Why Obama? Neither Hillary Nor Edwards Read The NIE Before Sending Our Troops to Die!

Dems Will Win

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Thu Dec-20-07 03:20 PM
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Why Obama? Neither Hillary Nor Edwards Read The NIE Before Sending Our Troops to Die!

Edited on Thu Dec-20-07 03:38 PM by Dems Will Win

THIS PRIMARY IS ABOUT OCTOBER 2002 AND THE WAR VOTE BY EDWARDS AND CLINTON

Why Obama? This is the main reason I am voting for Barack: because he had the good sense to be against the War in Iraq in 2002, calling it a "Dumb War". Edwards meanwhile co-sponsored the Authorization of Force Resolution and said on the floor: "We know Saddam has WMD".

Here is the devastating video of Edwards' floor speech to send us to war on a lie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY6BZgkI0kI

What was Obama's speech on Iraq a month later? He called it a dumb war. Here's a video interview. Who had better judgement? Who was mnore for peace and diplomacy? Who is the true progressive when the merde hits the fan? Barack Obama:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXzmXy226po

Here is Hillary, trusting BUSH all the way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSu0zXCR9sE&feature=related

Think it's pretty clear who is the true progressive from these tapes, who is a true leader instead of a calculating politician.

And Clinton? She is even worse than Edwards, not reading the NIE again, not even the summary! And then she even did something Joe LIEberman did not do, definitively link al Quada and Saddam:

HILLARY'S WAR

According to Senate aides, because Clinton was not yet on the Armed Services Committee, she did not have anyone working for her with the security clearances needed to read the entire N.I.E. and the other highly classified reports that pertained to Iraq. She could have done the reading herself. Senators were able to access the N.I.E. at two secure locations in the Capitol complex. Nonetheless, only six senators personally read the report, according to a 2005 television interview with Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia and then the vice chairman of the intelligence panel. Earlier this year, on the presidential campaign trail in New Hampshire, Clinton was confronted by a woman who had traveled from New York to ask her if she had read the intelligence report. According to Eloise Harper of ABC News, Clinton responded that she had been briefed on it.

''Did you read it?'' the woman screamed. Clinton replied that she had been briefed, though she did not say by whom. The question of whether Clinton took the time to read the N.I.E. report is critically important. Indeed, one of Clinton's Democratic colleagues, Bob Graham, the Florida senator who was then the chairman of the intelligence committee, said he voted against the resolution on the war, in part, because he had read the complete N.I.E. report. Graham said he found that it did not persuade him that Iraq possessed W.M.D. As a result, he listened to Bush's claims more skeptically. ''I was able to apply caveat emptor,'' Graham, who has since left the Senate, observed in 2005. He added regretfully, ''Most of my colleagues could not.''

On Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2002, Senate Democrats, including Clinton, held a caucus over lunch on the second floor of the Capitol. There, Graham says he ''forcefully'' urged his colleagues to read the complete 90-page N.I.E. before casting such a monumental vote. In her own remarks on the Senate floor on Oct. 10, 2002, Clinton noted the existence of ''differing opinions within this body.'' Then she went on to offer a lengthy catalog of Saddam Hussein's crimes. She cited unnamed ''intelligence reports'' showing that between 1998 and 2002 ''Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability and his nuclear program.'' Both the public and secret intelligence estimates on Iraq contained such analysis, but the complete N.I.E. report also included other views. A dissent by the State Department's intelligence arm concluded -- correctly, as it turned out -- that Iraq was not rebuilding its nuclear program. Clinton continued, accusing Iraq's leader of giving ''aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members.'' This statement fit squarely within the ominous warning she issued the day after Sept. 11.

Clinton's linking of Iraq's leader and Al Qaeda, however, was unsupported by the conclusions of the N.I.E. and other secret intelligence reports that were available to senators before the vote. Indeed, the one document that supported Clinton's statement, a public letter from the C.I.A. to Senator Graham, mentioned ''growing indications of a relationship'' between Al Qaeda and Iraq but acknowledged that those indications were based on ''sources of varying reliability.'' In fact, the classified reports available to all senators at the time found that Iraq was not allied with Al Qaeda, and that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden harbored feelings of deep mistrust and enmity for each other.

...

Nevertheless, on the sensitive issue of collaboration between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Senator Clinton found herself adopting the same argument that was being aggressively pushed by the administration. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials had repeated their claim frequently, and by early October 2002, two out of three Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was connected to the Sept. 11 attacks. By contrast, most of the other Senate Democrats, even those who voted for the war authorization, did not make the Qaeda connection in their remarks on the Senate floor. One Democratic senator who voted for the war resolution and praised President Bush for his course of ''moderation and deliberation,'' Joe Biden of Delaware, actively assailed the reports of Al Qaeda in Iraq, calling them ''much exaggerated.'' Senator Dianne Feinstein of California described any link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda as ''tenuous.'' The Democratic senator who came closest to echoing Clinton's remarks about Hussein's supposed assistance to Al Qaeda was Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. Yet even Lieberman noted that ''the relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime is a subject of intense debate within the intelligence community.''

For most of those who had served in the Clinton administration, the supposed link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had come to seem baseless. ''We all knew it was ,'' said Kenneth Pollack, who was a national-security official under President Clinton and a leading proponent of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Pollack says he discussed Iraq with Clinton before her vote in 2002, but he won't disclose his advice. The Saddam-Al Qaeda link, so aggressively pushed by the Bush administration, was later debunked as false. So how could Clinton, named in 2006 by The Washingtonian magazine as the ''brainiest'' senator, have gotten such a critical point wrong? Referring to the larger question of her support for the authorization, Clinton said in February of this year, ''My vote was a sincere vote based on the facts and assurances that I had at the time.''

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE3DC1430F930A35755C0A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print

Please recommend if you are against the war and can't understand why Clinton AND Edwards voted for this grievous mistake, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people for WMDs that were never there. That is the most important difference in this primary: the Iraq War Vote.

Obama should talk about nothing else for the next 2 weeks and let people know EXACTLY how misguided, leaderless and arrogant both Edwards and CLinton were in October 2002 for not reading the NIE then sending our troops into a war they could never win.

WHY DIDN'T EDWARDS READ THE NIE BEFORE VOTING? WHY DIDN'T CLINTON? -- BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO APPEAR HAWKISH TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT AND NEEDED TO HAVE AN EXCUSE FOR THEIR VOTE, THAT'S WHY...