Now the narrator says "the war rhetoric was at full volume".
Writers featured so far have included the author of Fiasco and Pretext For War. They did have William Kristol on briefly. That was right after the narrator used the word "neocons", natch.
Paul R. Pillar, former deputy chief of counterterrorism at the CIA under Clinton. According to Paul R. Pillar of the CIA’s counter terrorism centre, “fewer Americans die from it [terrorism] than drown in bathtubs.”
10 posted on 02/10/2006 12:32:46 AM PST by kcvl [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1
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[This may well be true- but Pillar needs to understand that it isn’t the constitutionally mandated role of government to prevent Americans from drowning in bathtubs. It IS the role of government to prevent Americans from getting attacked by terrorists.-—piasa]
The flippant Pillar- a bureaucrat since Carter’s time- was the guy who prepared the NIE; he is thought also to be the guy who unlawfully leaked it to the NY Times, though he denied being the leaker.
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This overeducated twit wrote in Security Management for May 2001, “Is the Terrorist Threat Misunderstood?” The title is autobiographical. He has claimed that terrorism cannot be defeated only controlled. If that is the case, what happened to the Molly Maguires, the Sydney Ducks, the Red Army Brigades, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the SS, etc., etc., etc.
12 posted on 02/10/2006 5:36:32 AM PST by gaspar
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To: fight_truth_decay
Pillar recommends that the intelligence community be granted autonomous status, like the Federal Reserve, so that they are not subordinate to the corrupting politicization of the ignoramuses who move into and out of the White House every few years. That way, their oracular pronouncements and policy preferences would be ritualistcally obeyed by their inferiors at the WH and Pentagon, without such unqualified nitwits as Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld being allowed to ask pesky questions about the sufficiency of their reporting and reasoning on al Qaeda-Saddam ties.
A more thoroughly asinine and blindly arrogant suggestion from a more self-important score-settling popinjay bureaucrat can hardly be imagined. Among many other idiotic aspects, it would require a neutering of the President’s explicit Constitutional authority as Commander in Chief.
13 posted on 02/10/2006 5:55:07 AM PST by Buckhead
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Pillar making claims about politicized intelligence is rich. In a column published September 27, 2004, Robert Novak identified Pillar as a speaker at a private dinner in California. Pillar’s “management team” at the CIA, where he was employed as the national intelligence officer on the Near East/South Asia desk, approved the appearance. According to Novak, the ground rules for the speech were based on the “Lindley Rule,” which holds that the speaker, his audience and the event are not to be disclosed, “but the substance of what he said can be reported.” That substance, apparently, was a harsh assessment of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq.
Think about that: A senior, unelected CIA official—Paul Pillar—was given agency approval to anonymously attack Bush administration policies less than two months before the November 2, 2004, presidential election. That Pillar was among the most strident of these frequent critics—usually in off-the-record speeches to gatherings of foreign policy experts and business leaders—was well known to his colleagues in the intelligence community and to Bush administration policymakers. His was not an isolated case; CIA officials routinely trashed Bush administration policy decisions, often with official approval, in the months leading up to the Iraq War and again before the election. Pillar, who had complained to a CIA spokesman that someone had violated the ground rules by providing his name to Novak, simply got caught. -—— Paul Pillar Speaks, Again The latest CIA attack on the Bush administration is nothing new.
Weekly Standard ^ | 02/10/2006 4:15:00 PM | by Stephen F. Hayes
Let me guess- was this CIA guy Ray McGovern, now of VIPS fame?
MARCH 2006 : (FORMER CIA OFFICIAL PAUL PILLER ... DISSING THE IRAQ/AL QAEDA CONNECTION) A former top CIA official said Thursday that despite the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Iraq is likely to be looking for weapons of mass destruction within the next five to 10 years. Paul Pillar, who until last year was in charge of intelligence assessments for the Middle East, said the CIA warned the Bush administration before the Iraq invasion in 2003 that a change of regimes would not necessarily solve any WMD problem.
In a speech at the Middle East Institute here, Pillar said Iraqis live in "a dangerous neighborhood," with rival countries pursuing weapons of mass destruction. So the CIA had warned that a future Iraqi government would likely want the very weapons Hussein was (wrongly) suspected of hiding, including nuclear weapons, he said.
"Iraq may turn once again to ... a WMD program," Pillar, who is retired from the CIA, said Thursday. "And wouldn't that be ironic?"
Pillar recently published an article in Foreign Affairs magazine that for the first time fully laid out the CIA's side of the battle with the Bush administration over Iraq intelligence.
Pillar charges that the administration never sought strategic assessments from the CIA about Iraq. He said in his article that the Bush administration made its decision to go to war and then "cherry-picked" items from intelligence assessments in an effort to justify the decision to the public.
The biggest discrepancy between the CIA's intelligence and the administration's line on Iraq was the claim by Bush that there was a relationship between Hussein and al-Qaida, Pillar wrote. There was no intelligence supporting that theory, Pillar said, but the administration wanted to capitalize on "the country's militant post-9/11 mood," he wrote.(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...------------------Official: Iraq may still seek WMDs Newsday ^ | March 9, 2006 | TIMOTHY M. PHELPS
So, what is the MEI?
It's been around for a long time, since Eisenhower's admin. It employs Joe Wilson as its adjunct scholar, and note that former Ambassador to Gabon, Joe Wilson [spouse of the "outed" CIA employee Valerie Plame and fomer spouse of the uranium-mining nation of Gabon's lobbyist in the US] is also a source used in the Frontline bit concerning the "16 words". The MEI is funded by some members of the Saudi royal family, at least recently, and is in opposition to Chalabi's INC. [Chalabi is not a Wahabbi.]
* MEI : The institute also receives funds from Saudi Arabia, which opposes the INC specifically and Bush's approach to regime change in Iraq in general. ------ http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:IRKdQ1Ptv7sJ:www.iht.com/articles/56717.htm+%22Middle+East+Institute%22+saudi+arabia+espionage&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
JULY 9, 2003 : (9/11 COMMISSION : FORMER STATE DEPT OFFICIAL MURPHY BACKS OUT FROM TESTIFYING - See SAUDI-BACKED MIDDLE EAST INSTITUTE------- see JOE WILSON) Meanwhile, a former State Department official [Mr. Murphy ] who, according to the book "The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq," by Kenneth Timmerman, was sympathetic to a group that promoted trade with Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the U.S.-Iraq Business Forum, was suddenly removed from the commission's list of scheduled witnesses. Mr. Murphy said he had to withdraw due to a scheduling conflict. "They invited me, I accepted, but the original schedule called for the panel that I would be on to be the first of three that day and they had to change the program.I would have been on the third panel which was in a direct conflict with something I had long scheduled in Washington," Mr. Murphy said.
A former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Syria, and Mauritania, Mr. Murphy also served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs in the Reagan administration. He serves on the board of governors of the Washington-based Middle East Institute, a think tank that accepts funding from members of the Saudi Arabian royal family. -- "U.S. Misunderstood Iraq Role In 9/11, Expert Will Testify (Laurie Mylroie)," The New York Sun | July 9, 2003 | ADAM DAIFALLAH
* MEI : Walker, the former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, is president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, which promotes understanding with the Arab world. Its board chairman is former senator Wyche Fowler, ambassador to Riyadh in the second Clinton administration. Saudi contributions covered $200,000 of the institute's $1.5 million budget last year, Walker said. [Saudi Arabian Prince] Bandar has told associates that he makes a point of staying close to officials who have worked with Saudi Arabia after they leave government service. "If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office," Bandar once observed, according to a knowledgeable source, "you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office." -----------http://www.la.utexas.edu/chenry/oil/press02/Oil%20for%20Security%20Fueled%20Close%20Ties%20(washingtonpost_com).htm
Wasn't ol' Bandar in the news for some financial monkey biz recently, or am I mistaken?
Unfortunately I fear no matter who we elect President we are going to get the Arabian candidate.