Wait-Bluesman actually said he worked for the CIA? Since when does anyone who works for the CIA admit it? My great-aunt did, but no one found out that she did until she retired. (And she wasn’t an agent or anything, just a secretary).
Well, were he an actual intelligence officer, hinting around at “secret evidence” that was going to come out soon and prove something would have been a professional breach of conduct.
Of course, I don’t believe for a second that he’s involved in intelligence at all. But it’s simple: his little hints on the message board were a tremendous breach of professional integrity if he was indeed a professional. Otherwise, they were out and out lies and a terrible breach of personal integrity.
I try not to view people like him as emblematic of others who share his views. But just look at the thread that inspired this - is there any evidence that they have any integrity whatsoever? Truly, someone like Bluesman would fit right in, wouldn’t they?
I see no defense for him and you certainly haven’t offered up much of an effort. I’m not necessarily terribly fond of Sevastopol, but by comparing him with a pathetic lying sack like Bluesman, you’ve done a bang-up job of making him look good.
Just to add. Doesn’t this jump out at you as a dangerous and wrong thing to say, for someone who works in intelligence analysis?
Bluesman Pit thread - contents also link to an earlier thread.
The evidence is circumstantial. So if you wish to reject circumstantial evidence, feel free. So far, Airman Doors has said he was a mere executor of policy. That’s the strongest defence and I don’t buy it for reasons which should be clear by now. The man corrupted his position.
I don’t know to a level of certainty. I know enough to say he knew the evidence was not there.
See Polycarp: Trained, experienced and professionally skeptic, intelligence analyst. All that training, experience and professional skepticism was fooled? I don’t think so and neither do you, or anyone in this discussion.
This is where you and I differ. He was on board with his analysis and his policy view from day 1. To listen, the evidence was rock solid, or even if it wasn’t the policy was necessary and he was taking the necessary steps to back it, evidence be damned. Isn’t that what the quote from him says?
No, I did it as courtesy to you and understanding Bluesman as a byword for bad character and a useful data point, the Bluesman scandal is useful and compelling evidence in interesting questions. If not for that I could merely have linked the 2 earlier Pit threads.
I believe he claimed to work for NSA, not that it changes anything. I don’t think those guys go around telling people what they do for a living either.
Yeah, that’s my recollection, too.
“They” in sentence two refers to members of the United States intelligence services.
And this has to do with your argument how?
Good Lord, I’d forgotten all about that thread - which isn’t surprising, given its date of April 2004. I read the first page, and all I found from you were unsupported allegations. When come back, bring better links.
So: are you going to explain what the evidence is, and how it adds up to an argument supporting your claims?
I guess not. Never mind.
Kindly don’t tell me what I do or don’t think. It’ll just be yet one more thing you’re wrong about.
You did NOT post the following as a courtesy to me:
I wasn’t even in the thread at that point. Did your crystal ball tell you I’d show up?
Yeah, I was pretty pissed at him about that too. And I don’t blame you for being pissed even now. He was, quite simply, an asshole about that. I can’t excuse him for what he said, or especially how he said it.
Yeah, I try to drop in on him and Lucretia whenever I’m down that way, which is a few times a year.
I’ll pass the message along. 
Because it shows he brought a biased mind to his professional responsibility.
No need, other people provided the relevant links in that thread. Do I really need to duplicate what’s there?
Some of the circumstantial evidence is in my previous post. It’s too large a task to find it all.
So do you believe trainedProfessionalExperiencedIntelligenceAnalyst was fooled? And so enthusiastically? What do you think happened?
No of course not that. But subsequent references to the man yes, my promise not to do so notwithstanding.
Isn’t it just barely possible he’s too embarrassed about having been fooled so badly to face it himself, much less say so to anyone else?
yea, I remember that ass. but aren’t there still some dumbfucks currently around who have the fucking audacity to continue to spout the party line as if we were the ones who had it wrong back then?
Ya know, that’s a characteristic I really don’t want in an intelligence agent. Because, well, their job is dealing with life and death situations, and someone who refuses (for example) to call off an operation, because they’re too embarassed to admit that they got bad intel, is someone who’s going to allow a whole lotta innocent people to get killed for no good reason.
What would Mr. Rogers do?
He’d make a plan and he’d follow through / That’s what Mr. Rogers would do.
Well, I agree with that on its own, but why apply it to Bluesman. I remember the dude, and I don’t care who here knows him, who has sat on his porch, whatever.
He always seemed to me as full of shit as any other “If I told you I’d have to kill you” types on the board. As AD said, he might have an intel billet. That could mean anything from a clerk to a low level analyst to a full fledged spook. The latter I highly doubt. And if he showed an NSA (or insert agency of choice) ID to somebody who he knows, that don’t mean shit either. There are tens of thousands of alphabet agency employees that never see anything on the intel end.
As was said earlier, the real intel guys don’t say shit about what they do, much less on a message board. Personally, I think at the most he might have rubbed elbows here and there with intel types, and decided to play it up here on the Dope without really knowing shit.
Just my opinion, feel free to flame, but remember I might have your dossier… 
I still can’t get my head around the notion of an enlisted man being in the position to sign off on anything remotely resembling a comprehensive analysis. A single cog in the machine, perhaps.
I have this image of an NCO being given a stack of documents, each representing an assertion that is in question, and being ordered to determine whether the fact in each document can be shown to be true or not true. In my imaginary scenario, the NCO is not asked or encouraged to submit evidence that might place a fact into a context that shows it to be more or less significant than any other fact. When the officer[s] in charge of submitting the actual comprehensive analysis of the situation have put together the picture they believe most usefully describes the reality, they assemble it and forward it up the chain.
Now, if there’s any validity to the picture I have just drawn, our imaginary NCO will not himself be doing the cooking of intel, or the cherry-picking, and although the sign on the door of his department may say “Intelligence Analysis and Retrieval” in a big official-looking font, he’s not really an analyst in any true sense of the word; he’s more of a collation specialist. Nevertheless, he actually eyeballs a metric assload of facts that he’s been ordered to determine the factualness of, and he will form his own perceptions of what the whole truth is, based on the facts he has seen, and in some cases, vetted.
Such an NCO, while not blameless for the part he played in the creation of final intelligence documents, can be said to be offering his opinions (outside the context of the office environment) in good faith, and probably should not be considered as culpable as, say, Condoleeza Rice, in the screwed-up mess that emerges trom the bowels of the NSA. OTOH, shooting off his mouth (metaphorically speaking) on an Internet message board, is probably not the wisest thing to do, at least if he values the opinions that the message board denizens hold of him.
DISCLAIMER: the above is pulled entirely out of my ass, and I make no representation that I believe it to be an accurate summation of the role of an enlisted man in an analysis department of the NSA.
Same here, kaylasdad. And I can’t get too hot and bothered, even retrospectively, over Bluesman’s rigid stance back then. IIRC I rather tangled with his wife Lucretia, also an Air Force officer, over whether even questioning the justification for war would cause active harm to our folks serving. We differed, sharply. But…meh. None of it’s worth retrospective spite.
It was give-and-take on a message board. I believed then, as now, that Bluesman and Lucretia sincerely and whole-heartedly believed every word they wrote. Neither of 'em made any secret of their dedication to the military, nor their loyalty to it. They both shared some–equally IMO–genuinely moving insights about why they believed their sacrifices and service mattered. They misled no one about where they came from or why.
Of course Bluesman believed what his chain of command told him. It’s part and parcel with serving honorably. I don’t fault him for a minute for stating his views strongly. He was lied to. We all were. Most of us don’t expect a whole helluva lot out of politicans but the consequences for cynical political idiocy are vastly different for serving military folks.
Scapegoating Bluesman is wrong, just plain flat wrong. He, and so many good, dedicated people like him, have been betrayed worst of all. I wouldn’t be suprised if he still wants to believe, if for no other reason than anything else makes a mockery of his life of service. Offhand I can’t think of many more excruciating traps.
He didn’t cause it, he couldn’t control it and he couldn’t cure it.
Perhaps, but he didn’t have to imply that others were traitors or friends of Saddam for disbelieving it.
Military intelligence (go ahead, make your jokes) is strictly operator based. Before we deploy, before we fly, and in the case of the Army before they go out on any sort of mission, patrol, whatever, we are the end-users of that information. With certain clearances, required for intel people, you can see much more, but the bottom line is that military people are at the end of the chain, especially low-ranking enlisted people (at that time he was a Tech Sergeant and I was a Senior Airman). We know what we were told, he saw more big-picture stuff but it was all disseminated down to us. His job was to make what got down to us into a cogent and coherent briefing with everything we needed to know, or to provide the same briefing to his bosses.
My point in all this is that when it got to us it was already spun in the direction the Administration wanted it to go. Where that happened, I don’t know. But it happened way above our pay grades. The problem with this sort of thing is that when you’re dealing with somebody with a history of subterfuge like Saddam, if they tell you that they know where the stuff is, well, they know. They knew where the Scuds were in the first war, right? Nothing can hide from the US government, right? It wasn’t hard to believe that we did know.
I think (I hope) that we have learned to cast a critical eye to this kind of stuff now. Nevertheless, we in the military are stuck in an interesting quandary, because if we don’t believe what they’re saying now how are we supposed to believe them when they give us a mission briefing with information that could save your life? It’s not easy for me to reconcile anymore.
Let’s be honest. Bluesman wasn’t any more arrogant than the rest of us who were for the war, and he really wasn’t any more arrogant than some of you who were against it. That whole period of time was very trying for everybody, and it got ugly at times. This is really about trying to put the screws to somebody a little bit more because you can. It’s spiteful more than anything else.