[tw]

Originally posted by Undertoad on 16 September 2003
Let me take that a step further. It's the opinion of 99% of the media that there ARE no WMDs. Most of the outlets I watch have made that decision at a very high level somewhere and have spent time pushing that as fact. CNN was absolutely relentless for two weeks in the beginning of the summer. Only one newspaper bothered to publish the documents that were found suggesting that the al Qaeda connection could be real, and that newspaper is in the UK.

Now regardless of all of that, there are a few people in the world who know about the actual WMD situation and the actual al Qaeda connection, and none of those people work in the media.

And now we know those "few people" were political hacks working for the administration. Scientific fact after fact was distorted to prove the administration's lies. Why is it that the press got it all right, and yet some still believed the administration's lies about WMD? To believe a lying administration, the press was described as corrupt!

Having been part of too many lies too many times, insiders - little people who really do the work and know the truth - are coming forth. Not just member of the Joint Chiefs or White House officials. Many are leaking reality to the press from every part of this administration. Many doing so discretely because we know this administration will even out a CIA agent - a crime regarded so serious as to be considered treasoness - to take revenge on purveyors of truth.

These so many scientific distortions have even disturbed the IEEE. This article includes a picture of the highly propagandised Saddam's aluminum tubes with this description:

This photograph of high-grade aluminum tubes was used by Secretary of State Colin Powell in an address to the United Nations to support his argument that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program. It turns out that government scientists had disputed that claim, with support from Powell's own intelligence office.

So why were lies put forth by the George Jr administration?

from IEEE Spectrum of April 2004 Bush Administration's "Science" is Under Fire
Whether or not one chooses to see irregularities, and whether one regards UCS [Union of Concerned Scientists] as an organization expressing merely the opinion of some scientists, the incidents documented in the report are indisputably disturbing and serious, bearing as they do on issues of the very highest policy import. In climate science, for example, the administration asked the US National Academy of Sciences to review work by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the gobal organization of scientists that meets regularly to reach scientific consensus on global warming. Yet, after the academy's review reaffirmed the opinion that human activity was playing a role in climate change - and did so with support from major scientific organizations, such as the American Geophysical Union, in Washington DC - the US government excised that conclusion from offical reports and statements of policy. [if done in other countries, we criticize censorship of free press]

In September of 2002 and again in June 2003, the US Environmental Protection Agency removed entire sections of reports rather than modifying language along lines the administration wanted. An internal EPA memo of 29 April 2003 is reproduced in an appendix to the UCS report; in it, the author tells the head of EPA that it might be advisable to delete the climate report section of the June environmental report rather than risk a confrontation with the White House, which the EPA inevitably would lose.

In short, politics (not facts) are the source of administration science. Heaven forbid should we learn science that contradicts The Vulcans. Do they follow the facts to reach a conclusion OR do they make conclusions based only upon a political agenda? Even the IEEE writes about science distorted by a political agenda. Best to call it what it is - a lying president.

IEEE Spectrum goes on to discuss the lies about those aluminum tubes. Then says this:

Gregory Thielmann, a retired US Foreign Service officer who headed State Department intelligence unit, confirms the accuracy of the UCS report. "Senior officials in the US government misrepresented the evidence on the alunimum tubes", he told Spectrum, and ignored a growing consensus within the US intelligence that the tubes were not suitable for centrifuges. Further, Powell misrepresented technical arguments in his UN report, ignoring new evidence.