Council Winners
- *First place with 4 2/3 votes!–Joshuapundit-The Burning Man And The Walking Dead
- Second place with 2 1/3 votes – The Noisy Room – The Noisy Room – What This Video Of Jordanian F-16s Striking ISIS Tells Us Is Alarming And The Implications Regarding the US Are Troubling
- Third place *t* with 1 vote –Bookworm Room – The difference between the Muslim conquests and the Crusades, in a single picture
- Third place *t* with 1 vote –The Independent Sentinel – King Abdullah, Warrior King, Barack Obama, Wimp King
- Third place *t* with 1 vote –Rhymes With Right – On Obama’s Prayer Breakfast Speech
- Fourth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Nice Deb – The Regime Doubles Down: Kosher Deli Terror Attack in Paris Was Random-Not Anti-Semitic Attack
- Fourth place *t* with 2/3 vote –The Right Planet – Trolling the National Prayer Breakfast li>Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote –The Razor – Evidently Marijuana is Legal in NC Because These Reviewers Are High
li>Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Simply Jews – Bibi does DC and some US Jews get their panties in a bunch. Is there a case for that?
Non-Council Winners
- First place with 2 1/3 votes!–Mosaic – Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy submitted by Joshuapundit
- Second place with 2 votes –Ralph Peters – Islam’s Countless Slaves submitted by The Watcher
- Third place with 1 2/3 votes –Mark Steyn/NRO –The Glamor Of Evil submitted by The Noisy Room
- Fourth place with 1 1/3 votes – Elliot Abrams/CFR – What the President Thinks He’s Doing submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
- Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Harry’s Place – David Cameron and Muhammad Salah submitted by Simply Jews
- Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Walter Russell Mead –Why the White House Is Getting Lonelier on Iran submitted by The Razor
- Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Ed Morrissey/Hot Air – High horses and bull puckey: Professor Obama’s history lesson a dud submitted by The Glittering Eye
- Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Andrew Johnson/NRO - Obama Didn’t Just Lie about Opposing Gay Marriage; He Kept Citing His Faith While Doing It submitted by Nice Deb
- Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -The Muslim Issue- Islamic India: The Biggest Holocaust in World History…Whitewashed from History Books submitted by Bookworm Room
- Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Dennis Prager – Obama’s Moral Idiocy submitted by The Watcher
- Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote – Daniel Pipes – About Those 14 “Muslim-American Leaders” Who Met with Obama submitted by VA Right!
- Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote -The Political Chicken – State Republican Executive Committee to Select New State GOP Chair March 7th submitted by Rhymes with Right
12 comments:
The Bush Administration was clearly massively pressuring the CIA to produce reports that confirmed the Administration's arguments regardless of the facts, including creating an office in the Department of Defense to produce reports on exactly the same topics that the CIA was supposed to cover. In other words, they were effectively saying to the CIA, "If you won't produce what we want, we will find (or really create) someone who will," with the consequent threat to funding that anyone who has ever worked in a bureaucracy will immediately recognize. Then, when Iraq turned out not to have WMDs, the Administration had the unbelievable gall to blame the "faulty intelligence" on the CIA. As someone who works for a major national security laboratory, I take this particular outrage personally, as should anyone in the US who works in national security.
Administration spokespeople were also constantly on news talk shows making comments that were clearly intended to imply some kind of connection between the Iraqi government and 9/11, without saying anything explicit enough to get caught lying. This was some of the most cynical deception imaginable, playing on the ignorance and gullibility of the most vulnerable parts of their audience.
This is not even to mention the massive cherry picking that they applied to any materials they could get their hands on that they could manipulate to make their case. The whole performance was disgusting and it has absolutely poisoned the well for rational discussions of threats to national security, as now a huge proportion of the public will simply not believe at all in any threat to national security if recognizing it depends on intelligence reports.
Let's only say that the more recent events confirmed the suspicions about chemical weapons. The rest was never found, and multiple theories about Saddam hiding or transferring the biological and/or nuclear stuff to somebody else have been never proved.
Hopefully it will work eventually.
OK, I shall be more suspicious now ;-)
As I mentioned, David, there was a grain of truth in the reports, at least re chemical weapons that are found in abundance.
As for the whole invasion issue: I was against then, for reasons having more to do with total lack of understanding by the military and the administration of what to do in and with Iraq after the relatively straightforward task of winning the war.
And one more thing: Ariel Sharon was against the invasion and warned the WH in no uncertain terms.
And the crusades, of course.
Re chemical weapons: here is an NYT report:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?_r=0
As for our trust in intelligence reports: oh well, let's not forget that we, the public I mean, never see the intelligence reports as such, only the interpretation of these reports by the pols. And I would believe a pol only if I see one hanging. And even that only after I check...
Not to let somebody to have the last word: and the Muslim conquests preceding the Crusades...
Snoopy, just a note:
I read the NYT article to which you linked. It was, as near as I could tell, entirely about US personnel in Iraq soon after the invasion finding chemical weapons dumps left over from the early nineties. In terms of the question of whether or not Iraq had WMDs in 2003, this tells us nothing that was not generally acknowledged at the time, as everyone knew that Hussein had had and used chemical weapons at least until the late eighties.
According to the article, all the weapons in the dumps were useless or not even intact at all, and the whole point of the article was that the decaying weapons were very hazardous to deal with and that a number of US military personnel had been exposed to the contents because of leaking or disintegrating (or possibly mishandled) weapons.
The article really was very interesting, mostly because of the very strange behavior of the US military in neither reporting on the weapons publicly nor properly warning US troops of the possibility of finding such dumps once they began finding them. The reasons given for the apparent cover-up are so vague and non-compelling that it seems to me that there must have been something else behind it, but I am at a loss as to what that might have been.
Well, at least it proves that there was some truth to the claim of WMDs, limited and poor as it was.
There is no serious question that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program in the seventies into the early eighties (at least) or that he had and used chemical weapons in the mid and late eighties. I do not know anyone who denies these points.
Certainly, it was not unreasonable to think in 2003 that Hussein might have had WMDs, or that he might have still had some kind of nuclear weapons program. It turned out that he had neither and it was also the case that the "evidence" that the Bush Administration presented claiming to establish their claims was massively spun, cherry-picked, and some of it possibly just fabricated.
It was this patent dishonesty that has left some people so extremely skeptical about any claims of nuclear weapons programs in other countries, Iran in particular. This is very unfortunate, as Iran really does have such a program.
That true. I only wonder how much culpability should be assigned to the intelligence people who, in every country, are so ready to skew their reports in favor of he prevailing political trend.
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