Trump Says It's OK He Misled Media About Son's Russia Meeting

[bostonangler]

3 minutes ago, caz1104 said:

where is the moral high ground when the left does the same

 

You know caz, I'm beginning to think there is no moral high ground in America. Most people you meet are angry, intolerant and only care about themselves... Not everyone mind you, but more and more people are slipping to the dark side..... Reminds me of the Romans... Society isn't going the right way... I know I will get nailed on this one, but the news right now about locking up children in 30 x 30 cages seems more like Iran or North Korea than America. Laura Bush even Mrs. Trump have said this is wrong.  We need a reality check badly... JMHO

 

B/A

[bostonangler]

3 minutes ago, caz1104 said:

.boy how soon many forget

 

Yes and let's not forget, before we invaded Iraq, Saddam was getting ready to sell his oil in Euros and drop the Petrodollar... That was a big deal.

I'm not sure many people understand the petrodollar and our comfortable lifestyle here is America.

 

B/A

Edited June 18, 2018 by bostonangler

[caz1104]

2 minutes ago, bostonangler said:

 

You know caz, I'm beginning to think there is no moral high ground in America. Most people you meet are angry, intolerant and only care about themselves... Not everyone mind you, but more and more people are slipping to the dark side..... Reminds me of the Romans... Society isn't going the right way... I know I will get nailed on this one, but the news right now about locking up children in 30 x 30 cages seems more like Iran or North Korea than America. Laura Bush even Mrs. Trump have said this is wrong.  We need a reality check badly... JMHO

 

B/A

The moral & legal blame for this happening should be squarely put on those bringing kids here illegally.............period. It'll never stop under the "tree hugging" mentality.

[caz1104]

2 minutes ago, bostonangler said:

 

Yes and let's not forget, before we invaded Iraq, Saddam was getting ready to sell his oil in Euros and drop the Petrodollar... That was a big deal.

I'm not sure many people understand the petrodollar and our comfortable lifestyle here is America.

 

B/A

Just changed the subject.....u said GW lied.....now u shifted to Petrodollar

[bostonangler]

6 minutes ago, caz1104 said:

Just changed the subject.....u said GW lied.....now u shifted to Petrodollar

 

He did lie, there were no rockets ready to fire... Remember on the news they showed drawings of rocket launchers that didn't really exist... He lied to start a war about oil... You do know, it was our government who put Saddam in power?

 

B/A

Edited June 18, 2018 by bostonangler

[bostonangler]

Iraq actively researched and later employed weapons of mass destruction from 1962 to 1991, when it destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile and halted its biological and nuclear weapon programs.^[1] The fifth president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein,^[2] was internationally condemned for his use of chemical weapons during the 1980s campaign against Iranian and Kurdish civilians during and after the Iran–Iraq War. In the 1980s, Saddam pursued an extensive biological weapons program and a nuclear weapons program, though no nuclear bomb was built. After the Persian Gulf War (1990-1991), the United Nations (with the Iraqi government) located and destroyed large quantities of Iraqi chemical weapons and related equipment and materials, and Iraq ceased both its chemical, biological and nuclear programs.^[3]

In the early 2000s, the administrations of George W. Bush and Tony Blair asserted that Saddam Hussein's weapons programs were still actively building weapons, and that large stockpiles of WMDs were hidden in Iraq. Inspections by the UN to resolve the status of unresolved disarmament questions restarted between November 2002 and March 2003,^[4] under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, which demanded Saddam give "immediate, unconditional and active cooperation" with UN and IAEA inspections, shortly before his country was attacked.^[5] The United States asserted that Saddam's frequent lack of cooperation was a breach of Resolution 1441, but failed to convince the UN Security Council to pass a new resolution authorizing the use of force due to lack of evidence.^[6][7][8] Despite this, Bush asserted peaceful measures could not disarm Iraq of the weapons he alleged it to have and launched a second Gulf War. Later U.S.-led inspections found that Iraq had earlier ceased active WMD production and stockpiling.^[1]

[bostonangler]

Trump Is Right, Bush Lied: A Little-Known Part of the Bogus Case for War

In the Republican presidential debate in South Carolina on Saturday night, Donald Trump said something about the Bush administration and the Iraq War that is essentially illegal for Republican politicians.

“They lied,” he said. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none.”

Trump has subsequently walked it back a bit, but he shouldn’t have. I’ve followed the issue of Iraq’s WMD programs for 20 years, and won a $1,000 bet in 2003 that if the U.S. invaded, we would find nothing. There’s no question that the Bush administration lied enthusiastically about what it knew about Iraq and WMD.

There is an enormous amount of powerful evidence to prove it:

• Former Vice President **** Cheney kicked off the push for war in August 2002 by claiming: “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” Cheney’s speech had not been vetted by the CIA, and John McLaughlin, the CIA’s deputy director, shortly afterward told Congress that the likelihood of Iraq initiating a WMD attack “would be low.” Another CIA official later recalled that the agency’s reaction to Cheney’s speech was, “Where is he getting this stuff from?”
• The Bush administration said that aluminum tubes Iraq had tried to import were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs” — even as Bush himself was being told the State Department and Energy Department believed (correctly, of course) they were intended to be used as conventional rockets.
• Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union address that “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” even though his administration had been repeatedly warned this was dubious (and it turned out to originate with crudely forged documents).
• Colin Powell doctored intercepted Iraqi communications for his U.N. presentation to make them appear more alarming.

… and much more.

There’s also one specific story proving they lied that I think hasn’t received enough attention: the curious case of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel.

Kamel was a powerful figure in the Hussein regime, perhaps second only to Saddam himself, and had been in charge of Iraq’s completely real WMD programs in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War. After Iraq was pushed back out of Kuwait by a U.S.-led coalition in 1991, the U.N. Security Council decreed that its harsh sanctions on Iraq would remain until Iraq was disarmed of all WMD programs.

By 1995, Kamel was disillusioned with Hussein’s rule and defected to Jordan. There he told the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the CIA, and British intelligence an interesting story: Iraq was in fact disarmed, with no remaining chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons programs of any kind. All that remained hidden, he said, was documentation from the 1980s programs, which the U.N. shortly seized from Kamel’s farm back in Iraq.

While the details of Kamel’s debriefing were not public at the time, he went on CNN to openly declare that “Iraq does not possess any weapons of mass destruction.”

Kamel quickly realized that the world outside Iraq was not as hospitable as he’d expected, and, in particular, that the U.S. would not send troops to Baghdad in order to oust his father-in-law and put him in charge. In early 1996 he returned to Iraq, where he was promptly assassinated.

As the U.S. evaluated the Bush administration case for war six years later in the fall of 2002, Kamel’s statements should have been critical information. Certainly Bush officials felt they were: A post-war commission investigating the WMD intelligence debacle mentioned a “Senior Executive Memorandum” of January 12, 2002, “discussing the value of Kamil’s [sic] information.” Senior Executive Memoranda are generally produced by the CIA at the request of high-level officials in the executive branch.

This is where the lies about Kamel began. If the Bush administration wanted to grapple honestly with Kamel’s story, it would have had to make the case that either Kamel had been lying in 1995 or Iraq had restarted its WMD programs after his defection, or both.

Instead, the administration turned reality completely on its head. In the same August 2002 speech mentioned above, Cheney claimed this:

We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we’ve gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors — including Saddam’s own son-in-law [Hussein Kamel].

This lie should have been easily caught by the U.S. media, given Kamel’s 1995 CNN interview. Moreover, there were public documents sitting on the IAEA website stating the Kamel had told the agency “all nuclear weapons related activities had effectively ceased” in 1991.

Cheney’s lie didn’t even make sense: Inspectors were still in Iraq when Kamel defected, so if he’d told them Iraq had a nuclear weapons program, the IAEA would have dismantled it.

Yet none of that made any difference. With no one pointing out Cheney’s blatant falsehood, the rest of the Bush administration eagerly made use of Kamel.

Several weeks later, in September 2002, Donald Rumsfeld told Congress the U.N. inspections would be useless without informants like Kamel. However, he didn’t mention that Kamel had informed us that Iraq had nothing:

Unless we have people inside the Iraqi program who are willing to tell us what they have and where they have it — as we did in 1995 with the defection of Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel — it is easy for the Iraqi regime to hide its capabilities from us.

Shortly afterward, Bush himself mentioned Kamel, as did Colin Powell in his address to the U.N. Security Council.

This so infuriated someone with access to the detailed notes from one of Kamel’s original debriefings that he or she leaked them to Newsweek, which finally published a brief story about Kamel on March 3, 2003, just a few weeks before the war began. Newsweek did not mention Cheney’s lie about Kamel, but did explain that “the defector’s tale raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist.”

When subsequently questioned by Reuters for a follow-up story, the CIA and MI6 were clearly terrified and went ballistic. The British hilariously claimed that “We’ve checked back and he didn’t say this. He said just the opposite, that the WMD program was alive and kicking.” According to the CIA’s then-spokesperson Bill Harlow, the Newsweek story was “incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue.” (Harlow, who now makes a living defending the CIA’s torture program, recently told me that “I have no intention to engage in an exchange about that single answer to one of the thousands of questions I handled in that job more than a decade ago.”)

The CIA’s fear was understandable. At just about the same time, Alan Foley, the head of the CIA division in charge of analyzing Iraq’s purported WMD programs, was — according to retired CIA analyst Mel Goodman — privately saying that Iraq possessed “not much, if anything” related to WMD.

The rest of the story is well-known: The U.S. and allies invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, and Iraq had become a perpetual vortex of violence that may pull in the entire Mideast. We now know not just what Kamel had said in 1995, but that he’d been telling the truth.

Thus even if you disregard the mountains of evidence that the Bush administration shaded the truth, omitted pertinent facts, and straight-out lied in other areas, the story of Hussein Kamel tells you everything you need to know. Indeed, the Bush administration’s campaign of deceit was so successful at so little real cost that it continued with even more brazen post-invasion lies. For instance, Bush went on to claim that Saddam Hussein “absolutely” had WMD programs and repeatedly said that Iraq “wouldn’t let [U.N. inspectors] in.”

So hopefully Trump won’t buckle to the pressure from the Republican establishment to proclaim that the Bush administration’s WMD claims were all just an honest mistake. They weren’t, and Trump was absolutely right.

[caz1104]

17 minutes ago, bostonangler said:

 

He did lie, there were no rockets ready to fire... Remember on the news they showed drawings of rocket launchers that didn't really exist... He lied to start a war about oil... You do know, it was our government who put Saddam in power?

 

B/A

So NO rocket launchers were used in Iran-Iraq war? And again u have moved the argument to specifics, u made the blanket statement that GW lied......weapons of mass destruction WERE in Iraq

[caz1104]

20 minutes ago, bostonangler said:

Iraq actively researched and later employed weapons of mass destruction from 1962 to 1991, when it destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile and halted its biological and nuclear weapon programs.^[1] The fifth president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein,^[2] was internationally condemned for his use of chemical weapons during the 1980s campaign against Iranian and Kurdish civilians during and after the Iran–Iraq War. In the 1980s, Saddam pursued an extensive biological weapons program and a nuclear weapons program, though no nuclear bomb was built. After the Persian Gulf War (1990-1991), the United Nations (with the Iraqi government) located and destroyed large quantities of Iraqi chemical weapons and related equipment and materials, and Iraq ceased both its chemical, biological and nuclear programs.^[3]

In the early 2000s, the administrations of George W. Bush and Tony Blair asserted that Saddam Hussein's weapons programs were still actively building weapons, and that large stockpiles of WMDs were hidden in Iraq. Inspections by the UN to resolve the status of unresolved disarmament questions restarted between November 2002 and March 2003,^[4] under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, which demanded Saddam give "immediate, unconditional and active cooperation" with UN and IAEA inspections, shortly before his country was attacked.^[5] The United States asserted that Saddam's frequent lack of cooperation was a breach of Resolution 1441, but failed to convince the UN Security Council to pass a new resolution authorizing the use of force due to lack of evidence.^[6][7][8] Despite this, Bush asserted peaceful measures could not disarm Iraq of the weapons he alleged it to have and launched a second Gulf War. Later U.S.-led inspections found that Iraq had earlier ceased active WMD production and stockpiling.^[1]

That's not true.....Iraq ceased to let inspectors in and inspect specific sites

[caz1104]

It's funny how quickly folks forget & like I said earlier I know of folks that served that stated without question WMD's were still present

Edited June 18, 2018 by caz1104

[bostonangler]

25 minutes ago, caz1104 said:

So NO rocket launchers were used in Iran-Iraq war? And again u have moved the argument to specifics, u made the blanket statement that GW lied......weapons of mass destruction WERE in Iraq

 

I don't think we were talking about the Iraq Iran war... I think we were talking about lying politicians...

 

B/A

[bostonangler]

24 minutes ago, caz1104 said:

I know of folks that served that stated without question WMD's were still prese

 

Then that proves my point, Trump is a liar... You see his statement above.... A direct quote. So he is like any other politician democrat or republican... They are lie in order to get power. They are all the same... That's why people  like us are not politicians, because we had a conscience...

con·science

ˈkän(t)SHəns/

noun

noun: conscience; plural noun: consciences

1. an inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of one's behavior.

    

    

   People in politics generally do not have any such thing... Note I said generally.

    

   B/A

[caz1104]

BA your all over the place....smh. Nevermind it's hard having an intelligent & coherent conversation with one that purports to be open minded but seems to see things in rose colored LEFT seeing glasses.

[girljulieta]

On 6/15/2018 at 2:28 PM, bostonangler said:

Two things I hate, thieves and liars

 

[girljulieta]

8 hours ago, Shabibilicious said:

Trump Fibs

 

 

Salivating Followers

 

 

Questions?

 

GO RV, then BV  

 

 

 

 

[bostonangler]

1 hour ago, caz1104 said:

BA your all over the place....smh. Nevermind it's hard having an intelligent & coherent conversation with one that purports to be open minded but seems to see things in rose colored LEFT seeing glasses.

 

That's BS... I started the thread about lying... You proved they lie, by saying you know people who said there were WMD and Trump said there wasn't... That is the problem. You can't have it both ways. You are right there are no reasonable, coherent or intelligent conversations because everyone is living in denial... And you always throw leftist at me, but you should know by now I didn't vote for either of the two major parties because they are corrupt... Something many refuse to accept... 

 

B/A

[girljulieta]

2 hours ago, bostonangler said:

but the news right now about locking up children in 30 x 30 cages

 

[umbertino]

3 hours ago, caz1104 said:

"George W lied about weapons of mass destruction"....boy how soon many forget that BEFORE we invaded Iraq inspections were being performed BECAUSE Iraq had used deadly chemicals of mass destruction on its own people. Iraq was not compliant with agreed upon openness of said inspections. I know of people that returned from duty saying there were still stock piles of chemicals in Iraq.

 

 

But evidently in the eyes of SH  not "his own People" as they were Iraqi Kurds, an ethnic group he hated so much ( just as Turkish President Erdogan does with Turkish and Syrian Kurds) for their independent stances.......

 

He (SH) did indeed gas them

 

 

Erdogan instead accuses all Kurds ( men, women, children) to be terrorists...And consequently jails hordes of them......

 

When he ( Erdogan) is the only terrorist actually......

 

 

But that's typical....Just look at Israel.....

Edited June 18, 2018 by umbertino

[girljulieta]

 

[caz1104]

27 minutes ago, bostonangler said:

 

That's BS... I started the thread about lying... You proved they lie, by saying you know people who said there were WMD and Trump said there wasn't... That is the problem. You can't have it both ways. You are right there are no reasonable, coherent or intelligent conversations because everyone is living in denial... And you always throw leftist at me, but you should know by now I didn't vote for either of the two major parties because they are corrupt... Something many refuse to accept... 

 

B/A

BA not BS.....I argued a point u put forth about a specific statement you made .....then you started to dance around that point saying I was dancing around - smh

[caz1104]

14 minutes ago, girljulieta said:

 

So Saddam DIDNT use nerve gas on his own people? And all those inspections agreed upon after 1st Gulf War that Saddam kept skirting were all LIES?

[caz1104]

29 minutes ago, umbertino said:

 

 

But evidently in the eyes of SH  not "his own People" as they were Iraqi Kurds, an ethnic group he hated so much ( just as Turkish President Erdogan does with Turkish and Syrian Kurds) for their independent stances.......

 

He (SH) did indeed gas them

 

 

Erdogan instead accuses all Kurds ( men, women, children) to be terrorists...And consequently jails hordes of them......

 

When he ( Erdogan) is the only terrorist actually......

 

 

But that's typical....Just look at Israel.....

So there were WMD's?

[girljulieta]

1 minute ago, caz1104 said:

So Saddam DIDNT use nerve gas on his own people? And all those inspections agreed upon after 1st Gulf War that Saddam kept skirting were all LIES?

I do not doubt that he did both.

Nevertheless, the Truth is always more complicated than "they" would have us believe.

[caz1104]

My ONLY point in all of this is BA stated that GW LIED about WMD's...and in my opinion that was not true, there were WMD's.

Edited June 18, 2018 by caz1104

[girljulieta]

8 minutes ago, caz1104 said:

My ONLY point in all of this is BA stated that GW LIED about WMD's...and in my opinion that was not true, there were WMD's.

I disagree.

They ALL LIED to one degree or another for various reasons and various agendas.