The folks in MSNBC's Documentaries department have released a small set of clips from the shooting of Hubris: Selling the Iraq War that are not included in the final cut of the documentary, including the one below of tonight's guest, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, on whether speaking out against the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq would have been heeded.
Hubris re-airs this Friday, March 22 at 9 p.m. ET
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If we had a congress that would stand for something. The Democratic party bends over to the Republican party every time, no backbone.
House Dems voted 82 for, and 126 against the authorization of force in Iraq.
Senate Dems voted 29 for, and 21 against.
Moderate Dems protest that they were persuaded of the administration that there was credible evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat to US cities and that this would give the President needed negotiation leverage to force Iraq to submit to inspections to verify the truth.
Those who voted against believed that Bush wanted any excuse to go to war with Iraq and that the pretext was all a charade. I happened to be one who had no faith in Bush's sincerity or good will, but reasonable people could have believed that in office, Bush would be a faithful public servant and not make such craven calculations.
What Lawrence Wilkerson is saying here though is more important. He is saying that there is no avenue for anyone even within the intelligence community to stand up and say the emperor has no clothes.
This is a grave concern, and the house and senate intelligence communities need to establish a protocol for whistleblowers so that information can confidentially flow to members of the committee with complete confidentiality, and without fear of professional retaliation.
If the Senate Intelligence committee had access to the grave doubts expressed in the intelligence community, it is hard to believe that Bush would have won the authorization vote.
I am hypothesizing an outcome if there were such a confidential channel. It could be naive on two points:
Hey John,
So why did these Democrats make these statements?
"We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."
-- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002
"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
-- Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002
He has systematically violated, over the course of the past 11 years, every significant UN resolution that has demanded that he disarm and destroy his chemical and biological weapons, and any nuclear capacity. This he has refused to do"
-- Rep. Henry Waxman (D, CA), Oct. 10, 2002
"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members ... It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."
-- Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct 10, 2002
Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction ... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real..."
-- Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003
Did these Senators know something or just playing politics with soldier's lives?
To..Bob""""
Claim: Quotes reproduce statements made by Democratic leaders about Saddam Hussein's acquisition or possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Origins: All
the quotes listed above are substantially correct reproductions of statements made by various Democratic leaders regarding Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's acquisition or possession of weapons of mass destruction.
However, some of the quotes are truncated, and context is provided for none of them — several of these quotes were offered in the course of statements that clearly indicated the speaker was decidedly against unilateral military intervention in Iraq by the U.S. Moreover, several of the quotes offered antedate the four nights of airstrikes unleashed against Iraq by U.S. and British forces during Operation Desert Fox in December 1998, after which Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and Gen. Henry H. Shelton (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) announced the action had been successful in "degrad[ing] Saddam Hussein's ability to deliver chemical, biological and nuclear weapons."
In the section below where we highlight these quotes, we've tried to provide sufficient surrounding material to make clear the context in which the quotes were offered as well as include links to the full text from which they were derived wherever possible.
....http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/wmdquotes.asp
To..Bob"""
And...
Congress Doesn't See Same Intelligence as President, Report Finds
Thursday 15 December 2005
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Washington - President Bush and top administration officials have access to a much broader ranger of intelligence reports than members of Congress do, a nonpartisan congressional research agency said in a report Thursday, raising questions about recent assertions by the president.
(snip)
The Congressional Research Service, by contrast, said: "The president, and a small number of presidentially designated Cabinet-level officials, including the vice president ... have access to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information, including information regarding intelligence sources and methods."
Unlike members of Congress, the president and his top officials also have the authority to ask U.S. intelligence agencies more extensively for follow-up information, the report said. "As a result, the president and his most senior advisers arguably are better positioned to assess the quality of the ... intelligence more accurately than is Congress."
The CRS report identified nine key U.S. intelligence "products" that aren't generally shared with Congress. These include the President's Daily Brief, a compilation of analyses that's given only to the president and a handful of top aides, and a daily digest on terrorism-related matters.
The White House didn't respond to a request for comment.
(snip)
Knight Ridder also has reported that the Bush administration relied on information that wasn't shared with Congress, including bogus claims by Iraqi defectors supplied by a former Iraqi exile group.
Also withheld from Congress was a discredited report by a now-defunct Pentagon unit that alleged that Saddam was cooperating with the al-Qaida terrorist network. No evidence of such a link has been found.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/reports/intelligence/story/13180.html
Sorry to leave this OT comment here, but you folks need to get NC on your radar. Gerrymandering changed Raleigh and Gov. McCrory is changing NC. Voter ID is now on deck. You also need to look at HB 4 and SB 4. Serious damage is in progress. Think MI/WI and ALEC.
Z
when investigating gerrymanderibg, also include Illinois. If people like zzoyd are against this practice, then Im sure he (she) will back it as well.
Rachel.......55,000 Americans died in Viet Nam.
Both Hubris and Ed Schultz' interview with Scott Prouty are worthy of Edward R Murrow Awards. Thank you both.
Rachel....55,000 Americans died in Viet Nam.
We know. She said 16,000 died after LBJ said it was ending and Nixon screwed it up.
Between 1969 and 2006, the total is 21,264. http://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics.html That's excluding Nov. 6, 1968 - Dec. 31, 1968
The entire PNAC crowd needs to be hung for their War Crimes!
Capitalism has turned war into a money making machine. We don't push for more guns in the streets or war after war to make us safe: we push for more wars because someone makes a huge profit. The trillion dollar war put 100 billion dollars of profit into the pockets of a "few good men" and the gun industry does the same thing. See how many wars we would wage if nobody was making a profit off it. The middle class has been "hoodwinked."
Is it still considered being hoodwinked if you know what's going on but you can't do anything about it?
OF COURSE NOT --
When is someone going to bring charges against Dick Cheney for profiting during
wartime with his Haliburton company overcharging the US military for gasoline and
for his involvement in hiring Haliburton to maintain Security in Iraq. It has always
been considered a conflict for any politician.
If true, then why isnt Holder all over this? Are you implying Holder is crooked?
When we protested the reasoning for getting into or remaining so long in Vietnam and Iraq, we were branded as traitors or worse. (At the same time, Vietnam vets were spat upon when we walked through airports ... possibly because folks didn't know how to better address the situation through their govt officials.) We went into Iraq and stayed in Vietnam and Iraq so long for same reason. Certain folks stood to make megabucks through their "interests"/"holdings" in or, may I say "bribes" from the civilian war machine corporations ... they profited from the weapon and munition makers, etc. And of course Brown & Root, aka Kellogg, Brown & Root, aka KBR, aka subsidiary of Halliburton now, actually date back to WWII ... and have a long history of, as the Government Accounting Office reported, of being responsible for massive accounting lapses and allowing thefts of materials in regards to their military contracts. And yet, we continued to use them through the years ... even to the point of not allowing any other bids. I wonder why. Perhaps somebody should ask Cheney.
Vietnam vets were spat upon when we walked through airports ...
A dubious claim , talking point , of a cherished value . Cousin to the intellectual heft found in the ancient art of name calling , this chestnut may be relied upon . As a hydra based two for one deal at your Sly Stallone history and narcissism den , join the popular kids in believing the unbelievable . The pleasing insults defamation of honorable Americans searching for the why in our determination to kill rather than befriend strangers satisfies , and they are mild . The coincidental elevation of a profiteering cabals search for anonymity simultaneously disguising the motive while simply selling war , war , war , has the stuff that jus cain't be beat . BYOO , Bring your own opium !
As disgusting as expiration-al based communication may be , is there a certain fury based kernel of truth within the contrived acts when they are mere phantoms of profiteering propaganda ?
Wilkerson and his boss Colin Powell by themselves could have had a significant effect by resigning. They made their choice and are fully deserving of everyone's disgust.
Paul Wolfowitz was interviewed on CCN this past Sunday (Mar. 16, 2013) by Fareed Zakaria.
Wolfowitz said,
"The question was whether Iraq was also part of the problem. And we could spend an entire show going into the historical detail."
But he didn't. The tenor of his argument was that Saadam had been a real bad guy for years and was surely going to develop WMD sooner or later.
You mention Wolfowitz in your book "Hubris" (I haven't read it--shame on me--not my thing) but from a "Look Inside" and comments on it, it doesn't look like you really hammered him.
(I think Gen. Powell needs to hammered more, too)
Wasn't Wolfowitz, along with Rice, one of "The Vulcans?"
in wiki he is quoted as saying,
"if we say our only problem was to respond to 9/11, and we wait until somebody hits us with nuclear weapons before we take that kind of threat seriously, we will have made a very big mistake."[32]
I'm surprised that you didn't slam his apologetics during your piece with Wilerson tonight.
Bob Hughes, Post Falls, Idaho
I can fully believe the fear of many who may have objected the the Iraq war. I have tried
for half an hour to remember Bushs most dareing critic. Aha! got it. KIETH OLBERMAN
It took a while but they got him. I need to look for him. His own hubris made him an easytarget.
Has anyone looked into Bush I's back stage machinations in Iran just before election day in Carter v. Bush? Is it too much conspiracy theory to suspect there's a smoking gun there, too. Just askin'.
I recall being among the very small minority at work who protested that there was no EVIDENCE to go to war. Just like I did for trickle down. I quickly learned that the populous was sold a bill of goods based on fear of further attacks. I shut up for fear of retaliation. We are quick to use muscle when we need to exercise our brains.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-21814734
I am a veteran of Viet Nam and so I was flabbergasted that our government was desiring to start a war in Iraq. The biggest problem that I had was the fact that it was a preemptive war. I wasn't convinced about the WMD but even if Saddam had them it wasn't in my mind a good enough reason to go to war. Especially a preemptive war. The Japanese launched a preemtive attack at Pearl Harbor and we have still not gotten over that. So how did we justify doing the same thing in Iraq?
I knew that Saddam was a bad guy. His sons were worse. But there were, and still are, more obnoxious dictators in the world that could be removed for more benefit to the world. Why start war with Iraq? A lot of people thought that Little George needed to finish the business started by Big George but that didn't make much sense to me. So what was the real reason for an invasion of Iraq? I had a theory.
My theory is probably wrong because I am just a plain ol' country hick with no access to the knowledge necessary reqired to form such a theory. And its also probably wrong because some smarter and better informed person has not expressed it. But here goes:
George was really interested in positioning for a war with the real enemy, Iran. Preparation for the continuation of the Crusades. He figured that our liberation of Iraq would make us beloved by the Iraqi people. And that our military would be able to establish lots of bases in the vicinity of Iran. A lot of our current politians our quite annoyed that we pulled out of Iraq a lot more thoroughly than they would like. And they are continuing to establish an excuse to militarily act in Iran. So its still going on.
Does this make sense to anyone else?
No, it was Dick "Wormtongue" Cheney, doing the bidding of the military industrial complex.
How do you stop a railroad when you do not own the tracks or drive the train. Even when you know the ground has a sink hole, we as individuals are not believed when our voices are raised.
Look at what is happening today. The people overwhelmingly support a gun measure but the ones WE selected, voted for, called, wrote to, and pay for are ignoring us. It is not about the people. The train runs over us. If we don't change the balance of power, get ready for the next staged war. Give up another generation.
I watched this segment and again found myself disappointed in Rachel's eagerness to declare that some people were "right" and "wrong" in their vote to authorize the use of force. I understand Rachel's political and philosophical viewpoint, and that she's eager on some level to make people pay for not opposing the Iraq War, but after the airing of Hubris I think she's bordering on damaging her journalistic credibility in making such assertions.
Her hostility in particular toward Democrats who voted to authorize force is of course not unique on the left, or in anti-war circles. So I don't expect her to avoid feeling that others in positions of power should have expressed or acted on the doubts and suspicions that she and others had at the time. But having rather firmly established that a small group of people in the Bush administration did in fact lie the country into a war, I'm not sure how she manages to both make that case and then blame people in the greater government for having also been duped.
To say that people "should have known" is to say that they should have guessed correctly. But that's not the same as knowing, or having a firm basis for a choice. One of the most important aspects of the lies coming from the Bush administration (including cooking the NIE before the war), was effectively positioning Congress to vote either to trust Saddam Hussein not to do something crazy or to trust the Bush administration in its case for war. And I'm not sure how a lot of people would have voted under those manufactured and fraudulents circumstances, including Barack Obama. (Who did not vote on the war because he was not in the Senate.)
So which is it? Did a small group of people in the Bush administration lie the country -- including Congress -- into a war or didn't they? I think she's made a persuasive case that they did, but her desire to exact a pound of flesh from candidates and politicians that she was previously hostile to is undermining her case. And her.
Millions of people all over the world marched in demonstrations or otherwise protested. Did they all just "guess right"? What about the governments of Canada, France and Germany?
They lied. They were lying then, and it wasn't a secret. It's not that they "should have known", they actually knew. Cheney was on the talk shows doing his best to link Saddam to the World Trade Center, with absolutely no evidence. America was stuck in its creepy post-9/11 fog when asking questions, or challenging authority somehow became "Un-American", and the press completely abdicated its responsibility to seek out and uphold the truth.
Yes, it's certainly the case that many people protested the march to and inception of war against Iraq. Unfortunately, you could say the same about every war and military action, because there is always a certain percentage of any population that opposes each specific war, and a certain percentage of any population that reflexively opposes all war. So pointing to a bunch of people waving signs is not in fact some sort of automatic indicator that an obvious truth was known or overlooked.
It also seems to me that there is always a desire to be "right" about such things, and then, in the aftermath, to profit -- even if only emotionally -- from such a position. You can see this from both sides of any war, where the aftermath is not about what happened, but about who was "right" and "wrong" or patriotic/unpatriotic. And that seems very much to be the point of your post here -- to make the case that the lies were totally obvious and that anybody who hedged or wasn't sure about the right path was a blithering idiot.
Again, I have to point out that the real mastery of the Bush administration's case for war was the way that it constrained the debate. Either you voted no and trusted Saddam Hussein not to do something truly nuts (someone who had gassed his own people), or you voted yes and trusted the Bush administration not to do something truly nuts (when in fact they were using their offices to fraudulently start a war).
That's what people had to vote on, and the reason they had to vote that way was because of the lies of the small band of Bush officials who perpetrated that fraud. To be honest, any time I hear someone say the lies were obvious and that person didn't have to take that vote, I think of them as less credible on the subject, not more so. It's always easy to oppose something. It's much harder to get something right when you're being lied to. As Hubris proved.
Having watched Rachel’s presentation regarding the release of audio tape on the conversations between President Johnson and advisors like Dean Rusk, I was surprised that she provided very little or no context to the conversations between Johnson and his advisors. She presented the evidence, at least in my mind, as defacto evidence that the government could manipulate a situation to achieve their political ends, and then lie to the people about it.
While I am not intending to defend Nixon’s actions, I think some background on Johnson’s actions prior to the announcement of the “end of hostilities” 1 week before the presidential election where his VP Hubert Humphrey was a candidate deserved some exposure. It was definitely like Rachel just picked a starting point in the middle of the movie and ignored many things that had already happened to draw her conclusions.
I use as a basis for these comments, not only my own recollections, having lived through the Vietnam Era that the tapes are in reference to, but also the work of writer/reporter Jack Newfield in his book on Robert Kennedy, RFK: A Memoir. His recollections on why Johnson had such a “dramatic decline in popularity and power between 1964 and 1966” include:
“First, of course, was the steady, open-ended escalation of the war in Vietnam”.
So one week before the election, having withdrawn from it for political reasons, he suddenly had the end of the war in hand. Really? It was the done deal that Rachel
described?
“The second reason was Johnson’s own defects of character and personality…. The Washington press kept catching the President telling unnecessary lies on even the smallest matters”
“Johnson had run on the campaign promise in 1964 of “no wider war”, and had enlarged the war two months after his 1965 inaugural…promised that bombing missions were not causing civilian casualties, but television and newspaper reports showed this to be untrue.”
So while I applaud Rachel for bringing greater emphasis on the Johnson tapes, and bringing out the actions Nixon would undertake to get elected, I would suggest more context and evidence that Johnson truly believed and intended for the war to end as he stated at the time. To me it could have been staged to help Humphrey, and it was not a slam –dunk that the war was to be ended at that time.
Having watched Rachel's presentation regarding the release of audio tape on the conversations between President Johnson and advisors like Dean Rusk, I was surprised that she provided very little or no context to the conversations between Johnson and his advisors. She presented the evidence, at least in my mind, as defacto evidence that the government could manipulate a situation to achieve their political ends, and then lie to the people about it.
While I am not intending to defend Nixon's actions, I think some background on Johnson's actions prior to the announcement of the "end of hostilities" 1 week before the presidential election where his VP Hubert Humphrey was a candidate deserved some exposure. It was definitely like Rachel just picked a starting point in the middle of the movie and ignored many things that had already happened to draw her conclusions.
I use as a basis for these comments, not only my own recollections, having lived through the Vietnam Era that the tapes are in reference to, but also the work of writer/reporter Jack Newfield in his book on Robert Kennedy, RFK: A Memoir. His recollections on why Johnson had such a "dramatic decline in popularity and power between 1964 and 1966" include:
"First, of course, was the steady, open-ended escalation of the war in Vietnam".
So one week before the election, having withdrawn from it for political reasons, he suddenly had the end of the war in hand. Really? It was the done deal that Rachel described?
"The second reason was Johnson's own defects of character and personality…. The Washington press kept catching the President telling unnecessary lies on even the smallest matters"
"Johnson had run on the campaign promise in 1964 of "no wider war", and had enlarged the war two months after his 1965 inaugural…promised that bombing missions were not causing civilian casualties, but television and newspaper reports showed this to be untrue."
So while I applaud Rachel for bringing greater emphasis on the Johnson tapes, and bringing out the actions Nixon would undertake to get elected, I would suggest more context and evidence that Johnson truly believed and intended for the war to end as he stated at the time. To me it could have been staged to help Humphrey, and it was not a slam –dunk that the war was to be ended.
Note: Text in quotes extracted from RFK: A Memoior, by Jack Newfield
I for one was never fooled by the fear-mongering about the weapons of mass destruction. I had a bad feeling about the war from the very beginning, and I was not at all surprised when they found no weapons of mass destruction.
I knew Saddam was no angle and that he had all those weapons and the big army, but he was more interested in using them against his own people to keep himself in power.
One thing I learned from reading the life and works of John Milton is that you cannot make anyone free; you have to free the inner man first. Thus, going to war to liberate an oppressed people is always a waste of blood and treasure. People are always responsible for the governments they get. No government can survive without at least the tacit support of a large segment of the population.
History is still out on the validity of the Iraq war. The argument that Bush lied about wmd's just does not hold water. The world view was that he had them and he had used them in the past against his own people. He refused to allow inspectors into many sites. Does anyone seriously think that the Arab Spring would have happened if the Iraqi dictator had not been ousted from power? For better or worse, it was the beginning of the chain reaction that lead to the ovethrow of repressive regimes in the region. Bush himself stated that a democracy in Iraq would spread the ideals of freedom throughout the region. If in a couple decades something close to a democracy still exists in Iraq, history will be favorable to Bush despite the blundering mess of the war. Despite President Obama campaining against the war, he used Bush's own negotiated timetable for withdraw and then claimed he had successfully ended it.
There was NO logical reason to commit to invading Iraq. Cheney, the former CEO of Haliburton NOW VP, sent his emissary over to the Chief Intelligence officer at the CIA to....quote, "get something to hang our hat on".........the CIO told him there was no concrete, definitive intel to support Saddam having WMD's.....well, that was not good enough as history has shown...........now with 5K American men and women killed bc that piece of crap cheney wanted to stimulate his bank account and get Haliburton into Irag for the rebuild.............oh yes kids.........there was NO bidding on which company would be the rebuilder........HB took all the jacks off the floor. Well, guess what........current studies have shown that of all the infrastructure work done in Iraq, a lot of it is not substantial or does not fit the needs of the people...........Saddam was a scum bag and needed to go away.......BUT the two self-serving pricks (Bush/Cheney and their buddies) got us into a big mess..........lies, lies, and more lies.......Just like Tricky Dick did in Vietnam...............gosh do ya think the GOPygmies have a chance of changing their brand?????????
I and a bunch of my friends are huge Rachel Maddow fans, but we live in Germany and work for the DOD. Many of us download Rachel's show from iTunes to our iPads or iPhones and listen to her show the next day on the way to or from work. (Unfortunately Rachel's show is getting uploaded to iTunes later and later so now it is often 36 instead of 12 hours after the show before we can listen during our morning commute.) We are dealing with this delay, but now we are not dealing so well with the fact the "Hubris" was not included in iTunes. Now what do we do?