When will Bush be prosecuted for War Crimes ?
 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/#41630788

When hell freezes over.

Oh wait, not possible given the reported climate change.


Begin infinite loop...

Long arm of the law is finally here ?

:rofl:

Can you imagine what these comments would be if it was the Socialist Black Man who won't show a Birth Certificate? :beatup:

There's little more he could do to make some of us think less of him. :D

'Curveball': I lied about WMD to hasten Iraq war.
Defector admits he fabricated information to try to bring down Saddam regime.

Yesterday

'Curveball': I lied about WMD to hasten Iraq war - World news - Mideast/N. Africa - msnbc.com



LONDON — An Iraqi defector who went by the codename “Curveball” has publicly admitted for the first time that he made up stories about mobile bioweapons trucks and secret factories to try to bring down Saddam Hussein’s regime.

"I had a problem with the Saddam regime," Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, who fled Iraq in 1995, told The Guardian newspaper.
"I wanted to get rid of him and now I had this chance."



Al-Janabi’s information was used in part by the U.S. as justification for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

More than 100,000 people, most of them Iraqi civilians, have died in the war. The U.S. began to withdraw its troops from Iraq last summer.



Janabi said he was comfortable with what he did, despite the war that ensued.

"Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right," he told the Guardian.
"They gave me this chance.
I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime.
I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy."

Al-Janabi’s admission that he lied comes a little over a week after the eighth anniversary of then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in which he laid out the case for the war by presenting U.S. intelligence that purported to prove that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.



[B]At one point, Powell presented slides alleging that Saddam had bioweapons labs mounted on trucks that would be almost impossible to find.

"My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources," Powell told the U.N. gathering.
"These are not assertions.
What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."

As it turned out, Powell was not told that one of the sources for the information — “Curveball" — had been flagged by the Defense Intelligence Agency as suspect and untrustworthy.



The Guardian said it recently interviewed Al-Janabi in a series of meetings in Germany, where he has been granted asylum.

The Iraqi engineer said the BND, the German secret service, approached him in March 2000 looking for inside information about Saddam's Iraq.

He said he had told a German official about the existence of mobile bioweapons trucks throughout 2000.

The BND traveled to a Gulf city, believed to be Dubai, to speak with his former boss at the Military Industries Commission in Iraq, Dr. Bassil Latif.

Latif strongly denied al-Janabi's claim of mobile bioweapons trucks and another allegation that 12 people had died during an accident at a secret bioweapons facility in Baghdad, according to the Guardian.

German officials confronted al-Janabi with his boss’s denial and did not contact him again until the end of May 2002, al-Janabi told the Guardian.
Despite his earlier disputed statements, al-Janabi said, Gerrman and U.S. authorities continued to take him seriously.

He said he was not asked again about the bioweapons trucks until a month before Powell's speech.

"I tell you something when I hear anybody — not just in Iraq but in any war — [is] killed, I am very sad.
But give me another solution.
Can you give me another solution ?" he told the Guardian.

"Believe me, there was no other way to bring about freedom to Iraq.
There were no other possibilities."



Tyler Drumheller, the former head of the CIA in Europe, said Curveball's admission made him feel better about himself.

Drumheller, who says he warned his superiors at the CIA before the 2003 invasion that Curveball might be a liar, said the confession would be a final wake-up call for those who continue to insist there had been weapons of mass destruction.

"The interesting part for me is that he has recanted what he said, which is fascinating in the sense that I think there are still a number of people who still thought there was something in that.

Even now," Drumheller told the Guardian.

Colin Powell demands answers over Curveball's WMD lies

Former US secretary of state asks why CIA failed to warn him over Iraqi defector who has admitted fabricating WMD evidence.


Today

Colin Powell demands answers over Curveball's WMD lies | World news | The Guardian


Colin Powell, the US secretary of state at the time of the Iraq invasion, has called on the CIA and Pentagon to explain why they failed to alert him to the unreliability of a key source behind claims of Saddam Hussein's bio-weapons capability.



Responding to the Guardian's revelation that the source, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi or "Curveball" as his US and German handlers called him, admitted fabricating evidence of Iraq's secret biological weapons programme, Powell said that questions should be put to the US agencies involved in compiling the case for war.

In particular he singled out the CIA and the Defence Intelligence Agency – the Pentagon's military intelligence arm.
Janabi, an Iraqi defector, was used as the primary source by the Bush administration to justify invading Iraq in March 2003.

Doubts about his credibility circulated before the war and have been confirmed by his admission this week that he lied.


Powell said that both the CIA and DIA should face questions about why they failed to sound the alarm about Janabi.

He demanded to know why it had not been made clear to him that Curveball was totally unreliable before false information was put into the key intelligence assessment, or NIE, put before Congress, into the president's state of the union address two months before the war and into his own speech to the UN.

"It has been known for several years that the source called Curveball was totally unreliable," he told the Guardian .
"The question should be put to the CIA and the DIA as to why this wasn't known before the false information was put into the NIE sent to Congress, the president's state of the union address and my 5 February presentation to the UN."



On 5 February 2003, just a month before the invasion, Powell went before the UN security council to make the case for war.

In his speech he referred to "firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails … The source was an eyewitness who supervised one of these facilities".
It is now known that the source, Janabi, made up the story.



Curveball told the Guardian he welcomed Powell's demand.

"It's great," he said tonight.
"The BND [German intelligence] knew in 2000 that I was lying after they talked to my former boss, Dr Bassil Latif, who told them there were no mobile bioweapons factories.
For 18 months after that they left me alone because they knew I was telling lies even though I never admitted it.

Believe me, back then, I thought the whole thing was over for me.

"Then all of a sudden [in the run up to the 2003 invasion] they came back to me and started asking for more details about what I had told them.
I still don't know why the BND then passed on my information to the CIA and it ended up in Powell's speech."

"I want there to be an inquiry so that people will know the truth. So many lies have been told about me over the years.
I finally want the truth to come out."



Powell has previously expressed regret about the role he unwittingly played in passing on false information to the UN, saying it had put a blot on his career.

But his latest comments increase pressure on the intelligence agencies and their former chiefs to divulge what they knew at the time and why they failed to filter out such a bad source.



George Tenet, then head of the CIA, is particularly in the firing line.

He failed to pass on warnings from German intelligence about Curveball's reliability.

Tenet put out a statement on his website in response to Curveball's admission.
He said: "The handling of this matter is certainly a textbook case of how not to deal with defector provided material.
But the latest reporting of the subject repeats and amplifies a great deal of misinformation."

Tenet refers to his own 2007 memoir on the war, At the Centre of the Storm, in which he insists that the first he heard about Curveball's unreliability was two years after the invasion — "too late to do a damn thing about it".

Tenet has disputed Drumheller's version of events, insisting that the official made no formal warning to CIA headquarters.



In the light of the defector's confession, politicians in Iraq called for Curveball's permanent exile and poured scorn on his claim to want to return to his motherland and build a political party.

"He is a liar, he will not serve his country," said one Iraqi MP.



In his adopted home of Germany, MPs are demanding to know why the BND, paid Curveball £2,500 a month for at least five years after they knew he had lied.

Hans-Christian Ströbele, a Green MP, said Janabi had arguably violated a German law which makes warmongering illegal. Under the law, it is a criminal offence to do anything "with the intent to disturb the peaceful relations between nations, especially anything that leads to an aggressive war", he said.
The maximum penalty is life imprisonment, he added, though he did not expect it would ever come to that.



Curveball told the Guardian he was pleased to have finally told the truth.
He said he had given the Guardian's phone number to his wife and brother in Sweden "just in case something happens to me".

Further pressure on the CIA came from Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff at the time of the invasion.
He said Curveball's lies raised questions about how the CIA had briefed Powell ahead of his fateful UN speech.

Tyler Drumheller, head of the CIA's Europe division in the run-up to the invasion, said he welcomed Curveball's confession because he had always warned Tenet that he may have been a fabricator.





Curveball or Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi who gave dubious information on Iraq's secret biological weapons programme.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/...l-Jana-007.jpg

You mean the lie that won't go away ?

Like the Iraq War ?

Have anything to add or are you just trolling ?

It must really hurt ... :D

Matthews is not an idiot, and years ago his show and commentary had some relevance. Even Dennis Miller, when introducing him as a guest on his old HBO talk show, called him "The sharpest knife in the drawer".

But his act is somewhat played out, his ratings are on the downslide, and he's flailing. I could say the same about others in the cable news celebrity sweepstakes, but I won't hijack the thread, which is about Matthews.

It’s still a simple question; why did we go to War when we know before they didn’t have WMDs?

The second question would be, why did they continue to lie about it?

And the last questions would be, why would we ignore the above two questions?

You can run from the questions, but they will not go away.

:waiting:

I'll hijack it for you ... apparently CBS Reporter Lara Logan was sexually assalted and beaten in Egypt ... some Faux Noize bimbo apparently mocked and laughed at her ... I'll post the The Last Word with Lawrenece O'Donnell vid as soon as it's posted ...

Maybe you can us if Faux Noize is played out too ...

Yes, valid questions that will be asked for generations. But thinking any president is going to be charged with war crimes is fantasy and cable news showmanship, and it is beneath Matthews intelligence and reputation.

Television journalism was played out nearly fifty years ago.

... how'bout the internet(s) ... http://i54.tinypic.com/2poqg3p.gif

Where some think they can change 8 year old history. :lol:


At least the rest of us are content bitching about current events. :D

That's (the internet) a whole different can of worms that is a long way from playing out. The internet is the public square. It is not as profit driven (yet) nor is it as government regulated as TV.

We live in times every bit as interesting as when Edison invented the light bulb and the Wright brothers first flew.

... so Bush is telling you about the rumors on the internets 7-8 years ago because perhaps he had no idea they would be biting 'em in the azz to this day ... is this your defense of Bush ?