Wrong citation.
We know they lied. Anyone paying attention knew they lied, including Clinton. She’s being willfully evasive about the fact that she didn’t vote against the war because it would have looked bad for her politically, not because people didn’t know it was a lie. We had thousands of protestors, people writing articles in papers, people on the news, etc. all saying it was a lie before we went to war in 2003. She and other senators toed the line and voted for war.
Hey, do you remember that guy Hans Blix? You know, the guy who was in charge of making sure Iraq dismantled its WMD production capabilities? Yeah, that guy <a href=“http://www.un.org/press/en/2003/sc7777.doc.htm"target=”_blank">tried to tell the world.
[e] This whole exchange between you and nungesser is having me reply to the wrong party. The point is, Bush the Lesser was going to invade Iraq. Period. Evidence, schmevidence.
The question isn’t whether they lied. It’s whether someone like Hillary Clinton could have/ought to have known they were lying at the time.
Another question, I guess, is whether the war was a good idea even if you believed the information given, including the information that it was a foreign war without UN approval. Maybe that isn’t a “war crime” but it is was a war that was a crime under international law, and Clinton voted for that.
Um, no.[quote=“anon50609448, post:124, topic:82476”]
It’s whether someone like Hillary Clinton could have/ought to have known they were lying at the time.
[/quote]
Yes, that is true. I don’t know the answer to that; neither does @enso. Many, many senators voted for the war. It was a poor decision. Not knowing what went on in her head, or what insight she may have had, it’s a bit silly to declare that she knew more than she says she knew, or knew more than what the rest of the Senate knew.
I indistinctly remember Cheney threatening to invade again, and this was very early in the first (EDIT: George W.) Bush admin., months before 9/11. I say “indistinct” because, while I think I have a good memory, I don’t recall if it was Jan. or Feb. 2001. (It may have even been late 2000, after the election, but before they were even inaugurated.) They’d barely moved in and they were already talking about fighting Saddam again.
Whenever I’ve tried to find an old source for this, though, I’ve come up with nothing. (EDIT: Found this, though.)
Sure. I was speaking of the great divide between the sanctimony and the down’n’dirty trench fighting to which it was put. Such leaps should be appreciated.
To find out, we would need a war crimes trial, with compelled testimony and very serious consequences for lying and obfuscation. We won’t get one, so we have to go with appearances, and Clinton appears to have had sufficient intelligence, knowledge, connections, powers, etc., to know what she was doing.
Sure but others didn’t have to throw their votes in to support it, did they, and then excuse it for years after the fact.
Uhm, yes because I wasn’t asking you for a citation that Bush and Cheney lied, which is what you provided. I’m asking you for proof that Clinton didn’t know and that there was no way she could have known despite a large portion of the country clearly knowing at the time.
If we were to have war crimes trials, there are a whole lot of people involved in far more serious ways and far more responsible who we’d want to try first. Her role was a vote to authorize force was one out of 77. While she was wrong, she didn’t wage the war, nor cook the intelligence, nor press for the war other than in a (deeply wrong) vote. At the time she wasn’t on any Senate committees that would have given her any more privileged information than the false information the Bush admin was providing. While it’s easy to claim that it was obvious they were being lied to in hindsight, at the time I wouldn’t expect unambiguous certainty. It’s a bit different when you’re the one who is being targeted by a carefully orchestrated campaign of lies (and political coercion) to manipulate you into a decision rather than an external observer with no role. Her vote was wrong, but to attribute some kind of willing complicity to invade, or to attribute the level of the responsibility for the Iraq invasion itself that you do is sort of warped.
Indeed, if we had a war crimes trial there would be hundreds and hundreds of people in the dock, which is one of the reasons we won’t have one. One might say half the U.S. electorate should be there, since they voted for Bush in 2004 when it had long since become obvious he was a mass murderer and a liar. And there was certainly plenty of manipulation going on. However, Clinton’s subsequent hawkishness requires us to place a different interpretation on her 2002 vote than (very improbable) muddle-headedness.
Well, we do finally have the Chilcot Report on Blair’s role in selling the war in the UK, so this kind of inquiry is not impossible. I seriously doubt the Senators who were duped by the Bush dog-and-pony-show would feature as villains in any such investigation.
Agreed. One item of a long list of reasons I don’t want to vote for Clinton.
True. But oompa loompa skinned shitgibbon attacked a Gold Star family in a malicious fashion. I am far too patriotic to let that one slide.
So I will hold my nose and vote for her royal highness, I am entitled to be president because of “reasons”, Hillary.
I agree, but urk, did you watch her press conference today? How can a person we know to be so brilliant flub such a simple thing so badly? She needs to take cues from Bernie Sanders on how to handle a hostile press.
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