5:22 p.m. 2004-07-16
The Bitch says: It reproduces itself
Just when I think stuff can't get any stranger....guess what....it does. I started out with one issue to post about and now have a few.
Issue #1: Los Alamos has lost computer disks again. It's funny cuz I didn't know about the first 3 incidents this year. And, Mr. Nanos said that people will be punished up to and including termination. So, you can mysteriously lose highly classified computer disks from the Weapon Physics area and.....wow, get fired for it. I bet if you were Iraqi you'd get more than fired. What was really funny is that in Dec. 2003 they found 10 storage devices missing but in Oct. 2003 they won a "Best Practices In Storage" award from Computerworld and Storage Network Industry Association. I wonder if they want their award back???
Issue #2: The US military plans to develop an experimental 30,000-pound (13,600 kg) bomb, the biggest in its inventory, aimed at destroying deeply buried targets beyond the reach of existing bombs, the Air Force said. I read about this on the Aljazeera website. So, we are going to build a bigger bomb to bust further down into Mother Earth on the off-chance that we will do what? Find Osma maybe?
Issue #3: This was my original main one but, I'm going to paste the info here and see what happens. By the way, this was in the Boston Globe on 7/13/04 by Thomas Oliphant.
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THE VERY BEST that can be said on President Bush's behalf is that he used the CliffsNotes version of intelligence information about Iraq as the basis for a poorly planned and rushed invasion of Iraq in March of last year.
The problem with this charitable approach to Bush is that it's unfair to CliffsNotes.
In plain English, the Central Intelligence Agency was serving Bush large helpings of baloney in the form of summaries of analyses and conclusions that were directly contradicted by the detailed information on which these analyses and conclusions were supposedly based. For those seeking to blame the summaries, including Bush's own campaign and policy big shots, the desperate finger-pointing works only on the basis of an assumption that is grounds for tossing Bush out of office.
To try to escape accountability by blaming CIA summaries, the president would have to ask the country to believe that he led it to war after reading a few cover pages without once glancing at the backup material that was sent to him and his top advisers. This view of the Bush style -- big picture and full of alleged moral clarity -- is grounds all by itself for electing a new president.
But it gets worse. The major finding in the material released so far is not so much that the CIA's hard-liner-serving conclusions were uniformly false or wildly overstated. The major finding is that the conclusions and declarative statements were in every significant instance found to be undermined or even contradicted by the intelligence data that was sent along with them.
To absolve Bush of disqualifying responsibility for this true scandal, this is what you have to believe. The most glaring example involves one of the CIA's major National Intelligence Estimates about Iraq's unconventional weapons "programs" about six months before the invasion. Like any of these estimates, sent to the top security officials of the government, there is a brief summary and then gobs of more detailed material.
You have to believe that Vice President Cheney -- he of the long resume and rich experience, not to mention his status as prime mover behind the idea of hasty, nearly unilateral invasion -- never bothered to see if his extreme statements about the "threat" from Iraq were supportable. You have to believe that his many personal visits to the CIA were simply to ask questions, not influence answers.
And you have to believe that before he went to the UN to make Bush's "case" just before the war, with George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, sitting right behind him, Secretary of State Colin Powell's own visits to the CIA never once turned up the hedging, contradictory information that the Senate committee found by the bucketful.
Much more is coming -- about the prison torture scandal and from the 9/11 Commission about the intelligence dots that were ignored or never connected by Bush and his top advisers. Nothing can top the discovery, however, that the wild statements about Iraq's actions, capabilities, and intentions before the war are belied by the data.
To return to my point about CliffsNotes, imagine you were Bush's instructor at Yale. He has turned in his exam, and you have noted that his assertion that David Copperfield dispatched Uriah Heep with the fireplace poker is contradicted by Dickens's novel itself. To save his skin, Bush comes to you and claims with a straight face that he used the CliffsNotes version to study and that the fact he got it wrong should be ascribed to the cheat sheet, not to him.
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I can only say one thing.....Can this man possibly be trusted to run our country.....even for the few months remaining on his term?
LATERZ
