[monkeywrench]

This is becoming (very apparently) right vs. left.

[Tailgunner Joe]

Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in an interview with the New Yorker magazine in May that the Office of Special Plans "started picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the president. It's not intelligence. It's political propaganda." - SOURCE

Seymour Hersh quotes Patrick Lang regarding Rumsfeld: 2003-05-12 - "The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi. The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the C.I.A."

Walter Pincus quotes Patrick Lang disputing Iraq/Al-Qaeda ties with regards to "CASE CLOSED": "(The Weekly Standard report) is a listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship. If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?" - SOURCE FR thread

NYT's Nicholas Kristof quotes Patrick Lang that when experts wrote reports that were skeptical about Iraq's W.M.D., "they were encouraged to think it over again."

Lang make an appearance in UNCOVERED: THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR along with Joseph Wilson, Scott Ritter, Rand Beers, Henry Waxman, Robert Baer, and David Corn.

More on Lang and Wilson.

National Review on Lang's ties to the LYNDON LAROUCHE organization!

[Delta 21]

Its always been right vs. wrong, and it always will be.

[meenie]

The hunt is on to find some scapegoat to blame for the problems in Iraq. Chalabi is to be blamed for the intelligence miscues leading to the invasion. The heat has been getting to the administration hawks and Chalabi with the accusations of false information and spying for Iran is to fill the bill for scapegoat. Anybody with a good sense of reality would have known that with Chalabi opposing Saddaam, he would slant any intelligence toward the United States getting rid of Saddaam.

The hawks engaged Chalabi to provide intelligence supporting their wishes to intervene in Iraq. Now that Iraq has proven to be a larger problem than they anticipated, blame has to be shifted from them to someone. With Bush's popularity fading, intelligence failure by Chalabi is hoped to shift the blame to him and save the election. In Washington politics a friend is to be used until it becomes an advantage to bite him in the back.