White House Fisking
Dean
My goodness, I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like this before: the White House has issued a fisking of the New York Times.
I mean, what else would you call it?
Mind you, I applaud it. It's about time they stop rolling over and letting the press and others continually spew falsehoods in their efforts to rewrite history. And we don't need the press to act as our conduits to White House statements anymore. I'm just amazed: is this a first? I suspect it is.
Let's hope it's not a last.
By the way, I notice Bill Quick has caught my own Senator Levin prevaricating, too.
I seem to recall that it was Lord William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson who, about eight years ago, predicted radical transformation of governmental power because of the capabilities of the internet to create the "sovereign individual". As Publishers Weekly described these trends:
"The computer revolution, in the authors' dire scenario, will subvert and destroy the nation-state as globalized cybercommerce, lubricated by cybercurrency, drastically limits governments' powers to tax. They further predict that the next millennium will see an enormous decline in the influence of politicians, lobbyists, labor unions and regulated professions as new information technologies democratize talent and innovation and decentralize the workplace. In their forecast, citizenship will become obsolete; new forms of sovereignty reminiscent of medieval merchant republics will spring up; electronic plebiscites will decide legislative proposals; mafias, renegade covert agencies and criminal gangs will exercise much more behind-the-scenes power."
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Part of the horrific rewriting of history, for a lot of us, has been watching the disingenuous press spin a narrative that it was just WMDs, WMDs, WMDs. This is absolutely false. During the final few weeks of debate--after over a year--the White House began mentioning them primarily because critics kept complaining that they were giving too many reasons, that their "story kept changing." So they began, toward the end, to concentrate on the one thing that everyone on both sides of the aisle and the vast majority of the intelligence community (including most foreign intelligence agencies) agreed: that he had used WMDs, that he sought to obtain more, that he wsan't cooperating in his agreement to prove he didn't have them, and that we couldn't afford to wait for him to use them or give them to terrorists.
It has been deplorable to watch the administration's critics--including most of the press--pretend now that none of this other stuff was there. Instead they tell us the President said Iraq was an imminent threat (lie, he said almost exactly the opposite), that he and Cheney conspired to delude the public into thinking Saddam was behing 9/11 (another lie), and more.
I call them lies because they've all been shot town so many times and so irrefutably, I won't even grace it anymore by characterizing it as mere confusion. They're just plain vicious lies.
If the White House called it a fisking.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Take a look at just one of the items in this so called WH “fisking” of the NYT:
NYT: "Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact." (Editorial, "Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials," The New York Times, 11/15/05)
WH response: The Presidents Daily Brief (PDB) did not have anymore information than the NIE.
Huh? Did the NYT say the PDB had more information than the NIE? No! The NYT said the president had “access to” more information than was in the NIE. Bush is famous for not wanting to listen to data that does not support his position, so the PDB probably did contain largely the same information as the NIE, but that does not mean that the people around him, on the NSC and other intelligence agencies did not have access to a lot more information. The NSC knew that the intelligence on the nuclear program and the links between al Qaeda and Iraq were very, very weak, even if they did not dare tell Bush this. Bush had “access” to this information, but Bush just didn’t use that access, which is one of the reasons the Bush administration is so dysfunctional at everything except political campaigning and generating hit pieces on people who criticize their policy.
The WH denies pressuring analysts to reach certain conclusions in the NIE. The support for that is that various congressional committees asked the analysts if they felt pressured and they said “no”. If you believe that “proves” that the intelligence community was not pressured to reach the conclusions it did in the NIE, I have a bridge you might be interested in buying. Come on, get a clue. That is not how it is done. The Bush boys are not amateurs. When you want a government agency to write a report to support a policy position, you manipulate who in the agency is assigned to write the report. You do that by pressuring high level officials. Tenet wanted to be part of the Bush team. He made sure the people chosen to write the NIE would produce what the WH wanted. The NIE reached the conclusions the WH wanted and buried the information that did not support those conclusions in footnotes that most members of congress did not have time to read.
There were other, better arguments that could have been made for the Iraq war, but those are not the arguments that were made before the war. (I don’t believe those argument justified a war either, but I think you probably do).
As I said, the Bush team is very, very good at
lyingdeception. The fact that you could read this WH memo and not see through the deception just proves that.The facts are as stated: only Congress has the authority to declare war, and is fully empowered to ask for any evidence it wants. They were not then and are not now limited to whatever the White House provides. The evidence that people were pressured to do anything is just about zero, but you insist it was done anyway, based on nothing but your own belief that it must be so and some half-assed observations.
Also, the White House gave over a dozen reasons for going to Iraq, not just this one. Why do you keep lying and saying no other reasons were given when you've been shown over and over again the proof that other reasons were given? Here are all the reasons the White House and the Congress gave, in case you missed it while you were so busy lying.
Why do you lie so much, Mike?
(Oh, is there some possibility here that you're not actually lying, you're just mistaken? Funny, that doesn't seem to be anything you're willing to give to the administration.)
You really think we'd be better off, we'd be safer, with him still in power? Or if we'd dragged our feet for a few more years when we'd already dragged our feet for over a decade? When we know now that Saddam was convinced we would never, ever invade and he could do whatever he wanted?
Come on, it doesn't even make sense.
It's also water under the bridge. What do we do now? Playing the "Bush lied!" game makes Democrats feel good, makes Republicans angry, makes independents who support the war angry because it's so false and so harmful, and otherwise does... what? How about this instead: what are the best strategies for how to move forward from here?
Me, I think the best strategy is to continue to help the Iraqis fight off Al Qaeda and establish a stable democracy, slowly withdrawing our troops as the Iraqis are better able to take care of their own security... but also establishing a permanent base up in Kurdistan where we're loved and where they'd be thrilled to have us, and use that as an operations center against Al Qaeda in the region. A base of 20,000 or so would do it I'd think but the Pentagon would have a better answer.
That's what I think makes sense. What do you think makes sense?
The so called WH “fisking’ document is good example of what I call a non-denial denial. Somebody makes a charge against you. You respond by putting out a strong, forceful statement denying some straw man issue which is not actually what the charge was. You combine this with clever definitions of what words mean, and you can fool lots of people while still claiming that technically you are not lying. This technique is used by all politicians of both parties all the time. Clinton was very good at this (“I didn’t have sex with that woman” is technically true if you accept the Clinton definition of sex, but it was still a lie.)
The famous 16 words in the SOTU speech is a great example. If you parse the exact words Bush said, they are technically true. At the time the British intelligence did believe that there was evidence Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger, but the US CIA had the same intelligence and had investigated the claim more thoroughly than the British and concluded that the claim could not be true. What Bush said was technically true, but intended to mislead, deceive and scare the American people. Steve Hadley, who pushed very hard to get this into the speech, was fully aware that the US CIA had more information than the British and did not believe this claim. That does not meet the standard of truthfulness that I expect from a US President. (And Clinton didn’t meet that standard either).
Your response to me seems to be non-denial denial type responses too:
The evidence that members of Congress were pressured is right in front of your eyes. Bush insisted the vote had to be a couple of weeks before the 2002 mid-term elections to place maximum political pressure on member of Congress. He could have waited until two weeks after the mid-term elections, like his father did under similar circumstances in 1990. Bush wanted to politicize the decision about the war so he could get maximum political benefit from it. Any member of Congress who voted against the war because he had read all the classified footnotes in the NIE could be attacked for being soft on terrorism and he could not even reveal what was in those classified footnotes.
Congress does not have its own independent intelligence organization. It relies on the CIA, NSA, and military. In theory Congress could have held hearings to look into how the NIE got written, but in the politically supercharged atmosphere a few weeks before the mid term election, there was not time for that. It was not a real option, and that is exactly what Bush wanted.
I also know there were many other arguments, besides the Iraqi WMD-terrorist link. The administration did sometimes mention some of those other arguments, but absent the WMD-terrorist argument, the support for the war would have been much less and might not have gotten through Congress.
Mike, for example, is conveniently ignoring is that Clinton believed in the WMDs, the British believed in the WMDs, the French believed in the WMDs, and so on.
There is a very large body of data which shows -explicitly- that more than a few countries believed that Hussein either had -or was working very hard on gettting- WMDs. Mike is deliberately ignoring this (among other things) so that he can focus on op-eds from the Times.
What Mike should do is bring some FACTS to the table. Why not quote (chapter, verse, and line) the data which Bush had, but the Senate didn't? Tell us just what the administration knew, but refused to disclose.
{...crickets chirping...}
He can't, because the data doesn't exist. What the "lies" crowd does instead is spin paranoid theories and hope no one notices the holes therein.
For example, Mike spends an entire paragraph bloviating about how the Bushies "really" pressured the analysts into following the party line. Alas, he DOESN'T PROVIDE A SINGLE, STINKING FACT. It's all just unsupported hypothesizing.
A suggestion; if you want to convince someone of a proposition, you have to have PROOF. You need FACTS. Mike hasn't provided jack. (heh) His last entire post was one long editorial.
In fact (excuse the pun) Mike himself has perpetrated a lie, by his own standards. From his post:
ACTUAL RESPONSE: (emphasis added)
Um, whoops.
Mike may as well admit that he doesn't have a fracking clue how intel analysis works. Let's pretend, for a moment, Bush had "more" intel, as he claims.
Who here understands what "more" intel means? Really? It means more data. That's all. What some folks have obviously failed to grasp is that more data does not equate to more detail, or more information. Data and information are two entirely different beasts.
I suppose I should step back for a second, and explain that. Data are facts, while information is data imbued with meaning. For example:
-fact: it is 32 degrees outside
-information: that's cold enough that your kids should wear their jackets.
Actually, this gives a good example of accurate, but incomplete data. Given the above fact, the above information is true. But what if it turns out the thermometer used the Centigrade scale? In that case, the information above is wrong, and if you bundle your kids up for freezing weather you'll probably give them heatstroke instead.
This illustrates how one may legitimately develop reasonable (but inaccurate) conclusions from accurate (but incomplete) data. "More data" just means more things to misinterpret.
The above should also illustrate the problems facing anyone trying to analyze intelligence. Recall in the real world your intel will always be incomplete. It will also be confusing, contradictory, and misleading, especially since one's opponent will be trying to mislead you.
One of the tricks the Soviets used (after they determined the orbits of US spy-sats) would be to deliberately change shifts in their military factories in odd ways, depending upon whether a US satellite was overhead. They might have everyone leave (with their cars) to make it look like no one was working days in one place, or have them show up at 2:00am to make it look like there were three shifts operating at another facility. I'm sure you can think of other ways to perform this stunt yourselves, and that's just one of the many tricks the Soviets developed.
Then visualize the guy who has to analyze just what the data in the photos mean. Are the commies working three shifts in this plant, or one? Or if there's never any cars there (that the satellite can see), is the plant even operating?
Tough call. And I haven't even mentioned tricks involving smoke (chimneys) and heat signatures.
Now recall that the Iraqis learned directly from the Soviets, think about the incomplete data the analysts got, and try to comprehend how hard the job is. It is -very much- an imperfect art.
Sometimes I think the people complaining about all this believe the intel is simple, and obvious, just like in the movies. The US can move satellites anywhere they want, anytime they want (they can't). The photos always clearly show Bloemfeld's Monster Laser Cannon in perfect detail (the photo linked by S. is the typical reality), and everything is always 100% clear (never).
I repeat: this will come back to haunt the Democrats; either from GOP "payback," or from another blown analysis; and I promise you, the analysts will blow another one. Guaranteed. It's in the nature of the beast.
But if the typical citizen can manage to grasp the fundamentals (incomplete and/or ambiguous data, deliberate deception by one's opponents, difficulty of analysis, rarity of high accuracy) it will be much more difficult for anyone to hoodwink them with lies. This protects not just a given political party, but everyone.
P.S. Just remembered, I never even mentioned the fact that virtually all of the US intel was satellite-based, and virtually no human intel existed. Why? We didn't have any sources in the area, but that's another post...
Casey Tompkins:
Everyone thought Iraq had chemical artillery shells and maybe some short/medium range missiles with chemical warheads. It was a brilliant Bush/Rove war marketing tactic to start calling chemical weapons WMDs, when in fact they are not. By changing the definition of WMD, they can say everyone thought Iraq had WMDs and hope the listener assumes that WMDs means nuclear weapons. (“I never has sex with that woman”, because by my definition it wasn’t sex).
Duh… I thought this thread was about the op-ed from the NYTs and the WH answer to it, but you are free to rant on about whatever you like.
You might want to read my other comments in other threads, like here or here
Some additional facts:
The administration knew that the technical experts on centrifuges at the Energy department had concluded the Iraqi aluminum tubes were not for centrifuges. The State Department also agreed that they were not for centrifuges. The NIE concluded they are for centrifuges based on the judgment of other, less technically knowledgeable analysts, and buried the fact that the most knowledgeable analysts disagreed with the NIE conclusions. The NIE conclusions on the aluminum tubes was declassified so that the administration could talk publicly about it, but the fact that the most knowledgeable analysts on centrifuges disagreed was kept classified until after the war so that critics could not use this information publicly. Probably most members of Congress did not realize this either, because it was so deeply buried in the footnotes of the NIE and they only had a short time to read the whole NIE.
The administration knew that the case for links between al Qaeda and Iraq were very thin. Many of there claims were based on a single captured al Qaeda member, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who gave this information under torture in Egypt. As it discussed here as early as February 2002 the intelligence community had concluded this information was unreliable and al-Libi was a likely fabricator. The Bush administration continued to repeat al-Libi’s claims in public and Powel used them at the UN in Feb 2003 without mentioning any reservations about the claims.
The list goes on and on.
Apparently, as best as I can make out, the rest of your rant is because I said “The Presidents Daily Brief (PDB) did not have anymore information than the NIE.” while WH document actually says “The Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) Was Judged Not To Have Different Intelligence Than The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)”
I guess in your mind there is a big difference between “more information” and “different Intelligence”. I stand correct. I should have said “The Presidents Daily Brief (PDB) did not have any different intelligence than the NIE.”
My point, that you conviently omitted and don’t talk about, is that the NYT never mentioned the PDB. They said that Bush had ACCESS to more intelligence, if he so wanted. The WH seems to be saying that the only intelligence Bush ever gets is what is in his PDB. That may be true for this president, but he still has access to more.
Salman Pak Terror Training Facility Complete with practice airliner for 9/11 style takeovers. Salman Pak was a training ground for Al Quaida related Islamist terrorists, btw, allowed to opperate on Iraqi territory.
and Saddam's Empty Throne. Anyone care to venture a guess where those ICBMs are headed to?
Yes, I remember that year very well. In particular, I remember Bush saying that Iraq draws together all the most dangerous elements of our age in one place (or words to that effect, meaning a murderous dictatorship pursuing both mass destruction weapons and terrorist proxy wars against the US and it's allies) and Jon Stewart ridiculing this statement on The Daily Show: "Oooh, it's like they're the Walmart of evil!"
This was the main criticism of Bush at the time, that he couldn't decide on the right justification for war, NOT that he was hell bent on the WMD angle. It's been the press, and Bush's internal and international enemies, more than anything, that built up the WMD "strawman" after the fact.
The Wikipedia entry on Salman Pak says it was built with help from British MI6 in the late 1980s for counter terrorism training. After 9/11 Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress brought forward several defectors that claimed that Iraq was also using the facility to train Islamic terrorists, and even implied that the 9/11 hijackers may have trained there.
According to Seymour Hersh, the CIA doubted this story, because while you need a real airliner to train for counter terrorism, you don’t need a real airplane to train for hijacking.
Since we now know that the claims made by almost all of other defectors associated with the Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress turned out to be fabrications, it is hard to put much faith in this claim.
According to Wikipedia, the director of the CIA (until this year) writes the PDB. Now you are saying that the PDB had pro-invasion contents (like the NIE) because that's what Bush wanted. So, as I understand it, Tenet made a fool of himself and lost his job, because HE DIDN'T WANT TO MAKE BUSH UPSET. Right.
And the part about Bush having "access" to intel not in the PDB? Doesn't Congress have access to intel not in the NIE? What's the difference?
Only one or two of the prewar PDBs have been declassified. Some members of Congress have been allowed to read some of the pre-war PDBs, and they are the one that say the intelligence in the PDBs was similar to what is in the NIE.
Tenet was a hold over from the Clinton administration. Many people have claimed that Tenet was too eager to please Bush and so didn’t always give Bush an accurate intelligence picture. There is of course no way it this is true.
The CIA and other intelligence agencies report to the President. In principal, Bush could go over to CIA headquarters any day he wants and talk to anyone he wanted to. Dick Cheney did make a number of trips to CIA headquarters to talk with the analysts who were writing the NIE. This is very unusual and some people outside the CIA have pointed to this as pressuring the analysts to reach certain conclusions, although the analysts deny that they felt pressured by these visits.
Congress can hold hearing and subpoena intelligence agency managers to testify, usually in closed door hearings because the subject may be classified. In the case of the Iraq war vote, the NIE was delivered to Congress in early Oct 2002, and Bush was demanding that Congress vote within a few days on the war resolution. In principal the Senate that was controlled by Democrats could have refused to vote and said they need to investigate the reliability of the intelligence in the NIE, but that would have taken months. Bush would have charged the Senate democrats with endangering US security by stalling the vote. In the supercharge political atmosphere a few weeks before the 2002 midterm election this was not a real option. Bush knew that. That was one of the reasons he was demanding the vote right then. He knew most members of Congress would not even have time to read the whole NIE, much less hold hearings to investigate the intelligence.
he says, nicely dodging the question. The larger context of the White House reply to the (inaccurate) Times editorial is that there was a broad base of those who believed that Iraq had -or was trying to rebuild- their WMD capability. You can call my post a "rant" if you like, but you are still dodging the basic question.
Your next couple of paragraphs merely support my position that intelligence gathering and analysis is a very uncertain endeavor.
Oh, my bad; it was a "rant," therefore unworthy of consideration.
You have (very obviously) ignored the entire thrust of my post -and I repeat myself- that intelligence gathering and analysis is a very uncertain endeavor. Which part of that do you not understand? Which part of "incomplete and uncertain data" do you not understand? Which part of "your opponent will actively try to decieve you" evades your comprehension?
You have not demonstrated the slightest grasp of how elusive an accurate intelligence analysis is; much less how difficult it is to gather accurate, reliable data. You have -in fact- not demonstrated the slightest grasp of the elementals of intelligence analysis.
The statement 'I guess in your mind there is a big difference between “more information” and “different Intelligence”.' pretty well defines the problem. If you actually took the time to read and understand my examples, you would grasp the difference between data and information, and begin to understand why more data does not necessarily provide a more accurate picture.
I get what the Times is saying. My position is that it is irrelevant. I will also say that the Times wouldn't understand intel gathering and analysis if it were tattoed on their eyelids with a dull ball-point pen.
But then, who am I to argue with someone who uses Wikepedia as a source in a discussion such as this?
Mike, I'll be honest. You don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about when it comes to intel, nor does the Times. I'm sorry; hate to be harsh; but you have no idea what you're saying. Imagine arguing with someone who knows, knows, thaf the Apollo landings were faked. You can argue all day, with elemental examples, but you can't derail their paranoid fantasies.