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| Fifth Column | |
| The Last Bastion of the Left’s Sanity Slowly Slipping Away | |
| 2003-11-26 | |
| ’Evidence’ for Link Is Administration Ploy By Christopher Scheer Christopher Scheer is the co-author of the "The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq," co-published this month by Seven Stories Press and Akashic Books. (Sounds like a moderate to me) Two weeks ago, a flurry of opinion polls from CBS News and elsewhere showed that Americans were increasingly unhappy with the war in Iraq and didn’t believe that it had achieved its aims or made us any safer. The following week, the Weekly Standard, the organ of the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, published extensive excerpts of a leaked, top-secret memo sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee the previous month by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, a leading neocon ideologue in the Bush administration. (So explain to me how these two things are connected? How about that poll that shows the majority of Americans believe that Saddam and Al-Qaeda had ties? Makes more sense doesn’t it?) The memo sought to retroactively defend the debunked claims that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden had meaningful ties. Coincidence? Perhaps. But the leak and publication of the Feith memo, which selectively presented a few dozen raw intelligence items plucked from more than a decade of debriefings by national and foreign intelligence agencies, not only shows a certain desperation on the part of the administration to shore up support for the occupation, but it also fits squarely into the cynical pattern of abusing Americans’ trust we have seen since 9/11. That, you will remember, was when the administration made the calculated political decision to exploit American anger and grief as the launching pad for an unrelated and extremely reckless foreign policy hatched up in a pair of right-wing think tanks. (What did you just say? Give me some of that stuff you’re smoking.) "This is made to dazzle the eyes of [those] not terribly educated" about intelligence methods, said Greg Thielmann, a longtime veteran of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence who retired in late 2002. (So this is why you didn’t use the more relevant poll. I believe it’s called Susan Sarandon Syndrome (SSS). If you don’t believe what I believe then you’re, how shall I say it, not terribly educated. Harumph!) For those who have watched this pattern, the modus operandi is familiar: Leak to the media or place in speeches intelligence nuggets of questionable value — aluminum tubes, Nigerian uranium, the undocumented Prague meeting — then retreat when pressed. Keep the story alive in the friendly pockets of the media, like William Safire’s column or Fox News. When the factoid’s cracks start showing, replace it with a new one. Repeat as needed. (Yup, there’s that Conservative Media Bias everyone keeps telling me about.) Is this just business as usual for American government? No, it is not. Despite all our tough talk about not trusting politicians, Americans living in a democracy are always forced to some extent to trust our leaders to not exploit our lack of knowledge by lying to us, especially about matters of national security. This is one reason the intelligence agencies have long-established ground rules for how intelligence is vetted and distributed within the government: to make it less open to political manipulation. Raw intelligence, for example, shouldn’t be divulged publicly because it is riddled with unverifiable hearsay. But these best practices have been ignored at the Pentagon, where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has bypassed the department intelligence agency in favor of an ad hoc, Feith-based system where any flotsam that echoes the White House position is deemed solid. (Don’t touch the Memo. Attack the Memo writer. It doesn’t matter that the Memo was a response to specific questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee asking for the specific "raw-intelligence" that Feith used in his prior testimony before the panel. Oh right, but the Intelligence your using to back your assertions is above pale. How silly of me.) Feith, who has been playing the cherry-picking role as an amateur intelligence chief for two years, could have just as easily gone into the mountains of intelligence data assembled every year to paint a picture of the much stronger links between Al Qaeda and the Saudi royal house, for example, or the Pakistani intelligence agency — (Don’t say it if you don’t really mean it. However, since you mentioned it, we’re a little busy right now. Give us some time to clear our schedule and then will consider you proposal for squeezing the Saudis and Pakistanis. Thanks for the input.) both from nations that are our allies. But the White House position since the first days after 9/11 has been that remaking Iraq was to be the centerpiece of the "war on terror." Unfortunately for the president heading into an election year, it doesn’t wash. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that a full 79% of Americans didn’t believe the war in Iraq had made them safer from terrorism. (10 bucks the poll asking Americans if the Dems make them feel safer comes in at less than 15%.) This is why eight months after we took Baghdad, the conservatives continue to leak questionable secrets to justify their actions. The simple fact is, Al Qaeda didn’t need Iraq to pull off 9/11 or any of its other savage attacks, and (brace yourselves) even if all the anonymous statements in Feith’s memo panned out, there still would be no evidence Iraq significantly aided the extremists. (Thank you Perry Mason. Better change that poll to less than 10%.) We are, whatever the neocons might want us to believe, waging the wrong war in the wrong way. (Do I detect a little War envy?) Long-time listener, first-time ranter. Painful, huh? You’re witnessing the destruction of the foundation of the Bush-hater’s worldview. You’ve been warned. It won’t be pretty. At any moment, we’ll get word from any of the multiple top Al-Qaeda or Iraqi prisoners further detailing the relationship. It’s painfully obvious. The Democrats hitched their party’s success on the Saddam Hussein billion-to-one longshot. They haven’t quite grasped the ramifications of it yet, even though they have caught glimpses of it (lost seats in the House and Senate in 2002, a Republican Gov. of California, lost Governorships in Kentucky and Mississippi). Bush will get re-elected and Republicans will gain seats in the House and Senate. Ushering in a period in which the Republicans will run the show much like FDR and the Democrats did during the 1930s.
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| Posted by:Daniel King |
| #5 That bin Laden was colluding with Saddam is hardly an invention of the Bush administration; indeed, one of the counts in the November 4, 1998 indictment of bin Laden by the Clinton justice department (usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/98110402.htm) was that "al Qaeda reached an understanding with the Government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq." |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2003-11-26 11:57:15 PM |
| #4 Weekly Standard, the organ of the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party and MoveOn.org would be what "organ" of the DNC exactly? The rectum isn't an organ...... |
| Posted by: Frank G 2003-11-26 11:18:17 PM |
| #3 Akashic Books? An obvious sign of lunacy. It's time to get out Martin Gardner's old book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Look up the chapters on Theosophy and the Akashic Record.
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| Posted by: Eric Jablow 2003-11-26 11:17:35 PM |
| #2 I Woosley (ex CIA director) is just not sophisticated in the ways of intelligence. He said that if you didn't believe the memo, you were illiterate. I'll raise you not my terribly educated with his illiterate. This is definitely a wholesale rant. AS 2004 election time starts to come around, the loony factor will be raising to infinity |
| Posted by: capt joe 2003-11-26 10:26:00 PM |
| #1 God damned newbie. Can't even follow directions. Sorry about the double post. This should be the thread. Please cancel the other one. Pretty proud of the title if I do say so myself. |
| Posted by: Daniel King 2003-11-26 10:02:37 PM |