CNN’s Late Edition celebrated its 10th anniversary today by re-airing some of Wolf Blitzer’s key interviews with Bush administration officials about the Iraq war. Some highlights:
GOV. BUSH: If at any time I found that the Iraqis were developing weapons of mass destruction, they wouldn’t exist anymore. [Jan. 2000]
RICE: There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. [Sept. 2002]
RUMSFELD: There is no question but that there are fabricators that operate in the intelligence world, and there’s also no question you can find intelligence reports on every side of every issue. [Nov. 2005]
CHENEY: You can go back and argue the whole thing all over again, Wolf, but what we did in Iraq in taking down Saddam Hussein was exactly the right thing to do. [Jan. 2007]
Trona, San Bernardino County - It was the dead birds that set Rita Smith off.
Her husband, Steve, had been ill for years, with oozing sores on his skin, shortness of breath and mental confusion. She suspected that it all was tied to a Mojave Desert chemical plant where they both had worked.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the White House directed telecommunications carriers to cooperate with its efforts to bolster intelligence gathering and surveillance -- the administration's effort to do a better job of "connecting the dots" to prevent terrorist attacks.
No, it started a few weeks after Bush took office - a time when the Bush administration was ignoring the terrorist threat. So it was about something else, and was a high enough priority to plan out during the transition. (Can you say "political spying?")
One telecom company, Qwest, refused because it was flat-out illegal. The Bush administration punished them, blocked federal contracts, and in an early indicator of what was to come from the politicized Bush Justice Department, they prosecuted Qwest's CEO on trumped-up charges.
The combination of the telecoms letting Bush illegally spy on us BEFORE September 11, and the politicized Bush Justice Department punishing the company that refused - refused because it was illegal - is the reason so many of us are so adamant that Democrats should not be passing a law giving these companies immunity. The President can't spy on people without warrants, and the telecoms knew that. They knew it was illegal to spy on us without warrants but they went along with it. Why? Why didn't they ask the Bush administration to just get warrants? And why would Democrats vote to let them off the hook?
Don't forget that Watergate was about Republicans illegally wiretapping Democrats. Don 't think they don't do it.
