Well, you’re certainly not setting a good example of intellectual honesty right now, manhattan. I think you know as well as the rest of us that Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent was the sort of secret that was never supposed to be leaked to any unauthorized person under any circumstances; whereas intelligence briefings of the kind cited in the OP often are deliberately partially “leaked” in order to test the wind of public opinion. Furthermore, this particularly leak, unlike the Plame leak, puts no lives in danger. Quite the contrary – it might help build public support for getting us out of this mess, which would save American lives.
Wow!
Kudos from Tam! Made my Doper day. 
since the document wasn’t leaked, you may have to eagerly wait a very long time. NYT noted, “The officials declined to discuss the key judgments…”
First, CIA≠NIC. Second The bulk of what was presented in the 1st NIE was correct.
But your right caution shouldbe exercised as always. Look at how closely one had to read the first NIE. One had to read it as if it were a matter of life or death.
Good thing because of what I’ve noted above- very long time and all that.
And keep in mind how much things have gone downhill since that report was prepared in July.
It’s not just the Democrats that are seeing that the President’s “Freedom is on the march” is hyperbolic, to put it as nicely as I can.
In the event that the OP returns to cull our thoughts:
I think it’s a typical report from the sky-is-falling network. It is a bleeding heart editorial thinly disquised as news, using rhetorical technique rather than fact to nudge the reader in a particular direction. For example:
Why is that a contrast? It is perfectly possible to make significant progress on one front while losing ground on others. Yet CNN presents a false dilemma.
Why is that worth even mentioning? A CIA spokesman who comments on a “highly classified” document prepared for the president is a rat. And all we can tell abouth the NSC spokesman is that he might have been at a PTA meeting or something. Yet CNN presents this as some onerous evidence that everyone is being hush-hush about something dreadful.
English has articles and other qualifiers for a reason — they help to deobfuscate and clarify. When it suits them, CNN (and other news sources) use them liberally. Some Senate Republicans… Most Senate Republicans… Or in this case, A Senate Republican. CNN quoted only Chuck Hagel. Yet CNN chooses to use a phrase that implies that, for all we know, all Senate Republicans and Democrats denounce blah blah blah.
And so? Setting aside another missing qualifier (how many other committee members?), it isn’t clear to me what this has to do with the story, and in fact implies that it’s pretty old news. It’s more like CNN saying, “Hey, look! Here’s more proof that Bush is a dodo-head!” Frankly, if all these Republicans were up in arms before the war, where the hell was CNN back when it might have mattered? CNN could have opposed the war when it would have been brave to do so. Yet CNN chooses to pick one out of (for all we know) many pessimistic reports that it happens to see some other source reporting, and pretend it’s news.
And there’s the crux of it — its own sting being woefully impotent, CNN hopes to stir something up by painting the Republicans as fiercely fighting each other, when the whole world knows that Karl Rove has wrapped up the Democrats into a knot and thrown them in the trash. Too little too late, CNN. No wonder you’re number two.
No, they’re not, Liberal. CNN has more viewers than Fox; Fox has higher ratings because, apparently, its viewers spend more hours per week watching it.
I’m confused. I thought ratings were a rough measure of how many people watch during a specific time period. Your saying that more different people watch CNN, but they do so in small groups? Meanwhile less different people watch Fox, but they do so in large groups. That way any particular measure shows fox with more viewers, but really its just that more of thier viewers are watching.
I’m more confused.
It’s very simple: More people watch CNN than Fox News, but the viewers of Fox are more devoted – they watch it for more hours per week.
From Extra! (the magazine, print and online, of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), April 2004 (http://www.fair.org/extra/0404/fox-ratings.html):
That’s what I thought. But how does that put to lie Liberal’s suggestion that CNN is number 2? Isn’t the standard measure of such things the ratings?
The post was based on my understanding of the news broadcast on Thursday evening. Having seen more on the report, or the parts made public, and looking at the parts of the report released by the Administration, not leaked, the analysis is more pessimistic that the initial news reports suggested.
You don’t have to rely on spin and comment to reach that conclusion. All you have to do is read the damned thing. Of course it should be read with a view to the fact that some past NIEs have been about as wrong as they could have been – especially the estimate of October 2002 on Iraq’s unconventional weapons. Some how I keep thinking of the staff officers axiom – that no battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy. This estimate does serve to emphasize that our nation went into this thing with a battle plan that assumed the best case scenario – that US forces (the collation of the willing) would be welcomed as liberators and rescuers, that the whole thing could be funded with oil revenues, that the civil infrastructure could be made operational in short order and that every thing would be hunky-dory and Donald Rumsfelt would be made the Queen of May. The plan didn’t work because it was based on wishful thinking and there was no fall back position. There should have been a Plan B, and a Plan C and yet another plan right through the alphabet. It was throughly predictable that Plan A would fail. That is why there is an axiom, for Pete’s sake.
For those who think that the whole invasion and occupation were handled in a suburb manner, was required for the security of the nation in the face of a clear and present danger and that everything is going just dandy, I can only hope that Senator McCain was wrong last week when he opined a 20 year occupation and that your children and grandchildren will not have to follow the flag into the Iraqi desert. Surely that wasn’t the Plan.
It seems that by your standards, everything is an editorial and nothing is news.
So when was the last time you heard Bush saying “We are making progress in some areas, but losing in other areas”? To hear Bush or his various mouthpieces tell it, only those who are “excessively negative” (Scott McClellan) see anything bad happening in Iraq. So it looks to me like CNN’s description of the situation is right on the money.
I read the CNN article, and I do not see any sentence which says or suggests what you claim here. Where to they suggest that “something dreadful” is being covered up?
So what exactly is your complaint? CNN and others shouldn’t allowed to use the phrase ‘Democrats and Republicans’ unless every single members of both party is acting in unsion? Or if not that, then what is the standard you’re using to judge them negatively on this, and why is it reasonable to ask that every news organization obey your standard? Face the facts. Everybody regularly describes something as a bipartisan effort even if the only evidence they provide is statements from one or a few people from each party. Explain why CNN should be castigated for this particular instance.
Cite, please. If the whole world knows it, you obviously won’t have any trouble providing some evidence.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/08/20040805-4.html
Here’s a better cite, of Bush talking in August after he got that report. According to him, there have been “great challenges” but we’ve “successfully met every one” and in the final analysis everything is just rosy in Iraq. So CNN was absolutely correct when they said that the contents of the report were not compatible with what Bush is telling the country.
No, it doesn’t. It says in the very first paragraph that “America and our allies are fighting a new kind of war against a different kind of enemy. This conflict places great demands on the men and women of our armed forces, including our Guard and Reserve. They have met every test. They’ve risen to every challenge.”. The word ‘challenge’ is used one other time in an entirely different context. Nowhere in the link does Bush say that we have conquered every challenge. It says simply that we have risen to them.
No it doesn’t.
Constantly. He’s constantly saying that there’s much more work to do.
I’m sure it does.
I quoted the sentence.
You mean, if I repeat it, you’ll get it this time?
Oh, do you have a link to a Bush speech that actually acknowledges the truth about what’s going on in Iraq? That violence is on the rise, with 90 attacks on our troops daily and God knows how many on the Iraq civilian populace? That a significant chunk of the country is in the hands of insurgents? That the vast majority of the money we sent for reconstruction hasn’t been spent? And that a civil war may be imminent? That’s orders of magnitude away from just saying “a lot of work needs to be done”.
You quoted this sentence: “CIA spokesman declined to comment Wednesday night, and a National Security Council spokesman could not be reached for comment.”
Then you said: “CNN presents this as some onerous evidence that everyone is being hush-hush about something dreadful.”
The sentence that you quoted from CNN does not mean the same thing as the sentence that you yourself wrote, at least not when parsed in the English language. As far as I can tell they have no relationship to each other whatsoever. If you think they do mean the same thing, please explain to me how you reached that conclusion. Otherwise provide an example of CNN stating that the CIA and NSC are covering up “something dreadful”, or else admit that you lied about what CNN wrote.
I asked several questions in that paragraph. Are you capable of answering any of those questions, or are you just going to stick with snarky but meaningless retorts?
I really do appreciate your attempt to remove the polemic earlier. but this seems to simply reasert it. Can you name for me a single serious policy thinker who belives that everything is going just dandy? Really?
This seems reasonable. But the report itself is classified. So we cannot read the damned thing. We have a few quotes from a few people who have read it. These quotes are necessarily taken out of context (although not necessarily to the point of falshood) because we don’t have the actual report. Everything else. I repeat, everything else is spin. It may be accurate, but it is spin, nonetheless.
To me saying that our forces have “met every test” and “risen to every challenge” means the same thing as saying that our forces have succeeded on our mission in Iraq despite every challenge. Perhaps you were taught a different meaning of the words. Regardless, one of our goals was to create a stable, prosperous, and peaceful democracy in Iraq. We have not achieved that goal, we have not risen to every challenge to that goal from the insurgency, and the report from the NIC indicates that it’s very unlikely we will. So I stand by my previous interpretation. Of course, if you don’t like that Bush statement, I’m sure there are bloggers out there who will give you plenty of other head in the clouds quotes from the Bush administration.
There is no “standard measure.” CNN has more viewers, and I say that makes CNN number 1, Fox number 2. YMMV.
Perhaps we were. But even so, it seems pretty clear from the rest of that link that Bush was not suggesting that the conflict was over.
Can you quote the part of the report which says that this is unlikely? Obviously we have not achieved that goal. No one said we would in this amount of time. Can you name the challenges we have not risen to meet? They shoot at us we shoot at them. Perhaps not the best way to meet their challenge, but meeting it nonetheless.