A little terrorism context
An excerpt from "The One Percent Doctrine" by Ron Suskind that takes place just prior to President Bush's visit to the UN to drum up support for the war in Iraq.
"On Friday afternoon, January 10, Jami Miscik, the head of the DI walked down the hall on the seventh floor shaking with rage.
John Moseman, Tenet's chief of staff, saw her as she passed his office.
'You okay?'
'No. I'm not okay. I'm definitely not okay!'
A moment later, she'd made it to Tenet's suite.
She barely could get out the words. Stephen Hadley, Condi's second, had called from the office of 'Scooter' Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.
They wanted her down at Libby's office in the White House by 5 p.m. At issue was the last in an endless series of draft reports aobut the connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. How many drafts? Miscik couldn't remember. The pressure from the White House--and from the various intelligence divisions under the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense--had started a week after 9/11.
Cheney's office claimed to have sources. And Rumsfeld's, too. They kept throwing them at Miscik and CIA. The same information, five different ways. They'd omit that a key piece had been discounted, that the source had recanted. Sorry, our mistake. Then it would reappear, again, in a memo the next week. The CIA held firm: the meeting in Prague between Atta and the Iraqi agent didn't occur.
Miscik was no fool. She understood what was going on. It wasn't about what was true, or verifiable. It was about a defensible position, or at least one that would hold up until the troops were marching through Baghdad, welcomed as liberators.
A few days before, when she had sent the final draft over to Libby and Hadley, she told them, emphatically, This is it. There would be no more drafts, no more meetings where her analysts sat across from Hadley or Feith, or the guys in Feith's office, while the opposing team tried to slip something by them. The report was not what they wanted. She knew that. No evidence meant no evidence.
'I'm not going back there, again, George,' Miscik said. 'If I have to go back to hear their crap and rewrite this goddamn report... I'm resigning, right now.'
She fought back tears of rage.
Tenet picked up the phone to call Hadley.
'She is not coming over,' he shouted into the phone. 'We are not rewriting this fucking report one more time. It is fucking over. Do you hear me! And don't you ever fucking treat my people this way again. Ever!'
They did not rewrite the report.
And that's why, three weeks later, in making the case for war in his State of the Union address, George W. Bush was not able to say what he'd long hoped to say at such a moment: that there was a pre-9/11 connection between al Qaeda and Saddam."
* * *
Of course, he was able to keep in that Saddam had bought quantities of yellow cake uranium in Africa, which not only wasn't true, but the CIA had been over this point again and again: 1. They didn't think it happened at all. 2. Saddam already had several hundred pounds of yellow cake, so why would he want more? 3. It's just not that easy to turn that crap into something that can be used in a bomb. He also said that the high-strength aluminum tubes were suitable for nuclear weapons production, which has been rejected by the CIA as well as the UN weapons inspection teams.
Educational, ey?
Best,
Mark Terry
"On Friday afternoon, January 10, Jami Miscik, the head of the DI walked down the hall on the seventh floor shaking with rage.
John Moseman, Tenet's chief of staff, saw her as she passed his office.
'You okay?'
'No. I'm not okay. I'm definitely not okay!'
A moment later, she'd made it to Tenet's suite.
She barely could get out the words. Stephen Hadley, Condi's second, had called from the office of 'Scooter' Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.
They wanted her down at Libby's office in the White House by 5 p.m. At issue was the last in an endless series of draft reports aobut the connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. How many drafts? Miscik couldn't remember. The pressure from the White House--and from the various intelligence divisions under the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense--had started a week after 9/11.
Cheney's office claimed to have sources. And Rumsfeld's, too. They kept throwing them at Miscik and CIA. The same information, five different ways. They'd omit that a key piece had been discounted, that the source had recanted. Sorry, our mistake. Then it would reappear, again, in a memo the next week. The CIA held firm: the meeting in Prague between Atta and the Iraqi agent didn't occur.
Miscik was no fool. She understood what was going on. It wasn't about what was true, or verifiable. It was about a defensible position, or at least one that would hold up until the troops were marching through Baghdad, welcomed as liberators.
A few days before, when she had sent the final draft over to Libby and Hadley, she told them, emphatically, This is it. There would be no more drafts, no more meetings where her analysts sat across from Hadley or Feith, or the guys in Feith's office, while the opposing team tried to slip something by them. The report was not what they wanted. She knew that. No evidence meant no evidence.
'I'm not going back there, again, George,' Miscik said. 'If I have to go back to hear their crap and rewrite this goddamn report... I'm resigning, right now.'
She fought back tears of rage.
Tenet picked up the phone to call Hadley.
'She is not coming over,' he shouted into the phone. 'We are not rewriting this fucking report one more time. It is fucking over. Do you hear me! And don't you ever fucking treat my people this way again. Ever!'
They did not rewrite the report.
And that's why, three weeks later, in making the case for war in his State of the Union address, George W. Bush was not able to say what he'd long hoped to say at such a moment: that there was a pre-9/11 connection between al Qaeda and Saddam."
* * *
Of course, he was able to keep in that Saddam had bought quantities of yellow cake uranium in Africa, which not only wasn't true, but the CIA had been over this point again and again: 1. They didn't think it happened at all. 2. Saddam already had several hundred pounds of yellow cake, so why would he want more? 3. It's just not that easy to turn that crap into something that can be used in a bomb. He also said that the high-strength aluminum tubes were suitable for nuclear weapons production, which has been rejected by the CIA as well as the UN weapons inspection teams.
Educational, ey?
Best,
Mark Terry
posted by Mark Terry at 9:24 PM
8 Comments:
Educational? You bet.
There's need for more women in govt. to say "NO"
It would solve a lot of problems.;)
BB@YA'
Dory
The Middle East is funny. You fight 'em now or fight 'em later. What do you do with people who have one desire: wipe you and every other infidel off the face of the earth?
If my wife or daughter was next in line for Sodomy Insane's rape room, I wouldn't care what reasons GWB came up with to go in.
What amazes me is the number of people who actually believed, and still believe, the laughably transparent lies. And even more, it's remarkable to think that there are people who don't care about being lied to. Who don't care about people being slaughtered on a pretext. Pitiful.
Are there bad guys in the world? Criminals? Sure. Big surprise. Wars and killing innocent people and devastating whole regions isn't an effective way to deal with them, let alone moral. Some crook from Brooklyn holds up a liquor store in Newark, so New Jersey's got the right to carpet bomb all the way from the Brooklyn Bridge to Coney Island. Right.
The shrub and his gang have pretty much adopted P.T.Barnum's philosphy - there's a sucker born every minute. Actually they've updated it -- what they count on is that there's a cowardly sucker born every minute. Whatever happened to "Give me liberty or give me death" ?
The One Percent Doctrine is also sometimes called The Cheney Doctrine, and although Cheney hasn't apparently put this forward to the press, it's apparently been very clearly articulated to policy makers all over government. And that is: if there's even a 1% chance a country or group might cause harm to the US, it's cause for action against that group or country.
Think about that for a second. That 1% doesn't actually have to be verifiable or based on anything other than: we've got some rumors that says...
It becomes justification to do things like invade Iraq, which was already under a no-fly zone and embargo and UN inspections when we went in and took over the country, making it into our unofficial 51st and grumpiest state. (Think about that fact we have about 110,000 troops in that country for a moment. The township I live in has a population of about 20,000 people.)
Well, anyway...
To be logical and rational about the Bush Administration, one of the things that most frustrates me is how this administration appears to be circumventing our own laws, and congress (Motto: If I Only Had a Spine.) just shrugs and says, "Yeah, but can we get re-elected?" Both Cheney and Rumsfeld came to power during Watergate, or more specifically, just post-Watergate, and it seems clear that they both learned some things from that debacle. Unfortunately, what they learned was that it wasn't what Nixon did that was so bad, it was that he managed to get caught doing it.
It looks good. Why the change?
Mark,
The new blog looks good....so does the new web page....like it mucho.
Good move. Good timing.
BB@Ya'
Dory
I think dory's absolutely right.
Like the new site, Mark. Great masthead.
Ah, I see. Yes, the site looks great. Nice compact front page. Impressive.
Post a Comment
<< Home