••can ye pass the acid test?••

ye who enter here be afraid, but do what ye must -- to defeat your fear ye must defy it.

& defeat it ye must, for only then can we begin to realize liberty & justice for all.

time bomb tick tock? nervous tic talk? war on war?

or just a blog crying in the wilderness, trying to make sense of it all, terror-fried by hate radio and FOX, the number of whose name is 666??? (coincidence?)

Thursday, October 26, 2006

with all the gop anxiety over the possibility of a speaker of the house nancy pelosi, plus all the stuff about dennis hastert not knowing about mark foley, i thought it might be nice to look back at a simpler time.

the link for the following excerpt is no longer available, and meet the press's archive seems to go back only to august 2003. how odd. just one month short. what a coincidence.

MEET THE PRESS
Sunday, July 20, 2003

MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to the war and the whole premise for it, because a central piece of the rationale given was the potential nuclear threat that Saddam possessed. This is what the president said in October of 2002:

(Videotape, October 7,2002):
PRES. BUSH: Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: And when the House debated the resolution to go to war, this was one of the key elements of that actual resolution that was voted on, “Whereas Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States...by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability...”

And Time magazine did this analysis of the vote: “The House of Representatives [passed] a resolution authorizing use of force against Iraq.... More than 180 members of Congress mention the possible Iraqi nuclear threat as a reason for supporting the resolution.”

And you, yourself, Mr. Speaker, your home state paper, Daily Herald, “Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, [Speaker Dennis] Hastert said, already possesses a ‘dirty nuke’ weapon and is on the brink of obtaining a nuclear bomb.”

In hindsight, with all the questionable intelligence, if you will, about uranium from Africa and aluminum tubes, do you believe that the potential nuclear threat of Saddam Hussein was overstated?

REP. HASTERT: You know, we don’t know. First of all, we do know that Saddam Hussein possessed, even today, that it’s there, barrels, as a matter of fact tons, of plutonium, some of it this yellow cake plutonium from Niger, that they had purchased, you know, previously.

MR. RUSSERT: Where is it?

REP. HASTERT: Well, it’s there; it’s contained. I mean, it’s of record that it is there, and it’s stored, it’s in barrels and it’s marked. And, you know, that is there. There’s no question about it. But, you know, this was purchased years ago. So they do have capability, and, you know, the intelligence that some folks had in 1998 to make decisions in 1998 and 1999, the 16 resolutions that the UN passed in 12 years, said there were weapons of mass destruction. In that included the potential of creating a nuclear weapon. And I think he had the potential for a dirty bomb and a nuclear device takes a little bit longer and more technology, but I think he was clearly striving to get that.

MR. RUSSERT: But could our intelligence have been wrong? Now, this is what you said when campaigning in Michigan for one of your colleagues, right here. “US House Speaker Dennis Hastert said he saw classified information on Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction that convinced him of the need to go to war.”

Could the intelligence have been wrong? Or hyped? Or manipulated? Where someone in Congress, like you, drew the wrong conclusion, or you were intentionally spun to encourage you to vote?

REP. HASTERT: Look, you know, I’m not the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, but I do get briefed on a weekly basis. It’s part of my job to know what’s going on. And we get intelligence sources, obviously, through the CIA. We use British intelligence sources. We use Australian, British intelligence sources. We use intelligence sources from any of our friends or allies or other sources that we can get. The Brits use some different intelligence sources than we do. As a matter of fact, they have closer ties to the French, and, you know, some of this intelligence is corroborated by them. I think the intelligence that was on the table, the intelligence that we got to make a decision, we had to make the best decision we had with the information that we had. And I think we made that decision.

so the guy 2 heartbeats from the presidency doesn't know the difference between uranium and plutonium. how reassuring.

and the gops are scared of pelosi?!

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