A blowjob kinda pales in comparison, doesn’t it?

Senate committee: Bush knew Iraq claims weren’t true

WASHINGTON- A long-awaited Senate Select Intelligence Committee report made public Thursday concludes that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made public statements to promote an invasion of Iraq that they knew at the time were not supported by available intelligence. [...]

“Before taking the country to war, this administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” said committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, D- W. Va. [...]

Among the reports conclusions:

* Claims by President Bush that Iraq and al Qaida had a partnership “were not substantiated by the intelligence.”
* The president and vice president misrepresented what was known about Iraq’s chemical weapons capabiliies.
* Rumsfeld misrepresented what the intelligence community knew when he said Iraq’s weapons productions facilities were buried deeply underground.
* Cheney’s claim that the intelligence community had confirmed that lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 was not true.

INN World Report does a report on Sibel Edmonds story.

Shoddy? Since it’s the Bush administration we’re dealing with here, I’m sure Ahmadinejad meant to say ’shitty’. And seeing as how the older report appeared to be pulled out of someone’s ass, that would be quite more fitting.

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday called a U.S. intelligence report that downgraded Iran as a nuclear threat “a declaration of victory” for the Iranian nuclear program.
[...]

During a televised speech made from Ilam province in western Iran, Ahmadinejad said earlier reports from the United States had been based on “shoddy intelligence.”

The Bush administration has for years warned that Iran’s development of nuclear power plants and enriched uranium masked an effort to produce an nuclear bomb.

Top officials have called the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran “unacceptable.”

But in a report released Monday, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Iran had suspended nuclear weapons work in 2003 and was unlikely to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb until at least 2010. The assessment reverses a 2005 National Intelligence Estimate that found the Islamic Republic was “determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure.”

Let’s see…..he scoops people up from any country he wants and takes them to secret CIA prisons to torture them. Then, if they’re lucky, they get thrown in Gitmo never to be charged with anything and left to parish. He wiretaps, reads emails, gets phone records……whenever, whoever he feels like. He can freeze assets of any American he wants by stating they are keeping him from bringing democracy (ha ha) to Iraq. Ok, somebody tell me…..what does he want updated? He doesn’t abide by any law, anyway. Why update anything?

WASHINGTON –President Bush wants Congress to modernize a law that governs how intelligence agencies monitor the communications of suspected terrorists.

“This law is badly out of date,” Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, provides a legal foundation that allows information about terrorists’ communications to be collected without violating civil liberties.

Democrats want to ensure that any changes do not give the executive branch unfettered surveillance powers.

Bush noted that terrorists now use disposable cell phones and the Internet to communicate, recruit operatives and plan attacks; such tools were not available when FISA passed nearly 30 years ago. He also cited a recently released intelligence estimate that concluded al-Qaida is using its growing strength in the Middle East to plot attacks on U.S. soil.

“Our intelligence community warns that under the current statute, we are missing a significant amount of foreign intelligence that we should be collecting to protect our country,” Bush said. “Congress needs to act immediately to pass this bill, so that our national security professionals can close intelligence gaps and provide critical warning time for our country.”

More at Boston.com

Current and former intelligence officials say the Bush Administration’s National Intelligence Estimate regarding terrorist threats to the United States does not provide evidence to support its assertions and may have inflated the domestic threat posed by the Lebanese political and military group Hezbollah, perhaps because it receives financial support from Iran.

According to the report, Hezbollah - a Shi’a Muslim group with ties to Iran that has been labeled a terrorist organization by the United States - may target the US domestically if the US poses a serious threat to Iran. But sources say the allegations about Hezbollah were simply “thrown in.”

Speaking under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, several intelligence officers asserted that the report was sloppy and lacked supporting evidence. “The NIE seems… fiddled [with],” regarding Hezbollah, one high-ranking CIA official said. “Whether it is or isn’t is not really the point. The point is that nobody is ready to believe it.”

“As regards to the Hezbollah ‘threat,’” the official added, “they just threw that in. “Nobody in CIA talks to Hezbollah, and they’re living off their assessments from back in the 80s, which they really never got right anyway.”

Full article at Raw Story

Steven Schwankert
IDG News Service

News Corp’s popular MySpace.com social networking site hosted Web pages for at least 29,000 known sex offenders as of July 2007, North Carolina’s Attorney General said Tuesday.

North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper’s office said in a statement that based on MySpace’s own estimates, the number of registered sex offenders with MySpace pages under their own names was four times more than the company’s previous estimate.

Cooper is proposing that North Carolina pass legislation to ban registered sex offenders from using social networking sites that allow minors, and strengthening other anti-child pornography and criminal penalties for Internet solicitation of minors and children for sex. The proposal also suggests that social networking sites’ underage users be required to get parental permission before registering and posting personal information.

Young people have been the early adopters and most avid users of social networking sites, making them targets for sexual predators.

MySpace said it would provide sex offender data to state attorneys general in late May, after first saying it would not make such disclosures. Cooper did not say when MySpace had provided the data.

The site has come under attack not only for the risque content posted by some of its members, but by allegedly providing a venue for sexual predators targeting children. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal estimated in May that at least 5,000 sex offenders were registered for MySpace using their own names, with an unknown number using false identities.

read more HERE

Oh what a shock……..

By John Solomon
Washington Post Staff Writer

An independent oversight board created to identify intelligence abuses after the CIA scandals of the 1970s did not send any reports to the attorney general of legal violations during the first 5 1/2 years of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism effort, the Justice Department has told Congress.

Although the FBI told the board of a few hundred legal or rules violations by its agents after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the board did not identify which of them were indeed legal violations. This spring, it forwarded reports of violations in 2006, officials said.

The President’s Intelligence Oversight Board — the principal civilian watchdog of the intelligence community — is obligated under a 26-year-old executive order to tell the attorney general and the president about any intelligence activities it believes “may be unlawful.” The board was vacant for the first two years of the Bush administration.

The FBI sent copies of its violation reports directly to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. But the board’s mandate is to provide independent oversight, so the absence of such communications has prompted critics to question whether the board was doing its job.

“It’s now apparent that the IOB was not actively employed in the early part of the administration. And it was a crucial period when its counsel would seem to have been needed the most,” said Anthony Harrington, who served as the board’s chairman for most of the Clinton administration.

More at the Washington Post

from THINK PROGRESS

In his commencement speech at the Coast Guard Academy this week, President Bush discussed “2-year-old information, declassified by the White House a day earlier,” which asserted that Osama bin Laden had instructed al Qaeda in Iraq to attack the United States. Using the intel to stoke fears of terrorism, Bush argued for the continuation of his stay-the-course policy in Iraq, claiming “Al Qaeda’s leaders inside and outside of Iraq have not given up on their objective of attacking America again.”

As ThinkProgress noted, President Bush has a history of selectively declassifying intelligence that works to his political advantage. Counterterrorism experts now tell Newsweek that “the president’s characterization of the intelligence may have been incomplete” and that he appears to have “ignored contradictory reporting about what actually happened.”

Here are a few examples of Bush’s “incomplete” intelligence:

1) BUSH MYTH: Zarqawi was a top al Qaeda operative before the war. A Senate Intelligence Committee report published last September said that the CIA learned “A-from a senior Al Qaeda detainee- that before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi had actually A-rebuffed several efforts by bin Laden- to recruit Zaqawi to work with Al Qaeda.” But in reality, it was only “after the U.S. invasion of Iraq that Zarqawi permanently set up operations inside the country and then formed much closer ties between his Iraqi insurgent organization and the central leadership of Al Qaeda.”

2) BUSH MYTH: Zarqawi “welcomed” bin Laden’s orders. “A U.S. counterterrorism official familiar with the original intelligence told Newsweek that some of the intel showed that Zarqawi actually resisted bin Laden’s instructions at the time, sending word back to the Al Qaeda leader that he had his hands full orchestrating attacks against U.S. forces inside Iraq.”

3) BUSH MYTH: Bin Laden wants to use Iraq to launch attacks against the West. Rand Beers, a former national’security aide who served under both Clinton and Bush, pointed out that “most of the recent intelligence reporting on terror plots aimed at the U.S. shows that the plans were hatched in Pakistan, not Iraq, and were initiated during the same time frame (in 2005) that bin Laden was ordering Zarqawi to open up a cell.”

Once again, President Bush has been caught fixing intelligence around his policies instead of shaping his policies around intelligence.

By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Intelligence analysts predicted, in secret papers circulated within the government before the Iraq invasion, that al-Qaida would see U.S. military action as an opportunity to increase its operations and that Iran would try to shape a post-Saddam Iraq.

The top analysts in government also said that establishing a stable democracy in Iraq would be a “long, difficult and probably turbulent process.”

Democrats said the newly declassified documents, part of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation released Friday, make clear that the Bush administration was warned about the very challenges it now faces as it tries to stabilize Iraq.

“Sadly, the administration’s refusal to heed these dire warnings - and worse, to plan for them - has led to tragic consequences for which our nation is paying a terrible price,” said Senate Intelligence Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.

Some Republicans rejected the committee’s work as flawed. The panel’s top Republican, Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, said the report’s conclusions selectively highlight the intelligence agencies’ findings that seem to be important now, distorting the picture of what was presented to policy-makers.

He said the committee’s work on the Iraq intelligence “has become too embroiled in politics and partisanship to produce an accurate and meaningful report.”

Publication of the 229-page document was approved by a vote of 10-5, with two Republicans - Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska - voting with Democrats to release it.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in a new book, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a “serious debate” about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.

The 549-page book, “At the Center of the Storm,” is to be published by HarperCollins on Monday. By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical, it is the first detailed account by a member of the president’s inner circle of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to find the unconventional weapons that were a major justification for the war.

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

Mr. Tenet admits that he made his famous “slam dunk” remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But he argues that the quote was taken out of context and that it had little impact on President Bush’s decision to go to war. He also makes clear his bitter view that the administration made him a scapegoat for the Iraq war.

A copy of the book was purchased at retail price in advance of publication by a reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Tenet described with sarcasm watching an episode of “Meet the Press” last September in which Mr. Cheney twice referred to Mr. Tenet’s “slam dunk” remark as the basis for the decision to go to war.

“I remember watching and thinking, A-As if you needed me to say A-slam dunk- to convince you to go to war with Iraq,- ” Mr. Tenet writes.

Read more at The New York Times