Saturday, January 31, 2004

Intelligence failure. Posted here Saturday, January 31, 2004 at 9:04:16 PM     We will see massive politics in the way the intelligence community is blamed for the failure in Iraq. But the story is heating up. ********

On Bush Posted here Saturday, January 31, 2004 at 2:46:49 PM     Eliz Drew in the NYReview of books Unlike 2000, this time the voters know that it matters a great deal who is elected president. Almost everything the federal government does, therefore every citizen, is affected. The President has formidable advantages: the constant publicity that comes with occupying the White House; vast amounts of money; the power to affect at least some events; the ability to perform what may be convincing stunts. He may have lucky breaks, such as the capture of bin Laden, before the election. Bush's denigrators to the contrary, he isn't dumb. He is inarticulate, uncurious, and anti-intellectual, to be sure, but also shrewd in limited but important ways: in meetings he is said to go quickly to the main point,[6] and he's a very effective politician. According to polls, much of the public finds him genial and easygoing, which is a political advantage, even if it's a deceptive impression. Like his mother, who also puts on a good show, Bush is tough on those around him and he can be mean. One often hears the fuzzy proposition that many Americans want to like their president and that, with some exceptions, they usually vote for the seemingly more likable candidate. Still, Bush is not at this stage unbeatable: his foreign and economic policies have stirred widespread opposition. According to John Zogby's polling, even after the capture of Saddam Hussein only 45–47 percent of respondents said they would vote to reelect him—not at all a good sign for a supposedly popular president. A great deal will depend on unpredictable events. ********

The nature of al-qa'eda Posted here Saturday, January 31, 2004 at 1:28:15 PM     From The Spectator "British and American foreign policy is itself based on a series of highly improbable conspiracy theories, the biggest of which is that an evil Saudi millionaire genius in a cave in the Hindu Kush controls a secret worldwide network of ‘tens of thousands of terrorists’ ‘in more than 60 countries’ (George Bush). News reports frequently tell us that terrorist organisations, such as those which have attacked Bali or Istanbul, have ‘links’ to al-Qa’eda, but we never learn quite what those ‘links’ are. According to two terrorism experts in California, Adam Dolnik and Kimberly McCloud, this is because they do not exist. ‘In the quest to define the enemy, the US and its allies have helped to blow al-Qa’eda out of proportion,’ they write. They argue that the name ‘al-Qa’eda’ was invented in the West to designate what is, in reality, a highly disparate collection of otherwise independent groups with no central command structure and not even a logo. They claim that some terrorist organisations say they are affiliated to bin Laden simply to gain kudos and name-recognition for their entirely local grievances. " ********

Lear Posted here Saturday, January 31, 2004 at 1:22:19 PM     Lear's rousing summons to Cordelia, regardless of their fallen state. "So we'll live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues / Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too, / Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out; / And take upon's the mystery of things, / As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, / In a wall'd prison, packs and sets of great ones / That ebb and flow by the moon." ********

Early Bush reaction to 911. Posted here Saturday, January 31, 2004 at 11:34:01 AM     Important to look back. These are from Bush a few days after 911. Looking for clues as to how ar emerged from the rubble, here are some hints. Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil. War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing. compare to: Ben Franklin once said: "Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."   ********

Marshall on WMD Posted here Saturday, January 31, 2004 at 9:53:12 AM     This is a good review. Go to the link (title) nto find it all. But let’s review what we know. We know that after 9/11 there were intense battles pitting the Intelligence Community against political appointees in the administration and that those battles were over almost every aspect of the Iraqi threat: nuclear weapons capacity, ties to terrorism, whether Saddam would use his arsenal against the United States, degrees of certainty about the state of Saddam’s chemical and biological programs, everything. To the best of my knowledge there is not one single instance we know of in which any portion of the Intelligence Community pressed for a more ominous view of the threat in the face of skepticism from the political appointees at DOD, the Office of the Vice President, the White House or anywhere else in the administration. Not one. We know of many points of controversy. And, to the best of my knowledge, every last one involved administration politicals pressing for more extreme and ominous interpretations of the Iraqi threat against skeptical members of the Intelligence Community. Every last one. This is hardly even a controversial point. The hawks themselves made the same argument endlessly. They only stopped when the evidence came in and they were shown to have been wrong in almost every particular. An internal review at the CIA conducted by Richard J. Kerr, a retired senior CIA official, has now also concluded that there is no evidence the CIA shaded its estimates to support the administration's case for war. But even if we grant the accuracy of that judgment it really doesn't get at the true question. Why? Because we know that there were numerous cases in which people in the Intelligence Community tried to stop the White House from making various hyperbolic or unsubstantiated claims, precisely because they were not supported by the Intelligence Community's consensus estimates. What we have here is a serious intelligence failure, but one that in itself would almost certainly not have led to war, at least not on the grounds of there being an imminent threat to the United States. Recognizing that it was an insufficient casus belli the White House then hyped it up with all manner of unsubstantiated mumbo-jumbo. And for this the Intelligence Community owes the president an apology? Just as the president did last summer when he forced an apology from George Tenet over the Niger-uranium claims and then tried to put the matter to rest without firing Tenet or asking for any kind of investigation, he now wants to pocket the blame being heaped on the Agency (because it absolves him politically) without having any sort of investigation to get to the heart of what happened. Why? Simple. Because any truly independent investigation of how this all unfolded would expose the administration's systematic exaggeration of what we knew about the threat Iraq posed and, almost certainly, its willful deception of the American people. -- Josh Marshall ********