According to The Washington Post, Paul R. Pillar, the senior CIA intelligence officer, with 28 years service, and who was responsible for coordinating all information on Iraq from 15 intelligence agencies, has written that the Bush administration misused intelligence in its drive to go to war in Iraq.
"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."
"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote
If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication," Pillar wrote, "it was to avoid war -- or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath."
How much evidence is necessary to prove that Bush and Cheney lied their way to this war, have burdened America with an entirely unnecessary financial, military and human catastrophe, and have betrayed the American peoples' trust?
3 comments:
In a broader context, how much evidence is needed that Bush and his administration are one of the most corrupt, dishonest, undemocratic, and inept administrations in American history before the public has had enough.
I've sat baffled all week marveling at the number of scandalous stories that have come out against Bush, yet he still manages to get by ok, with little serious public or political backlack. Partly this has to do with the failure of the mainstream media to get these stories out there, and present them in a non-"balanced" way (i.e. presenting a story objectively without presenting disequal positions as equal)
Peter Daou has a good round up of the stories that came out this week. And that does not include last week's leaked Downing St. memos which allege that Bush and Blair made a pact to invade IRaq regardless of the UN and the one in which Blair and Bush plan their own version of the Potemkin.
I begin to wonder if the spirit of democracy is dying, if not already dead.
How much is enough? We already have enough. Plenty. In a normal world, most of Bushco would already be in jail.
But Bushco controls the three houses of government, the secret government (NSA and so on), the press, television, most of radio, the World Bank, transnational oil, Big Pharm, Big Healthcare, and on and on . . . and the human beings that have created or simply become dependent on these ganglia want above all to keep Bushco intact because it has become their daily bread.
Who is left to believe that change is possible when the wheels of change are locked?
Loved reading this, thanks
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