Ashikita: No MATTER how you feel, this was a VERY disrespectful thing to say.

  • Robdar
    Robdar

    Tell me this my liberal friends...how many of you opposers are supporting the US sending troops to Liberia? Why?

    I can't think of one single war in my life time that I ever supported.

    Robyn

  • Reborn2002
    Reborn2002

    http://slate.msn.com/id/2085604/

    The Buck Stops There Bush shifts the blame for his Iraq whopper. By William Saletan
    Posted Monday, July 14, 2003, at 3:31 PM PT

    When George W. Bush ran for president, one of his big selling points was responsibility. Americans were tired of Bill Clinton's fudges and legalisms. They were tired of hearing that the latest falsehood was part of a larger truth, or that it was OK because the president had attributed it to somebody else, or that the country should "move on." Bush promised to end all that. He promised an "era of responsibility" in which leaders and citizens would no longer "blame somebody else."

    This month, Bush was given a chance to make good on those promises. In his State of the Union address earlier this year, he told Americans, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." But in March, the International Atomic Energy Agency debunked the only public documentation for that claim. And on July 6, a U.S. emissary who had been sent to Niger to check out the principal basis of the claim disclosed in the New York Times that he had found—and had told the U.S. government more than a year ago—that "it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place."

    What do Bush and his aides have to say about this?

    1. It's the CIA's fault. On Friday, in a joint briefing with White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice emphasized that the CIA had "cleared" Bush's speech. In case anyone missed the point, Rice repeated it nine times verbatim and another eight times indirectly. Hours later, a reporter asked Bush, "Can you explain how an erroneous piece of intelligence on the Iraq-Niger connection got into your State of the Union speech? Are you upset about it, and should somebody be held accountable?" Bush replied that the speech "was cleared by the intelligence services."

    CIA Director George Tenet took a different approach. He didn't blame CIA underlings who had cleared the speech. "I am responsible for the approval process in my Agency," he said .

    The honorable step for Bush—who had often promised to restore honor to the White House—would have been to follow Tenet's example by declaring, "I am responsible for the approval process in my administration." Instead, Fleischer told reporters on Saturday, "The President is pleased that the Director of Central Intelligence acknowledged what needed to be acknowledged. … The President said that line because it was based on information from the intelligence community, and the speech was vetted." On Sunday, Rice repeated on Face the Nation that "the clearance process should have picked up" the error and that Bush had to "depend on the intelligence agencies" to remove bogus lines from his speeches. On Monday, Bush repeated three more times that the CIA had "cleared" the speech.

    2. It's the speechwriters' fault. The intelligence reports on which the claim was based were "given to the speech writers; they wrote it," Rice pleaded on Fox News Sunday. When asked on Face the Nation how the line got into Bush's speech, Rice described the process this way: "A text is created." Tenet agreed that the line "should never have been included in the text written for the President." True, every president relies on speechwriters. But if presidents get the credit for good lines (and, as in the case of "axis of evil," get irked when speechwriters take credit for them), they ought to take equal responsibility for the bad ones. If speechwriters were always at fault, no president who stuck to his script could ever be called a liar.

    3. It's true that Britain said it. Rice went on three of the five Sunday talk shows to insist that the uranium line " was indeed accurate. The British government did say that ." On the other two shows, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld likewise argued that the line was " technically correct " and "technically accurate." When Bush ran for president, he derided Bill Clinton for failing to correct the statement by Clinton's lawyer, Bob Bennett, that "there is no sexual relationship" between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Evidently, that standard of responsibility has expired. Now it's OK not just to permit a fishy statement but to repeat it, as long as you attribute it to somebody else.

    It's also now OK to hedge your language just enough to avoid clear falsehood. According to Tenet, CIA "officials who were reviewing the draft remarks on uranium raised several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence with National Security Council colleagues. Some of the language was changed." By all accounts, the change consisted of attributing the statement to Britain. On Sunday, Rice assured CNN viewers that "had there been a request to take that [line] out in its entirety, it would have been followed immediately." Since the CIA didn't demand removal of the line "in its entirety," the White House decided that tweaking the language was good enough.

    4. It's part of a larger truth. On Wednesday, Bush was asked whether he still believed that Saddam had sought "to buy nuclear materials in Africa.' Bush reframed the question in broader terms: "I am confident that Saddam Hussein had a weapons of mass destruction program." On Saturday, Fleischer added : "A greater, more important truth is being lost in the flap over whether or not Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. The greater truth is that nobody, but nobody, denies that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons." Fleischer went on to emphasize the "larger truth" and the "bigger picture." Monday, Bush again changed the subject to this "larger point"—evidently forgetting that he and Fleischer took a slightly less generous view of larger truths back when the subject was Al Gore's role in creating the Internet.

    5. It's time to move on. "The President has moved on. And I think, frankly, much of the country has moved on as well," Fleischer told reporters Saturday, without apparent irony.

    Rice's comments raise several additional questions. In her briefing with Fleischer, she said twice that the CIA cleared the speech "in its entirety." But according to Tenet , the CIA received only "portions" of the draft. On Late Edition, Rice claimed that "the Agency did not react to [the] statement" about uranium during the vetting. On Face the Nation, she added , "Had there been even a peep that the agency [CIA] did not want that sentence in … it would have been gone." Neither comment squares with Tenet's assertion that CIA officials who reviewed "the draft remarks on uranium raised several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence with [NSC] colleagues."

    It's fitting that Fleischer asks us to move on from the uranium story as he prepares to move on to a new career in the private sector. We'd like to move on, too, Ari. It's just that when it comes to presidential responsibility, we seem to be moving in circles.

    Make more excuses for him Yeru?

  • William Penwell
    William Penwell

    Who is going to pay??? Every taxpaying American citizen that who and wait till you need a life saving operation or an old age pension etc. That's when they will say "sorry Mr. there ain't no more money, though luck". Better get used to eating cat food. Oh yeah I also understand Bush was going to cut back the veterans pensions to. That's the thanks you get.

    Will

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