OT welcome back Scott

"tak" ...

Don't encourage him.

:-P

Natalie

He'll have a tough time with that article, he'll have to rely on straight jingoism.

First of all who are those two organizations and when do you think we will find out George Soros or someone like that is funding them?

Secondly, the statements about Iraq having WMDs was not false at the time and I believe still is not false today. All intelligence organizations agreed that was the case and had unequivocal proof at the time. Just because nothing turned up doesn't mean Saddam Hussein didn't have them and transported them to friendly nations such as Syria.

Thirdly, Al-Qaeda did have ties to Saddam Hussein if not overtly then certainly covertly. It is already known Hussein was paying Palestinians who were blowing up themselves among crowded restaurants in Israel. He certainly had the will and the means to extend that generosity to our shores and was most certainly making plans to do such.

The war in Iraq is just an extension of a larger War on Terror. The main front is currently there but there are many more subversive clashes going on all over the world. Don't believe everything you read in the papers. The real story takes a long time to eventually come to light. Don't get too excited about these "studies" anyway. If there was really something to them you can bet your entire life savings Congress would be using them to bring the administration down.

By the way, why is it the media never gets on Colin Powell's case? He has as much responibility for promoting the war as anyone else.

Thank you for holding the fort for Scott. It must be very hard to face the failures of Bush after having invested so much of yourself in support of his administration.

What failures? He's kept your head from being cut off by a bunch or radical Moslems. He's corrected the failures of the Clinton Administration who let these people roam free for 8 years, attacking America all over the world, including the 1993 WTC attacks. How can you say that with a straight face? You really must be using selective memory or are truly blinded by hate.

Hate, no. Disappointment (in the extreme).

If Bush were as good as you say, why won't the current Republican candidates for the office have anything to do with him while campaigning, hmmmm?

You can leave Ron Paul out of this since he isn't really a Republican anyway. He is a Libertarian and in my view short-sighted regarding the War on Terror. Besides I'd bet he would sing a different tune if actually faced with making the hard decisions Bush has been forced to make.

I don't spend much time listening to the candidates these days since I actually have a life but it seems to me Giuliani, Thompson, and McCain all support the war. Romney I have no idea since he changes his position constantly. Huckabee seems to be the most liberal of the lot. He's actually much like Bush, socially conservative but fiscally liberal.

At the end of the day whoever becomes President is obligated to defend Americans from the threat of radical Islam. If push comes to shove even Obama or Clinton will do whatever necessary to keep the fight away from our homeland. So far Bush has done that one thing well.

"So far Bush has done that one thing well."

---Badgolferman

With all due respect, I disagree with your claim, and if it weren't for Gates, Petraus, and our troops, even you would concede the point that the top level leadership and planning has been abysmal.

During the Reagan presidency, the CIA had perfect information about Pakistan's nuclear weapons development. This had to be kept quiet to avoid embarrassing Reagan, who insisted that Pakistan was behaving itself. This enabled Reagan to publicly declare that it was fine for us to continue providing Pakistan with weapons and cash.

In order to maintain the lie, the intelligence had to be cooked, not just to keep Reagan happy, but to avoid the truth to leak to the press. One of the primary chefs in the kitchen was none other than Cheney (assisted by Paul Wolfowitz). So, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the same chef was at work in the Bush-2 administration.

This should also cast doubts on anything Bush says about Iran's nuclear program.

Here we go again. What specific measures has Bush taken to keep our heads from being cut off by radical Muslims?

Unfortunately for you, the failures you describe were not failures. Rather, they were part of a carefully orchestrated plan which began in a small way with Carter, and were turned into a machine to big to stop by Reagan and Bush-1, with slimy assistance behind the scenes from Cheney and Wolfowitz, who've been pulling strings for many, many years, unbeknownst to you.

Unless you have a security clearance I doubt you will be able to find out specific information about how we keep terrorists at bay here in the U.S.

Why do continue to ask the same questions over and over again?

Because the measures that are NOT top secret have been described dozens of times by government officials on TV and in print. I keep asking because it's so much fun to shed light on how little attention you (and others) pay to the information that is available to us as citizens.

The publicly available descriptions are enough to answer the question. I'll keep asking the question until you or one of your little friends finally wakes up and answers it.

He didn't ask for specific details, nor that anything classified be revealed. Rather he just asked for an opinion as to what anyone thinks has been done to keep your head from leaving your body at the hands of a nutjob.

I'm sure it's because no one has yet answered. I happen to agree with

Because the measures that are NOT top secret have been described dozens of times by government officials on TV and in print. I keep asking because it's so much fun to shed light on how little attention you (and others) pay to the information that is available to us as citizens.

The publicly available descriptions are enough to answer the question. I'll keep asking the question until you or one of your little friends finally wakes up and answers it.

Poor excuse. How accurate is the report? Hint: When the White House spokesman was recently asked about hit, he didn't deny it but had no comment.

It was false according to intelligence available in 2002 and is still false today.

Not true, either. Tell me: then Secretary of State Colin Powell had read the intelligence reports but said Saddam was under control and no threat. Why would he have said that if what you said was true?

The Iraq Survey Group said Saddam didn't have them, and they found no evidence that any WMDs had been transported to Syria. OTOH a lot of the insurgency crossed into Iraq through the Syrian border, so why didn't they bring back some of those WMDs and use them in insurgency attacks? None of you pro-war people have explained that.

So covertly that when one of al Qaeda's top leaders needed surgery in Baghdad, he had to sneak into the country under an alias to avoid arrest by Saddam's government. Saddam hated al Qaeda because of their fundamentalism and the threat they posed to his power.

That had nothing to do with al Qaeda or any terrorist threat to the US, and it was just a minor publicity stunt. You're grasping at straws.

Only in the eyes of the ignorant and foolish. Saddam wasn't participating in terrorism, wasn't sponsoring terrorism, and, according to the CIA, Iraq was only one of two Middle East nations free of al Qaeda activity, the other being Israel.

The main "front" is in Afghanistan or Pakistan. The war in Iraq is mostly against Iraqis who are not terrorists and against Saudi Arabia in Iraq, AKA al Qaeda in Iraq.

But instead rely upon your wisdom and sources, right? :(

This is the same Democratic Congress that's full of wimps who go along with everything GW Bush wants. Right.

The media reported that Powell was ashamed of his UN presentation about WMDs. How is that letting him off the hook?

Next time, get your facts right.

HA, HA, HA, HA, HA! Good one, Slicer!

But he didn't do that for 3,000 Americans on 9/11, thanks to his completely ignoring the terrorist threat from al Qaeda and obsessing on Iraq instead.

The first WTC attack occurred a month into Clinton's presidency. The second WTC attack occurred 7 months into GW Bush's presidency, and he had been given plenty of warning, not only from the outgoing Clinton administration (by Richard Clarke himself, among others) but also from his own administration ("Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States") a month before the attack actually happened. To say that GW Bush has kept us safe from terrorism since 9/11/2001 is like saying Clinton kept us safe from it since 2/26/1993.

You've proved that hindsight isn't always 20/20.

But not his hair.

Snorted lots and lots of cocaine and drowned in Jack Daniels.

The CIA and IAEC both said that Israel's 1981 attack on the Osirak nuclear facility easily set Iraq back at least 10 years in terms of putting the pieces back together. Inspectors later found that Saddam was trying to rebuild, but hadn't gotten very far because we and the Europeans had gotten a little better at watching out for exported materials that could be used for the wrong purposes.

The bigger worry was that he could simply purchase a nuclear weapon from Pakistan, whose weapons program Reagan ignored for many years in return for their assistance with fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.

None of it really matters, though.