The US Senate is currently holding hearings on whether to confirm Condoleezza Rice to replace Colin Powell as Secretary of State. It is important for Senators to keep the following facts in mind about Ms. Rice's performance as National Security Advisor.

Fact: prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Ms. Rice ignored repeated warnings that Al Qaeda was planning attacks within the United States.

Fact: Ms. Rice told the president and the American people that there was firm evidence that Saddam Hussein was aggressively pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Either she knew this was false, and was lying, or thought it was true, in which case she is incompetent.

By any objective measure, Condoleezza Rice has been the worst National Security Advisor in US history. Do we really want her to be our Secretary of State?

You can contact your Senators at http://www.senate.gov/
- posted by truthspeaker    Comments

Remember the big stink Bush made about corruption in the UN-administered Iraq oil-for-food program? Remember how he and his cronies in Congress tried to blame UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, even though the program was administered by the Security Council, not the Secretariat?

Turns out the US knew about the corruption all along but failed to pass this information on to other members of the Security Council or do anything else to halt it.

US ignored warning on Iraqi oil smuggling (Financial Times)

For months, the US Congress has been investigating activities that violated the United Nations oil-for-food programme and helped Saddam Hussein build secret funds to acquire arms and buy influence.

President George W. Bush has linked future US funding of the international body to a clear account of what went on under the multi-billion dollar programme.

But a joint investigation by the Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian business daily, shows that the single largest and boldest smuggling operation in the oil-for-food programme was conducted with the knowledge of the US government.

"Although the financial beneficiaries were Iraqis and Jordanians, the fact remains that the US government participated in a major conspiracy that violated sanctions and enriched Saddam's cronies," a former UN official said. "That is exactly what many in the US are now accusing other countries of having done. I think it's pretty ironic."

The Iraq Survey Group has officially ended its search for Saddam Hussein's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction™ and weapons programs, the weapons that George W. Bush and his national security team assured us were such a grave threat that invasion and regime change were the only option. The evidence that such weapons existed was overwhelming, they claimed, ignoring the dissenting opinions of the UNSCOM inspection team, many US intelligence professionals, and the leaders of most nations allied with the United States.

As millions of people worldwide predicted, Bush was wrong.

US gives up search for Iraq WMD (BBC News)

So, now that people like Scott Ritter, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, and Robin Cook have been vindicated, we can expect to see them interviewed on all the network and cable news channels, along with in-depth reporting on the Bush administrations WMD claims and press coverage of them, right? Right?

Of course not.

But even if we didn't find any banned weapons, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has made the world safer from terrorism, right?

Iraq New Terror Breeding Ground (Washington Post via Yahoo! News)

Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director's think tank.

Woops.
- posted by truthspeaker    Comments