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Who cares.....

We all know you don't, but some are concerned about something called "accountability." Some are held accountable for lying about oval office oral, others for starting a 5+ year quagmire have yet to be held accountable.

the entire Congress had the same Intel that Pres. Bush did..

Why don't we have the gonads to impeach this dolt?

Basically, no, the gonads have been removed and burned.

The Downing Street "Memo" is actually the minutes of a meeting, transcribed during a gathering of many of the British Prime Minister's senior ministers on July 23, 2002. Published by The Sunday Times on May 1, 2005 this document was the first hard evidence from within the UK or US governments that exposed the truth about how the Iraq war began.

Since that time, much more information has come to light through leaks of secret government documents and the accounts of an increasing number of people who have witnessed the administration’s wrongdoing firsthand.

There is now in the public record a large body of evidence that vividly illustrates:

* Bush’s long-standing intent to invade Iraq

* Bush’s willingness to provoke Saddam (in a variety of ways) into providing a pretext for war

* The fact that the war effectively began with an air campaign nearly a year before the March 2003 invasion and months before Congressional approval for the use of force

* The administration’s widespread effort to crush dissent and manipulate information that would counter its justification for war

* The lack of planning for the war’s aftermath and a fundamental lack of understanding of the Iraqi society

From cherry-picked intelligence to a non-existent plan to win the peace; from no-bid contracts for reconstruction to character assassination for anyone who dares to question the premises of the war—the Bush administration has perpetrated what is by any measure one of the most egregious foreign policy misstep in our history.

http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/

NSC Document

For instance, toward the end of a recent story in The New Yorker magazine, writer Jane Mayer reported the discovery of a National Security Council document dated Feb. 3, 2001 – only two weeks after Bush took office. It instructed NSC officials to cooperate with Vice President****Cheney’s Energy Task Force, explaining that the task force was “melding” two previously unrelated areas of policy: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states” and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”

Before this disclosure, it was believed that Cheney’s secretive task force was focusing on ways to reduce environmental regulations and fend off the Kyoto protocol on global warming. But Mayer’s discovery suggests that the Bush administration in its first days recognized the linkage between ousting the likes of Saddam Hussein and securing oil reserves for future U.S. consumption. In other words, the Cheney task force appears to have had a military component to “capture” oil fields in “rogue states.” [For details on Mayer’s document, see The New Yorker, Feb. 16, 2004.]

The NSC document dovetails with statements by Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, who has described a similar early linkage between invading Iraq and controlling its vast oil reserves. In Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, O’Neill describes the first NSC meeting at the White House only a few days into Bush’s presidency. An invasion of Iraq was already on the agenda, O’Neill said. There was even a map for a post-war occupation, marking out how Iraq’s oil fields would be carved up.

O’Neill said even at that early date, the goal of invading Iraq was clear. The message from Bush was “find a way to do this,” according to O’Neill, who was forced out in December 2002. To this day, of course, the U.S. news media still joins the Bush administration in mocking as a conspiracy theory any suggestion that oil might have been a motive for the Iraq War.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/031604.html

”A year before the war started, three things are going on. Franks is secretly developing this war plan that he's briefing the president in detail on,” says Woodward. “Franks simultaneously is publicly denying that he's ever been asked to do any plan.”

For example, here's Gen. Franks’ response to a question about invading Iraq, in May 2002, after he's been working on war plans for five months: “That’s a great question and one for which I don’t have an answer, because my boss has not yet asked me to put together a plan to do that.”

But according to Woodward, the general had been perfecting his war plan, and Vice President****Cheney knew all about it. Woodward reports that Cheney was the driving force in the White House to get Saddam. Cheney had been Secretary of Defense during the first Gulf War, and to him, Saddam was unfinished business – and a threat to the United States.

In his book, Woodward describes Cheney as a "powerful, steamrolling force obsessed with Saddam and taking him out."

"Colin Powell, the secretary of state, saw this in Cheney to such an extent, he, Powell, told colleagues that ‘Cheney has a fever. It is an absolute fever. It’s almost as if nothing else exists,’” says Woodward, who adds that Cheney had plenty of opportunities to convince the president.

”He’s just down the hall in the West Wing from the president. President says, ‘I meet with him all the time.’ Cheney's back in the corner or sitting on the couch at nearly all of these meetings.”

The president had hoped Saddam could be removed in some way short of war. But early in 2002, Woodward reports, the CIA concluded they could not overthrow Saddam. That word came from the CIA's head of Iraq operations, a man known simply as “Saul.”

"Saul gets together a briefing and who does he give it to first?****Cheney. He said, ‘I can count the number of sources, human sources, spies we have in Iraq on one hand,’” says Woodward. “I asked the president, ‘What was your reaction that the CIA couldn't overthrow Saddam? And the president said one word. 'Darn.'"

The vice president led the way on declaring that Saddam Hussein definitely had weapons of mass destruction. Before that, the president had said only that Saddam “desires them.”

But ten days later, the vice president said Saddam already had weapons of mass destruction. And 12 days after that, the president too had apparently been persuaded: “A lot of people understand he holds weapons of mass destruction.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/15/60minutes/main612067.shtml

The signs of impending disaster were clear from the beginning of this administration. Insiders knew it all along. Statements made by the Bush administration often seem to convey the message that Iraq only became a focus of attention after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The evidence points in another direction.

Sometime in the spring of 2000, Stephen Hadley, now Condoleeza Rice's deputy at the National Security Council (NSC), briefed a group of prominent Republican party policymakers on the national-security and foreign-policy agenda of a future George W. Bush administration. Hadley was one of a group of senior campaign policy advisers to then-Texas Governor Bush known collectively as "the Vulcans." The group, in addition to Hadley, included Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and had been assembled by George Shultz and****Cheney beginning in late 1998, when Bush first launched his presidential bid.

Hadley's briefing shocked a number of the participants, according to Clifford Kiracofe, a professor at the Virginia Military Institute, who spoke to several of them shortly after the meeting. Hadley announced that the "number-one foreign-policy agenda" of a Bush administration would be Iraq and the unfinished business of removing Saddam Hussein from power. Hadley also made it clear that the Israel-Palestine conflict, which had dominated the Middle East agenda of the Clinton administration, would be placed in the deep freeze.

Dr. Kiracofe's account of the pre-election obsession of the Vulcans with the ouster of Saddam Hussein is corroborated by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's memory of the first meetings of the Bush National Security Council, which he attended in late January and early February of 2001. Ron Suskind's book The Price of Loyalty, based on O'Neill's memory and notes, tells us of an NSC meeting, ten days into the Bush administration, at which both the Israel-Palestine and Iraq situations were discussed.

Referring to President Clinton's efforts to reach a comprehensive peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, President Bush declared, "Clinton overreached, and it all fell apart. That's why we're in trouble. If the two sides don't want peace, there's no way we can force them. I don't see much we can do over there at this point. I think it's time to pull out of the situation."

Next, Condoleeza Rice raised the issue of Iraq and the danger posed by Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. A good deal of the hour-long meeting was taken up with a briefing by CIA Director George Tenet on a series of aerial photographs of sites inside Iraq that "might" be producing WMD. Tenet admitted that there was no firm intelligence on what was going on inside those sites, but at the close of the meeting, President Bush tasked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Hugh Shelton to begin preparing options for the use of U.S. ground forces in the northern and southern no-fly zones in Iraq to support an insurgency to bring down the Saddam regime. As author Ron Suskind summed it up: "Meeting adjourned. Ten days in, and it was about Iraq. Rumsfeld had said little, Cheney nothing at all, though both men clearly had long entertained the idea of overthrowing Saddam." If this was a decision meeting, it was strange. It ended in a presidential order to prepare contingency plans for war in Iraq.

Surely, this was not the first time these people had considered this problem. One interesting thing about those at the meeting is that no one present or in the background had any substantive knowledge of the Middle East. It is one thing to have traveled to the area as a senior government official. It is another to have lived there and worked with the people of the region for long periods of time. People with that kind of experience in the Muslim world are strangely absent from Team Bush. In the game plan for the Arab and Islamic world, most of the government's veteran Middle East experts were largely shut out. The Pentagon civilian bureaucracy of the Bush administration, dominated by an inner circle of think-tankers, lawyers and former Senate staffers, virtually hung out a sign, "Arabic Speakers Need Not Apply." They effectively purged the process of Americans who might have inadvertently developed sympathies for the people of the region.

http://www.mepc.org/journal_vol11/0406_lang.asp

W. Patrick Lang

Col. Lang is president of Global Resources, Inc. and former defense intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

Who cares.....the War is ongoing so what how it started or whatever now we need to figure out the best policy going forward....simple as that. thats the problem with you Liberals you spend some much time dwelling on the past that you get in the way of the future..

QUOTE: Honestly..... only an absolute cretin would have believed the BS that he was coming out with re: Iraq

^^ Read around on the forums. You'll be surprised how many "cretins" there still are in fact.... it's vaguely unbelievable, IMO, but there still are true believers.

Let me ask you this: what has the invasion of Iraq ever done for you and your country?

lol Glamour wow. Scott McClellan, Clarke and so many others are telling us that no, they didn't...This Clarke dude said last night on the news the administration flat out, straight up lied. How can you possibly say this is the congress' fault now? They were given misinformation on purpose. You can't blame people for voting for something when they were so monumentally decieved. And you go right on ahead and keep calling McClellan a 'disgruntled employee who made himself secretary of the war' or whatever it was you said. If that makes you sleep better at night clinging to your loyalty....then I say go ahead and hold tight to that little dream. The rest of us will step up and demand accountability.

The Intel was deemed false after the fact.. no one was pushing known false information..

Why don't we have the gonads to impeach this dolt?