Gonna PO alot of you

[David]

Originally posted by judyvillecco We never before in history have preempted military strike on any nation where we were not threatened except in this and alas Vietnam.

Judy he harbored the same people who flew two commercial airliners into the twin towers. If that does not present a threat to the United States then what in your opinion would? Conspiracy theories abound and we have heard them all "ad nauseaum" as well :re:

[judyvillecco]

Again David, that is the party line that he harbored these terrorists. So he did, so he was a bad guy, so he had to go, then say that but don't lie about all this WMD and other reasons. Be honest and say we want the oil and don't want to be captive to the mideast anymore but quit lying to the American people. We aren't stupid! All this hype and emotionallity and rally around the flag stuff he did is bull and you of all people know that. The pentagon loves war but they don't live with the lives they waste. its a numbers game for them. i'm sorry but we disagree on this one big time. I know it may be the difference in your age and mine but the blunders of Vietnam are not wasted on my generation. We lived through it and saw the carnage and stupidity of several Presidents. Bush is a chip off the old block and what tricks his machinery pulled on McCain in the election told me his deal. He personally may be ok but the machinery that runs him is not!

[Seascamp]

Well Reeb, easy does it now and take care of yourself Sailor, ya hear. No doubt both Bush and Blair are taking a lot of heat and will continue to take a lot of heat about the WMD issue. The WMD issue was the reason for??and their opposition is not going to rest until some serious bashing and crashing is done. It remains to be seen how much damage is going to be done and if the current Presidency will survive for another term. My guess is yes. And personally I don?t see any of the opposition I?d trust with the horrendous national and international issues at hand. Moderate Democrats that have a solid feel for everything seem to get trashed and hissed by their more liberal opponents and that?s scary shit for sure. Even Hillary Clinton has picked up the moniker ?Artillery Hillary? and is being bashed and dissed by the more Liberal side of things.

My major concern is simply what did happen to all that tonnage of WMD? I reckon it existed in Iraq until the late fall of 2002 for sure. So the question of the time is who?s got it, not if it does or does not exist. Syria and Libya are at the top of the list of recipients and now they will stare down the barrel of a mighty mean shotgun and if they so much as wiggle, they will know all about ?blowing in the wind?. In time and distance we will have an accounting of Saddam?s WMD and let?s hope it?s not as targets. I?d truly hate to be among those hollering about fraud and all and causing damage to our preparedness and resolve. That hollering and political levering about WMD, in my opinion, is the greatest risk facing the American people and let?s hope it doesn?t turn into the most tragic political wrangling in our national history. We simply got to find that WMD shit, not argue about if it does or does not exist, of course it exists.

Scamp

[Gimpy]

so-called "compassionate conservative"--ever again, never--nada--not-on-your-life--and here's just one reason---Remember when he (GEE-DUBYA) clamied that "a promise made should be a promise KEPT" to all those Veterans service organizations during his campaign?? Lies--ALL lies, here is just ONE example>

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By Michael Moran
MSNBC

June 4 ? When Bob Harris heard four years ago that the federal government had set itself the goal of awarding at least 3 percent of all contracts to veterans, the disabled Navy veteran and computer consultant put together a bid for a Veterans Administration cyber-security contract, investing some $300,000 in the effort. But Harris soon discovered what other veterans had before him: The government is not putting its money where its mouth is.
IN FACT, SINCE THE Bush administration took office, the percentage of total contract money going to veterans has plummeted, with the Department of Defense?s enormous coffers proving particularly elusive to the men and women who served their country.
?I expected a little more enthusiasm,? says Harris, who broke his back at the U.S. Naval Academy in the early 1980s but served his five years on board ship nonetheless. Harris Consulting, his Alexandria Va.-based firm, has won contracts from several Fortune 500 firms, but the VA was another story.
?I didn?t get any enthusiasm, though,? he says. ?Frankly, they just didn?t care.?
It was not supposed to work this way. Under legislation passed by Congress in 1999, the Pentagon and all U.S. federal agencies are required to try to award at least 3 percent of their total budget for procurement to companies owned by veterans, in particular ?service-disabled veterans? ? those who lost limbs or were otherwise maimed in service of their country.
Angela B. Styles, who handles federal procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget, told Congress earlier this year that the Bush administration wants to expand contracts going to veteran-owned businesses and ?is working hard to place the interests of small and new entrants to the procurement system at the forefront of our policy.?
Yet since the Bush administration took office, the federal government?s performance in this area has been exceedingly poor.
Data obtained from the government?s Federal Procurement Data System shows that the overall share of federal contract dollars flowing to veterans has fallen by nearly half since 2000, from close to 1 percent that year to about 0.5 percent in fiscal 2002, the last year for which statistics are available.
Particularly galling to veterans groups is the failure of the Defense Department to address the issue. These same statistics show that, of the approximately $60 billion allotted to the Pentagon for procurement in 2002, only about $786 million ? or 0.51 percent ? went to veterans. A mere $150 million, just 0.1 percent, was awarded to businesses run by those maimed in battle or, like Harris, in accidents while serving in the military.
?Since 1999, when the goal was set, they?ve gone down,? says Rep. Rick Renzi, R-Ariz., and a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee in the House. ?The Pentagon was close to 1 percent, and now they?re about half a percent.?
?SET-ASIDES? VS. ?GOALS?
Renzi, who has sponsored legislation in the current session to address the problem, says, ?The Pentagon can offer excuses, but they?re just that: excuses.?
A Pentagon spokeswoman, Cheryl Irwin, took issue with that idea. She noted that the goal is not a legal requirement and said that defense officials are doing their best to improve the current numbers.
Because the 3 percent threshold is a ?goal? rather than a legal requirement, veterans groups have little leverage on the issue. Unlike the 5 percent ?set-asides? for minority and female-owned businesses that are legally required when federal contracts are let, veterans groups have tried to be patient, according to one lobbyist, hoping that a sense of obligation on the part of the military and some prodding by sympathetic members of Congress would make the difference.

IRAQ CONTRACTS SPUR ANGER
But their patience appears to have run out this spring as a flood of new funding for defense-related endeavors failed to trickle down to vets. With the Pentagon?s procurement budget now at $70 billion, and with defense officials largely overseeing the distribution of hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts for reconstruction in Iraq, lobbyists say they faced a ?closed door? in discussions with the Defense Department on how to involve some of the 800,000 veteran-owned businesses in fulfilling these contracts.
?This latest go-round in Iraq really has kind of tipped the scales, and it?s boiled over to the point where we?re like, ?What the hell is going on??? one lobbyist for veterans issues said, requesting anonymity. Several veteran business owners contacted for this article, including a Vietnam-era vet whose soft drink distributorship was repeatedly turned down for contracts at Army bases in the Southwest, said they felt deeply betrayed.
?The very people to create disabled veterans are some of the worst non-compliers,? said Joseph Forney, who says he was told no first by the Pentagon, and then by Coca-Cola when he asked the Atlanta-based giant for regional subcontracts.
?You?d think the federal government would be most willing to help those who fight for them,? he says.
Other veterans would not publicly criticize the military, some out of loyalty, and some out of fear that future opportunities would be lost forever.
?Maybe they?ll fix this thing, you know?? one disabled veteran businessman said. ?They?ll remember who said what.?
There are some 23 million veterans in the United States, about 2 million of them classified as disabled. Congressional data estimates that about 800,000 small businesses are owned by those veterans ? some 200,000 of them by disabled vets.
?These are the very same guys and gals they?ve sent into the cauldron of fire over there, and you?d think they would embrace the idea of making sure they can make a living out of what is left of their lives,? the veterans lobbyist said.
Renzi, the Arizona Republican, concedes that Congress may not have been aggressive enough in overseeing the issue. Among other things, he notes, the Defense Department was directed by Congress in 1999 to create a database of veteran-owned businesses so that the military?s local ?small-business contract officers,? who are spread around the country, could actively seek matches that would advance the goal toward 3 percent. The Veterans Administration has created a VetBiz Vendor Information Pages Web site, but it currently remains under construction.

Michael Moran is senior correspondent at MSNBC.com.

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Now I'm gonna "quote" one the conservative "poster boys" most renowned and outspoken, so-called economic gurus'----Ole Ronnie Reagen hisseff----"Are YOU better off NOW than you were when "this guy" took office"?? The TRUTH be told---I THINK NOT!!!

There you have it my friends!

TA, TA.

[David]

Judy no doubt we want the oil, we are buying it everyday are we not? Why would we go to war over oil that we already have access to? That does not make sense. Now it would have made sense for the Russians to sweep into the oil fields of the middle east. It probably would have averted their downfall, probably would have started WWIII as well. We really will not know the truth until we meet our maker will we? Until then it is not helping matters to spread such speculation causing the weak minded to dive deeper into their paranoia delusions is it?

[1IDVET]

As to wanting oil.
We could have just bought the oil really cheap from Saddam and his cronies, oil for food, er, I mean palaces. Yeah, that's the ticket!

[judyvillecco]

Thank God for reinforcements becAUSE i HAVE TO GO TO WORK. Don't get me started on wired contracts the Government has for small business with the good ole boy Bush brothers sicne they took office here in Florida. I have attempted to bid on a few and tell them to stuff them where the sun don't shine now and don't bothe to call me for their games. Please! that's a set up! Take the small business money for nothing for the big corp. What a game!

Ok David, I just say follow the money and Halliburten and the contracts and see who gets them. Do you really think I can cause other people to be deluded. I'm not that powerful, but thanks for the compliment.

Anyhoo...The Gimp is here today to keep you folks straight while I go to work. Give em...Gimp and keep them on track! Love you guys even if you are deluded some of you! Bye for now! There's Dem that's got it and Dos that don't!

[Gimpy]

the war was about "OIL"!

Check THIS out!

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Wolfowitz: ?Iraq War Was About Oil?
By George Wright

Wednesday 04 June 2003

Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed, confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the US-led war.

The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war - has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is "swimming" in oil.

The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.

Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

Mr Wolfowitz went on to tell journalists at the conference that the US was set on a path of negotiation to help defuse tensions between North Korea and its neighbours - in contrast to the more belligerent attitude the Bush administration displayed in its dealings with Iraq.

His latest comments follow his widely reported statement from an interview in Vanity Fair last month, in which he said that "for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction."

Prior to that, his boss, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had already undermined the British government's position by saying Saddam Hussein may have destroyed his banned weapons before the war.

Mr Wolfowitz's frank assessment of the importance of oil could not come at a worse time for the US and UK governments, which are both facing fierce criticism at home and abroad over allegations that they exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in order to justify the war.

Amid growing calls from all parties for a public inquiry, the foreign affairs select committee announced last night it would investigate claims that the UK government misled the country over its evidence of Iraq's WMD.

The move is a major setback for Tony Blair, who had hoped to contain any inquiry within the intelligence and security committee, which meets in secret and reports to the prime minister.

In the US, the failure to find solid proof of chemical, biological and nuclear arms in Iraq has raised similar concerns over Mr Bush's justification for the war and prompted calls for congressional investigations.

Mr Wolfowitz is viewed as one of the most hawkish members of the Bush administration. The 57-year old expert in international relations was a strong advocate of military action against Afghanistan and Iraq.

Following the September 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, Mr Wolfowitz pledged that the US would pursue terrorists and "end" states' harbouring or sponsoring of militants.

Prior to his appointment to the Bush cabinet in February 2001, Mr Wolfowitz was dean and professor of international relations at the Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), of the Johns Hopkins University.


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

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Gee-Dubya can't even control the "Loose Cannons", or loudmouths within his OWN cabinet, like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. These two guys are on a course to undermine and discredit the ONLY source of REAL credibility in this administration---Colin Powell!

When the truth comes out----Powell will end up "telling all" about this corrupt bunch of idiots! I can't WAIT until he does---and FINALLY let the world know just how the citizens of this country have been mislead!

[Gimpy]

Want to hear MORE from some "TOP" officials in the Government.

Check THIS out!

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How Their Big Lie Came to Be
By Robert Scheer
The Los Angeles Times

Tuesday 03 June 2003

Leave it to a Marine to be blunt. When Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, was asked Friday why his Marines failed to encounter or uncover any of the weapons of mass destruction that U.S. intelligence had warned them about, his honesty put the White House to shame.

"We were simply wrong," Conway said. "It was a surprise to me then, it remains a surprise to me now, that we have not uncovered [nuclear, chemical or biological] weapons" in Iraq. And, he added, "believe me, it's not for lack of trying. We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwait border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there."

Now that the "imminent threat" posed by Iraqi chemical or biological weapons has turned out not to be so imminent, the question is: Did our gazillion-dollar spy operations blow the call, or was the dope they developed distorted or exaggerated by our political leaders?

Either way, heads should roll.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is feeling real political heat for arguing before the allied invasion that Saddam Hussein "has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes," a terrifying claim apparently now proved false.

Yet the White House seems to believe nobody cares that its war was based on the same distortions pushed by our president.

Paul Wolfowitz, one of the general's top civilian bosses in the Pentagon and a key proponent of invading Iraq, certainly seems unconcerned with the implications of making arguments for war based on convenience rather than facts. In a Vanity Fair interview released last week, the neoconservative Wolfowitz said, "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason."

He listed two others: to fight terrorism and Hussein's criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. However, Wolfowitz dismissed the last reason, saying "the third one, by itself is a reason to help the Iraqis but it is not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale [that] we did it."

Of course, the marketing of policy ? spin ? is an established, albeit unfortunate, part of politics. However, it is unacceptable to misinform your troops going into battle or mislead your citizens about why you are putting their sons and daughters in harm's way.

Bush and his band of hawks seem to believe the ends justify the means. Thus, the terror of 9/11 and the boogeyman of Iraq's supposed WMD stash became the key to pushing an ambitious plan to redraw the map of the Middle East. That was the pet project of a band of neocon missionaries who had failed to convince either the first Bush administration or the Clinton administration that such a campaign was plausible or desirable.

For Wolfowitz and friends, the 9/11 attacks were almost a gift, an opportunity to play God. "If you had to pick the 10 most important foreign policy things for the United States over the last 100 years, [Sept. 11] would surely rank in the top 10 if not No. 1," he told Vanity Fair.

Knocking Al Qaeda's Taliban friends out of Kabul became only a warm-up for dethroning Hussein as part of the broader neocon agenda. In marketing this war, however, there was a little problem: Hussein, as loathsome as he was, didn't have anything to do with 9/11. Or, as Wolfowitz put it tactfully in his interview: "That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy."

But they didn't let that stop them. They kept hyping the Al Qaeda connection and turning up the volume on the WMD alarm. After all, we knew Hussein had some scary biological and chemical weapons in the '80s because he was our ally in the war against Iran, and we supplied him with some of them.

And though United Nations inspectors found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon hawks found some Iraqi exiles in Washington who were more than willing to provide handy lists of the precise locations of deployed WMD. And thus was born the big lie: There's no time for U.N. inspectors to continue their work; the threat from Iraq is less than an hour away, and any delay puts the planet at risk.

It worked so well even our Marines were fooled.


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[Gimpy]

Want to read some about the "evidence"??

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Passing the Buck, a Leadership Sport
The Gulf News

Tuesday 03 June 2003
While all around him display shades of grey over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair remains true to his convictions: Iraq had them, has still got them and "we'll" find them.

The British public, however, is less convinced, especially in the light of recent statements made by U.S. neocon hawks, Iraqi nuclear scientists, American marines and the Australian Prime Minister, while MI6 has expressed discontent over the way its intelligence reports have been embellished and spun.

As much as "black-and-white" Blair would like the British to be as laid-back as the Americans - who, as evidenced by a recent poll, are not particularly bothered whether WMD are found in Iraq or not - in the same way that his compatriots came to the conclusion many moons ago that the world is not flat, they are stubbornly refuting the Blairite "Article of Faith".

Blair's statement: "We have already found two trailers that both our and the American security services believe were used for the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons," as Britain's cassus belli for war has been ridiculed by the sceptics.

It's common knowledge that the public has a short collective memory, but we would all have to be suffering from Alzheimer's to forget Downing Street's lurid pre-invasion warning - that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes of an order to do so.

Robin Cook, a respected British politician and former member of Blair's cabinet who resigned his post just prior to the invasion, said: "We were told Saddam had weapons ready for use within 45 minutes. It's now 45 days since the war has finished and we have still not found anything."

Sadly for Blair, who might be tempted to dismiss the anti-war sceptics as a mere "focus group" as did his mentor in the White House, his own Labour Party backbenchers can't be waved away in such a cavalier fashion.

Former Labour Defence Minister Peter Kilfoyle is championing a Commons motion, signed by 72 members of parliament, which calls on the prime minister to publish hard evidence to back up his Iraq weapons claims. If Blair fails to come up with the goods, Kilfoyle says that he will report him to the Commons' Speaker for "misleading Parliament".

If Blair is fazed by such accusations, he isn't showing it. During an interview screened by Sky News last Saturday, he insisted that he has secret proof that Iraq's alleged WMD will be discovered and asked his detractors for patience. It is clear that the public's patience is wearing thin these days with a flurry of ambiguous statements concerning Iraq's WMD annoyingly wafting across the pond, serving to fuel the angst of the burgeoning Doubting Thomases.

American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld didn't help Blair's cause when he suggested that Iraq's weapons could have been destroyed before the war. "We don't know what happened," he told the Council of Foreign Relations. "It is also possible that they [the former Iraqi regime] would destroy them prior to a conflict."

This may sound like a perfectly reasonable statement given the U.S. weapons-hunting teams have scoured the length and breadth of the country, prompting top Marine Commander Lieutenant General James Conway to publicly express his surprise that WMD haven't yet been uncovered, but it has also amounted to an admission of sorts. In other words, the Iraqi regime may have, in fact, complied with UN Security Council Resolution 1441.

It also begs the question: why should Saddam Hussain spend decades developing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons only to destroy them when the enemy is literally at the door?

Iraqi nuclear scientist Imad Khadduri, who has long asserted that Iraq's weapons were destroyed in the early 1990s, wonders why Iraq's scientists aren't queuing up to show the occupiers where the alleged weapons have been hidden now that a $200,000 reward has been offered for any information leading to their discovery.

Khadduri asks: "What is stopping these scientists from coming forward to collect this reward perhaps to be hand-delivered by the same Iraqi defectors who were already paid similar amounts for spreading these lies during the past few years and who marched behind the American tanks during the invasion??" - an obvious reference to Khidhir Hamza.

Known super-hawk Paul Wolfowitz was quoted by Vanity Fair as saying that one of the main reasons for the invasion of Iraq was to facilitate the withdrawal of American troops from Saudi Arabia, calling the administration's accent on WMD a mere "bureaucratic" device. Choosing weapons of mass destruction was "the one reason everyone could agree upon" he said during the interview.

Jane Harman, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee has said: "This could conceivably be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time." Others, less diplomatic than Harman, wonder whether it wasn't so much of an intelligence-led hoax but one deliberately perpetrated by the governments of the occupying powers to further their own political agendas.

A secret transcript of an alleged pre-invasion meeting at New York's Waldorf Hotel between U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and his British counterpart Jack Straw was unveiled in last Saturday's Guardian newspaper.

The report indicates that Powell and Straw "privately expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programme at the very time they were publicly trumpeting it to gain UN support for a war on Iraq."

According to the article, Straw "expressed concern that claims being made by Blair and Bush could not be proved", and that there was a lack of corroborative evidence. Powell, apparently, shared Straw's concern and told him that he, too, was "apprehensive" and hoped that "the facts, when they came out, would not explode in their faces".

In the event the transcript is accurate, it goes a long way to explain why Powell often looked embarrassed when his presentations to the Security Council on Iraqi weapons were challenged by chief weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei.

Not only did Powell call Britain's Iraq dossier, plagiarised from the 12-year-old thesis of an Iraqi student, "exquisite", he maintained that aluminium tubes and magnets had been imported into Iraq for use in weaponising uranium, notwithstanding ElBaradei's well-researched conclusions to the contrary.

Further, Powell stressed that there was a Saddam-Al Qaida alliance, since proven spurious, and he filed into 'evidence' - forged correspondence between Niger and Iraq - saying that this was proof of Saddam's intention of purchasing large quantities of uranium.

If Powell's poker playing abilities are in question, however, Straw's are not. Many of us will still remember Straw's impassioned diatribe in response to his French counterpart Dominique de Villepin's anti-war speech, which received a rare standing ovation from Security Council members.

Early last month, Straw was furiously backtracking - his passion about Saddam's artillery somewhat muted - when he claimed that discovering proscribed weapons was "not crucially important".

The Prime Minister of Australia - another member of the "Coalition of the Willing" - seems to be trying to distance himself from the entire debacle now that his personal popularity has dived at home.

John Howard admitted that Iraq may have destroyed or hidden its WMD before the conflict and said that assessments made by Australian intelligence agencies concerning the Iraqi threat were made "on the basis of a lot of shared intelligence with the British and the Americans".

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