[CLUE-Talk] Intelligence failure? Don't you believe it.

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

So now it looks as if Bush is going to order a "probe" into the
intelligence agencies to try to cover his own ass. I wonder if Bush is
going to be probing Rumsfeld and his "four- to five-man intelligence
team" that sifted through the intelligence data to cherry-pick the data
they used to build the case to go to war.

For those of you who don't remember Rumsy's special team, it was
reported back in October 2002:
http://www.slate.msn.com/?id=2073238

"Rumsfeld has publicly continued to push this link as a prime; or at
least the most easily sellable¿rationale for going to war with Iraq,
even after the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency
have dismissed the connection as tenuous at best. But Rumsfeld contends
that the spy bureaucracies may have missed something. As his top team
member, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, put it to the
Times, there is "a phenomenon in intelligence work that people who are
pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won't,
and not see other facts that others will." Since Wolfowitz is one of
Washington's most forceful advocates of a second Gulf War, we can safely
predict that he will find the facts he needs to make his case."

This was back when Rumsy was trying to make a case for an Iraq-Al Qaeda
connection, which also goes to show that the Bush administration was
*not* led by intelligence reports to go to war with Iraq, but tried to
sift through intelligence reports *to find an excuse to go to war* -- I
can't emphasize that point enough. The Bush administration had already
made up its collective mind to go to war and simply went after data to
try to sell that decision to the public. The CIA was saying "no, we do
not have the data to suggest that Iraq has WMD or ties to Al Qaeda" --
it was Rumsy's special team that cooked the data. 

Go read the article from 2002 on Slate, it might give a fresh
perspective on the spin the Bush White House is trying to sell the
public now. 

Certainly, the intelligence agencies aren't perfect -- but laying the
blame at their feet is yet another reason why Bush is unfit to hold the
office. 

Zonker
--
"A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, 
less good when they obey and acclaim him, worse when they 
fear and despise him. Fail to honor people and they fail 
to honor you. But of a good leader, when his work is done, 
his aim fulfilled, they will say, 'We did this ourselves.'" 
~ Lao-Tzu