Image courtesy of The U.S. Army under CC BY 2.0.
The Bush administration is rushing into damage control mode consisting of finger-pointing as well as their intent to launch yet another long, drawn-out investigation that is guaranteed to delay its findings until after this year’s presidential elections. Will it work? Of course it will, and in precisely the same manner as the myth they floated convincing most Americans that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were directly involved in 9-11.
The question never was, nor will it ever be, whether or not there was an “intelligence failure.” President George W. Bush did indeed cherry-pick whatever “information” he needed to con Congress and the American people into giving him war powers enabling him to unilaterally attack another sovereign nation that in no way ever provoked US. And notice how quickly former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s and his blockbuster revelations have been buried by both the New York Times and Rush Limbaugh?
The Bush administration’s initial and most motivating “intelligence” was of course the neoconservative Project for the New American Century cabal that adjudicated that Iraq must be destroyed to secure the Mid East for America and Israel. And notice how it has become imperative on the part of the Bush administration to erect a huge wall between the pre 9-11 terrorist intelligence and that used to justify Bush’s war powers to invade Iraq?
According to a New York Times article on February 2, 2004, David Sanger writes, “In interviews on Sunday, White House officials rejected direct comparisons to the commission that is examining the intelligence failures surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks, or the commission that issued a blistering critique of NASA after the Columbia disaster a year ago.” He continues in his article, “Bush to Establish Panel to Examine U.S. Intelligence,” offering, “Instead, a senior White House official said Sunday afternoon, Mr. Bush intends to order a look ‘at the global security challenges of the 21st century.’”
Columbia disaster? NASA? Global security? What about the lies to obtain war powers? And why is there no connection between the intelligence accurately predicting the 9-11 terrorist attacks that Bush and his administration chose to ignore, and the “faulty” cherry-picking intelligence used to obtain war powers to justify the unprovoked and unnecessary attack on Iraq? What about a reference here to the O’Neill testimony as concerns the Bush administration’s top priority from the get-go?
Has everyone already forgotten the special, independent, autonomous, separate, jointly created 9-11 Kean commission, created via agreement by both Congress and the White House? Has everyone already forgotten how the Bush administration blocked funding to the commission, blacked out 28 pages of its report, refused to turn over information and documents, and is now fighting to shut down the commission after having so seriously delayed it? Has everyone already forgotten how Bush tried to stack it and bias the commission by appointing as its chair Kissinger the Hun?
And now, we’re getting another investigative panel, controlled by Bush funding, documents, and executive privilege, to “get to the bottom of this?” Sanger writes, “The commission will not report back until after the November elections. Some other officials who have been approached about taking part say they believe it may take 18 months or more to reach its conclusions.” How perfectly convenient!
Christopher Marquis in his February 1st article in the New York Times entitled “Ex-Arms Inspector Now in Center of a Political Maelstrom” writes regarding the inspector, “David A. Kay, the arms inspector who changed his mind about the existence of unconventional weapons in Iraq, is perplexed by all the fuss he has caused. The weapons are simply not there, he says; it is empirical. Yet since he went public with his findings in recent days, Dr. Kay, a plainspoken technocrat, has been in the center of a political maelstrom. The C.I.A. is fighting for its reputation, and the Bush administration is battling accusations that it went to war on the basis of false information.”
Marquis continues, “Dr. Kay holds that, based upon information provided to the administration, ‘it was reasonable to conclude that Iraq posed an imminent threat.’” Yet when confronted with such questions in a TV interview, Bush vehemently denied using the term “imminent” or even implying such. Marquis quotes Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), who has it right when he says, “[Kay] is trying quite clearly to put responsibility on the intelligence community and deflect it from the administration.” Perhaps the Kay “leak” wasn’t an inconvenient blunder after all – no one’s holding Bush accountable now for those weapons of mass disappearance!
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”