USA Today reports that the Dems are "in search of a pithy agenda." Is that "pithy" as in "totally pithed off"? Because if not then I don't wanna hear about it.
Under no circumstances
Harvested squeezings from mirth's most irritated pore
Friday, February 10, 2006
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6 Comments:
"Too much information is not good sometimes," said Lauria, 64, a retired General Motors plant worker from West Branch, Mich. "Just give me six or seven strong points that catch people's eye."
I can't say how badly I don't want that to be the way they win...
I can't say how badly I wish we still had two parties in the US. Hell, three or four would be terrific, but I would settle for at least having an opposition party.
Author, I don't know if it's just (as we're told by someone who also tells us he has great credibility) having "blind trust" in my alleged "boy" Howard Dean that tells me this is significant, but here you go and fuck the Dems if they don't run on it no matter how it plays among self-styled "wolves" and "patriots" out in no-spin non-talking point land.
Ex-CIA official: Bush administration misused Iraq intelligence
Friday, February 10, 2006; Posted: 11:28 a.m. EST (16:28 GMT)
(CNN) -- The Bush administration disregarded the expertise of the intelligence community, politicized the intelligence process and used unrepresentative data in making the case for war, a former CIA senior analyst alleged.
In an article published on Friday in the journal Foreign Affairs, Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, called the relationship between U.S. intelligence and policymaking "broken."
"In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made," Pillar wrote.
Although the Clinton administration and other countries' governments also believed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was amassing weapons of mass destruction, they supported sanctions and weapons inspections as means to contain the threat, he said.
The Bush administration's decision to go to war indicates other motivations, Pillar wrote, namely a power shake-up in the Middle East and a hastened "spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region."
The Bush administration "used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made," Pillar wrote. "It went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."
Though Pillar himself was responsible for coordinating intelligence assessments on Iraq, "the first request I received from any administration policymaker for any such assessment was not until a year into the war," he wrote.
Pillar: Intelligence was right
Pillar said much of the intelligence on Iraq proved to have been correct.
Prior to the March 2003 invasion, the intelligence community concluded that the road to democracy in Iraq would be "long, difficult and turbulent" and forecast power struggles between Shiites and Sunnis, Pillar said.
Intelligence experts also predicted that an occupying force would be attacked "unless it established security and put Iraq on the road to prosperity" immediately after the fall of Hussein, he wrote.
As to whether Iraq pursued nuclear weapons, intelligence reports had concluded Iraq was years away from developing them and was unlikely to use such weapons against the United States unless cornered, Pillar said.
The biggest discrepancy between public statements by the Bush administration and judgments by the intelligence community centered on the relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, he said.
"The enormous attention devoted to this subject did not reflect any judgment by intelligence officials that there was or was likely to be anything like the 'alliance' the administration said existed."
Rather, "the administration wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to the 'war on terror' and the threat the American public feared most, thereby capitalizing on the country's militant post-9/11 mood," Pillar wrote.
White House at odds with intelligence
Pillar cited an August 2002 speech by Vice President Dick Cheney that said "intelligence is an uncertain business" and that intelligence analysts had underestimated how close Iraq was to developing a nuclear weapon before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
"His conclusion -- at odds with that of the intelligence community -- was that 'many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.'"
After such remarks, the intelligence community was left "to register varying degrees of private protest," he said.
Pillar also cited President Bush's claim, made in his 2003 State of the Union address, that Iraq was purchasing uranium ore from an African country.
"U.S. intelligence analysts had questioned the credibility of the report making this claim, had kept it out of their own unclassified products, and had advised the White House not to use it publicly," Pillar said.
"But the administration put the claim into the speech anyway, referring to it as information from British sources in order to make the point without explicitly vouching for the intelligence."
http://www.cnn.com/2006/
WORLD/meast/02/10/iraq.intelligence/
" Out of curiosity, how would you want them to win, walrus?"
A fair question, so excuse me while I worm out of it.
I don't think we win out when we reduce the arguments into short 'easy to swallow statements,' in essence a battle of bumper stickers. I loath advice that rhymes, and I am suspicious of things presented as 'common sense.' I have the lost pipe dream of an informed electorate. But at the same time I acknowledge, as Jon Stewart often points out, 'We have shit to do."
But people have made great use of short 'easy to swallow statements,' for more than just getting a message across but for obscuring the details, the reality, the actual truth.
I don't want to be manipulated, I don't want to be talked down to, I don't want to be distilled. And I want to live in a world where other people would find that as insulting as I do. We all have fantasies.
But in short, I feel that a large part of my problem with the 'current power' is that they've used that technique not only to get
thier point across, but to manipulate and alter the truth, and that abuse is too easy to use to be okay with anyone using it.
Walrus,
If by "current power" you mean BOTH political parties, then I agree with you. I think current politics has been reduced to the "ens justify the means" theory, where obscuring facts is both folly and the goal of a party's simplified message. For instance, tort reform to reduce malpractice insurance costs was a good idea, but it could not be expected reduce health insurance costs substantially. Both parties are at fault.
Would another example be how blaming the case President gave to the American people on the intelligence services makes (for you) an absolutely convincing talking point, despite being inaccurate and unintelligent?
Thanks for further demonstrating the idiocy of "blind trust".
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