In yesterday's column I hinted at hoping the wheels might be beginning to come off the bus. And awwway we go.....
Now I know what you're thinking: Not another "Lack of WMD" story. But this one is a little bit different somehow and it's from the New York Times not The Village Idiot or The Huffington Howler. A different language has started to insinuate itself into the media these days. I wouldn't call this a spin exactly. I'd call this all the makings of a tasty scandal. (As if we didn't see this coming...) What with all the Military-Intelligence-is-an-oxymoron jokes bantered about of late, it seems that the folks that work in that field are kinda getting their feelings hurt.
A column earlier this month on this issue drew a torrent of covert communications from indignant spooks who say that administration officials leaned on them to exaggerate the Iraqi threat and deceive the public.
"The American people were manipulated," bluntly declares one person from the Defense Intelligence Agency who says he was privy to all the intelligence there on Iraq. These people are coming forward because they are fiercely proud of the deepest ethic in the intelligence world that such work should be nonpolitical and are disgusted at efforts to turn them into propagandists.
[...]
The outrage among the intelligence professionals is so widespread that they have formed a group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, that wrote to President Bush this month to protest what it called "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions."
A bit more on the term "administration officials" a bit later. First, where did this "political pressure" originate? Hmmm. This is where things get interesting because apparently GW was just a rube - an innocent masthead of a pawn; embroiled unwittingly in the master scheme.
"I've never heard this level of alarm before," said Larry Johnson, who used to work in the C.I.A. and State Department. "It is a misuse and abuse of intelligence. The president was being misled. He was ill served by the folks who are supposed to protect him on this. Whether this was witting or unwitting, I don't know, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt."
I don't know about you, dear readers, but I ain't buyin any of that; I nor a whole host of fine media type folks everywhere. (One can hope!)
When examining the facts so far, what we're seeing erupt here is one of natural human nature. Start telling the intelligence folks that they're all a bunch of fat slovenly oafs who couldn't find their asses with both hands (which the media has been collectively implying of late), you spawn a rebellion of sorts. At this stage we've just entered the finger pointing phase which I, for one, consider a bit tiresome. The next lesson in human nature is: Pin a "scapegoat" tag on someone and that someone will begin singing like a canary on steroids.
I promised I'd mention more about that amorphous "administration officials" entity. Seems that toward the end of this story it had morphed into "Top Pentagon Officials". Strange that. My only wonder at this point is whether this one's gonna get ugly or will it somehow disappear by next Thursday. Stay tuned.
So much for the gossip. Onward and upward. CENTCOM seems to have misplaced one its Iraqi prisoners. Said prisoner was apparently one bad dude too. (Don't know if he was a "card" or not.) To be fair, CENTCOM didn't misplace him - they opened up the front door and let him out. Now it seems he is misplaced. The fact that the military lost this guy isn't tremendously remarkable. After all the military is always losing things like Rumsfeld "misplaces" $2.3 trillion dollars. What is interesting about this turn of events is the blatantly different way that it is being reported in American versus foreign newspapers. The American version of this story sanitizes many key points about local political ramifications arising from the fact that this bad guy is in the wind. If this kind of thing interests you at all try the BBC version here first. Then try ABC's version here. CNN and MSNBC apparently misplaced the story entirely.
| Finally, on a lighter note, one Edoardo Raspelli, food critic, is being sued by McDonalds to the tune of 25 million dollars.
...after he compared its burgers to rubber and its fries to cardboard, in [an] article last year.
Edoardo isn't backing down either and said he had received hundreds of e-mails of support.
You've gotta love this guy. |
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2:57:23 PM 
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Welcome To The Club
