Iraq on the Record

[GioFX]

Iraq on the Record - The Bush Administration Public Statements on Iraq

Nel sito riportato potete trovare tutte le dichiarazioni sull'Iraq e le motivazioni adotte alla sua invasione dal governo americano. Il report dettagliato di tutte le fonti è curato dal Comitato per la Riforma Governativa (http://www.house.gov/reform/min), una speciale commissione parlamentare della Camera dei Rappresentati americana.

Io mi chiedo ancora dove sono quei fantasmagorici laboratori chimici mobili...

[-kurgan-]

per me c'era lavaggio strade e li hanno parcheggiati da un'altra parte

[SPhinX]

Aspetta che prendo nota con la mia macchina da scrivere invisibile

Mah quante se ne inventano, con un altro po ce li portano loro i laboratori

[GioFX]

Varsavia, 14:53
Iraq, presidente polacco: su Adm ci hanno ingannato

Il presidente polacco Aleksander Kwasniewski ha detto oggi durante un incontro con i giornalisti che il suo paese è stato "menato per il naso" sull'esistenza delle armi di distruzione di massa in Iraq. Il presidente polacco ha comunque ribadito che "non avrebbe senso" un ritiro delle sue truppe dal paese.

[GioFX]

Poi, mi sto chiedendo ancora come mai non abbiano provato a rovesciare Saddam con un colpo di stato, data la loro grande esperienze in questo tipo di attività, come hanno fatto in Iran, ad esempio...

[Nevermind]

Ma la cosa + bella è vedere ora che scia di scaricabarili reciprochi tra i vari capoccia: "Non l'ho detto io l'ha detto pippo.... io no no a me l'aveva detto topolino..... ma io sono innocente a me lo aveva comunicato minni...."

Saluti.

[GioFX]

Originariamente inviato da Nevermind
Ma la cosa + bella è vedere ora che scia di scaricabarili reciprochi tra i vari capoccia: "Non l'ho detto io l'ha detto pippo.... io no no a me l'aveva detto topolino..... ma io sono innocente a me lo aveva comunicato minni...."

Saluti.

[GioFX]

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[GioFX]

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[GioFX]

Da Nytimes.com:

President Asked Aide to Explore Iraq Link to 9/11

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: March 29, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 28 — The White House acknowledged Sunday that on the day after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush asked his top counterterrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarke, to find out whether Iraq was involved.

Mr. Bush wanted to know "did Iraq have anything to do with this? Were they complicit in it?" Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, recounted in an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes."

Mr. Bush was not trying to intimidate anyone to "produce information," she said. Rather, given the United States' "actively hostile relationship" with Iraq at the time, he was asking Mr. Clarke "a perfectly logical question," Ms. Rice said.

The conversation — which the White House suggested last week had never taken place — centers on perhaps the most volatile charge Mr. Clarke has made public in recent days: that the Bush White House became fixated on Iraq and Saddam Hussein at the expense of focusing on Al Qaeda.

In his new book, "Against All Enemies," Mr. Clarke recounts that the president pulled him and several other aides into the White House Situation Room on the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, and instructed them "to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way."

Mr. Clarke was incredulous, he said in the book. "But, Mr. President, Al Qaeda did this," he said he responded.

Mr. Bush answered: "I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred," according to Mr. Clarke's account. Mr. Clarke added in later interviews that he felt he was being intimidated to find a link between the attacks and Iraq.

Last week, the White House said it had no record that Mr. Bush had even been in the Situation Room that day and said the president had no recollection of such a conversation. Although administration officials stopped short of denying the account, they used it to cast doubt on Mr. Clarke's credibility as they sought to debunk the charge that the administration played down the threat posed by Al Qaeda in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks and worried instead about Iraq.

The political fallout over Mr. Clarke's charges intensified on Sunday, as he and four of the president's top advisers traded jabs in separate televised appearances over the question of whether the Bush White House did enough to deter terrorism before Sept. 11.

Mr. Clarke, in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," urged the Bush administration to make public the testimony he gave in 2002 to a joint Congressional committee that was investigating the attacks.

He said declassifying his testimony — as well as other memorandums and materials from Ms. Rice and the administration — would show he had long complained that the Bush administration failed to take aggressive action against Al Qaeda before the Sept. 11 attacks.

In particular, he urged the administration to make public a memorandum on counterterrorism initiatives that he wrote just days after Mr. Bush took office, as well as a counterterrorism plan that the White House ultimately approved more than seven months later, a week before the attacks.

"Let's see if there's any difference between those two, because there isn't," he said. "And what we'll see when we declassify what they were given on Jan. 25 and what they finally agreed to on Sept. 4 is that they are basically the same thing, and they wasted months when we could have had some action."

Meanwhile, members of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks pressed Ms. Rice to appear publicly before the commission to explain the events leading up to the attack.

Ms. Rice "has appeared everywhere except my local Starbucks," Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the commission, said in an interview. "For the White House to continue to refuse to make her available simply does not make sense."

Ms. Rice met with the commission in February to discuss pre-Sept. 11 initiatives, but an official involved in that meeting said the White House insisted that she not be put under oath and that the session not be recorded. Commissioners were allowed to take notes, but no transcript of her comments is thought to exist.

The White House says that having the national security adviser testify in public would compromise executive privilege and the president's ability to get confidential advice.

The commission and the White House are continuing to discuss the possibility of Ms. Rice's reappearance. Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey governor who is co-chairman of the panel, said on "Fox News Sunday" that "we are still going to press and still believe unanimously as a commission that we should hear from her in public," although he added that a subpoena was unlikely.

Ms. Rice, for her part, said on "60 Minutes" that "nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify."

Analysts say Mr. Clarke's charges could do significant political damage to a president who has built his foreign policy record largely around the campaign against terrorism. Republican leaders have responded in force, suggesting that Mr. Clarke's testimony last week was at odds with the closed testimony he gave before the joint Congressional panel in 2002 and that he may have lied in one or both appearances.

But intelligence officials familiar with his classified briefing said they were aware of no obvious contradictions. Mr. Ben-Veniste said he thought Mr. Clarke's earlier testimony should be declassified to resolve any dispute, but he added that "it is not my recollection that there were any notable or substantive differences in testimony."

Mr. Clarke's Congressional testimony, given while he was still at the White House, put a more "positive spin" on the administration's counterterrorism efforts, just as he did in a 2002 press briefing that was released last week, said a senior Democratic Congressional aide who spoke on condition of anonymity. But factually, it did not appear to contradict what Mr. Clarke told the Sept. 11 commission last week, the aide said.

Mr. Clarke's assessment last week is also generally consistent with journalistic and Congressional accounts of the early Bush administration's approach to terrorism.

In Bob Woodward's "Bush at War," the president himself acknowledged that Osama bin Laden had not been a central focus in the eight months before the attacks.

"I was not on point," Mr. Bush was quoted in the book as saying. "I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."

Similarly, the public report of the joint Congressional inquiry into Sept. 11 intelligence failures, released last December, said that the Bush administration did not begin a major counterterrorism policy review until April 2001 and that "significant slippage in counterterrorism policy may have taken place in late 2000 and early 2001," in part because of Mr. Clarke's "unresolved status" as head of counterterrorism. He had that role under Clinton and for the first few months of the Bush administration. After Sept. 11, 2001, he had a more limited role as cyberterrorism adviser.

The public report does not describe Mr. Clarke's testimony before the joint committee in great detail, but it does suggest that he found areas of concern in counterterrorism coordination during both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Although Mr. Bin Laden would become an urgent priority in the late 1990's, "Mr. Clarke told the Joint Inquiry that Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah were the most important terrorist concerns during the first Clinton administration," the report said.

In general, the report said, "Mr. Clarke noted that the White House `never really gave good systematic, timely guidance to the Intelligence Community about what the priorities were at the national level,' " although the time period he described was unclear.

The Bush administration, which fought successfully to keep sensitive parts of last year's joint inquiry out of the public report, did not say if it would agree to declassify material from Mr. Clarke or Ms. Rice.

But Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation," said he would prefer publicizing as much relevant material as possible. "We're not trying to hide anything," he said.

Mr. Powell said an examination of Mr. Clarke's assessment in 2002 showed "inconsistencies and contradictions between what he is saying now and what he said then." And he said it was wrong to suggest the Bush administration simply abandoned the counterterrorism priorities of the Clinton administration.

"That's not the case," he said. "They weren't out bombing Afghanistan and invading Afghanistan and we suddenly said stop."

Ms. Rice, in particular, "is getting a bit of a bum rap," Mr. Powell said. She and other key advisers aggressively formulated counterterrorism policy, he said, but "unfortunately, we never got the information or intelligence that we needed to tell us that these 19 guys were in the country and already there was a plot under way."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld appeared on "Fox News Sunday" and ABC's "This Week," disputing Mr. Clarke's charges that the administration had not devoted sufficient attention to terrorism and had been unduly focused on Iraq. And Terry Holt, the chief spokesman of the Bush campaign, called Mr. Clarke "a political opportunist" on CNN's "Inside Politics Sunday."

Mr. Clarke said the administration is intent on attacking him personally through a "character assassination campaign" rather than debating the arguments he has raised about Mr. Bush's prosecution of the campaign against terrorism.

"After 9/11, I say that by going into Iraq he has really hurt the war on terrorism," he said. "Now, because I say that, the administration doesn't want to talk on the merits of that. They don't want to talk about the effect on the war on terrorism of our invasion of Iraq."

To rebut the administration's criticism of his credibility, he produced a handwritten letter from Mr. Bush at the time of his resignation, dated Jan. 31, 2003, that read: "Dear Dick: You will be missed. You served our nation with distinction and honor. You have left a positive mark on our government."

Last week, the White House produced a resignation letter of its own — one from Mr. Clarke to Mr. Bush — in which the seasoned adviser praised the president for his "courage, determination, calm and leadership" on Sept. 11.

[Andreucciolo]

Ciao Giofx.
Volevo saper che ne pensavi riguardo ad una cosa: con tutte le storie dei giochi sporchi dei servizi segreti, a te non sembra strano che non abbiano voluto/saputo mettere su delle prove false?
In fondo l'Iraq è un paese enorme, non sarebbe stato cosi' difficile....io ancora non mi sono dato una spiegazione, anche se devo ammettere che questa evidenza ridimensiona molto quel cosiddetto "complottismo", per cui dietro a qualsiasi evento potrebbe esserci l'onnipresente CIA. Tu che ne dici?

OT vedo che sei di Padova, bella città, ci ho vissuto un anno e mezzo, quando ti capita beviti uno spritz alla mia salute....

[GioFX]

Originariamente inviato da Andreucciolo
Ciao Giofx.
Volevo saper che ne pensavi riguardo ad una cosa: con tutte le storie dei giochi sporchi dei servizi segreti, a te non sembra strano che non abbiano voluto/saputo mettere su delle prove false?
In fondo l'Iraq è un paese enorme, non sarebbe stato cosi' difficile....io ancora non mi sono dato una spiegazione, anche se devo ammettere che questa evidenza ridimensiona molto quel cosiddetto "complottismo", per cui dietro a qualsiasi evento potrebbe esserci l'onnipresente CIA. Tu che ne dici?

Senza andare a scomodare sempre le teorie dei complotti, non si parla di alcun complotto, semplicemente ci si chiede (negli Stati Uniti come nel resto del mondo) perchè sono state adotte come motivazione principale alla guerra in Iraq prove che si sono rivelate quantomeno azzardate se non infodate sulla immediata pericolosità per la sicurezza degli Stati Uniti d'America, prima che per la tutela dei propri interessi nel medio oriente, e sulla disposizione da parte del regime iracheno di armi di distruzione di massa chimiche e batteriologiche.

OT vedo che sei di Padova, bella città, ci ho vissuto un anno e mezzo, quando ti capita beviti uno spritz alla mia salute....

Grazie, alla salute caro!

[Andreucciolo]

No, scusa Giofx, forse non mi sono spiegato con chiarezza.
La mia non era una domanda retorica, sono informato su tutta la vicenda della guerra, e mi pare di capire che la tua posizione sia simile alla mia.
Quindi la mia domanda è da prendere alla lettera, volevo sapere tu cosa ne pensi del fatto che non hanno voluto o saputo costruire delle prove false per poter dire "visto che c'erano"?
Il riferimento ai complotti era riferito al fatto che spesso nel senso comune la CIA viene considerata pressochè onnipotente e onnipresente, in questo caso secondo te, perchè non hanno costruito delle false prove?
Spero di essere stato più chiaro

[GioFX]

Originariamente inviato da Andreucciolo
No, scusa Giofx, forse non mi sono spiegato con chiarezza.
La mia non era una domanda retorica, sono informato su tutta la vicenda della guerra, e mi pare di capire che la tua posizione sia simile alla mia.
Quindi la mia domanda è da prendere alla lettera, volevo sapere tu cosa ne pensi del fatto che non hanno voluto o saputo costruire delle prove false per poter dire "visto che c'erano"?
Il riferimento ai complotti era riferito al fatto che spesso nel senso comune la CIA viene considerata pressochè onnipotente e onnipresente, in questo caso secondo te, perchè non hanno costruito delle false prove?
Spero di essere stato più chiaro

Si interessante come domanda, penso però che sarebbe assai difficile, oltre che dispendioso e pressochè inutile ormai costruire false prove... senza contare che questo sarebbe disastroso per l'amministrazione Bush se si dovesse realizzare una cosa del genere e si dovesse scoprirlo, considerando il putiferio che la cosa sta alzando in patria, con la campagna elettorale in atto.

[Andreucciolo]

Si, penso anch'io che il rischio non valesse la candela, tanto la guerra ormai era fatta e inganno o no, erano riusciti ad incassare l'appoggio "a scatola chiusa " di un certo numero di governi....

[GioFX]

Tratto da un thread apparso su SSP (http://www.skyscraperpage.com/forum/...threadid=36668):

As the Bush regime turns, reluctantly, away from its fruitless search for WMD in Iraq, it's important to remember that the Bush regime did, in fact, mislead America into war on false pretenses: despite protests to the contrary, Bush regime officials did indeed insist that Iraq was an imminent threat to the nation.

In Their Own Words: Iraq's 'Imminent' Threat

Originally posted January 29, 2004
americanprogress.org

The Bush Administration is now saying it never told the public that Iraq was an "imminent" threat, and therefore it should be absolved for overstating the case for war and misleading the American people about Iraq's WMD. Just this week, White House spokesman Scott McClellan lashed out at critics saying "Some in the media have chosen to use the word 'imminent'. Those were not words we used." But a closer look at the record shows that McClellan himself and others did use the phrase "imminent threat" – while also using the synonymous phrases "mortal threat," "urgent threat," "immediate threat", "serious and mounting threat", "unique threat," and claiming that Iraq was actively seeking to "strike the United States with weapons of mass destruction" – all just months after Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that Iraq was "contained" and "threatens not the United States." While Iraq was certainly a dangerous country, the Administration's efforts to claim it never hyped the threat in the lead-up to war is belied by its statements.

"There's no question that Iraq was a threat to the people of the United States."
• White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan, 8/26/03

"We ended the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."
• President Bush, 7/17/03

Iraq was "the most dangerous threat of our time."
• White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 7/17/03

"Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States because we removed him, but he was a threat...He was a threat. He's not a threat now."
• President Bush, 7/2/03

"Absolutely."
• White House spokesman Ari Fleischer answering whether Iraq was an "imminent threat," 5/7/03

"We gave our word that the threat from Iraq would be ended."
• President Bush 4/24/03

"The threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction will be removed."
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 3/25/03

"It is only a matter of time before the Iraqi regime is destroyed and its threat to the region and the world is ended."
• Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, 3/22/03

"The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."
• President Bush, 3/19/03

"The dictator of Iraq and his weapons of mass destruction are a threat to the security of free nations."
• President Bush, 3/16/03

"This is about imminent threat."
• White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 2/10/03

Iraq is "a serious threat to our country, to our friends and to our allies."
• Vice President Dick Cheney, 1/31/03

Iraq poses "terrible threats to the civilized world."
• Vice President Dick Cheney, 1/30/03

Iraq "threatens the United States of America."
• Vice President Cheney, 1/30/03

"Iraq poses a serious and mounting threat to our country. His regime has the design for a nuclear weapon, was working on several different methods of enriching uranium, and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 1/29/03

"Well, of course he is.”
• White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett responding to the question “is Saddam an imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home?”, 1/26/03

"Saddam Hussein possesses chemical and biological weapons. Iraq poses a threat to the security of our people and to the stability of the world that is distinct from any other. It's a danger to its neighbors, to the United States, to the Middle East and to the international peace and stability. It's a danger we cannot ignore. Iraq and North Korea are both repressive dictatorships to be sure and both pose threats. But Iraq is unique. In both word and deed, Iraq has demonstrated that it is seeking the means to strike the United States and our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction."
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 1/20/03

"The Iraqi regime is a threat to any American. ... Iraq is a threat, a real threat."
• President Bush, 1/3/03

"The world is also uniting to answer the unique and urgent threat posed by Iraq whose dictator has already used weapons of mass destruction to kill thousands."
• President Bush, 11/23/02

"I would look you in the eye and I would say, go back before September 11 and ask yourself this question: Was the attack that took place on September 11 an imminent threat the month before or two months before or three months before or six months before? When did the attack on September 11 become an imminent threat? Now, transport yourself forward a year, two years or a week or a month...So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you must do something?"
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 11/14/02

"Saddam Hussein is a threat to America."
• President Bush, 11/3/02

"I see a significant threat to the security of the United States in Iraq."
• President Bush, 11/1/02

"There is real threat, in my judgment, a real and dangerous threat to American in Iraq in the form of Saddam Hussein."
• President Bush, 10/28/02

"The Iraqi regime is a serious and growing threat to peace."
• President Bush, 10/16/02

"There are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place. Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists."
• President Bush, 10/7/02

"The Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency."
• President Bush, 10/2/02

"There's a grave threat in Iraq. There just is."
• President Bush, 10/2/02

"This man poses a much graver threat than anybody could have possibly imagined."
• President Bush, 9/26/02

"No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq."
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/19/02

"Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent - that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain. And we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons. Iraq has these weapons."
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/18/02

"Iraq is busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue an aggressive nuclear weapons program. These are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale, developed so that Saddam Hussein can hold the threat over the head of any one he chooses. What we must not do in the face of this mortal threat is to give in to wishful thinking or to willful blindness."
• Vice President Dick Cheney, 8/29/02

[GioFX]

Da Center for American Progress:

Condoleezza Rice's Credibility Gap

A point-by-point analysis of how one of America's top national security officials has a severe problem with the truth


Pre-9/11 Intelligence

CLAIM: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 5/16/02
FACT: On August 6, 2001, the President personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane." In July 2001, the Administration was also told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles. [Source: NBC, 9/10/02; LA Times, 9/27/01]

CLAIM: In May 2002, Rice held a press conference to defend the Administration from new revelations that the President had been explicitly warned about an al Qaeda threat to airlines in August 2001. She "suggested that Bush had requested the briefing because of his keen concern about elevated terrorist threat levels that summer." [Source: Washington Post, 3/25/04]
FACT: According to the CIA, the briefing "was not requested by President Bush." As commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste disclosed, "the CIA informed the panel that the author of the briefing does not recall such a request from Bush and that the idea to compile the briefing came from within the CIA." [Source: Washington Post, 3/25/04]

CLAIM: "In June and July when the threat spikes were so high…we were at battle stations." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: "Documents indicate that before Sept. 11, Ashcroft did not give terrorism top billing in his strategic plans for the Justice Department, which includes the FBI. A draft of Ashcroft's 'Strategic Plan' from Aug. 9, 2001, does not put fighting terrorism as one of the department's seven goals, ranking it as a sub-goal beneath gun violence and drugs. By contrast, in April 2000, Ashcroft's predecessor, Janet Reno, called terrorism 'the most challenging threat in the criminal justice area.'" Meanwhile, the Bush Administration decided to terminate "a highly classified program to monitor Al Qaeda suspects in the United States." [Source: Washington Post, 3/22/04; Newsweek, 3/21/04]

CLAIM: "The fact of the matter is [that] the administration focused on this before 9/11." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: President Bush and Vice President Cheney's counterterrorism task force, which was created in May, never convened one single meeting. The President himself admitted that "I didn't feel the sense of urgency" about terrorism before 9/11. [Source: Washington Post, 1/20/02; Bob Woodward's "Bush at War"]

CLAIM: "Our [pre-9/11 NSPD] plan called for military options to attack al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets -- taking the fight to the enemy where he lived." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: 9/11 Commissioner Gorelick: "There is nothing in the NSPD that came out that we could find that had an invasion plan, a military plan." Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: "Right." Gorelick: "Is it true, as Dr. Rice said, 'Our plan called for military options to attack Al Qaida and Taliban leadership'?" Armitage: "No, I think that was amended after the horror of 9/11." [Source: 9/11 Commission testimony, 3/24/04]

Condi Rice on Pre-9/11 Counterterrorism Funding

CLAIM: "The president increased counterterrorism funding several-fold" before 9/11. – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/24/04
FACT: According to internal government documents, the first full Bush budget for FY2003 "did not endorse F.B.I. requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators" and "proposed a $65 million cut for the program that gives state and local counterterrorism grants." Newsweek noted the Administration "vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism." [Source: New York Times, 2/28/04; Newsweek, 5/27/02]

Richard Clarke's Concerns

CLAIM: "Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: Clarke sent a memo to Rice principals on 1/24/01 marked "urgent" asking for a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with an impending al Qaeda attack. The White House acknowledges this, but says "principals did not need to have a formal meeting to discuss the threat." No meeting occurred until one week before 9/11. [Source: CBS 60 Minutes, 3/24/04; White House Press Release, 3/21/04

CLAIM: "No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: "On January 25th, 2001, Clarke forwarded his December 2000 strategy paper and a copy of his 1998 Delenda plan to the new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice." – 9/11 Commission staff report, 3/24/04

Response to 9/11

CLAIM: "The president launched an aggressive response after 9/11." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: "In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows. The papers show that Ashcroft ranked counterterrorism efforts as a lower priority than his predecessor did, and that he resisted FBI requests for more counterterrorism funding before and immediately after the attacks." [Source: Washington Post, 3/22/04]

9/11 and Iraq Invasion Plans

CLAIM: "Not a single National Security Council principal at that meeting recommended to the president going after Iraq. The president thought about it. The next day he told me Iraq is to the side." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: According to the Washington Post, "six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2-and-a-half-page document marked 'TOP SECRET'" that "directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq." This is corroborated by a CBS News, which reported on 9/4/02 that five hours after the 9/11 attacks, "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq." [Source: Washington Post, 1/12/03. CBS News, 9/4/02]

Iraq and WMD

CLAIM: "It's not as if anybody believes that Saddam Hussein was without weapons of mass destruction." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/18/04
FACT: The Bush Administration's top weapons inspector David Kay "resigned his post in January, saying he did not believe banned stockpiles existed before the invasion" and has urged the Bush Administration to "come clean" about misleading America about the WMD threat. [Source: Chicago Tribune, 3/24/04; UK Guardian, 3/3/04]

9/11-al Qaeda-Iraq Link

CLAIM: "The president returned to the White House and called me in and said, I've learned from George Tenet that there is no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04
FACT: If this is true, then why did the President and Vice President repeatedly claim Saddam Hussein was directly connected to 9/11? President Bush sent a letter to Congress on 3/19/03 saying that the Iraq war was permitted specifically under legislation that authorized force against "nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11." Similarly, Vice President Cheney said on 9/14/03 that "It is not surprising that people make that connection" between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, and said "we don't know" if there is a connection. [Source: BBC, 9/14/03]

[fabio69]

Originariamente inviato da GioFX
Poi, mi sto chiedendo ancora come mai non abbiano provato a rovesciare Saddam con un colpo di stato, data la loro grande esperienze in questo tipo di attività, come hanno fatto in Iran, ad esempio...

perchè secondo te negli anni scorsi non ci hanno provato o cercato di favorire diverse volte?
evidentemente non era così semplice

[GioFX]

Originariamente inviato da fabio69
perchè secondo te negli anni scorsi non ci hanno provato o cercato di favorire diverse volte?
evidentemente non era così semplice

non risulta da alcuna parte, e lo si sarebbe saputo a questo punto... considerando anche che sono esperti in questi giochetti...

ciò non toglie che è stato amico finchè serviva, e la guerra è stata fatta quando le armi di sterminio non esistevano più, non quando le aveva e le usava con il beneplacito del democratico occidente dei miei ********...

[fabio69]

Originariamente inviato da GioFX
non risulta da alcuna parte, e lo si sarebbe saputo a questo punto... considerando anche che sono esperti in questi giochetti...

ciò non toglie che è stato amico finchè serviva, e la guerra è stata fatta quando le armi di sterminio non esistevano più, non quando le aveva e le usava con il beneplacito del democratico occidente dei miei ********...

risulta, risulta ed è pure risaputo
e toglie, oh se toglie