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

To: Neocon who wrote (147772)	10/13/2004 4:52:38 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Your argument is being reduced to "ok, the tubes were not for nuke use, and the experts knew this, but just try to prove that Bush knew". The buck stops here. I could leave the response at that, but highlight a different paragraph in your excerpt: But if the opinions of the nuclear experts were seemingly disregarded at every turn, an overwhelming momentum gathered behind the C.I.A. assessment. It was a momentum built on a pattern of haste, secrecy, ambiguity, bureaucratic maneuver and a persistent failure in the Bush administration Don't skim over those words, as you are wont to do. The tubes were identical in specification (except increasingly tighter tolerances) to tubes used for years in Iraq's short range artillery rocket program. Experts stated they were not suitable. An independant thinker will draw the logical, correct conclusion. But the people cherry picking the facts were not independant thinkers. The Guardian (UK press) called them "ideological amateurs": guardian.co.uk As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war. It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses. This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of intelligence. According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency. The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney. Why is Newt Gingrich involved in the OSP? Why are political staff from the Whitehouse involved in intelligence gathering and interpretation? "They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it." There's Seymour Hersh's account of OSP, but of course no unthinking Bush apologist will accept anything Hersh says, even if he has a track record of being on the money: newyorker.com Instead, why not take into account a quote from someone who has some insider knowledge of OSP: "When I heard those (President Bush's) speeches I recognized many of the anecdotes. Having seen the intelligence I knew this was a manipulation of the information. It was cherry picked information, out of context information. It bothered me a great deal because I saw it to be conscious manipulation. Not an oversight but consciously done." "If you don't tell Dick Cheney what he wants to hear, you're out of a job." -- Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski worked at the Pentagon along side the 'Office of Special Plans'