Bush, Cheney, Santorum, Weldon - Axis of Incompetence

Under Clinton:

The Clinton Administration did a highly effective job of containing Saadam Hussein – his military and weapons programs were reduced to an ineffective shell by the judicious (and inexpensive) use of cruise missiles. Marine General Anthony Zinni: “Containment worked. Look at Saadam. What did he have?”

Under Bush pre-9/11:

At the beginning of the first Bush Administration Wolfowitz argued with Clarke dismissing the Al Qaeda threat: "I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden."

Clarke: "We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the US."

Wolfowitz: "You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist."

Clarke recognized that Wolfowitz "was actually spouting the totally discredited theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years & found to be totally untrue. Clarke had a flashback to Wolfowitz saying the very same thing in April. The focus on al Qaeda was wrong, he had said, we must go after Iraqi-sponsored terrorism".

Prior to 9/11 the Bush Administration ignored Clarke’s program: as he has said (in his very low-key fashion): “..all the things we recommended back in January were those things on the table in September.  They were done after September 11th.  They were all done. I really didn’t understand why they couldn’t have done it in February”

Clarke’s reaction to the first meeting of the Bush/Cheney/Weldon team after 9/11 was: "At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al-Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq."  

And that's exactly what happened. In the weeks and months that followed, the anger inspired in the American people by the attacks of Sept. 11 was cleverly hijacked by the administration to justify an invasion of Iraq that had nothing to do with the threat posed by terrorism. For Clarke, that was unforgivable. Clarke later resigned in disgust.

Bush Afghanistan:

The one sensible foreign policy move that the Bush Administration made was to invade Afghanistan.  Post-invasion, as usual, they have bungled everything

“Nearly five years after American military forces helped topple a Taliban government that provided sanctuary and training camps to Osama bin Laden, there is no victory in the war for Afghanistan, due in significant measure to the Bush administration’s reckless haste to move on to Iraq and shortsighted stinting on economic reconstruction.

The Taliban, operating from cross-border sanctuaries in Pakistan, has exploited Washington’s strategic blunders and Mr. Karzai’s disappointing performance to rebuild its political and military strength, particularly in the southern region where it first began its drive to power more than a decade ago. Daily battles now rage across five southern provinces. Civilian and military casualties are rising sharply, including those among the NATO forces that have recently moved into these areas.

The war in Afghanistan has always been an essential part of that larger struggle; it is a war that America simply cannot afford to lose.”

 
The Bush administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge. ... The Bush administration has never acknowledged that bin Laden slipped through the cordon ostensibly placed around Tora Bora as U.S. aircraft began bombing on Nov. 30.

The vicious push polling sponsored by Weldon supporters contains the following:

As recently as March 2006, Weldon touted his own great spy network (one unreliable informant) and announced that Bin Laden was dead. A month later, Bin Laden was alive (again).

 Remember, this is the same informant who provided the basis for Curt's widely discredited Able Danger book.

Then an audiotape attributed to the al-Qaida leader surfaced last week on Arab television in which he accuses the United States and Europe of waging war on Islam by cutting off aid to the Palestinian government.

So if bin Laden is alive, what does that say about the reliability of Weldon’s "impeccable clandestine source?" If the source’s information is the "heart" of the book, as Weldon writes, does the premise of the book still stand?

And should Americans still fear the "12th Imam Operation," the Iranian terrorist plot that Weldon said the CIA was ignoring?
 

Ali is Weldon’s codename for Paris-based Iranian exile Fereidoun Mahdavi, the subject of "Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information that Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America ... and How the CIA Has Ignored It," released in June by Regnery Publishing.

In 2003 and 2004, during meetings in Paris and faxes to Weldon’s Thornbury home, Mahdavi said Iran was planning terrorist attacks in the U.S., sponsoring a plan to assassinate President Bush’s father, had an atomic bomb program more advanced than believed at the time, was seeking nuclear cooperation with North Korea and was determined to undermine democracy in Iraq, among other things.

The CIA has dismissed Weldon’s source, largely because he is a close associate of Manucher Ghorbanifar, the former Iranian arms dealer who worked for the U.S. during the Iran-Contra affair and was later determined to have provided false information. The agency wrote in a June 2004 letter to Weldon that Mahdavi "used a characteristic trait of fabricators -- embellishing press reporting."

"His information is consistent with, but does not add to, what is available from press sources, without providing significant new or credible details not already available elsewhere," the letter states.

Other claims made by Mahdavi never happened, such as Iran’s first atomic bomb test in September 2003; terrorist attacks against "opposition personalities," including eight people in the U.S., starting in January or February 2004; and an al-Qaida attack on U.S. soil between Nov. 25 and Dec. 3, 2003.

In the world of espionage, Curt is our equivalent to Iraq's Comical Ali. We should provide Comical Curt and Comical Ali with buckets and spades and send them to build sand castles and look for W.M.D.s in the sands of Iraq

Bush Iraq Invasion:

With the invasion of Iraq the Bush/Cheney/Weldon Axis of Incompetence has made the world a vastly more dangerous place.  They have provided the world’s terrorists with a trillion dollar US Tax Payer funded “Field of Dreams” training ground: free weapons, free explosives, free targets and an unrelieved series of administrative blunders that have attracted an increasing stream of terrorist recruits to Iraq. The terrorists are now strong enough to export their effort to Jordan; it will soon be infecting other areas of the Middle East.  

All this has made our country itself increasingly vulnerable – Iraq is a distraction and makes it easier for terrorists to infiltrate the United States.

The Bush administration then failed to deal with Iran as it develops a nuclear capability. It ignored North Korea, now launching missiles. And after 6 years of not paying attention in the Middle East, Lebanon has again been devastated.

The Al Qaeda Connection:

Al Qaeda was not in Iraq before the invasion but they are there now.  Despite the claims of Comical Curt’s Keystone Cops spy network, Osama bin Laden is alive and well and Afghanistan is falling apart.  Had our effort been concentrated on Afghanistan, bin Laden would very likely have been caught and Afghanistan would very likely be a stable testament to the effectiveness of US Foreign Policy.

On Monday, August 21, President Bush finally admitted that the Iraq War had nothing to do with terrorism.

During a news conference in which the emphasis was again on the Iraq War and the so-called "War on Terrorism," Bush was asked what Iraq had to do with 9/11.  His answer: "Nothing."   

In terms of national security, our country is far less safe than it would have been if we had contained Iraq and had gone after the real culprits (Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban). None of these fanatics had anything to do with Iraq until Bush invited them in.

Weapons of Mass Destruction:

Nuclear Weapons, Uranium

In his 2003 State of the Union address Bush referred to "uranium from Africa"

"The latest evidence that Mr. Bush knew there was no hard evidence for this  was uncovered by The Washington Post:  The coordinating council for the 15 American intelligence agencies had already informed the White House that the Niger story had no factual basis and should be dropped. Last Sunday "60 Minutes" augmented this storyline and an earlier scoop by Lisa Myers of NBC News by reporting that the White House had deliberately ignored its most highly placed prewar informant, Saddam's final foreign minister, Naji Sabri, once he sent the word that Saddam's nuclear cupboard was bare".

Biological Weapons

The mobile biological weapons labs turned out to be fictitious. The sole human source on these W.M.D. labs, an Iraqi émigré known as Curveball, was mentally unstable and a fabricator.  

Comical Curt's Curious Caper

Their mission: to dig 25 feet down into the riverbed and unearth concrete bunkers filled with chemical weapons produced by Saddam Hussein's regime and hidden before the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003.

Former Federal Agent and staunch Bush supporter Dave Gaubatz said that Weldon intended just such an expedition over Memorial Day weekend, until Gaubatz put the kibosh on it.

Instead, Gaubatz said, Weldon latched onto the idea as a "personal political venture" and discussed a Hoekstra-Weldon trip to Iraq, under the guise of visiting the troops, that would detour to Nasiriyah.

Once there, Gaubatz said, the congressmen planned to persuade the U.S. military commander to lend them the equipment and men to go digging by the Euphrates for the cache Gaubatz believed to be there.

He said that Weldon made it clear he didn't want word leaked to the Pentagon, to intelligence officials, or to Democratic congressmen.

Gaubatz: "They even worked out how it would go. If there was nothing there, nothing would be said. If the site had been [scavenged], nothing would be said. But, if it was still there, they would bring the press corps out."

One final point: If you find Gaubatz's tale credible, as I do, then what we have here is an attempt at political showboating to the nth degree - and it's not the first time Weldon has done it.

If he wants to play secretary of state or CIA director, so be it. But let's draw the line at Indiana Jones. "

There were no weapons of mass destruction but, if a Shiite government aligned with Iran takes over (as seems likely), there may well be weapons of mass destruction in the future. 
 

Bush Iraq Occupation
 

We have lost  over 2,600 troops, we have lost an unlisted number of mercenaries who are not counted as troops, we have suffered over 18,000 wounded soldiers (many maimed for life), we have  killed over 100,000 innocent Iraqis, we will have spent over a trillion dollars before it is all over, we have alienated much of the world through that war and its torture procedures resulting in an unprecedented loss of US power and influence in the region, we have fueled terrorist and insurgency actions worldwide, exhausted our military and elevated Iran to a regional power.…and we have done it all for “Nothing.” The President, himself, said so

The American taxpayer subsidized Al Qaeda, Taliban and terrorists in general recruiting and training program has assured that Iraq, long term, will become an un-democratic theocracy. This exercise in serial incompetence has destabilized the Middle East and created thousands of new terrorists world wide.      

The Present

 All the Muslims recently arrested in the  plot to blow up trans-Atlantic flights were British citizens.  Stark evidence that American and British policies are radicalizing Muslims the world over. We are creating terrorists were there were none.  The pathetic attempts of the Bush Administration to capitalize on these arrests for political benefit puts in high relief their own lack of success - they arrest anyone who even looks sideways and take them away to torture confessions out of them.  They therefore end up with a lot of kooks in jail and little evidence against the real terrorists.  The British effort was real police work - they allowed the plot to develop under surveillance until there was overwhelming evidence of guilt.

Israel's iron fist approach to Lebanon (which, according to reports, the neo-cons in the US saw as a dress rehearsal for the US invasion of Iran) has been a fiasco. Even greater insane furies are likely from both the US and Israel unless we can get regime change in Washington.  Like the US, Israel is saying that Hezbollah could have been defeated if only it had been done right - calls now are for bigger and better wars. Pre-emptive war with Syria anyone?

Weldon is our of control and is representing himself and his delusional schemes rather than his district.

Admiral Sestak spent 30 years serving his country with distinction in peace and in war.  

Joe Sestak would make an outstanding, indefatigable, district oriented Congressman.  Joe has compassion, Joe has strength, Joe has the knowledge and experience to make our country safe. Time is running out. 

To paraphrase a Republican President in a different context:

 "Never has so much military, economic and diplomatic power been used so ineffectively. If, after all of this time, all of this sacrifice, and all of this support, there is still no end in sight, then I say the time has come for the American people to turn to new leadership not tied to the mistakes and policies of the past."