A must read for all political scientists (both professional and amateur), or people like us who simply want to know how we got into the mess we are in at the moment."Filled with headline-making revelations, this explosive account by two award-winning investigative reporters tracks the behind-the-scenes story of the forged intelligence document that the Bush administration used to push the nation into war with Iraq."
http://www.amazon.com/Italian-Letter-Bush-Administration-Build/dp/1594865736
Let's put this all into perspective with some quotes on the record from a former head of the CIA counter intelligence unit, Vincent Cannistraro....
The hawks are not getting evidence of al-Qaeda/Iraq ties “from the CIA because the CIA, to its credit, is telling it the way they see it, which is what they should be doing, describing the world as it is, not as policy-makers wish it to be, or hope it to be, but as it is.” [CBC News, 11/1/2002]
“They are politicizing intelligence, no question about it. And they are undertaking a campaign to get George Tenet [the director of central intelligence] fired because they can’t get him to say what they want on Iraq.” [Washington Post, 10/25/2002]
“All I can tell you is there is a general feeling among CIA analysts that intelligence was politicized and that the CIA and (Defense Intelligence Agency) was not given full consideration because the Pentagon, the policymakers, including the vice-president’s office, did not want to hear that message. They wanted to hear a hard line message supporting a policy they already adopted.” [Agence France-Presse, 6/1/2003]
“The Iraqi opposition, particularly the group led by Ahmed Chalabi, whose intelligence was underwritten by the Pentagon, played a crucial role in informing the Pentagon… with information that looks, from this vantage point, like it was fraudulent, in many cases was fabricated, and the most benign interpretation was that it was just flat wrong.” [ABC News, 6/16/2003]
The fact is that even if the documents hadn't been bogus, this was an easy one: All they had to do was translate the documents. And as soon as they [translated them] a year later, everyone said, "Oh, well, they are bogus." ...
Investigative journalist Craig Unger reports that nine US officials believe “the Niger documents were part of a covert operation to deliberately mislead the American public.”
This book is going on my "to do" list. And what a cast of characters!! Cheney, Bush, Rove, Tenet, Rumsfeld, Powell, as well as CIA insiders, Wilson, Plame, Cannistraro and Carl Ford (see link below for a very interesting interview he gave to PBS).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/interviews/ford.html
3 comments:
Yellow Cake:
A British intelligence review released July 14 calls Bush’s 16 words “well founded.”
A separate report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee said July 7 that the US also had similar information from “a number of intelligence reports,” a fact that was classified at the time Bush spoke.
Ironically, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who later called Bush’s 16 words a “lie”, supplied information that the Central Intelligence Agency took as confirmation that Iraq may indeed have been seeking uranium from Niger .
Both the US and British investigations make clear that some forged Italian documents, exposed as fakes soon after Bush spoke, were not the basis for the British intelligence Bush cited, or the CIA's conclusion that Iraq was trying to get uranium.
There is plenty of "stuff" to be found around the internet in order to justify any claim. Even your unfortunate, however apparently good intentioned efforts to justify the Bush administrations actions, and the events leading up to this war. I admire your loyalty, however what will you be saying when you are the last voice in the room? TWATK seems to be documenting credible sources to back up his concerns and contentions.
Just because you can find info on the internet that support any claim doesn’t – by itself – discredit that claim. I have a National Enquirer tabloid that has a photo of Jesse Jackson on its cover with his mistress. Just because the National Enquirer gets it wrong 98% of the time doesn’t mean Jesse Jackson didn’t have an affair.
I can say the same about authors who write books. Michael Moore comes to mind first off. All his books are full of misstatements and misquotes put forward as truths. I will give one small example:
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According to Moore in his book Stupid White Men, “the entire nation is composed of morons”. He writes: “There are forty-four million Americans who cannot read and write above a fourth-grade level – in other words, who are functional illiterates. How did I learn this statistic? Well, I read it.”
Moore should have read better. His endnotes attribute the figure to the U.S. Deptpartment of Education’s national Adult Literacy Survey. Yes, that survey found that 40-44 million Americans performed in the lowest level of literacy. But the survey doesn’t end there. In the next paragraph, it goes on to note that 25% of the people who scored in the lowest literacy category were immigrants who have learned little or no English. And in classic Moore fashion, he also fails to disclose that nearly 19% of the group he includes in the uneducated masses are actually people who have “visual difficulties that affect their ability to read print.”
Surprise: Functional English literacy is not high among the blind, and people learning to speak English may be highly educated, but only able to read their native klanguage. This hardly makes the United States a nation that, writes Moore, “GOES OUT OF ITS WAY TO REMASIN IGNORANT AND STUPID” (capitalization in the original).
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Page 67 of Dude Where’s My Country: Moore claims that, in building the famous Maginot Line, France "built the bunkers facing the wrong way and Germans were deep into France before you could say 'garcon, stinky cheese, please!'" In fact, the Maginot Line was built with many of the heavy weapons facing back and to the flanks of the line, to allow the bunkers to support each other, and the German invasion avoided it entirely, coming through the Ardennes north of the line.
Page 69: Moore misrepresents US contributions to the United Nations oil-for-food program in Iraq as "trade." He writes, "There were claims that the French were only opposing war to get economic benefits out of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In fact, it was the Americans who were making a killing. In 2001, the U.S. was Iraq's leading trading partner, consuming more than 40 percent of Iraq's oil exports. That's $6 billion in trade with the Iraqi dictator." Most of the money, however, was used to purchase food and other UN-approved humanitarian aid; the rest went to pay war reparations and administrative fees for the program. (For details on the program, see this report to Congress.)
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So you need to deal with the merits of the argument and not where they come from, and in doing so you will not be committing as fallacy of logic.
PapaG
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