Monday, April 04, 2005

 

The "Nukular" Option

With the recent death watch that has consumed the country, it's pretty obvious that the report presented by The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction last Thursday is going to get precious little coverage. In fact, just to put things into perspective, I did a Google search today on a few items and obtained the following results:

That seems about right. After all, the deaths of over 1500 soldiers for what appears to be a great big "I think so," isn't nearly as important as the feud over Terri Schiavo. And I realize that the Pope has passed away, but once again, one person versus the death of over 1500. Not trying to be callous, but Schiavo was ill and dying. The Pope was ill and dying. These 1500 plus soldiers were killed because George Bush sent them to fight a war that was sold on what can only be described as false information.

So, since the media isn't going to do it, Truespeak will. Let's take a closer look at the report, shall we? In fact, the part that most interests me is the first chapter concerning Iraq. Tonight we'll look at the section concerning nuclear (or is that "nukular") weapons.

For starters, the commission sums up its findings as follows:

As it turns out, there was always disagreement on the uses of these tubes. But more on that later.

To begin with, the report discusses what was known about Iraq's nuclear program following the 1991 Gulf War. And from the looks of things, we appear to have been guessing based upon past behavior and not hard evidence. While past behavior is often a strong indicator of future behavior, these guesses quickly became accepted as fact and any new evidence that didn't align with these guesses was quickly dismissed as unreliable.

After a discussion of what the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) found after the war (no WMD), the report analyzes how the pre-war intelligence got things so wrong. The begin with this statement:

As stated before, if the evidence didn't align with the preconceived notion, it was dismissed. To quote the report:

Nothing like ignoring the facts. If this were a junior high science project, they'd get an "F" on their research techniques and the validity of their conclusions would be called into question. Good thing this isn't junior high.

The report goes on to find the following:

And...

Call me crazy, but basing everything on an assumption that your contemporaries can't agree upon doesn't really sound like solid intelligence let alona a "slam dunk." And what of the other evidence that was being used to substantiate their claims?

Of course we all remember the famous words from Georgieboy's 2003 SOTU Address - "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Turns out this was based on blatantly forged documents that were provided by a liaison intelligence service in late 2001 and early 2002. According to the commission:

Once again, this information fit their preconceived notion, so why question it? Concerning those documents, the report states:

When I was younger, there was this woman that I worked with who was always on my case. She was always accusing me of something I hadn't done and when I'd deny it she'd say, "Denial is always the first sign of a guilty man." Little did I know that this approach would become the method of operation for our nation's intelligence agencies.

It's truly shameful to think that the lives of over 1500 soldiers didn't warrant a closer look at the evidence. Like a bull in a china shop, we just charged straight ahead without bothering to consider the damage we were doing.

More on the commission's findings concerning Iraq's biological weapons tomorrow.



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