Dean backtracks

[Guest Cerebus]

Article here.

 

Interesting, since raising the age is the only way we'll really be able to keep SS solvent (at least as far as I can see). Apparently, having a balanced budget will make sure the baby boomers stay at 64 years old? I dunno...anyway discuss.

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

Article here.

 

Interesting, since raising the age is the only way we'll really be able to keep SS solvent (at least as far as I can see). Apparently, having a balanced budget will make sure the baby boomers stay at 64 years old? I dunno...anyway discuss.

Naw, it's more like if he can balance the budget, he can put the surplus towards social security.

 

It's a tough issue, and it's not necessarily huge that he misspoke in the debate. After all, Bush does it all the time and I'm the only one that seems to care. This is an issue on which he had recently changed his stance (hey, better than blindly sticking to ideology; at least he acknowledged the mistake), and it was an admitted mistake. No harm, no foul.

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

Awww, Howie, I agreed with you regarding raising SS's benefit age. Tsk, tsk, tsk...

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

Dean's official Social Security position -- as stated by his speech on C-Span tonight -- is that he wants to uncap the income limit. Makes sense, but it might piss people off.

[Guest MikeSC]

Article here.

 

Interesting, since raising the age is the only way we'll really be able to keep SS solvent (at least as far as I can see). Apparently, having a balanced budget will make sure the baby boomers stay at 64 years old? I dunno...anyway discuss.

Naw, it's more like if he can balance the budget, he can put the surplus towards social security.

 

It's a tough issue, and it's not necessarily huge that he misspoke in the debate. After all, Bush does it all the time and I'm the only one that seems to care. This is an issue on which he had recently changed his stance (hey, better than blindly sticking to ideology; at least he acknowledged the mistake), and it was an admitted mistake. No harm, no foul.

So Dean "misspeaking" isn't a big deal to you, but Bush's is?

 

Fairness.

-=Mike

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

Give me one example where I've criticized Bush's misspeak and refused to back off after he apologized.

 

Don't even think about using WMDs, because that's a flat out lie that he used, not a misspeak.

[Vern Gagne 0]

How the hell is it a lie?Call it bad intel if you want, it doesn't mean the President lied.

[Firestarter 0]

It is neither "bad intel" nor is it a "flat out lie." It is merely information that we have not as yet publicly corroborated.

 

You should all try a little harder to avoid making bald assertions based in ignorance.

[Vern Gagne 0]

Oh I agree. Didn't feel like arguing.

[Firestarter 0]

Fair enough.

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

It is neither "bad intel" nor is it a "flat out lie." It is merely information that we have not as yet publicly corroborated.

 

You should all try a little harder to avoid making bald assertions based in ignorance.

Okay.

 

"Evidence which was used against the suggestions of the CIA and other people, who proved it wrong far before the SOTU address."

 

And what about the "trailers", Marney? He told us ad nauseum that those trailers were used to create biological weapons.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/09/internat.../09WEAP.html?hp

 

...Wait!

[Justice 0]

It is neither "bad intel" nor is it a "flat out lie." It is merely information that we have not as yet publicly corroborated.

 

You should all try a little harder to avoid making bald assertions based in ignorance.

Okay.

 

"Evidence which was used against the suggestions of the CIA and other people, who proved it wrong far before the SOTU address."

 

And what about the "trailers", Marney? He told us ad nauseum that those trailers were used to create biological weapons.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/09/internat.../09WEAP.html?hp

 

...Wait!

Tyler, not all of us are registered at the NY Times. I'm guessing this is an article where they say that the trailers were for fertilizer, right? Three questions:

 

Why would you have mobile labs for making fertilizer?

 

Why were the things absolutely spotless and sterile when they were found?

 

And lastly, why in God's name were they found buried in the ground? Why hide a trailer for making fertilizer?

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

Registering for the NY Times is free and takes about five seconds.

 

It's an article which quotes the Defense Department and says they were intended for making hydrogen.

 

Also, re: Iraq nuclear claims, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...0-2003Aug9.html

[Justice 0]

Congrads. You've taken one thing that's been infinitely blown out of proportion and on case of mistaken identity, neither of which were the fault of the president, and pushed the blame on him.

 

Tyler, you aren't taking the line of "Bush falsely sent our boys over there and now they are coming home in body bags" that the Democrats have become so fond of as of late, are you? Because, once again, there are many other ways to justify the invasion if you would like me to.

 

Wasn't there an article out a while back from an Iraqi scientist who said that Iraq went on a crash course to destroy all their weapons while France delayed in the UN, hoping that that would stop an invasion against him? I know I saw somethign like this, but I'd like some confirmation on it.

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

That would be this: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/20...bluff-wmd_x.htm

 

And how is the nuclear claim NOT the fault of the president? The CIA warned him about it almost a YEAR in advance.

[Justice 0]

That would be this: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/20...bluff-wmd_x.htm

 

And how is the nuclear claim NOT the fault of the president? The CIA warned him about it almost a YEAR in advance.

Ah, thank you. My dialup makes it incredibly hard to find that stuff, and I normally just get the paper. At any rate, if he was bluffing the whole time about having them, how are we at fault? We legimiately thought that he had them, he put on the facade that he did himself, and it backfired. Why wasn't it right to assume he didn't have them when he acted and portrayed that he did himself? If that story is completely true, he really just hoisted his own petard.

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

I'm not sure it is completely true, really. I've said for a long time that they probably had a few rockets full of chemical weapons lying around, and they probably destroyed those. But, I sincerely doubt that they had these massive stockpiles lying around.

[Firestarter 0]

"Evidence which was used against the suggestions of the CIA and other people, who proved it wrong far before the SOTU address."

Once more: the allegations have not been publicly corroborated. Neither the CIA nor anyone else has proven them false to any degree.

[Firestarter 0]

I sincerely doubt that they had these massive stockpiles lying around.

That's nice.

[Firestarter 0]

Registering for the NY Times is free and takes about five seconds.

That's nice, too. But not all of us have five seconds to spare for the New York Times.

 

If an article requires registration or "just a few quick questions" or a fucking trivia quiz to read, quote the damn thing and don't link to it. This forum is a pimp-free zone and nothing requires me to accept your solicitations in order to follow a thread. Whore your liberal bullshit somewhere else.

[Firestarter 0]

As for your nonsense about the mobile bioweapons labs, I notice that you got your story from the Times, as usual. Here's a less biased source which actually gets the facts right:

Officials confirmed that the internal State Department memo dated June 2 warned that it was "premature" to conclude that the mobile trailers were biological labs.

But the intelligence officials, who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity, said the memo, which was only two paragraphs in length, was drafted by "uninformed" State Department experts who did not have access to intelligence available to the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The officials also said the memo did not offer an alternative explanation as to the use for which the mobile labs were intended and noted that, several days after the memo was circulated, Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly that the trailers were apparently part of Iraq’s biological weapons program.

-NBC

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

Once more: the allegations have not been publicly corroborated. Neither the CIA nor anyone else has proven them false to any degree.

 

Ambassador Joseph Wilson (yes, the man your administration mercilessly smeared after he came out with the truth) investigated the claims over a year before the SOTU speech, and found them to be incorrect.

 

That's nice.

 

I'm glad you think so.

 

BLAH BLAH BLAH LIBERAL MEDIA LOL BLAH

 

Jesus, let's bring this one up again. I don't even feel like addressing your inane, pathetic attempts to label everything as "LIBERAL MEDIA~!!!!" and discredit it immediately.

 

As for your nonsense about the mobile bioweapons labs, I notice that you got your story from the Times, as usual. Here's a less biased source which actually gets the facts right:

 

That's a story from two months ago. Mine's from today. Mine has quotes from DIA and CIA officials stating that their conclusion was that these labs were used to make hydrogen.

 

Iraqi Trailers Said to Make Hydrogen, Not Biological Arms

By DOUGLAS JEHL

 

 

ASHINGTON, Aug. 8 — Engineering experts from the Defense Intelligence Agency have come to believe that the most likely use for two mysterious trailers found in Iraq was to produce hydrogen for weather balloons rather than to make biological weapons, government officials say.

 

The classified findings by a majority of the engineering experts differ from the view put forward in a white paper made public on May 28 by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which said that the trailers were for making biological weapons.

 

That report had dismissed as a "cover story" claims by senior Iraqi scientists that the trailers were used to make hydrogen for the weather balloons that were then used in artillery practice.

 

A Defense Department official said the alternative views expressed by members of the engineering team, not yet spelled out in a formal report, had prompted the Defense Intelligence Agency to "pursue additional information" to determine whether those Iraqi claims were indeed accurate.

 

Officials at the C.I.A. and the Defense Department said today that the two intelligence agencies still stood by the May 28 finding, which President Bush has cited as evidence that Iraq had a biological weapons program. The engineering teams' findings, which officials from the Defense Department and other agencies would discuss only on the condition of anonymity, add a new layer to disputes within the intelligence community about the trailers found by allied forces in Iraq in April and May.

 

The State Department's intelligence branch, which was not invited to take part in the initial review, disputed the findings in a memorandum on June 2. The fact that American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence were disputing the claims included in the C.I.A. white paper was first reported in June, along with the analysts' concern that the evaluation of the mobile units had been marred by a rush to judgment.

 

But it had not previously been known that a majority of the Defense Intelligence Agency's engineering team had come to disagree with the central finding of the white paper: that the trailers were used for making biological weapons.

 

"The team has decided that in their minds, there could be another use, for inefficient hydrogen production, most likely for balloons," a Defense Department official said.

 

The Defense Intelligence Agency's engineering teams had not concluded their work in Iraq at the time the white paper was drafted, and so their views were not taken into account at that time, the government officials said. They said the engineering teams had discussed their findings in meetings in Washington in June and again last month.

 

"We stand by the white paper," the Defense Department official said. "But based on the assessment of the engineering team, it has caused us to pursue additional information about possible alternative uses for the trailers."

 

A C.I.A. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the agency was "continuing to gather more information about the labs, but we stand behind the white paper."

 

Since the white paper was made public in May, new information suggesting that the trailers might have been used for making hydrogen has come from Iraqi officials interrogated by American military officers in Iraq, a military officer said today. Those Iraqi officials have repeated the claims of Iraqi scientists that the trailers were used to fill weather balloons, said the officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

 

Another government official from a different agency said the issue of the trailers had prompted deep divisions within the Defense Intelligence Agency. The official said members of the engineering team had been angry that the agency issued the joint white paper with the C.I.A. before their own work was completed.

 

The official said the question of how that had happened was being examined by the defense agency's inspector general as part of a broader inquiry that began in June.

 

A spokesman for the intelligence agency, Don Black, said he could not comment on the work of the inspector general.

 

The Bush administration has said the two trailers are evidence that Saddam Hussein was hiding a program for biological warfare. In the white paper made public in May, it detailed its case even while conceding discrepancies in the evidence and a lack of hard proof.

 

Senior administration officials have acknowledged that the United States has found neither biological agents nor undisputed evidence that the trailers were used to make such arms. They have said that intelligence analysts in Washington and Baghdad reached their conclusion about the trailers after analyzing, and rejecting, alternative theories of how they could have been used.

 

That view, described as a consensus of opinion with the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency, was presented to the White House before it was made public.

 

At that time, a senior official who examined the evidence in detail and concluded that the trailers were used for biological weapons said, "The experts who have crawled over this again and again can come up with no other plausible legitimate use."

 

That official said the agencies had rejected the theory put forward by Iraqi scientists who said one of the units was used to produce hydrogen.

 

Today, a Defense Department official said of Iraq, "There is not doubt in our minds that they had mobile biological weapons trailers." But the official said there was disagreement within the Defense Intelligence Agency about whether those found so far were used to produce biological weapons or hydrogen.

 

The engineering team that has come to believe the trailers were used to produce hydrogen includes experts whose task was to assess the trailers from a purely technical standpoint, as opposed to one based on other sources of intelligence. Skeptical experts had previously cited a lack of equipment in the trailers for steam sterilization, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production.

 

Bush administration officials have said the most compelling information that the trailers were used for making biological weapons has come from a human source, an Iraqi scientist who described the trailers and what he said was their weapon-making role to American experts months before the trailers were discovered.

 

The six-page report that was made public in May, "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants," called discovery of the trailers "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program."

 

Senior administration officials have said repeatedly that the White House has not put pressure on the intelligence community in any way on the content of its white paper, or on the timing of its release.

[Justice 0]

To note: The only people to say they weren't bio-weapons labs are guys looking from a purely technical standpoint and not having access to any other intelligence. Their main site is the lack of sterilization equipment... but then again, the places were found completely sterilized. It's not as though they couldn't have removed it or such. And the intelligence community still seems to support the idea of them being used for Bio-Weapons. This doesn't sway me too much.

[Vern Gagne 0]

What about the fact that Hussein was in violation of 1441. He was supposed to tell the UN is he dismantled the WMD's in his country, or show proof he didn't have them.

[Firestarter 0]

Ambassador Joseph Wilson (yes, the man your administration mercilessly smeared after he came out with the truth) investigated the claims over a year before the SOTU speech, and found them to be incorrect.

I'm sick and tired of you, Tyler. You don't know who Joe Wilson is; he's just a bunch of letters in a New York Times op-ed to you. You don't know what he did, where he went, or whom he met. You don't know anything. You don't know who "smeared" him or why, or whether it was justified or whether any of the criticisms of him and his report were sound, or if they'd been brought up by others in the past. You don't know how his "investigation" was conducted and you don't know how he got the appointments he did and why. If I told you you'd dismiss it all as propaganda, propaganda invented by people desperate (God knows why) to thrust the country into a war with a poor harmless little tyrant who posed no threat to us. You wouldn't even bother to read it because your ideology preconceives the majority of your positions, and nine times out of ten you won't bother to read anything that might indicate that you were wrong. Hell, you don't even read the articles you yourself quote as proof positive of your idiotic views. It says that the official view of all government agencies is and always has been that the trailers were mobile bioweapons labs. "Anonymous sources" have supposedly contradicted this in private to the "reporter." Translation: even if he didn't just pull it out of his ass, he was shown precisely zero evidence for the claim. He chose to publish it because of his ideological bent - wait, what am I saying? The New York Times isn't liberal at all, is it, Tyler? Christ. Having this conversation with you is like trying to tell a donkey why eating crabgrass and rotten Spam gives it the runs, illustrating the molecular composition of its intake with diagrams, and using flipcharts to show how their breakdown in its digestive system affects its proper functioning. The donkey isn't interested, it eats the flipcharts, and it still brays all night. And it still has the runs.

 

Hee-haw, Tyler. Hee-haw.

Edited August 11, 2003 by Cancer Marney

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

-- Ambassador Joseph Wilson went to Niger in 2002 and investigated the claims of nuclear yellowcake that was, supposedly, sold (or attempted to be sold) to Iraq. He found the claims (through investigation; unless my name is "Joseph Wilson", I sincerely doubt you'd expect me to know his methods) to be implausable, and according to him, advised the CIA about it. The CIA (according to some sources) knew the claims to be arguably false for allegedly a year before the SOTU address.

 

-- Joseph Wilson was "smeared" by the administration's disclosure of his wife as an active CIA agent. I suppose you believe that's not enough to shut someone up, is it?

[Firestarter 0]

Joseph Wilson was "smeared" by the administration's disclosure of his wife as an active CIA agent

The administration has never done anything of the sort. No one in the White House has ever done anything of the sort. Kindly provide some proof for your ridiculous slander. But you can't, can you? This is an invented story, and you've swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, without any proof at all because it fits with your preconceived notions about the President and his administration. You never even thought of looking for proof because you were too busy jacking off to this fairy-tale.

 

You are a liar and a fool.

 

[Wilson] found the claims (through investigation; unless my name is "Joseph Wilson", I sincerely doubt you'd expect me to know his methods) to be implausable

Since your username is Tyler McClelland, I don't expect anything from you at all. Yet in an article he wrote himself, Wilson says that his "methods" consisted of spending

eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business.

In short: he was never on the ground and he was not cleared for access to any past or current intelligence. Wilson is not an intelligence operative, he is not an analyst, and he is not the DCI. All he knows is what people in Niger were paid to tell him. Based on that unverified and unverifiable information (he never had any power to demand official documents, nor did he have the resources to analyse his informants and their statements in depth), your ilk feels that he's a more credible source than MI6 and the NCIS. Sorry, I'm not buying that. Their people tend to do a bit more than drink mint tea on assignment, and I'll take their conclusions over his.

 

The CIA (according to some sources) knew the claims to be arguably false for allegedly a year before the SOTU address

Incorrect. For the third time: the allegations in question have not been publicly corroborated at this time. No one has proven them false to any degree.

Edited August 11, 2003 by Cancer Marney

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/na...lnews-headlines

[Firestarter 0]

My memory must be failing. I can't remember when the President put BOB FUCKING NOVAK on the federal payroll. Jesus Christ, is that the best you can do? "The administration" turns into a fucking COLUMNIST? You pathetic little shit.

 

As for the rest of the story, it's nothing more than senior official this, senior official that. When a reporter claims he was told something by an anonymous "senior intelligence official," 99.999% of the time he was sitting at home in his boxers, scratching his ass, while he invented the "information." Unattributed quotes are not proof.

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

Because it's unheard of that someone could possibly leak information.