[Matchett-PI]

Thanks for your input, Southack. I knew you'd have some stats and valuable insight to add to the thread.

In #5 above, Cecily wrote:"I don't know if Michael Rubin could be considered part of the lamestream media. I have read his articles at National Review. I think he is one of the Chalabi fans over there, but I'm not certain. Lamestream or not, he does always seem to be pushing his personal viewpoint, rather than reporting or analyzing events as objectively as possible."

I think she's right about him being a Chalabi fan and that is the key to the slant of the article he wrote. I've always been a cautious Chalabi fan myself - more because of trust in the judgement of people like Laurie Mylroie, et.al., who have a much better handle on the behind-the-scenes goings on including how the Arabist Bush-haters in the State Department and the CIA (who side with the Baathists and hate Chalabi) tried to stop the Iraq war. From what I understand to be the case, when they were unable to stop it, they did their best to maneuver their people into place to undermine Chalabi and allow the Baathists back into the government.

The biggest war has been taking place - not it Iraq, but in D.C. between the Bush Administration and the State Department and CIA. Bush has not been able to get a handle on it until recently when he was able to put his own loyal people in charge in Foggy Bottom, the CIA and the UN. Heads have been rolling ever since, and it isn't over yet by a long shot.

I have no use for these Monday-morning quarterback Bush bashers supposedly on our side, who, if they had been president and tried to implement their agenda, would probably have not gotten nearly as far down the road as Bush has up to this point. Even though mistakes were no doubt made here and there, I think GWB has done the absolute best he could have done given the obstacles they've thrown in his path at every turn. I trust his judgement.

[Southack]

"...war has been taking place - not [just in] Iraq, but in D.C. between the Bush Administration and the State Department and CIA."

The American public has no idea how many anti-American, overt traitors operate inside our intel agencies.

Those traitors screamed about the Iraq war; they screamed about Porter Goss becoming their new boss; they fabricated bad intel (e.g. Iraqi WMDs); they accepted forged French intel docs from an Italian on French payrolls over Niger; they leaked and continue to leak intel, whether true or not, that they view as being damaging to the President; they have actively opposed President Bush's diplomacy with North Korea; they have attempted to poison our relationships with friendly nations (the most egregious example perhaps being the 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Serbia); they have *failed* to either predict or detect the Indian nuclear tests, the Pakistani nuclear tests, the bombing on the USS Cole, 9/11, the anthrax attacks, etc.

This is not a new problem. Our intel agencies, specifically the number 2 man Mark Felt at the FBI, illegally leaked classified intel in order to bring down the entire Nixon Presidency for personal gain and vengeance over a missed promotion.

In Iraq under President Clinton, our State Dept controvened our CIA's good work with two Kurdish factions, ruining years of good fieldwork. In Bosnia and Serbia, our intel agencies ignored the importation of Iranian Mujaheeden (our stated enemy), KLA drug running, and the massacres of Serb Christians by Islamic radicals...and instead touted wild-eyed claims of genocide against Muslims there, even though there was clearly no shortage of Muslims for the TV cameras (and "mass graves" of hundreds of thousands were mysteriously never found). Our intel agencies had no clue about the cells planning the 1993 WTC attacks. They chalk up TWA 800's shootdown to a physically impossible "center fuel tank explosion."

The enemy is among us. Mr. Goss has a Herculean job in front of him to clean up the Aegian Stables of our corrupt intel agencies.

The world's number one intel expert, Angelo Codevilla, states that "U.S. foreign policy successes are due in spite of, not because of, U.S. intelligence agencies."

Our intel agencies failed to stop the pilfering of Los Alamos nuclear secrets (with scant, but existing, exceptions) or the illegal foreign financial influence on American elections.

In fact, corrupt American field agents themselves (e.g. Valerie Plame) have been caught giving campaign contributions to the *SAME* politicians as the Red Chinese. Do I detect a faint *hint* of conflict of interest here?!

[Alberta's Child]

The biggest war has been taking place - not it Iraq, but in D.C. between the Bush Administration and the State Department and CIA. Bush has not been able to get a handle on it until recently when he was able to put his own loyal people in charge in Foggy Bottom, the CIA and the UN. Heads have been rolling ever since, and it isn't over yet by a long shot.

This is quite a remarkable statement. The U.S. government has absolutely no business sending troops to die halfway around the world in some stupid nation-building exercise if it can't even get its story straight within the halls of its own state department and intelligence agency.