ex-idaho

There has been alot of talk about the forged Niger documents and the claims from those documents that were in the Presidents SOTUA address in January. The media has been talking non-stop about it since last Monday and we have been discussing it on this board for well on 6 months now. In all that discussion I don't think anyone has asked the one question that cuts to the heart of the issue.

If the document was a forgerie then who forged it?

I think this is a question that must be asked because it is obvious that whoever is the culprit their intention was to drive America to war. Whether it was the Iraqi dissidents living in exile, greedy oil interest or the Bush administration itself I think we simply must have an answer to this question.

ex-idaho

I'm stunned that no one out there wants to speculate on the origin of the fradulent documents from Niger.

Buffman

I just heard ABC report that it began with a member of the Niger Italian embassy staff attempting to make some money by selling info to the Italian intelligence services. Evidently the Italians did not fully vet the info before passing it on to the British and American intelligence services. (That individual has since been sent back to Niger. How convenient!)

The Americans were able to identify all the incongruities and errors within the documents and establish them as forgeries.

I have no idea why the British are sticking by their statements other than the remote possibility that the Italians gave them more of the documents than they gave the Americans. However, since all three countries are NATO allies, I am hard pressed to believe this latest British claim...as voiced not by the British, but by our administration "wonks."

I asked this identical question in two other discussions and had not received a response. I was very pleased to hear the ABC report, but it didn't answer other factors (possibilities concerning the origins) within my question and has raised several more.

I have just finished a very biased frustration rant and hope you won't mind my adding it to this string since it attempts to analyze how all the propaganda got started. (There is much more that belongs in my rant, but perhaps others will add their thoughts to it.)

Buffman

(This is a very biased and sarcastic post. I readily acknowledge that. But then, this propaganda campaign has been long overdue for exposure.)

The Bush administration claimed that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a terrorist threat to the USA and the world. Therefore the USA was justified in launching a pre-emptive war against Iraq. The question that is "finally" being asked by the gullible and trusting American masses is "What verifiable evidence did/does the Bush administration have that Iraq was/is a terrorist threat to the USA or anyone else outside the Middle East?"

In my opinion, there was barely any publicly known, verifiable, evidence that Iraq was ever a threat, let alone a "terrorist" threat, to any country outside the Middle East. So how could the Bush gang convince the American public that it had enough to fear from Iraq that would allow our current, minority elected, judicially appointed, government to pre-emptively strike a sovereign nation killing innocent civilians and our own servicemen and women while expending enormous quantities of taxpayer dollars? What pre-texts could be found and used to propagandize the public and condition legislators to support violations of our Constitution and the brutalization of a country that had done little, if anything, to support Osama bin Laden and his Wahhabist suicide squads? What were the existing conditions that could be manipulated?

1. Many uninformed Americans still believed that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. The fact that not one of the 19 terrorists, who sacrificed themselves in that obscene, religiously motivated, attack was an Iraqi citizen was hardly, if ever, acknowledged by any member of this administration.

2. The U.S.intelligence services, whose miserable failure assisted those numerous Saudi Arabian born terrorists to accomplish their mission, admitted that they could find no verifiable or meaningful connection between the Iraqi government and the al Qaeda terrorist organization. They actually found a degree of enmity existed between Osama and Saddam.

3. Americans were so fearfully traumatized by the enormously successful attack on our own ground, that they could be easily recruited into lynching posse comitatus groups with Marshal "Wyatt Earp" Bush and Deputies "Bat Masterson" Rumsfeld, "Doc Holliday" Powell and "Billy the Kid" Ashcroft helping to keep the riders all headed in the same direction while "Belle Starr" Rice played the piano and hummed Party tunes at the local network TV stations. Meanwhile, back in the secret bunker, "Doctor Strangelove" Cheney was plotting how to gain control of the Iraqi oil wealth for Halliburton and associated, major political contributing, pals.

4. Christian doctrine advocates "Turning the other cheek." Jewish doctrine advocates "An eye for an eye." Evangelical Christians started lobbying fundamentalist Christians to rally behind anything that wrapped itself in patriotism and the American Flag, and to denounce anything that spoke ill of the party in power, especially President Earpppp, as unAmerican.

5. The name of the sick game became REVENGE...pure and simple...and what better group than Arab Muslims..."any" Arab Muslims. And since our government is infested with oil barons claiming that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait love America what better, or internationally vulnerable, oil possessing country to attack and Americanize, than Iraq?

So the propaganda minions went to work and began the Madison Avenue glamorization of "Weapons of Mass Destruction(WMDs)" as the psychological triggering device to cause memories of the World Trade Center horror to keep flashing in the minds of every American in order to keep them afraid for their own lives....and willing to follow anyone with a horse. Finally Americans are recognizing that the horse is really a jackass and that "Wyatt" Bush is really naked.

Thus I offer these three URLs to help better understand that WMDs have been around, and used, for a very long time and that terrorists could, and may have already, gain possession of them right here in the good old U.S.of A. because we have manufactured and stored more of them than almost any country on this fragile little pebble in space.

http://cns.miis.edu/research/wmdme/

http://cns.miis.edu/research/wmdme/chrono.htm

http://disarmament.un.org/wmd/