quoting at length from declassified sections of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq issued in October. White House officials have cited the NIE as the basis for pre-war speeches about Iraq. Cheney said three times that it would have been "irresponsible in the extreme" to disregard the warnings.
As though the NIE were "independent". Surely, it's supposed to be, but "scratch" the surface and you find
Former and current intelligence officials said they felt a continual drumbeat, not only from Cheney and Libby, but also from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Feith, and less so from CIA Director George J. Tenet, to find information or write reports in a way that would help the administration make the case that going into Iraq was urgent.
"They were the browbeaters," said 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. "In interagency meetings," he said, "Wolfowitz treated the analysts' work with contempt."
from
washingtonpost.com
So first you "mold" a document to your wishes; then you cite it as "proof". Any caveats that are left in the report are ignored.
he did not read the next sentence, which referred to a dissent from State Department intelligence experts
and
He omitted a qualifier at the start of the passage in which intelligence analysts said they "judge" that to be the case.
from the Allen article.
Clearly, the Admin is using the deaths of Hussein's sons to "mount a full court press" on their critics. Suddenly, we have Cheney, Wolfowitz and Bremer appearing on any available channel. While perceptions are important, they are ephemeral. The party line is that with the sons gone, and soon Saddam as well, the Baathist resistance will "fade away". Maybe. OTOH, if the bulk of the Iraqis want neither Saddam nor the US occupiers, no Saddam means they can concentrate on getting the Americans to leave.
We'll see.
JMO
lurqer |
