CNN is airing Dead Wrong — Inside an Intelligence Meltdown tonight. I think Larry C. Johnson will be interviewed about the fixing of the intelligence around the policy. America can finally learn to truth about the insane and counterproductive war in Iraq:
“I wish I had not been involved in it,” says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a longtime Powell adviser who served as his chief of staff from 2002 through 2005. “I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life.”
Wilkerson is one of several insiders interviewed for the CNN Presents documentary “Dead Wrong — Inside an Intelligence Meltdown.” The program, which airs Sunday at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET, pieces together the events leading up to the mistaken WMD intelligence that was presented to the public. A presidential commission that investigated the pre-war WMD intelligence found much of it to be “dead wrong.”
Powell’s speech, delivered on February 5, 2003, made the case for the war by presenting U.S. intelligence that purported to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Wilkerson says the information in Powell’s presentation initially came from a document he described as “sort of a Chinese menu” that was provided by the White House.
“(Powell) came through the door … and he had in his hands a sheaf of papers, and he said, ‘This is what I’ve got to present at the United Nations according to the White House, and you need to look at it,'” Wilkerson says in the program. “It was anything but an intelligence document. It was, as some people characterized it later, sort of a Chinese menu from which you could pick and choose.”
I think I’ll take the Wonton Soup, some Moo Goo Gai Pan, the Boneless Duck with Peking Sauce, and some nerve agent, Alex. Does that come with a mobile biological weapons laboratory? Can I get extra scud missiles?
Take the poll:
I love my local chinese restaurant’s offering of ‘Sophisticated Hunan Chicken’.
Booman, I just left a message in an older post by you, but which is still on your front page. In case you don’t see it (and because I am impatient, forgive me), let me repost it here:
Booman, I am curious as to your take on the Nafeez Ahmed article sitting at the top of Raw Story’s website, in of course large bold letters, especially his allegation that 4 or 5 hijackers’ names have turned up at various military installations, with Air Force personnel saying that the name Atta showing up “might not” be him (and besides, other hijackers’ names are apparently showing up at other military installations lists, so it likely IS the 9/11 Atta)…
(No need to insert Raw Story ridicule… this guy is not Raw Story but apparently an academic.)
Thanks
From CNN’s blurb: “But a presidential commission described the pre-war intelligence as “dead wrong.”
What commission?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/wmd/
Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Rove, et al, just blindly follow Tenet’s advice and look what happens…all hell breaks loose!
Well, everything’s fine now…Tenet is gone…and the world is now just “Shiny Happy People Holding Hands”.
God bless the Bush Administration…God’s chosen leaders for Team USA.
…what’s the latest news on the Runaway Bride??
Whatever you do, stay away from the PuPu Platter.
from Howie in Seattle, but of course
P.S. Editorial comment [DUMB FUCKS] mine.
Let’s make our next invasion be a GIANT FOOD FIGHT …
let’s see … Hummus V. Hamburgers!
Bush can say, “Yeah! You’ve been served! Oh yeah!” as he orders Donald to lob double Macs at Iran’s nuclear facilities!
Powell is just trying to salvage what is left of what was a fine reputation. But it is too late-he will live in infamy as a man who, when push came to shove, was a coward.
He’ll be tainted like Robert McNamara .. but without McNamara’s tortured soul. I don’t think Powell is that deep. He’s more embarrassed that his going along proved to be disastrous than he is troubled in his heart by what he helped to unleash.
Gee, that’s kinda cynical about him. Well, I used to see him as the sane person in the Bush administration but what good is being sane if you have no guts?
Michael were doing okay but decided to sell their souls to corporate masters and then each became each other’s hostage.
From
Wikipedia:
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” — Edmund Burke
This, of course, presupposes that Powell is a good man. I have some dubiety. I think his soul was compromised long before he started taking out the Bushco’s trash. I seem to remember he took out some trash during Vietnam, as well. There was this little glitch called My Lai.
My favorite WMD is my mouth
Is there a serious suggestion that this broadcast will be truthful in the largest sense? I don’t doubt that there will be plenty of facts cited but surely they’re not going to suggest that there might have been intelligent design behind the errors.
Yeah .. there’ll probably be some parts that’ll make us glad we tuned in … and then they’ll couch it all in the typical blah, blah, blah … both-sides-now BS.
It will be a mix. A lot of people talking about how the intelligence agencies made mistakes, but also a lot of talk about what a hard-on Cheney had for Saddam.
In my opinion, I think the intelligence agencies did make some mistakes. They assumed that Saddam would resume work on WMD after the inspectors left in 1998.
At the same time, I think the operations end ran an operation on the analyst end, by feeding them a steady supply of defectors that they knew to be either unreliable or fabricators.
It’s complicated. Even under Clinton, there was a propaganda campaign to make Saddam out to be more of a threat than he was. The effort was somewhat justified, if you accept the policy of containment as a valid policy. We had to maintain domestic and international support for the sanctions.
It’s funny when Bush supporters point to Democrats’ statements about WMD from the Clinton era. They were just supporting the policy.
In any case, we eventually succeeded in fooling ourselves to some degree, meanwhile the effort to deceive was ramped up. Add a steady supply of color-coded duct tape fatwas, and we were ready to assume the worst.
The program will only touch on the truth.
I just lost a nice, long comment to this diary since we are having some lovely rolling brownouts here on Long Island this morning. The same thing happened last weekend when I was in Crawford and it took me most of the week to repair my computer after it got pretty well fried.
So….Powell deserves no sympathy as far as I’m concerned since he seems to be more upset about his reputation being damaged than what has been wrought on the country because of the lies he helped sell to us. I never believed any of it, and couldn’t understand Powell’s willingness to go along with it. That was when I still had a small measure of respect for him and believed he had integrity, which he clearly does not.
Even in his disgust for what he did, he continues to sell the Bush Admins. fall back defense that they are the victims of faulty intelligence reports, when we all know that it was the Admin. itself that picked, plucked, and manufactured the intelligence they used t initiate a war that had been planned for long time before Bush even became the pResident. No mercy for him and his poor tortured soul.
Booman,
This new report may interest you.
I think even this is misleading. It wasn’t about an intelligence meltdown. It was about a plan to go to Iraq for oil come hell or high water, and manufacturing whatever evidence it took to persuade Congress and the American people to buy into it. The truth was never the objective. So was this an intelligence “failure” or in fact, an intelligence “success” in that the end goal, controlling oil reserves, was achieved?
I completely agree..the title is very, very misleading and sets up the blame on our intelligence units before the news show even starts.
If someone like myself who didn’t have that much experience in following politics could start to read extensively before the Iraq invasion about who was saying what-pro/con for WMD and about Saddam and come to my personal conclusion that people like Scott Ritter were correct(and others) while also reading more history of Iraqi people ..if I could come to as it turns out a correct conclusion about all this….then all this bullshit about intelligence failure is just plain cover-up bullshit so the administration doesn’t have to take the blame for their lying us into war.
Do you have any thoughts on the Nafeez Ahmed article that is prominently displayed on the homepage of Raw Story in big, bold letters? In it, he claims that the names drift hunters of four or five of the 9/11 hijackers have been found on lists at various military installations, with Air Force personnel claiming that the name Atta appearing on these lists “might not” be him (and, furthermore, other hijackers’ names are apparently appearing on other military installations’ lists, so it likely IS the 9/11 Atta).