Monday April 9, 2007 QUOTES

Were we misled?

A FEW QUOTES FROM OUR LEADERS:

"F**k Saddam, we're taking him out." –President Bush to three U.S. Senators in March 2002, a full year before the Iraq invasion

"My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." –Vice President Dick Cheney, "Meet the Press," March 16, 2003
"Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties." —President Bush, discussing the Iraq war with Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson, after Robertson told him he should prepare the American people for casualties

"Ladies and gentlemen, these are not assertions. These are facts, corroborated by many sources, some of them sources of the intelligence services of other countries." –Secretary of State Colin Powell, testifying about Iraq's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons capabilities before the United Nations Security Council, Feb. 5, 2003
"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." –National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, on Iraq's nuclear capabilities and the Bush administration's case for war, Sept. 8, 2002
"We know he's been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." –Vice President Dick Cheney, "Meet The Press" March 16, 2003
"I don't know anybody that I can think of who has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons." –Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, June 24, 2003
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NEWS FROM TODAY

BAGHDAD April, 2007(AP) - Tens of thousands of Shiites - a sea of women in black abayas and men waving Iraqi flags - marched from Kufa to Najaf on Monday, demanding U.S. forces leave their country on the fourth anniversary of fall of Baghdad. Streets in the capital were silent and empty under a hastily imposed 24-hour driving ban.
Demonstrators ripped apart American flags and tromped across a Stars and Stripes rug flung on the road between the two holy cities for the huge march, ordered up by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a show of strength not only to Washington but to Iraq's establishment Shiite ayatollahs as well.
Al-Sadr, who disappointed followers hoping he might appear after months in seclusion, has pounded his anti-American theme in a series of written statements, the most recent on Sunday when he called on his Mahdi Army militia to redouble efforts to expel American forces and for the police and army to join the struggle against "your archenemy."

The Mahdi Army may now be "several hundred thousand strong", per British intelligence. Even if that estimate vastly overstates his troop strength, it reflects the sense that he has the strongest political-military force in the country -- because of the loyalty that so many Shiites have to him.
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They call us occupiers, not liberators. We are not welcome, and yet we keep dying. Why?