Mark Hickey wrote:
Neil Brooks wrote:
Mark Hickey wrote:
Mark Hickey wrote:
If you mean, will I agree that GWB fabricated evidence? No I won't,
since there's been absolutely NO proof of that. Do I condemn some of
the intelligence gathering (including the UNMOVIC weapons inspectors)?
You betcha. Do I believe ALL of the intel was wrong? No, but I truly
HOPE it was (which is lots better than the WMD still existing in
Syria, for example).
Mark,
I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the Office of Special Plans.
Little is heard in the investigatory realm about this relatively
shadowy outfit, but the reporting has been exceptionally
consistent--from some reasonably credible sources [1].
I hadn't heard of the OSP previously, but would from a general
perspective would make a few points about your conclusions...
1) the organization seems to be focused on 9/11, not the run-up to the
Iraq war (or actually, the continuation thereof)
You should read more about this OSP bunch [1, 2, 3, 4, pick your own
sources]. These were the administration's go-to guys for the intel
they wanted to hear vis-a-vis 9/11-Iraq connections and justification
for war. In most cases, the actual intel community had no idea what
the OSP was feeding POTUS, their caveats regarding sources had been
stripped, etc., etc.
2) as such, the issue of coersion simply isn't applicable. The
shortcomings that led to our inability to prevent the 9/11 attacks
weren't because of believing faulty intelligence, but the lack of
intelligence.
Disagree. Many people claim "well, Congress voted for the war and
they had the exact same intelligence before them as the President
did." That's what scares me. Too many people had the intel derived
by the Bush administration, but not vetted (actually, discredited) by
the intelligence community.
3) the major mistakes made that allowed 9/11 to happen undetected
happened during the Clinton presidency (including systemic problems
that the 9/11 commissioners glossed over in their report - which is
really quite troubling).
So on the surface, it sounds like you're expecting the OSP to do
things that don't appear to be related to its charter.
From this comment, I'm not sure you understand what the OSP is alleged
to have been and done. I'd humbly suggest that--via your own choice
of sources--you learn a bit more about it.
The thing that makes me absolutely certain that no evidence of
intelligence tampering by the Bush administration will come to light
is simply that it didn't.
That's what's known as "argumentum ad ignorantiam--" the assertion
that--because something is inexplicable--it must not be true. It may
bolster a belief, but it doesn't prove a case.
If there HAD been a "smoking gun", is there
any doubt at all that the Democrats on the 9/11 committee (or one of
the other bipartisan committees looking into related topics) would
have come forward? After all, this was all happening during the
run-up to a VERY close election, and could have clearly changed the
outcome of the election.
OK, now this sounds dangerously close to contradicting Rumsfeld's
famous "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." :-)
The Democrats couldn't find a smoking gun if it were pointed at them
on national TV. Things that do, and things that don't, get picked up
by the national media often have no rhyme or reason (sometimes the
reason is that they're too controversial, or likely to upset corporate
sponsors . . . or media owners).
This story got enough legs that the administration should have had
much to answer for . . . but it didn't. I can't definitively explain
that . . . but that doesn't mean it's not all true (nor, of course,
does it mean that it all /is/ true).
To surmise that the evidence was obvious enough for "civilians" like
you or me to uncover, but hidden from those on the Senate intelligence
subcommittee or those on the various commissions is a bit of a
(loooong) reach.
I thought Watergate taught us all that this just isn't necessarily the
case. Sometimes it takes the public to unearth the darkest acts of
our government. Why didn't it go further? I dunno . . . but I'd like
to find out.
CNN just did a show ("Dead Wrong: Inside an Intelligence Meltdown")
[5] which--while not going into any detail--mentions the OSP as a
filter used by the administration to cherry pick intelligence in
support of a war. You should watch this show if you get a chance. If
I could figure out how to dump it from TiVo to a VCR, I might :-)
Here's a quote from the show:
"At the Pentagon, SECDEF Donald Rumsfeld sets up a special office to
provide him with alternative intelligence analysis, focusing on a
possible link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. The Pentagon unit is not
mentioned by the President's Commission."
Larry Johnson, Counterterrorism expert from the State Department, is
quoted as saying (about OSP), "They would brief their findings to the
[intelligence] Community and the Community would come back and say,
'Wait a second. You don't know what you're talking about. That's
garbage. That's misleading. That misrepresents, . . . ' and then
they would take the same brief--or even a more extreme version--and
brief it directly to people like the Vice President."
To assume that the Democrat congresscritters knew of
wrongdoing by Bush but kept it to themselves is even further from the
neighborhood of reality.
Here we just disagree, and for several reasons. First, I would say
that the current world of Democrats are anything but masterful
politicians. That, as much as anything, explains why they continue to
lose elections.
You may find (Senator John Kyl's and ) the Pentagon's non-denial
denial interesting as well. Very little in it directly contradicts
the direct accusations that the OSP was a filtering mechanism, asked
to find intelligence in support of a particular policy, which actively
ignored the intelligence community's admonitions [6]
And--though thoroughly trashed by certain groups who don't like her
position--you might be interested in reading about, and the
publications of, Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, formerly of
the Pentagon and the NSA [7]
Now I'm trying to muster up the grit to jump on my damned bike. I'm
not gonna' b*tch to you--a desert rat--about how hot it is here, but .
.. . for us . . . it's hot ;-)
[1]
http://snipurl.com/h9fu
[2]
http://snipurl.com/h9fv
[3]
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/...nate.pentagon/
[4]
http://snipurl.com/h9fw
[5]
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/presents/
[6]
http://rpc.senate.gov/_files/iraqpentagoncsisspeech.pdf
[7]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Kwiatkowski