patrick.net

socal2 says

The lie pushed by fucking hacks like Tatupu, Salon and Mother Jones has probably helped radicalize thousands of Muslims to jihad.

Keep it up Tatapu. ISIS can't buy better PR than what it gets for free from the likes of you and your fellow travelers.

You're hilarious. You think an article documenting lies told by the American administration radicalized more Muslims than the American military invading a country in the Middle East for dubious reasons?

Your words are falling on deaf ears. Acknowledging the difference between lying and being wrong will destroy their narrative...

socal2 says

Again, being wrong on the size and scope of Iraq's WMD program is not the same thing as lying.

SoftShell says

Your words are falling on deaf ears. Acknowledging the difference between lying and being wrong will destroy their narrative...

I know. I have been debating with the "Bush Lied" and 9/11 Troofer morons for years. Nothing penetrates their thick skulls.

But I will still keep calling them what they are....... ISIS Propagandists.

curious2 says

I see. You're back to the partisan blame and attributing a lie to someone without acknowledging the sources he relied on or knowing what was in his head. I updated my comment to add a source link for you on the "slam dunk" quote:

I know that's the argument that apologists frequently make--the intelligence was faulty, it's possible Bush believed what he was saying, etc. I think it strains credibility to say that Bush simply didn't know or believed what he was saying to be true when he said it, but either way it doesn't change the fact that he lied. How do you explain away

tatupu70 says

LIE #3: "We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." -- Vice President Cheney on March 16, 2003 on "Meet the Press."

FACT: There was and is absolutely zero basis for this statement. CIA reports up through 2002 showed no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

or

tatupu70 says

LIE #2: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." -- President Bush, Jan.28, 2003, in the State of the Union address.

FACT: This whopper was based on a document that the White House already knew to be a forgery thanks to the CIA. Sold to Italian intelligence by some hustler, the document carried the signature of an official who had been out of office for 10 years and referenced a constitution that was no longer in effect. The ex-ambassador who the CIA sent to check out the story is pissed: "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," he told the New Republic, anonymously. "They [the White House] were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more strongly."

Those aren't exaggerations. They are mistruths. Deliberate.

curious2 says

So, in your view, if a Republican President believes a CIA Director who had been appointed by a Democrat, that means the Republican "lied." Do you see the problem?

Not really. If the CIA director was out there lying(and I don't doubt he was)--he shares the blame too.

curious2 says

Also, I would appreciate any insights into this question: why do partisans insist on destroying their own party's credibility by putting others in the bizarre position of defending the other side? I never voted for W, but now I find I've wasted a half hour defending him. Let him defend himself, I suppose, although I can't help noticing that former Secretary of State Clinton and current Secretary of State Kerry (both of whom voted in the Senate to get America into Iraq) have also got us into Libya and Syria. Similar story, different day.

I cannot comment on your motivations. Your entire point seems to be that Dems are guilty too. Which I fully acknowledge. I don't find the crime of a Congressman lacking the cajones or political will to challenge a popular (at that time) President and risk being called weak on terrorism/defending the country to equal that of the President lying to the public to justify invading another country, however.

socal2 says

Read the article. They weren't abandoned in the desert and rotting, they were hidden away from UN inspectors and being sold to us by an Iraqi seller after Saddam fell.

These were some of the weapons we KNEW Saddam had in his possession based on earlier disclosures to the UN after the Gulf War. The fact that Saddam didn't give UN inspectors access to these KNOWN weapons gave us plenty of suspicion he was hiding more stuff.

Again, being wrong on the size and scope of Iraq's WMD program is not the same thing as lying.

Yes, they were sold by an Iraqi who wanted to make money. There is NO indication that the weapons were under control of the government. I assume from the article that someone found them and decided to make some quick money.

Tatpatu - Factcheck.org debunks your "lie #2". Why do you keep posting it and looking an ISIS supporting fool?
http://factcheck.bootnetworks.com/article222.html

The rest of your "lies" are comments like: "We believe based on the available intelligence...."

Bush's #1 intelligence guy (CIA Director) said it was a slam dunk. Was George Tenet (a Clinton appointee) in on the "big lie" as well?

SoftShell says

Your words are falling on deaf ears. Acknowledging the difference between lying and being wrong will destroy their narrative...

OK---so it I say the Cubs won the World Series last year, I'm not lying, I'm just wrong?

tatupu70 says

President lying

You quote W reading a speech that others wrote and the CIA approved. Where is your evidence that he knew the assertion was false? And why do you insist on going beyond your own evidence? And with whom do you surround yourself on a daily basis that nobody challenges your elisions? You seem very similar to what you accuse the W administration of doing, tbh.

tatupu70 says

Yes, they were sold by an Iraqi who wanted to make money. There is NO indication that the weapons were under control of the government. I assume from the article that someone found them and decided to make some quick money.

So we are to believe that Saddam could somehow lose 400 warheads filled with Sarin before the Iraq war when the UN and whole world was bearing down on him demanding more transparent inspections?

If this is true, Saddam was even more criminal if he could be so sloppy with these weapons to let outside groups get their hands on it.

One of the MANY justifications of liberating Iraq was the fear that Saddam's WMD's could fall into terrorist hands.

curious2 says

You quote W reading a speech that others wrote and the CIA approved. Where is your evidence that he knew the assertion was false?

Which one? I listed two specifically.

tatupu70 says

curious2 says

You quote W reading a speech that others wrote and the CIA approved. Where is your evidence that he knew the assertion was false?

Which one? I listed two specifically.

No, you didn't provide any evidence of W lying. You provided an example of something he read, that had been endorsed by the CIA, and that turned out to be false. Do you see the difference?

socal2 says

So we are to believe that Saddam could somehow lose 400 warheads filled with Sarin before the Iraq war when the UN and whole world was bearing down on him demanding more transparent inspections?

He lost them sometime in the 20 years prior to the 2nd Iraq War. Yes, one possibility is that an rogue Iraqi officer took them.

socal2 says

If this is true, Saddam was even more criminal if he could be so sloppy with these weapons to let outside groups get their hands on it.

He's not alone in that respect. But the weapons were rotting so they clearly weren't well cared for and maintained so it's not a stretch to think they could be stolen.

curious2 says

No, you didn't provide any evidence of W lying. You provided an example of something he read, that turned out to be false. Do you see the difference?

I do. Do you?

Saying he has evidence of something when he did not have such evidence is, in fact, lying.

Tenet admits error in approving Bush speech
President 'had every reason to believe' uranium claim, he says

That is a special case and would always be considered a lie...

tatupu70 says

OK---so it I say the Cubs won the World Series last year, I'm not lying, I'm just wrong?

curious2 says

Tenet admits error in approving Bush speech

President 'had every reason to believe' uranium claim, he says

So, you are in the camp that Bush was lied to by his team and that he repeated the lies because he didn't know any better and that makes it OK. Fine--would you feel better if I said the Bush Administration lied to the public to justify the war in Iraq? And that Bush may have lied or he may have been too stupid to know or care?

I think it defies credibility to believe that a President would make statements that were baldfaced lies without wanting to make sure they were sourced well, but maybe I give Bush too much credit.

tatupu70 says

you are in the camp

So, tatupu70, you're re a TERRORIST! Obviously, because by your non-logic either you are with us or you are with the terrorists, just like your doppelganger (whom you call a liar) said:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cpPABLW6F_A

curious2 says

So, tatupu70, you're re a TERRORIST! Obviously, because by your non-logic either you are with us or you are with the terrorists, just like your doppelganger (whom you call a liar) said:

No, not sure where you come up with that. Please clarify your position if I am presuming incorrectly. You write very cryptically so it's sometimes challenging to understand what you are trying to say.

It seems that you are trying really hard to make my position be partisan when it is not.

tatupu70 says

Please clarify your position if I am presuming incorrectly.

First, you make obviously false statements. Then, you say pointing out your obviously false statements puts me in the other "camp". Frankly, you can't possibly be that stupid, so the only conclusion remains the one you accuse W of: you're a liar. At least W had, according to the CIA director, "every reason to believe" what he said. You have no such excuse.

There's nothing new under the Sun here with ISIS.

ISIS knows exactly what it is doing, and the Atrocities are the Goal. The means is the end.

Pol Pot had no 'plan' for Cambodia other than killing everybody who wore glasses. ISIS has no real long term strategy except some general jack off fantasies about reconquering Al-Andalus or the Balkans or India.

A return to the "Year Zero". For Pol Pot, a basic agrarian society to act as a clean slate. For ISIS, year one of Islam in the 7th Century, to get everything "Right" this time and recreate the raw, awesome energy of the first burst of Islam from the Arab world.

These panics, these desires to burn it all down and start afresh, and never mind the consequences, are not at all new to humanity.

There have been flagellants, levelers, fascists, etc. who have all wanted the same thing. A fresh start with a pure heart.

curious2 says

First, you make obviously false statements. Then, you say pointing out your obviously false statements puts me in the other "camp". Frankly, you can't possibly be that stupid, so the only conclusion remains the one you accuse W of: you're a liar. At least W had, according to the CIA director, "every reason to believe" what he said. You have no such excuse.

I don't recall you pointing out any of my "obviously" false statements, and your link is similarly vague. If you think I lied, by all means link to the direct statement and let's go in to detail on it and see who is lying and who is stupid.

Here's a really depressing theory.

Since the late 70s, when Wahabi Youth fought Saudi Arabia for control of Mecca, and it took weeks for the KSA Mercs to stop the armed Wahabis, the Kingdom has been in a bind.

It must support Wahabism as the foundation of the Monarchy's legitimacy. However, extreme Wahabism is a danger itself to the Monarchy, demanding ever more purity.

The solution, blessedly provided 'right on time' by the Soviet Assistance to Afghanistan, saved their bacon. They've depended on giving stipends and salaries to the most radical Wahabis the country produces as a matter of course of the normal functioning of their society - their Education, their Religious Police, the very core Myth of the State.

These men are both the jihadis, the textbook writers, and the teachers at the Madrassah. If they stayed at home instead of going to Syria or Indonesia or Chechnya, they would create trouble.

Perhaps ISIS is just a means to meatgrind the excess Wahabis created by the House of Sauds attempt to maintain legitimacy, and a useful tool of foreign policy.

curious2 says

Tenet admits error in approving Bush speech

President 'had every reason to believe' uranium claim, he says

OK--please explain the purpose of this link if not to point out that the CIA director had OK'd the text of the speech in which Bush lied.

The CIA intelligence was deemed insufficiently bellicose by Cheney, Feith et. al., so Cheney actually built an independent team of intelligence analysts to create the intelligence to justify Cheney's predetermined conclusions.

At that point the distinction between "lying" and "delusional asshole" became less interesting to me.

See Benghazi and candidate clinton...

tatupu70 says

I think it defies credibility to believe that a President would make statements that were baldfaced lies without wanting to make sure they were sourced well, but maybe I give Bush too much credit.

tatupu70 says

If you think I lied, by all means link to the direct statement

Here.

tatupu70 says

let's go in to detail

You have a pathology. It includes occasionally lying, but to call you a pathological liar would be somewhat imprecise. Pathological trolling, resorting to lying in order to continue the game. I considered the possibility that you were some sort of Turing machine experiment, a machine programmed to keep the exchange going as long as possible. Then I wondered, who would bother programming a machine to elicit defenses of GW Bush? The answers seemed inconsistent with most (but certainly not all) of your other comments.

tatupu70 says

please explain the purpose of this link

It was a direct quote, refuting your prior lie. W had "every reason to believe" what he said, according to the Director of the CIA, which approved what he said.

If you are a Turing machine intended to support the Democratic party, then you are horribly misprogrammed. As with Hydrocabron bringing countless threads back to Benghazi, you insist on keeping the focus where Democrats are weakest, actually doing the Republicans' job for them. It is remarkable that of all the things a partisan bot could possibly say to repeat and elicit valid criticism of W and his Iraq policy, you insist on claims that are obviously false and then you invite defense of W and his Iraq policy. If you are a Turing machine programmed to maximize waste of bandwidth, then well done.

curious2 says

You have a pathology.

It's the strangest coincidence: All those who firmly disagree with you are mentally ill.

It must be comforting to know that everyone else out there is crazy.

By the way, you need to trim your verbiage. It's more prissy and precious than usual lately.

socal2 says

For starters.

"Bush's "16 Words" on Iraq & Uranium: He May Have Been Wrong But He Wasn't Lying"

http://factcheck.bootnetworks.com/article222.html

I suppose in Bob's world, the President of the United States is supposed to ignore the claims made by the CIA director and listen to some back office analyst?

Bush, Cheney, and Rummy made it very clear what intelligence they wanted. Blair did the same thing. Everyone fell into line or got thrown under the bus. People got fired for not toeing the line and giving the administration exactly what they wanted. There was plenty of warnings the intelligence was bad but these were totally ignored or buried. Not some back office analyst warning. The German government told the administration their primary sources for intelligence to go to war were full of shit well before colin powell spoke at the un. There is no way, no how bush was not aware of this going on. Bush can truthfully say he was given bad intelligence. But he damn well knew it was bad, the chickenhawk trifecta arranged for it to be bad.

HydroCabron says

everyone else out there

The most trollish users of PatNet are not even a representative sample of PatNet, and certainly not "everyone else out there."

curious2 says

You have a pathology. It includes occasionally lying, but to call you a pathological liar would be somewhat imprecise. Pathological trolling, resorting to lying in order to continue the game. I considered the possibility that you were some sort of Turing machine experiment, a machine programmed to keep the exchange going as long as possible. Then I wondered, who would bother programming a machine to elicit defenses of GW Bush? The answers seemed inconsistent with most (but certainly not all) of your other comments.

Sorry, but you need to look in a mirror. It's not a game to me. You are the one who posts purposely vague statements-instead of quoting an individual passage when calling me a liar, posts a link to an longer post-- and instead of actually having a discussion about the issue at hand, tries to act like a pseudo-psychologist.

Further, you can't simply state your position. When I asked if you believe that Bush's defense--the reason you don't consider his statements as lies--is that he and his administration believed the faulty intelligence (that his own intelligence officers have come out and said THEY didn't believe), you deflect and ignore the questions. It is impossible to have even the simplest discussion with you because you obstruct, confuse, and deflect at all turns.

And don't forget, my friend, you started this. You are the one who wanted to argue. Nobody was responding to anything you posted.

tatupu70 says

Sorry, but you need to look in a mirror. It's not a game to me.

He might not ever learn the definition of "troll", since he looks to his friend Call It Crazy to define the term.

What is it with wingnuts on this board? They all seem confused about the definitions of "sarcasm" and "trolling"?

Maybe he'll divert the thread into another tirade against Big PhArMa and the corruption of our vital bodily fluids, while sitting at his keyboard drinking only pure grain alcohol made from rainwater.

Ironman says

He can start learning from these guys

Aww!

Incurious2 finally has a friend on Patnet. Exactly the friend he deserves, too!

bob2356 says

Bush, Cheney, and Rummy made it very clear what intelligence they wanted. Blair did the same thing. Everyone fell into line or got thrown under the bus. People got fired for not toeing the line and giving the administration exactly what they wanted. There was plenty of warnings the intelligence was bad but these were totally ignored or buried. Not some back office analyst warning. The German government told the administration their primary sources for intelligence to go to war were full of shit well before colin powell spoke at the un. There is no way, no how bush was not aware of this going on. Bush can truthfully say he was given bad intelligence. But he damn well knew it was bad, the chickenhawk trifecta arranged for it to be bad.

Says the little ISIS voices in your head.

But....but....but the Germans had a source that said something different! Meanwhile our National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) said Saddam had WMD's with 90% certainty.

"THE DANGEROUS LIE THAT BUSH LIED"
By LAURENCE H. SILBERMAN
Feb. 8, 2015 6:25 p.m. ET
2853 COMMENTS

In recent weeks, I have heard former Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier on Fox News twice asserting, quite offhandedly, that President George W. Bush “lied us into war in Iraq.”

I found this shocking. I took a leave of absence from the bench in 2004-05 to serve as co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction—a bipartisan body, sometimes referred to as the Robb-Silberman Commission. It was directed in 2004 to evaluate the intelligence community’s determination that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD—I am, therefore, keenly aware of both the intelligence provided to President Bush and his reliance on that intelligence as his primary casus belli. It is astonishing to see the “Bush lied” allegation evolve from antiwar slogan to journalistic fact.

The intelligence community’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stated, in a formal presentation to President Bush and to Congress, its view that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction—a belief in which the NIE said it held a 90% level of confidence. That is about as certain as the intelligence community gets on any subject.

Recall that the head of the intelligence community, Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet, famously told the president that the proposition that Iraq possessed WMD was “a slam dunk.” Our WMD commission carefully examined the interrelationships between the Bush administration and the intelligence community and found no indication that anyone in the administration sought to pressure the intelligence community into its findings. As our commission reported, presidential daily briefs from the CIA dating back to the Clinton administration were, if anything, more alarmist about Iraq’s WMD than the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate."......

http://www.wsj.com/articles/laurence-h-silberman-the-dangerous-lie-that-bush-lied-1423437950

socal2 says

Again, being wrong on the size and scope of Iraq's WMD program is not the same thing as lying.

Being wrong isn't the same thing as lying, you are right. But this is a huge 'mistake', and appears calculated. Being really really wrong, and claiming a country has a capability which it does not, and using that as a pretext to motivate your nation to go to war, that's some highly calculated misinformation. "lying"? No. Manipulative? Oh yes.

Politicians love to be able to hide behind the "intelligence was wrong" shield. Of course we were going to find small amounts of chemical weapons munitions in Iraq. You think 400 rockets was worth going to war over? Highly doubtful those rockets are even up for grabs, on the black market, if we did NOT invade.

Oil, Israel, "payback", and Democracy v.s. WMDs and al-Qa'ida -- let's not pretend, at this hour, we cannot tell which are a sales pitch, and which are true motivations for the conflict.

HydroCabron says

At that point the distinction between "lying" and "delusional asshole" became less interesting to me.

What, you mean like giving "intelligence" to news outlets, so they can run a story, and then getting on broadcast TV and saying, "Some news agencies are saying that ... yes.".

;)

Rew says

Being wrong isn't the same thing as lying, you are right. But this is a huge 'mistake', and appears calculated.

Er - no. It doesn't appear to be calculated at all. Our elected leadership (both Democrats and Republicans) made decisions based on the best intelligence available. When the combined National Intelligence Estimate says with 90% confidence that Iraq has WMDs, would you expect our elected leaders to believe otherwise?

Rew says

Oil, Israel, "payback", and Democracy v.s. WMDs and al-Qa'ida -- let's not pretend, at this hour, we cannot tell which are a sales pitch, and which are true motivations for the conflict.

Israel was against (at worse - ambivalent) about removing Saddam as they have always been more concerned about Iran, and America didn't get a single drop of Iraq oil for profit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governmental_positions_on_the_Iraq_War_prior_to_the_2003_invasion_of_Iraq#Israel

The motivations you list above is the same shit ISIS believes.

"It was just bad intelligence! Everyone was fooled! You can’t say Bush “lied” about Iraq pursuing WMDs or about the Saddam Hussein regime having ties to 9/11 because he was just echoing what the intelligence community said, which was wrong.

This is a line of argumentation that Bush administration officials and Iraq war boosters have been clinging to ever since it became clear that U.S. troops would found no mobile biological weapons labs and no Mutual Admiration Society correspondence between Saddam and Osama. “We were wrong just like everyone else” isn’t a particularly compelling argument, though I suppose that if you’re responsible for one of the modern era’s most significant foreign policy disasters, “shared incompetence” is a more appealing excuse than “willful deception.”

But the Bush administration absolutely did engage in willful deception. Quite a bit of it, in fact. It’s one thing to simply repeat an intelligence assessment that is wrong, and quite another to take a disputed, credibly challenged intelligence assessment and state it as uncontested fact. That’s a lie, and senior Bush officials did it often. There’s no better example of this than the aluminum tubes."

If you were following politics in the six months or so leading up to the actual invasion of Iraq, then you probably remember how much importance senior Bush administration officials put on the fact that Iraq had tried to obtain a certain type of aluminum tube that was, per those same officials, only suitable for use in uranium centrifuges. The tubes were at the heart of their case that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a nuclear weapons program, and had been cited as evidence of Hussein’s intentions by Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell. They even earned a mention in George W. Bush’s now infamous 2003 state of the union address:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.

The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary, he is deceiving.

This was all wrong. And they knew at the time that the intelligence regarding those tubes was nowhere near as strong as they made it out to be. A number of intelligence agencies believed that the tubes were, in fact, made for uranium enrichment. There were, however, a number of dissenting views, including from the State Department and the intelligence arm of the Department of Energy, the agency responsible for maintaining the United States’ nuclear arsenal (i.e. the people who actually know this stuff). DOE determined that the tubes were completely impractical for use in uranium enrichment, and were probably intended for use in conventional rockets. The State Department came to a similar conclusion.

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/10/yes_bush_lied_about_iraq_why_are_we_still_arguing_about_this/

tatupu70 says

This is a line of argumentation that Bush administration officials and Iraq war boosters have been clinging to ever since it became clear that U.S. troops would found no mobile biological weapons labs and no Mutual Admiration Society correspondence between Saddam and Osama.

No - this is the line all independent investigations including the bi-partisan Robb-Silberman Commission determined. All you got are the hacks at Salon saying different. Couldn't you find a DailyKos link or something from MediaMatters too?

You just want to be a good ISIS monkey claiming America lies to start wars to kill Muslims or something.

Bravo!

What's with all the Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz/Hadley/Feith revisionism here? Is Patrick's new role as Keyboard Kommando Against Islamofascism inspiring the human trash to crawl back out of from under their rocks? Are wingnuts feeling guilty?

Why shy away from the term "lying"? Powell knew the intelligencs was b.s.

Colin Powell said to his staff during the preparation for his U.N. speech: ""I'm not reading this. This is bullshit."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/02/usa.iraq

Fresh evidence emerged last night that Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, was so disturbed about questionable American intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that he assembled a secret team to review the information he was given before he made a crucial speech to the UN security council on February 5.
Mr Powell conducted a full-dress rehearsal of the speech on the eve of the session at his suite in the Waldorf Astoria, his New York base when he is on UN business, according to the authoritative US News and World Report.

Much of the initial information for Mr Powell's speech to the UN was provided by the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, set up a special unit, the Office of Special Plans, to counter the uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq.

Mr Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, US News and World Report says today. At one point, he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine.

Presented with a script for his speech, Mr Powell suspected that Washington hawks were "cherry picking", the US magazine Newsweek also reports today. Greg Theilmann, a recently retired state department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, says that inside the Bush administration "there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused".