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Saturday, June 7, 2008 |
US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: "The Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV, and a bipartisan majority of the Committee (10-5), today unveiled the final two sections of its Phase II report on prewar intelligence.
'Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,' Rockefeller said. 'In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.'
'It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa'ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa'ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.
'There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.
These reports represent the final chapter in our oversight of prewar intelligence. They complete the story of mistakes and failures - both by the Intelligence Community and the Administration - in the lead up to the war. Fundamentally, these reports are about transparency and holding our government accountable, and making sure these mistakes never happen again,' Rockefeller added.
The Committee's report cites several conclusions in which the Administration's public statements were NOT supported by the intelligence. They include:
- Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
- Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
- Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
- Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
- The Secretary of Defense's statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
- The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed."
11:45:53 AM 
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The extract below is from Harper's. It is one of the best insights in our present economy and its essential flaw that I have ever read. You can read the whole article here.
"Suppose that the head of a federal agency came before this committee and reported with pride that agency employees had burned 10 per-cent more calories at work last year than they did the year before. Not only that - they had spent 10 percent more money too. I have a feeling you would want to know more. What were these employees doing when they burned those calories? What did they spend that money on? Most important, what were the results? Expenditure is a means, not an end, and to assess the health of an agency, or system, you need to know what it has accomplished, not just how much motion it has generated and money it has spent. The point seems obvious, yet Congress ignores it every day when it talks about 'the economy'. The administration and the media do it, too. Every time you say that 'the economy' is up, or that you want to 'stimulate' it, you are urging more expenditure and motion without regard to what that expenditure is and what it might accomplish, and without regard to what it might crowd out or displace in
the process.
That term 'the economy': what it means, in practice, is the Gross Domestic Product - a big statistical pot that includes all the money spent in a given period of time. If the pot is bigger than it was the previous quarter, or year, then you cheer. If it isn't bigger, or bigger enough, then you call Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke up here and ask him to do some explaining. The what of the economy makes no difference in these councils. It never seems to come up. The money in the big pot could be going to cancer treatments or casinos, violent video games or usurious credit-card rates. It could go toward the $9 billion or so that
Americans spend on gas they burn while they sit in traffic, or the billion plus that goes to such drugs as Ritalin and Prozac that schools are stuffing into kids to keep them quiet in class. The money could be the $20 billion or so that Americans spend on divorce lawyers each year, or the $41 billion on pets, or the $5 billion on identity theft, or the billions more spent to repair property damage caused by environmental pollution. The money in the pot could betoken social and environmental breakdown - misery and distress of all kinds. It makes no difference. You don't ask. All you want to know is the total amount, which is the GDP. So long as it is growing then everything is fine.
Tell us what this growth is, in concrete terms. Then we can begin to say whether it has been good. The failure to do this is insane. It is an insanity that is embedded in the political debate and in media reportage, and it leads to fallacy in many directions. We hear, for example, that efforts to address climate change will hurt 'the economy'. Does that mean that if we clean up the air we will spend less money treating asthma in young kids? The atmosphere is part of the economy, too - the real economy, that is, though not the artificial construct portrayed in the GOP. It does real work, as we would discover quickly if it were to collapse. Yet the GOP does not include this work. If we burn more gas, the expenditure gets added to the GOP. But there is no corresponding subtraction for the toll this burning takes on the thermostatic and buffering functions that the atmosphere provides. (Nor is there a subtraction for the oil we take out of the ground.) Yet if we burn less gas, and thus maintain the crucial functions of the atmosphere, we say 'the economy' has suffered, even though the real economy has been enhanced.
With families the logic is the same. By the standard of the GOP, the worst families in America are those that actually function as families - that cook their own meals, take walks after dinner, and talk together instead of just farming the kids out to the commercial culture. Cooking at home, talking with kids, walking instead of driving, involve less expenditure of money than do their commercial counterparts. Solid marriages involve less expenditure for counseling and divorce. Thus they are threats to the economy as portrayed in the GOP. By that standard, the best kids are the ones who eat the most junk food and exercise the least, because they will run up the biggest medical bills for obesity and diabetes.
The purpose of an economy is to meet human needs in such a way that life becomes in some respect richer and better in the process. It is not simply to produce a lot of stuff. Stuff is a means, not an end. Yet current modes of economic measurement focus almost entirely on means. For example, an automobile is productive if it produces transportation. But today we look only at the cars produced per hour worked. More cars can mean more traffic and therefore a transportation system that is less productive. The medical system is the same. The aim should be healthy people, not the sale of more medical services and drugs. Now, however, we assess the economic contribution of the medical system on the basis of treatments rather than results. Economists see nothing wrong with this. They see no problem that the medical system is expected to produce 30 to 40 percent of new jobs over the next thirty years. 'We have to spend our money on something,' shrugged a Stanford economist to the New York Times. This is more insanity. Next we will be hearing about 'disease-led recovery'. To stimulate the economy we will have to encourage people to be sick so that the economy can be well."
11:31:12 AM
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Wired: "An internal British Telecom report on a secret trial of an ISP eavesdropping and advertising technology found that the system crashed some unsuspecting users' browsers, and a small percentage of the 18,000 broadband customers under surveillance believed they'd been infected with adware.
From late September to early October 2006, British Telecom secretly partnered with Phorm to let the company monitor and track 18,000 of the BT's customers. Phorm installed boxes on BT's network that redirected web requests through their proxy server."
11:04:43 AM
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Reuters: "An Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites looks 'unavoidable' given the apparent failure of sanctions to deny Tehran technology with bomb-making potential, one of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's deputies said on Friday."
Now that 'pre-emptive attacks' are the dernier cri in 'diplomacy', why wouldn't the UN for a change pre-emptively attack Israel and destroy its nuclear capabilities and reactor at Dimona? Israel has flouted the United Nations' authority in a manner exceeding that of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and has disregarded the will of the United Nations in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
I am joking of course. But sadly enough Mr. Olmert's deputy is not joking.
10:59:40 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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