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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (593949)	11/22/2010 2:23:53 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1585090

Bush was a frat boy, legacy moron. That's the history. A ghost written book doesn't change that. Do you think Bush has read his own book?

To: i-node who wrote (593949)	11/22/2010 2:40:50 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1585090

Bush lets it all hang out in Decision Points. He complains bitterly that the NIE “tied my hands on the military side.” He notes that the Estimate opened with this “eye-popping” finding of the intelligence community: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” The former president adds that the “NIE’s conclusion was so stunning that I felt it would immediately leak to the press.” He writes that he authorized declassification of the key findings “so that we could shape the news stories with the facts.” Facts? The mind boggles at the thought that Bush actually thought the White House, even with the usual help from an ever-obliging FCM, could put a positive spin on intelligence conclusions that let a meretricious cat out of the bag, that the Bush administration’s case for war against Iran was as flimsy as its bogus case for invading Iraq. How painful it was to watch the contortions the hapless Stephen Hadley, national security adviser at the time, went through in trying to square a circle. His task was the more difficult since, unlike the experience with the dishonestly edited/declassified version of what some refer to as the Whore of Babylon — the Oct. 1, 2002, NIE on WMD in Iraq, this time the managers of the Estimate made sure that the declassified version of the key judgments presented a faithful rendering of the main points in the classified Estimate. A disappointed Bush writes, “The backlash was immediate. [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad hailed the NIE as a ‘great victory.’” Bush’s apparent “logic” here is to use the widespread disdain for Ahmadinejad to discredit the NIE through association, i.e. whatever Ahmadinejad praises must be false. But can you blame Bush for his chagrin? Alas, the NIE had knocked out the props from under the anti-Iran propaganda machine, imported duty-free from Israel and tuned up by neoconservatives here at home. How embarrassing. Here before the world were the key judgments of an NIE, the most authoritative genre of intelligence report, unanimously approved “with high confidence” by16 agencies and signed by the Director of National Intelligence, saying, in effect, that Bush and Cheney were lying about the “Iranian nuclear threat.” It is inconceivable that as the drafting of the Estimate on Iran proceeded during 2007, that the intelligence community would have kept the White House in the dark about the emerging tenor of its conclusions. And yet, just a month before the Estimate was issued, Bush was claiming that the threat from Iran could lead to “World War III.” [There is even new doubt about intelligence that the Iranians were working on a nuclear warhead before 2003. See Consortiumnews.com’s “Iranian Nuke Documents May Be Fake.”] consortiumnews.com