Comments Posted By Martin A. Knight
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CIA VS. THE WHITE HOUSE: McCARTHY AND THE DC REVOLVING DOOR
Mona,
Do you have anything other than your assertions to back up anything you claim about the Bush Administration?
For example, you claim that the Administration would lose 8-1 if the NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program ever came before the Supreme Court and point out that the Administration is avoiding putting the program up for trial as evidence to support your claim.
But that's ridiculous. The American Judicial system doesn't try moot cases. You need an individual or group with standing to challenge the program. It's beyond idiotic to demand the Administration challenge itself. So until you can prove to us that a person with standing was being prevented from filing a challenge in Court by the Administration, there's nothing to all your shrieks.
Honestly, is there any solid reason why I or anybody else should believe you or any of your other appeals to authority (including your laughable screeches that you voted for Bush in 2004)?
This entire thing just illustrates the cynical use of leaks to undermine the Bush Administration by Democrat partisans in the Executive Branch with the active collusion of the Press. The reason the Administration is down in the polls has a great deal more to do with the success the Press and their friends in the Democrat Party have had in pressing forward the narrative that Bush "lied", "misled", "manipulated","cherry-picked" and/or "exaggerated" the nation into War on Saddam Hussein's Iraq and is violating the law willy-nilly without actually having to substantiate their assertions.
Off-topic ... but let me focus on the BushLied™ narrative ...
The fact is, the New York Times and its cohorts made the cynical and completely unethical decision to play on the ignorance of the American people on how Intelligence is gathered, analyzed and presented to the decision makers in American government, in order to conduct a long running political assassination campaign on President for no other reason than partisanship just before the 2004 elections. Unfortunately, it seems that there are still many members of the White House staff, who resolutely hold on to the idea that there is nothing worthwhile in actively defending the Administration's use of pre-War Intelligence because it would be "re-litigating" the case for the War on Saddam Hussein's Iraq. This pose is a hybrid of arrogance, hubris and stupidity. The Bush Administration should never have conceded, through its silence, the WMD argument against Saddam Hussein.
Mendacious MSM boosters like Jay Rosen over at PressThink like to pretend that the justification for the war is no longer a pertinent topic of discussion, even as they work day and night to establish and shore up the narrative that the President deliberately used false Intelligence to send American soldiers to die in Iraq for some nefarious reason or other. Most normal people can differentiate between Bush
"lying"/"misleading"/"manipulating"/"cherry-picking"/"exaggerating", and operating from honest belief. Most normal people would find no fault with the man who does the latter (especially if target is someone like Saddam Hussein) ... which, I guess, is why the American Press is desperate to convince the American people that the President did the former.But the fact remains that it was the overwhelming consensus of the Intelligence Community that Saddam still maintained stockpiles of WMDs and was running programs to create more. It is right there on the front page of the 2002 NIE on Iraq.
Anyone with any experience in Intelligence matters knows that it is not possible to overstate the importance of this issue of "consensus".
There are literally hundreds of thousands of pages of information on almost every single nation on Earth at the CIA, DIA, NSA, INR, NRO, etc. On top of those pages of raw Intelligence data are thousands of pages of analysis of that data prepared by the agencies' analysts. Mali poses no threat to America, but you'd better believe that there is a great deal of paper about that nation at Langley.
Iraq was/is an entirely different kettle of fish. The amount of information on the country must have been massive. It is the analysts' job to sift through this information, come to conclusions, attach a certain level of confidence to them, and present the finished product to their superiors who futher work on it and present their findings upward till it gets to the President and other decision makers (which includes Senators and Representatives on the Intelligence Committees). At each step, conclusions by the analysts are accepted or rejected.
This is not a science. It involves a huge amount of estimation, extrapolation, reconciliation and consensus-building, using information
already known about the subject/target in question. In other words, the analysts who prepared the 2002 NIE didn't just use information gathered exclusively from 01/21/2001 but information going all the way back from the 1970s.Despite what the Press and their allies the Democrats would have the nation believe, there are ALWAYS caveats and dissenting views among the analysts. There are literally thousands of them working in more than a dozen agencies. How can there not be differences of opinion? How can there not be many differences of opinion?
This is why reaching a consensus on what the Intelligence means is so very important. There is not enough time in the world for the President (or anybody else) to read (and follow up) on the monstrous amounts of analysis reports produced at the agencies every single day. So what happens is that the reports are condensed all the way up the chain to the DCI who presents his report (which is the consensus of his analysts) to the President as the definitive word from the Intelligence Community as regards a particular subject.
Tenet described it as a "slam dunk" that Saddam had WMDs. This had been the consensus view since the Reagan Administration (note how many Democrats were fulminating about Saddam's WMDs in the 1990s up until 2003). Are we honestly expected to believe that the Intelligence Clinton based his decision on to launch Operation Desert Fox had no caveats and dissenting views? Yet did any Democrats (or Republicans for that matter) accuse him of lying when he said Saddam had WMDs? Is anyone so accusing him now?
Is there any plausible reason for Bush, considering Saddam's history of brutality, obfuscation, lies and deception to have rejected the conclusion reached by the vast majority of the nation's Intelligence agencies as well as EVERY other nation's (UK, France, Germany, Israel, Russian, Jordanian, etc.) Intelligence agencies, about Saddam and WMD?
What the New York Times and its cohorts have been doing for the past two years is simple enough. They get Leftist partisans at the Intelligence agencies, like Mary McCarthy, not to mention the Democrat staff of the Congressional Intelligence Committees, etc. to leak these minority conclusions that had been discarded in the course of preparing Intelligence for upper level consumption and tout them as definitive proof that the "Administration" was "informed" that there were no WMDs, Saddam could never ever consort with terrorists, etc. and therefore the President "lied", "misled", "manipulated","cherry-picked" and/or "exaggerated" Intelligence to start a war for fun, profit and/or pat on the head from Daddy.
Comment Posted By Martin A. Knight On 24.04.2006 @ 13:26
