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07/14/2003 Archived Entry: "Nope, not going away."
Nope, not going away.
You can almost smell the desire. The desire of Condi and Colin and Rummy and (most of all) Bush to just wish this all away - to keep denying everything until things are back to where they once were, back to the days when they were perceived to be incapable of doing anything wrong.
That's one bunch of haloes that have slipped. And now people see them for what they are - manipulating ideologues, not above doing anything to advance their globalist ambitions.
Paul Krugman has been MIA for the last couple of weeks, but he's back, and he brought the big hammer with him.
Literally before the dust had settled, Bush administration officials began trying to use 9/11 to justify an attack on Iraq. Gen. Wesley Clark says that he received calls on Sept. 11 from "people around the White House" urging him to link that assault to Saddam Hussein. His account seems to back up a CBS.com report last September, headlined "Plans for Iraq Attack Began on 9/11," which quoted notes taken by aides to Donald Rumsfeld on the day of the attack: "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."But an honest intelligence assessment would have raised questions about why we were going after a country that hadn't attacked us. It would also have suggested the strong possibility that an invasion of Iraq would hurt, not help, U.S. security.
So the Iraq hawks set out to corrupt the process of intelligence assessment. On one side, nobody was held accountable for the failure to predict or prevent 9/11; on the other side, top intelligence officials were expected to support the case for an Iraq war.
And his fellow Times writer, Nicholas Kristof - who probably has a closer relationship with the US intelligence community than anyone currently working in journalism - spins an equally ominous tale in his op-ed today.
After I wrote a month ago about the Niger uranium hoax in the State of the Union address, a senior White House official chided me gently and explained that there was more to the story that I didn't know.Yup. And now it's coming out.
Based on conversations with people in the intelligence community, this picture is emerging: the White House, eager to spice up the State of the Union address, recklessly resurrected the discredited Niger tidbit. The Central Intelligence Agency objected, and then it and the National Security Council negotiated a new wording, attributing it all to the Brits. It felt less dishonest pinning the falsehood on the cousins.
What troubles me is not that single episode, but the broader pattern of dishonesty and delusion that helped get us into the Iraq mess — and that created the false expectations undermining our occupation today. Some in the administration are trying to make George Tenet the scapegoat for the affair. But Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, issued an open letter to President Bush yesterday reflecting the view of many in the intel community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The open letter called for Mr. Cheney's resignation.
Replies: 2 people speak up
Hey you, Dick.
Figures.
Posted by Aristophanes @ 07/15/2003 09:38 AM NY
I'm just lovin' this more and more.
And I'd still like to see someone swing at the end of a rope for the lapse in security on 9-11. But that's just me being my usual vindictive self.
Posted by Metropolitan99 @ 07/15/2003 10:56 AM NY
