Kwiatkowski: Impeach Early and Often!

In a new article on Afterdowningstreet.org former Pentagon Offical Lt. Col Karen Kwaitkowski, whose been extremely outspoken on the subject of the Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans where the Iraq War was ginnied up, makes a series of statements that perhaps many of us would enjoy taking to heart.

There is no doubt in my mind that Feith, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, as well as Abe Shulsky should have been (or in the case of Abe Shulsky, still in the Pentagon – be) formally impeached for incompetence, neglect of and disregard for national security, and reckless malfeasance in the conduct of their duties. Impeachment and prosecution for criminal misconduct while holding public office is certainly appropriate in these cases.

Kwiatkowski retired from the military in protest of the Iraq War as hostilities initiated. While there she worked in close proximity to those within the OSP and was able to observe how they functioned up close and personally. Especially Douglas Feith.

SWANSON: Did the operations led by Doug Feith gather intelligence?

KWIATKOWSKI: When I spoke to the DoD IG over a year ago (regarding the investigation that recently produced a report pronouncing the Feith operations as inappropriate), I tried to explain to the IG that what the Feith group and the Office of Special Plans was doing was information manipulation, not the production of what we legitimately call "intelligence." Intelligence is vetted, contextualized, and conservative. What Feith's OSP wanted, needed and produced was inflammatory bits of data, cherry-picked statements, and isolated observations by often shady characters, presented as if they were vetted, contextualized and conservative intelligence. Unlike intelligence, this effort was designed not to inform decision makers, but to shape a national conversation such that decisions already made by the administration (to topple Saddam and get bases in Iraq) could be pursued without political backlash. That's what Doug Feith and his folks did for Bush and Cheney in the Pentagon.

On the issue of whether Feith's stove-piping of unvetted intellegence data was criminal.... you betcha.

Kwiatkowski: A good prosecutor could probably make the case that these guys – Feith, Shulsky, Cheney, etc, broke several other laws. Speaking to the press on issues of national security and top levels of intelligence out of school or without specific authorization from the classifying authority is illegal. For example, if I as a Lt Col in the Air Force, or any member of the military or civil service had given either the press or any Congressmen or women any information that I described as Top Secret or Secret level intelligence, as did the OSP and OSP connected political appointees in 2002 and early 2003, we would have been charged with a crime, and successfully prosecuted. In that prosecution, our intent would have come into play, and this is critical as well. Why exactly were Feith and company lying, and conspiring to mislead Congress?

As many of us know the core of what Karen is describing here are the claims that Iraq still had an agressive program to develop and deploy chemical weapons according to one lone ex-pat Iraqi codenamed "Curveball". This information was passed to the CIA and found it's way into speaches by Colin Powell and President Bush prior to the war - however, neither Powell or DCI George Tenet were never informed that Don Rumsfeld's DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) had gone to Germany to check on Curveball's credibility and found that he had none.

This is about the claims from Ibn Sheik al-libi, a Ghost Detainee who after being tortured and also supported the claims that Iraq had links to Al-Qaeda - yet again the DIA considered him a liar - but CIA and the State Dept were never informed.

Instead these claims, along with the forged Niger documents about yellow-cake uranium and alimium tubes for centerfuges (two claims that were heavily critized by the State and Energy Depts) were paraded out as absolute proof of Saddam's mendacity.

Even to this very day - Feith continues to claim that Saddam was linked to Al-Qaeda. No wonder Gen Tommy Franks has called Feith "the dumbest fucking guy on the planet".

In each case Doug Feith and the DIA stand at the center of the maelstrom.

Considering the wealth of first hand information that Kwiatkowski possesses regarding exactly how this War began you would think that she'd be a very strong candidate to speak to congress on the Senate's Phase II Intelligence investigation. You'd think....

SWANSON: Did you expect to be called to testify?

KWIATKOWSKI: I was not called for the Part II Senate Intelligence Subcommittee investigation, on the politicization of the Iraq intelligence. I had been called for a few hours with the staff of the committee for the Part I investigation in 2004, and yet what I have observed and written about mostly was indeed the politicization. So I don't expect to be called ever again. The only Congressmen I hear from are those who already understand it isn't about Republicans and Democrats, but rather the Constitution and what is right and wrong.

Hmm, I guess not. Maybe that might have something to do with Sen Roberts being too busy swinging from Cheney's Dick.

Frighteningly we now see some of the same intellgence skewing efforts we saw against Iraq being directed against Iran.

SWANSON: Reps. Kucinich and Conyers have suggested they would impeach Bush if he attacks Iran. Good idea? What about impeaching first to prevent it?

KWIATKOWSKI: Great idea. Impeach early and often. That's my advice. It can be done by the House so easily, for so little. Most senior members of the administration involved in our disastrous foreign policy and our incredibly stupid approach to fighting terrorism could be easily impeached for incompetence, wrongdoing, dishonesty, failure to honor the spirit and letter of the constitution and other laws, even in my view, traitorous acts, placing the interests of foreign countries above those of the United States. Some of these impeached officials would be easily removed from office by the Senate, and we would regain our honor as a nation by publicly recognizing their misbehavior.

Please note that Kwiatkowski isn't neccesarily recommending that we Impeach George Bush, although I suspect she supports that idea. She like John Dean is merely pointing out the truism that various administration officials can be impeached and removed by Congress.

Of those still in office, the most likely current candidate to be first up on the chopping block is Albert Gonzales for most recently thumbing his nose at Congressional Subpeonas and forcing out several U.S. Attorney's for political reasons.

Gonzales is they key-stone to the Bush Administration. His advice to ignore Geneva regarding terrorist detainees was tantamount to advising his client (the President) on how to get away with War Crimes!

It's only through his office that an Independant Counsel to investigate the many high crimes and misdemeanors of George W. Bush can be established and succesfully put forth the case to the American People and the Congress. With him in place, Bush is perfectly protected. Without him - the entire ball games shifts into a new court.

Kwiatkowski is absolutely correct - we should Impeach Gonzales, then Cheney, then Bush one by one - Early, Often and hopefully soon.

Vyan

The Republican War on Fact!

Even before Chris Wallace had his ass handed to him by President Clinton, and even before the airing of the ABC/Disney Smear-umentary "Path to 9-11", Ann Coulter got smacked down by guest Host Kirsten Powers on Hannity and Colmes as she tried to claim...

"As for catching Osama, it’s irrelevant. Things are going swimmingly in Afghanistan.”

Further as I previously posted

In her August 23 column -- "What Part of the War on Terrorism Do They Support" -- Coulter repeated the false claims that Democrats "oppose the National Security Agency listening to people who are calling specific phone numbers found on al-Qaida cell phones and computers" and "oppose the Patriot Act." Introducing Coulter on Your World, Buttner stated: "You do a great job in your editorial of ... listing it all out, and when you do, it's very interesting to see -- they're really good at saying what they're against, aren't they?" Buttner later appeared to concur with Coulter's false assertion that Democrats are "against every part of the war on terror," saying: "You've said it well. The problem is that the administration doesn't always go out there and sell this. It doesn't always go out there and say, 'What are the Democrats for in this war on terror?' " Buttner then asked Coulter: "Do you think the getting out there and selling themselves and fighting against the Democrats -- that finally we're going to get the Republicans out there to fight?"

President Clinton called it a "Disinformation Campaign" - and he was precisely correct. Republicans are desperate to hang their hat on the meme that Democrats are "Weak on Terror?", but during the critical time prior to 9-11 where were they?

As Washington Monthly and William Rivers Pitt pointed out in August - they were standing in the way on nearly every initiative that then-President Clinton attempted to implement against growing Global Terrorism.

-- Republicans blocked 1995 bill provisions to allow swifter deportations and court viewing of sensitive evidence
-- Republican controlled congress blocked roving wire taps and new powers to monitor money laundering; Phil Gramm and others lead the effort
-- John Ashcroft and others rejected initiatives to tighten controls on encryption software (encryption used by 1993 bombers and 2001 terrorists)
-- Clinton created the FBI Counter terrorism Center and increased the counterterrorism budget from $78 million to $609 million in four years
-- Clinton signed a National Security Directive in 1998 to destroy al-Quada and seize or assassinate Bin Laden. Multiple assassination attempts were made
-- Clinton's CIA al-Quada unit thwarted bombing attempts in Los Angeles, New York, the UN, and the Israeli embassy in Washington DC. They also neutralized dozens of al-Queda cells overseas -- all of this without any fanfare, then or post 9/11.
-- Clinton was labeled by the Right's Robert Oakely as having an "obsession with Osama". Yet now Republicans attempt to claim Clinton, not Bush Jr, was soft on terrorism and ultimately responsible for 9/11

They find it so easy to declare that America doesn't need to abide by the Geneva Conventions, even though it doesn't produce accurate information, makes it far more dangerous for our troops - and inspires the enemy to keep fighting rather than surrender, making the war more difficult to win. They find it so easy to ignore the courts when it comes to protecting the privacy of Americans -- "All Wiretaps require a court order" (except when they don't feel like asking for one).

Opposing these methods is NOT opposing victory in the War on Terror. This far more of a War of ideologies - than of military might - of competiting theories about the nature and direction of civilization. What Democrats need to do is highlight that difference rather than cower from it. We represent a higher vision of how to fight this war. Using Fact, Logic and doing so within the confines of the Law, the Constitution and our Conscience.

Just as he did prior to the Iraq War, President Bush continues to ignore and dismiss what his own Intelligence Agencies tell him. According to the New York Times, the latest National Intelligence Estimate (which collects the view of 16 different agencies) stated:

he American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks. The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

But According to Bush...

You know, I’ve heard this theory about everything was just fine until we arrived, and kind of “we’re going to stir up the hornet’s nest” theory. It just doesn’t hold water, as far as I’m concerned. The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

Even though the latest Senate Intelligence Report (PDF) clearly stated that Saddam had tried to Capture Zarqawi - and there was no connection between him and Al Qaeda - Bush Officials continue to claim the exact opposite.

And Bush himself tries to duck and cover by claim he never said there was an "operational relationship" between Saddam and Zarqawi - except that he did.

The Truth is: Saddam Hussein did not attack us. He was not armed with WMD's, didn't have programs in place to create either WMD's or Nuclear weapons - and certain was not about to hand any of these weapons over to terrorists.

But they simply refuse to believe the truth. They can not accept that torture doesn't work, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, that our occupation of that nation is sending more young muslim men into the open arms of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas then ever before.

The Truth: WE. ARE. LOSING. THIS. WAR.

Iraq is falling apart. Afghanistan is going to hell and a hand granade.

Do Democrats have a strategy to win? Well, yeah - the first thing to do is for America to Stop LYING TO itself.

We fucked up. Big time. Bush shouldn't have been given the authority to invade Iraq in the first place. They should have let the UN Inspectors finish their job first. (Once it was made clear that Saddam was already disarmed, he might have become the one with the insurgency problem - not us) They should have used more troops to maintain the peace after the initial attack was over. They shouldn't have let Katie O'Biern's husband hire inexperienced political partisans to oversee (and consquently fuck up) the Iraq Reconstruction Effort, not to mention let $8.8 Billion disappear into the thin air between their ears.

They should have caught or killed Osama Bin Laden at Tora Bora.

Coulda. Shoulda. Woulda. Ok, What do we do now?

Again as President Clinton has recently stated, Iraq is in a state much like that of Bosnia and Kosovo. Three distinct ethnic groups are commiting violence against each other, vying for control of the country and it's natural resources. The Loyaties of the Iraqi Army are questionable - but Clinton, with the support of both Russia and Europe was able to bring together a consensus that ended the violence in Bosnia, stopped the ethnic cleansing and brought Slobodon Milosevic to justice.

The same came be done in Iraq, if we reach out and seek help from our allies while insisting that the Iraq People take thier country back from those who would rip it apart. They can't expect us to take the bullet for them forever.

Unfortunately none of that is going to happen under this Administration. But with a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President - it just might.

And that's what the Neo-Cons are truly afraid of. They have to maintain this Deliberate Disinformation Campaign, because that's the only way they'll be able to hold on to power. They don't mind losing to Al-Qaeda, or losing to the insurgents in Iraq. It doesn't matter because they can simply spin another set of lies to make it seem like it's someone elses (Clinton's) fault. The way to really get under their skin is to make sure they lose - big time - in November. And then again in '08. It's the only way to bring a little factiness back into our Government.

Win the War at the Ballot Box, then we can finally end the War on Common Sense and Fact.

Vyan

A Collective Contempt for Fact

When describing Neo-Cons after she resigned in protest from the Air Force, leaving a position close to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, where the Iraq War was planned - Lt. Col Karen Kwaitkowski described them thusly...

the pressure of the intelligence community to conform, the rejection of it when it failed to produce intelligence suitable for supporting the "Iraq is an imminent threat to the United States" agenda, and the amazing things I was hearing in both Bush and Cheney speeches told me that not only do neoconservatives hold a theory based on ideas not embraced by the American mainstream, but they also have a collective contempt for fact.

Today we see just how true that statement is as both Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney choose to reject and/or ignore the findings of the New Senate Intelligence Report that there were No Links Betweeen Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

In an interview she gave to CSU Pomona Lt. Col Kwaitkowski talked openly about how the Iraq War began from her position working in Doug Feith's organization.

The normal process of using intelligence to develop policy, just wasn't followed. Among the group of policy makers who were particularly interested in - not just Iraq Police - but ensuring that this invasion of Iraq happened. I mean, it was very much a policy agenda.

I joined the office in May 2002, and it became clear to me the decision to invade Iraq, to topple Saddam Hussein - and it's unclear exactly what afterwards - that decision had already been made by the policy makers. And it was simply a matter of pushing the decision forward through the system. That's not quite the same as having a system that informs policy makers with accurate intelligence and measured analysis in order for them to say "What should we do now?"

They kinda knew what the "Should do", but they were intent on pushing it through - so information was used, intelligence was - I'm going to use the word "Manipulated", I believe it was manipulated. "Cherry-Picked" is a term I've used and others have used, to describe how bits of information about the threat that Iraq posed - about the relationship of Iraq with terrorist groups - the whole array of things we were told about Iraq. If you get down to the intelligence, if you look at the intelligence - it wasn't saying that. It wasn't saying that under Bill Clinton, it wasn't saying that under George Bush.

George Bush is right when he says "Bill Clinton had the same information". Well, yes he did. His assessment was that Iraq was not a threat to the United States, and that was a correct decision.

15 Months after that interview we know how the Senate Intelligence Report indicating exactly what Kwaitkowski has been saying since she left the Pentagon.

Iraq had no WMD's and no connection to Al Qaeda.

Somehow Condi and Dicky just can't seem to bring themselves to see it that way.

Today on Fox News Sunday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeated the false assertion that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had a relationship before the 2003 invasion, despite the recent Senate Intelligence Report that found U.S. intelligence analysts strongly dispute that claim.

Rice tried to pin the blame on then CIA Director George Tenet, saying he said, “there were ties going on between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime going back for a decade.” But in July, Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “the White House pressured him and that he agreed to back up the administration’s case for war despite his own agents’ doubts about the intelligence it was based on.”

Rice also tried to dismiss the Senate report as being after-the fact, stating, "Now, are we learning more now that we have access to people like Saddam Hussein's intelligence services? Of course." But as Wallace pointed out, a Defense Intelligence Agency report from Feb. 2002 -- before the U.S. invasion -- also concluded that Iraq and Al Qaeda had no relationship: "Iraq is unlikely to have provided bin Laden any useful CB, that's chemical or biological, knowledge or assistance." Rice said she did not remember seeing that report.

Seems to me it would be the job of the National Security Advisor to be aware of such a report - before we went to WAR. A similar conclusion - that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner - was also included as part of the National Intelligence Estimate requested and provided to Congress just days before the votes were cast on the Iraq War Resolution.

Of course that view was not included in the executive summary or in the unclassified versions of the report - but it was there.

From the New York Times November 2005

The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger, later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise.

The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.

So why in the hell is Condi still trying to squirm out of this one? She's like a kid who just stole some candy, got caught and is now trying to claim someone else put the candy in her purse. Whose she trying to kid?

And Cheney is just as bad.

On Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that concluded there was no relationship between Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. According to the report, "a CIA assessment in October 2005 concluded that Hussein's government `did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates.'" In fact, Hussein tried to capture Zarqawi.

This morning on Meet the Press, Cheney repeatedly cited Zarqawi as the link between pre-war Iraq and al-Qaeda. When Tim Russert mentioned the Senate Intelligence Committee report, Cheney said he "hadn't seen it."

"The Link" is he? Did the dog eat your homework Dickey? Maybe you shouldn't have had Whittington hold it for you.

Look, we all know what's going on here - these people are attempting to justify the unjustifiable.

Saddam wasn't a threat. If anything he was a bulwark against the spread of Islamic Extremism in his region. When Bush decided to begin to War, we had UN inspectors on the ground confirming what we know now - that Saddam Hussein destroyed his Chemical Weapons Stockpiles after the first Gulf War, had ended his Nuclear Program and had no links to allies in Al Qaeda.

Iraqi Defector General Hussein Kamel told the IEAE and UNSCOM this before he was killed in 1996.

Until now, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who was killed shortly after returning to Iraq in 1996, was best known for his role in exposing Iraq's deceptions about how far its pre-Gulf War biological weapons programs had advanced. But Newsweek's John Barry-- who has covered Iraqi weapons inspections for more than a decade-- obtained the transcript of Kamel's 1995 debriefing by officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N. inspections team known as UNSCOM.

Inspectors were told "that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them," Barry wrote. All that remained were "hidden blueprints, computer disks, microfiches" and production molds. The weapons were destroyed secretly, in order to hide their existence from inspectors, in the hopes of someday resuming production after inspections had finished. The CIA and MI6 were told the same story, Barry reported, and "a military aide who defected with Kamel... backed Kamel's assertions about the destruction of WMD stocks."

This is why CIA and U.S. has found since found nothing of Hussein former chemical weapons stockpiles but discarded and depleted remains buried in the desert.

If we simply let the inspectors do their job - they would have eventually discovered the truth of Kamel's confession. It would have exposed the fact that Saddam was defenseless. He had last used his chemical weapons to put down the Kurdish rebellion following the first Gulf War -- but if it became known and understood that these weapons were long gone, could he have been able to hold back a new rebellion and Civil War the likes of which we are now smack dab in the middle of?

This could've been Saddam's fate - brought down interally by the same insurgency which has killed so many of our own soldiers. There are some indications that Saddam wasn't captured by U.S. Forced - that the Kurds got to him first and turned him over to us.

Why are we there again?

Oh yeah... "They have a collective contempt for fact".

And reality it would appear.

Vyan

Hayden admits Bush political leaders trumped up WMD Intel

The main focus on today's confirmation hearings for Gen. Michael Hayden as Director of Central Intelligence have ostensibly been on the various and sundry NSA Scandals which have recently emerged, but Thinkprogress points out one section of his testimony which apparently cuts the Bush Admin to the quick on pre-Iraq War WMD claims.

Ever since AG Gonzales hinted during his Senate testimony that Bush may indeed have spied on domestic calls, the NSA have been an explosion waiting to go off. But Hayden's testimony today shows that the fuse has been quite a bit longer than previously foreseen.

Transcript:

Sen. LEVIN: Secretary of Defense for Policy, Mr. Feith, established an intelligence analysis, so within his policy office at the Defense Department. While the intelligence community was consistently dubious about links between Iraq and al Qaeda, Mr. Feith produced an alternative analysis asserting that there was a strong connection. Were you comfortable with Mr. Feith's office approach to intelligence analysis?

HAYDEN: No, sir, I wasn't. I wasn't aware of a lot of the activity going on, you know, when it was contemporaneous with running up to the war. No, sir, I wasn't comfortable.

Further commentary by Thinkprogress

What Hayden makes clear is that, despite Bush's assertion that the pre-war intelligence process "broke down," the false intelligence about Iraq's connection to al Qaeda was intentionally fabricated by political leaders, not intelligence analysts. Feith, Wolfowitz, and others in the Pentagon set up a stovepipe "to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership" to make the case for war. Hayden and other intelligence experts got steamrolled when it mattered most.

As has been repeatedly noted it was not a case where intelligence analyst had to be "intimidated" into changing their view -- people like Feith were running their own independent intelligence operation through the Defense Intelligence Agency and portions of the State Department. These people were intent to find the evidence they wanted and use each an every scrap they located - no matter how dubious it might have been - to promote the story that Iraq was an imminent threat.

This yet again shows why Sen. Pat Roberts has been delaying the Phase II portion of the WMD/intelligence investigation for over two years. It's why both the Robb-Silberman Commission and previous Senate investigations were prohibited from asking this very question -- the Administration already knows the answer.

Whether the various and sundries Special Access NSA programs currently underway are legal or not remain a hot topic. AT&T's attorney argues that they received a Special Letter from the Attorney General which legally authorized their cooperation in lieu of a Warrant. This is quite interesting since it appears the NSA refused to do exactly the same thing for QWEST when they asked for it.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. Attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events

This diary here points out how the NSA actually already had a more effective and much more responsible Clinton era program in place prior to 9/11, but that program was shutdown by -- General Michael Hayden.

As reported by the Baltimore Sun

WASHINGTON // The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project -- not because it failed to work -- but because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency's surveillance powers, according to several intelligence officials.

The program the NSA rejected, called ThinThread, was developed to handle greater volumes of information, partly in expectation of threats surrounding the millennium celebrations. Sources say it bundled together four cutting-edge surveillance tools. ThinThread would have:

* Used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.

* Identified U.S. Phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy.

* Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency.

* Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records.

An agency spokesman declined to discuss NSA operations.

Feel free to send any wingnut acquaintances you have this Baltimore Sun story whenever they claim - "We can't abide by the strict letter of the law and fight al Qaeda at the same time" or "Clinton did nothing to fight terrorism".

It may be very well that Hayden was "uncomfortable" with this decision just as he was with the actions of Feith et al in the pre-Iraq War run-up - but being a good little soldier, he did what he was ordered to do by his superiors (i.e. Cheney and Bush) He may be fairly candid now during his confirmation hearings, but he's also made it quite clear that he will do whatever it is that the Commander-in-Chief requires of him.

A pure "Yes, man" through and through - just like (General) Colin Powell who permanently shredded his own credibility for all time with his command performance before the UN in 2002.

Let us recall just another reason why Qwest was reluctant to participate in this program:

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information -- known as "product" in intelligence circles, -- with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

This naturally explains the thousands of bogus leads that the FBI was complaining about in January.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

FBI officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency, which was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of foreign-related phone and Internet traffic, that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. Some FBI officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

So we have the scenario that prior to the Iraq War the Bush Administration threw out good intelligence (such as Joe Wilson's) in favor of bad intelligence, a fact that has also been confirmed by 27 Year CIA vet Ray McGovern, former Colin Powell Chief of Staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, State Dept Intelligence Analyst Greg Theilman, former Pentagon Special Plans Aid Lt. Col Karen Kwaitkowski, former European CIA chief Tyler Drumheller and former CIA intelligence Officer Paul Pillar.

This is a clear and obvious pattern of behavior on their part and there no reasonable indication that it's going to end anytime soon. These issues (poor WMD intel and the avoidance of FISA) are linked by the same dangerous extralegal pathology.

In his response to the Hayden hearings so far, Christy at Firedoglake points to comments by Bruce Fein which seem to bear repeating.

The Bush Administration is doing everything it can to prevent any of the illegally collected data and information from being used in any courtroom context, because they do not want to have to face the consequences of a constitutional challenge to their failure to obtain a lawful warrant. Think about that for a moment -- Bruce Fein is no liberal, he is a very conservative Reagan Republican, having worked in the DoJ as Deputy Attorney General in the Reagan Administration.

And he is saying, out loud, that the Bush White House is avoiding constitutional scrutiny because they know -- they KNOW -- they will be shown to be what they are. Lawbreakers.

They realize that everything they've done to skirt the law and bypass judicial scrutiny would present them with a massive fruits of the poison tree catastrophe in a court of law. If the NSA is sharing it's data with the FBI - and we know damn well they are - they can not present that evidence in court, or even acknowledge that they used illegally gathered evidence to target a specific individual without that case being tossed out of the court on it's ear.

This road only leads one direction.

They simply aren't going to take these cases to court, except for "show trials" like Moussuaoui. They're going to use the FBI to do surveillance - then if they decide on a whim that the situation is serious enough, perform a rendition followed by indefinite detention of that subject - even if they happen to be an American Citizen - to the secret military gulag of their worst nightmare for a little bit of the ole' waterboarding. Without judicial review. Without trial. Without appeal. Without oversight. Without hope.

This is not a hypothetical, there are strong indications that it's already been happening -- and if it did, the last thing that would happen would be a paper trail.

The likelihood of them doing this to the "right" person is about as strong as the possibility that we're going to finally find those mobile labs "North, South, East and West somewhat of Tikrit and Baghdad" almost three years after the fact.

They invaded the Wrong Fucking Country for Christ sake... you think they're really going to care if they capture the wrong terrorist suspects?

The sad part is that this is pretty much common knowledge at this point -- and the resulting outrage (outside of highly Democratic circles) is practically nonexistent. This is how the Wingnut Brigade fights terrorism - no holds barred and wiping their ass with the Constitution as they storm through, Jackboots akimbo.

What and who are they going to mistake for an imminent threat next?

And how many more innocent people will suffer for it while the real terrorist laugh at our continued ineptitude?

[Update: Even short of my admittedly worst case scenario of unchecked renditions of American Citizens above, there is also the very real danger of thousands of FBI Files that have been generated from this practice. Remember when the Clinton White House inadvertently gained access to a several hundred FBI files due to a Secret Service Screwup? (They had used an out of date White House Access List) Magnify that situation by the order of thousands! Filegate: dogged the Clinton's for years with allegations that they planned to use these files against their political rivals - well guess whose got the files now, and just who are their rivals? That's right kiddies - Quakers, Peace-Mongers, Greenpeace, War Protestors, Journalist, Congress, and y'know - US!)

Vyan

Bush Re-Lying on Iraq

Last Friday on Veteran's Day and again yesterday the President fired his harshes attacks ever on critics of the Iraq War and Intelligence failures which lead us into this conflict. On Meet the Press, the President has been supported by John McCain "I don't think the President lied"...

"While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," the president said in a Veterans Day speech in Pennsylvania.

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges," he said. "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will."

But was it the truth?

Bush: "Some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war," he said. "These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs. They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein."

Well, that's isn't entirely true now is it? The Washington Post on Saturday responded to the Presidents claims:

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered "the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence." He said that "those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen."

But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."

In the same speech, Bush asserted that "more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power." Giving a preview of Bush's speech, Hadley had said that "we all looked at the same intelligence."

But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President's Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community's views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.

The New York Times on the issue of "Pressure applied to analysts".

Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. . . . Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was "significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration's "hammering" on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency. . . .

Further the Senate Report included information which was later revealed as Under Secretary of State John Bolton attempting to bolster reports of Cuban Wmd's.

(U)When Chairman Roberts asked whether analysts had been pressured to change their assessments at a Committee hearing on June 19,2003,one [INR] analyst stood up and said that he had some encounters involving some pressure ”but noted that he had not changed his assessments as a result of that pressure.The analyst agreed to meet with Committee staff following the hearing to discuss the issue.

(U)The analyst told Committee staff that his concerns about being pressured were not related to Iraq,but rather to an incident that had occurred with the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security concerning Cuba ’s BW program.The analyst had received a routine request to declassify language concerning Cuba ’s BW program for a speech that the Under Secretary intended to give in an open forum.The analyst told Committee staff that the text of the Under Secretary ’s speech contained a sentence which said that the U.S. believes Cuba has a developmental,offensive biological warfare program and is providing assistance to other rogue state programs.The text also called for international observers of
Cuba ’s biological facilities.The analyst said the portion of the speech he was given contained top secret codeword information.

There was also a report on a Pentagon "Desk Officer" in the Office of Special Plans who I strongly suspect is actually Lt. Col Karen Kwaitkowski who has been extremely vocal in her criticism of the Iraq War and Bush Administration.

(U)Committee staff contacted a former desk officer in the Office of the Deputy Under
Secretary of Defense for Special Plans and NESA who had come to the Committee ’s attention through press accounts of the desk officer ’s experiences.

(U)The desk officer told Committee staff that she never worked the Iraq issue and had no direct knowledge of any attempts to pressure or coerce intelligence analysts. She obtained the information that she provided to Committee staff based on looking at the secret level intranet in the Pentagon and through discussions with colleagues.

(U)The desk officer told Committee staff that a DIA senior intelligence analyst had told her that he had been pressured by the Deputy Under Secretary to change a briefing he was giving on Iraq and that he refused to change the briefing because the intelligence did not support the Deputy Under Secretary ’s conclusion.She said that after this incident the senior analyst was excluded from bilateral exchange visits.Committee staff interviewed the DIA senior intelligence analyst (See page 280)who said that he had not been asked to change any briefings on Iraq, but said he was asked not to use the word “assassinations ”when giving a brief on the Israeli Defense Force.He provided no information to show that he had been excluded from the bilateral visits because of his analysis.

It's interesting to note that the "Desk Officer" heard one thing, but when the person she heard it from was brought before the commitee - he denied everything. If there was in fact pressure, one of the key elements of that pressure would have been to "deny the pressure". It's the cornerstone of any cover-up.

"First Rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club. Second Rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club".

What the British Government felt according to the Downing Street Minutes:

It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.

And then you have other countries such as France, Russia and Germany who voted in the UN against the invasion of Iraq and were accused by Bush's supporters of doing so because they'd received kick-backs from Saddam Hussein via the Oil-for-Food program. An allegation that has proved uniformly false.

Bush says now that Congress received the same intellegence, but there are many reasons to doubt that claim.

Media Matters: It should be further noted, that the Bush Whitehouse initially refused to supply any Intelligence Information to the Congress -- the White House reportedly objected to the production of such a [National Intelligence Estimate] at the time. An article in the September 22, 2003, edition of The New Republic described how the then-chairman of the committee, Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), and Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-IL) pushed for the NIE after reviewing a classified CIA assessment of the Iraqi threat that reportedly took "the most aggressive view of all available information":

Stunned by what they read, Graham, Durbin and others on the committee intensified their demands for [then-director of central intelligence George J.] Tenet to produce an NIE on the Iraq threat. It was not a request that Tenet could easily fulfill. "The White House didn't want it," says a source with direct knowledge of the effort. "They wanted to draw their own analytical conclusions

In short, Bush's claim that Congress received the same information as the White House is simply false. They don't get the same information, and even what they did get they had to beg in order to get. But all of this back and forth sometimes obscures the core issue -- why was the intelligence so wrong?

Well it turns out that if you looked closely at it - it wasn't wrong. What started this entire hullabaloo with the President is the recent declassification of a DIA report concerning an detainee who repeatedly claimed that Iraq was working with Al-Qaeda - who simply "wasn't credible".

On November 6, both the Post and the Times reported on a newly declassified document proving that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had voiced strong doubts about the credibility of an Al Qaeda operative whose statements provided the basis for many of the administration's prewar claims regarding Iraqi training of terrorists. The DIA report -- produced and distributed in February 2002 -- raised serious questions about the first interrogation report on the operative and determined that "it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers." Both newspapers noted that administration officials, in late 2002 and early 2003, repeatedly cited the alleged chemical and biological training as proof of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection but never noted that the DIA considered this intelligence suspect. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), who released the new materials, stated "that he could not be certain that White House officials read the DIA report, but his 'presumption' was that someone at the National Security Council saw it because it was sent there," according to the Post

More on this Detainee from William Rivers Pitt.

The operative, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, was exposed as a liar by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February of 2002. Their report bluntly stated that al-Libi was deliberately misleading interrogators, and any information he provided was not to be trusted. By 2004, al-Libi had completely recanted all of his testimony.

"The (Defense Intelligence Agency) document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility," reported the Times. "Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as 'credible' evidence that Iraq was training al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons. Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that 'we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.'"

This is information that the Administration possessed, but certainly didn't share either with the American people or Congress. Even when you look at the information that was eventually provided to the Congress via the NIE - there was a substantial section questioning the conclusions on Iraq's Nuclear Threat supplied by the State Departmentt.

NIE "key judgments" had included a lengthy dissent on behalf of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) regarding the claim that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.

That dissent had included the likelyhood that the Niger Uranium documents were forgeries.

Other information provided in that report was found by the Senate Intelligence Committee to be "totally wrong", particularly when the informant Curveball was relied upon.

In a scathing report released Thursday, President Bush's intelligence commission found that the CIA "failed to convey to policy-makers new information casting serious doubt on the reliability of a human intelligence source known as 'Curveball."' The commission found that several agency officers said they had doubts about the source and raised those doubts with senior leadership, including then-CIA Director George Tenet. In separate statements Friday, Tenet and former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin denied the accounts. "It is deeply troubling to me that there was information apparently available within CIA as of late September or October of 2002 indicating that Curveball may have been a fabricator," Tenet said in a detailed seven-page rebuttal. "There is nothing more serious or galvanizing in the intelligence business than associating the word fabricator with a human source." McLaughlin said "unequivocally" that he wouldn't have allowed Curveball's information to be used "if someone had made these doubts clear".

Despite the apparent concerns, the commission found that information from Curveball remained a centerpiece of former Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations about the need to attack Iraq, as well as in an authoritative intelligence estimate prepared for policy-makers in the run-up to the Iraq war.

From the Dulfer Report on Curveball.

...the Dulfer Report showed... that many key allegations of WMD activity by Saddam all came from a single source, code-named Curveball. A source that his own German intelligence handlers found "not credible", yet his claims of mobile laboratories and imminent mushroom clouds still managed to find their way into Presidential Speeches and public comments by Secretary Powell, then-NSA Chief Condoleeza Rice and even Clinton Admin hold-over George Tenet, Director of the CIA.

So we have one liar in Guantanemo (al-Libi), another liar in Germany (Curveball) and a set of forged documents from Niger that apparently no one noticed except for members of the INR. Only the DIA had noted al-Libi's fabrications and only the DIA had even bothered to actually go visit Curveball "face-to-face" - the result of that meeting was a complete loss in confidence in that source by those who took the trip to Germany. CIA had no clue, and apparently neither did Congress.

Meanwhile the President and his chief Adversers ignored (or were blocked from learning) of warnings coming from the DIA in Feb 2002, the INR and Joe Wilson's report to the CIA on uranium sales - and continued making wildly inaccurate claims:

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

- Dick Cheney, 8/26/2002

There is already a mountain of evidence that Saddam Hussein is gathering weapons for the purpose of using them. And adding additional information is like adding a foot to Mount Everest.

- Ari Fleischer, 9/6/2002

We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

- Condoleeza Rice, 9/8/2002

Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.

- George W. Bush, 9/12/2002

Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons. We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons - the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.

- George W. Bush, 10/5/2002

And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons.

- George W. Bush, 10/7/2002

After eleven years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more. And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.

- George W. Bush, 10/7/2002

We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas.

- George W. Bush, 10/7/2002

Iraq could decide on any given day to provide biological or chemical weapons to a terrorist group or to individual terrorists ...The war on terror will not be won until Iraq is completely and verifiably deprived of weapons of mass destruction.

- Dick Cheney, 12/1/2002

If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world.

- Ari Fleischer, 12/2/2002

We know for a fact that there are weapons there.

- Ari Fleischer, 1/9/2003

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

- George W. Bush, 1/28/2003

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.

- George W. Bush, 1/28/2003

We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more.

- Colin Powell, 2/5/2003

There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction. If biological weapons seem too terrible to contemplate, chemical weapons are equally chilling.

- Colin Powell, 2/5/2003

If Iraq had disarmed itself, gotten rid of its weapons of mass destruction over the past 12 years, or over the last several months since (UN Resolution) 1441 was enacted, we would not be facing the crisis that we now have before us ... But the suggestion that we are doing this because we want to go to every country in the Middle East and rearrange all of its pieces is not correct.

- Colin Powell, 2/28/2003

Let's talk about the nuclear proposition for a minute. We know that based on intelligence, that has been very, very good at hiding these kinds of efforts. He's had years to get good at it and we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.

- Dick Cheney, 3/16/2003

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

- George W. Bush, 3/17/2003

Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly ... all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes.

- Ari Fleischer, 3/21/2003

We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

- Donald Rumsfeld, 3/30/2003

Yet, when UN Inspectors re-entered Iraq in the Winter of 2002 following the passage of HJ 141 (The Iraq War Resolution) and UN Security Council Resolution 1441 -- they found nothing (except a few missles whose range was 15 miles beyond sanctioned limits).

CBS News - Inspectors Call U.S. Tips 'Garbage'

Feb. 20, 2003
U.N. weapons inspectors prepare to investigate a
private battery acid plant outside of Baghdad.  (AP)

So frustrated have the inspectors become that one
source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they've
been getting as "garbage after garbage after garbage."

(CBS) While diplomatic maneuvering continues over
Turkish bases and a new United Nations resolution,
inside Iraq, U.N. arms inspectors are privately
complaining about the quality of U.S. intelligence and
accusing the United States of sending them on
wild-goose chases. 

CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips reports the U.N.
has been taking a precise inventory of Iraq's
al-Samoud 2 missile arsenal, determining how many
there are and where they are.

Discovering that the al-Samoud 2 has been flying too
far in tests has been one of the inspectors' major
successes. But the missile has only been exceeding its
93-mile limit by about 15 miles and that, the Iraqis
say, is because it isn't yet loaded down with its
guidance system. The al-Samoud 2 is not the
800-mile-plus range missile that Secretary of State
Colin Powell insists Iraq is developing.

In fact, the U.S. claim that Iraq is developing
missiles that could hit its neighbors – or U.S. troops
in the region, or even Israel – is just one of the
claims coming from Washington that inspectors here are
finding increasingly unbelievable. The inspectors have
become so frustrated trying to chase down unspecific
or ambiguous U.S. leads that they've begun to express
that anger privately in no uncertain terms.

U.N. sources have told CBS News that American tips
have lead to one dead end after another.

Normally Senior Advisers such as Tenet and Powell would be relied upon to provide information to Congress directly, either in report format or via testimony. Although the full investigation of how or why intelligence information may have been manipulated within the Bush Administration has yet to take place -- it seems clear based on many reports and most obviously the treatment of Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame as well as comment by the CIA ombudsman that in the cases of Tenet and Powell, their were mid-level politcal appointees who were prioritizing, de-prioritizing and coloring certain reports which fit their own agenda and preeferred opinion - rather than the facts.

Bush argues "Garbage in - Garbage out", but it's not really that simple. It's common today to sort your garbage prior to simply throwing it into the can -- and apparently it was the sifting, filtering and vetting process to seperate the credible information from the flat-out incredible that broke down -- or was deliberately subverted.

How much Bush was involved or aware of this at the time remains an open question -- but his comments now, in the face of such overwhelming amounts of information show that whether or not he was deliberately lying then - he's definately lying now.

Vyan

It's the Incompetence, Stupid

Crossposted on Dailykos.

As we look back over the last 5 dark years of Bush II, and particularly over the aftermath of Hurricane Fema in New Orleans, Alabama and Mississippi - it may finally have become glaringly obvious to more and more of the nation what Democrats and Progressives have been saying all along.

The problem with Bushco isn't the lies, it's not the cronyism, it's not the jingoism or the over-the-top militarism - it's the Incompetence, stupid.

From day one, Bush was on the wrong page.

He and Condoleeza Rice ignored Richard Clarke's warnings of impending problems with terrorism and al Qaeda.

They failed to respond to the California Energy Crisis, or to rein in the frenzy of corporate greed that gripped Enron, Tyco, Aldephia and others.

They shoved Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill out the door when he questioned their lust for tax cuts despite what it would do to the defecit.

They ignored the FBI Agent who reported that there are some Arab men here in Arizona who are learning to fly, but not how to land.

They ignored 52 warnings of potential highjacking with intent to crash from the F.A.A.

They ignored the August 6th PDB on Bin Ladin.

After 9/11 - they failed to sufficiently cut al Qaeda off from escape and let bin Ladin out of Tora Bora.

They failed to listen to the skeptics who questioned whether Saddam Hussein was really as dangerous as they thought, then intimidated (Kwaitkowski) or otherwise attempted to discredited their commentary (Plame/Wilson).

They failed to listen to Gen. Shinshekii when he said they needed more troops in Iraq.

After declaring "Mission Accomplished" : They failed to pay attention to the security problem created by dismantling the Iraqi Army, and how that lack of security would effect their efforts to begin restoring the water and power to the people of Iraq to also fail. (Just like in New Orleans)

They failed to realize that when you torture, rape and murder innocent Iraqi citizens in order to extort them to become "confidential informants" against the insurgency in places like Abu Ghraib and Gitmo - you just might fuel, rather than quell that insurgency.

So is it little wonder, that when a massive Category 4 Hurricane strikes sacred American soil and creates a brand new Atlantis -- that they fail to do what pure common sense indicates they need to do?

Many American's where shocked that their fellow Americans could be reduced to the state of existence that you would only expect to see in the third-world. The same state of existence that the prosperous and industrially developed country of Iraq was reduced to in the aftermath of "Shock and Awe".

I for one, was not surprised by what I saw in New Orleans -- haven't we been seeing this all along?

It's not the fact that those people were poor, or that they're black, or that they voted primarily democratic --

...it's the Incompetence.

Vyan

Hardball: Taking the DSM to the Next Level

Click to View Window Media Video (Courtesey of Dembloggers.com)

Tonight Hardball on MSNBC did a Special Report on the Downing Street Memo, and contrary to expectation of many, including myself, who predicted yet another lame white-washing of the issue similar to the recent Washington Post Editorial by Dana Milbank - this story, I dare say, may have been a breakthrough moment.

Rather than throwing cold water on the issue as did CNN when it first mentioned the memo (Calling the London Time a "Tabloid"), Hardball with host David Gregory - temporarily sans Faux-macrat Chris Matthews - handled the story in a very sober and serious manner, starting with primary guest Michael Smith (the original author of the London Times piece), and moving on to former CIA Director Jim Woolsey as well as UN Weapons Inspector David Kay.

(Read Full Transcript)

Instead of the standard right-wing claims that the information within the Memo's is "Second Hand", this report gave I think a fair estimate that either MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove was wrong in his assessment that the "facts were being fixed", OR the United States simply used the UN as a "pretext" to give legal authority to the Iraq War.

For his part, Michael Smith did an good job of expaining exactly why the original documents were photocopied, transcribed by a secretary, afterwhich the originals were returned to the source and the photocopies were destroyed : On the advice of attorneys to protect the anonymity of the source.

There was also the arguement that, "fixed means something different in England" and that this is "old news", however it seemed quite obvious even to a casual viewer that the first option (Dearlove is wrong), is a rather strange position in conjunction with "this is old news", when Richard Clarke, former Treasury Secratary Paul O'Neill and even Bob Woodward (although not mentioning former Pentagon insider Lt. Col Karen Kwaitkowski) are all called upon as examples of how "Bush was focused on Iraq and Saddam from day one".

Could all of these people be wrong in exactly the same way?

Click to view Part II of report

Jim Woolsey provided the most damaging commentary, stating his opinion, in contrast to Britain's Attorney General, that Saddam's repeated violations of UN Security Resolution #1205 already provided ample ammunition to go war.

As it turns out UN Resolution #1205 dates back to 1998, when the Weapons Inspectors were pulled out in the wake of continued resistance by Saddam to their continued work in detecting and destroying chemical and biological weapons. This resolution, among others, was used by then President Clinton to begin a massive bombing campaign of Iraq specifically targetting all known and suspected WMD sites. (In fact, it may be because of the work of weapons inspectors up to this point in conjunction with Clinton Administration bombing that WMD's have to date not been found in Iraq.)

When asked whether or not the efforts by the US and UK to seek UN support for the war, subsequent to the events of the DSM, are indeed a debunking of the information contained in the memo/minutes - Michael Smith pointed out twice that the key element of the minutes is the apparent plot to use the UN as a pretext to create a legal justification for the war when none currently existed. The expectation was the Saddam would resist the re-insertion of weapons inspectors - as he had prior to the passage of resolution #1205, But how after going to the UN and getting the passage of resolution #1441, the weapons inpectors were indeed allowed back into Iraq, and contrary to UK and US expectations - as outlined by the DSM's - Saddam submitted completely to their intrusion, and thereby completely abrogated the hoped for justification for military intervention.

Inspectors did not find WMD's, but they did find and destroy hundreds of Iraqi missles which were in violation of UN Resolutions. Saddam did not resist. At this point Saddam was in complete and total compliance with resolution #1205 and #1441 as well as all relevent resolutions.

What then, was the continued justification for War?

The fact is, there wasn't one. Saddam and Iraq was in compliance and had provided thousands of pages of documentation to that effect. Weapon's inspectors were back in place and doing their job.

Yet we still went to war? Why?

Apparently because President Bush decided he didn't trust Saddam, and decided to forgo further diplomacy in direct violation of the October 2002 Resolution (H.J. 141) authorizing War in Iraq as a last resort.

Tonights excellent report on Hardball - as well as a similar report and the immediately following Countdown with Keith Olbermann (Transcript), may have been the first serious examination by the MSM on Downing Street: The Series (as it was described in the Countdown crawl), and the first real MSM attempt to explain why we are in the midst of a war that didn't need to occur.

During the report Woolsey futher argued, deftly I must admit, that Saddam was certainly a danger to security in the region as well as to his own people - and that "We are certainly better off now - without Saddam". That may indeed be true, even John Kerry was forced to admit this many times during the election, but what is also clear is that Saddam's continued resistance to inspections was tied directly to his ability to remain in power. If weapons inspectors had been allowed by the Bush administration to finish their job and had confirmed in 2003 that Saddams WMD's were in fact either exhausted or destroyed (as the ISG eventually did report in 2004), it's certain that as Woolsey puts it he wouldn't have become "Philosopher King" - but without any real way to again repel an insurection by the Kurds from the north (as was openly supported by the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998), it may also be equally argued that he may not have remained the leader of Iraq either.

Imagine that - Saddam gone without the blood of a single American soldier, or $322 Billion (and counting) of the American Treasury having been spent? Wouldn't that be a far more preferable situation to the one we have now?

Vyan

Bush World : Faith before Fact

Tommorrow may be a Historic Day, and then again it may not.

At 2:30 pm Eastern, a hearing on the Downing Street Minutes, by the Democratic members of the House questioning when the Bush Administration decided to begin the Iraq War and on what basis, will be convened. Expectations from both sides of the political spectrum are quite extreme. The "Far-Left", including those who hate the very idea of George W. Bush in the White House may be hoping that this will be the first serious salvo in the march toward eventual impeachment hearings - while those with a right-ward bent are sure to insist that this is just another example of how those "whiny Loser-crats" refuse to accept that their defeats in the 2000/2004 elections, and simply can't resist blaming everyone else but themselves.

As usual, my position is toward the Center as I suspect that both sets of expetations will fall far short of the reality.

Did President Bush Lie us into a War? I think not. At least - not exactly. Was the President merely the innocent victim of a broken intelligence apparatas that failed to warn us of 9/11, and then continued to fail when it came to Iraq's involvment in the event, ties to al-Qaeda and possession of WMD's? Again, I think, not exactly.

I think if you look at the facts honestly and squarely, you will begin to see a pattern that has led us to where we are now - and it's not neccesarily a pattern of deliberate deception, it's a pattern of paradigm, a pattern of received wisdom, and fervent belief. A pattern of faith before fact.

In 1998, the often noted PNAC (Project of the New American Century) penned it's letter to then President Clinton urging that he commit American energy and forces to removing Saddam Hussein as leader of Iraq. Signatories on this letter including Donald Rumseld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, William Bennet, Richard Armatage, Dick Cheney and others. This document outlines a strategy which would, thought it's authors, lead to greater world security and a new renaissance of Democracy in the Arab world and beyond. It was clear that Saddam was our enemy, although many of the left often gloss over it, Saddam's Intelligence Agency did conspire to assasinate President George H.W. Bush with a car-bomb in Kuwait in 1993. The plan failed, but the animous lingered - at least among many who felt that President Clinton by bombing the Iraqi Intelligence Headquarters, simply didn't do enough.

We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.

...

We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.

I see little reason to assume that those who penned this letter, didn't believe thier own words - in fact I feel confident that they absolutely and devoutly believed every sentence, as they've done nothing if not remained true to the goals outlined then. And there in, lies the beginning of our saga and the problem we find ourself living in today.

After the 2000 Election, there was a not just a change in the Chief Executive, there was also a major shift among key positions througout the Administration. Besides Dick Cheney as Vice-President, many other PNAC supporters and signatories - people who hold an ideological fervor the likes of which this country has rarely seen - were given Deputy and Undersecratary positions in Defense (Wolfowitz), the State Department (Bolton) and others. For example, Bush's Deputy in the Labor Department is Eugene Scalia, son of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and a former business lobbyist against workers compensation claims. Mr. Scalia has been known to claim that Repetitve Motion Injuries are simply "Junk Science" being used as an excuse for lazy workers to soak their employers. This person is now the Socitor of Labor, the primary legal representative for workers in the United States. A rather sad irony some would say.

The question on Downing Street has been framed as how much did the President and Administration know about Iraq WMD's and when did they know it? But the question should be, knowing that they believed Saddam himself was an imminent threat what did they do to verify that belief and most importantly did they ignore or downplay evidence which defied that belief?

The record is repleat with examples.

Following 9/11, the fear of international terrorism was at a fever pitch. It's clear that Saddam did at one time possess significant stockpiles of WMD's. He had used them against Iran and had used them against the Kurds following the first Gulf War in 1991. According to Richard Clarke's "Against all Enemies", contrary to credible evidence Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz continued to posit theories of Iraqi involvement not only in 9/11, but also in the first World Trace Center Bombing in 1993. Some of the lastest Post-Downing British Memos that have been released also confirm this view of Wolfowitz's. Against all evidence, Saddam was still the ultimate Boogey Man.

As it stands now, there have been several investigations into the Iraq WMD intelligence and indeed many failures have been found, but none have found that the intelligence was "fixed around [a specific] policy" - but that may be simply because one of these investigations were never tasked with answering that question. The 9/11 Committee didn't addressed the issue. The President's Robb-Silberman Commision on WMD's didn't bring the subject up.

"(W)e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community

The Senate Intelligence Committee Investigation was split into two sections, the second which was to address Administration influence on intelligence has be indefinately postponed. Senator Harry Reid responded to the announcement in a Press Release:

Last year, the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee committed to investigate whether Bush Administration officials misused intelligence. The failure of the report issued today to examine this important issue only serves to increase the need for the chairman to keep that commitment.”

All of which indicates all the more need for the core question to be answered - how did America screw up this badly?

Some would argue that there was no evidence against the presumption of guilt by Saddam, and of course, it's better "safe than sorry". That's all well and good, except for the fact that there was quite a bit of evidence indicating that Saddam had no more WMD's, and that this information may indeed have been systematically ignored by those with a shared fervent belief - including the PNAC Deputies - who then proceeded to block positive news about Saddam from their bosses, Rumfeld, Powell and by extension, the President.

When the U.S. Energy Commision stated that the aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were the wrong type for Uranium enrichment, this information didn't reach Colin Powell before he testified before the UN. When his own State Department's intelligence service stated that they had doubts about Saddam's continued possess of WMD's. Those doubts were ignored, many strongly suspect, by well position Deputies such as John Bolton - who himself already had a reputation for intimidating and threatening analyists who he felt were understating the dangers of WMD's in Cuba.

When Joe Wilson went to Niger to investigate whether Iraq could find a way to aquire Uranium, he returned stating that it simply wasn't possible - and was promptly trashed by a Robert Novak, who reported based info from a unamed Adminstration source (someone in the "middle"?) stating that his wife, CIA Operative Valarie Plame, had been instrumental in his being sent to Africa. A year ago the Washington Post reported that Wilson's claims that Plame "had nothing to do with" his trip were contradicted by a Senate Intelligence Report, even with this blow to his credibility his core claim that Iraq didn't have Uranium remains strong as it is clearly supported by the Dulfer Report.

ISG has not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material—activities that we believe would have constituted an Iraqi effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program.

The other key factor that the Dulfer Report showed, was that many key allegations of WMD activity by Saddam all came from a single source, code-named Curveball. A source that his own German intelligence handlers found "not credible", yet his claims of mobile laboratories and imminent mushroom clouds still managed to find their way into Presidential Speeches and public comments by Secretary Powell, then-NSA Chief Condoleeza Rice and even Clinton Admin hold-over George Tenet, Director of the CIA.

Subordinates have claimed that they passed information up the chain concerning Curveball's lack of credibility, yet Tenet, for one, continues to state they he was unaware of this:

"It is deeply troubling to me that there was information apparently available within CIA as of late September or October of 2002 indicating that Curveball may have been a fabricator," Tenet said in a detailed seven-page rebuttal. "There is nothing more serious or galvanizing in the intelligence business than associating the word fabricator with a human source.

Once again, the failure wasn't at the analyst level - the inteligence wasn't "Dead Wrong" - nor was it (allegedly) with the leadership (Tenet, Powell) - the disconnect was apparently somewhere in the middle. Somewhere among the middle management or at the Administration appointed deputy level were PNACers such as Wolfowitz and Bolton who in all likelhood, simply refused to believe or to promote ideas and facts that deviated from their predetermined agenda.

This view is further supported by information and experience provided by Lt. Col Karen Kwaitkowski, a former Aide to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, who has been quite outspoken and direct concerning on this issue. In her experience working directly with high-level Bush appointees during the lead-up to the Iraq War she has written that "the pressure of the intelligence community to conform, the rejection of it when it failed to produce intelligence suitable for supporting the 'Iraq is an imminent threat to the United States' agenda, and the amazing things I was hearing in both Bush and Cheney speeches told me that not only do neoconservatives hold a theory based on ideas not embraced by the American mainstream, but they also have a collective contempt for fact." Particularly, it seems when those facts are inconviently opposed to their shared beliefs.

For these Deputies and Undersecretaries, it's not simply a matter of them deliberately lying to their superiors - it's an issue of which facts did they choose to highlight in their reports, and which did they choose to de-emphasize or omit? This might mean that the longed-for independant investigation of President Bush may find that he was simply the victim of misguided and overzealous aids, not a deliberate prefabricator or liar per se.

Or then again, was he a willing victim of this paradigmatic group-think?

The most telling answer to this question comes from former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who said the Bush was like ""a blind man in a room full of deaf people", and that he whole-heartedly belives his decisions are the right ones, regardless of all nay-sayers and in many cases - clear and raw evidence to the contrary.

This is why he [Bush] dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts," Bartlett [a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance] went on to say. "He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.

This reliance on belief and conviction over fact, may indeed be a common trait among the PNAC/neo-conservative movement, and has gradually influenced the President. Where once he opening took input from many source, according to a extensive report by Ron Suskind for the New York Times, today he has closed himself into the tightest circle of "happy-talking" insiders and confidents of any President in modern history.

To lie is to state as fact, something that you yourself don't believe is true - but I strongly suspect that the aswer to the perennial question of "How did we get here?" may be something both far greater and far smaller than simply a set of repeated lies, it may indeed involve quite a bit of blind self-deception as well.

If the nation is to truly learn something valuable from this process, it will not be achieved simply by toppling the Bush Adminstration in the midst a highly-partisan conflagration in the rush to the third impeachment trial in our nation's history. We need to learn what really did and what did not occur in our intelligence assesment process, and what may be continuing to occur in all of our government decision making in order to truly prevent anything like this from happening again.

And if we fail in this, we ensure - whether the right remains in power, or the left regains it - that we remain quite ilkely, if not certain, to repeat this type of failure sometime in future.

It may happen later rather than sooner, with luck, but it's clear that without genuine understanding and a national commitment to a true paradigm shift away from pure belief to verifiable fact in governing - we will again ask and wonder in frustration, "How did we get here?"

Vyan