[CLUE-Talk] I'm getting dizzy from the Bush Administration's Spin

[Randy Arabie]

Quoting bill ehlert <ehlert_b at yahoo.com>:

> 
> 
> 
> 
> > > DK: Tom, an imminent threat is a political
> > judgment. 
> > 
> > Exactly.  Which is why we keep debating this
> > issue.
> 
> **  what's to debate?  i thought it
>     was widely accepted that saddam
>     had us  WAY  outnumbered in both
>     camels and single-shot enfields . . .

The real interesting fact is that even a whole lot of folks in Iraq thought
Saddam had WMD.  I heard a report that the overwhelming majority of the
officers in the Republican Guard thought that when the War started, they
would have WMD delivered to them.  This would explain the Iraqi military's
purchase of large amounts of VX nerve agent antidote from Syria just prior
to the war's start.

Kay has concluded that the Iraqi's in charge of the secret WMD programs
were lieing to Saddam about their progress and even Saddam thought he had
WMD.

Has anyone here read Kay's opening remarks to the Senate yesterday?

Here's a good excerpt regarding the pre-war intelligence:

<quote from http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/01/28/kay.transcript/ >

As leader of the effort of the Iraqi Survey Group, I spent most of my days not
out in the field leading inspections. It's typically what you do at that level.
I was trying to motivate, direct, find strategies.

In the course of doing that, I had innumerable analysts who came to me in
apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had
thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in
advance.

And never -- not in a single case -- was the explanation, "I was pressured to do
this." The explanation was very often, "The limited data we had led one to
reasonably conclude this. I now see that there's another explanation for it."

And each case was different, but the conversations were sufficiently in depth
and our relationship was sufficiently frank that I'm convinced that, at least to
the analysts I dealt with, I did not come across a single one that felt it had
been, in the military term, "inappropriate command influence" that led them to
take that position.

It was not that. It was the honest difficulty based on the intelligence that had
-- the information that had been collected that led the analysts to that conclusion.

And you know, almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence
because we know how to correct that.

We get rid of the people who, in fact, were exercising that.

The fact that it wasn't tells me that we've got a much more fundamental problem
of understanding what went wrong, and we've got to figure out what was there.
And that's what I call fundamental fault analysis. 

</quote>

-- 
Allons Rouler!

Randy
http://www.arabie.org/