"I Guess"

I think it's the flippancy at the end of the sentence that sets my blood boiling.

GIBSON: You've always said there's no do-overs as President. If you had one?

BUSH: I don't know -- the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

First there's the continuation of the Big Lie - not everybody was looking at the same intelligence. The Germans and the French and even substantial elements of the US intelligence community were not sold on the existence of WMD in Iraq. The facts were sifted by those who wanted war to fit the policy. Those with access to unsifted information, like Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei, who were on the ground in Iraq before Bush kicked them out, knew that the truth was that there were no credible reports of weapons stockpiles. When Bush says that members of Congress were looking at the same intelligence, he's referring to that sifted intelligence. In other words, he sold them on a lie.

A lie which Democrats were far too willing to buy for short-term political expediency:

Of course, Bush made the decision to overlook all the good intel — not to mention the claims of those poor forgotten inspectors — saying that Saddam wasn’t really a threat at all, or certainly not one requiring the response Bush himself ordered.

One overlooked thing about this is that not only Bush, but many supporters of the war — Dems and liberal hawks included — also have a vested interest in pretending that the good intel never existed and those inspectors never said what they said. Those inconvenient historical facts reflect rather badly on them, too. With so many opinion-makers having vested interests of their own in telling the story this way, history has been tidily rewritten, and Bush is able to make this claim without a peep of objection from his big-time network interviewer.

It's a little secret that everyone's willing to keep.

But it's the "I guess," with the hundreds of thousands of American and Iraqi lives hanging on it, that really drives me insane. He wishes the intelligence were different, sorta... what he means is that he wishes nobody caught him in his lie, and he wishes the war wasn't such a disaster. Everything else is a dodge from responsibility. It's true in economic policy, too:

GIBSON: Do you feel in any way responsible for what's happening?

BUSH: You know, I'm the President during this period of time, but I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived in President, during I arrived in President.

I'm a little upset that we didn't get the reforms to Fannie and Freddie -- on Fannie and Freddie, because I think it would have helped a lot. And when people review the history of this administration, people will say that this administration tried hard to get a regulator. And there will be a lot of analysis of why that didn't happen. I suspect people will find a lot of it didn't happen for pure political reasons.

Well that's just a standard-issue lie right there, from the largely irrelevant focus on Fannie and Freddie to the "innocent bystander" idea that he just couldn't direct his own regulatory agencies - over whom the Congress has far less control - to investigate CDSes and subprime lending and massive over-leveraging.

"I guess" I won't miss this guy in the White House. By the way, these 2-hour interviews about nothing seem superfluous when there's a financial meltdown going on.

Rogue's Gallery

Ron Suskind's revelation of document forgery to cover up the case for war with Iraq caused quite a stir yesterday. Today he writes in the Huffington Post about the whole sordid tale - it's quite unbelievable.

The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying a $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger. The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization."

The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists like Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of the CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting the CIA from conducting disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.

This is all well-sourced in the book, Suskind claims, and nobody has impeached his credibility to this point in his other best-sellers. So the benefit of the doubt is definitely on his side.

And then what you have a picture of is your government, to which you pay tax dollars, forging evidence for a nonexistent al Qaeda-Iraq link, using wanted criminals as intelligence assets, paying them off to the tune of $5 million dollars in hush money, and laundering propaganda through dicey media sources. This is a government out of control, with nothing but contempt for the rule of law and American values.

Somehow, this Administration isn't involved in the 2008 Presidential race. Despite this track record. That's a big mistake.

Happy Loss Of Colin Powell's Honor Day

It's Super Tuesday, but it's also an ignominious milestone, the date where Colin Powell traded his own dignity for the clucking approval of the very serious foreign policy neoconservancy. The date where he held up a tiny vial of anthrax and showed a bunch of shadowy aerial photographs and mixed them up into a big stew of deception and misinformation. The date where all the serious people shook their heads and said "Well, if Colin Powell's on board, then it must be true. The date, in many ways, when those who desire global hegemony, endless empire, hijacked our government for good.

At the time that Powell was at the UN, five years ago today, Iraqi scientists knew that there were no WMD, no nuclear weapons, no programs that could even hope to threaten the United States.

When Saad Tawfiq watched Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations on February 5 2003 he shed bitter tears as he realised he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing.

As one of Saddam Hussein's most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes in 1995 -- and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.

And yet here was the then US secretary of state -- Tawfiq's television was able to received international news through a link pirated from Saddam's spies next door -- waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.

"When I saw Colin Powell I started crying. Immediately. I knew I had tried and lost," Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital Amman [...]

"I went crazy. The questions were dumb. She was telling me: 'They know you have a programme,' and I was saying: 'There is nothing. Tell them there is nothing, absolutely nothing. They have left us with nothing'," Tawfiq said.

"She was taking notes. There were 20 major questions, and to all of them the answer was: 'No, no, no...' I kept swearing on the grave of my mother."

According to Tawfiq, Saddam Hussein gave the order to dismantle Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programmes in 1995, after his brother-in-law and arms chief Hussein Kamel defected and briefed the UN inspectors.

"I was Saddam's scientist," Tawfiq declared, with an ironic smile. "In 1991 if you exposed something you were killed. In 1995 if you hid something you were killed!"

Now, five years later, we're caught in very difficult foreign policy messes on two fronts, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The rationale for these wars, to fight Al Qaeda and radical extremism, has completely failed, as Al Qaeda seeks WMD and remains as great a threat to the country as at any time since 2001.

We have just utter incompetence at the highest levels of our foreign policy, and a concerted effort to cover up those mistakes. But Colin Powell's error was out in broad daylight, for everyone to see and regret. It was a day that drove a stake through the heart of this country.

BREAKING: Fred Thompson Remembers Something!

And it actually happened before last week's Office premiere! Only thing is, what he remembers didn't actually happen at all.

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson said today he was certain former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction prior to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, a point of contention in the 4.5 years since the war began.

"We can't forget the fact that although at a particular point in time we never found any WMD down there, he clearly had had WMD. He clearly had had the beginnings of a nuclear program," the former Tennessee senator told an audience of about 60 at a Newton cafe.

Freddie is in the furthest reaches of Outer Wingnuttia with this one. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, it's an article of faith on the far right that Saddam sent all the weapons to Syria before the war (in special invisibility-cloak transport vehicles that our radar didn't see), or he had his Imperial Guard eat them, or SOMETHING. They simply can't believe that the major WMD programs were dismantled, and there was no credible effort to acquire nuclear material. This isn't just a fundamental question of policy, it's a fundamental question of sanity.

The sidelight of this, of course, is that when it's a subject Hollywood Freddie would rather not touch, it's banished to the part of his memory that's on permanent lockdown. But when it's something he doesn't mind highlighting, then, WHAM! Total recall.

I believe that neurologists and scientists studying the brain call this "the pander effect."

Also, as a complete side note, Thompson's top-level brain trust was with him on this trip:

Thompson was traveling with his wife, Jeri, and country music star John Rich, the second half of the act Big and Rich.

The Big and Rich guy has a lot of competition for Cabinet posts or a major foreign policy portfolio:

President Serial Liar

We learned a couple things today that are in direct opposition to one another, at least theoretically. One is that the President still believed Saddam had WMD as late as April of 2006, though he dare not say it in public for fear of sounding like a nutjob (as if that's stopped him). The other thing we learned is that, actually, Bush knew Saddam didn't have WMD BEFORE he went to war with Iraq.

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

The evidence came from the former Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, who disclosed that Saddam didn't have WMD. But it didn't matter. The policy was already in motion and if you disagreed you hated America.

These two seemingly contrasting statements can easily both be true. Bush was told Saddam has no WMD in 2002; he refuses to believe it, invades the country claiming that the WMD are there somewhere, and spends three long years clinging to that belief because the last thing he can admit to himself is that he was wrong.

But the point is that the CIA had the intel. And it was hidden from key players, in particular Colin Powell and the senior military leaders who were still out in the field in hazmat suits expecting to be hit with chemical or biological agents. The whole war was a fiction, a complete, inescapable fiction, right down to the current assertion by the President that we're kicking ass over there.

There's not a jail big enough for this gang of miscreants.

UPDATE: This is encouraging and I hope Senator Kerry is being straight about it.

update: A lot of you are asking about what we can do about it. That’s the right question. I can't guarantee success, but we're closer than we've ever been. The media swirl around this debate doesn't capture the dynamics I see in Congress. Republicans are much more nervous about this, and there's far less Democratic disunity than the media storyline portrays. I'm talking to my colleagues every day (I just got out of a caucus meeting), and the Bush-advanced fallacy that the escalation is working just isn't a big part of our discussions. I think we hammered that reality home pretty hard yesterday at the Foreign Relations Committee with some important validation from Sen. Lugar.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are not confident at all. Their party is being driven over the cliff by the President’s stubborn insistence on sticking to this failed policy. And they know it. No one wants to consign themselves to a permanent minority, but that's what's happening. They're not unified at all on this.

Contrasted with Carl Levin's wishy-washy statements, I'm not so sure. Perhaps the idea is to give the Republicans the room they need to come over to the other side. But I fear that we'll end up with some nonbinding suggestion to withdraw 50 troops at a time of the President's choosing but only if he feels like it and this isn't a demand it's more a suggestion please PLEASE DON'T CALL ME UNPATRIOTIC!!!!!

Candidate Null Set

Mitt Romney wins the Lie of the Night award, answering the question "Was it a mistake to invade Iraq?"

Well, the question is, kind of, a non sequitur, if you will. What I mean by that — or a null set — that is that if you're saying let's turn back the clock and Saddam Hussein had opening up his country to IAEA inspectors and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein therefore not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn't be in the conflict we're in. But he didn't do those things, and we knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in.

Um. Saddam Hussein did let the inspectors in. Hans Blix was in Iraq right up until a few days before the war, when George Bush ordered him and his team out. And they weren't finding anything.

This is the "big lie" about the Iraq war, and I'm sure most Americans don't even know the truth here. As Matthew Yglesias notes regarding Giuliani's suggestion that Iraq is "part of the overall terrorist war on the United States," the Republicans are going to lie with impunity in this next election, and the Democrats need to be ready for it.

Unfortunately for Democrats, the way political reporters in practice cover this stuff is much better exemplified by my other colleague Marc Ambinder who merely notes that "Giuliani linked Iraq to the broader war on terror and kept accusing Democrats of burying their heads in the sand."

I don't like it, but that's the way the game is played. What I'd really like to see, though, is the politician with enough confidence in his or her own command of the national security issue to just shoot back as if we live in a sane universe wherein BS like that from Giuliani demonstrates not "toughness" but his unfitness to lead the country.

I don't know if there's anyone out there on the Democratic side willing to challenge that assumption and call out the lies for what they are, but I certainly hope so. It's a smackdown waiting to happen, but it has to be broadcast loudly to drown out the Republican noise machine.

UPDATE: I should also mention that null set is a math term and has absolutely no relevance in Romney's statement. Maybe it means something different on the planet of the Psychlos.

The Intelligence Was Being Fixed Around The Policy

The latest "book about politics I simply have to read but have such a backlog that I won't get around to it for two years" appears to be The Italian Letter, which has actually been out there for a little while. Because talking about the run-up to war is "old news" and coincidentally deeply embarrassing to the traditional media, not much has been made of the revelations in the book, which generally concerns the Niger forgeries but also delves a bit into prewar intelligence. Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution notices some facts that should be, well, relevant:

There were strong indications that Foley all along was toeing a line he did not believe. Several days after Bush's State of the Union speech, Foley briefed student officers at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, DC. After the briefing, Melvin Goodman, who had retired from the CIA and was then on the university's faculty, brought Foley into the secure communications area of the Fort McNair compound. Goodman thanked Foley for addressing the students and asked him what weapons of mass destruction he believed would be found after the invasion. "Not much, if anything," Goodman recalled that Foley responded. Foley declined to be interviewed for this book [...]

One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center's analysts: "If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so." The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.

"Foley" is Alan Foley, and at the time he was in charge of the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC). So this is a fairly important person in the chain of command on intelligence, particularly WMD intelligence, which was a central foundation for the war. And here we have him allegedly telling his staffers to find some justification for a preordained policy. Schwarz finds this passage, of someone high up the intelligence ladder telling subordinates to find the intelligence to justify the war, in several other books, but never attributed to Foley. He writes:

Any serious congressional strategy to end this war would include nationally televised hearings about this and all the other lies that got us into Iraq. The seriousness of the Democrats can be judged by such hearings' non-existence.

Of course, the thing is that they're somewhat embarrassed about it as well. After all, 94 senators didn't read the pre-war NIE on Iraq, and they weren't all Republicans. This is a time period that neither party wants to revisit, particularly in an election season where the front-runners on both sides of the aisle have so much culpability for this mistake. And yet it's crucial that they do revisit this time period. For the fact that it was impossible to take the nation to war without lying informs the fact that the policy is never likely to work. The mission was so unclear that lies had to be invented to give it shape. We found out this week that Doug Feith's office was making up names of Dutch companies that were supposedly the key to linking Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden:

On or around 25 July 2002, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (OUSDP) of the US gave a briefing entitled 'Assessing the Relationship Between Iraq and al-Qaida'. This alternative intelligence report wrote that Osama Bin Laden's al-Hijra Company had contacts with the Netherlands-based company Vlemmo NV, which was allegedly involved in the purchase by Iraq of military equipment, Verhagen confirmed.

But "the company Vlemmo is unknown in the Netherlands," according to the minister. "The company has never been registered with the Chamber of Commerce in the Netherlands and is also not known to the tax service. That the company may have served as a front for illegal arms trade with Iraq is equally unknown to me."

The 2002 OUSDP report was made public last month by the chairman of the US Senate's defence committee, Carl Levin. "The contents of the intelligence report has only become known to me following the recent publication of the document," said Verhagen.

Feith, aka "the stupidest fucking man on the planet" according to Tommy Franks, was busily construcing false companies in the Netherlands on which to lay his claims while systematically shutting out of government anyone who actually knew anything about the Middle East:

Patrick Lang told a hilarious story the other night, for example, about a job interview he had with Douglas Feith, a key architect of the invasion of Iraq.

It was at the beginning of the first Bush term. Lang had been in charge of the Middle East, South Asia and terrorism for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1990s. Later he ran the Pentagon's worldwide spying operations.

"He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me," Lang recalled, "which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers -- they always had briefing papers, you know -- about me.

"He's looking at this stuff, and he says, 'I've heard of you. I heard of you.'

"He says, 'Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?'

"And I said, 'Yeah, that's really true.'

"That's too bad," Feith said.

The audience howled.

"That was the end of the interview," Lang said. "I'm not quite sure what he meant, but you can work it out."

They didn't want anyone around who had a clue because their pretexts for war were so transparent they wouldn't be sufficient to cover Janet Jackson's nipple and pass FCC standards.

It's nice that the Senate is finally able to put together a Phase II report about prewar intelligence. But based on these stunning revelations which are going almost entirely unnoticed, it's clear that more is needed. Remember when everyone thought that the Downing Street Memo would be enough to bring down the Bush Administration? It wasn't. But not because it wasn't an excellent launching pad to investigate how the President deliberately misled this country into an unnecessary war. It's because there wasn't any follow-up, with the Republicans in power. Now that's not the case; Democrats are in power, and we're continuing to flounder in this foreign policy nightmare. And it will not improve until we confront the fact that we were pushed to war under false pretenses, and are therefore over there illegally, without a clear mission, and must leave.

Those Damn Iranians of Iraqi Origin Living In Iraq

Funny story about those explosively formed penetrators:

"Iraqi army soldiers swept into the city of Diwaniya early this morning to disrupt militia activity and return security and stability of the volatile city back to the government of Iraq," the U.S. military said in a statement.

Bleichwehl said troops, facing scattered resistance, discovered a factory that produced "explosively formed penetrators" (EFPs), a particularly deadly type of explosive that can destroy a main battle tank and several weapons caches.

I thought they all came from Iran. It simply can't be possible that the Bush Admnistration would stretch the truth to serve their political goals, right?

Of course, we'll see this spinned into how Iran just supplied the "technology and know-how" for the EFPs, which have been mostly used in Iraq by Sunnis, so somebody tell me why Shiites in Iran would be aiding Sunnis in Iraq who kill Shiites.

Meanwhile, another Iraqi-made weapon favored by insurgents, the chlorine bomb, killed 30 in Ramadi. We're doing an excellent job providing the training ground for the terrorists of the future.