The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and
you are the easiest person to fool. -- Richard Feynman
Feynman almost certainly never met George W. Bush, but he would apparently know what to say to him if he did. Recent articles are making the frightening assertion that the current administration is putting pressure on intelligence agencies to report what the administration wants, rather than what the agencies actually find. From Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay of Knight-Ridder Tribune News,
. . . a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats . . . charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses -- including distorting his links to the al-Qaida terrorist network -- have overstated the amount of international support for attacking Iraq and have downplayed the potential repercussions of a new war in the Middle East.
They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument . . . .
Furthermore,
"Analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A dozen other officials echoed his views in interviews.
No one who was interviewed disagreed.
Too anonymous, you say? Thirteen is too small a statistical sample, even if all of them are saying the same thing? Consider this from Julian Borger of the Guardian:
Officials in the CIA, FBI and energy department are being put under intense pressure to produce reports which back the administration's line . . . . In response, some are complying, some are resisting and some are choosing to remain silent.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence.
Apparently, the CIA is resisting, to a point. According to Robert Scheer in Salon.com,
[A] CIA report released late last week and designed to bolster Bush's case for preemptive invasion instead provided clear evidence that Iraq poses less of a threat to the world than at any other time in the past decade.
So now any clear-thinking and sufficiently informed person can figure out that the Bush administration does not care about the facts, beyond how they can be manipulated to help them achieve what they want.
Which is war. We could try to mind read why (it's an election year distraction, it's for oil, it's for revenge for Bush Sr., it's to help reduce their Viagra expenses . . . ) but in the end it does not matter. What matters is that this a group of people willing to put our sons and daughters in danger based on a foundation of lies.
Oh, how I long for those innocent days when the worst this nation faced was a zipper scandal.
6:18:33 PM 
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