June, 2003
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June, 2003
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Sunday June 1 , 2003 When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny. Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)
I keep up a list of folks that I used to work with and use it to send out notices or parties, retirements, weddings, funerals and when someone gets sick. I received an e-mail a few days ago from someone on my list notifying me that a man I don't know had a stroke. I forwarded her e-mail and asked if someone could clue me in on who he was , I got about seven e-mails back in less than two hours. then a few folks started to send me updates from his wife and I forwarded them too. I was going to start sending the messages from her to just the folks that specifically requested to see them but I have changed my mind.
Monday June 2 , 2003 On June 2, 1953, Queen Elizabeth II of Britain was crowned in Westminster Abbey, 16 months after the death of her father, King George VI. This is significant to me only in that for once I can remember what I was doing at a particular time and place. Fifty years ago my mother plopped us down in front of our little red Magnavox TV and made us watch Princess Elizabeth become Queen. She said that someday I would be thankful that she had made us watch this... I guess she was right, not for the reason she foretold perhaps. I have a real hard time remembering stuff that happened back then. Mostly only the really dramatic (for a kid) stuff, a couple fights, some stupid risks, some that worked and some that didn't, a fire in a vacant field that some friends and I started playing with matches, sticking a dart in the top of my sister Leigh's head... An accident!!! Honest!!!. It irks me that I can't remember things chronologically, some jumbled up synapses in my brain I guess. The fact that I am incapable of remembering stuff in order squelches my aspirations of writing any sort of autobiography. (I can almost see you cringe) I would never inflict a history of my tedious life on anyone but I would have liked to do one just for self-centered little me. Tuesday June 3 , 2003 The most important political office is that of private citizen. Louis Brandeis, lawyer, judge, and writer (1856-1941) I am waiting for a motocross race to come on TV, answering e-mail and doing laundry. The race was excellent, wish I could have seen it live. They will be racing in Washougal, Washington later this summer, I may try to get up there, a dry run for the Tin Can Sailors Reunion in August... Here is a pretty awesome site/sight... http://www.panoramas.dk/fullscreen2/full22.html 360 degree view from the top of Mt. Everest... My bike is fixed, I will pick it up tomorrow after I get back from getting Autumn's braces in Reseda. I called "B"'s Social Worker and told him what's going on with "B"... we are going to put the adoption on the back burner until we can get "B" in a better frame of mind... his behavior lately is making Christy and I very anxious. Sure is scary having Bush out of the country... wonder what sort of a mess he will get us into next... Wednesday June 4 , 2003 I took Autumn in to Reseda to get her new brace, she seems un-phased by it. Se was taking baby steps with it in the Dr.'s office but by the time we hit the front door of the building she was chugging along pretty good. I think she actually walks a little better with it. I picked up my Bike at noon today... runs just fine Took the rest of the dogs in for their shots, the 'Dot' and 'Spot' names were a hit with the people in the waiting room... There are some young men on bicycles wearing dark pants and white shirts. I saw them pedaling up the dirt road on their mountain bikes. Back packs full of religious tracts and Watchtower magazines. I have talked with them in the past and find them to be cheerless automatons. Devoting your life to God used to be a way to make a contribution to society back a couple hundred years ago. some segments of society still find it to be an admirable thing to do with your life but, personally I find it to be a waste. The Peace Corps type missionary work is commendable I suppose but to my mind to proselytize at the same time is the epitome of evil. I just read a brief biography of T. Jefferson... I still think he was a man of incredible integrity. He was a true "Free thinker" and the consummate Liberal. He fought for minimal taxes and frugal spending, he struggled to expand the country with the Louisiana Purchase and for fair dealing with the citizens and the world. "No one likes to raise taxes, least of all me. On the other hand, the inevitable is here." I hate to make predictions, but watch the tap dance & listen for the 'Spin', you are going to hear words like this [the quote above] a lot if Bush is allowed to continue with his "Tax Relief" policies. It seems pretty obvious to me that if we are going to improve or even sustain any sort of school system and the Federal Government is not going to send as much or less Federal money to support it, then the money will have to come from State and Local taxes. If the Federal Government is not going to spend as much to support the infrastructure, that's roads, Fire protection, Police, Libraries, children's Services, just about everywhere you look, and the infrastructure is collapsing then the money will have to come from the State and Local Government, .
The world is not full of entrepreneurs, the majority of us are not willing to risk going into business or sacrificing 4-8 years of our lives going to college just to go into competition with other college grads to make a living, most of us are 9-5 blue & white collar average Jane's and Joe's who want to raise families and play on the weekends... we are the victims of Trickle down economics. Bush says "Don't worry about the poor, the wealthy will step up to the plate and feed, clothe, house and educate the underprivileged among us. "The good Christian Charities will fill the gap". Bull!!!! Christian Charities are not going to be funding AIDS research, or care for the victims of AIDS. They are not going to caring for unwed mothers or impoverished migrant workers. They are not going to support and provide services for the hundreds of thousands of kids currently being cared for by Children's Services... they couldn't even if they wanted to, which they don't. I went to a Christian USO sort of thing when I was in the Navy looking for some help and understanding... they were awful, they didn't even listen to me. Bunch of 'Blissed out on Jesus" zombies who only wanted to satisfy some internal desire to fulfill their own agendas. The Christian version of a suicide bomber. It was the scariest two hours of my life. They wanted my soul... they didn't want to save it they wanted to possess it. The good thing about that experience was to be able to pick up on where Scientology was coming from when I encountered it. Thursday June 5 , 2003 On June 5, 1968, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot and mortally wounded just after claiming victory in California's Democratic presidential primary. Gunman Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was immediately arrested. Another instance where I can drift back in time. Bobby K had completed a tour of LA and went down the main drag in El Monte, I watched the cavalcade from the roof if the Telephone Building where I worked. There were security people with sniper rifles up there.. I thought, "How silly". very sobering though. I went home at midnight and for some reason I was watching his speech on TV, he left the floor and then the shots rang out. Wonder where the Sniper rifle boys were when that went down... Our heroic leader George Bush made a last minute change to his flight plan and flew over Baghdad today on his way home from Qatar... aren't you proud. At least Blair went in and walked around a little bit... I heard one of the radio reporters trying to make the fly by sound heroic... damn. I went for a short ride today, it takes every ounce of my self control to stay within 10MPH of the speed limit... really hard... I went up in the hills, rode about 25 miles of twisty roads and it seemed like 5. Lots of exhilarating fun. I bought a new TV, the old one finally bit the dust... Best Buy has some great deals, I just wish they wouldn't put the High Definition Plasma Screen $5000 monsters next to the ones I can afford... makes walking out with a brand new 32" TV feel like I'm getting some sort of consolation prize. Went to WalMart to get Cindy some clothes to wear tomorrow to her party at the skating rink. The pants I bought her are too long... damn. I bought a bra for the first time... not the most fun I have ever had in WalMart... Damn, talk about being clueless! I had no idea there were so many combinations of sizes types and shapes and styles, padded, unpadded, support, with and without under-wire 34 36 38 A B C My God!!! it is totally boggling. I had to ask for help, Cindy was no assistance what so ever... Never again!! A very patient older lady who worked in the department took pity on me and helped us... if she hadn't I would still be there. Friday June 6 , 2003 Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure." H.L.Mencken I have read this quote several times and I think I understand now, when I first put it up I thought it was a little arbitrary and would be hard for most folks to grasp, it was for me. Mike came home and started cleaning, part of the deal he made with Christy who was picking up Mark for another visit... I heard a SNAP! from the living room and went out and Mike was trying to put the front stabilizing rung from my grandfathers chair back together... He just kicked it... I asked "Why?" he said; "I don't know...it was an accident, sorry?" Like he had bumped over a glass of milk with his elbow or something. That chair belonged to my grandfather, he was given it when he graduated from Colby College in 1919. It's the only thing of his I own... irreplaceable. Saw a Sidewinder this morning. He was laying at the side of the road and he looked as though he may have been hit by a car, he wasn't moving and laying out straight which is a little odd. I stopped the car and picked up some rocks and rolled them down at him and he didn't move, I figured he was dead and took a few steps toward him and on the second step that snake snapped into strike mode and slithered backwards never taking it's eyes off me. His rattles buzzing, like a hiss. Quite a show. I have been listening to Republicans saying that it doesn't matter if there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that the Loony Left Liberals are just trying to discredit Bush. In their hearts they always believed that the occupation of Iraq was justified because someday he would have had nuclear weapons and someday he would have been a real threat... and look at all the mass graves, children, still clutching their dolls. Liberals are evil, they don't care about the children in mass graves clutching dolls. It is perfectly reasonable to falsify and manipulate facts, lie, if in the end you can justify your actions by finding a legitimate excuse attacking after the fact. Shoot first, Justify later. What is wrong with this country... when did it become acceptable to annihilate a country simply because we have declared it to be "Evil". As though, declaring it to be "Evil" is validation for manufacturing evidence [forged Nigerian paperwork citing Iraq purchased uranium], distorting intelligence information from the CIA, listening to defectors who hate Saddam instead of legitimate intelligence sources, frightening the American people with terrorist alerts and nonexistent WMD's... Bush is, at best, a pious ideologue bent on imposing his will over America. He presides over a world where he presumes to dictate what is Right and Wrong and Good and Evil... how long before he starts locking up dissidents in this country... when will we have another witch-hunt for heretics who refuse to accept the lies? Saturday June 7 , 2003 I was helping Christy get the kids get ready for church and had just sat down at the PC to figure out a genealogy puzzle someone sent me and I heard a funny sounding crunch/crash... I knew what it was but wouldn't let my mind accept it. I walked out the front door and saw my bike off the ledge and upside down... wheels up in the air... and my heart sank... My bike fell over... apparently "B" was showing off for Christian and sat on my bike he tried to stand it up and straddle it and with the bike so close to the edge of the hill he couldn't hold it and it fell down the hill... "B" is OK, he scratched his shin and his shoulder and he seemed to almost have a moment of remorse... but when I yelled at him and said "Why "B"?" he said "You care more about your bike than you do about me." ...it's like some kid taking a hammer to the inside of your car and as he was getting out he got his fingers jammed in the door and now he wanted your sympathy. He got hurt a little, but he got hurt trashing my bike... I don't feel sorry for him. The bike is scratched up and a mirror snapped off. I was almost afraid to go anywhere near "B"... I picked it up and somehow leveraged it back up the hill and onto two wheels... the only thing broken is the mirror but the scratches on the right side of the faring are going to be a problem... it looks like crap. I drove [the car] into Lancaster and ordered a new mirror and checked on what it would cost to replace the right side faring... $403.00+tax... I will have to find another way to camouflage the damage. What would be the point of getting it fixed...My kids have damaged or destroyed everything of value that I own from my house to my socks... it is pretty maddening. Mike got picked up by Mark's mother, Christian went over to Shon's again and Calie got invited to the movies and to spend the night with her friend Amy, I took her into Palmdale and dropped her off and then Monica and I went to the movies. We went to see 'Saving Nemo' but it was a five hour wait to get into a packed theater so we went to see Bruce Almighty instead. I thought it was terrible but Monica liked it. Could have been an original and entertaining movie but they decided to go with Jim Carry's predictable shtick, he played the main character Bruce, was such an self-centered whining schmuck that there was no time when I cared what happened to him. When he had his 'amazing transformation' into a sensitive and caring saintly, wonderful person it rang so hollow for me I would have left the theater if I had been alone. He did all the goofy mugging he did as though it was Ace Ventura trying to make a respectable comedy, but, like I said, Monica [who is 10] liked it so I got half my money's worth out of it. Sunday June 8 , 2003 Respect for veracity Nixon, Anderson Accounting, Clinton, Sosa, ENRON, WMD, NYTimes... it seems the list is endless. So Bush says well, maybe we were wrong about Chemical Weapons, and Nuclear Weapons and Unmanned Killer Drones, and fight to the death Army, and everything else... but look at those mass graves!!! 15000 people slaughtered!!! Er... George, those are all Shiites... the ones your Daddy told to "Rise up and take your country back." and, thinking they would have American support... they tried... they were mowed down by Sadaam and you did nothing... now even the people that were on our side and supported your rhetoric have been betrayed and they hate you worse than anyone. Today was pretty laid back, I listened to a Motocross race from Southwick, Massachusetts... pretty cool, one site had audio, one site had the readouts from the transponders on the bikes so I could watch everyone in the race at the same time. Really neat. Watching it live is exciting but pretty confusing because the tracks are so large that you can't see the whole thing, so you would watch a guy go around a turn and disappear for about 30 seconds and then you try and pick him up again...seeing it live you miss about half of it.
Standard Operating Procedure
Was the Intelligence Cooked?
Like most Americans, we believed the government's repeated warnings that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction threatened the security of the world. The urgent need to disarm Saddam Hussein was the primary reason invoked for going to war in March rather than waiting to see if weapons inspectors could bring Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs under control. It would still be premature to conclude that Iraq abandoned its efforts to manufacture and stockpile unconventional arms after the first Persian Gulf war in 1991. But after weeks of futile searching by American teams, it seems clear that Iraq was not bristling with horrific arms and that chemical and biological weapons were not readily available to frontline Iraqi forces. America's intelligence agencies betrayed little doubt about the Iraqi threat last October when they produced a comprehensive assessment of Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction. A declassified version, while noting that Iraq was hiding large portions of its weapons programs, flatly stated: "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade." The question today is whether that and other assessments were sound or were influenced by a desire to tailor intelligence findings to policy prescriptions. By their nature, intelligence reports, in the absence of a smoking gun, are subjective exercises based on ambiguous information that is open to differing interpretations. In the case of Iraq, Washington relied largely on circumstantial data rather than spy satellite photographs or intercepted phone calls that would have proved and pinpointed the existence of unconventional weapons. But given the failure so far to find a single weapon of mass destruction, it is fair to wonder if intelligence analysts might have misread the available data, played down ambiguities or even pushed their findings too far to stay square with Bush policy on Iraq. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, has said that the C.I.A.'s work was not compromised by politics. These matters are properly being examined by Congressional committees and a White House advisory board on intelligence practices, as well as by the Central Intelligence Agency itself. It is also reasonable to ask if the administration's fixation on Iraq influenced the way intelligence reports were used by top officials intent on making the case for war. Careful attention should be given to examining the work of a separate Pentagon unit that was created after Sept. 11 to search for terrorist links with Iraq. The issue goes to the heart of American leadership. Mr. Bush's belief that the United States has the right to use force against nations that it believes may threaten American security is based on the assumption that Washington can make accurate judgments about how serious such a danger is. If the intelligence is wrong, or the government distorts it, the United States will squander its credibility. Even worse, it will lose the ability to rally the world, and the American people, to the defense of the country when real threats materialize.
Missing Weapons Of Mass Destruction:
Friday, Jun. 06, 2003
President George W. Bush has got a very serious problem. Before asking Congress for a Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American military forces in Iraq, he made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason the United States needed to pursue the most radical actions any nation can undertake - acts of war against another nation. Now it is clear that many of his statements appear to be false. In the past, Bush's White House has been very good at sweeping ugly issues like this under the carpet, and out of sight. But it is not clear that they will be able to make the question of what happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) go away - unless, perhaps, they start another war. That seems unlikely. Until the questions surrounding the Iraqi war are answered, Congress and the public may strongly resist more of President Bush's war-making. Presidential statements, particularly on matters of national security, are held to an expectation of the highest standard of truthfulness. A president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it. President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to stand down from reelection. President Richard Nixon's false statements about Watergate forced his resignation. Frankly, I hope the WMDs are found, for it will end the matter. Clearly, the story of the missing WMDs is far from over. And it is too early, of course, to draw conclusions. But it is not too early to explore the relevant issues. President Bush's Statements On Iraq's Weapons Of Mass Destruction Readers may not recall exactly what President Bush said about weapons of mass destruction; I certainly didn't. Thus, I have compiled these statements below. In reviewing them, I saw that he had, indeed, been as explicit and declarative as I had recalled. Bush's statements, in chronological order, were: "Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons." United Nations Address "Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons." "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have." Radio Address "The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons." "We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas." "We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States." "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujihadin" - his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." Cincinnati, Ohio Speech "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent." State of the Union Address "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Address to the Nation Should The President Get The Benefit Of The Doubt? When these statements were made, Bush's let-me-mince-no-words posture was convincing to many Americans. Yet much of the rest of the world, and many other Americans, doubted them. As Bush's veracity was being debated at the United Nations, it was also being debated on campuses - including those where I happened to be lecturing at the time. On several occasions, students asked me the following question: Should they believe the President of the United States? My answer was that they should give the President the benefit of the doubt, for several reasons deriving from the usual procedures that have operated in every modern White House and that, I assumed, had to be operating in the Bush White House, too. First, I assured the students that these statements had all been carefully considered and crafted. Presidential statements are the result of a process, not a moment's thought. White House speechwriters process raw information, and their statements are passed on to senior aides who have both substantive knowledge and political insights. And this all occurs before the statement ever reaches the President for his own review and possible revision. Second, I explained that - at least in every White House and administration with which I was familiar, from Truman to Clinton - statements with national security implications were the most carefully considered of all. The White House is aware that, in making these statements, the President is speaking not only to the nation, but also to the world. Third, I pointed out to the students, these statements are typically corrected rapidly if they are later found to be false. And in this case, far from backpedaling from the President's more extreme claims, Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer had actually, at times, been even more emphatic than the President had. For example, on January 9, 2003, Fleischer stated, during his press briefing, "We know for a fact that there are weapons there." In addition, others in the Administration were similarly quick to back the President up, in some cases with even more unequivocal statements. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly claimed that Saddam had WMDs - and even went so far as to claim he knew "where they are; they're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad." Finally, I explained to the students that the political risk was so great that, to me, it was inconceivable that Bush would make these statements if he didn't have damn solid intelligence to back him up. Presidents do not stick their necks out only to have them chopped off by political opponents on an issue as important as this, and if there was any doubt, I suggested, Bush's political advisers would be telling him to hedge. Rather than stating a matter as fact, he would be say: "I have been advised," or "Our intelligence reports strongly suggest," or some such similar hedge. But Bush had not done so. So what are we now to conclude if Bush's statements are found, indeed, to be as grossly inaccurate as they currently appear to have been? After all, no weapons of mass destruction have been found, and given Bush's statements, they should not have been very hard to find - for they existed in large quantities, "thousands of tons" of chemical weapons alone. Moreover, according to the statements, telltale facilities, groups of scientists who could testify, and production equipment also existed. So where is all that? And how can we reconcile the White House's unequivocal statements with the fact that they may not exist? There are two main possibilities. One that something is seriously wrong within the Bush White House's national security operations. That seems difficult to believe. The other is that the President has deliberately misled the nation, and the world. A Desperate Search For WMDs Has So Far Yielded Little, If Any, Fruit Even before formally declaring war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the President had dispatched American military special forces into Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, which he knew would provide the primary justification for Operation Freedom. None were found. Throughout Operation Freedom's penetration of Iraq and drive toward Baghdad, the search for WMDs continued. None were found. As the coalition forces gained control of Iraqi cities and countryside, special search teams were dispatched to look for WMDs. None were found. During the past two and a half months, according to reliable news reports, military patrols have visited over 300 suspected WMD sites throughout Iraq. None of the prohibited weapons were found there. British and American Press Reaction to the Missing WMDs British Prime Minister Tony Blair is also under serious attack in England, which he dragged into the war unwillingly, based on the missing WMDs. In Britain, the missing WMDs are being treated as scandalous; so far, the reaction in the U.S. has been milder. New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, has taken Bush sharply to task, asserting that it is "long past time for this administration to be held accountable." "The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat," Krugman argued. "If that claim was fraudulent," he continued, "the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history - worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra." But most media outlets have reserved judgment as the search for WMDs in Iraq continues. Still, signs do not look good. Last week, the Pentagon announced it was shifting its search from looking for WMD sites, to looking for people who can provide leads as to where the missing WMDs might be. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, while offering no new evidence, assured Congress that WMDs will indeed be found. And he advised that a new unit called the Iraq Survey Group, composed of some 1400 experts and technicians from around the world, is being deployed to assist in the searching. But, as Time magazine reported, the leads are running out. According to Time, the Marine general in charge explained that "[w]e've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad," and remarked flatly, "They're simply not there." Perhaps most troubling, the President has failed to provide any explanation of how he could have made his very specific statements, yet now be unable to back them up with supporting evidence. Was there an Iraqi informant thought to be reliable, who turned out not to be? Were satellite photos innocently, if negligently misinterpreted? Or was his evidence not as solid as he led the world to believe? The absence of any explanation for the gap between the statements and reality only increases the sense that the President's misstatements may actually have been intentional lies. Investigating The Iraqi War Intelligence Reports Even now, while the jury is still out as to whether intentional misconduct occurred, the President has a serious credibility problem. Newsweek magazine posed the key questions: "If America has entered a new age of pre-emption --when it must strike first because it cannot afford to find out later if terrorists possess nuclear or biological weapons--exact intelligence is critical. How will the United States take out a mad despot or a nuclear bomb hidden in a cave if the CIA can't say for sure where they are? And how will Bush be able to maintain support at home and abroad?" In an apparent attempt to bolster the President's credibility, and his own, Secretary Rumsfeld himself has now called for a Defense Department investigation into what went wrong with the pre-war intelligence. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd finds this effort about on par with O. J.'s looking for his wife's killer. But there may be a difference: Unless the members of Administration can find someone else to blame - informants, surveillance technology, lower-level personnel, you name it - they may not escape fault themselves. Congressional committees are also looking into the pre-war intelligence collection and evaluation. Senator John Warner (R-VA), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said his committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee would jointly investigate the situation. And the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence plans an investigation. These investigations are certainly appropriate, for there is potent evidence of either a colossal intelligence failure or misconduct - and either would be a serious problem. When the best case scenario seems to be mere incompetence, investigations certainly need to be made. Senator Bob Graham - a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee - told CNN's Aaron Brown, that while he still hopes they find WMDs or at least evidence thereof, he has also contemplated three other possible alternative scenarios:
One is that [the WMDs] were spirited out of Iraq, which maybe is the worst of all possibilities, because now the very thing that we were trying to avoid, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, could be in the hands of dozens of groups. Second, that we had bad intelligence. Or third, that the intelligence was satisfactory but that it was manipulated, so as just to present to the American people and to the world those things that made the case for the necessity of war against Iraq.
Senator Graham seems to believe there is a serious chance that it is the final scenario that reflects reality. Indeed, Graham told CNN "there's been a pattern of manipulation by this administration." Graham has good reason to complain. According to the New York Times, he was one of the few members of the Senate who saw the national intelligence estimate that was the basis for Bush's decisions. After reviewing it, Senator Graham requested that the Bush Administration declassify the information before the Senate voted on the Administration's resolution requesting use of the military in Iraq. But rather than do so, CIA Director Tenet merely sent Graham a letter discussing the findings. Graham then complained that Tenet's letter only addressed "findings that supported the administration's position on Iraq," and ignored information that raised questions about intelligence. In short, Graham suggested that the Administration, by cherrypicking only evidence to its own liking, had manipulated the information to support its conclusion. Recent statements by one of the high-level officials privy to the decision-making process that lead to the Iraqi war also strongly suggests manipulation, if not misuse of the intelligence agencies. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, during an interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair magazine, said: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." More recently, Wolfowitz added what most have believed all along, that the reason we went after Iraq is that "[t]he country swims on a sea of oil." Worse than Watergate? A Potential Huge Scandal If WMDs Are Still Missing Krugman is right to suggest a possible comparison to Watergate. In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed. As I remarked in an earlier column, this Administration may be due for a scandal. While Bush narrowly escaped being dragged into Enron, it was not, in any event, his doing. But the war in Iraq is all Bush's doing, and it is appropriate that he be held accountable. To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose." It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power. Nixon claimed that his misuses of the federal agencies for his political purposes were in the interest of national security. The same kind of thinking might lead a President to manipulate and misuse national security agencies or their intelligence to create a phony reason to lead the nation into a politically desirable war. Let us hope that is not the case. |
he latest vogue in Washington is the proposition that it really doesn't matter whether Saddam Hussein maintained an arsenal of unconventional weapons in recent years. American troops may not have uncovered any evidence of the weapons of mass destruction the Bush administration was warning about, the argument goes. But they have found plenty of proof that Iraq suffered under a brutal dictator who slaughtered thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of his own people, and that is reason enough to justify the invasion. We disagree. We are as pleased as anyone to see Saddam Hussein removed from power, but the United States cannot now simply erase from the record the Bush administration's dire warnings about the Iraqi weapons threat. The good word of the United States
is too central to America's leadership abroad — and to President Bush's dubious doctrine of pre-emptive warfare — to be treated so cavalierly.