<p>Look what happened when the world’s foremost expert in rebuilding hospitals in war-time was replaced by a political-insider adoption social worker, because the Bush administration wanted a “loyalist” in the job:</p>
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<p>How many Iraqis who were on our side changed their mind after they lost a loved one due to the planned incompetence of the hospital rebuilding effort?</p>
<p>If something is important enough to ask Americans to die for, important enough to saddle future generations of Americans with crushing national debt for, shouldn’t it have been important enough to put accomplishment over cronyism?</p>
<p>The pictures of the “Good Humor” trucks displayed by Powell on national tv came from the “intelligence” agencies. The “pinpoint” photos of the chemical weapons depots (which turned out to be a headquarters of a pro-U.S. Kurdish tribal chieftain) came from the “intelligence” agencies. The overwhelming amount of information sifted through by Powell and Wilkerson, and which formed the basis of Powell’s international lying campaign, came from the intelligence agencies. </p>
<p>I think you let them off far too easily. I watched so-called “intelligence” unwind in Iran in the 1970s from what the folks on the ground were reporting to what was being passed on at the highest levels. It wasn’t a pretty picture. </p>
<p>"Could someone explain why they are so eager to fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan (where they mostly are not) but not in Iraq?a’</p>
<p>The reality is that they are not particularly eager to fight them anywhere, because to defeat them requires earning the trust and respect of the local population. Hmmm.</p>
<p>“How many Iraqis who were on our side changed their mind after they lost a loved one due to the planned incompetence of the hospital rebuilding effort?”</p>
<p>Well into the 1980s, Iraq had the best medical infrastructure in the entire Middle East, and folks from other countries used to go there for all sorts of operations. Now most of the docs and other health care workers are among the 1.8 million refugees.</p>
<p>But after the Clinton genocide, there weren’t all that many on “our side”. The docs had to stand by inside the hospitals and clinics, and watch the children die.</p>
How could anyone arrive at this conclusion? Both the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 Commission placed a great deal of the blame on “the intelligence community” and concluded that Joseph Wilson had made numerous false public statements (which changed when he was under oath).</p>
<p>Of course, the raw data is collected by the intelligence community, just like your e-mails to Iranian friends are collected. But, the intelligence that is passed up the ladder is sifted and sorted.</p>
<p>The stuff used by the administration in painting the false picture of Iraq WMD programs was not passed up the ladder from the intelligence community. Instead, it came from an off-the-books intelligence operation put together in the Pentagon by Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, largely relying on the claims of Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. The CIA reports, State Department intelligence reports, normal Military Intelligence reports, and the National Intelligence Estimates prepared by the CIA were telling a very different story. They were NOT highlighting Iraq as posing a short-term nuclear threat. They were NOT highlighting Iraq as being a major player with Al Queda.</p>
<p>Yeah, well, ultimately Powell lied because he chose to. No one forced him to. He had a track record as a lying team player from the early '90s, and this was just a reprise of his earlier role. He could have checked on any of the pics - if semi-amateur reporters could prove he was a liar in 48 hours, certainly the Secretary of State had the resources to. </p>
<p>Of course now we have Madame Secretary Mendaciousness of the “no foreign renditions” or torture cells.</p>
<p>We aren’t talking about 9-11. We are talking about pre-war Iraqi intelligence, specifically related to the threat of Iraq WMD programs and Iraqi/Al Queda connections. The professional intelligence community got those questions more or less right. Their accurate assessments were ignored at the top levels of the administration.</p>
<p>9-11 is a different issue. However, even in that case, the intelligence community knew something was coming and had briefed the top levels of the adminstration about indications of imminent threats.</p>
<p>Oh…I totally agree with that. He knew he was lying, too.</p>
<p>IMO, Powell should have resigned as Secretary of State and refused to make his presentation to the UN.</p>
<p>I am particularly angry about Powell. While I do not expect top level government leaders to be free from error (they are human), I do expect a good-faith effort and I think history has shown that we usually get that (even from administrations that I vehemently disagree with). Furthermore, I think the permanent government consitutencies (professional diplomats, professional intelligence, professional military, etc.) serve as an institutionally cautious check and balance. These checks and balances were intentionally and cynically short-circuited by the administration.</p>
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<p>I believe that the semi-amateur reporters were tipped off by members of the professional intelligence community who watched Powell’s sham presentation to the UN in disbelief because they KNEW that the administration’s story contradicted what they had written in their intelligence assessements about those issues.</p>
<p>Don’t get me started on the torture. IMO, a legitimate case could be made for war crimes charges against our Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Vice President, and President. I am much more disturbed about this than I am about the issue of warrantless electronic data-mining. At least the data-mining produced results. The torture wasn’t even effective. It’s wrong on every level – legal, moral, ethics, effectiveness, public relations.</p>
<p>Before deciding that torture was a failure, you have to know what it was intended to accomplish. It couldn’t have been intended to produce intelligence–it’s long been established that intelligence gained by torture is faulty. </p>
<p>But the torture issue was very, very effective in firming up the hard right here at home in their political support of the war and its architects. Without the torture issue to galvanize them into calling people who opposed torture “traitors” or portraying them as “weak-kneed and spineless”, who knows if the escalation would enjoy the popular support it does or if the Republicans would have held as many seats in Congress as they did.</p>
Not true. It was CIA chief George Tenant–inexplicably carried over from the previous administration–who told the Bush administration (including Powell) that WMD was a “slam dunk.”</p>
<p>The “torture” business is another red herring. Not only was Abu Ghraib not “torture” in any sensible meaning of the word, it wasn’t part of an interrogation strategy. On the other hand, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and the like have proven to be quite effective, despite not being torture (again, according to any sensible standard). Too many of you are confusing Democrat campaign rhetoric with reality. If what you believe to be true were in fact true, there would be impeachments and President Pelosi. Bank on it.</p>
<p>"IMO, a legitimate case could be made for war crimes charges against our Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Vice President, and President.'</p>
Conyat, the fact you may not have heard of it does not make it false. The reality is that there were major areas of improper planning and mistakes in WWII - everything from pre-invasion shelling and bombing at Normandy being totally off target, to not preparing for the hedge-row fighting to designing tanks that had no chance to withstand a hit from a German panzer. The loss in lives to these mistakes was huge. </p>
<p>interesteddad - you really should spend some time reading the senate Intelligence committee report on the intelligence - it was clearly NOT a case of the administration ignoring it or not reading it correctly.</p>
<p>They were not proven to be effective at all in the case of Al Queda. The only real breakthough results from captured Al Queda operatives came from traditional “good cop” methods…building a level of positive interaction over time, especially with high level Al Queda operatives who disagreed with the strategy of the 9-11 attacks. The torture victims provided either nothing or crap.</p>
<p>BTW, I don’t rely on “Democratic campaign rhetoric” for information. Remember, I voted for Bush in 2004…in the face of much family resistance, I might add!</p>
<p>I recommend a book called The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of its Enemies since 9/11 by Ron Suskind. Suskind was the senior national affairs reporter for The Wall Street Journal.</p>
<p>I’ll have to go reread the section on Tenant and the WMD, which is covered in great detail, including a 2:00 am phone call from Rice the night Joe Wilson’s story hit the New York Times website, a call basically alerting Tenant that he would be the designated fall guy. The overall theme of the book’s chapters on WMD and the Powell speech is that the CIA did not believe Iraq was a WMD threat. Powell’s talking points were handed to him by the administration, from Rumsfeld’s DOD off-the-books intelligence operation. The CIA gutted most of Powell’s intended points. Remember, Powell didn’t even refer to US intelligence sources on the Niger yellowcake story, he pawned it off as “British sources”. That’s because the CIA had specifically and emphatically shot it down during the vetting of his speech. They told him that Sadaam already had 550 pounds of yellow cake and had had it, unused, for years, so why would he be trying to buy more? They had shot down the aluminum tubes, based on engineering analysis from Oak Ridge experts. They had shot down the Al Queda/Saddam connections.</p>
<p>"Remember, Powell didn’t even refer to US intelligence sources on the Niger yellowcake story, he pawned it off as “British sources”. That’s because the CIA had specifically and emphatically shot it down during the vetting of his speech.</p>
<p>Yup. CIA vetted the speech, and kept the “Good Humor” trucks. You think Larry Wilkerson is that dumb? They made a plan to lie, and the next step was just trying to figure which words and which pictures given to them by “intelligence” would convey the lies most emphatically.</p>
<p>OK, the “slam dunk” meeting is covered on pages 186 - 189 of The One Percent Doctrine. The meeting took place on December 21st, 2002 in the Oval Office attended by Tenant and 30-year career CIA analyst John McLaughlin. McLaughlin presented all of the evidence that the CIA could offer linking Sadaam to WMD or to Al Queda. The evidence was both old (mostly dating to the early 1990’s), thin, and of questionable reliability.</p>
<p>At the end of the briefing, which did not include any strong evidence, Bush said to McLaughlin, “Nice try. I don’t think this is quite – it’s not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from”.</p>
<p>Bush said to Tenant, “I’ve been told all this intelligence about WMD and this is the best we’ve got?”</p>
<p>Woodward reported that Tenant said “It’s a slam dunk case” in this meeting. Woodward’s sources for the quote were White House officials. Tenant does not recall saying that. McLaughlin specifically recalls that Tenant did NOT say that.</p>
<p>Think about it. We know what Powell presented to the UN. We know that what he presented was easily shot down. Given how badly the administration wanted to make its case, don’t you think they would have used better intelligence evidence if they had it?</p>
<p>Inspectors had been crawing around Sadaam’s factories off and on for years. Nuclear weapons programs and delivery systems are not that easy to hide. They are fairly complex time-consuming activities.</p>
<p>“Given how badly the administration wanted to make its case, don’t you think they would have used better intelligence evidence if they had it?”</p>
<p>Nope. That was the best they had. 10 years, two administrations, a dozen agencies. “Verified” by all those other non-existent “intelligence” agencies in Lower Slobovia. That was the very, very best they had.</p>
<p>Given that, why would you believe ANYTHING they put out now? Go anywhere else in the world, and anything the U.S. State Department puts out has virtually NO credibility. No one believes their “intelligence”, no believes they can be trusted, and, above all, no one believes they even know how to tell the truth. Only in America does anyone put any stock in the pack of liars.</p>
<p>Look: once you’ve committed genocide, and been called on the carpet for it, it is difficult to recover. The sympathy of the world - beginning with the march of a hundred thousand in Tehran five days later - was with the American people after 911. But this Administration has squandered it, and will be at least a decade before the U.S. will regain anything in the way of international stature that doesn’t come out of the barrel of a gun.</p>
Well, actually, the State Dept. intelligence people were the only ones that got it right concerning the nuclear program. The CIA, DIA and DoE were in agreement that Saddam was reconstituting the program. Actually, even they were partielly correct as the Duelfer report shows.</p>
<p>Well, let’s look at this statement logically: according to mini the US committed genocide in the 90’s and therefore we should generate no sympathy from the world. Yet, in his second sentence he says that Iran showed us sympathy after 9/11. Something doesn’t add up with this logic.</p>
<p>But, let’s say that indeed the world did show us sympathy after 9/11. Tell me exactly what good it did for the world to be sympathetic toward us in terms of preventing it from happening in the first place. Who gives a rat’s behind about “sympathy” when there are people out there trying to kill as many of as they possibly can? I certainly don’t. </p>
<p>What is more important than sympathy is the willingness to work with us to prevent future terrorism. Despite the “genocide” of the 90s and the “illegal” war in Iraq, the level of cooperation among intelligence agencies since 9/11 has improved dramtically by all accounts.</p>