Geoge Bush in denial

[Gimpy]

Hot off the pressses!

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January 29, 2004
TESTING TWO LEADERS
George Bush, in Denial



While Tony Blair was cooperating with a British investigation into his handling of the lead-up to the Iraqi invasion, the Bush White House continued to follow its strategy of spin and evade.

Because Mr. Blair was compelled to take the risk that objective investigators would find that he had acted honorably and honestly, Britain is now able to move on to the next logical step ? finding out why its intelligence was so completely wrong. Americans, however, are still stuck in stage one. President Bush needs to move things forward by starting ? or allowing Congress to start ? an independent investigation that goes beyond the British inquiry and looks into all aspects of the apparent intelligence failures on Iraq.

Mr. Bush, whose aides had been plotting a war against Iraq practically since Inauguration Day, has dodged questions about why the American intelligence about Iraq was just as wrong as Britain's intelligence. Vice President Dick Cheney continues to make outsized claims about Iraq's prewar weapons programs, and the administration's allies continue to grasp at straws.

It was painful yesterday morning to watch John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, trying to drag some positive nuggets from David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector. After Dr. Kay said he had found no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and concluded that none would be found, Mr. Warner pounced on the idea that Dr. Kay said he had accounted for "only" 85 percent of Iraq's military programs. So that, Mr. Warner said triumphantly, leaves 15 percent. Yes, and in a few months it will be 10 percent, and months after that 5 percent, and the answers will almost certainly be the same: Iraq destroyed its weapons and weapons programs long ago under the pressure of the same United Nations inspectors that Mr. Bush and his aides vilified in the months leading up to the war.

American intelligence was wrong in concluding that weapons existed, and that robust programs to develop more were continuing.

Dr. Kay has repeatedly told the administration just that. It has responded by trying to edit the rhetoric. Rather than addressing the alarming failures of American intelligence, Mr. Bush and his aides have gone from talking about weapons to talking about weapons programs, and then, in the State of the Union address, "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

It is time to stop refining the spin and make a serious attempt to find out where and how American intelligence went wrong. The public also needs to know, as authoritatively as possible, whether the administration made ambiguous intelligence seem certain for political reasons or, worse, whether analysts were pressured to exaggerate their intelligence.

It is easy to understand, tactically, why Mr. Bush is reluctant to do that in an election year. No matter how he and his aides try to change the subject to how tyrannical Saddam Hussein was, it was the presence of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq that Mr. Bush gave as his justification for rushing into a war without real international backing.

Dr. Kay said yesterday that he had seen no evidence of politically twisted intelligence reporting before the war. But he put it well when he said that "it's important to acknowledge failure." Only an independent panel can be trusted at this point to find out what went wrong in Iraq and give the public some hope that another big intelligence failure can be prevented in the future.

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[Gimpy]

"Hot off the presses!"

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January 29, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Dump Cheney Now!



WASHINGTON ? The awful part is that George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein were both staring into the same cracked spook- house mirror.

Thanks to David Kay, we now have an amazing image of the president and the dictator, both divorced from reality over weapons, glaring at each other from opposite sides of bizarro, paranoid universes where fiction trumped fact.

It would be like a wacky Peter Sellers satire if so many Iraqis and Americans hadn't died in Iraq.

These two would-be world-class tough guys were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to show that they couldn't be pushed around. Their trusted underlings misled them with fanciful information on advanced Iraqi weapons programs that they credulously believed because it fit what they wanted to hear.
Saddam was swept away writing his romance novels, while President Bush was swept away with the romance of rewriting the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war to finish off the thug who tried to kill his dad.

The two men both had copies of "Crime and Punishment" ? Condi Rice gave Mr. Bush the novel on his trip to Russia in 2002, and Saddam had Dostoyevsky down in the spider hole ? but neither absorbed its lesson: that you can't put yourself above rules just because you think you're superior.

When Dr. Kay spoke these words on W.M.D. ? "It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment, and that is most disturbing" ? both America and Iraq learned that when you try too hard to control the picture of reality, you risk losing your grasp of it.

In interviews, Dr. Kay defended the war with Iraq, saying that the U.S. "has often entered the right war for the wrong reason." He also told Congress "there's no evidence that I can think of, that I know of" that Saddam collaborated with Al Qaeda.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, the ex-C.I.A. weapons sleuth used a metaphor that was perhaps inspired by Martha Stewart, comparing the C.I.A. with a lousy stockbroker.

"If I were your broker," he told Senator Jack Reed, "and you were investing on my advice . . . and at the end of the day, I said Enron was the greatest company in the world, and you had lost a substantial amount of money on it because it turned out differently, you would think I had abused you."

Certainly the C.I.A. has a lot to answer for. For a bargain price of $30 billion a year, our intelligence aces have been spectacularly off. They failed to warn us about 9/11 and missed the shame spiral of a deranged Saddam, hoodwinked by his top scientists.
They were probably relying too much on the Arabian Nights tales of Ahmad Chalabi, eager to spread the word of Saddam's imaginary nuclear-tipped weapons juggernaut because it suited his own ambitions ? and that of his Pentagon pals.

But while he is skittering away from his claims about Iraqi weapons, President Bush is not racing toward accountability. It's an election year.

The Times's David Sanger wrote about an administration debate "over whether Mr. Bush should soon call for some kind of reform of the intelligence-gathering process. But the officials said Mr. Bush's aides were searching for a formula that would allow them to acknowledge intelligence-gathering problems without blaming" the C.I.A. or its chief.

The president wants to act as though he has a problem but not a scandal, which he can fix without rolling heads ? of those who made honest mistakes or dishonest ones by rigging the intelligence.

Dick Cheney, who declared that Saddam had nuclear capability and who visited C.I.A. headquarters in the summer of 2002 to make sure the raw intelligence was properly interpreted, is sticking to his deluded guns. (And still trash-talking those lame trailers.)

The vice president pushed to slough off the allies and the U.N. and go to war partly because he thought that slapping a weakened bully like Saddam would scare other dictators. He must have reckoned there would be no day of reckoning on weapons once Saddam was gone.

So it had to be some new definition of chutzpah on Tuesday, when Mr. Cheney, exuding more infallibility than the pope, presented him with a crystal dove.

Cheney needs to go.

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[HARDCORE]

GIMPY -

Interesting read....

VERITAS

[reconeil]

ditto-ditto that: "Interesting reading".

Still, how our Intelligence works (or not) during wartime, must be infinitely more: "Interesting reading" to our many enemies,...since knowing just how far they can: "Push The Envelope" without any worry and/or how well they can waltz-us-around, without even lifting a cannister, uraniun byproduct, vile or whatever.

Just some thoughts, my Friend.

Neil

[Gimpy]

Do you suppose Neil is saying that folks who write (or post on discussion forums) articles like ones' above are in some way "aiding & abetting" our "enemies????

Naw....surely not! From one who so avidly espouses "freedom" and outspoken "commentary"..........I surely hope not?? :cd:

[HARDCORE]

GIMPY -

"Friend Recon is A-1!" A patriot and a man of his own mind - good people, just like you and most others upon this site!

Sometimes, many of us say things that are not totally understood, even though our meaning (mine included) is genuinely above board! -VERITAS-

Friend Hardcore