Pre-Emptive Strike Policy Gets Pre-Menopausal
The Bush White House is getting sudden hot flashes from the final report of a Presidential Commission studying American intelligence failures. The conclusion? There were and still are massive failures of intelligence. Hard to say you can strike first in warfare if all of your intelligence is faulty. It's happened to us once, and we have yet to clean up the mess and get our kids home. Think the American public will be duped again? Just another chink in Bush's armor of ideology. Social Security falls next, then he'll go after making tax cuts permanent. Think it'll happen? States can't meet their budgets because of three tax cuts for the rich in four years. People are beginning to feel the belt tightening and smell the stink of hypocrasy. Think the people will trust this guy's values much longer?
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posted by Phil at 6:47 PM
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From my current Wise Man, Dr. Eric Alterman, all quoted from his "The Book on Bush", but the emphasis is mine:
An Army intelligence officer quoted in TIME. "Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence."
A former defense intelligence official who attended some of the meetings in which Wolfowitz and others pressed for a different approach to the assessments they were receiving, quoted in The Washington Post, "They were the browbeaters…In interagency meetings," he said, "Wolfowitz treated the analysts' work with contempt."
Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Defense Intelligence Agency, in The New Republic, on conclusions that did not jibe with administration war aims, “They were encouraged to think it over again." Moreover when analysts warned that the Iraqi people might not welcome an invading force and that the Shiite clergy might cause particular problems, "The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome."
A former staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee quoted in The New Republic: "People [kept] telling you first that things weren't right, weird things going on, different people saying,'There's so much pressure, you know, they keep telling us, go back and find the right answer,' things like that.
A former military intelligence officer quoted in The Washington Post, “It was a foregone conclusion that every photo of a trailer truck would be a `mobile bioweapons lab' and every tanker truck would be `filled with weaponized anthrax.”
A former CIA agent quoted in The New Yorker: who resigned over his “sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with—to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.”
A Defense Intelligence Agency quoted in The New York Times, "The American people were manipulated."
Remember all of these quotes have been available for between eighteen months and two years. I found them during the summer of 2003 when I was drafting the book. So could have any writer, reporter, senator, (or Secretary of State) who cared enough to look
Let's face it, the entire intelligence community has been ordered to fall on their swords on this one. They had no choice--if they didn't, they would be labeled as obstructionist, and would have been removed. Nice gig you got going there, George!
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