New Vietnam --- America Defeated Again

[Roadtoad]

As near as I can tell, we aren't really at war in Yugoslavia. We're supposed to be part of an international peace keeping force. So for the American Media to claim this is a new Vietnam is false, and more self-absorbed posturing. They can't get enough of their own words and images, especially when they paper sells out it's initial print run, or the Neilsen's show a 30 share.

 

[Elind]

Re: Re: Press, Schmess . . .

Sorry to nitpick, but we did fight white, European Christians in the very war about which this thread started. Remember this sorry scene:

Jesse Jackson and then US Representative, now Illinois Governor Rod Blagojovich embarassing the POTUS (that'd be Clinton) by going behind his back and negotiating a POW release w/ the enemy in enemy territory during a time of war!

What's funny is that the BBC story that pic is from didn't even mention Blago.

Brings back memories. Jesse is good at ambulance chasing, but sometimes that can achive good results, so maybe we need this kind of undercover negotiator who seems to blatantly self serving that he is always trusted?

He did the same think in Kuwait. Remember? He was in the Intercontinental hotel negotiating for the release of some civilian hostage held by Iraq, and he did something else that I credit him with.

There was a woman, Palestinian origin (who were of course supporters of Saddam) but with US citizenship, in the hotel and she managed to get a message to Jackson that she was a US citizen and needed help to get out. The Iraqis heard the call and confined her to her room, while accusing her of treason to the cause, but Jackson who was about to leave with some release hostages, refused to do so until she was allowed to go with him. There was a standoff and eventually the Iraqis relented and let her go with the others.

We were close friends at the time, and I believe the story. In fact I heard it first hand shortly after.

Pity I don't always think as favorably about Jackson as at that time.

 

[Art Vandelay]

When someone says that a war is "the next Vietnam", there's a rather big difference to be pointed out: in the original Vietnam, people weren't constantly asking "Is this going to be out next Vietnam?"

Republicans: the Persecuted Majority.

I guess you don't see the hypocrisy of whining about a "cowed" press, then sarcastically referring to Republicans as "persecuted"?

And for those of you on the Right who have such disdain for free press, I suggest you take a long hard look at the countries who DO institute the views you espouse regarding free press.

And I take you do not see the irony in calling the press "cowed", then accusing the Right of having disadain for the press, either?

I SAID there were exceptions, which, of course, you ignored.

So the press are cowed- except for where they aren't. What a trenchant observation. I'd just like to point out that every single Leftist is a child raping commie who wipes his ass with the Constitution. Except, of course, for the ones who don't.


WildCat

Sorry to nitpick, but we did fight white, European Christians in the very war about which this thread started.

Grenada, Panama, Haiti, and Iraq, however, are completely devoid of white Christians. Nope, not one in any of those countries.

Elind

Brings back memories. Jesse is good at ambulance chasing, but sometimes that can achive good results, so maybe we need this kind of undercover negotiator who seems to blatantly self serving that he is always trusted?

It sets a very bad precedent for private individuals to negotiate. It invites divide and conquer strategies.

 

[Skeptic]

About Jesse Jackson, I have to say that I can't stand the sonofabitch, but he DOES have courage.

Anyway:

a) I SAID there were exceptions, which, of course, you ignored.

When the "exceptions" are the New York Times and CBS news--among many others--doesn't that tell you something? Doesn't that tell you they aren't the "exception" but the general rule?

Bush is undermining the very foundations of our liberty and way of life,

The problem is that this sort of hyperbole is precisely what's marginalizing the democrats: they just cannot understand why nobody else sees just how evil Bush is.

There are three reasons why this is not taken seriously:

1). First, unlike in the past, when CBS and the rest of the media were seen as trustworthy when they unleashed the latest "Republican president is EVIL" story, now bloggers and other sources can check them.

2). Second, your "truth"--Chimp Bushitler, the world's dumbest fascist, is, at the same time, an evil genius AND a complete fool--is ludicrous. It is the hallmark of conspiratorial thinking: in all conspiracies, the "evil" people are both amazingly clever and evil (as seen by them ruling the world) AND amazingly blundering and stupid (as seen by them letting the brave band of conspiracy theorists discover "the truth" that "everybody is hiding").

3). Third, what was said about Bush is exactly what was said about Reagan. Yet, the real result of eight years of Reagen was, of course, the exact opposite: America at the end of the Reagan years was far better off than before--despite being, for eight years, being ruled by the world's dumbest evil racist maroon, out to destroy everything America stands for and turn it into a fascist dictatorship, if the press was to be believed.

For this reason, the media is seen as untrustworthy, conspiratorial, and hysterical. Experience tells most Americans that if the press (or the Democrats) consider a president an evil maroon out to destroy all they hold dear, with all probability this is evidence that he is a very good president; while if the press considers a president (like Carter) an amazing, intelligent, caring and wonderful man, with all probability he's a catastrophic president.

So attacking Bush more would not only not have helped the Democrats, it would have almost certainly increased the Republican victory (which was convincing enough as it was).

 

[Kodiak]

And yet that list seems like an accurate discription of the Bush folks preparing for the Iraq invasion.

Your ignorance regarding the gathering, processing, and dissemination of national security intel staggers the mind...

At the very least try reading a Tom Clancy novel before spouting off...

 

[Kodiak]

So the press are cowed- except for where they aren't. What a trenchant observation. I'd just like to point out that every single Leftist is a child raping commie who wipes his ass with the Constitution. Except, of course, for the ones who don't.

As sig-worthy as anything I've ever read on JREF...

 

[Ladewig]

Your ignorance regarding the gathering, processing, and dissemination of national security intel staggers the mind...

CNN reporting on results of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction

The commission's report said the principal cause of the intelligence failures was the intelligence community's "inability to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions rather than good evidence."

Washington Times pointing out that reliance on an unconfirmed source led to incorrect conclusions about Iraq's threat.

Most recently, the U.S. reliance on intelligence from Iraqi exile and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi proved to be unwise. Chalabi and the INC were sources of intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability now widely believed to be false.

CBS story about convicted embezzler and proven liar Ahmad Chalabi:

Secretary Colin Powell said: “We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological agent factories. Ladies and gentlemen, these are sophisticated facilities. For example, they can produce anthrax and botulinum toxin. In fact, they can produce enough dry biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people.”

But the government had already concluded that Chalabi's defector was unreliable. And the CIA now admits it made a mistake in allowing his information to be included in Powell's U.N. speech.

ContraCosta Times on the unreliablity of "Curveball"

For instance, Bush claimed in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address that Saddam was working to obtain "significant quantities" of uranium from Africa, a conclusion the president attributed to British intelligence and made a key part of his assertion that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program.

More than a year later, the White House retracted the statement after questions were raised about its veracity.

But the Senate report makes it clear that even in January 2003, just before the president's speech, analysts at the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center were investigating the reliability of the uranium information.

Similarly, the president's intelligence commission, chaired by former appellate judge Laurence Silberman and former senator Charles Robb, D-Va., disclosed that senior intelligence officials had serious questions about "Curveball," the code name for an Iraqi informant who provided the key information on Saddam's alleged mobile biological facilities.

The CIA clandestine service's European division chief had met in 2002 with a German intelligence officer whose service was handling Curveball.

The German said his service "was not sure whether Curveball was actually telling the truth," according to the commission report.

When it appeared that Curveball's material would appear in Bush's State of the Union speech, the CIA Berlin station chief was asked to get the Germans to allow him to question Curveball directly.

On the day before the president's speech, the Berlin station chief raised a warning about using Curveball's information on the mobile biological units in Bush's speech.

The station chief warned that the German intelligence service considered Curveball "problematical" and said their officers had been unable to confirm his information.

The station chief recommended that CIA headquarters give "serious consideration" before using that unverified information, according to the commission report.

Nonetheless, Bush told the world the next day, "We know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile weapons labs ... designed to produce germ warfare agents and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors."

He attributed that information to "three Iraqi defectors."

A week later, Powell said in an address to the United Nations that the information on mobile labs came from four defectors, and he described one as "an eyewitness ... who supervised one of these facilities" and was at the site when an accident killed 12 technicians.

Within a year, doubts emerged about the truthfulness of all four, and the "eyewitness" turned out to be Curveball, the informant the CIA station chief had red-flagged as unreliable. Curveball was subsequently determined to be a fabricator who had been fired from the Iraqi facility years before the alleged accident, according to the commission and Senate reports.

Perhaps my ignorance is as you put "mind-staggering." I am willing to learn. What am I missing in accusing the Bush administration of "fabricating evidence, not confirming sources, and not checking facts"?

 

[CapelDodger]

What am I missing in accusing the Bush administration of "fabricating evidence, not confirming sources, and not checking facts"?

Nothing, I think. You've covered the essentials of the case. The administration's ignorance of how to properly evaluate intelligence is staggering, if they weren't simply dishonest. I don't see any middle way.

 

[Elind]

It sets a very bad precedent for private individuals to negotiate. It invites divide and conquer strategies. [/B]

I agree, and was commenting tongue in cheek. However it's always hard to say no when you are close to the situation.

 

[Dr Adequate]

I can't believe that this provoked serious debate rather than much laughter. However, since it did, I'd like to agree with WildCat.

Sorry to nitpick, but we did fight white, European Christians in the very war about which this thread started.

Without poking, prodding, or Pearl Harbour, the US did the right thing, not in support of your cultural prejudices or financial interests or a desire for revenge, but because you could. I wish every Muslim suicide bomber would bear this in mind before going boom, and speaking as a grateful European (who often takes the mickey out of the US) I should say that this is something that Americans can brag about without any reservation.

So for once I'll do this:

 

[Kodiak]

What am I missing in accusing the Bush administration of "fabricating evidence, not confirming sources, and not checking facts"?

What are you missing? Everything.

1) Your links provided no evidence the the Bush administration fabricated evidence.

2) Your links indeed suggest that mistakes were made by allied intel gatherers and intel analysts, and that this flawed info was provided to leadership, which, once again I must state, included the UK government, the previous administration, and all of Congress.

3) It is the intelligence community's responsibility to confirm sources and check facts, not the administration's. It is the administration's responsibility to take what intel they receive, and make decisions based on the info they possess at the time.

 

[Kodiak]

The administration's ignorance of how to properly evaluate intelligence is staggering...

Evidently not as staggering as your own ignorance in light of the fact that it is not the administration's job to evaluate intelligence.

 

[Ladewig]

What are you missing? Everything.

1) Your links provided no evidence the the Bush administration fabricated evidence.

After the attacks on NYC and Washington, there were claims that Iraq was tied to the hijackings through a meeting between 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague.

In April of 2002 administration officials and CIA and FBI analysts--almost all unnamed--who said that on closer scrutiny, "there was no evidence Atta left or returned to the U.S. at the time he was supposed to be in Prague." FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III went on the record at a San Francisco meeting saying the evidence wasn't there: "We ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on, from flight reservations to car rentals to bank accounts..." citation

Yet even after that story had been discredited, in September 2002, Cheney went on "Meet the Press," said that Atta "did apparently travel to Prague. . . . We have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center."

I consider quoting discredited evidence on the same level as fabricating evidence.

Originally posted by Kodiak
3) It is the intelligence community's responsibility to confirm sources and check facts, not the administration's. It is the administration's responsibility to take what intel they receive, and make decisions based on the info they possess at the time.

Here is a site that claims that the information flow is not entirely in one direction.

Cheney's staff also waged a campaign to include the allegation in Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's speech to the United Nations in February in which he made the administration's case for war against Iraq. Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, pressed Powell's speechwriters to include the Atta claim and other suspected links between Iraq and terrorism, according to senior and mid-level administration officials involved in crafting the speech.

When State Department and CIA officials complained about Libby's proposed language and suggested cutting large sections, Cheney's associates fought back. "Every piece offered . . . they fought tooth and nail to keep it in," said one official involved in putting together the speech.

The vice president's role in keeping the alleged meeting in Prague before the public eye is an illustration of the administration's handling of intelligence reports in the run-up to the war, when senior officials sometimes seized on reports that bolstered the case against Iraq despite contradictory evidence provided by the U.S. intelligence community.

Perhaps that site is not objective enough to be used as unassailable evidence, but surely you will agree that during speechwriting there is a back-and-forth process between Bush administration officials and intelligence analysts that prevents the process as being described as a one-way flow of information from the intelligence side to the higher up's in the executive branch.

Lastly, given the amount of incorrect information produced by the CIA and used by the Bush staff, one has to wonder why CIA director George Tenet was given the highest possible award for his service. Harry Truman said "the buck stops here," does the buck stop anywhere in the Bush administration?

 

[Kodiak]

After the attacks on NYC and Washington, there were claims that Iraq was tied to the hijackings through a meeting between 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague.

In April of 2002 administration officials and CIA and FBI analysts--almost all unnamed--who said that on closer scrutiny, "there was no evidence Atta left or returned to the U.S. at the time he was supposed to be in Prague." FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III went on the record at a San Francisco meeting saying the evidence wasn't there: "We ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on, from flight reservations to car rentals to bank accounts..." citation

Yet even after that story had been discredited, in September 2002, Cheney went on "Meet the Press," said that Atta "did apparently travel to Prague. . . . We have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center."

I consider quoting discredited evidence on the same level as fabricating evidence.

The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time and The New York Times wouldn't dare play partisan politics, would they?!?

Also, you left this part of your link out:

"But a Prague connection linking Al Qaeda and Iraq remains very much alive for New York Times columnist William Safire, among others. Within the week that media reports were discrediting the story, Safire--a hardliner on U.S-Iraq policy--fired off a column (5/9/02) laying out how the reports were part of a campaign by Bush administration officials to shoot down a troublesome story that would force the U.S. to act against Hussein. Safire chastised U.S officials who refused to be named in the news accounts, and quoted a reported statement by the Czech interior minister who says his intelligence chief stands by their evidence of a meeting between Atta and an Iraqi agent.

Safire concluded his column by noting he can play the unnamed source game too, citing a conversation with a "senior Bush administration official" who told him: "...we're still in the process of pursuing [the allegation of the Prague meeting] and sorting out the timing and venue. There's no doubt Atta was in Prague in 2000, and a subsequent meeting is at least plausible."

Here is a site that claims that the information flow is not entirely in one direction.

Perhaps that site is not objective enough to be used as unassailable evidence, but surely you will agree that during speechwriting there is a back-and-forth process between Bush administration officials and intelligence analysts that prevents the process as being described as a one-way flow of information from the intelligence side to the higher up's in the executive branch.

Lastly, given the amount of incorrect information produced by the CIA and used by the Bush staff, one has to wonder why CIA director George Tenet was given the highest possible award for his service. Harry Truman said "the buck stops here," does the buck stop anywhere in the Bush administration?

Your second link fails to show that intel flows in any way other than as I have already described. That some CIA 'officials', not analysts, might disagree with facts (or falsehoods) to be included in a speech has nothing to do with the fact that once presented with CIA and NSA conclusions, appraisals, and best guesses (and yes, there are a lot of 'best guesses' given to the President), it is up to the President and his assets in the executive branch (cabinet members, NSC, the joint chiefs) to act or not act on whatever intel they either do, or do not, receive.

 

[Tony]

Good point.

Maybe not new, but possibly worse now than ever before?

I don't know. Again, looking at WRH and his role in the Spanish/American War and the criminalization of marijuana, it would seem that his power and influence is unparalleled in today's media.

 

[Kodiak]

I don't know. Again, looking at WRH and his role in the Spanish/American War and the criminalization of marijuana, it would seem that his power and influence is unparalleled in today's media.

Sorry. 'Worse' as in wide-spread...

BTW, you couldn't suggest a good biography on Ol' Willie, could you?