The war in Iraq.

[Nemont]

Nemont- Do you believe GW was mistaken or lied about the WMD's? Do you believe going to war should be based on more than third party intelligence or should that intelligence have confirmation? Do you really believe the reason we went to war with Iraq is based solely on the WMD's that Iraq was purported to have? If so, why are we not attacking N. Korea?

Should we continue to support a war that was started based on bad intelligence and misinformation?

At this point I won't get into the questions about GW leadership skills and his accountability.

Matt,

Does any of that make GWB a murderer? I never said a word about supporting a war or anything.

Answer my question first and then I will answer yours. Explain how GWB should be tried for murder and if such a case exists why has there been no move to impeach?

I don't care if you support the war or not support the war. I don't care if you hate the President or love him.

We should not give a free pass to anyone who ties the conservatives to a fringe group of lunatics. Nor do I believe we should give a pass to people who make stupid statements about the President being a murderer.


So please make your case for impeahment and tying conservative to crazies first and then I will anwer your questions regarding the war and N. Korea etc.

Nemont

 

[JB]

So please make your case for impeahment

illegal domestic surveillance program.

 

[Nemont]

illegal domestic surveillance program.

Okay make your case using the facts.

BTW I don't disagree with you. I was responding to the GWB is a murderer rant but if anything this administration has done that is illegal it would be going around the FISA court. The stupid part is that it was not necessary to avoid the FISA court.

Thanks,

Nemont

 

[JB]

Okay make your case using the facts.

In March 2004, a standoff between the White House and the Justice Department ensued because James Comey, the department's No. 2 in command, would not authorize a continuation of the warrantless wiretaps, Comey told lawmakers.

"We communicated to the relevant parties at the White House and elsewhere our decision that as acting attorney general I would not certify the program as to its legality, and explained our reasoning in detail, which I will not go into here," Comey testified.

Responding to questions by Senator Chuck Schumer, (D-New York), Comey said Justice Department officials "had concerns as to our ability to certify its legality, which was our obligation for the program to be renewed."
"You thought something was wrong with how it was being operated or administered or overseen?" Schumer asked.

"We had - yes," Comey said.

The surveillance program was secretly authorized by President Bush after 9/11 to monitor communications between alleged terrorist suspects abroad and US citizens without first obtaining approval from a special court designated to authorize such activities under guidelines known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The program has come under fire by civil liberties groups and Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who said innocent American citizens have been caught up in the wiretaps.

Comey told lawmakers that his refusal to reauthorize the spy program resulted in a hastily arranged late-night meeting at a hospital, where then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and President Bush's former Chief of Staff Andrew Card tried to coerce a barely conscious John Ashcroft to approve the controversial eavesdropping program. Comey said he also was present at the meeting.

Ashcroft was in intensive care at the time, hospitalized with pancreatitis, but, according to Comey, Ashcroft was able to rebut the arguments made by Gonzales and refused to sign the authorization. Comey testified that Ashcroft had not recertified the program earlier because he had reservations about its legality. Comey assumed control of Ashcroft's duties as attorney general after Ashcroft was hospitalized. Under federal law, the spy program was supposed to be recertified by the Department of Justice every 45 days.

Comey described in extraordinary detail how the March 9, 2004 meeting at the hospital unfolded.

"I was headed home at about 8 o'clock that evening; my security detail was driving me," Comey said.

"And I remember exactly where I was - on Constitution Avenue - and got a call from Attorney General Ashcroft's chief of staff telling me that he had gotten a call from Mrs. Ashcroft from the hospital ... Mrs. Ashcroft reported that the call had come through, and that as a result of that call, Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales were on their way to the hospital to see Mr. Ashcroft."

Comey said that he rushed to the hospital to arrive before the White House officials.

Comey testified that he believed President Bush had phoned Ashcroft's hospital room directly, and he was sure that the call "came from the White House." Mrs. Ashcroft was not allowing any calls to be taken by her ill husband. She then called Ashcroft's chief of staff to inform him that the White House was sending Gonzales and Card to the hospital to meet with the debilitated attorney general face to face.

At Ashcroft's bedside, Gonzales did most of the talking, Comey said, adding that Gonzales and Card pressed the attorney general to reauthorize the program in spite of reservations about its legality. Comey said Ashcroft reiterated his concerns and refused to sign the order reauthorizing the program.
Ashcroft "lifted his head off the pillow, and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me - drawn from the hour-long meeting we'd had a week earlier - and in very strong terms expressed himself, and then laid his head back down on the pillow, seemed spent, and said to them, 'I'm not the attorney general,'" Comey said, adding that Gonzales and Card left the hospital that evening without a signature from the Justice Department allowing the surveillance program to continue.

"I was very upset. I was angry," Comey testified. "I thought I just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me.... I was concerned that this was an effort to do an end run around the acting attorney general and to get a very sick man to approve something that the Department of Justice had already concluded - the department as a whole - was unable to be certified as to its legality. And that was my concern."

The next day, March 10, 2004 the White House sidestepped the judicial process and signed off on the program anyway, and continued to monitor American citizens' communications in what appeared to be a violation of the law.
"The program was reauthorized without us and without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality," Comey said.

The meeting at George Washington University Hospital and the administration's total disregard of the law so disturbed Comey that he threatened to resign in protest, he told lawmakers.

"I prepared a letter of resignation, intending to resign the next day, Friday, March the 12th," Comey said. "I believed that I couldn't - I couldn't stay, if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis. I just simply couldn't stay."

Comey added that FBI Director Robert Mueller was prepared to resign in protest, as well as were other officials in the Justice Department. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee that shortly thereafter he spoke to President Bush "in his study and we had a one-on-one meeting for about 15 minutes - again, which I will not go into the substance of. It was a very full exchange."
The revelations Tuesday, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, are just another example of the politicization of the Justice Department under the leadership of Gonzales.

In an interview with Truthout following Comey's testimony, Philip Heymann, a former deputy attorney general, said he believed Gonzales and the other White House officials had behaved like "thugs."

"This gives you an understanding of what Gonzales thinks about the Department of Justice," said Heymann, now a law professor at Harvard University. "You had the most complete form of legal deliberation over the NSA spying issue; hours of discussion between FBI, DOJ, the solicitor general, and through this process, the DOJ decides that the program is not legal. To do this by using a ploy - which couldn't possibly amount to a sound legal judgment, and in effect creating a war, with the Justice Department rallying its forces to uphold the law - the White House officials, led by Gonzales and Card, were behaving like thugs."

Of course, the same article of impeachment declared that Nixon had acted "in disregard of the rule of law" and had "failed to take care that the laws were faithfully executed." If those standards were applied today, the history of the warrantless wiretapping program over the past six years would provide more than enough justification for similar action against Bush.

 

[MattK]

Nemont- 1) What JB said. 2) I don't believe in trying GW for murder...If any impeachment were to happen it would have to be based on perjury and illegal actions taken but I doubt it would ever or could happen. It's way too late in his presidency to get something like that started. As for the conservative kooks...people listen to Rushbo by the millions. Should we just ignore his rants also or could he be speaking for the Republican party? How about Michael Savage...Does he speak for the Republican party/ conservatives? Do you think Savage is radical or is he a spokesman for conservatism in the US today? Does this "radical" conservative religious group represent the conservative party or just a fringe group? I honestly don't know the answer. You tell me.

 

[Nemont]

Nemont- 1) What JB said. 2) I don't believe in trying GW for murder...If any impeachment were to happen it would have to be based on perjury and illegal actions taken but I doubt it would ever or could happen. It's way too late in his presidency to get something like that started. As for the conservative kooks...people listen to Rushbo by the millions. Should we just ignore his rants also or could he be speaking for the Republican party? How about Michael Savage...Does he speak for the Republican party/ conservatives? Do you think Savage is radical or is he a spokesman for conservatism in the US today? Does this "radical" conservative religious group represent the conservative party or just a fringe group? I honestly don't know the answer. You tell me.

People listen to Air America as well. Does that mean Randi Rhodes and Mark Green speak for the liberals?

If you believe that a this "Church" from Kansas represents anything in American Conservative politics then there isn't much sense in debating anything with you further.

Also Perjury is when someone lies under oath. I don't think that GWB has been under oath during his presidency.

I don't listen to Rush, Savage, Hannity. I do enjoy Larry Elder as he has not drank the Kool-Ade.

Do you believe there are liberal kooks just as there are conservative kooks?

Nemont

 

[cjcj]

CJ,

Bin Laden has been seeking Nukes and WMD's, and Duby has left him in power.

Hoser could you tell us about Bin Ladens "POWER" where is it? and where is his country?... Oh you can`t answer... |oo

 

[danr55]

"The people of this country ARE working together. If you remember, the people of this country got together in November and voted the GOP out of control of the Senate and House and elected people with a mandate to get our troops out of Iraq.

What more do you want them to do?"

THe electorate of this country have become, for the most part, a bunch of namby pamby, "if you can't finish it in 1 hour it's not worth doing" "don't rock the boat" "don't let the cops chase the bad guys" pussies. Dump the TV mentality and support the troops. Remeber what these rag heads did in Manhattan. Rather than cutting and running, some substantial ass kicking is in order. Fighting a limited war with restrictive rules of engagement, while politically expedient, is a definite recipe for failure from the pint of view of the guys with thier asses in the grass..or the sand as the case may be. I seem to remember all that failure mode starting in Korea. "You can't bomb here" and "you can't chase them past this line of latitude" and "you can't shoot until".. and "don't you dare carry loaded firearms in camp!" It's all crap. If you are going to fight a war, then fight it. If you start it, then finish it and do so in a most expeditious manner. I agree with you that Bush has failed the nation. (So did Chaney and so did Rumsfeld.) Not because he won't bring the troops home, but because with all of the bullshit restrictions that have been placed on them, they never had a chance of winning..not to mention they were so poorly equipped that I'm really surprised that we didn't lose more of them. Does it remind any of you older guys of another war fought across the water? I wonder if that had any relationship to Gen. Powell resigning?

So now where is the electorate turning? To some elitist would be queen of America. A woman who cares nothing about the nation or the people and is only interested in getting her name in the history books and securing a place i the world for her equals... of which she is sure she has very few.

Who knows. If that's what they want, maybe that's what they deserve.

 

[ELKCHSR]

The democrats have hedged all their bets on the side of losing; they have taken all their stock in failure

For all our sakes, I for one hope they aren't allowed to indulge this line of thinking, they will drag us all down with their defeatist ways

 

[BigHornRam]

Good Read From A Democrat On This Issue

The Left's Iraq Muddle
Yes, it is central to the fight against Islamic radicalism.

BY BOB KERREY
Tuesday, May 22, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

At this year's graduation celebration at The New School in New York, Iranian lawyer, human-rights activist and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi delivered our commencement address. This brave woman, who has been imprisoned for her criticism of the Iranian government, had many good and wise things to say to our graduates, which earned their applause.

But one applause line troubled me. Ms. Ebadi said: "Democracy cannot be imposed with military force."

What troubled me about this statement--a commonly heard criticism of U.S. involvement in Iraq--is that those who say such things seem to forget the good U.S. arms have done in imposing democracy on countries like Japan and Germany, or Bosnia more recently.



Let me restate the case for this Iraq war from the U.S. point of view. The U.S. led an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein because Iraq was rightly seen as a threat following Sept. 11, 2001. For two decades we had suffered attacks by radical Islamic groups but were lulled into a false sense of complacency because all previous attacks were "over there." It was our nation and our people who had been identified by Osama bin Laden as the "head of the snake." But suddenly Middle Eastern radicals had demonstrated extraordinary capacity to reach our shores.
As for Saddam, he had refused to comply with numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions outlining specific requirements related to disclosure of his weapons programs. He could have complied with the Security Council resolutions with the greatest of ease. He chose not to because he was stealing and extorting billions of dollars from the U.N. Oil for Food program.
No matter how incompetent the Bush administration and no matter how poorly they chose their words to describe themselves and their political opponents, Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before. And no matter how much we might want to turn the clock back and either avoid the invasion itself or the blunders that followed, we cannot. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is over. What remains is a war to overthrow the government of Iraq.

Some who have been critical of this effort from the beginning have consistently based their opposition on their preference for a dictator we can control or contain at a much lower cost. From the start they said the price tag for creating an environment where democracy could take root in Iraq would be high. Those critics can go to sleep at night knowing they were right.

The critics who bother me the most are those who ordinarily would not be on the side of supporting dictatorships, who are arguing today that only military intervention can prevent the genocide of Darfur, or who argued yesterday for military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda to ease the sectarian violence that was tearing those places apart.

Suppose we had not invaded Iraq and Hussein had been overthrown by Shiite and Kurdish insurgents. Suppose al Qaeda then undermined their new democracy and inflamed sectarian tensions to the same level of violence we are seeing today. Wouldn't you expect the same people who are urging a unilateral and immediate withdrawal to be urging military intervention to end this carnage? I would.

American liberals need to face these truths: The demand for self-government was and remains strong in Iraq despite all our mistakes and the violent efforts of al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to disrupt it. Al Qaeda in particular has targeted for abduction and murder those who are essential to a functioning democracy: school teachers, aid workers, private contractors working to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, police officers and anyone who cooperates with the Iraqi government. Much of Iraq's middle class has fled the country in fear.

With these facts on the scales, what does your conscience tell you to do? If the answer is nothing, that it is not our responsibility or that this is all about oil, then no wonder today we Democrats are not trusted with the reins of power. American lawmakers who are watching public opinion tell them to move away from Iraq as quickly as possible should remember this: Concessions will not work with either al Qaeda or other foreign fighters who will not rest until they have killed or driven into exile the last remaining Iraqi who favors democracy.

The key question for Congress is whether or not Iraq has become the primary battleground against the same radical Islamists who declared war on the U.S. in the 1990s and who have carried out a series of terrorist operations including 9/11. The answer is emphatically "yes."

This does not mean that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11; he was not. Nor does it mean that the war to overthrow him was justified--though I believe it was. It only means that a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq would hand Osama bin Laden a substantial psychological victory.



Those who argue that radical Islamic terrorism has arrived in Iraq because of the U.S.-led invasion are right. But they are right because radical Islam opposes democracy in Iraq. If our purpose had been to substitute a dictator who was more cooperative and supportive of the West, these groups wouldn't have lasted a week.
Finally, Jim Webb said something during his campaign for the Senate that should be emblazoned on the desks of all 535 members of Congress: You do not have to occupy a country in order to fight the terrorists who are inside it. Upon that truth I believe it is possible to build what doesn't exist today in Washington: a bipartisan strategy to deal with the long-term threat of terrorism.

The American people will need that consensus regardless of when, and under what circumstances, we withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq. We must not allow terrorist sanctuaries to develop any place on earth. Whether these fighters are finding refuge in Syria, Iran, Pakistan or elsewhere, we cannot afford diplomatic or political excuses to prevent us from using military force to eliminate them.

Mr. Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska and member of the 9/11 Commission, is president of The New School.

 

[Curly]

Mr. Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska and member of the 9/11 Commission, is president of The New School.

See........not all Democrats are liberals. This guy actually makes sense.

 

[JoseCuervo]

See........not all Democrats are liberals. This guy actually makes sense.

Don't you have another soldier's funeral to go protest?

 

[noharleyyet]

Don't you have another soldier's funeral to go protest?

Don't you have another pejorative blog to post?

 

[ELKCHSR]

Don't you have another soldier's funeral to go protest?

Your one of the only ones on this board I could see actually indulging in this endeavor

One of the less intelligent comment to date...