This weekend, a number of "Where are the WMD's", and "Misuse of intelligence" stories hit the wires, capping off a week of related stories. This one is typical: (excerpts)
The Bush administration pushed for war against Iraq last fall because of weapons of mass destruction despite a secret Pentagon report it did not have enough "reliable information" Iraq was amassing chemical weapons, a defense official said on Friday.
... a U.S. defense official confirmed a sentence in the report that said the DIA did not have enough "reliable information" that Iraq had chemical weapons.
"It (the report) talks about the fact that at the time in September 2002 we could not specifically pin down individual facilities operating as part of the weapons of mass destruction programs, specifically the chemical warfare portion,"
Republican Sen. John Warner urged Americans to trust the administration's claims. "I make the appeal to the American people to continue to repose trust in this administration as we go forward (in the search)."
ADDENDUM: Just for fun, we entered "WMD" into Yahoo's search-for-stories, and came up with this:
The Washington Post has a story that recaps the recent Democratic-legislators-bugging-out-of-Texas story, with emphasis on how Representative Laney's plane was tracked. It's detailed, and reports multiple instances where Federal law enforcement was called in to track down the Democrats. However, this line does not belong in the story:
Both parties, in Texas and other states, regularly try to redraw congressional boundaries to concentrate or dilute blocs of voters to favor their own candidates.
Nope. They don't regularly try to redraw boundries. If anything, they "regularly" (i.e. every 10 years) redraw boundries according to custom.
Normally we stay away from personal stories when processing the news, but in the case of the New York Times affair, we find ourselves curious about what makes Jason Blair tick. Was he simply a con-man, or is the story more complicated? What, for example, was Blair's reaction to the news that Raines and Boyd resigned? According to CBS Channel 2 New York, it's this:
Shortly after the high-level resignations at the Times were announced, CBS 2's Andrew Kirtzman snared an exclusive interview with Blair, who commented on the latest developments.
"I'm truly sorry for my actions and what they have done," said Blair. "I feel like, you know, I was in a cycle of self-destruction, but I never intend, and I never intended to hurt anyone else. And the pain that I have caused my colleagues, I'm sorry. The pain for my family and friends and anybody else."
Blair called the affair a "complicated human tragedy," and when asked by Kirtzman to define that phrase said, "It has to do with my own human demons, my own weaknesses, and it ranges from, you know, my struggles with substance abuse, to my own struggles with mental illness."
Asked about his future plans, Blair says he's "thought about doing some volunteer work with people who have mental illness. I've thought about doing volunteer work related to substance abuse."
What kind of mental illness leads a person to engage in deception of colleagues and friends? We will be very interested to learn more as this story develops.
In a sfgate story by Tim Goodman about NBC's plan to go ahead with a "Saving Jessica Lynch" television movie, we read:
If [NBC] airs the movie it no doubt thought it was getting -- young female soldier's harrowing journey from naive soldier to POW, battered and bloody but eventually saved in a daring, morale-boosting nighttime raid -- it may find out that that movie was fiction.
Not a crime, of course. But what if these allegations are true -- even partly true? Wouldn't NBC have an even better story? Talk about your "Wag the Dog" scenario. A stage-managed rescue? Brilliant.
Well, no. The American public has shown little interest in those stories. It wants a feel-good tearjerker, not a feel-used ethics inquiry. And they are unlikely to believe the combination of Iraqis telling journalists as opposed to the U.S. military's version.
At least for the moment, it can be obtained here (MP3 file, 10 meg). The first half is Franken's speech; the Al & Bill & Molly Ivins panel discussion starts at minute 20.
Via Riba Rambles (here and here), we went and read a Molly Ivins column from 30 January 2003 about media consolidation and the (then) upcoming FCC vote. It contained this startling item:
Edward Monks, a lawyer in Eugene, Ore., did a report for the newspaper there last year on the prevalence of right-wing hosts on radio talk shows. "The spectrum of opinion on national political commercial talk radio shows ranges from extreme right wing to very extreme right wing -- there is virtually nothing else." Monks notes the irony that many of these right-wing hosts spend much of their time complaining about "the liberal media."
On the two Eugene talk stations, Monks found: "There are 80 hours per week, more than 4,000 hours per year, programmed for Republican and conservative talk shows, without a single second programmed for a Democratic or liberal perspective. ... Political opinions expressed on talk radio are approaching the level of uniformity that would normally be achieved only in a totalitarian society. There is nothing fair, balanced or democratic about it."
In a related vein, Riba Rambles makes the observation that:
"... the notion that there are two sides to every story can be abused to give credence to false information. This is how many Holocaust deniers try to gain attention -- by trying to paint their views as just another side of something that shouldn't be in dispute."
We are reluctant to agree with that (Holocaust and Hitler is normally considered too extreme a parallel), but in light of the most recent lies and outright fabrications (noted by Paul Krugman today), have to admit that she is correct.
This morning on his radio show, Bill O'Reilly discussed the dust-up over the weekend between himself and Franken. (It was big enough to get covered in USA Today.) Most of it was the usual bad-mouthing of "extreme" liberals that want to impose socialism, are making money "on the backs" of people like O'Reilly and Limbaugh, are "crass and classless", and so on. But there were two comments that we thought were of interest. They are:
O'Reilly talking about why Franken won't be on any "Fox property" from now on. (8 seconds, 72k .wav file) audio here
O'Reilly discussing what he'd like to do to Franken. (75 sec, 586k .wav file) audio here
THe first clip is amusing. The second one is not.
NOTE TO BILL: It's Wilshire Boulevard, not Wilshire Avenue.
Hearing him this morning, we are now convinced that our placement of O'Reilly "at the bottom of the barrel" in the Bush Regime playing cards was a correct decision (i.e. lowest ranking cards).
GEORGE WILL: There was a famously disagreeable Frenchman, de Gaulle, who said "Nations do not have permanent friends or permanent enemies. They have permanent interests."
FAREED ZAKARIA: No, that was Palmerston. (laughter) An agreeable Englishman.
GEORGE WILL: France can be useful to us. Germany can be useful to us. But at the end of the day, by the way, neither France nor Germany is in the top ten of important nations in the world any longer. That's what we have to get over.
MICHELLE MARTIN - spoke about Bush being a moralist
FAREED ZAKARIA: I also take issue with the point you're making George. There's a huge gap between number one and everybody else in the world. But look, Germany is the second or third richest country in the world. The third richest country in the world.
NOTES:
The "permanent interests" statement was made by Benjamin Disraeli. Both Will and Zakaria were wrong. But Zakaria was closer, in that he identified a 19th century British Prime Minister.
As to France and Germany not being in the top ten of important nations, we suggest Will take a look at this table (source CIA World Factbook - except for Russia military):
We thought the roundtable on Meet the Press today was more interesting than ususal. It consisted of William Safire, Robert Novak, Al Hunt, and David "the dean" Broder. We consider Safire and Novak totally unreliable, Hunt reasonable, and that Broder has yet to recognize the insanity of Bush's fiscal and foreign policy. But Broder may be waking up to the facts. Here, are some excerpts of interest: (emphasis added)
MR. DAVID BRODER: What's going on is that the CIA, which is professional, realizes now that its reputation is on the line for reasons that it is not able to control. Whatever the quality of the intelligence, it's pretty clear now that the interpretation that was given to the public by the Bush administration was at the far edge of what was plausible in terms of the intelligence information that came to the White House and to the State Department and to the Pentagon. Tenet is in an difficult position. He cannot repudiate the president that he serves, but he also has to try to protect the reputation of his own agency, which in my view has been misused by this administration.
MR. RUSSERT: Misused? Politicized?
MR. BRODER: I think so. MR. HUNT: Well, there's a lot at stake here, Tim, and I'm not sure they aren't going to find weapons. ... if we don't find them, if we don't find sufficient numbers to justify the clear and present danger that was depicted by the president and other top officials, then I think it's a tremendous blow to American credibility. MR. NOVAK: Oh, several of the people who are hard-liners in the administration, when the war was still going on inside Iraq, said it was absolutely essential, that we were going to be hugely embarrassed, if they didn't find weapons of mass destruction. So this is a tremendous problem for the Iraqi hawks. You know, however, after the attack on Afghanistan, I wrote a column for the next day, the next Monday, and I talked to a lot of people in the administration who wanted to say, "The next step is Iraq. We have to hit Iraq." Nobody mentioned weapons of mass destruction. They mentioned the need for a regime change, the brutality, the security of Israel, the general posture of the Middle East.
MR. SAFIRE: ... the three bases for going in [to Iraq are]: the criminal behavior and the destruction of human rights by an evil leader; the ties to terrorism, which we haven't talked about, but I still think we'll see them; and the weapons of mass destruction. ... We've seen two mobile biological germ warfare labs that have been found. And what you're going to see is every time we find something, everybody's going to jump on it and say, "Well, we manufactured it," or, "It doesn't really do that thing," or, "It has dual use." And there'll be an attempt by the people who didn't think we should go into this war in the first place to derogate it. MR. RUSSERT: Well, on January 24th, the president's State of the Union message, he said that "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently bought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," and that now has been proven not to be accurate, that the documents were forged. How does that find its way into a presidential speech?
MR. SAFIRE: That was stupid, and somebody goofed. But that doesn't derogate the whole thing.
MR. RUSSERT: Bob Novak, Albert Hunt, the president said in Poland yesterday that we have found weapons of mass destruction.
MR. NOVAK: Well, he's talking about those two chemical-biological warfare things. I don't think that really - I don't think that really makes the case. He obviously feels a credibility problem here. ... Now, obviously [Saddam] did not have weapons of mass destruction ready for use or he would have used them. Nobody ever thought he had nuclear arms, but he didn't have chemical and biological warfare. That's a real problem for this country, in my opinion. (Videotape, May 28, 2003): MR. CLINTON: When practical people find themselves in a hole, they stop digging. When ideological people find themselves in a hole, they ask for a bigger shovel. The design and scope of the 2003 tax cut is the bigger shovel. And the accounting gimmicks with which it was passed to look like $350 billion would have made the accountant for Enron blush. It is, in fact, bigger than originally proposed. Do you really think all this stuff's just going to go away in two or three years? (End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Broder.
MR. BRODER: Well, he's right about that, and the administration would confirm that. They don't want to let these tax cuts phase out. They will seek very quickly to make them permanent so the bill will go up and the deficit will go up
U.S. News has a good (and moderately long) story about how Powell's U.N. speech came to be. We excerpt four sections of interest:
Not all the secret intelligence about Saddam Hussein's misdeeds, they found, stood up to close scrutiny. At one point during the rehearsal, Powell tossed several pages in the air. "I'm not reading this," he declared. "This is bulls- - -."
and
Vice President Cheney's office played a major role in the secret debates and pressed for the toughest critique of Saddam's regime, administration officials say. The first draft of Powell's speech was written by Cheney's staff and the National Security Council. Days before the team first gathered at the CIA, a group of officials assembled in the White House Situation Room to hear Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, lay out an indictment of the Iraqi regime--"a Chinese menu" of charges, one participant recalls, that Powell might use in his U.N. speech. Not everyone in the administration was impressed, however. "It was over the top and ran the gamut from al Qaeda to human rights to weapons of mass destruction," says a senior official. "They were unsubstantiated assertions, in my view."
and get this
The team ... tried to follow a 45-page White House script, taken from Libby's earlier presentation. ...
One example, included in the script, focused on intelligence indicating that an Iraqi official had approved the acquisition of sensitive software from an Australian company. The concern was that the software would allow the regime to understand the topography of the United States. That knowledge, coupled with unmanned aerial vehicles, might one day enable Iraq to attack America with biological or chemical weapons. That was the allegation. Tenet had briefed Cheney and others. Cheney, says a senior official, embraced the intelligence.
The White House instructed Powell to include the charge in his presentation. When the Powell team at the CIA examined the matter, however, it became clear that the information was not ironclad. CIA analysts, it turns out, couldn't determine after further review whether the software had, in fact, been delivered to Iraq or whether the Iraqis intended to use it for nefarious purposes. One senior official, briefed on the allegation, says the software wasn't sophisticated enough to pose a threat to the United States. Powell omitted the allegation from his U.N. speech.
Yeah, like you need to know the topography to attack New York or Washington D.C. with a UAV launched from a ship in the Atlantic (which is about the only way their limited-range drones could be used: in tandem with the mighty Iraqi navy).
Finally, this pretty much sums it up:
Veteran intelligence officers were dismayed. "The policy decisions weren't matching the reports we were reading every day," says an intelligence official.
What else has Lewis "Scooter" Libby been involved with? Here is a reminder of how many PNAC-ites are in the White House (including "Scooter"):
This most recent news validates our ranking of the players. Cheney clearly is the Ace of Spades. (Bush gets ace ranking because he does hold the office of president, and you can't ignore that.)
