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Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents
Posted on 03/28/2006 4:58:53 PM PST by eyespysomething
The Document Refuseniks
There is an effort afoot to discredit any material that may undermine the narrative that "Bush lied us into war" and that Saddam's connection to al Qaeda was tenuous at best. Consider this quote from an AP wire story today:
[John] Prados, an analyst with the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research institute, dismissed the documents: "The collection is good material for somebody who wants to do a biography of Saddam Hussein, but in terms of saying one thing or the other about weapons of mass destruction, it's not there."
Prados knows "it's not there," even if he hasn't read all the documents -- the vast majority of which haven't been made public let alone translated. Of course, he has a book out saying Bush lied us into war, so there CAN'T be anything that contradicts the book he already wrote.
The same holds for Peter Bergen, who informs us that only "Bush administration defenders, right-wing bloggers and neoconservative publications are crowing about Iraqi documents newly released by the Pentagon that, they say, prove that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were in league." We learn from Bergen that, "the 9/11 commission found no 'collaborative relationship' between the ultrafundamentalist Osama bin Laden and the secular Saddam Hussein...." Well, one of those 9/11 commissioners, former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, said recently that the documents are a "very significant set of facts" and "tie [Saddam] into a circle that meant to damage the United States." It's unclear what Republican box Bergen would put the onetime Democratic presidential candidate in. Like Prados, Bergen has invested a lot of time and effort in one particular Iraq war story line. "It's long been known that Iraqi officials were playing footsie with Al Qaeda in the mid-1990's," he writes, "but these desultory contacts never yielded any cooperation."
And then there's the ubiquitous Michael Scheuer, a former CIA official who pops up in a silly and dismissive front-page piece on the documents in today's New York Times. He notes that "there's no quality control" when you just throw a bunch of documents out into the public domain. Another U.S. intelligence official is quoted anonymously as saying that "our view is there's nothing in here [the documents already released] that changes what we know today." There's no doubt that some documents may be fraudulent and that a few may wildly over interpret the meaning of some the documents. But to dismiss all of them -- leaving aside that fact the most haven't been reviewed -- is a bit rich and arrogant considering how clueless U.S. intelligence was on what was going on inside Iraq and al Qaeda. Consider these two congressional reports, the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 (pp. 90, 91), and the Report on U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq (pp. 322, 323, 351, 355):
“The U.S. Intelligence Community was not able to penetrate al Qaeda’s inner circle successfully before September 11, despite the fact that human penetration of that organization was considered a priority.”
“According to senior CTC [Counterterrorist Center] officials, CIA had no penetrations of al Qaeda’s leadership and never obtained intelligence that was sufficient for action against Usama bin Laden.”
“CIA acknowledged the poor intelligence collection on both the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda leadership.”
“CIA stated it did not have specific intelligence reports that revealed Saddam Hussein’s personal opinion about dealing with al Qaeda.”
“There was no robust HUMINT collection capability targeting Iraq’s links to terrorism until the fall of 2002.”
“Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collection that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime’s possible links to al Qaeda.”
“The CIA had no…sources on the ground in Iraq providing reporting specifically on terrorism.”
Let's recap. The US intelligence consensus was that Saddam wouldn't invade Kuwait in 1990. They were totally unaware that Saddam was operating a "Manhattan Project"-sized nuclear weapons program until after the 1991 Gulf War. They were a bit off on the status of Saddam's wmd programs in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. Imagine if they also blew it on the extent of the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda.
All of the above pretty much encapsulates the current media view. Because they cannot even entertain the possibility that they may have been wrong, there isn't any new evidence that can possibly be produced.
To be continued....
I have to go be mommy. I'll be back. :-)
Release/Translation of Classified PreWar Docs ping. If you want to be added or removed to the ping list, please Freepmail me.
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Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents
They can ignore, ignore, ignore or even try to discredit all they want (which is what we predicted two weeks ago they would do).
However, the MSM needs to understand that no one is paying attention any more. When they lost their monopoly we saw clearly their agenda (for those who hadn't already seen it).
If they want people to start paying attention again, they should do what my old friend Mark Twain said was their duty.
Mark Twain did not say: "The duty of the press is to be agenda driven and avoid anything that conflicts with their agenda."
Mark Twain said: "The duty of the press is to print the truth and raise hell."
Two, or one, still believe this, but most don't understand what the truth is. And here, with these documents, the truth so far is that they exist, they tell a story and that story is being uncovered. In the end I suspect we will learn that the truth is not what they told us it was.
Evidence then is not evidence unless is proves what you want it to
BTTT
Maybe they get interested if somebody told them the boxes were full of chads.
Dontcha love the media? Believe forged memos, koran flushing, play puppetmaster for the kneejerkers ,etc... but documents from Iraq that were seized from sites in Iraq are discredited. How much you wanna bet that if the articles validated their "Bush lied" meme, it would be front page news above the fold for months! Give me a FReeper like Jveritas anyday over the obsolete media.
Don't forget to spread the blogsite address for jveritas - www.iraqdocs.blogspot.com. I would love to see his sitemeter go through the roof!
Off topic - I would like to congratulate those FReepers that think for themselves. After dabbling on the immigration threads, I'm in need of some moral clarity and integrity.
Does anyone know for sure? I thought jveritas was a woman.
bttt
They know the documents tell us nothing new, when they haven't read them yet. They haven't been translated yet.
That tells you everything you need to know about these people.
They are still misquoting the 911 commission, when obviously even the commission didn't have access to this material.
I'm sure there were a lot of misgivings about putting this material out there for the public, but it was genius. We can see that everyone, the political establishment, CIA, State, and the press itself, has had an interest in shaping the story more than merely communicating the story.
Bush has gone over their heads to the American people. It was a hail-mary move.
nope - jveritas is male. The NY slimes published his name in their article today.
"Dontcha love the media? Believe forged memos, koran flushing, play puppetmaster for the kneejerkers ,etc... but documents from Iraq that were seized from sites in Iraq are discredited. How much you wanna bet that if the articles validated their "Bush lied" meme, it would be front page news above the fold for months! Give me a FReeper like Jveritas anyday over the obsolete media."
This is one part of the story that is really telling. The LSM has been trying, for the most part, to ignore this story and hope it goes away. The report in the Slimes today shows that it is not going away and they are responding to the story. They are not ahead on this one.
It is obvious to me that after 2 weeks the LSM still has not figured out what to do with this story. They can not dispute the interpretation. They would have on day one if they could. They tried ignoring it and that hasn't worked. Now the only thing left is to say the documents must not be real. That one won't work either.
jveritas - your honesty in translating these documents is obvious by the reactions of those who do not want to believe facts. Thank you, again, for all the work you have put into this.
We need to keep pounding on the MSM. Until they realize that we will not shut up about these documents, then they may start recognizing them.
"And then there's the ubiquitous Michael Scheuer, a former CIA official who pops up in a silly and dismissive front-page piece on the documents in today's New York Times. He notes that "there's no quality control" when you just throw a bunch of documents out into the public domain."
The CIA controlled the "quality" so well they missed 9/11.
Do you suppose 'quality control' is demospeak for 'we can't control what gets revealed'?
Deadly combo - politics, correctness and ineptitude
................
"Last summer, CIA censors took the unusual step of permitting Michael Scheuer to publish "Imperial Hubris" in the middle of the presidential election season. This move, along with several simultaneous leaks of classified intelligence studies painting a grim portrait of the American campaign in Iraq, struck many as a blatant intervention by the agency into electoral politics, with Mr. Scheuer being used as a proxy. According to the Washington Post, however, the decision had an entirely different motive. Four top CIA managers had given Mr. Scheuer a green light out of fear that, if blocked, he would resign from the agency, thereby "earning even more attention for a work they viewed as partly ludicrous."
Whether the decision was a CIA calculation or (yet another) miscalculation, we are still left with the question of how, for a period of years, a man of this caliber had been given primary responsibility for the effort to understand and counter Osama bin Laden. But the bad news is that the presence of such a figure in a pivotal position within the CIA was not a fluke.
'snip'
By 1999, the agency's top leaders were actively engaged in the campaign for greater diversity, or, in plain English, quotas. Mr. Clinton's third director, George Tenet, issued a major statement deploring the fact that "minorities, women, and people with disabilities still are underrepresented in the agency's mid-level and senior officer positions," and asserting his determination to end this state of affairs. It was, he said, incumbent on "supervisors and managers" at all levels to understand that diversity is "one of the most powerful tools we have to help make the world a safer place," and he declared that they would be held accountable for "ensuring that this agency and community are inclusive institutions."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006359
The degenerate clinton proved that character DOES matter in our highest leaders (and in his case the lack of moral character). Sadly, the sovereigns of this nation have stopped paying any attention to such a thing when contemplating their vote so degeneracy is now taking over the 'nation's conscience'. America is already in the swirl going down the toilet, but there's plenty of bread and circuses to keep the sovereigns distracted!
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