Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to I hate to argue with a sick man...

...but you will anyway.
Robert — (archived)

Ah, but there are a couple of problems:

--In the New Republic scenario, Cheney cooked the intelligence info that was presented to Bush. In other scenarios the intelligence was cooked by staffers. Bush is known to disdain getting information from the outside world, and relies on his trusted advisers. Too much opportunity for manipulation there.

--The cooked intelligence info was presented to Congress. They were manipulated too, whether by Cheney two steps removed, or by Bush at one step. If you could see past your partisan blinders, you might see that many members of Congress feel they were misled and betrayed. Not all opposition to Bush is craven partisanship; it can be principled, as in this case.

Since the intelligence info was shaky, there was plenty of room for slanted interpretation. Remember Powell's testimony to the UN? Highly spun. He'd present a satellite photo showing a truck parked outside some building, and assert that it was transporting chemical or biological material. How do we know that? Only because Powell said so. Hell, we don't really know when the photo was taken. It could've been years old.

How do you explain the Niger uranium cake incident? It's clear that the White House knew by the time of Bush's SOU speech that the report was false, but they used it anyway. According to the TNR article, Cheney insisted on it. How do we guard against that?

A policy that allows the US to go to war based on assertions, and maybes, and tortuous chains of inference, and single-source intelligence, is dangerous.

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