Re: a pitiable orphan
- From: "Alvin E. Toda" <aet@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 05:05:41 -1000
On Thu, 10 May 2007, jimstevens wrote:
[Default] On Wed, 9 May 2007 16:51:19 -1000, "Alvin E. Toda"
<aet@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 8 May 2007, jimstevens wrote:
Art, I don't know where you mine this kind of thing but it is very tough to read. Just in the first dozen lines he throws in as many names and creates a jumble of crap to confuse the reader. I don't read them generally as I like writing that gets to the point and does not need to reach all over God's creation to make a point.
She's still at it on Charley's Rose's show. Tenet has already said that going to war with Iraq was a strategic and ideological decision. He wasn't going to engage in politics, and he could only report intelligence-- not a political decision about whether the intelligence warranted an invasion. He called that a political decision. And Rice should knows that. It's not a case that everybody had evidence. It's just that the best guess of the CIA was that Sadaam might have WMDs-- but that was based on a lot of shakey assumptions.
Don't go to Tenet for some credible source. He is all about saving his ass and has a great deal to answer for on his own.
Please don't assume running the CIA is not a political job. Of course it is. People inside the CIA have reported many times that they told Tenet facts and then when it got to both Clinton and Bush, things were always watered down depending on the politics involved.
It would be better if Clinton or Bush heard directly from the source. But it seems that Tenet is the typical bureaucrat that did not want to make any judgements to the intelligence that he gave. He keeps saying that if he had done so (for example, saying that the Iraq intelligence was not good enough to invade the country), then the President and his staff would never trust his intelligence (ie, that they might feel that he's shading the intelligence for making a case of not invading Iraq). In that case, he would be of little use to the President.
Hence, he says that the CIA made a judgement (guess) that there were WMDs in Iraq, but he admits that there was little evidence to back that up. The "slam dunk" statement did NOT refer to how good he thought the evidence was for that judgement. He says that "slam dunk" refered to whether the CIA could inprove its presentation of the known facts of the case. He said that it's a policy decision as to whether Bush and company use, or NOT use, intelligence from other sources-- ie such as the FBI, UN inspectors, or British intelligence-- that corroborate the CIA's judgements. He resented that his words "slam dunk" were misused this way. It's one of his reasons for writing his tell-all book. He makes it pretty clear that he was only doing his job. By implication, the Bush and company decision to invade Iraq was their own political decision-- and theirs alone. He says so. In the end if the Iraq war turns out good or sour, Bush can take all the credit or the blame for the final outcome.
.
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