Go Back to the B3 Home Page
Complaints, compliments, arguments? Email me.
[<< "Buy this record."] [Archive Index] [>>"Cranking up the Wurlitzer on Iran"]
05/30/2003 Archived Entry: "NYTimes Double Header"
NYTimes Double Header
The op-ed page at the NY Times is chock full of good stuff today. The ever-excellent Paul Krugman and the almost-always-excellent Nick Kristof have turned it into a theme page of sorts, talking about the farce that was the WMD Threat. Krugman revisits 'Wag The Dog':
Last fall the former head of the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism efforts warned that "cooked intelligence" was finding its way into official pronouncements. This week a senior British intelligence official told the BBC that under pressure from Downing Street, a dossier on Iraqi weapons had been "transformed" to make it "sexier" — uncorroborated material from a suspect source was added to make the threat appear imminent.It's now also clear that George W. Bush had no intention of reaching a diplomatic solution. According to The Financial Times, White House sources confirm that the decision to go to war was reached in December: "A tin-pot dictator was mocking the president. It provoked a sense of anger inside the White House," a source told the newspaper.
Administration officials are now playing down the whole W.M.D. issue. Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, recently told Vanity Fair that the decision to emphasize W.M.D.'s had been taken for "bureaucratic reasons . . . because it was the one reason everyone could agree on." But it was the W.M.D. issue that stampeded the Senate into giving Mr. Bush carte blanche to wage war.
And Kristof seems to have been getting email from pissed-off members of the intelligence community:
"The American people were manipulated," bluntly declares one person from the Defense Intelligence Agency who says he was privy to all the intelligence there on Iraq. These people are coming forward because they are fiercely proud of the deepest ethic in the intelligence world — that such work should be nonpolitical — and are disgusted at efforts to turn them into propagandists....The outrage among the intelligence professionals is so widespread that they have formed a group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, that wrote to President Bush this month to protest what it called "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions."
"While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes," the letter said, "never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize launching a war...."
Some say that top Pentagon officials cast about for the most sensational nuggets about Iraq and used them to bludgeon Colin Powell and seduce President Bush. The director of central intelligence, George Tenet, has been generally liked and respected within the agency ranks, but in the last year, particularly in the intelligence directorate, people say that he has kowtowed to Donald Rumsfeld and compromised the integrity of his own organization.
"We never felt that there was any leadership in the C.I.A. to qualify or put into context the information available," one veteran said. "Rather there was a tendency to feed the most alarming tidbits to the president. Often it's the most ill-considered information that goes to the president.
"So instead of giving the president the most considered, carefully examined information available, basically you give him the garbage. And then in a few days when it's clear that maybe it wasn't right, well then, you feed him some more hot garbage."
Register if you haven't done so. Don't miss these op-eds.
Replies: somebody speaks up.
Awww now come on. Rummy would never lie to us.
What's becomign rediculous is that none of the major news networks or papers have yet to do a serious in-depth investigation into why this was allowed to happen.
Maybe that's because they'll find that much of the blame lies with the media for not questioning and investigating in the first place.
Posted by Jason @ 05/30/2003 10:17 AM NY
