Politics As Usual

[Tyrone Slothrop]

The editorial in today's New York Times is 99.44% dead on -- the only false note I see is the suggestion that Bush should be more "frank," whatever that means:

• The Senate Report
  
  Published: July 10, 2004
  
  In a season when candor and leadership are in short supply, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the prewar assessment of Iraqi weapons is a welcome demonstration of both. It is also disturbing, and not just because of what it says about the atrocious state of American intelligence. The report is a condemnation of how this administration has squandered the public trust it may sorely need for a real threat to national security.
  
  The report was heavily censored by the administration and is too narrowly focused on the bungling of just the Central Intelligence Agency. But what comes through is thoroughly damning. Put simply, the Bush administration's intelligence analysts cooked the books to give Congress and the public the impression that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear arms, that he was plotting to give such weapons to terrorists, and that he was an imminent threat.
  
  These assertions formed the basis of Mr. Bush's justifications for war. But the report said that they were wrong and were not a true picture of the intelligence, and that the intelligence itself was not worth much. The freshest information from human sources was more than four years old. The committee said the analysts who had produced that false apocalyptic vision had fallen into a "collective groupthink" in which evidence was hammered into a preconceived pattern. Their bosses did not intervene.
  
  The report reaffirmed a finding by another panel investigating intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks in saying that there was no "established formal relationship" between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. It also said there was no evidence that Iraq had been complicit in any attack by Osama bin Laden, or that Saddam Hussein had ever tried to use Al Qaeda for an attack. Although the report said the C.I.A.'s conclusions had been "widely disseminated" in the government, Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have repeatedly talked of an Iraq-Qaeda link.
  
  Sadly, the investigation stopped without assessing how President Bush had used the incompetent intelligence reports to justify war. It left open the question of whether the analysts thought they were doing what Mr. Bush wanted. While the panel said it had found no analyst who reported being pressured to change a finding, its vice chairman, Senator John Rockefeller IV, said there had been an "environment of intense pressure." But the issue was glossed over so the report could be adopted unanimously.
  
  The panel's investigation into how President Bush handled the intelligence has been postponed until after the election. But the bottom line already seems pretty clear. No one had to pressure analysts to change their findings because the findings were determined before the work started.
  
  By late 2002, you'd have had to have been vacationing on Mars not to know what answer Mr. Bush wanted. The planning for war had begun. The C.I.A. was under enormous pressure over getting it wrong before 9/11. And the hawkish defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to set up his own intelligence agency to get the goods on Iraq that the wishy-washy C.I.A. couldn't seem to deliver.
  
  Both political parties see all this as an election issue, and the international community will see the committee report as another reason to decry Mr. Bush's go-it-alone foreign policy. But the report also speaks to a critical long-term security threat. We cannot afford to have the public become too cynical about the government's assessment of danger.
  
  There may well come a time when Mr. Bush, or another president, will have to ask the nation and its allies to back a pre-emptive military strike against terrorists, or a country that poses a real threat. And he's probably going to have to rely on intelligence that is hardly the "slam dunk" that George Tenet reportedly called these shoddy reports on Iraq. The public will have to believe that the president is acting against a real threat, not one manufactured to justify a political agenda.
  
  This administration has not made it easier for people to have that confidence. Its continuing insistence on linking Iraq and Al Qaeda is not aimed at helping the public understand the situation in the Middle East, but at providing political cover for an increasingly unpopular invasion.
  
  Then there are the news conferences that administration officials hold periodically to warn us that we're about to be attacked. Everyone is aware of the danger out there, but there is no reason to go on television and repeat vague warnings that seem to be intended to frighten everyone, but are more likely to lull people into complacency by their familiarity and repetition. When Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland defense, holds a news conference to warn the nation of dire peril and it winds up as fodder for comedy shows, there's something very wrong somewhere.
  
  The Senate Intelligence Committee's report ought to be the first move back from the brink of destructive public cynicism. The next must come from the president, who could help restore confidence in the government's risk assessment by simply being frank about the errors his administration made and the lessons it learned. That would do more to prepare the country for the next crisis than a full season of scary press conferences by Mr. Ridge.

[sgtclub]

As many of you seem to like what Bill Kristol has to say, here is his latest:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Conten...4/312rpsfo.asp

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
We all pretend its all so simple... but here's some thing I don't think are easly explained.

Bush was about equal to gore. If you add in Texas knowing a vote didn't matter and the Fla. panhandle, it was a wash.

But bush won at least a dozen states by an enormous amount (70%). That should mean if total vote is close, Bush should have lost the electoral, right? why not?

Perhaps I do not understand math, and I sense a trap, but I would postulate that the dozen or so states to which you refer are largely Western states, largely with voting populations a tiny fraction of the populations of states such as New York, California (of course), Florida, or even Texas. Thus, the 70-30 split in Wyoming, et al. means relatively little to the popular vote total, as compared to the (still few) electoral votes it sent Bush's way. Florida was a tie. The smaller % margins for Gore in NY and California, e.g. add up to many more votes than the bigger margins in the smaller states.

After all, the numbers must add up, because they do.

S_A_M

[sgtclub]

For Edwards, however, the evidence wasn't quite so clear. "So did I get misled? No. I didn't get misled," he said on Hardball with Chris Matthews on October 13, 2003, almost a year to the day after he voted to authorize the Iraq war and some six months after major combat ended. When Matthews followed up, asking Edwards if he got an "honest reading on the intelligence," the junior senator from North Carolina seemed to place much of the blame on the intelligence community.

EDWARDS: "And as you know, I serve on the Senate Intelligence Committee. So it wasn't just the Bush administration. I sat in meeting after meeting after meeting where we were told about the presence of weapons of mass destruction. There is clearly a disconnect between what we were told and what, in fact, we found there."

What's more, on February 24, 2002, Edwards was asked by CNN's John King about President Bush's labeling of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil." His response: "You know, the most imminent, clear and present threat to our country is not the same from those three countries. I think Iraq is the most serious and imminent threat to our country. . . . And they do, in my judgment, present different threats. And I think Iraq and Saddam Hussein present the most serious and most imminent threat."

MATTHEWS: Were we right to go to this war alone, basically without the Europeans behind us? Was that something we had to do?

EDWARDS: I think that we were right to go. I think we were right to go to the
United Nations. I think we couldn't let those who could veto in the Security Council hold us hostage. And I think Saddam Hussein being gone is good. Good for the American people, good for the security of that region of the world, and good for the Iraqi people.

MATTHEWS: If you think the decision, which was made by the president, when basically he saw the French weren't with us and the Germans and the Russians weren't with us, was he right to say, "We're going anyway"?

EDWARDS: I stand behind my support of that, yes.

[Skeks in the city]

Now, club can get his ketchup fix without supporting Kerry. He can eat W Ketchup.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
Perhaps I do not understand math, and I sense a trap, but I would postulate that the dozen or so states to which you refer are largely Western states, largely with voting populations a tiny fraction of the populations of states such as New York, California (of course), Florida, or even Texas. Thus, the 70-30 split in Wyoming, et al. means relatively little to the popular vote total, as compared to the (still few) electoral votes it sent Bush's way. Florida was a tie. The smaller % margins for Gore in NY and California, e.g. add up to many more votes than the bigger margins in the smaller states.

After all, the numbers must add up, because they do.

S_A_M

Texas cancelled out NY, but you're right huge numeric difference in Cali. and Ill. explain it.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

The DOD neo-cons -- Rumsfeld's boys -- being served up on a platter? Tough time to have no friends in Washington.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/...gon/index.html

Headline and excerpts:

"Pentagon's prewar intelligence role questioned

"WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Sunday that they want to know whether the Pentagon knowingly withheld information from the CIA and ran a secret intelligence-gathering operation in building a case for invading Iraq.

"Their comments came two days after the committee released an independent, bipartisan report condemning flawed prewar intelligence that said Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. (Full story)

Speaking on NBC's 'Meet the Press,' the committee's chairman and vice chairman, Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas and Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, respectively, expressed concern over actions by the Defense Intelligence Agency and Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.

Roberts cited false information on Iraq that the Bush administration had taken from a source code-named Curveball.

'Curveball really provided 98 percent of the assessment as to whether or not the Iraqis had a biological weapon,' Roberts said.

"'Yet the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, knew of his background. He has a very troubled background.'

"Based on this source's claims, the administration argued that Iraq had biological weapons capability, Roberts said.

"'That's the kind of flaw in intelligence and I think -- I won't say willful -- but the DIA should have shared that information with the CIA. And the CIA should have gone from there.""

[The rest of the piece goes on to hammer Feith and his Office of Special Plans.]

S_A_M

[Not Me]

Anyone thinking of visiting Paris this summer? Make sure you don't look like a jew or who the hell knows what will happen to you.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/sto...259063,00.html

Swastikas drawn on woman in Paris attack

[Say_hello_for_me]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
The DOD neo-cons -- Rumsfeld's boys -- being served up on a platter? Tough time to have no friends in Washington.
...
S_A_M

There was an article somewhere today about recalling Hussein's military folks, and it placed the blame for disbanding it (without any plans for what these people would do) squarely on the senior civilian leadership of the DOD. Who is that again?

It indicated that the Joint Chiefs and the Provisional Authority civilians did not have a say, and possibly any warning. Not surprisingly, the critic was a Col. who served as an adviser to the Provisional Authority.

The military hates, hates, hates these guys. Anyone seen an officer say something nice about Rummy and his friends in public lately?

Neither have I.

Hello

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
There was an article somewhere today about recalling Hussein's military folks, and it placed the blame for disbanding it (without any plans for what these people would do) squarely on the senior civilian leadership of the DOD. Who is that again?

It indicated that the Joint Chiefs and the Provisional Authority civilians did not have a say, and possibly any warning. Not surprisingly, the critic was a Col. who served as an adviser to the Provisional Authority.

Hmmm. I knew they were reversing the "de-Baathification" -- which always seemed like a move motivated much more by ideology than pragmatism which ignored the realities of Iraqi society -- but I had not seen that article.

Bremer has taken a great deal of criticism for the initial decision to disband the Iraqi Army. Perhaps now that he is out of there, he and/or some of his folks are quietly correcting the record.

S_A_M

P.S. Fortunately for the Republicans, the voters will surely not allow their estimation of the performance of the President to be affected by the performance/abilities of those he appoints to key positions. Fear not, and keep the focus on smearing Kerry.

[the Spartan]

Originally posted by Not Me
Anyone thinking of visiting Paris this summer? Make sure you don't look like a jew or who the hell knows what will happen to you.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/sto...259063,00.html

Swastikas drawn on woman in Paris attack

Does this surprise anyone? Of course, what is dismaying is that these are the people that the UN and the American Liberals look to for moral guidance.

One World Government indeed!

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by the Spartan
Does this surprise anyone? Of course, what is dismaying is that these are the people that the UN and the American Liberals look to for moral guidance.

One World Government indeed!

When do the French switch fom bathing once a month to bathing twice a month? Is it July? I hope so, otherwise it could be awhile before this poor woman gets rid of these offensive markings.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by the Spartan
Does this surprise anyone? Of course, what is dismaying is that these are the people that the UN and the American Liberals look to for moral guidance.

Right. Because France elects militant Muslim teenagers to public office all the time. And of course no one in America -- especially not in your neck of the woods, Penske -- has ever painted a Swastika or assaulted a Jew.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
Right. Because France elects militant Muslim teenagers to public office all the time. And of course no one in America -- especially not in your neck of the woods, Penske -- has ever painted a Swastika or assaulted a Jew.

France was actually thinking of setting up a parallel legal system for its muslims. I'll have to catch the latest on this at Little Green Footballs. And the level of attacks on Jews in France is spiking. France has a major problem with this.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
France has a major problem with this.

And would France have a problem with this if it were anti-Semitic? I think not. It wouldn't care, would it? In fact, France would be good with it.