It took far too long, but a report by the Pentagon inspector general has finally confirmed that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s do-it-yourself intelligence office cooked up a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda to help justify an unjustifiable war.
The report said the team headed by Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, developed “alternative” assessments of intelligence on Iraq that contradicted the intelligence community and drew conclusions “that were not supported by the available intelligence.” Mr. Feith certainly knew the Central Intelligence Agency would cry foul, so he hid his findings from the C.I.A. Then Vice President Dick Cheney used them as proof of cloak-and-dagger meetings that never happened, long-term conspiracies between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that didn’t exist, and — most unforgivable — “possible Iraqi coordination” on the 9/11 attacks, which no serious intelligence analyst believed.
The inspector general did not recommend criminal charges against Mr. Feith because Mr. Rumsfeld or his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, approved their subordinate’s “inappropriate” operations. The renegade intelligence buff said he was relieved.
So let's see if we have this straight -- it is essentially universally acknowledged at this point that Feith led a team whose implicit (possibly explicit, within the confines of its parent agency) mission was to find or contrive intel links that would support the Chimpco administration's fraudulent casus belli for invasion. And yet Feith is immune from accountability because his bosses signed off on it. And they are in turn immune from accountability because....well, I guess because such notions are as quaint and outdated as the Constitution.
Does it need to be said that that is not how intel gathering is supposed to work, that partisan information by definition is bullshit? Of course it needs to be said; people have become so addled and inured to the process that they welcome crap like "intelligent design" being dumped on their kids in science class. Why wouldn't they automatically assume that the Cheneyites had some sort of god-given right to present their own carefully cobbled "side" of the story?
The Dumbest Motherfucking Guy on the Face of the Planet prepares some hot, fresh intel to justify his bosses' fever dreams.
Top administration officials, especially Mr. Cheney, had long been furious at the C.I.A. for refusing to confirm the delusion about a grand Iraqi terrorist conspiracy, something the Republican right had nursed for years. Their frustration only grew after 9/11 and the C.I.A. still refused to buy these theories.
Mr. Wolfowitz would feverishly sketch out charts showing how this Iraqi knew that Iraqi, who was connected through six more degrees of separation to terrorist attacks, all the way back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
But the C.I.A. kept saying there was no reliable intelligence about an Iraq-Qaeda link. So Mr. Feith was sent to review the reports and come back with the answers Mr. Cheney wanted. The inspector general’s report said Mr. Feith’ s team gave a September 2002 briefing at the White House on the alleged Iraq-Qaeda connection that had not been vetted by the intelligence community (the director of central intelligence was pointedly not told it was happening) and “was not fully supported by the available intelligence.”
The false information included a meeting in Prague in April 2001 between an Iraqi official and Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 pilots. It never happened. But Mr. Feith’s report said it did, and Mr. Cheney will still not admit that the story is false.
The continued existence of Richard Bruce Cheney is merely proof that the Flying Spaghetti Monster has an irretrievably warped sense of humor. As the saying goes, the evil that he's done will live on long after he's gone. He should be proud of himself, of the carnage he's willfully brought down on a lot of innocent people. What a good Christian man he is; do unto others and all that.
What White House intel analyst would be taken seriously without his Official Cooking Ensemble? Be just like your favorite administration official/rightard blogger -- get yours today!
In a statement released yesterday, Senator Carl Levin, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has been dogged in pursuit of the truth about the Iraqi intelligence, noted that the cooked-up Feith briefing had been leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine so Mr. Cheney could quote it as the “best source” of information about the supposed Iraq-Qaeda link.
The Pentagon report is one step in a long-delayed effort to figure out how the intelligence on Iraq was so badly twisted — and by whom. That work should have been finished before the 2004 elections, and it would have been if Pat Roberts, the obedient Republican who ran the Senate Intelligence Committee, had not helped the White House drag it out and load it in ways that would obscure the truth.
Truth, schmuth. Seriously, Pat Roberts' obstructionist behavior in all this has been unconscionable and unacceptable, and I assume that Levin and the rest of them are ready to crawl up this motherfucker's scroungy ass with a microscope. Roberts needs to go down with the rest of this ship of fools.
The latest intel regarding Iran, ready for popular consumption.
1 comment:
It took far too long, but a report by the Pentagon inspector general has finally confirmed that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s do-it-yourself intelligence office cooked up a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda to help justify an unjustifiable war.
I confirmed this as it was happening, and I would have only charged a fraction of the price that this investigation cost them to make my findings known to the public.
I mean, I know I'm just a modern-day Visigoth at the gates of decent society, but Jesus Fuckemall Christ, why do I still hear so many people going on and on about the intelligence? They lied to get what they want. The intelligence was one fig leaf out of many. And they're goddamn doing it again, which is what really makes me froth and foam. What good is all this examining recent history with a magnifying glass if no one can draw a conclusion from it to apply in real time?
They're pathological liars. They can't be trusted to deliver a weather report. Ostracize them from society and don't ever listen to them again. There, we're done! Wasn't that easy?
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