Wednesday, December 14, 2005
And it continues...Part Deux
And it continues….
The Chicago Tribune, in its perpetual quest to defend the administration’s drunken lurch towards war, publishes another section on apologizing for The Road to War series.
My post yesterday (The Big Lie) is largely a refutation of the Tribune’s rancid argument, but I feel the need to expound.
I wouldn’t trust the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee further than I could collectively throw them. According to Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the committee, [Roberts was trying to] "lay all of this out on the intelligence community and never get to any other branches of government; in particular the White House and associated high and visible government agencies," he told Knight Ridder.
Roberts, the Kansan Republican who chairs the committee, is a blind thrall to the White House. His concern for the outing of Valerie Plame? "I must say from a common sense standpoint, driving back and forth to work to the CIA headquarters, I don't know if that really qualifies as being, you know, covert," he tells CNN.
Yup. To quote Larry Johnson, an actual CIA agent who worked with Valerie Plame, “Folks, there is no excuse for this level of incompetence. There are thousands of undercover CIA employees who drive through the three gates at CIA Headquarters in McLean, Virginia everyday. And this Senator from Kansas who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee has the audacity to blame CIA for intelligence failures? How can he recognize failures when he does not even understand the very simple basics about people who work undercover at CIA?”
Of course, Roberts understands “the very simple basics about people who work undercover at CIA” well enough. He simply chooses to echo Republican National Committee talking points because he is a rank traitor who puts loyalty to party over loyalty to truth and loyalty to country. The conclusions of the committee he chairs are swarming with omissions, mischaracterizations, and willful blindness like maggots devouring a head-sized block of rotten meat.
The report, like many other similar reports (the Butler Report for one), concluded that although Al Qaeda made overtures to Iraq, “these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship.” Period. The Tribune editorial even quotes this, but then goes on to selectively quote other parts of the report that relay tidbits of information that do not come within a country mile of supporting Bush’s claim that “You can't distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam” on 9/25/02. Cheney used the standard administration deceptive generalization to claim that Iraq "had long-established ties with al Qaeda," not bothering to mention that, by his definition of “ties,” 60 nations have “ties” to Al Qaeda.
But The Tribune cites misleading and weak bits of evidence anyway.
“Al Qaeda or associated operatives were present in Baghdad and northeastern Iraq,” but there are Al Qaeda cells in an estimated 60 countries!
And that a desperate Hussein might use Al Qaeda to conduct a terrorist attack in a time of war, though that is pure speculation.
The Tribune article goes on to claim that “Iraq was a likely suspect. Its chronic refusal to heed United Nations mandates made it more so.” And so now we launch wars based on suspicions of collaboration?
At least the article makes a passing attempt to acknowledge the discredited assertions, like the supposed Czech rendezvous between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi officials, which never happened. Czech officials told the Bush Administration so at the time.
American Progress has a good analysis of the claims v. the intel here.
The Bush Administration had access to all sorts of Curveball-false informers, DIA dissents, and CIA suspicions that collectively added up to known lies, refutations of the weak arguments to invade, and baseless speculation. And on this sterling evidence they launched an invasion in violation of the UN charter, without the assent of the Security Council, and against the will of the vast majority of the people of the region and the world. To paper over their porous wall of bad intelligence they used the broad brush of generalization to quote out of context, appeal to ignorance, make a one-sided argument, and make an appeal to fear (“we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”). All in the service of starting a war.
The Chicago Tribune, in its perpetual quest to defend the administration’s drunken lurch towards war, publishes another section on apologizing for The Road to War series.
My post yesterday (The Big Lie) is largely a refutation of the Tribune’s rancid argument, but I feel the need to expound.
I wouldn’t trust the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee further than I could collectively throw them. According to Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the committee, [Roberts was trying to] "lay all of this out on the intelligence community and never get to any other branches of government; in particular the White House and associated high and visible government agencies," he told Knight Ridder.
Roberts, the Kansan Republican who chairs the committee, is a blind thrall to the White House. His concern for the outing of Valerie Plame? "I must say from a common sense standpoint, driving back and forth to work to the CIA headquarters, I don't know if that really qualifies as being, you know, covert," he tells CNN.
Yup. To quote Larry Johnson, an actual CIA agent who worked with Valerie Plame, “Folks, there is no excuse for this level of incompetence. There are thousands of undercover CIA employees who drive through the three gates at CIA Headquarters in McLean, Virginia everyday. And this Senator from Kansas who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee has the audacity to blame CIA for intelligence failures? How can he recognize failures when he does not even understand the very simple basics about people who work undercover at CIA?”
Of course, Roberts understands “the very simple basics about people who work undercover at CIA” well enough. He simply chooses to echo Republican National Committee talking points because he is a rank traitor who puts loyalty to party over loyalty to truth and loyalty to country. The conclusions of the committee he chairs are swarming with omissions, mischaracterizations, and willful blindness like maggots devouring a head-sized block of rotten meat.
The report, like many other similar reports (the Butler Report for one), concluded that although Al Qaeda made overtures to Iraq, “these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship.” Period. The Tribune editorial even quotes this, but then goes on to selectively quote other parts of the report that relay tidbits of information that do not come within a country mile of supporting Bush’s claim that “You can't distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam” on 9/25/02. Cheney used the standard administration deceptive generalization to claim that Iraq "had long-established ties with al Qaeda," not bothering to mention that, by his definition of “ties,” 60 nations have “ties” to Al Qaeda.
But The Tribune cites misleading and weak bits of evidence anyway.
“Al Qaeda or associated operatives were present in Baghdad and northeastern Iraq,” but there are Al Qaeda cells in an estimated 60 countries!
And that a desperate Hussein might use Al Qaeda to conduct a terrorist attack in a time of war, though that is pure speculation.
The Tribune article goes on to claim that “Iraq was a likely suspect. Its chronic refusal to heed United Nations mandates made it more so.” And so now we launch wars based on suspicions of collaboration?
At least the article makes a passing attempt to acknowledge the discredited assertions, like the supposed Czech rendezvous between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi officials, which never happened. Czech officials told the Bush Administration so at the time.
American Progress has a good analysis of the claims v. the intel here.
The Bush Administration had access to all sorts of Curveball-false informers, DIA dissents, and CIA suspicions that collectively added up to known lies, refutations of the weak arguments to invade, and baseless speculation. And on this sterling evidence they launched an invasion in violation of the UN charter, without the assent of the Security Council, and against the will of the vast majority of the people of the region and the world. To paper over their porous wall of bad intelligence they used the broad brush of generalization to quote out of context, appeal to ignorance, make a one-sided argument, and make an appeal to fear (“we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”). All in the service of starting a war.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 10:30 AM 
