We have a vague notion that the "inevitability" of democracy's spread throughout the world may be a false claim, but we don't know for sure, and don't know how to evaluate the idea.  So even Democrats hesitate to call the idea nonsense.

Frances Fitzgerald wrote "Fire in the Lake," published in 1972.  This book described the debacle that results when Americans try to insert American values and institutions into a society (Vietnam) that cannot accept them.

From outward appearances no member of Congress, no present or recent member of the administration (let's include Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and the State Department) and none of the Sunday morning interview hosts has ever read this book or any similar book.

Right now there is an absolutely terrific diary on the Rec list by Chomskyface that is reviewing a Salon.com article that essentially proves once and for all that Bush knew there were no WMD's in Iraq prior to invasion.

Salon:

The next day, Sept. 18, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri. "Tenet told me he briefed the president personally," said one of the former CIA officers. According to Tenet, Bush's response was to call the information "the same old thing." Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to think. "The president had no interest in the intelligence," said the CIA officer. The other officer said, "Bush didn't give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up."

Please follow me below the jump.

There is a famous Sherlock Holmes case where the fact that the guard dog didn't bark is the key clue to the mystery. It showed that the person who committed the crime was an insider recognized by the dog.

So I'm going to claim that the evidence about how the run up to the Iraq was was based upon over-hyped evidence also reveals a dog that didn't bark.

by
Larry C Johnson (bio/blog)

Senators Bond, Hatch, and Burr have sent the rightwing nuts into a frenzy with their comments challenging the truthfulness of Valerie Wilson in one of the appendices to the latest report from the Senate Intelligence Committee on pre-war Intelligence about post-war Iraq.  If dumb is forever then the three intrepid Senators are guaranteed eternal life.  Bond can be excused because, like Bill "Bolangles" Robinson, "he drinks a bit".  Orrin Hatch's failing mental faculties are probably the result of his dotage--he has become more shrill with each passing year.  And Senator Burr?  Okay, just plain dumb.

With feigned outrage the three Senators assert they are trying to clear up confusion about the Committee's original report (see July 2004) but proceed to issue a new bunch of disingenuous stupidity and fluff to try to further cloud the picture and accuse Ambassador Wilson and his wife of acting dishonestly.  First, let's recall the specific facts presented in the original report:

[From the Frog Pond]

I really hate it when people set their (.pdf)'s so that you can't cut and paste.  But that is exactly what the Senate Intelligence Committee has done with their Prewar Intelligence Reports on Post-War Iraq report.  It's frustrating because I'd like to make some points about their conclusions without having to freaking type out huge chunks of their text.

The report details what the intelligence community (IC) told our policy makers about the likely landscape of a post-Saddam Iraq.  And, perhaps not too shockingly, the IC got it mostly right.

It's coming out. The Bush Administration was warned, repeatedly, months before the event, about the consequences of a badly planned Iraq invasion, with no meaningful strategy to "win the peace." It wasn't that they had NO plan, but that it was a BAD plan with no chance of succeeding.

AP reports that analysts in the intelligence community widely circulated what is by and large a deadly accurate estimate of the consequences of the Iraq invasion.

***UPDATE***H/T to Topdog08 for this: The Senate Intelligence Committee, released this PDF report with the details. Hagel and Snowe actually voted with the majority. Think Snowe is starting to hear the wolves howling in the distance?

(Made the rec list. Big thanks to everyone. Let's keep shining the light. And keep fighting. Don't let the appropriations defeat keep you from staying with us!)

With nauseating earnestness, Tenet keeps saying: "I believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

This is a lie. And no matter how many times he says it (after the axiom of his master, George W. Bush, who has stressed publicly that repetition is necessary to "catapult the propaganda"), Tenet can no longer conceal the deceit. Indeed, the only other possibility—that he is (as he complains) being made the useful "idiot" on whom Vice President Dick Cheney and others mean to blame the war—can be ruled out.

The quote is from a piece distributed today by TomPaine entitled The Center Of Tenet's Book: Lies written by Ray MCGovern, who begins with an epigraph from Kipling:

If they question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.

What bothers me most about Banana Republicans is not what gets them outraged, although getting outraged about gay marriage, the estate tax, and invading immigrant hordes is pretty ridiculous.  What really disturbs me is what doesn’t get Banana Republicans outraged.

What got me going on this issue is the way that Republicans have dismissed the US Attorneys scandal as much ado about nothing.  Yesterday, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said of the scandal, "The list of accusations has mushroomed, but the evidence of wrongdoing has not."

I had a party to attend tonight, so I had to DVR Countdown and am just watching it now (relax, I'm in Hawaii, I'm not watching Countdown at 3 in the morning :)) I just now saw what Senator Durbin from Illinois said today on the floor of the Senate and I have to say, I am outraged and I am personally going to be doing some writing demanding answers from senators about this...

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I think you could file this one under "Sumo Wrestling Comes to America."  George Tenet, the former head of the CIA, is about to release his tell-all book, At the Center of the Storm.  And apparently he's got his sights on going belly-to-belly with a certain Richard Bruce Cheney.

In what is being called "A Battle Royale," Tenet will be out in force, defending his---and his agency's---performance before the Iraq war.

In other words, this is not the kind of headache the White House wants to be dealing with right now.  Not with everything else collapsing around it.  Bush and Cheney are going to be dragged through the WMD mud again.  Better yet, Tenet is throwing a nasty wrench into Bush and Cheney's rah-rah campaign to garner support for their "surge."

And how fun is it that you and I have front-row seats for the whole thing?  It's gonna be frickin' beautiful watching these bigwigs spittin' at each other.

Oh, and Condi gets a cream pie in the face, too.

Below is a segment of The Chris Matthews Show that I transcribed this evening.  It offers a juicy preview of the mud-slinging to come.  Call it a potent shot of bloggerdorphine.

The Washington Post has a big piece up on the bogus Niger uranium claims made by the Bush admin.  It ain't pretty:

Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available to them at the time showing that that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable.

In February 2002, the CIA received the verbatim text of one of the documents, filled with errors easily identifiable through a simple Internet search, the interviews show. Many low- and mid-level intelligence officials were already skeptical that Iraq was in pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Read the whole thing though.  I guess this explains why they were willing to out a CIA agent to keep the truth from coming out.  

The tiff that is the controversy over whether Obama "caved" to Bush over Iraq War funding, or whether he did not, pales next to the truth over what the Democrats knew about bad intelligence in autumn 2002.

A bad case of historical amnesia has developed, and this diary looks back at op-eds from Senators Graham and Edwards in Nov. 2005 in order to set the record straight. (See update at end of diary.)

Henry Waxman is taking off the gloves. Once again, Henry Waxman is trying to get Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to answer to questions he has been asking about George W. Bush's claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger. Questions, Waxman has been trying to get Rice to answer since 2003. Today, as Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Waxman sent this letter to Rice:

Since 2003, I have written 16 letters to you, either in your capacity as National Security Advisor or Secretary of State. According to Committee records, you have satisfactorily responded to only five of those 16 letters. Those five were co-signed by Republicans. Under the Bush Administration, several agencies followed a policy of not responding to minority party requests. Although I do not agree with this policy, I presume that you were also following it when you decided not to respond to my requests for information.

I am now renewing my requests as the chairman of the chief oversight committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Shorter version: Waxman to Rice — stop ignoring me.

Up on the WaPo website is an article by Douglas Feith called Questions We Were Right To Ask. It must be read to be believed.

Follow me below the fold for a few choice tidbits, and accompanying translations from Bushit into English.

It is well known that the Bush administration favors firing any government employees that don't fall in line with their agenda, but I didn't realize that a CIA agent had actually been fired leading up to the '03 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.  And much to my surprise, the Scooter trial isn't the only courtroom where testimony is being heard on pre-war intelligence.

From US News:

A federal judge has ruled that a CIA agent identified only as "Doe," allegedly fired after he gathered prewar intelligence showing that Iraq was not developing weapons of mass destruction, can proceed with his lawsuit against the CIA. The judge has ordered both parties to submit discovery requests–evidence they want for their case–to be completed by March 15, according to the CIA agent's lawyer and a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is defending the CIA in court.

Emphasis mine.

It was fascinating to watch this smirking NeoCON cracker all puffed up with faux indignation and arrogance all the while justifying his treasonous distortions of the original CIA analysis.

Feith's spurious logic is so bad especially toward the end of the interview.  He seems to fall apart, accusing the Pentagon Inspector General of circular logic, when that is the technique he used to dispute the IG's scathing assessment. Indict this liar.

Can you think of a better reason for Speaker Pelosi to shut down the White House propaganda budget; muzzle these liars, and put them on the witness stand and make them take an oath every time they want to open their bloody mouths. Make these War Racketeers pay dearly for the crime.

The following is just part of a Chris Wallace interview of  Douglas Feith on FOX News Sunday, something I usually do not watch but which I’m glad I caught today!

IMPEACH!! IMPEACH!! IMPEACH!!

Doug Feith talked to Wolf Blitzer today in the Situation Room. He came to defend his role in the production of intelligence assessments that were meant to push the professional intelligence community to concede that there was an Iraq-al-Qaeda connection before the US invasion of Iraq. It looked to me like at some point Wolf made him sweat, so this is a preview of what will happen to him when he goes testifying before Levin, or Rockefeller on the activities of his OSP.

Lets start with a key portion of the interview, right below the fold...

Watch this play.

WaPo:

A "very damning" report by the Defense Department's inspector general depicts a Pentagon that purposely manipulated intelligence in an effort to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida in the runup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, says the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee....

The investigation by acting inspector general Thomas F. Gimble found that prewar intelligence work at the Pentagon, including a contention that the CIA had underplayed the likelihood of an al-Qaida connection, was inappropriate but not illegal.....

Feith called "bizarre" the inspector general's conclusion that some intelligence activities by the Office of Special Plans, which was created while Feith served as the undersecretary of defense for policy the top policy position under Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were inappropriate but not unauthorized.

"Clearly, the inspector general's office was willing to challenge the policy office and even stretch some points to be able to criticize it," Feith said, adding that he felt this amounted to subjective "quibbling" by the IG.

It should be obvious what Feith's motive is, especially with the Libby trial looming in the background. His primary interest, of course, is that the activities of his OSP be deemed at least not unlawful. And he's managed to get the IG's cooperation on that score. But he wants more than that. He wants to scotch their designation of his activities as inappropriate even if not unauthorized.

But what does that mean? Or more importantly, what's the difference between what it means and what Feith and the rest of the "administration" want you to think it means?

When this "administration" makes an argument that its activities were legal because they were "not unauthorized," you need to be thinking of how Attorney General Alberto Gonzales regards the nexus between legality and authorization.

Back in February 2006, Gonzales clashed (in)famously with Sen. Russ Feingold, in a hearing before the Senate Judiciary committee. In Feingold's own discussion of the hearing, he told us:

I reminded the Attorney General about his testimonyduring his confirmation hearings in January 2005, when I asked him [18.4MB video file] whether the President had the power to authorize warrantless wiretaps in violation of the criminal law.  We didn't know it then, but the President had authorized the NSA program three years before, when the Attorney General was White House Counsel.  At his confirmation hearing, the Attorney General first tried to dismiss my question as "hypothetical" before stating "it's not the policy or the agenda of this President to authorize actions that would be in contravention of our criminal statutes."  Yesterday, he tried to claim [25.6MB video file] that he had told the truth at that hearing, bringing the parsing of words to new lows.  I think it is clear that the Attorney General misled the Committee and the public not only about the NSA wiretapping program but about his views on presidential power.

But I don't think it was parsing. I think it was misleading, but not parsing. Here's how I saw it:

Not only is he saying that no law can be passed that infringes upon the president's "inherent authority," he is saying that he told the truth in his confirmation hearings because he believes the surveillance programs do not violate the law because they cannot violate the law.

That's why he regarded Senator Feingold's question as a hypothetical. Because it was and is his assumption that no program initiated by the president in furtherance of the national security could be in violation of the law.

That is, it is a resurrection of the infamous Nixon doctrine, revealed in Nixon's 1977 interview with David Frost:

Frost: "So ... what ... you're saying is that there are certain situations ... where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal."

Nixon: "Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal."

Frost: " By definition."

Nixon: "Exactly, exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security ... then the president's decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating a law."

The "administration's" gambit here is that we'll all fall back on the presumption that the government is "entitled" to this kind of deference. Either that the "Commander in Chief" can get away with certain methods of circumventing the law, and that if he "breaks" it, it's really not breaking it, precisely because he's the president. Or failing that, they hope at the very least that we'll accept their view that the sort of "not illegal" activities which Feith pursued at the behest of the "administration" ought to be beyond the reach of the criminal law, because otherwise we're "criminalizing politics."

At bottom, though, this report makes clear that the "administration's" presumption rests on the willingness of the American people to believe that the purposeful dismantling and circumvention of our legal and authorized intelligence channels -- up to and including the outing of critical undercover non-proliferation agents and the insanely dishonest selling of a war that turned out to be the worst foreign policy disaster in American history -- is "just politics."

It's time we all asked ourselves a question I posed early in the Plame investigation:

What I'm asking is, what's bigger? The lies the administration used to convince the country to go to war? Or the lie that the administration only fought the intelligence community after the fact, to cover its tracks when caught?

Is the administration covering up the lengths to which it went to prevent the exposure of its mistaken reliance on bad intelligence? Or is the administration covering up the lengths to which it went to promote intelligence developed by its own, parallel intelligence structure, a plan which required the simultaneous undermining and the destruction of the credibility of the country's established (read: authorized and legitimate) intelligence structure, which refused to give them what they wanted?

The answer to that question is the difference between "just politics," and "we're not kidding when we whisper the word 'treason.'"