Devastating Commentary
I’ve been ignoring the big talk about Pentagon intel before this because, to put in bluntly, it doesn’t mean anything nor does it change anything. Then or now. It is simply a stick, and not a very impressive one, for people who want to beat the administration and try to make it look like they are doing something useful. Take Carl Levin … please:
… while the actions of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy “were not illegal or unauthorized,” they “did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to senior decision makers” at a time when the White House was moving toward war with Iraq.
“I can’t think of a more devastating commentary,” said Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.
Well, I can. I’m looking at one attack after another in the 1990s, and nothing in reaction but a few missiles lobbed.
Levin’s doing the best he can with the commentary he has to work with. It needs to be devastating, so he’ll think it’s as devastating as he needs it to be.
I’m looking at intelligence agencies that never were able to get a good picture inside of Saddam’s Iraq, nor were they able to get a good handle on al-Qaeda in advance of 9-11. But that is all beside the point. There are differences of opinion about the extent of contacts between Saddam and al-Qaeda that persist to this day, even with documented evidence from Saddam’s own intelligence agency that indicate there were high-level contacts. If the Pentagon doubted what the intel agencies were telling them, and said so, I’m not particularly surprised. I’m glad they weren’t just sitting around allowing themselves to be spoon-fed analysis by people with a pretty poor track record. After all, these are people who sent an analyst’s husband off to talk to his pals in Niger and bought when he came back with a “shocked, shocked” reaction to the notion that Saddam’s agents might have been sniffing around for uranium.
Here’s more from Levin. He’s on a tear:
He cited Gimble’s findings that Feith’s office was, despite doubts expressed by the intelligence community, pushing conclusions that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague five months before the attack, and that there were “multiple areas of cooperation” between Iraq and al-Qaida, including shared pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
“That was the argument that was used to make the sale to the American people about the need to go to war,” Levin said in an interview Thursday. He said the Pentagon’s work, “which was wrong, which was distorted, which was inappropriate … is something which is highly disturbing.”
Actually, that was an argument, one of many. For Levin to suggest otherwise is wrong … distorted … inappropriate …. in fact, it’s highly disturbing.
We also didn’t know exactly what the state of Saddam’s WMD programs were. But, as with his contacts with al-Qaeda, we knew this: If he didn’t have them then, he’d have them later. The box around Saddam was falling apart, and crazy neighbor-invading sociapathic mass-murdering megalomaniac boy’s time was up. (Off topic, but let me just add here that I’m glad they hung him and that he got mocked, by the way, even if it was by a Sadrist who probably deserves a dance at the end of the rope himself.)
Most devastating commentary of the day?
“I’m trying to figure out why we are here,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., saying the office was doing its job of analyzing intelligence that had been gathered by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Dadmanly: don’t believe the hype.
Scott, sitting in a hand at Flopping Aces, smells politics and reviews the history of important, necessary, unrelenting and ongoing efforts to prove “Bush Lied!”
Overheard in the Captains Quarters: “They were for dissent and alternative analysis before they were against it.”
Powerline: it’s a topsy turvy world.
Allah at Hotair: Uh oh! WaPo has an intel problem. It is swallowing and misattributing inaccurate assessments from … Carl Levin! Devastating commentary!
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 7:53 pm Comments (8) on Friday, February 9, 2007
8 Responses to “Devastating Commentary”
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February 9th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
Massive WaPo Blunder
We’re so used to the relentless media bias that we’ve come to expect it on a daily basis. Considering the amount of times they screw up, the mainstream press unwittingly has become a boon for bloggers over the past several years. Today we have a whop…
February 9th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
“Devastating Commentary”
WaPo quasi-retracts page-one story about Feith Iraq/AQ intel Allahpundit Spruiell e-mails with the subject header, “Good Lord.” Indeed. They’re calling it a “correction,” but is it really a correction if you’re quoting from an entirely diff…
February 9th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
I had to chuckle at that Washington Post “correction.” Long ago, in the age of carbon paper and different colors for the internal copies to the file and reading boards, we would have a solution at hand. Have the WaPo “reporters” put their own draft on yellow paper, copy the Levin report on pink paper, and put the IG’s report on white paper. Then, the reporters might be able to keep track of which paper they are “quoting” in their own article.
February 10th, 2007 at 1:05 am
The press seems to be doing this more and more frequently: they publish a story, allow it to be disseminated widely, and then “correct” it when no one is watching – like on a Friday afternoon. You can bet Russert won’t spend any time talking about how WaPo got it wrong this Sunday. The press has – once again – established a phoney narrative that has entered into the mainstream.
Chris Matthews pushed this story as real tonight. He needs to spend an additional hour now, talking about how it wasn’t right.
After all, he supports the “fairness doctrine” doesn’t he?
February 10th, 2007 at 6:45 am
I think the idea that Saddam did not have any contacts with AlQaida is absurd. Of course he did. Everyone knew that. But at the same time, if people are looking for proof they might well not find it.
No one knows where Jimmy Hoffa is, but we have a pretty good idea he is dead. There will never be proof that Al Capone ordered the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, but every mafia crime buff knows he did. And so far as we know Hitler never signed an order for the Final Solution, but we know he was running that show.
I am surprised no historical revisionists have come along and told us that Hitler’s Third Reich and the Imperial Japanese could not possibly have been allies because after all, Hitler was a white supremist.
February 10th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
[...] Jules Crittenden: I’ve been ignoring the big talk about Pentagon intel before this because, to put in bluntly, it doesn’t mean anything nor does it change anything. Then or now. It is simply a stick, and not a very impressive one, for people who want to beat the administration and try to make it look like they are doing something useful. Take Carl Levin … please: … while the actions of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy “were not illegal or unauthorized,” they “did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to senior decision makers” at a time when the White House was moving toward war with Iraq. [...]
February 10th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
Deal in the making?
Tigerhawk speculates on a possible imminentdeal between North Korea and the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and South Korea to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear program. He also wonders why this news, which has been leaking for several days now, has
October 13th, 2008 at 10:54 am
The best part about the entire Feith, Dem/Congress ranting and alleging that intel was manipulated…is the timeline. According to the Senate Intel Com, Feith’s office gave its last presentation to the White House on a Monday, and the CIA gave theirs on the same subject (regime ties to AQ) the following Wednesday. Any alleged misleading that Feith’s office did to the White House is completely moot as such alleged misleading would have been clarified just 48-72hrs later. Levin sits on the very committee that pointed out this timeline fact, and still he and other Democrats claimed Feith’s office somehow tricked America to war. Democrats also claim that the White House then used info from the briefing that Feith’s office gave to mislead Congress, but the House and Senate intelligence committees had almost 2 dozen combined, closed door briefings with intelligence officials in the time between Feith’s office briefed the White House, and the invasion half a year later. The third strike is the worst, and it is the core of the entire Iraq-intelligence issue: from December 1998-December 2002…the entire collective of sixteen American intelligence services wasn’t able to get a single human intel asset inside Iraq; not one person. It’s not that there was bad intel, or misleading intel, it’s that there was almost no intel! There was nothing but reports from other nations, and sat pics of WMD facilities that were bombed in December 98 being rebuilt. That’s a failure of oversight, and lo to the Democrat that dares stand up and say, “WHOA! We really screwed up. Let’s fix this problem.”
More here:
http://www.floppingaces.net/2007/04/18/saddams-ties-to-al-quedadebunk/