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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rascal who wrote (112718)	8/25/2003 10:26:05 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Public not liking what they see in Iraq dailykos.com

To: Rascal who wrote (112718)	8/25/2003 10:34:08 AM
From: E	Respond to of 281500

That's a good piece. And I'd completely forgotten this startling detail of the drumbeat to war. Oh, sorry, Bush says the drumbeat to war wasn't the WH's, it was the media's. On occasion, the tales would converge in a single, breathtaking outburst from the White House. "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," said Bush last Oct. 7.

To: Rascal who wrote (112718)	8/25/2003 6:51:42 PM
From: KonKilo	Respond to of 281500

There's not much precedent for publications running retractions of their opinions, so the task becomes one of eating crow without making a face. Best line I've heard this year. I bookmarked his archive, thanks.

To: Rascal who wrote (112718)	8/25/2003 9:03:16 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 281500

Meanwhile, the NYT Book Review had this article yesterday pointing out propaganda plan B now in the early stages of marketing. It seems that the CIA allegedly put too work fabricating the wrong data. Their fabrication work should have gone in a different direction. And as usual, we don't need no stinkin' evidence, the true believers just KNOW. Clips from nytimes.com And a score-settling one at that. She uses the book to lash out at the ideological losers of the prewar period, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department, saving her greatest wrath for the nation's spy service. Most observers will recall that the White House and Pentagon easily steamrolled over the few pockets of institutional resistance in Washington on the drive to Baghdad. Yet Mylroie seems to believe that the national security bureaucrats very nearly derailed the war, and only the certitude of the president himself carried the day. . . . Even so, Mylroie comes at the agency from a skewed angle of attack. Its greatest sin, she proposes, is that it mulishly refused to agree that Iraq was behind the Sept. 11 attacks. If it had, she suggests, then President Bush would have been saved the trouble of worrying about Iraq's efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction. Not that she doubts that the weapons were there. But if Sept. 11 had been recognized as a plot hatched in Baghdad, then there would have been a clear-cut case for war, one not fought pre-emptively but in self-defense. Mylroie complains that the C.I.A. seems to have been duped into believing that Al Qaeda is a loose-knit group of Islamic extremists, and that the agency's analysts have turned a collective blind eye to the evidence suggesting that Al Qaeda could well be a front organization for Iraqi intelligence. She believes that Iraq was behind almost every major terrorist attack of the past decade, dating back to the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. What has the C.I.A. overlooked that she hasn't? Here Mylroie slips, offering speculation in place of solid evidence. She suggests that key Qaeda leaders who have been captured by the United States may only be posing as Qaeda leaders: they could actually be Iraqi intelligence agents who are way, way undercover. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's chief of operations and the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and who is now in American custody, may not really be Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He could be an Iraqi intelligence agent secretly sent to run Al Qaeda by Saddam Hussein. Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the first World Trade Center bombing and a 1995 plot to blow up American airliners over the Pacific, who now sits in a federal prison, also may be an Iraqi agent. Both Mohammed and Yousef, who are related, are Kuwaitis originally from the Baluchistan region of Pakistan, and their papers and their identities could have been stolen for use by Iraqi intelligence agents during Baghdad's occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Mylroie offers no proof that such a switch did take place. In the case of Yousef, she neatly leaps from one assumption to the next down a convoluted paper trail. She puts great stock in the fact that people who knew Mohammed when he was a student in North Carolina in the 1980's thought he was nice and find it hard to believe he became a world-class terrorist. Could that mean it was not really the same person? Unlike most cub reporters, it seems, Mylroie has never been sent out to talk to the neighbors of a murderer and been told, ''He was a quiet man.'' Advertisement The C.I.A.'s refusal to pursue this line of reasoning, Mylroie implies, has led American counterterrorist officials on a wild-goose chase of global proportions, hunting down Islamic extremists when they should have focused their energies on Iraqi intelligence operatives. The C.I.A.'s other unpardonable sin is its reluctance to do business with Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi exile leader who was adopted by the Pentagon after the agency ended its stormy relationship with his organization in the 1990's. The book is peppered with little digs at midlevel government officials, like the C.I.A.'s former Near East Division chief, Steven Richter, who lacked the vision to see that Chalabi represented Iraq's future. One lesson from ''Bush vs. the Beltway'' is that in the wake of its historic failure on Sept. 11, which left nearly 3,000 Americans dead, the C.I.A. has so much to account for that it has to get used to taking whatever criticism comes its way. In the meantime, readers will have to wait for another book to try to explain a more recent intelligence flap -- the one having to do with those missing weapons of mass destruction.