Am I the only one who sees Bush’s sudden interest to get to the bottom of the Iraq WMD debacle as about as believable as OJ searching every golf course in the U.S. for Nicole’s killer?
“If there’s evil biology in Iraq, we must attack!”
I hear he’s putting some guy called Hutton in charge of it …
Details on this seem pretty scarce.
If it’s substantially as it’s being reported, ie; “Bush appoints independent inquiry into Iraq intelligence,” then, yeah, guffaws.
If it turns out to be something along the lines of “Bush agrees to independent inquiry into Iraq intelligence,” then, well, applause.
I do find Tony Blair’s familiar “Ooh! Ooh! Me too!” hysterical, though.
I swear, that man can turn on a U.S. dime.
No, Reuters is reporting that he will personally appoint the members of the commission. It’s fucking outrageous.
It called “getting ahead of it”. If there is no chance of stopping something, you try to pretend you’re leading the charge, as that is the best way to get control of the outcome. Note well: he has already indicated that he wants the investigation to expand its focus beyond the Iraq WMD issue to larger questions of intelligence failure, and that he doesn’t expect results until after the election. By taking direct charge, he expects to name all the panelists (though I doubt he’s got the chutzpah to try to use Henry Kissinger again…as well, I very much doubt that the name “Scott Ritter” appears anywhere…)
Of course, the first thing he tried was suggesting that he was going to wait until the Iraqi WMD search team was finished and had submitted it’s report. (I wonder if he really thought that had any chance…)
I commend the reader to Josh Marshalls Talking Points Memo http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ without which no citizen can hope to be fully informed. This bit of drollery:
“The president is a consumer of intelligence, not a producer of it," Perle told the Times. “I have long thought our intelligence in the gulf has been woefully inadequate.”
Right. Perle has long been a staunch critic of the CIA. His argument was that they understated the scope of Saddam’s WMD programs, naively discounted his ties to terrorist organizations and had an overly pessimistic vision of post-war Iraq…"
And, of course, Ms. Rice: “The President is not a fact-checker”
As I’ve said elsewhere, I am considering ordering new dancing shoes. I dance like a white boy, spasms of enthusiastic arythmia, but sometimes a patriot has just got to boogie!
Cue Bush apologists in five… four… three…
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/02/02/sprj.nirq.iraq.wmd/index.html
A independent?? This man graduated from Harvard??
:rolleyes:
No… Yale.
Oh shit, sorry sorry sorry Reeder.
Harvard Business School as well. My apologies.
Wait a minute, you’re both right!
Yale undergrad, Harvard Biz school. He’s got his bases covered.
Isn’t “a independent” perfectly good Texican-English? 
Well Rueters is reporting it this way (my bolding):
I’m surprised no one caught this gem (my bolding):
No doubt the Plame leak investigation, about which Bush feigned indignation and determination, will wrap up soon, leaving its members to join the WMD investigation (er, make that the WMDPRA investigation).
The indispensable Paul Krugman on 1/30/04:
It went…
A uhh ahh ehh independent. Or noises to that effect. He stammered between the words.
I’ve been lucky enough to be privy to the list! The list of nominees are:
Republican:
Justices Antonin Scalia/Clarence Thomas (one half vote each)
Admiral John Poindexter
Lt. Col. Oliver North
Paul Wolfowitz
Independent/Nonpartisan:
Strom Thurmond
Huey Long
Roger B. Taney
Democrats:
Jimmy Hoffa
Zell Miller
My preliminary guess is that this nine-person panel will carefully filter the information available and come to a just conclusion, that the Bush family should assume the position of Emperor and reign in glowing splendour for a thousand years.
The whole concept of “intelligence failures” has me shaking my head. A few years back, I had a job that required me to deal with members of the intelligence community on the working level. These people took what information they could get, both open source and clandestinely gathered, and made their best determinations - it amounted to a best guess sometimes. In my experience, these people didn’t have an agenda - they were just trying to understand and interpret the data available to them.
Move a little farther up the line, however, and things changed fast. Spin came into play. Those who did have agendas picked and chose what was important and what wasn’t. I’m not saying the agendas were purely political, but certainly if someone in a senior position felt that something was a fact, he’d make sure that fact was supported, perhaps to the detriment of truth. When you come right down to it, sometimes intel analysis is a judgement call. You don’t always have hard facts to work with.
My point being, while I don’t doubt there were gaps in intelligence and perhaps some faulty analysis, I’m more inclined to believe what filtered down from above was “Give me an assessment that supports my position. Conflicting evidence be damned.” Pure spin. Not an intelligence failure by any means.
And I have no hard cite. It’s just my own reaction based on a few years in those trenches. Take it for what it’s worth.
Exactly. I think that what we had was intelligence interpretation failures, not intelligence failures. Intelligence is about the data.
I heard a short interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski on NPR the other day. He shot a fairly large whole in the Bush line on Iraq.
He was talking about Bush’s claim that it wasn’t just US intelligence that got it wrong. The entire world thought he had WMDs. I think he called this a sad joke. Essentially the reason the whole world thought Saddam had WMDs is because we told them he did. Most all of the countries that bought into this theory based their decision on information provided by US intelligence.
So the administrations argument taken one step further is: We told the world that he had WMDs. The world accepted this determination. We were wrong. But thats OK because the rest of the world was wrong as well.
Worse is the fact that intelligence officials were pretty open about their not having had sufficient intelligence to justify an invasion of Iraq. Then there was Senator Rockefeller (D-WV) who was calling for an investigation of the notorious Niger papers about a week before Bush started the war. This has got to be the most degrading, demoralizing treatment that American intelligence agencies have seen in ages. You know, what with Bush’s father having been the director of the CIA, you don’t suppose Bush’s disrespect for our intelligence agencies is some sort of extension of an Œdipus complex, do you? Tearing down Daddy to win Mommy over? Looks that way to me. I’m going to believe that this is just Bush lashing out in an Œdipal fit until I have proof that it isn’t.
Seriously, what kills me here is the flagrant lack of accountability! A president (or the head of any organization) needs to take some responsibility for what his staff has done. Even if he’s not responsible, he’s got to be able to say, “It’s my fault.” Or at the very least, he can’t go passing the blame off on others. This is truly the most appalling president we’ve had for at least a century. I used to defend Bush against accusations of creeping Nixonism, but now I can safely say that Bush has surpassed Nixon in sleaze and deceit and unjust warmongering and frame-ups.
I’d suggest that Karl Rove revive the acronym CREEP, if Bush had been legitimately elected in the first place. Instead I suggest he form the Committee to Re-Appoint the President.
The short list should include: White House, Tony Blair, CIA, MI-5, NSA, NRO, OSP, DoD, and everyone else mentioned all the time in relation to who booted this question.
Second, whoever Bush appoints will be under intense scrutiny if not outright personal attack before anyone even knows who he appoints. Proof: this thread.
Third, sure it’s just another election year partisan (read, independent) investigation into a president, but this one is meaningful. If you’ve hit 30, this should all seem like a rerun.
Fourth, no matter what the commission concludes, the bureaucracy will do what it can to preserve its funding. Deep denial is what government does best.
Finally, if you want to get at Bush, the political process is the only way you are going to be able to bag him by November.