Post all Media links that PROVE DSM are TRUE, CNN, MSNBC, etc Here

[symbolman]

Now I KNOW that we have a research team of 60,000 here that do VERY good work when presented with a challenge.

Here's a good challenge: Let's show everyone the actual NEWS (CNN, MSNBC, etc) Links and stories that SHOW that the DSminutes are Verifiably TRUE.

Maybe Starting with (was it Newsweek?) the Media story that Bush had said back in 2000 or 2001, "Saddam? Fuck 'em, We're taking him OUT.."

I remember that one, but I don't have the link.. we've got links among all of us to create a verifiable trail and if we assemble it here on the DU, we can write a nice little story, replete with THE MEDIA'S OWN STORIES to PROVE that the DSM are TRUE..

Post away if you will, we can PROVE THIS, and prove it to the average Joe in the street AND CONGRESS, and then shove it up the Media's ASS and FORCE them to accept or report on it..

Let's roll people, you're the greatest at this, all those "reporters" at all these media centers that get PAID have nothing on your research, because YOU have passion and WE are a community of Patriotic Americans that want the TRUTH..

and the JUSTICE that comes with it,

I'll poke around my list of saved links from 2000 forward if you will?

[symbolman]

1. Here's a good timeline by Knight Ridder

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/special_packages/11574296.htm


anyone else? We can get Will Pitt or the Plaid Adder to put this all into a coherent form, something that cannot be denied.

It will work, we at Takebackthemedia.com caught CNN removing 750 words from the Hans Blix report before the "war" and with the strength of our readers forced CNN to put the words BACK the very same afternoon..

and we can all do that again, this time with DU researchers..

LINKS, Please!

[evermind]

2. Speaking of timelines

There's a well-sourced chronology of intelligence fiddling at http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=24889 with links to stories like this one in The New Yorker:

THE STOVEPIPE
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.
Issue of 2003-10-27
Posted 2003-10-20

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact

How did the American intelligence community get it so wrong?

Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.

A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: “Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings?” The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities—a process known as “stovepiping”—without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

Despite the interpretation in that last paragraph, I see no reason why the question of whether the "stovepiping" was consciously encouraged is illegitimate.

There's ample evidence at the americanprogress chronology to support the picture of WH wilfully ignoring intelligence warnings, pushing the stories they wanted pushed and blanking out contrary advice.

It seems one major point of difference between the CIA and the Administration's own intelligence network was to do with Chalabi and the INC. According to the very in-depth story at http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/19210 (Ahmed Chalabi's List of Suckers By Douglas McCollam, Columbia Journalism Review. Posted July 12, 2004) "Chalabi seemed to have an "endless stable' of defectors to talk with reporters [Chris Hedges of The New York Times says] "He had defectors for any story you wanted". The CIA was suspicious of anything connected with Chalabi, possibly regarding him as an Iranian spy.

For more links on Chalabi defector trial baloons, try searching google on chalabi khodada

One other story I noticed recently is:

Missing in Action: Truth
By Nicholas D. Kristof
New York Times
May 6, 2003

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/unmovic/2003/0506missing.htm

I rejoice in the newfound freedoms in Iraq. But there are indications that the U.S. government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at home and around the world. Let's fervently hope that tomorrow we find an Iraqi superdome filled with 500 tons of mustard gas and nerve gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 29,984 prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several dozen Scud missiles, gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, 18 mobile biological warfare factories, long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to dispense anthrax, and proof of close ties with Al Qaeda. Those are the things that President Bush or his aides suggested Iraq might have, and I don't want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit.

Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously. I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway. "It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said.

Another example is the abuse of intelligence from Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq's biological weapons program until his defection in 1995. Top British and American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the early 1990's. Glen Rangwala, a British Iraq expert, says the transcript of Mr. Kamel's debriefing was leaked because insiders resented the way politicians were misleading the public. Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that he hears from those still in the intelligence world that when experts wrote reports that were skeptical about Iraq's W.M.D., "they were encouraged to think it over again."

(If you're interested in Kamel, make sure you see http://www.middleeastreference.org.uk/kamel.html , on Glen Rangwala's site, which has the full text of Kamel's interview online, and many quotes from Bush/Blair which show how badly they misused his information in public statements.

Also, Rangwala's Iraq page has lots of WMD facts at: http://www.middleeastreference.org.uk/iraqweapons.html , "Claims and evaluations of Iraq's proscribed weapons". )

(Edit: tidying up and url checking..)

[evermind]

3. From CBS

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/19/60minutes/main607356.shtml

Clarke's Take On Terror, March 21, 2004

(CBS) In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush ordered his then top anti-terrorism adviser to look for a link between Iraq and the attacks, despite being told there didn't seem to be one.

--snip--

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

--snip--


"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

--snip--


Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'

Much more, including video, at the site.

Via http://www.phxnews.com/fullstory.php?article=21988

See also: http://www.phxnews.com/comment.php?cid=34696

[Justice]

4. Wesley Clark's statements about what Pentagon friends told him

http://new.nique.net/issues/2003-11-14/news/1

"Clark said friends in the Pentagon told him just after the events of September 11, 2001, that the United States would go to war with Iraq “because this administration doesn’t feel very confident about the War on Terror, but they’re pretty confident they can take down a state.”"


Clark said this repeatedly, above is just one quote.

[symbolman]

5. This is good stuff

These people have the integrity needed to make a case, and they've been saying this from the beginning.

Anyone have any links from the media re that second resolution that the BushCo decided (I believe along with Blair) NOT to submit to the UN as it would have been shot down?

I think that would be very telling..

(And this is the guy who always talks about an Up or Down Vote :) )

[Spazito]

6. Here is a timeline that includes information on the second

UN resolution:

Feb. 24, 2003- The United States , Great Britain , and Spain submit a proposed resolution to the UN Security Council stating, “ Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity afforded to it in Resolution 1441.” The resolution concludes it is time to authorize use of military force. France , Germany , and Russia submit an informal counter-resolution, stating that inspections should be intensified and extended to ensure there is “a real chance for the peaceful settlement of this crisis” and that “the military option should only be a last resort.”

March 1, 2003- Iraq begins destroying its Al Samoud missiles.

March 7, 2003- Hans Blix reports Iraq has accelerated its cooperation, but inspectors need more time to verify Iraq's compliance.

March 12, 2003- New York City passes a city council resolution opposing a preemptive/unilateral war against Iraq , joining more than 150 other U.S. cities, including Philadelphia , Chicago , and Los Angeles. “We, of all cities, must uphold the preciousness and sanctity of human life,” says Councilman Alan Gerson, a Democrat whose district includes the World Trade Center site, where 2,792 people were killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Feb. 24–March 14, 2003- The United States and Great Britain's intense lobbying efforts among UN Security Council members yields support only from Spain and Bulgaria. Since nine votes (and no vetoes from the five permanent members) out of fifteen are required for the resolution's passage, the United States decides not to call for a vote on the resolution.

http://www.afsc.org/iraq/guide/war-timeline.htm

Edited to add CBS article on the push for the second resolution and bush's comments:

The two nations' effort for a second resolution lost momentum after the U.N.'s chief inspector Hans Blix said last week that Iraq had shown some signs of cooperation with inspections.

"Council members," said a diplomatic source, "find it difficult to walk away from inspections while they're showing some piecemeal progress."

So U.S. and British diplomats are talking about spelling out some sort of final challenge in the new resolution, which, if not met, would put the onus on Iraq, not U.N. members, for ending the inspection process.

President Bush said again that a second U.N. resolution, while useful, isn't necessary. And he suggested that a final chance is more than Saddam Hussein deserves.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/19/iraq/main541109.shtml

Further edited to add another article re second resolution and bush threats to Iraq:

The United States, Britain and Spain on Monday abandoned efforts to seek a vote on their proposed second U.N. resolution on Iraq.

"The co-sponsors have agreed they will not pursue a vote on the draft resolution," British Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock said. "The co-sponsors reserve the right to take their own steps to secure the disarmament of Iraq."

snip

Annan also said war against Iraq without U.N. backing would lack legitimacy.

"If the action is to take place without the support of the council, its legitimacy will be questioned and the support for it will be diminished," Annan said.

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/17/sprj.irq.int.main/

[wideopen]

7. Kick!