Thread: Impeach the President - Proof Bush lied to Americans and Congress

"If Saddam Hussein was an immediate and serious threat to America, as the White House claimed, then Bush might have been justified in invading Iraq. But it appears that Bush misled the public, the Congress and the UN by consistently overstating the threat from Iraq. By lying to Congress, Bush violated US Laws related to Fraud and False Statements."

Impeach Bush - Iraq Lies

1.

"A classified report, delivered to Bush in early January 2003, was a summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, focusing on whether Saddam would launch an unprovoked attack on the United States, either directly, or indirectly by working with terrorists. The report stated that U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that it was unlikely that Saddam would try to attack the United States."

"On at least four earlier occasions, beginning in the spring of 2002, according to the same records and sources, the president was informed during his morning intelligence briefing that U.S. intelligence agencies believed it was unlikely that Saddam was an imminent threat to the United States. However, in the months leading up to the war, Bush, Cheney, and Cabinet members repeatedly asserted that Saddam was likely to use chemical or biological weapons against the United States or to provide such weapons to Al Qaeda or another terrorist group. The Bush administration used the potential threat from Saddam as a major rationale in making the case to go to war. The president cited the threat in an address to the United Nations on September 12, 2002, in an October 7, 2002, speech to the American people, and in his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003."

NATIONAL JOURNAL: What Bush Was Told About Iraq (03/02/2006)

2.

"The CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material in Africa. The CIA warned the White House early on that the charge, based on an allegation that Iraq sought 500 tons of uranium in Niger, relied on weak evidence, was not particularly significant and assumed Iraq was pursuing an acquisition that was arguably not possible and of questionable value because Iraq had its own supplies."

"Disclosures indicate top White House officials knew that the CIA seriously disputed the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa long before the claim was included in Bush's January address to the nation. The claim was a major part of the case made by the Bush administration before the Iraq war that Hussein represented a serious threat because of his nuclear ambitions."

washingtonpost72303

3.

"Eleven days before President Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address in which he said that the US learned from British intelligence that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Africa - an explosive claim that helped pave the way to war - the State Department told the CIA that the intelligence the uranium claims were based upon were forgeries."

State Dept. Exposed Niger Forgeries 11 Days Before Bush's 16 Words

4.

"The CIA had evidence Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction six months before the 2003 US-led invasion but was ignored by a White House intent on ousting Saddam Hussein."

Ex-CIA agent says WMD intelligence ignored - Boston.com

5.

"The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq. According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons."

"The White House ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball's account. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years."

How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball'

PS.

Two volumes of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Phase II report comparing the Bush administration's public statements about Saddam Hussein with the evidence senior officials reviewed in private were released on September 8, 2006. The conclusions of these reports were that there was no prewar evidence that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction and there was no evidence that Saddam had links to al-Qaeda.

Key Judgments of the Report Comparing Pre-War Intelligence to Post-war Findings:

-Iraq did not provide any material or operational support to al-Qa’ida prior to the war.

-No evidence was found of any meeting between the Iraq regime and al-Qa’ida before the war other than a single meeting that took place in 1995 in the Sudan, and that meeting did not lead to any operational support.

-Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qa’ida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime. He refused all al-Qa’ida requests and issued a general order that Iraq should not deal with al-Qa’ida.

-The claim that Iraq provided al-Qa’ida with training in chemical and biological weapons prior to the war was false and based on the reporting of a single source, al-Libi, whom the Defense Intelligence Agency warned as early as February 2002 was intentionally misleading his debriefers. The CIA concluded in February 2004 that al-Libi was a fabricator.

-Iraq was not aware of al-Zarqawi’s presence in Baghdad in 2002 until alerted by a foreign government. Saddam Hussein viewed al-Zarqawi as an outlaw and attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture him. Al-Zarqawi left in November 2002 and did not return to Baghdad until after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime.

-The Intelligence Community was correct that there was no connection to 9/11, no indication that Saddam Hussein intended to use al-Qa’ida or any other terrorist group to strike the U.S.

http://intelligence.senate.gov/phaseiiaccuracy.pdf

ROCKEFELLER SAYS PARTIAL RELEASE OF PHASE II REPORTS PAINT CLEARER PICTURE OF MISTAKES MADE IN LEAD UP TO IRAQ WAR

Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I say let us impeach him and send him over to Iraq and lock him in a cell with his good old buddy Sadaam. And if the Iraqis choose to set Bush free they can keep him and make him their president. Over there he could be a real dictator... Just like he always wanted...

Constituents were calling for Impeachment long ago, but during that time, his own Party, who had total control, wasn't about to hang themselves and impeach the President who supports their own agenda.

Now it's a dfifferent story.

It may work. Start writing your letters to your Rep and demand impeachment again, now, today. It's the only way to get the process re-started.

Another fallback charge is that Mr. Bush, operating mainly through Mr. Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.
The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."

For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that "without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again."

The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was "hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation."
So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with this admonition:
Of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous--or more urgent--than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons. All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Mr. Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Mr. Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the 16 resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?

Originally Posted by freckles

in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.

There are two reports. The first Senate report from 2004 did not examine HOW the Bush administration used intelligence before the war. The second report (Phase II) shows that the Bush administration distorted intelligence by presenting conjecture as evidence. Bush also distorted intelligence by claiming that Iraq harbored al Zarqawi.

I cited the Phase II report in my post:

Originally Posted by Jack Pott

Key Judgments of the Report Comparing Pre-War Intelligence to Post-war Findings:

-Iraq did not provide any material or operational support to al-Qa’ida prior to the war.

-No evidence was found of any meeting between the Iraq regime and al-Qa’ida before the war other than a single meeting that took place in 1995 in the Sudan, and that meeting did not lead to any operational support.

-Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qa’ida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime. He refused all al-Qa’ida requests and issued a general order that Iraq should not deal with al-Qa’ida.

-The claim that Iraq provided al-Qa’ida with training in chemical and biological weapons prior to the war was false and based on the reporting of a single source, al-Libi, whom the Defense Intelligence Agency warned as early as February 2002 was intentionally misleading his debriefers. The CIA concluded in February 2004 that al-Libi was a fabricator.

-Iraq was not aware of al-Zarqawi’s presence in Baghdad in 2002 until alerted by a foreign government. Saddam Hussein viewed al-Zarqawi as an outlaw and attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture him. Al-Zarqawi left in November 2002 and did not return to Baghdad until after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime.

-The Intelligence Community was correct that there was no connection to 9/11, no indication that Saddam Hussein intended to use al-Qa’ida or any other terrorist group to strike the U.S.

http://intelligence.senate.gov/phaseiiaccuracy.pdf

ROCKEFELLER SAYS PARTIAL RELEASE OF PHASE II REPORTS PAINT CLEARER PICTURE OF MISTAKES MADE IN LEAD UP TO IRAQ WAR

Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

First off, learn the definition of "Lied".

You start a thread with the title "Impeach the President - Proof Bush lied to Americans and Congress"

Then you follow up with the opening paragraph totally ignoring the worlds condemnation and belief of the same things....including most Democrats...

Originally Posted by Jack Pott

"If Saddam Hussein was an immediate and serious threat to America, as the White House claimed, then Bush might have been justified in invading Iraq. But it appears that Bush misled the public, the Congress and the UN by consistently overstating the threat from Iraq. By lying to Congress, Bush violated US Laws related to Fraud and False Statements."

Your witch hunt is baseless. Could Bush have had faulty intelligence and made poor decisions yes...Lied? No.

You and Robodon aught to get together.

Originally Posted by Oberdan

Constituents were calling for Impeachment long ago, but during that time, his own Party, who had total control, wasn't about to hang themselves and impeach the President who supports their own agenda.

Now it's a dfifferent story.

It may work. Start writing your letters to your Rep and demand impeachment again, now, today. It's the only way to get the process re-started.

Yes, write those letters so our hard earned tax dollars can be spent to the tune of millions on baseless claims. Investigations have been secretly going on for years and guess what?? THEY PROVED NOTHING. Why not send your paychecks with those letters? That way they can leave the smart people's money alone and use yours for the investigative team.

Originally Posted by ilikeGW

Yes, write those letters so our hard earned tax dollars can be spent to the tune of millions on baseless claims. Investigations have been secretly going on for years and guess what?? THEY PROVED NOTHING. Why not send your paychecks with those letters? That way they can leave the smart people's money alone and use yours for the investigative team.

GW, it's pretty hard to believe you would complain about millions of dollars spent to impeach the President after the Partisans did the same thing to the last President to rake him over the coals about a personal domestic incident.

Originally Posted by Yonak

GW, it's pretty hard to believe you would complain about millions of dollars spent to impeach the President after the Partisans did the same thing to the last President to rake him over the coals about a personal domestic incident.

That's a straw-man argument at it's finest!

We weren't talking about Clinton now were we?