More About Uranium Claim
The New York Times editorial Uranium Quicksand states the paper’s opinion regarding the administration’s blunder in saying that the claim is accurate because of British intelligence:
The explanation conveniently glosses over the fact that long before Mr. Bush delivered the speech on Jan. 28, American intelligence officials had concluded that the British charge was probably unreliable.
The British-made-us-do-it defense might be more compelling if London had a better track record when it came to assessing Iraq's unconventional weapons programs. In fact, parts of the British dossier on Iraq's arms that was published with great fanfare in February were lifted verbatim from unsubstantiated Internet sources.
The decision to attribute it to British intelligence was clearly a desperate effort to get around the objections that had been raised by the C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies. By clinging to that weak justification, the White House is only compounding its mistake. The honorable response at this point would be to concede the error and apologize to the American people.
The Guardian online newspaper printed an informative article regarding the lack of credibility of British intelligence; authored by Richard Norton-Taylor, it is titled Tell us the truth about the dossier .
One of my favorite sections from that article is printed below:
[T]here...had to be a pretext [to this war]. Thus the government for months applied pressure on the intelligence agencies to come up with a dossier on Iraq's banned weapons .
As Sir John Stanley, former Conservative minister and member of the Commons foreign affairs committee, has said, never before has Britain gone to war "specifically on the strength of intelligence assessments". The intelligence and security services were horrified by the prospect but appear to have persuaded themselves they had no choice.
Intelligence, as former chairmen of Whitehall's joint intelligence committee (JIC) have pointed out, is not evidence. Raw intelligence is often no more than assertions made by informants. These are turned into "assessments" by officials working for the JIC. They are based on judgments, subjective at the best of times, even more so when you have No 10 breathing down your neck.
There is no audit trail for this kind of thing and it is hard to see how even the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, which meets in private (and whose forthcoming report on the saga both the government and the intelligence community set great store by) will be able to discover how much pressure the government put on the JIC to sex up the dossier, and how much the spooks did it themselves.
Meanwhile, LiberalOasis and Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times report that the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity are requesting that Bush fire Cheney for his role in cooking evidence to justify a war with Iraq. Kristof feels it should be done because of the level of dishonesty involved. Moreover, as Kristof notes, "Intelligence isn't just being dumbed down, but is also being manipulated - and it's continuing."
From Kristof's article, 16 Words, and Counting:
What troubles me is not that single episode, but the broader pattern of dishonesty and delusion that helped get us into the Iraq mess - and that created the false expectations undermining our occupation today. Some in the administration are trying to make George Tenet the scapegoat for the affair. But Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, issued an open letter to President Bush yesterday reflecting the view of many in the intel community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The open letter called for Mr. Cheney's resignation.
Bush’s Standing
Remember yesterday I mentioned that it is hard to predict how this Uranium fiasco or the missing WMD will affect Bush. Scott Rosenberg’s posting today has an excellent opinion about why these issues aren’t sparking more of a furor, especially amongst Congress:
There isn't much more to say about the flap over President Bush's State of the Union use of fraudulent evidence regarding Iraq's nuclear program. We know that an administration desperate to make a case for war seized upon material that it had been repeatedly warned was suspect or (as is actually the case) outright forged and presented it to the American public. That impeachment hearings aren't already being held is just another sign of the deep dysfunctionality of our political system -- in which partisan operatives in Congress can drum up an impeachment vote when a president lies about his sex life, but when a president lies about the gravest matters of war and peace, it's not even considered worth an investigation.
Rosenberg also points out an interesting pattern arising in Bush’s war on terror:
What is interesting here is that this story is playing out at precisely the same time the nation may be slowly coming to the belated realization that things really aren't going so well in the president's open-ended, no-clearly-defined-goals "war on terrorism." Our principal foe, Osama bin Laden, remains on the loose, and his organization continues to operate in a region sandwiched between one nation that we conquered and one that is nominally our ally. His principal ally, Mullah Omar, is also on the loose. The leader of the other nation we've recently invaded, Saddam Hussein, is also on the loose. Is there a pattern here? Why can't we find these guys?
The Spurious Iraq Connection to 9/11
Yesterday, TomPaine.com printed an exceptional piece by Jim Lobe titled Faulty Connection. Lobe suggested that "the other causus bellum on which the administration based its war -- the alleged link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein -- also gets the scrutiny it deserves."
While the link was hyped less by administration officials than by right-wing idealogues and the conservative press, an organized campaign was nonetheless launched to persuade the American public that such a connection was real -- and represented a mortal threat.
Lobe reports the conversation that Tim Russert, the host of Meet The Press, had with Gen. Wesley Clark, in which Clark revealed that he had pressure from the White House after 9/11 occurred to suggest in his interview with CNN that this tragedy was connected to Saddam Hussein.
Lobe writes that "Clark has never said who called him, but we can identify others who were asserting the same connection both on television and in print at the same time." He then goes on to name these others as Richard Perle; Ex-CIA chief James Woolsey, Jr.; and William Kristol of The Weekly Standard and chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
More damning might be the content in Lobe’s section titled "Forcing the Connection," in which he describes how Rumsfield and Wolfowitz were trying to push the connection, beginning at Camp David merely four days after 9/11.
CBS News' David Martin reported last September that ''[B]arely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, the secretary of defense was telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks," FAIR pointed out recently. Martin attributed his account to contemporaneous notes by a Pentagon aide that quote Rumsfeld as asking for the "best info fast" to "judge whether good enough to hit SH at the same time, not only UBL [for Saddam Hussein and Usama bin Laden]." The notes then go on to quote Rumsfeld as urging that the administration's response "go massive... sweep it all up, things related and not."
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