MSNBC – Bush panel rips U.S. intelligence abilities It will be fun to watch the wingnuts spin this one. It will be the old, “gosh, we were just reacting to the same flawed intelligence everyone else had” routine (intelligence so flawed that the former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet had to be rewarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.) For those of you addicted to the FauxNews 6-second soundbite, I’ll translate some of the commission’s findings:
President Bush’s commission on weapons of mass destruction found that America’s spy agencies were “dead wrong” in most of their judgments about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.
“Saddam never had the weapons that he said he never had.”
The main cause, the commission said, was the intelligence community’s “inability to collect good information about Iraq’s WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions rather than good evidence.”
“We never really told the president we were just guessing that Saddam had weapons.”
“The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments,” the report said.
“We didn’t make those guesses because the president told us to…”
But it added: “It is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom.”
“…but we knew damn well what kind of guesses the president wanted us to make.”
The proposals were prompted in part by an Iraqi defector code-named “Curve Ball” who may have had a drinking problem and who provided suspect information on Saddam’s purported mobile weapons labs, officials said.
“There was this alcoholic Iraqi who told us stuff that supported our guesses…”
The document included dissent in the form of cautionary footnotes from the State Department’s intelligence bureau, the Energy Department and the Air Force.
“…which we thought was a little shaky, so we put it at the end of the novella-sized report…”
But a senior administration official acknowledged in July 2003 that Bush and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice did not read footnotes in the 90-page document.
“…so you can’t blame us that Bush and Rice couldn’t be bothered to read the fine print!”
Yeah, except this time the “fine print” doesn’t get us stuck with a two-year service agreement with a wireless phone comany, it got us 1,534+ American soldiers killed, 12,000+ seriously wounded, uncounted thousands of dead Iraqis, emnity of the Muslim world, fractured relations with our allies, loss of moral high ground due to torture and suspension of habeus corpus, $158B spent, and falling military morale and recruitment.
Regarding the right-to-die issue of last week (as I futilely resist the urge to post any more about Schaivo) Bush likes to say we should “err on the side of life”. In considering warfare, why does this standard not apply? How about erring on the side of caution? How about erring on the side of proof rather than assumptions?
