God, hes left as on aur oun.
This dog, on the other hand, will hunt.
Forget Wilkinson; that’s so yesterday. Gregory Thielmann is the real deal. The former director of the State Department’s bureau of intelligence, he had access to the raw materials that the administration used to build its case for war on Iraq. His conclusion?
“I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq.”
He conceded that part of the problem lay with US intelligence, but added: “Most of it lies with the way senior officials misused the information they were provided.”
Demosthenes digs into Thielmann’s Rumsfeld Reprise? report and finds “faith-based intelligence” to have always been a tool of the Bush administration and its constituents—long before 9/11. From Thielmann’s report:
In recent weeks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has come under fire for his part in the Bush administration’s misuse of U.S. intelligence to justify the US invasion of Iraq. But Rumsfeld’s tendency to hype selective portions of intelligence that support his policy goals was already familiar to intelligence professionals. They remember his chairmanship of a 1998 congressionally chartered commission charged with evaluating the nature and magnitude of the ballistic missile threat to the United States. As with Iraq, Rumsfeld’s work on ballistic missiles often ignored the carefully considered views of such professionals in favor of highly unlikely worst-case scenarios that posited an imminent threat to the United States and prompted a military, rather than diplomatic, response. Just as is likely to be the case with Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD), time has proven Rumsfeld’s predictions dead wrong.
—Bolding courtesy Demosthenes. Go, read how and why. And then, if your outrage has merely been whetted, consider these devasting blows by way of Josh Marshall. First, about how the yellow cake got into the State of the Union in the first place:
It was in the speech for at least ten days prior to its delivery. And the appropriate people from all the key national security agencies and departments signed off on it.
Bartlett’s drawn the line pretty clearly, leaving only two real possibilities. Either the speech was intentionally deceptive or folks at the State Department and the CIA were guilty of some mixture of gross negligence and incompetence.
Second, what Secretary Rumsfeld has to say about the whole yellow cake flap:
Rumsfeld, in a terse exchange with Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., said he learned only “within recent days” that the Africa claims were based on faulty evidence. UN officials determined the documents were forgeries before the war.
And third, there’s Ari Fleischer, caught in an out-and-out lie:
Fleischer is lying—there’s no other way to describe it—about what Wilson’s report said to make it seem less significant than it was. (If Fleischer had said Wilson’s reasoning was flawed or his investigation incomplete, then you could say he was spinning or distorting. But saying he said something completely different from what he said means he’s lying.)
We were lied to—whether through Straussian mendacity or faith-based incompetence, it doesn’t matter; we were lied to, and we went to war because of those lies. Thousands of people died. People—“theirs” and “ours”—continue to die every day.
We have committed a horrible crime, and no amount of reeking cordite wafting from inside the Beltway will set it right.
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Kip, Kip, Kip....why are you reliving ancient history? Really. Move on.
("Faith-based intelligence"....giggle....)