tinyurl.com/2r8apw -> www.theweekmagazine.com/news/articles/news.aspx?ArticleID=1947
Contact Us Thumbs up Good Week For Baseball fans, after pitchers and catchers reported to spring-training camps in Florida and Arizona at the same time a winter storm swept across the US Thumbs up Bad Week For Interventions, after Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, released an audiotape in which he calls President Bush an alcoholic, and says he is "addicted to two other faults: lying and gambling."
A new report by the Pentagon's inspector general has confirmed that a sinister White House team known as the "Office of Special Plans" deliberately twisted intelligence to suggest a link between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein, thus enabling the Bush administration to "justify an unjustifiable war." Every time the CIA reported that there was no reliable evidence of a relationship between Saddam and al Qaida--because there wasn't--Vice President Dick Cheney dispatched one Douglas Feith, a former undersecretary of defense, to "review" those reports and reach the opposite conclusion. Next thing you know, the US had embarked on "a disastrous and unnecessary war." The contacts between Iraq and al Qaida were not imagined, said Andrew McCarthy in National Review Online. Iraqi intelligence operatives met several times with al Qaida jihadists to discuss terrorist attacks on US interests, including at a critical 2000 planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Those obsessed with proving that the White House lied us into war simply ignore this evidence. And in accusing Feith's office of twisting intelligence, the critics are also ignoring "how intelligence analysis is supposed to work." Intelligence is by definition speculative, and as we all know by now, the CIA's speculations about Iraq were full of errors. All Feith did was to challenge the prevailing "group think" about Iraq--hardly a crime. If this war has taught us anything, said The New York Sun, "it is that intelligence deserves to be criticized by policy officials, rather than blindly accepted." Feith, though, wasn't told merely to examine the intelligence on Iraq, said Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation. His mission was to provide the White House with a justification for an invasion. While CIA analysts and Middle East scholars were debating the theological viability of a Baathist-al Qaida alliance, Feith's unit was reporting that such an alliance already existed. Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Osama bin Laden had a "mature symbiotic relationship," according to Feith, and were enjoying "cooperation in all categories." His reports were sent directly to the White House, bypassing the CIA. Before long, Cheney was telling the world about "possible Iraq coordination" with al Qaida in the 9/11 attacks. These conclusions, the Pentagon inspector general said in his report last week, were "not supported by the available intelligence." That's a bureaucrat's way of saying that our nation went to war on the basis of a "lie-filled pile of crap."
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