BEA.

Katrina did not come "on the heels of 9/11" either. I came 4 years later.
The 1993 Mississippi floods came 6 months after the first WTC attack. By
your own standards, the 1993 floods should have damaged the economy more.

And as for "cruising on Reagan's economic policies", that flood came "on
the heels of" a long economic downturn. Katrina came during an allegedly
"strong" recovery.

You have revealed yourself to be an ignorant, partisan stooge.

Astonishingly bad for a supposedly strong recovery. But hey, crappy
economies are good when a repub is in office and strong economies are
"bubbles" when a democrat is in office, right?

"if he were to meet all the conditions of the United Nations, the
conditions that I've described very clearly in terms that everybody can
understand, that in itself will signal the regime has changed."
- George W. Bush, 21 October, 2002

"He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of
mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his
neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the
neighbors of Iraq..."
- Colin Powell, 24 February 2001

"Saddam does not control the northern part of the country. We are able to
keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."
- Condoleeza Rice, April 2001

"We know where they [WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit
and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
- Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003

"He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of
mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his
neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the
neighbors of Iraq..."
- Colin Powell, 24 February 2001

"Saddam does not control the northern part of the country. We are able to
keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."
- Condoleeza Rice, April 2001

"We know where they [WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit
and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
- Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003

[quote]
The Vice President is a man with something to hide. The simple truth
is: Cheney did lie, repeatedly, to bludgeon the U.S. Congress into
approving an unnecessary and disastrous invasion and occupation of
Iraq. According to several eyewitness accounts, Cheney personally lied
to scores of members of the U.S. Senate, claiming that the White House
had rock-solid proof that Saddam Hussein was close to building a
nuclear bomb, and that war was the only option. No such evidence
existed-and Cheney knew it.

Cheney's favorite Iraqi liar, Dr. Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National
Congress (INC), now a deputy prime minister, all but gloated over his
and Cheney's war-by-deception scam in an infamous Feb. 19, 2004
interview with the Daily Telegraph. Confronted on the piles of
INC-fabricated intelligence that helped lead the United States to war
in Iraq, Chalabi shrugged his shoulders, and said, "We are heroes in
error. As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. That
tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said
before is not important."

...No doubt, there were some significant intelligence
failures-notably, failures of nerve by senior intelligence community
bureaucrats, to resist White House pressure to "spin" the intelligence
to justify invasion. But the overriding factor in the rush to war was a
campaign of lies by Cheney, and by what Col. Lawrence Wilkerson
(USA-ret.), former Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of
staff, dubbed the "Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal."

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed on Oct. 25, 2005, Colonel Wilkerson
declared: "In President Bush's first term, some of the most important
decisions about U.S. national security-including vital decisions
about postwar Iraq-were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It
was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.... Its insular and secret
workings were efficient and swift-not unlike the decision-making one
would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy.... But the
secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of
disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged
with implementing them would not or could not execute them well....
It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy
over an efficient cabal every time."

...One of Dick Cheney's favorite arguments for invading Iraq and
overthrowing Saddam was that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks on New
York and Washington. And according to news accounts, the Sept. 21, 2001
PDB made clear that there was no evidence of any Saddam/al-Qaeda ties.
In fact, the intelligence estimate presented to President Bush, Cheney,
and other top national security officials on Sept. 21, was that Saddam
was an arch enemy of al-Qaeda, and had spied on it.

Despite this, and the more in-depth CIA study on why the
Saddam/al-Qaeda ties were bogus, Cheney and company kept on lying that
Saddam was behind 9/11.

The Sept. 21, 2001 PDB came in response to demands from the White House
for all available evidence of a Saddam link to the authors of the 9/11
attack. Five days before the PDB was delivered, President Bush had
convened a War Cabinet meeting at Camp David, where the planned attack
on Afghanistan was finalized. At that meeting, Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, speaking for the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal, had called for
an invasion of Iraq, claiming that Saddam was at the center of global
terror and should be America's first target. The next day, President
Bush signed a secret order, authorizing the military campaign against
Afghanistan, but also ordering the Pentagon and CIA to begin plans for
future action against Iraq.

On Sept. 19, the Defense Policy Board (DPB), a Pentagon advisory panel
then chaired by neo-con Richard Perle, and populated by a collection of
like-minded war hawks, convened a closed-door session. Both Rumsfeld
and Wolfowitz attended the meeting, which was addressed by INC head
Ahmed Chalabi and Dr. Bernard Lewis, the octogenarian British
intelligence Arab Bureau spook, who was a longtime booster of Chalabi.
The topic was the need to overthrow Saddam Hussein in retaliation for
9/11. As the direct result of the session, one DPB member, former CIA
Director R. James Woolsey, was dispatched on a mission to London, to
round up evidence that Saddam was behind the recent terror attacks, as
well as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. London was the
headquarters of the INC.

ATTA IN PRAGUE

Shortly after Woolsey's first Defense Policy Board sojourn to London,
the first news stories appeared, alleging that 9/11 plotter Mohammed
Atta had been in the Czech capital, Prague, on April 8, 2001, meeting
with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the Second Secretary of the
Iraqi Embassy and an officer in the Iraqi foreign intelligence service.
The "Atta in Prague" urban legend would serve as Cheney's favorite
"smoking gun" on the issue of Saddam's hand in 9/11.

The ostensible source of the information was an "Arab student," working
undercover for Czech intelligence, who had spotted the two men in a
restaurant. The "student" would later relocate to London, raising some
speculation that he may have been part of the INC disinformation
machine from the outset. Later versions of the story claimed that Czech
intelligence had photographed the meeting, because al-Ani was under
surveillance as the result of an earlier alleged terror plot against
American targets in the Czech capital. One well-placed U.S. military
intelligence source recently told EIR that Czech intelligence had
indeed surveilled the meeting, but had later determined that the man
with al-Ani was not Atta.

Despite conflicting evidence, showing that Atta was in the United
States on the date of the alleged Prague meeting, Vice President Cheney
was among the first Bush Administration officials to jump the gun and
proclaim the Atta-Baghdad ties. On Dec. 9, 2001, in an appearance on
"Meet the Press," Cheney declared, "It's been pretty well confirmed
that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of
the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several
months before the attack."

On April 30, 2002, FBI Director Robert Mueller gave a speech in San
Francisco, in which he publicly refuted the Atta-in-Prague story,
citing the FBI's detailed evidence that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va.
on that date. "We ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and
checked every record we could get our hands on," he explained.

The FBI trashing of the Atta links to Iraq did nothing to deter Cheney.
On another "Meet the Press" appearance on Sept. 8, 2003, the Vice
President reiterated, "There has been reporting that suggests that
there have been a number of contacts over the years. We've seen, in
connection with the hijackers, of course, Mohammed Atta, who was the
lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of
occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places
him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months
before the attack on the World Trade Center." Cheney went so far as to
describe Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us
under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
[/quote]

Want more? I have it.

Now here's the part where you shoot the messenger...