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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (119840)	11/17/2003 9:56:17 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

A "fabrication" is something that you make up in order to deceive. If you are using data that you believe is correct to reach a conclusion that you believe is correct, it is not a "fabrication" even if it turns out to be wrong. Well, a fabrication can also be willfully ignoring contrary evidence in order to prove your point, or giving an emphasis to the evidence that does prove your point and de-emphasizing the evidence which is contrary to it. Such appraisals may be made in good faith or may not be. Determining whether good faith was behind it or not is, at the very end of the day, not possible for us outsiders to do definitively. Look, everyone in the Bush admin who counts (i.e., Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, et al) has said at some point over the past 6 months that intelligence is rarely black and white, there are always not only shades of grey, but facts laced with speculation, some facts corroborated by lousy sources, some by less lousy sources, some are properly triangulated, most aren't, and anyone looking at the evidence most of the time will have to fill in a lot of blanks and make some logical jumps in order to come to a conclusion. I am willing to accept that--it gives an out to them, to the intelligence community, even to some extent to the anti-war people, everyone can hang their hat on the intel that supports their position. But when you decide to go to war, with all the uncertainty and destruction of property and life and blowback that that entails, you better be damned sure. The anti-war people look at the Bush crew and their arrogance before, during and after the invasion, and see people who used the invasion for political purposes, who were claiming before the war that Saddam was so dire a threat that the US Congress couldn't take the time to have proper hearings, they couldn't wait for UN inspectors as they of course would never find the WMDs, Congress had to vote on this thing in a month, the chickenshit UN had to support the US or be irrelevant to world peace, which of course depended on this invasion. The US knew they were there, there were even claims or implications that they knew where they were. Look we've been over this I dont' know how many times. You're right that someone could be mistaken rather than fabricating. One day perhaps there will be a David Stockman in this administration who will write a book detailing the ins and outs of what really went on that will parallel Stockman's The Triumph of Politics. You see a mistake, I see a despicable decision made in order to win an election, to divert attention from the crummy economy. I guess we'll have to leave it at that until that "Stockman" figure comes along, if he/she does.