July 16, 2004

Probe clears Blair of deliberate distortions on Iraq

Prime Minister Tony Blair escaped harsh criticism in an official inquiry into prewar intelligence on Iraq, which faulted him yesterday for informal decision-making and pushing available intelligence to the limit, but found no deliberate distortions.
    
Mr. Blair said he took full, personal responsibility. But after the much-awaited report was released, he told Parliament, "No one lied, no one made up the intelligence."
[...]
 Although the report criticized Mr. Blair's "informal" governing style, it absolved him of misleading the public over Iraq, a charge that has dogged the prime minister since he took Britain into the U.S.-led war.
[...]
    
 Mr. Butler's judgment vindicates the British government of some of the harshest charges against it, a week after a Republican-led U.S. Senate committee excoriated a "broken corporate culture" at the CIA and said there had been a "global intelligence failure" on Iraq.

The verdict takes some pressure off Mr. Blair, whose popularity and credibility have been battered by the war and continuing violence in Iraq, and by the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction.
[...]   
"We have no reason, found no evidence, to question the prime minister's good faith," Mr. Butler told reporters.
    
He concluded "no single individual" was responsible for intelligence failures that led Mr. Blair's government to overstate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
   
 Before the war, Mr. Blair said Saddam "has chemical and biological weapons ... [and] existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons."
    
Addressing the House of Commons yesterday, however, he acknowledged it was likely Saddam "did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons ready to deploy."
   
 But Mr. Blair defended his decision to go to war.

"I cannot honestly say I believe getting rid of Saddam was a mistake at all," he said. "Iraq, the region, the wider world is a better and safer place without Saddam."
[...]
    
 The report was the latest to exonerate the Blair government. Three previous inquiries also cleared officials of misusing intelligence or lying.
 

Good to see our wartime British allied leader is cleared--I never doubted he would be!--and by consequence, so was President Bush, who was also cleared by the Senate report, as well.
Here's more about former Ambassador and now fiction writer and sKerry campaign boy Joe Wilson:
British report undermines Wilson on prewar data

The British government yesterday bolstered President Bush's assertion that Iraq sought uranium from Niger, casting further doubt on former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's claims to the contrary.

The conclusion was reached by Robin Butler, who once was Britain's top civil servant, in a major report on prewar intelligence that came five days after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reached a similar conclusion in its report.

Taken together, the British and U.S. reports appear to undermine Mr. Wilson's criticism of Mr. Bush, which led to a criminal investigation of the White House and made the retired diplomat a media darling.
[Oh, yeah...Joe and his spook wife were having big fun this time last year speculating about who was going to play them in the inevitable blockbuster film which would have been the "companion piece" to the dreadful Fahrenheit 911.
What is almost as revolting as Wilson accusing the President of lying to the American people in his SOTU address without a shred of proof is the fact that the Liberal Left Lying media carried Wilson's water for him and now that he's been exposed as a fraud and a liar, they are maddeningly silent and not issuing the flurry of apologies to us, their audience, for playing this story for all it was worth.
Disgusting and revolting behavior on the part of the Left all the way around!]

It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999," the British report said. "The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium.
    
"Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible," the report added.
   
 That buttressed an assertion by Mr. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
[...]
The State of the Union assertion rankled Mr. Wilson,
[It seems anything done by a Republican President does rankle Mr. Wilson.--Jen]
who said he found no evidence of such an attempted purchase during a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger. Mr. Wilson arrived in the African nation in late February 2002.
[My private belief is that in those first few months after the 9/11 attacks, the intell community of the FBI and the CIA was in such a flurry and kind of a mess trying to comb the world to identify and track our enemies so that they couldn't hit us again that they were force to use every warm body to track down leads and tips.
This is why I think that Wilson's spook wife was able to recommend her hubby to track down the story on Saddam trying to buy yellowcake from Niger, because everyone else was so busy.--J.T.]
[...]

Mr. Wilson, who opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom and works as an adviser to Democratic Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign, accused Mr. Bush of twisting the facts "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
    
The accusation set off a feeding frenzy in the media that intensified after conservative columnist Robert Novak mentioned in a July 2003 column that Mr. Wilson's Niger trip had been suggested by his wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA employee.
[...]
 Mr. Wilson, who did not return phone calls yesterday,
[Can you imagine? Have you ever seen a publicity whore like Wilson pass a camera or a mirror without diving in? I love it, though.
Maybe he actually has a sense of shame, unlike most of the people in his political party!]
has publicly accused White House political strategist Karl Rove of leaking the name, although he has provided no evidence to back up that accusation.
   
 "It's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs," he told an audience on Aug. 21, 2003.
[As I've stated below, it's Joe Wilson and his wife I'd like to see frog-marched off to jail in handcuffs!
No-one talks about Ms.
Plame's ethics and why she would compromise our national security by letting her partisan husband handle a matter of our national security!]
   
 Earlier this year, Mr. Wilson parlayed the controversy into a book, "The Politics of Truth," in which he insisted that his wife was not the one who had suggested that the CIA send him to Niger.
[Oh, goody! Another Bush-bashing book that's all made up of lies. Just what we need...Thud.]

"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Mr. Wilson wrote. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."
    
But that assertion was disputed by the Senate intelligence committee report last week.
[And then this British report really put the matter to rest!--Jen]
[....]
According to the Senate report, Mrs. Plame boasted to her CIA superiors about Mr. Wilson's contacts with Niger.
[...]

Like the British report, the United States did not back away from Mr. Bush's State of the Union assertion. The U.S. report said Mr. Wilson did little to change the CIA's belief that Iraq had tried to buy uranium.
    
"The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts' assessment of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal," the U.S. report said. "For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal."

Mr. Wilson has defended his position by pointing out that some documents linking Iraq with Niger were forgeries. U.S. and British officials said the forgeries may have been a red herring to cloud the issue
[And like the real idiot he is, Wilson fell for it!] and, in any event, did not surface until after the link had been established.

For my money, Conservative talk radio host supreme Hugh Hewitt puts it simply and best on his equally terrific blog:

[...]...Joe Wilson lied.  Joe Wilson's wife did have a hand in sending him to Niger. Saddam was trying to buy enriched uranium from Niger --and there is only one reason to do so, which is to build nukes. And Bush and Blair didn't lie. In fact. they acted as any sane leader would act: To preemptively remove a dangerous tyrant trying to gain even more lethal weapons than the ones our intelligence agencies already believed him to possess.

Instapundit ...is right to gloat over the collapse of credibility of the Bush Lied crowd, but note carefully how they are covering their collective ears and raising their collective voices so as not to have to notice the appearance of the truth at their door. The truth doesn't matter to these people.  Power matters. They want it back, even if it means denying real threats to the country and thereby setting impossibly high standards of threat visibility in the future.  Quite simply, they have taken the Democratic Party to a position where it could not be trusted to take any action to prevent an attack on the United States because they have denounced the legitimate basis for having attacked Saddam. They have raised the bar too high to ever act preemptively, and in so doing, have disqualified themselves.  It is that stark.

Thanks for the clear analysis, Hugh (and for all the other fine work you do--I listen to him every weeknight!).
We can only hope and pray that the Left's attempt to raise the bar too high on President Bush's policy of preemption is an abyssmal failure, for as our troops help the Iraqis settle down in their newly born democracy, we have problems looming ever larger with the NorKs and with the Iranians;
Behold, if you have a strong stomach and lots of courage to read these current reports:
North Korea admits to nuclear weapons facility, says US
Iran Plans to Continue Nuke Program Work
Diplomats: Iran Atomic Shopping Deepens Bomb Fears.
I would have you note the bellicosity of both nation's insistence on their "right" to pursue nukes, but it will only upset and outrage you, as it does me.
These 2 reports--that of Congress and of Lord Butler--came just in the nick of time!
These Axis of Evil countries need to know that the Civilized World, led by Bush and Blair with the backing and the confidence of a good majority of their citizens, will hold the leaders of these rogue states responsible for developing WMDs and harboring and sponsoring terrorism as we did Iraq and Afghanistan.

    

July 15, 2004

Via the Drudge Report:
Guantanamo braces for change: South Florida Sun-Sentinel

For nearly two years, the prisoner refused to talk about terrorist connections. Then, a few days ago, an interrogator got him chatting.

Puffing on a cigarette, sipping coffee, and eating chocolate cake, he sat for hours in an orange jumpsuit and shackles talking to U.S. operatives in the "Gold 12" room of a trailer at the Navy's Guantanamo Bay base in eastern Cuba.


An intelligence analyst listened on headphones, watching from behind a two-way mirror while typing the prisoner's disclosures into a U.S. global database on terrorism.
[I didn't know we'd put this into operation, but delighted to hear about it!--Jen]

At one point, an interrogator rose and gave the detainee an all-American high-five. The prisoner laughed.

"We get pieces of the puzzle," said Esteban Rodriguez, who leads the information-gathering teams. "Then we compare it to what others have said. We are getting successful intelligence."

Military and civilian interrogators at the highest levels here say the government has collected thousands of pages of intelligence at Guantanamo about terrorist cells in the U.S. and around the world, the financing of operations and the planning of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Such claims cannot be independently confirmed, and human-rights activists have doubts about the information.
[What would we do without their watchful eyes?]

But in intelligence briefings given here to the Tribune last week, the Tribune learned that recent information from Guantanamo has derailed plans for attacks during the Athens Olympics next month and possibly forestalled at least a dozen attacks elsewhere.

This detention facility has been cloaked in secrecy since the U.S. decided in early 2002 to bring prisoners from Afghanistan and elsewhere to Guantanamo.

Now, the veil is lifting in the wake of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision giving prisoners held as enemy combatants the right to challenge their detention.

In gaining access to the detention facility, the Tribune agreed to allow military officials to escort its reporter and photographer, to choose the itinerary and to screen photographs and delete those that the Pentagon regarded as compromising intelligence.

Under the agreement, no detainees could be photographed showing their faces and no pictures were allowed of interrogations and of some other venues at the base.

CNN, which toured Guantanamo at the same time as the Tribune, operated under the same arrangements.

Commanders here fear the Supreme Court ruling will cause the intelligence operation to be compromised because prisoners will have access to people outside the base.

Under orders from President Bush, the nearly 600 detainees at Guantanamo have remained without hearings or counsel since 2002.

In coming days, that will change as legal processes unfold.

There is much skepticism, however, about the value and legitimacy of what's been learned at Guantanamo.

Human-rights groups that have only incomplete lists of detainees' names reportedly have found that many were picked up in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere
[Jihadi killers, all, I have no doubt!--Jen]
after the U.S. offered bounties for the capture of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.

In some cases, human-rights groups charge, detainees were wrongly apprehended because locals turned them in for the money.
[So why aren't there thousands, if not millions of detainees there, hmmm? Because Heaven knows the people in these countries are poor enough.]

Lawyers contend the government is inflating the value of its intelligence from Guantanamo to bolster its case to detain people without due process.

And there is no way to verify government claims about Guantanamo activities and humane treatment because interviews with prisoners are prohibited and documents classified.

"We don't know what goes on in Guantanamo because we haven't been allowed there," said Jumana Musa of Amnesty International.

Intelligence agents here acknowledge that up to half and possibly two-thirds of the detainees have little more of value to tell.
[How do they know this???]

More than 150 detainees' cases have been in a bureaucratic limbo in Washington for the last year, awaiting review by several federal agencies.

Commanders at Guantanamo say they hope the Supreme Court decision will hasten the release of those prisoners.
[Trust me: our people get no joy from keeping these nasty men under guard!]

"We need to let go of those who have no purpose and who are no longer a threat," said one high-level commander.

But senior officials say they are convinced that at least 10 percent of the prisoners have yet to talk.

Most of that percentage are hard-core terrorists who intelligence officers know have crucial information about Al Qaeda and terrorism, officials say.

While designed as a prison, Guantanamo's Camp Delta's primary mission now is not detention but

Detainees are mostly kept in Camp Delta in barracks. Military guards keep watch through personal and high-tech surveillance so that no inmate is out of sight for more than 30 seconds.
Detainees are taken several times a month to intelligence interrogations where U.S. operatives chat with them, mostly about their personal lives.
Interrogators probe for ways to get detainees to divulge intelligence. Sometimes that comes while playing board games with the detainees. Other times it comes out of building a personal relationship, interrogators said.

Detainees who cooperate are given incentives such as more time outdoors and additional toiletries. About 150 have been moved to a minimum-security area where they share communal meals, wear traditional white Arab clothing, are given reading lessons in their native languages and even get an occasional day of beach recreation.

"They have been consistently getting very valuable intelligence at Guantanamo," said Bob Newman, a former military intelligence officer and interrogation expert. Newman, now a Denver talk show host, said he speaks regularly with those involved in gathering intelligence at Guantanamo.
"If the American people only knew some of it, they would fight to keep Guantanamo as closed as possible," he said.
[Well, that says it all, doesn't it?!
Close the door. We're done here.--Jen]

Droves of civilian lawyers will soon descend on the island to do otherwise.
The information they gather, along with descriptions of detention here from dozens of prisoners who may be freed soon, will give Guantanamo the public scrutiny that officials sought for years to avoid.
Starting this week, the inmates will be formally informed about the recent Supreme Court decision.
Over the next weeks, three military panels, each with three officers, will evaluate their cases. In the end, they will be charged, let go or transferred. The panels are to start early this week and work six days a week, conducting hearings for 12 prisoners a day and 72 per week, the Pentagon said Friday.

Meanwhile, more than 60 lawsuits have been filed in U.S. courts challenging the way the military plans to handle detainee cases.
Lawyers hope to get details from detainees to determine their treatment and the government's interrogation methods. From scant reports, lawyers fear detainees are suffering under the duress of being locked up, most of them in single cells, with no due process.

Several lawsuits allege that the detainees have been subject to duress such as being forced to stand for hours or sit for prolong periods in uncomfortable positions.
[Oooh! Sounds pretty uncomfortable!]

In interviews, guards, intelligence officers and senior leaders claim the kinds of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq did not occur here.
A handful of guards have been disciplined for breaking regulations and dealing harshly with detainees. But human-rights groups say conditions need review and transparency.

This week, a congressional committee will receive hundreds of videotapes showing the conduct of an elite squad here that responds to trouble in the cells. It will be the first public airing of footage taken in the closed cellblocks that shows guards dealing with detainees.

Of the 500 tapes reviewed here by military commanders, at least three dozen are being analyzed further for possible violations, they said. Most are technical or procedural problems and do not constitute abuse, commanders say.

As the government braces for details about Guantanamo to be made public, the Pentagon is considering moving the detainees it considers of highest value elsewhere.

It's likely that Bagram air base in Afghanistan will soon become the hub of intelligence activities rather than Guantanamo, officials here predict.
"Guantanamo as we have known it will never be again," said a senior commander here. "The nature of intelligence gathering is that it is done in secret. That can't fully happen anymore."

Isn't that pitiful, that our own Supreme Court has made that a ruling that may involve not only putting the lives of Americans in jeopardy, but that they are working at odds in wartime with our Pentagon?
(I hated the Abu Ghraib story from the get-go because I knew it was basically a tempest in a teapot manufactured by the Media, but you've got to wonder how much that reportage influenced the Supremes.)
Whatever our people are doing, I want them to keep doing it and I don't want these thugs in U.S. courts or being released to potentially try to harm us again!

Envoy: Palestinian Authority May Collapse

The U.N. Mideast envoy on Tuesday said the Palestinian Authority has made no progress toward combating terror attacks against Israel and is "in real danger of collapse."
[This is the best news I've heard all week!--Jen]

Terje Roed-Larsen's assessment received a rebuke from the Palestinians and praise from the Israelis, despite his criticism of Israel's lack of progress in dismantling new settlements and freezing settlement activity.
[They're working on it! Give them a little more time because the Israeli Right Wing is being stubborn.]

U.S. Ambassador John Danforth called it "a good ... balanced presentation" which stressed that progress toward peace must come through the political process and the road map endorsed by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.

He said the U.N. envoy's view of the Palestinian Authority's weakness raised an "alarm" and "a question of whether it's possible to have a negotiated peace if one side is so weak that there isn't anything to negotiate with."

Roed-Larsen painted a grim picture of lawlessness in the Palestinian Authority, its failure to institute critical reforms, and he blamed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

He lamented that there was "no sign" of the bold leadership needed to tackle Palestinian reform and move toward peace.

"The Palestinian Authority, despite consistent promises by its leadership,
[This is all that Arafat has ever offered: meaningless lip service to "peace."]
has made no progress on its core obligation to take immediate action on the ground to end violence and combat terror, and to reform and reorganize the Palestinian Authority," he said.

Roed-Larsen said the only explanation is "the lack of political will" to advance toward reform, which is critically needed in the security services.

"Despite a well-intended prime minister, the paralysis of the Palestinian Authority has become abundantly clear," he said.

"Clashes and showdowns between branches of Palestinian security forces are now common in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian Authority legal authority is receding fast in the face of the mounting power of arms, money and intimidation," Roed-Larsen said.

"The perceived Palestinian Authority abdication of responsibility" has led many residents of Rafah in southern Gaza to take matters into their own hands, including establishing a checkpoint to prevent Palestinian officials from entering the city or crossing into Egypt, he said.

The security problem has also spread to the West Bank.

"Lawlessness and gang rule is becoming common in Nablus," and "Jericho is actually becoming the only Palestinian city with a functioning police," he said.

The U.N. envoy stressed that "this collapse of authority cannot be attributed only to the Israeli incursions and operations inside Palestinian towns. The Palestinian Authority is in deep distress, and is in real danger of collapse."

Nasser Al-Kidwa, the Palestinian U.N. observer, disagreed, saying Roed-Larsen presented "a completely distorted picture."

"The Palestinian Authority has serious problems, but I would say that this is the direct result of Israeli policies and Israeli actions," he said. "We have occupation. We have an occupying power that has been engaged on a daily basis in illegal activities, war crimes."
[Actually, when the Israelis take down the settlements and settle in behind their fence in not too very long, the Paleostinians will no longer have this an excuse--which is all this ever was--and they will be left to live in the pigsty they created, just as Iraqi jihadis can no longer blame their woes on an "occupying" American force.--J.T.]

Al-Kidwa also criticized the U.N. envoy's support for Sharon's plan to withdraw from Gaza and his failure to urge Israel to comply with the world court's advisory opinion calling for the destruction of the barrier it is building to seal off the West Bank.

As for peace, Al-Kidwa warned that "there is no road map without a cessation of settlement activities and a cessation of the construction of the wall."

They're not going to stop building the fence--it's never going to happen!
Sharon may have the settlements ended (for the time being), but the fence is going to stay, because it's so obviously working as a barrier to terror attacks!
Of course, the PA has always contained the seeds of its own destruction and that is why President Bush planned his strategery the way he did, starting with his Rose Garden speech on March 24, 2002.
The deal is this--Arafat and his boys have to give up terror to get their state and that they're not going to do.
Between the imminent collapse of the PA and plans for Arafat's funeral, Life is looking a lot better for God's people in the Holy Land!

Passengers' good will turned soldiers' trip home into a flight of fancy

U.S soldiers fresh from Iraq were surprised but grateful for the first-class seats on Flight 866 from Atlanta to Chicago.

It all began with a chance encounter at an airport, a glance, an offer, a quiet chat.

What's your seat number, soldier?

It's 23-B, sir, the soldier told the businessman.

No, son, that's my seat. Yours is in first class.

As more soldiers boarded, similar offers quickly came from the other first-class passengers.

And eight soldiers heading home from Iraq for two weeks of R&R found themselves with their officers in the big seats up front instead of the center seats in coach.

U.S soldiers fresh from Iraq were surprised but grateful for the first-class seats on Flight 866 from Atlanta to Chicago.

That spontaneous act of good will transformed American Airlines Flight 866, from Atlanta to Chicago, on June 29.

"The soldiers were very, very happy, and the whole aircraft had a different feeling," said Lorrie Gammon, one of the Dallas-based flight attendants working the trip.

"There were 14 seats in first class, and there were 12 soldiers there. The other two first-class passengers wanted to give up their seats, too, but they couldn't find any more soldiers."

Flight attendant Candi Spradlin of Conway, Ark., said she was impressed with how passengers treated the soldiers.

"If nothing else, those soldiers got a great homecoming," she said.

The soldiers were so surprised they barely knew what to do, said Ms. Gammon, who lives in Frisco.

"They were so humble and thankful – they spent the whole flight saying thank you," she said.

"But we should have been saying thank you to them for what they're doing for us."

[Sorry not to be able to post the link, but the DallasNews website is hinky!]
Way to go, my fellow considerate and grateful Americans and thank you for me and mine, too, to all you fine soldiers!

July 14, 2004

Yahoo! News - Bush Twins Break Silence About Campaign, Parties

Shielded for years from public view, President Bush's twin daughters have broken their silence in an interview describing a karaoke party at Camp David and how they surprised their father by deciding to join his campaign.

And I, for one, am delighted as I'm sure George and Laura are, too!
I've still got my fingers crossed that one (if not both) of these precious girls meet Mr. Right in the next year or two so that we can have a White House wedding during President Bush's second term.
Bless you, girls, for showing your love and support for your father when and where he can appreciate it the most and I pray that lots of your college-age peers will follow your beautiful examples!