Tom Maguire:
If the Republican Party is prepared to nominate a 9/11 TrutherTrump nailed this down in the debate Saturday night.
Time will tell. Scientists have confirmed the existence of gravity waves but political scientists have yet to confirm that Trump is subject to the laws of political gravity.
ROLL THE TAPE: From the transcript, edited:
DICKERSON: … On Monday, George W. Bush will campaign in South Carolina for his brother. As you’ve said tonight, and you’ve often said, the Iraq war and your opposition to it was a sign of your good judgment.
In 2008, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, talking about President George W. Bush’s conduct of the war, you said you were surprised that Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi didn’t try to impeach him.
You said, quote: “Which, personally, I think would have been a wonderful thing.” When you were asked what you meant by that and you said: “For the war, for the war, he lied, he got us into the war with lies.” Do you still believe President Bush should have been impeached?
…
TRUMP: So let me just tell you, I get along with everybody, which is my obligation to my company, to myself, et cetera.
Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right? Now, you can take it any way you want, and it took — it took Jeb Bush, if you remember at the beginning of his announcement, when he announced for president, it took him five days.
He went back, it was a mistake, it wasn’t a mistake. It took him five days before his people told him what to say, and he ultimately said, “It was a mistake.” The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don’t even have it. Iran has taken over Iraq, with the second-largest oil reserves in the world.
Obviously, it was a mistake.
DICKERSON: So…
TRUMP: George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.
DICKERSON: But so I’m going to — so you still think he should be impeached?
BUSH: I think it’s my turn, isn’t it? [Lucky for Bush, Trump kept going. -TM]
TRUMP: You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.
(BOOING)
DICKERSON: All right. O.K. All right.
OK, a full Truther would declare that Bush plotted the destruction of the Twin Towers, but still, this is DKos/Al Gore territory, not what people expected at a Republican debate. The Ace thinks this has to hurt Trump, but plenty of other thrice bitten, fourth time shy commentators aren’t sure what if anything can hurt Trump.
As another example, did we expect to see a Republican defending Planned Parenthood? Back to Trump, this time scuffling with Ted Cruz:
The first thing that should have been asked of Dickerson is why he wasn’t asking if Obama should be impeached given his gross abuses of power and the fact that he is the one they are trying to succeed not Bush. As for Trump’s response, he like those responding to him, must not have seen the declassified documents proving that at a minimum there were over 5,000 WMD from the Gulf War era that were discovered. Saddam was supposed to have NO WMD, period. Once again, Trump is running for the Republican nomination using left wing talking points. His supporters need to start to realize this guy isn’t what he is selling himself as. We’ll see how this plays in out in SC where there is a very large number of military personnel and Veterans.
This AM Trump was on a Sunday show and ”walked back” his mind reading aspect of what Bush knew.
He said, there was no way to know for sure what Bush knew.
This is better than what he had said when he was quoted about Pelosi.
The fact is he forgot that Bush/Congress had either 14 or 17 specific reasons for going to war in Iraq whether or not there were WMDs.
Perhaps someone might educate him.
I get the impression that his focus has, for most of his waking hours, been on things other than politics.
Saying that Iraq was a huge mistake (which it was) and that there were no WMD (which there weren’t) is not being a 9/11 “truther”.
That’s still a bogus assertion. It conflates Gulf War era ordnance that had degraded from one-time usable weapons into toxic junk with something else entirely. Forgotten toxic junk posed absolutely no threat of arriving on our shores, or on anyone else’s, “in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
What we went to war to find wasn’t there.
Again, we’re back here discussing this topic,
When I was in western Iraq with my team, one of our tasks was to halt and search all traffic headed to the Syrian border for contraband materials – primarily WMD precursor materials, WMD documents, WMD personnel and WMDs – no big secret. Several other units were spread out across the region performing the same task. When we stopped several Russian convoys, our chemical detectors alarmed repeatedly indicating they may be in possession of WMD materials. Though they asserted diplomatic privilege, they agreed to cursory inspections. These inspections were not intrusive, but they were of concern to Russian SOF and Russian diplomatic security escorting the convoys. A few hard questions were asked but no one was detained, nothing seized. We could have pressed harder, but probably would have led to a shooting incident that no one wanted.
For Trump and his supporters, and others who continue to deny Iraq had NBC programs, both R&D and production, please read the these declassified documents:
Al Muthanna Chemical Weapons Complex: https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd_2004/chap5_annxB.html
Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/
And, for those who may think Iraqi chemical weapons posed no danger, just being “toxic junk”, Operation Avarice was undertaken to secure and dispose of Iraqi chemical weapons that were looted shortly after Baghdad fell in 2003. The joint CIA-military program was secretly buying back those weapons from a single source. Of those weapons, some were empty, some were degraded and the remainder, the nerve agent (GB) retained its potency and was much higher in purity than estimated. Also, several IEDs were found to be made from 155mm artillery shells that had CW markings. Fortunately, those IEDs were found to be duds. Afterwards, EOD and combat engineering teams became more aggressive in finding IEDs.
What remains unaccounted for were the Iraqi stores of VX nerve agent and a portion of their cyclosarin stock. Another point, what were 1,000+ empty, steam-cleaned artillery shells were doing at the Al Muthanna complex when the 101st Airborne overran the position? None of the empty shells had a speck of dust and appeared ready for filling with chemical agent, or had been drained of their CW/BW agent.
No one in their right mind would have gone to war with Iraq out of fear of ordnance so old it had degraded to the category of toxic junk. By definition it was still dangerous, but that sort of danger posed no credible threat to the United States. As mentioned previously, when you’re warning America about something “that could come in the form of a spreading mushroom cloud,” you can’t claim you’ve found it when you turn up a toxic waste dump.
Bi-partisan Congressional committees conducted investigations concerning prewar intelligence. If we’re not going to accept their findings, why bother to conduct investigations? How do we make better decisions in the future if we cover up the errors of the past?