Hmm. My pal in Iraq (a retired reservist who still got the call) says the sentiment in his unit is anti-administration. At least that’s what he reported in his last letter. But they’ve had their rotation kicked back a few times so that’s probably fueling it.
Yes, you had, and have, a security clearance. And Iraq was, and is, your specialty. But where does that leave you?
Still without an explanation for the chasm between what was claimed about the WMDs before the war, and the total absence of them that we’ve found.
Still without an explanation for why Rumsfeld felt he could cut the troops out of his war plan that might have secured prospective WMD sites to keep them from being looted after our troops had swept Saddam’s troops away, and then moved on. (Links in my posts in the Hey Bluesman, a question for you thread from last spring. Probably about page 3.)
And that latter one is still a stinker, IMHO. If there had been WMDs at these sites, they very well could be in the hands of terrorists by now. If y’all really believed Saddam had 'em, this was a strategy designed to accomplish the very goal that the war was allegedly to prevent.
Fortunately, there appear to have been no WMDs in Iraq, and as a result, our asses are safe from that particular threat.
Was Rummy a traitor? Or a total moron who got lucky? Or did he know from the beginning that there were no WMDs? AFAICT, that pretty much covers the waterfront.
I don’t have a security clearance, and don’t particularly want one. But I don’t always need one.
Bluesman, how do you think your CO would react if he read this thread? If you think it might be a rather negative reaction, you might consider being more careful about what you post, particularly if it involves classified information that has not yet been made public. If Iraq is your intelligence specialty, I think is a spectacularly bad idea for you to be discussing it on a public message board, considering the situation there. And frankly, your posts (particularly the last one quoted above) give me the hives.
TS/SCI.
Only a fool would bet against a man playing with a stacked deck. As we saw last time, Bush only needs to get close to win.
But the side bets are interesting. Here’s where I’d plunk my beer money if I had it:
Date the WMDs are “discovered”: July 23, 2004, the weekend before the Democratic National Convention.
Most discussed issue in the mainstream “liberal” press: gay marriage.
Month it is revealed that millions of Republican dollars were funneled into the Howard Dean election campaign (elucidator turned me onto this one): February, 2005.
And the long shot… Should the President find himself without a commanding lead by mid-August, 2004, the event which will catapult him forward in the polls is: a foiled assassination attempt by a man of pigment on or about August 23, 2004.
If you think the above is cynical, you’ll have to laugh at this next statement, which borders on paranoia. Bluesman may work intel for SOCOM, but what he might not yet have realized is that there are a lot more people who used to work for SOCOM in the world today than there are at Forts Campbell and Bragg… and Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. Want to guess who wants 'em when they go civilian?
I’ll tell ya what, Hoss. You call the FBI if you think I’ve said anything here that you THINK may be classified, or even protected information. I’ll post from prison to apologize if you’re right. Because those are the stakes. I know it, and I never go over the line. I’ve been in this bidness for 18 years, and I’ve never been cited for a security violation or even a practice dangerous to security. I take it seriously, I do assure you.
Well, what a small world. Me, too. But what sets us apart (except for about a ton o’ different accesses) is that I have a need to know to do my job. My job concerning Iraq.
You do if you want to further the mission of this message board on this particular subject.
We don’t want to believe that our leaders are jackals, leading sheep. We will mightily resist even the most iron-clad evidence, we want to nothing to trouble our minds when we rise for the National Anthem at tractor pulls. We honestly believe that a stern admonition to Support Our Troops is some kind of answer, that it explains something. Given the least shred of plausibility to cower behind, we will. Hell, it took years after Viet Nam was revealed to be an utter shitstorm to convince the majority of Americans of the obvious truth. Ronald Reagan virtually admitted that he buggered the Constitution…nobody cared.
So, yeah, its an uphill fight. But I take heart… If an enormous advantage in money, power, and propaganda can be defeated by a savvy American public…however narrowly…God, what a morning that will be! Me, I’ll be that maniac dancing down the street waving Old Glory and spouting quotations for Thomas Paine! and maybe the occassional “Hosannah!”
Do I have to Pit you, Keith? Because frankly, that’s a pile of BS.
Just because one doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean one can’t fight ignorance. Like you say, you know the line between what you can say and what you can’t. But I’m assuming there’s a great deal in the public domain that you can argue, if there’s an argument to be made.
But if you know where the WMDs went, then I have to assume that Rumsfeld does too, and that we’re being lied to in ways that make me shudder. If you can’t explain where they went, then there should be things that you can say about why you can’t explain, that are safe to say. (Other things you can say might not be so safe.)
But “I know the truth and you don’t” is not fighting ignorance, podner, no matter what you know that you can’t say.
But a third thing without an explanation is why your uber-bosses have given up claiming there were actual WMDs in Iraq (as opposed to WMD ‘programs’ which can mean anything), even though you know there were. Dude, something’s fishy here if your C-in-C has pulled an el-foldo on this, but you’re still fighting the battle.
And Saddam’s capture changes none of this, regardless of the morale boost it’s given you.
Pit me, then, Kim. I never thought I’d see the day.
Here’s some news you can use, friend:
There are over a hundred Iraqi weapons dumps that are larger than the island of Manhattan. Uncounted numbers of smaller ones. “Securing the sites” is three small words that have just enormous problems for a force that is still fighting to keep themselves and the friendly Iraqis alive. Hell, the shreiks from this very message board were deafening when some Mesopotamian pottery did NOT go missing, because of our slackness and inattention and blahblahblah…
Do I know where the WMD went? If I did, I’d be the next SecDef. But they were there, past a doubt. What killed all those Kurds, all those Iranians? He not only HAD 'em, he USED 'em!
You want a cite for the stuff I claim to know? I AM the authority here; I am the reference work. You’re not, and unless somebody in the Intelligence Community that I most likely know and have worked with on this problem checks in here, nobody else on the SDMB had my credentials. THAT is a FACT.
THE ONLY REASON I ever post here is because I KNOW WHAT I KNOW, and the opinions expressed on this narrow subject by others are just that - opinions. And unlike anybody else in here, I cannot get away with proffering up my musings on this subject when I do my job. You think GD is tough with all the “CITE?” posts? Wait until your boss hands you the phone with the words, “It’s CIA, and they want to know how you came to your conclusions.” Happens all the time. And even though that’s a common occurrence…
I have had to cancel exactly ONE of my reports in eighteen years, and it was a Big Dam’ Deal; something I never want to do again, and a point of pride with me. (BTW, that was some ten years ago from Misawa, Japan, and in no way related this this subject.)
IF REPORETED IT, I CAN PROVE IT.
But not to you, and not here. You don’t like my debbating style? I don’t care. My credentials are better than yours or anybody else’s. All that’s left for you to doubt is my integrity. And as your friend, I hope I never see that day.
Look, pal, if you’re trying to sell a leap of faith, you’re hanging with the wrong bunch, lemme tell you.
OK, howzabout I just tell you that I got such super-duper secret stuff that if I was to tell you, you’d get an e-mail virus that would kill you and erase your hard drive.
And everything you think is true about Iraq is just a cunning plot by the Mossad. And Tom Clancy. He works for them, you know…
Your argument is that your authority is more credible than our opinions. I dissagree there. You see saying “I have some secret intelligence” would probably work for most people. However under this administration that secret evidence has turned out to be picked by ideology rather than what is actually real.
And in that case opinions not driven by ideology are better than people with facts who wont accept the overwhelmingly obvious conclusion.
The article also says:
I can see that searching a hundred weapons dumps larger than Manhattan would be next to impossible in any finite amount of time. But you guys apparently didn’t believe the WMDs to be hidden in these vast dumps. You thought you knew where they were, and they weren’t there - either due to looting, or because they’d never been there in the first place. (With the first possibility more scary than the second.)
I’m talking about last March and April, when our invincible “Wall of Steel” was roaring through, meeting no opposition. I’m talking about Rumsfeld cutting troop strength for the invasion, and cutting it again, and again, because he had some damned theory he wanted to prove.
He proved it, alright: by not worrying about leaving troops behind to occupy the lands behind our front lines, we were able to take Baghdad in three weeks. But in Iraq, everything from the WMD sites to vital infrastructure were looted. It doesn’t do much good to secure stuff now, if we didn’t bother when the situation was fluid.
At any rate, we had a list of sites that were small enough to be searchable, apparently. We didn’t bother to secure them because we didn’t beef up our forces like we could have - a choice made in advance of the invasion. So, what’s the deal?
If we let these far more discrete, high-probability sites be looted then, it’s silly to blame the failure to find WMDs on these vast weapons dumps now. I agree that there’s no way to prove a negative: WMDs certainly could be hidden in these places. But when we had more specific and clear-cut places to search, we developed a war plan from the get-go that undermined our capability of doing so.
If you are right, then we have traitors in the Cabinet. They went to war allegedly to keep WMDs from the hands of terrorists, but deliberately did so in a way designed to maximize the possibility of those weapons winding up in those very hands.
No kiddin’ on that one, man. This place gives me a stomach ache, and is a total failure on it’s stated mission.
Ignorance abides. Fuck this.
Is this how you and your colleagues responded to the President when aksed for proof of WMDs in Iraq?
That’s not how the quest for knowledge works. If you can’t back up your statements with evidence, your opinion doesn’t count any more than anyone else’s. “This expert said so” isn’t considered a valid reference, at least not in my world (academia). “This expert has found such and such evidence, which is confirmed by this other expert” would be a valid cite, but nothing short of that.
Well, I admit, Bluesman, this is an impossible situation.
It’s perfectly rational for you to say what you know. That’s fine.
But it’s also perfectly rational for people here not to accept such statements without back up which you, with respect for your clearance, cannot provide.
So there’s no way to resolve the issue to the standards available here.
So don’t get worked up over it as I like seeing what you have to say…but my exposure to both our elected leaders and senior members of the military have engendered in me a certain…cynicism. But that’s because I’m in the media. I have to treat them all as if they’re gaming me…even when I’m reasonably certain they’re not.
Hell, I’ve held TS clearance in the past when I worked for USAID and the State Department. I never once shared that info with anyone not cleared for it.
But since I left there and joined my current profession I’ve been exposed to far more sensitive info than ever when I actually HAD a clearance. And all of it was done a-purpose.
So go ahead and share…it’s a worthwhile addition to the discussion. But we all have to know that it’s statements from someone in the know who CAN’T cite sources and methods and just adjust to that.
What a lovely little snit.
Well, a recent Newseek poll casts a rather odd light on all this.
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh04gen.htm
It seems that GeeDubya out-polls every Dem candidate, closest runner being Dean, who would lose 49% to 42%.
But, when asked the question of whether or not GeeDubya deserved another term i.e. “In general, would you like to see George W. Bush reelected to another term as president, or not?”
he loses 50% to 45%.
I’m not sure what to make of such numbers, 'cept that rumors of invulnerability are wildly exaggerated.
And that’s why I made the bet, Bricker!
I expect that scotch will go down Smoooooth…
’Luci:
Yeah, when I saw those poll numbers last week they sure did seem contradictory. But you needn’t worry. I’m sure no one in the Bush administration is taking his re-election as a given. This’ll be one nasty election, especially if Dean is the Dem candidate.
The one caveat I’d give is that, assuming the economy chugs along well and the situation in Iraq gets no worse, there is one thing that will assure Bush of re-election: if ObL is captured.