So we all know that White House assertions about the Iraqi ‘threat’ were so much smoke and mirrors. This piece is a good compendium of administration assertions of the threat from the public record, just in case they try to backpedal further from those assertions as they appear less and less plausible during the election campaign. Faced with being seen as either gullible dupes of intelligence misinformation or abject liars pursuing a covert agenda by any means, of course the Bush people will try and control the debate by framing its terms as only the former; the current dance about the independent investigation of intelligence failures will clearly have that restricted, defensive scope. We cannot let administration innocence be rammed down our throats. There are encouraging signs of a backlash by the media and, importantly, by the intelligence community. I particularly like the take the State Department’s top intelligence officer, Greg Theilmann, has:
“The main problem [before the war] was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show…They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce. I would assign some blame to the intelligence community and most of the blame to the senior administration officials.”
The emphasis is added; ‘faith-based intelligence’ is so apt, even though oxymoronic. I have already waxed enthusiastic several times about Seymour Hersh’s detailed analysis several months ago of the pervasive ways in which the Bush people have willfully marginalized intelligence community analysis because it wasn’t telling them what they wanted to hear. It is easy to mistrust the CIA, almost axiomatic on the Left to do so. It is important to realize, in the current furor, that they are more believable than their dysadministration bosses.
And speaking of contradictions in terms, where is poor George Tenet in this mess? Some responses to his February 5th speech highlight his bold admission that the CIA never told the administration there was an imminent threat and see him as a courageous hero. Yet Bush does not seem embarrassed or threatened enough to find a way to oust him, although I predict we will see Tenet resigning “for personal reasons” “to spend more time with his family” and “go into the private sector” in the not too distant future (before the election, probably, once Karl Rove has thought up a spin on it that would stop Democratic jibes in their tracks). Others, like the former career CIA analyst commenting here (also at tompaine.com), find him (no surprise!) a master of disingenuousness. He points out another way in which the administration framing of the terms of the debate obscures the real issue. Regardless of what intelligence assessments of the Iraqi theret were or were not made, and how the White House did or did not use them, there is ample evidence that the Bush minions had long since decided to invade Iraq.
