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Holy crap!!
From www.dailykos.com
by Hunter
Fri Jun 17th, 2005 at 15:52:19 PDT
Via The American Street, a Bob Woodward 60 Minutes interview from April, 2004:
Woodward reports that just five days after Sept. 11, President Bush indicated to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that while he had to do Afghanistan first, he was also determined to do something about Saddam Hussein.
"There's some pressure to go after Saddam Hussein. Don Rumsfeld has said, `This is an opportunity to take out Saddam Hussein, perhaps. We should consider it.' And the president says to Condi Rice meeting head to head, 'We won't do Iraq now.' But it is a question we're gonna have to return to,'" says Woodward.
"And there's this low boil on Iraq until the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 21, 2001. This is 72 days after 9/11. This is part of this secret history. President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically, and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, 'What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.'"
Woodward says immediately after that, Rumsfeld told Gen. Tommy Franks to develop a war plan to invade Iraq and remove Saddam - and that Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank check.
"Rumsfeld and Franks work out a deal essentially where Franks can spend any money he needs. And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the preparations in Kuwait, specifically to make war possible," says Woodward.
"Gets to a point where in July, the end of July 2002, they need $700 million, a large amount of money for all these tasks. And the president approves it. But Congress doesn't know and it is done. They get the money from a supplemental appropriation for the Afghan War, which Congress has approved. ...Some people are gonna look at a document called the Constitution which says that no money will be drawn from the Treasury unless appropriated by Congress. Congress was totally in the dark on this."
The Downing Street Minutes were written on July 23, 2002:
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
This isn't going away. It may be a slow build, but the danger to the Bush administration is that there really is a break in the dam, at this point -- on a wide variety of fronts, previous snippets and stories are being merged together to finally reveal the larger storyline. Bolton, the DSM, ElBaradei, the movement of funds and troops away from the active search for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in preparation for the Iraq action, the heightened bombings being carried out against Iraq in the period before the involvement of the U.N. -- rather than a collection of discrete stories, the overall plot is coming together. And it is damning.
Wow!! Just wow!! Too bad the Bush administration hasn't had a more effective Deepthroat. That or too bad that the Republicancensorship media machine hadn't silenced any whistleblowers so effectively.
Just wow. Imagine what that 700 million could have done in Afghanistan? The infrastructure would be substantially better off, we might have actually gotten more of Al Quaeda's command structure, and we wouldn't have destroyed the entire infrastructure of another country and completely destabilized the region.
Wow!
by Hunter
Fri Jun 17th, 2005 at 15:52:19 PDT
Via The American Street, a Bob Woodward 60 Minutes interview from April, 2004:
Woodward reports that just five days after Sept. 11, President Bush indicated to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that while he had to do Afghanistan first, he was also determined to do something about Saddam Hussein.
"There's some pressure to go after Saddam Hussein. Don Rumsfeld has said, `This is an opportunity to take out Saddam Hussein, perhaps. We should consider it.' And the president says to Condi Rice meeting head to head, 'We won't do Iraq now.' But it is a question we're gonna have to return to,'" says Woodward.
"And there's this low boil on Iraq until the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 21, 2001. This is 72 days after 9/11. This is part of this secret history. President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically, and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, 'What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.'"
Woodward says immediately after that, Rumsfeld told Gen. Tommy Franks to develop a war plan to invade Iraq and remove Saddam - and that Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank check.
"Rumsfeld and Franks work out a deal essentially where Franks can spend any money he needs. And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the preparations in Kuwait, specifically to make war possible," says Woodward.
"Gets to a point where in July, the end of July 2002, they need $700 million, a large amount of money for all these tasks. And the president approves it. But Congress doesn't know and it is done. They get the money from a supplemental appropriation for the Afghan War, which Congress has approved. ...Some people are gonna look at a document called the Constitution which says that no money will be drawn from the Treasury unless appropriated by Congress. Congress was totally in the dark on this."
The Downing Street Minutes were written on July 23, 2002:
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
This isn't going away. It may be a slow build, but the danger to the Bush administration is that there really is a break in the dam, at this point -- on a wide variety of fronts, previous snippets and stories are being merged together to finally reveal the larger storyline. Bolton, the DSM, ElBaradei, the movement of funds and troops away from the active search for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in preparation for the Iraq action, the heightened bombings being carried out against Iraq in the period before the involvement of the U.N. -- rather than a collection of discrete stories, the overall plot is coming together. And it is damning.
Wow!! Just wow!! Too bad the Bush administration hasn't had a more effective Deepthroat. That or too bad that the Republican
Just wow. Imagine what that 700 million could have done in Afghanistan? The infrastructure would be substantially better off, we might have actually gotten more of Al Quaeda's command structure, and we wouldn't have destroyed the entire infrastructure of another country and completely destabilized the region.
Wow!