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Boomer Chick
Joined: 01 Sep 2003
Posts: 407
Location: Colorado |
Saddam's Ouster Planned in 2001?
 Sun Jan 11, 2004 6:20 am
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If this isn't mainstream enough for you, Letxa, I don't know what is! The truth is coming out as many have said it would! This does not bode well for the neocon bullies!
Saddam's Ouster Planned In 2001?
By CBS News
Saturday 10 January 2004
The Bush Administration began making plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001 -- not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks, as has been previously reported.
That's what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider. O'Neill talks to CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl in the interview, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, Jan. 11 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," he tells Stahl. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a really huge leap."
O'Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source for an upcoming book, "The Price of Loyalty," authored by Ron Suskind.
Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall -- including post-war contingencies such as peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil.
"There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"
A Pentagon document, says Suskind, titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from...30, 40 countries, and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq," Suskind says.
In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill in the book.
CBS News Correspondent Mark Knoller reported Saturday that, as the White House sees it, O'Neill's remarks are those of a disgruntled former official, and it should not have come as a surprise to O'Neill that the U.S. advocated Saddam's ouster.
In fact, a senior administration official tells CBS News it would have been irresponsible not to plan for Saddam's eventual removal.
As for the charge that there were early plans to invade Iraq, Knoller says the official calls that "laughable." Suggesting that O'Neill doesn't know what he's talking about on this matter, the official told CBS News O'Neill had enough problems in his own area of expertise, so, "Why should anyone believe he has a credible understanding of foreign policy?"
Another senior administration official told CBS News Saturday, "No one ever listened to the crazy things he said before, why should we start now?"
Separately, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan added Saturday, "We appreciate his service. While we're not in the business of book reviews, it appears the world according to Mr O'Neill is more about justifying his own opinions than looking at the reality of the results we're achieving on behalf on the American people.
"The president is going to continue to be forward-looking and focus on building on the results we've achieved on the economy and efforts to make the world safer and a better place."
According to CBS News Reporter Lisa Barron in Baghdad, "The Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella group of former exiles, says it's not surprised by O'Neill's remarks. Spokesman Entifadh Qanbar tells CBS News that the Bush administration opened official channels to the Iraqi opposition soon after coming to power, and discussed how to remove Saddam. The group opened an office in Washington shortly afterwards."
Suskind also writes about a White House meeting in which he says the president seems to be wavering about going forward with his second round of tax cuts. "Haven't we already given money to rich people ... Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle," Suskind says the president uttered, according to a nearly verbatim transcript of an Economic Team meeting he says he obtained from someone at the meeting.
O'Neill, who was asked to resign because of his opposition to the tax cut, says he doesn't think his tell-all account in this book will be attacked by his former employers as sour grapes. "I will be really disappointed if [the White House] reacts that way," he tells Stahl. "I can't imagine that I am going to be attacked for telling the truth."
O'Neill also is quoted saying in the book that President Bush was so disengaged in cabinet meetings that he "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."
Also, as saying the administration's decision-making process was so flawed that often top officials had no real sense of what the president wanted them to do, forcing them to act on "little more than hunches about what the president might think."
"It's revealing," said Stahl on The Early Show Friday. "I would say it's an unflattering portrait of the White House and of the president -- and specifically, about how they make decisions."
A lack of dialogue, according to O'Neill, was the norm in cabinet meetings he attended. And it was similar in one-on-one meetings, says O'Neill. Of his first such meeting with the president, O'Neill says, "I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage [him] on...I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just listening...It was mostly a monologue."
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letxa2000
Joined: 30 Apr 2002
Posts: 588
Location: U.S. citizen in Mexico |
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Sun Jan 11, 2004 11:16 pm
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quote:
Originally posted by Boomer Chick:
If this isn't mainstream enough for you, Letxa, I don't know what is! The truth is coming out as many have said it would! This does not bode well for the neocon bullies!
I saw this, too, and knew it would be posted here. 
I'll wait for a second source. More than just talking about Iraq pre-9/11, he's burning Bush on how he ran/runs his cabinet meetings, didn't listen to input, etc. This may be true, or it may be sour grapes from someone who was fired about a year ago... and someone wanting to sell a few more copies of his book.
But if I hear another senior person echo this then I'll agree something is of interest there. Still wouldn't mean that the Administration orchestrated or planned 9/11, but it would certainly show that 9/11 helped them advance plans they already had. |
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Boomer Chick
Joined: 01 Sep 2003
Posts: 407
Location: Colorado |
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Mon Jan 12, 2004 3:31 am
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Both the headlines and the main gist of both articles underlines the Saddam Hussein question, Letxa. Of course the administration is going to deny everything and make O'Neill look like just a case of sour grapes! But O'Neill wrote a whole book on the administration. Might be interesting reading!
Jan 11, 9:27 AM EST
Ex-Aide: U.S. Planned Iraq War Pre-9/11
By SCOTT LINDLAW
Associated Press Writer
CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) -- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill contends the United States began laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq just days after President Bush took office in January 2001 - more than two years before the start of the U.S.-led war that ousted Saddam Hussein.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill told CBS's "60 Minutes" in an interview to be aired Sunday night.
The official American government stance on Iraq, dating to the Clinton administration, was that the United States sought to oust Saddam.
But O'Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, said he had qualms about what he asserted was the pre-emptive nature of the war planning.
"For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap," according to an excerpt of the interview that CBS released Saturday.
The administration has not found evidence that the Iraqi leader was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks but officials have said they had to consider the possibility that Saddam could have undertaken an even larger scale-strike against the United States.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan would not confirm or deny that the White House began Iraq war planning early in Bush's term. But, he said, Saddam "was a threat to peace and stability before September 11th, and even more of a threat after September 11."
"It appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinions than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people," McClellan said in Texas, where the president is staying at his ranch.
O'Neill's interview was part of his effort to promote a new book about the first half of Bush's term, "The Price of Loyalty," for which O'Neill was a primary source.
The administration began sending signals about a possible confrontation with Iraq even before Sept. 11, 2001.
In July 2001, after an Iraqi surface-to-air missile was fired at an American surveillance plane, Bush's national security adviser put Saddam on notice that the United States intended a more resolute military policy toward Iraq.
"Saddam Hussein is on the radar screen for the administration," Condoleezza Rice said at the time.
Yet Secretary of State Colin Powell said in December 2001, after the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York, that "with respect to what is sometimes characterized as taking out Saddam, I never saw a plan that was going to take him out."
According to the book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, the Bush administration began examining options for an invasion in the first months after Bush was inaugurated.
Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved. http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/B/BUSH_ONEILL?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=POLITICS&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
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Bush Sought ‘Way’ To Invade Iraq?
By CBS News
Sunday 11 January 2004
Iraq War Planned Pre-9/11?
A year ago, Paul O'Neill was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasury Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president's policy on tax cuts.
Now, O'Neill - who is known for speaking his mind - talks for the first time about his two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the centerpiece of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush White House is run.
Entitled "The Price of Loyalty," the book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author their personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents.
But the main source of the book was Paul O'Neill. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.
Paul O'Neill says he is going public because he thinks the Bush Administration has been too secretive about how decisions have been made.
Will this be seen as a “kiss-and-tell" book?
“I've come to believe that people will say damn near anything, so I'm sure somebody will say all of that and more,” says O’Neill, who was George Bush's top economic policy official.
In the book, O’Neill says that the president did not make decisions in a methodical way: there was no free-flow of ideas or open debate.
At cabinet meetings, he says the president was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection," forcing top officials to act "on little more than hunches about what the president might think."
This is what O'Neill says happened at his first hour-long, one-on-one meeting with Mr. Bush: “I went in with a long list of things to talk about, and I thought to engage on and as the book says, I was surprised that it turned out me talking, and the president just listening … As I recall, it was mostly a monologue.”
He also says that President Bush was disengaged, at least on domestic issues, and that disturbed him. And he says that wasn't his experience when he worked as a top official under Presidents Nixon and Ford, or the way he ran things when he was chairman of Alcoa.
O'Neill readily agreed to tell his story to the book's author Ron Suskind – and he adds that he's taking no money for his part in the book.
Suskind says he interviewed hundreds of people for the book – including several cabinet members.
O'Neill is the only one who spoke on the record, but Suskind says that someone high up in the administration – Donald Rumsfeld - warned O’Neill not to do this book.
Was it a warning, or a threat?
“I don't think so. I think it was the White House concerned,” says Suskind. “Understandably, because O'Neill has spent extraordinary amounts of time with the president. They said, ‘This could really be the one moment where things are revealed.’"
Not only did O'Neill give Suskind his time, he gave him 19,000 internal documents.
“Everything's there: Memoranda to the President, handwritten "thank you" notes, 100-page documents. Stuff that's sensitive,” says Suskind, adding that in some cases, it included transcripts of private, high-level National Security Council meetings. “You don’t get higher than that.”
And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations.
“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.
“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”
As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.
"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’" says O’Neill. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”
And that came up at this first meeting, says O’Neill, who adds that the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later.
He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. “There are memos. One of them marked, secret, says, ‘Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,’" adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of 2001.
Based on his interviews with O'Neill and several other officials at the meetings, Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq's oil wealth.
He obtained one Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, and entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts," which includes a map of potential areas for exploration.
“It talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries. And which ones have what intentions,” says Suskind. “On oil in Iraq.”
During the campaign, candidate Bush had criticized the Clinton-Gore Administration for being too interventionist: "If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I'm going to prevent that."
“The thing that's most surprising, I think, is how emphatically, from the very first, the administration had said ‘X’ during the campaign, but from the first day was often doing ‘Y,’” says Suskind. “Not just saying ‘Y,’ but actively moving toward the opposite of what they had said during the election.”
The president had promised to cut taxes, and he did. Within six months of taking office, he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through Congress.
But O'Neill thought it should have been the end. After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice president after the mid-term elections in 2002, Suskind writes that O'Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.
“Cheney, at this moment, shows his hand,” says Suskind. “He says, ‘You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.’ … O'Neill is speechless.”
”It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society,” says O’Neill. “And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction.”
Did he think it was irresponsible? “Well, it's for sure not what I would have done,” says O’Neill.
The former treasury secretary accuses Vice President Dick Cheney of not being an honest broker, but, with a handful of others, part of "a praetorian guard that encircled the president" to block out contrary views. "This is the way Dick likes it," says O’Neill.
Meanwhile, the White House was losing patience with O'Neill. He was becoming known for a series of off-the-cuff remarks his critics called gaffes. One of them sent the dollar into a nosedive and required major damage control.
Twice during stock market meltdowns, O'Neill was not available to the president: He was out of the country - one time on a trip to Africa with the Irish rock star Bono.
“Africa made an enormous splash. It was like a road show,” says Suskind. “He comes back and the president says to him at a meeting, ‘You know, you're getting quite a cult following.’ And it clearly was not a joke. And it was not said in jest.”
Suskind writes that the relationship grew tenser and that the president even took a jab at O'Neill in public, at an economic forum in Texas.
The two men were never close. And O'Neill was not amused when Mr. Bush began calling him "The Big O." He thought the president's habit of giving people nicknames was a form of bullying. Everything came to a head for O'Neill at a November 2002 meeting at the White House of the economic team.
“It's a huge meeting. You got Dick Cheney from the, you know, secure location on the video. The President is there,” says Suskind, who was given a nearly verbatim transcript by someone who attended the meeting.
He says everyone expected Mr. Bush to rubber stamp the plan under discussion: a big new tax cut. But, according to Suskind, the president was perhaps having second thoughts about cutting taxes again, and was uncharacteristically engaged.
“He asks, ‘Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut's gonna do it again,’” says Suskind.
“He says, ‘Didn’t we already, why are we doing it again?’” Now, his advisers, they say, ‘Well Mr. President, the upper class, they're the entrepreneurs. That's the standard response.’ And the president kind of goes, ‘OK.’ That's their response. And then, he comes back to it again. ‘Well, shouldn't we be giving money to the middle, won't people be able to say, ‘You did it once, and then you did it twice, and what was it good for?’"
But according to the transcript, White House political advisor Karl Rove jumped in.
“Karl Rove is saying to the president, a kind of mantra. ‘Stick to principle. Stick to principle.’ He says it over and over again,” says Suskind. “Don’t waver.”
In the end, the president didn't. And nine days after that meeting in which O'Neill made it clear he could not publicly support another tax cut, the vice president called and asked him to resign.
With the deficit now climbing towards $400 billion, O'Neill maintains he was in the right.
But look at the economy today.
“Yes, well, in the last quarter the growth rate was 8.2 percent. It was terrific,” says O’Neill. “I think the tax cut made a difference. But without the tax cut, we would have had 6 percent real growth, and the prospect of dealing with transformation of Social Security and fundamentally fixing the tax system. And to me, those were compelling competitors for, against more tax cuts.”
While in the book O'Neill comes off as constantly appalled at Mr. Bush, he was surprised when Stahl told him she found his portrait of the president unflattering.
“Hmmm, you really think so,” asks O’Neill, who says he isn’t joking. “Well, I’ll be darned.”
“You're giving me the impression that you're just going to be stunned if they attack you for this book,” says Stahl to O’Neill. “And they're going to say, I predict, you know, it's sour grapes. He's getting back because he was fired.” “I will be really disappointed if they react that way because I think they'll be hard put to,” says O’Neill.
Is he prepared for it?
“Well, I don't think I need to be because I can't imagine that I'm going to be attacked for telling the truth,” says O’Neill. “Why would I be attacked for telling the truth?”
White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked about the book on Friday and said "The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."
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Go to Original
Confessions of a White House Insider (O'Neill Interview)
By John F. Dickerson
Time
Sunday 11 January 2004
A book about Treasury's Paul O'Neill paints a presidency where ideology and politics rule the day
If anyone would listen to him, Paul O'Neill thought, Dick Cheney would. The two had served together during the Ford Administration, and now as the Treasury Secretary fought a losing battle against another round of tax cuts, he figured that his longtime colleague would give him a hearing.
O'Neill had been preaching that a fiscal crisis was looming and more tax cuts would exacerbate it. But others in the White House saw a chance to capitalize on the historic Republican congressional gains in the 2002 elections. Surely, Cheney would not be so smug. He would hear O'Neill out. In an economic meeting in the Vice President's office, O'Neill started pitching, describing how the numbers showed that growing budget deficits threatened the economy. Cheney cut him off. "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," he said. O'Neill was too dumbfounded to respond. Cheney continued: "We won the midterms. This is our due."
A month later, Paul O'Neill was fired, ending the rocky two-year tenure of Bush's first Treasury Secretary, who became known for his candid statements and the controversies that followed them. Rarely had a person who spoke so freely been embedded so high in an Administration that valued frank public remarks so little.
Now O'Neill is speaking with the same bracing style in a book written by Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Ron Suskind. The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill traces the former Alcoa CEO's rise and fall through the Administration: from his return to Washington to work for his third President, whom he believed would govern from the sensible center, through O'Neill's disillusionment, to his firing, executed in a surreal conversation with Cheney, a man he once considered a fellow traveler. Suskind had access not only to O'Neill but also to the saddlebags he took with him when he left town, which included a minute-by-minute accounting of his 23 months in office and 19,000 pages of documents on CD-ROM.
So, what does O'Neill reveal? According to the book, ideology and electoral politics so dominated the domestic-policy process during his tenure that it was often impossible to have a rational exchange of ideas. The incurious President was so opaque on some important issues that top Cabinet officials were left guessing his mind even after face-to-face meetings. Cheney is portrayed as an unstoppable force, unbowed by inconvenient facts as he drives Administration policy toward his goals.
O'Neill's tone in the book is not angry or sour, though it prompted a tart response from the Administration. "We didn't listen to him when he was there," said a top aide. "Why should we now?"
But the book is blunt, and in person O'Neill can be even more so. Discussing the case for the Iraq war in an interview with TIME, O'Neill, who sat on the National Security Council, says the focus was on Saddam from the early days of the Administration. He offers the most skeptical view of the case for war ever put forward by a top Administration official. "In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," he told TIME. "There were allegations and assertions by people.
But I've been around a hell of a long time, and I know the difference between evidence and assertions and illusions or allusions and conclusions that one could draw from a set of assumptions. To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else. And I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence." A top Administration official says of the wmd intelligence: "That information was on a need- to-know basis. He wouldn't have been in a position to see it."
From his first meeting with the President, O'Neill found Bush unengaged and inscrutable, an inside account far different from the shiny White House brochure version of an unfailing leader questioning aides with rapid-fire intensity. The two met one-on-one almost every week, but O'Neill says he had trouble divining his boss's goals and ideas. Bush was a blank slate rarely asking questions or issuing orders, unlike Nixon and Ford, for whom O'Neill also worked. "I wondered from the first, if the President didn't know the questions to ask," O'Neill says in the book, "or if he did know and just not want to know the answers? Or did his strategy somehow involve never showing what he thought? But you can ask questions, gather information and not necessarily show your hand. It was strange." In larger meetings, Bush was similarly walled off. Describing top-level meetings, O'Neill tells Suskind that during the course of his two years the President was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."
In his interview with TIME, O'Neill winces a little at that quote. He's worried it's too stark and now allows that it may just be Bush's style to keep his advisers always guessing. In Suskind's book, O'Neill's assessment of Bush's executive style is a harsh one: it is portrayed as a failure of leadership. Aides were left to play "blind man's bluff," trying to divine Bush's views on issues like tax policy, global warming and North Korea. Sometimes, O'Neill says, they had to float an idea in the press just to scare a reaction out of him. This led to public humiliation when the President contradicted his top officials, as he did Secretary of State Colin Powell on North Korea and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman on global warming. O'Neill came to believe that this gang of three beleaguered souls—only Powell remains—who shared a more nonideological approach were used for window dressing. We "may have been there, in large part, as cover," he tells Suskind.
If the President was hard to read, the White House decision-making process was even more mysterious. Each time O'Neill tried to gather data, sift facts and insert them into the system for debate, he would find discussion sheared off before it could get going. He tried to build fiscal restraint into Bush's tax plan but was thwarted by those who believed, as he says, that "tax cuts were good at any cost." He was losing debates before they had begun. The President asked for a global-warming plan one minute and then while it was being formulated, announced that he was reversing a campaign pledge to cut carbon dioxide emissions and pulling out unceremoniously from the Kyoto global- warming treaty, short-circuiting his aides' work. The President was "clearly signing on to strong ideological positions that had not been fully thought through," says O'Neill. As for the appetite for new ideas in the White House, he told Suskind, "that store is closed."
To grope his way out of the wilderness, O'Neill turned to his old friends from the Ford Administration, Alan Greenspan and Dick Cheney. According to the book, Greenspan agreed with many of his proposals but could not do much from his Delphian perch. When O'Neill sought guidance from the Vice President about how to install a system that would foster vigorous and transparent debate, he got grumbles and silence but little sympathy. Soon O'Neill concluded that his powerful old colleague was rowing in a different direction."I realized why Dick just nodded along when I said all of this, over and over, and nothing ever changed," he says in the book. "This is the way Dick likes it."
Where ideology did not win, electoral politics did. Overruling many of his advisers, the President decided to impose tariffs on imported steel to please voters in key swing states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio.
When the corporate scandals rocked Wall Street, O'Neill and Greenspan devised a plan to make CEOs accountable. Bush went with a more modest plan because "the corporate crowd," as O'Neill calls it in the book, complained loudly and Bush could not buck that constituency. "The biggest difference between then and now," O'Neill tells Suskind about his two previous tours in Washington, "is that our group was mostly about evidence and analysis, and Karl (Rove), Dick (Cheney), Karen (Hughes) and the gang seemed to be mostly about politics. It's a huge distinction."
A White House that seems to pick an outcome it wants and then marshal the facts to meet it seems very much like one that might decide to remove Saddam Hussein and then tickle the facts to meet its objective. That's the inescapable conclusion one draws from O'Neill's description of how Saddam was viewed from Day One. Though O'Neill is careful to compliment the cia for always citing the caveats in its findings, he describes a White House poised to overinterpret intelligence. "From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country," he tells Suskind. "And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'"
Cheney helped bring O'Neill into the Administration, acting as a shoehorn for O'Neill, who didn't know the President but trusted the wise counselor beside him. So it was perhaps fitting that Cheney would take O'Neill out. Weeks after Bush had assured O'Neill that rumored staff changes in the economic team did not mean his job was in peril, Cheney called. "Paul, the President has decided to make some changes in the economic team. And you're part of the change," he told O'Neill. The bloodless way he was cut loose by his old chum shocked O'Neill, Suskind writes, but what came after was even more shocking. Cheney asked him to announce that it was O'Neill's decision to leave Washington to return to private life. O'Neill refused, saying "I'm too old to begin telling lies now."
Suskind's book—informed by interviews with officials other than O'Neill—is only a partial view of the Bush White House. Bush's role on key topics like education, stem-cell research and aids funding is not explored. Bush's role as a military leader after 9/11 is discussed mostly through O'Neill's effort to stop terrorist funding. Bush comes across as mildly effective and pleased with O'Neill's work. The book does not try to cover how Bush engaged with his war cabinet during the Afghan conflict or how his leadership skills were deployed in the making of war. On the eve of the Iraq war, however, O'Neill does tell Suskind that he marvels at the President's conviction in light of what he considers paltry evidence: "With his level of experience, I would not be able to support his level of conviction."
There is no effort to offer an opposing analysis of O'Neill's portrayal of his tenure. The book lists his gaffes—he ridiculed Wall Street traders, accused Democrats of being socialists and disparaged business lobbyists who were seeking a tax credit that the President supported—but it portrays these moments as examples of brave truth telling in a town that doesn't like it. White House aides have a different view: It wasn't just that O'Neill was impolitic, they say; his statements had real consequences—roiling currency markets and Wall Street. What O'Neill would call rigor, Bush officials say, was an excessive fussiness that led to policy gridlock and sniping within the economic team.
O'Neill says he hopes that straight talk about the broken decision-making process in the White House will highlight the larger political and ideological warfare that has gripped Washington and kept good ideas from becoming law. Perhaps naively or arrogantly, or both, he even believes it may help change the climate. Ask him what he hopes the book will accomplish, and he will talk about Social Security reform in earnest tones: tough choices won't be made in Washington so long as it shuns honest dialogue, bipartisanship and intellectual thoroughness. O'Neill may not have been cut out for this town, but give him this: he does exhibit the sobriety and devotion to ideas that are supposed to be in vogue in the postironic, post- 9/11 age.
Loyalty is perhaps the most prized quality in the White House. In the book, O'Neill suggests a very dark understanding of what happens to those who don't show it. "These people are nasty and they have a long memory," he tells Suskind. But he also believes that by speaking out even in the face of inevitable White House wrath, he can demonstrate loyalty to something he prizes: the truth. "Loyalty to a person and whatever they say or do, that's the opposite of real loyalty, which is loyalty based on inquiry, and telling someone what you really think and feel—your best estimation of the truth instead of what they want to hear." That goal is worth the price of retribution, O'Neill says. Plus, as he told Suskind, "I'm an old guy, and I'm rich. And there's nothing they can do to hurt me."
http://truthout.org/docs_04/011204B.shtml
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Comments?
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JerseyBluEyz
Joined: 09 Jul 2003
Posts: 1257
Location: Northeast |
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Mon Jan 12, 2004 4:52 pm
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Here is what they're saying over in the U.K. today.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=480363
Bush was demanding excuse to invade Iraq in January 2001, says ex-treasury secretary
By Andrew Gumbel, in Los Angeles
12 January 2004
The Bush administration started making detailed plans for the invasion of Iraq within days of coming to office, with the President himself anxious to find a pretext to overthrow Saddam Hussein, a high-ranking former cabinet member said yesterday.
The revelation is the latest in a string of potential embarrassments for the White House offered by the former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, who has gone on the record for a new book looking at his bumpy two years at the centre of US power, The Price of Loyalty.
Mr O'Neill said invading Iraq was "topic A" at the very first meeting of President George Bush's National Security Council, 10 days after his inauguration on 20 January 2001, and continued to be an abiding theme in follow-up meetings.
"From the very first instance, it was about Iraq," said Mr O'Neill, who was a participant in all the meetings and provided voluminous minutes and other documents to the book's author, Ron Suskind. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying 'Go find me a way to do this'."
Mr O'Neill is the first cabinet member to implicate directly Mr Bush in planning a war against Iraq so early in his presidency. One of the documents passed to Mr Suskind was a secret dossier from the first few weeks of the administration entitled "Plan for post-Saddam Iraq". The disclosure will provide further ammunition for to Bush critics who believe the administration cynically exploited the 11 September terror attacks to launch an aggressive policy of global military interventionism that neo-conservative hawks such as Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, had been advocating for years.
It makes clear that hints of a link between Saddam and the 11 September attacks, repeatedly made by administration officials in the run-up to the war but never substantiated, were a political convenience, not the driving motivation behind the invasion. And it also poses a considerable challenge to the official version of history, which has sought to portray Mr Bush as undergoing a near-religious conversion after 11 September from a meek peacetime leader to a man with a global mission to stamp out evil.
Mr O'Neill, who spoke to CBS's60 Minutes news programme yesterday, said he was surprised nobody at the NSC meetings asked questions such as "Why Saddam?" or "Why now?" "For me," he added, "the notion of pre-emption, that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is really a huge leap."
It has been clear for some time that the neo-conservatives in the administration were pushing such unilateralism. Mr Bush came to office pledging the opposite - an aversion to so-called "nation-building" and the commitment of US troops to world trouble-spots.
The former treasury secretary gives a unflattering portrait of the President in the book and in follow-up interviews, describing him as disengaged from the issues and apparently uninterested in dialogue with advisers. In cabinet meetings, Mr O'Neill said, the President was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people" - having nothing to say and allowing others to fix the agenda.
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letxa2000
Joined: 30 Apr 2002
Posts: 588
Location: U.S. citizen in Mexico |
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Mon Jan 12, 2004 5:28 pm
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Not surprisingly, not everyone in the Bush cabinet agrees with O'Neils portrayal. Now one could say that those that are defending Bush have a vested interest, but so does O'Neil.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/11/oneill.bush/index.html
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Two Cabinet members Sunday defended President Bush from harsh criticism by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in an upcoming book and accompanying television and magazine interviews.
In the book, "The Price of Loyalty," by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, scheduled for publication Tuesday, O'Neill says administration officials discussed plans to go to war with Iraq as early as their first weeks in office.
He also compares Bush's presence at Cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people."
Commerce Secretary Don Evans, a longtime Bush friend who was chairman of his 2000 campaign, disputed that account Sunday.
"He drives the meeting, asks tough questions. He likes dissent," Evans told CNN's "Late Edition."
"He likes to see debate. He thinks it's very healthy, very constructive for the process. Oftentimes, he has to make the deciding decision when he has his advisers on both sides of the same subject."
An interview with O'Neill aired Sunday night on the CBS program "60 Minutes."
In it, O'Neill said the Bush administration was eyeing an invasion of Iraq "from the very beginning" -- months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that administration officials said changed their strategic perspective.
Bush administration officials say regime change in Iraq had been U.S. policy since 1998, when President Clinton was in office, and insist removing Saddam by force was a last resort.
They also say the Bush administration has contingency plans about many global hotspots.
"For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap," O'Neill said in the interview.
"We didn't listen to [O'Neill's] wacky ideas when he was in the White House, why should we start listening to him now," said a senior official. The official said he informed Bush of O'Neill's comments but declined to describe the president's reaction.
Suskind said he interviewed hundreds of people for the book, including several Cabinet members who gave him their accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents.
But the main source of the book was O'Neill, who said he was going public because he felt the administration "has been too secretive about how decisions have been made," CBS said.
The network added that O'Neill gave Suskind 19,000 internal documents and took no money for his role in the book.
O'Neill, the former CEO of aluminum giant Alcoa, was fired in December 2002 over differences with the administration's tax cuts.
Suskind writes that O'Neill warned Vice President Dick Cheney of the consequences of a growing budget deficit, only to be told that Ronald Reagan's two-term presidency showed "deficits don't matter."
"I enjoyed my times spent with Paul O'Neill and I appreciate his service," Evans said. "But we continue to stay focused on jobs for the American people, growing this economy, and the results are proving that the president's policies that he's been leading on are working."
John Snow, who replaced O'Neill's at the Treasury Department, said the administration believes cutting budget deficits -- projected to hit $500 billion -- is important, but the shortfalls are "understandable" given the impacts of recession and war.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan brushed off O'Neill's criticism Saturday.
"We appreciate his service, but we are not in the business of doing book reviews," he told reporters.
"It appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinion than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people."
O'Neill also told Time magazine he never saw evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq --Bush's primary justification for the U.S.-led invasion of the country in March.
None have been found, although searches have turned up evidence of continuing research on banned weapons.
O'Neill predicted that his former colleagues -- one of whom has already tried to paint him as a disgruntled former employee with a "tin ear" for politics -- would hit back.
"These people are nasty and they have a long memory," O'Neill told Time.
Democrats vying for the chance to challenge Bush in November jumped on O'Neill's comments.
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, whose opposition to the invasion of Iraq has boosted him to the front ranks of Democratic candidates, said the Suskind book shows Bush "planned to go to war all along."
Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who backed the decision to go to war in Iraq, said O'Neill's concerns about Bush's economic programs were right.
"This administration has taken us into the largest fiscal deficit in our history," Lieberman told "Fox News Sunday."
"The dollar is at an all-time low, and 3 million people lost their jobs. Last month, when the administration said we'd expect to see 150,000 new jobs created, we ended up seeing 1,000 -- a very lame performance."
Former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri told CBS that O'Neill's observations about Bush "are things that I've found when I met with the president."
"I told the president on 9/12, the day after 9/11, that we had to trust one another, that we had to try to put politics aside, to try to prevent further acts of terrorism," Gephardt said.
"I said, 'This is a matter of life and death, and we've got to do our best to work together to keep our people safe.' And I've really tried to do that. I found him to be hard to help."
Former Sen. Bob Dole, the Republican Party's presidential nominee in 1996, said he wouldn't suggest O'Neill was "bitter," but he was "certainly very critical."
"I mean, there's always somebody in somebody's administration who jumps out early, sells a book, and goes after the guy who hired him," Dole told CNN. "I don't know if that's good. It may be good business; it's not good politics." |
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Boomer Chick
Joined: 01 Sep 2003
Posts: 407
Location: Colorado |
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Mon Jan 12, 2004 5:39 pm
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Letxa said: "Not surprisingly, not everyone in the Bush cabinet agrees with O'Neils portrayal. Now one could say that those that are defending Bush have a vested interest, but so does O'Neil."
And what interest might that be? What does O'Neill gain from all of this?
bc
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JerseyBluEyz
Joined: 09 Jul 2003
Posts: 1257
Location: Northeast |
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Mon Jan 12, 2004 8:13 pm
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quote:
Originally posted by Boomer Chick:
What does O'Neill gain from all of this?
Fear for his welfare and life?
Quote from above: O'Neill, who was asked to resign because of his opposition to the tax cut, says he doesn't think his tell-all account in this book will be attacked by his former employers as sour grapes. "I will be really disappointed if [the White House] reacts that way," he tells Stahl. "I can't imagine that I am going to be attacked for telling the truth."
Isn't that a little naive? Of course the man will be attacked - and from all sides. If he is not, I will be surprised and wonder WHY NOT? - his comment absolutely surprised me!
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letxa2000
Joined: 30 Apr 2002
Posts: 588
Location: U.S. citizen in Mexico |
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Mon Jan 12, 2004 8:33 pm
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quote:
Originally posted by Boomer Chick:
And what interest might that be? What does O'Neill gain from all of this?
Publicity. People wanting to talk to him. 15 minutes of fame. Burning his former employer with whom he had disagreements. There is no shortage of potential motives, many of them political. |
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Boomer Chick
Joined: 01 Sep 2003
Posts: 407
Location: Colorado |
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Mon Jan 12, 2004 8:34 pm
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Point well made, JBE! In fact, O'Neill risks more than any benefit he could derive! He obviously wants the truth to come out!
Go the the veteran's abuse thread and see the latest "tell all" from a veteran of the Pentagon involved in White House foreign affairs!
Same thing! She doesn't stand to gain anything, either, but she's telling it like she saw it -- for the sake of truth!
The truth floats to the top like sweet cream, but the taste is often bitter!
bc 
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letxa2000
Joined: 30 Apr 2002
Posts: 588
Location: U.S. citizen in Mexico |
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Mon Jan 12, 2004 8:49 pm
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quote:
Originally posted by Boomer Chick:
Point well made, JBE! In fact, O'Neill risks more than any benefit he could derive! He obviously wants the truth to come out!
Yeah, right. He disagreed with the policies of his former employer. He was fired. And now he's making accusations against his former employer. Obviously he wants the truth to come out!
He might be telling the truth, but the circumstances don't let us reach such a conclusion. It still looks more like sour grapes to me.
More telling will be what happens with O'Neil in the months to come. The 2004 elections are starting to heat up and it will be interesting to see if he plays any part in them, be it publically or behind the scenes. |
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Boomer Chick
Joined: 01 Sep 2003
Posts: 407
Location: Colorado |
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Mon Jan 12, 2004 11:14 pm
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It was more than disgreeing with them, Letxa. It was simply that no one, not even him, the Secretary of the Treasury, could openly debate, be considered as worthy of an opnion at all or even heard. This is unusual administrative behavior and not the norm. He had previous experience in several administrations and knew this book would reveal quite a bit. His interviews revealed quite a bit as well!
He still does not stand to gain much of anything, other than sales, from the book. Just like the Pentagon retiree, they're older and they have no fear of their own future as their benefits are in tact and they have nothing to lose.
Why would a Republican work for the Dems? That's an odd thing to assume.
Look, why you would waste your time trying to defend this administration is truly beyond me. Whistleblowers have always been part of getting to the truth of any administration.Tell all books are the norm, George Stefanopoulis wrote one about the Clinton administration.
Get on the light side, Letxa, and quit defending the dark side!
You may think you're defending the right to objectivity, but indeed you come off as quite the opposite.
His view is one view. All views should be put together to form a picture -- and that picture is obviously one of an administration with an agenda, a closed administration, a secretive one, and one who does not allow any kind of disagreement with the people in charge -- and in this case -- it was Dick Cheney. The neocon agenda is coming out in many ways and for you to sit in another country and criticize all effort to bring the picture of our administration to light is to only add to the darkness. Too bad. I feel sorry for you. But I don't feel sorry for the American people as we will kick them out and get back the America we know we deserve. One in which we respect life, liberty, freedom, open and fair government and the ethic of world cooperation and national self respect.
bc |
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Boomer Chick
Joined: 01 Sep 2003
Posts: 407
Location: Colorado |
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Tue Jan 13, 2004 12:46 am
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THE DAILY MIS-LEAD
< http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1922896&l=14345 >
===============================
FORMER TREASURY SECRETARY SAYS WAR IN IRAQ WAS PLANNED BEFORE 9/11
Last year, President Bush made the case for war in Iraq by saying that
America needs to protect itself from terrorism in a post-9/11 world. Bush
told the nation that "the dynamics have shifted since 11 years ago, because
of what happened on September the 11th," adding, "No longer are we secure."
Bush also assured the nation that use of force in Iraq was a last resort,
saying, "A military option is my last choice, the last choice." However,
new revelations from one of Bush's former cabinet members show that war
plans were being developed long before the terrorist attacks.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told 60 Minutes that regime change in
Iraq was the main topic at the very first meeting of Bush's National
Security Council - a full eight months before 9/11. O'Neill said, "It was
all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president
saying 'Go find me a way to do this.'"
Since this story broke, the administration has attempted to discredit O'
Neill, claiming that "the treasury secretary is not in the position to have
access to that kind of information." Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Ron
Suskind, who has worked with O'Neill for a year on a book about the Bush
White House, calls that allegation "simply wrong," adding, "[O'Neill] got
every file from [CIA Director] George Tenet." Suskind has reviewed nearly
19,000 internal administration documents provided by O'Neil.
Read the Mis-Lead -->
< http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1922896&l=14346 >
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letxa2000
Joined: 30 Apr 2002
Posts: 588
Location: U.S. citizen in Mexico |
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Tue Jan 13, 2004 4:31 am
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quote:
Originally posted by Boomer Chick:
[B]It was more than disgreeing with them, Letxa. It was simply that no one, not even him, the Secretary of the Treasury, could openly debate, be considered as worthy of an opnion at all or even heard. This is unusual administrative behavior and not the norm.
My reading of the original article is that O'Neil went into a monolog with Bush in a private meeting. Perhaps he wanted to debate the president or bounce ideas off of him and all Bush did was listen. There's certainly nothing wrong with that. My understanding is that JFK did much the same thing--listened to input, said "Thank you" and then considered it on his own.
As for the cabinet meetings, it's not clear to me (based on the quotes I've seen) whether Bush gave unclear "marching orders" (i.e., no-one knew what to do even after a decision had been made) or if simply O'Neil wanted Bush to come up with an immediate and clear answer at a given cabinet meeting. Again, from what I've read JFK worked much the same way and used cabinet meetings more for information-gathering rather than deciding on the spot what to do. Again, there's nothing wrong with that except that maybe O'Neil doesn't like that form of cabinet meetings.
As for the allegation made by O'Neil that Bush "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people." I'm not even sure what that means. It certainly sounds insulting, but I'd have to hear more from O'Neil to really understand what that line means.
quote:
He had previous experience in several administrations and knew this book would reveal quite a bit. His interviews revealed quite a bit as well!
Every president has his own way of handling cabinet meetings just as every manager has his way of managing. Sometimes a perfectly good manager and a perfectly good employee simply don't get along or have incompatible ways of doing things. That simply speaks to the incompatability of the people, not to any inherent flaw in either of them.
quote:
He still does not stand to gain much of anything, other than sales, from the book. Just like the Pentagon retiree, they're older and they have no fear of their own future as their benefits are in tact and they have nothing to lose.
Not much to gain "other than sales?" Oh, yeah, that's an insignificant point. Let's also forget about burning the employer that fired you, I'm sure he's a saint that would never want some "payback." The timing of his comments is interesting, too. Looks like the Democratic candidates are already having a field-day with it.
quote:
Why would a Republican work for the Dems? That's an odd thing to assume.
I've seen stranger things including a Democratic Senator of Colorado becoming a Republican back in, what, 1994? The wife of the Republican governor of California is Democrat and was publically supporting her husband even though he belongs to a different party.
These days party affiliation is almost irrelevant except for nomination and funding purposes.
quote:
Look, why you would waste your time trying to defend this administration is truly beyond me.
I'm not going to defend it against valid criticism. I've already stated I'm not exactly convinced that the Iraq war was a good idea. But I'm also not as quick to jump to conclusions as others here are. This is an anti-Bush camp and anything that remotely suggests something bad about Bush is immediately grabbed and run up the flagpole without much consideration as to the source of that news or the possible motivations behind it.
The "necons" and Bush people aren't the only ones with agendas, you know. They're just the ones that happen to be in power right now.
quote:
Whistleblowers have always been part of getting to the truth of any administration. Tell all books are the norm, George Stefanopoulis wrote one about the Clinton administration.
And I have no idea what he wrote. But if he was the only one who said something bad about the Clinton administration and many others defended the inner workings of the Clinton Administration, I'd write off Stef's comments to book sales even though I was never fond of Clinton. If there is some corroberating evidence then, yes, it deserves more attention.
So far it seems we have O'Neil making a claim and everyone else writing him off. As the article says, "Another senior administration official told CBS News Saturday, "No one ever listened to the crazy things he said before, why should we start now?"" Which is exactly my point.
He is a fired ex-employee that may have sour grapes. If there is some more convincing accusations then great--O'Neils comments plus other comments start to make a convincing case. But a fired ex-employee that never agreed with his employer on how to do his job? Forgive me if I don't jump on the anti-Bush bandwagon based on his comments.
quote:
Get on the light side, Letxa, and quit defending the dark side!
I'm on the side of truth and FAIR REPORTING AND INVESTIGATION. If the truth and fair investigation shows that O'Neil is right, fine. I'll accept it. But what I'm doing here is making sure people realize that much of what is posted here is unsubstantiated or has its own agenda.
quote:
You may think you're defending the right to objectivity, but indeed you come off as quite the opposite.
It's sad that you see what I'm doing as "defending Bush." I'm doing nothing of the sort. The fact that you see me in that way tells me just how far out to field your particular viewpoint is. All I'm asking for is some responsibility in investigation and reporting. That's largely missing in this forum.
quote:
His view is one view. All views should be put together to form a picture -- and that picture is obviously one of an administration with an agenda, a closed administration, a secretive one, and one who does not allow any kind of disagreement with the people in charge
An Administration with an agenda? That's normal. You may not agree with the agenda, but that administration that does not have an agenda is a useless administration. Much like Clinton's... 8 years in the White House and really didn't do anything except raise taxes and close out the millenium. No-one is sure what Clinton's legacy is because he didn't leave one. Some even seem to be waiting for Hillary to become president so that people can try to define Bill's legacy... THAT was a president without an agenda.
A closed administration? What exactly is that and why is it bad? Could I just walk in on Clinton or Reagan or Carter and let them know what I think they should do??
A secretive administration? Secretive in what sense? Every administration has secrets. What exactly do you think this administration is secretive about? Its position on terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea are all pretty clear and well-known. What is it being secretive about?
No disagreement with the people in charge? Heck, Powell was a pretty vocal opponent leading up to the Iraq war, or at least certainly not as thrilled as others in the administration. Of course he knew how to handle himself diplomatically. But he didn't get fired. Perhaps O'Neil was preceived as a confrontational idiot rather than a team player. And team player does not necessarily mean he agrees with the coach all the time, but it DOES mean someone who can get along and get things done. And when there are disagreements, one has to know how to present those disagreements tactfully. Perhaps he was just abbrasive.
I've worked with qualified people in the past that were fired because they just created too much friction in the group even when they got along with the manager... meanwhile I've often very vocally disagreed with my bosses (when I was an employee) and was never fired even after heated arguments. It's all a matter of tact and diplomacy. Perhaps O'Neil had neither.
quote:
The neocon agenda is coming out in many ways and for you to sit in another country and criticize all effort to bring the picture of our administration to light is to only add to the darkness.
Just trying to keep things balanced because, obviously, this site is basically one-sided. You may see me as defending Bush but that's not the case. I could care less if he or another Republican is elected in 2004. But I do insist on working with facts and that's often not the case here. There should always be at least a second credible source before something is paraded around as fact.
quote:
I feel sorry for you.
And I feel sorry for those here that cling to each and every story that portrays Bush (or anyone else) in a bad light without verifying sources or considering whether that source has an agenda. I feel sorry for the people here that rejoice in bad news, wherever it may come from. I feel sorry for the people here that only see bad news and gleefully ignore any good or positive news. I feel sorry for the people here that are excited when they see something that appears to be bad for Bush, even if it's bad for the country as a whole. I feel sorry for the people here that would still hate Bush even if all evidence suggested that everything you believe is wrong--you'd just write it off as a conspiracy to cover-up the wrongs of the administration.
Basically, I feel sorry for the people here that are more interested in proving the administration is evil than actually searching for the truth.
quote:
But I don't feel sorry for the American people as we will kick them out and get back the America we know we deserve. One in which we respect life, liberty, freedom, open and fair government and the ethic of world cooperation and national self respect.
That's the beauty of democracy. I just hope everyone votes based on reality and substantiated facts, and not just the latest "news" report on a conspiracy site.
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Boomer Chick
Joined: 01 Sep 2003
Posts: 407
Location: Colorado |
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Tue Jan 13, 2004 6:34 am
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Are you still a citizen?
Amazing that even a national news subject of public debate in all forums, television, talk shows, news shows of all kinds would strike you as only negative. This story is all over the news. You think we drug it up on some conspiracy site?
The writings from retired Pentagon employee Karen Swiatkowski are also worth reading. She is another whistle blower giving insight and experience with the administration an airing.
We don't like Bush, we didn't like the occupation of Iraq and we have every right to watch and find any information that points to truth about this president and his cabinet. The world and our nation is in dire danger.
The fact that you don't know a patriot from a rock, is your problem, not mine!
We read a full range of interesting and positive material -- so how on earth could you judge? This is a forum for "other conspiracies" not a forum including all kind of fuzzy wuzzy fun stuff! We belong to other forums (together) to share such things. What an assuming person you are!
This forum is true to its purpose -- finding truth and information on a threat to our nation. Why don't you join another board if you cannot understand the purpose of this one! There are thousands out there!
And the main gist of the story is that Bush and his cabinet planned the ousting of Saddam before 9/11! This is big news with documents (thousands) to prove it!
quote:
Since this story broke, the administration has attempted to discredit O'
Neill, claiming that "the treasury secretary is not in the position to have
access to that kind of information." Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Ron
Suskind, who has worked with O'Neill for a year on a book about the Bush
White House, calls that allegation "simply wrong," adding, "[O'Neill] got
every file from [CIA Director] George Tenet." Suskind has reviewed nearly
19,000 internal administration documents provided by O'Neil.
One should not be concerned with good or bad. Truth is truth and it cannot be supressed for long.
Cream rises to the top, but the taste is often bitter!
Deal with it!
We do!
Grow up!
bc
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letxa2000
Joined: 30 Apr 2002
Posts: 588
Location: U.S. citizen in Mexico |
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Tue Jan 13, 2004 6:50 am
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quote:
Originally posted by Boomer Chick:
Are you still a citizen?
Yes, I am.
quote:
Amazing that even a national news subject of public debate in all forums, television, talk shows, news shows of all kinds would strike you as only negative. This story is all over the news. You think we drug it up on some conspiracy site?
I didn't say you dug this story up on a conspiracy site. The problem is that while the current buzz is O'Neils comments, many others from the same cabinet are also rejecting it. You have heard about those that are basically saying the opposite, haven't you? Or do you only pay attention to the anti-Bush spin rather than the whole picture? Taking what he says on balance with what others say, or just using him as vindication of your preconceptions of Bush?
quote:
We don't like Bush, we didn't like the occupation of Iraq and we have every right to watch and find any information that points to truth about this president and his cabinet. The world and our nation is in dire danger.
You have the right to do anything you want. I just hope you have the intelligence and decency to get ALL the information, not just the information that supports your viewpoint. It is every citizen's RESPONSIBILITY to be informed and that doesn't mean listening to half the debate. And that's exactly what would happen in this forum if people like me didn't come and stir things up a bit.
quote:
The fact that you don't know a patriot from a rock, is your problem, not mine!
Perhaps. But the possibility that you automatically label someone a "patriot" just because he has something bad to say about someone you don't like rather than even considering other motivations is unfortunate. In fact, it puts you close to Rumsfield in regards to Saddam "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" (or "patriot," in this case).
quote:
This is a forum for "other conspiracies" not a forum including all kind of fuzzy wuzzy fun stuff! We belong to other forums (together) to share such things. What an assuming person you are!
The problem is that even if this area is to discuss "other conspiracies," the full picture should be under discussion. Just considering part of the story is a disservice WHEREVER it happens, even in a conspiracy forum.
quote:
This forum is true to its purpose -- finding truth and information on a threat to our nation. Why don't you join another board if you cannot understand the purpose of this one! There are thousands out there!
In other words, you don't want to hear "the rest of the story." You want to hear what you want to hear and damn everything else. That is not the position of a thinking person.
I don't want to go to thousands of other forums because I, for one, DON'T want to go to some place where everyone thinks like me. I am of no benefit to the others that think like me and those that think like me are of no benefit to me. True discovery occurs when OPPOSING people are put in the same room.
I'm sorry to hear you don't favor openn discussion, or only favor it when it agrees with your viewpoint. I respecfully decline your invitation to leave. |
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