Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

To those of us who have believed for some time that Cheney is delusional, this is not a surprise. Those who believe Cheney always has a firm grasp of the truth and reality will never believe otherwise, no matter what kind of evidence to the contrary is presented. Today, we not only have polarization in politics, we have polar opposite realities.

10. The Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti, met privately with bin Laden at his farm in Sudan in July 1996. Tikriti used an Iraqi delegation traveling to Khartoum to discuss bilateral cooperation as his "cover" for his own entry into Sudan to meet with bin Laden and Hassan al-Turabi. The Iraqi intelligence chief and two other IIS officers met at bin Laden's farm and discussed bin Laden's request for IIS technical assistance in: a) making letter and parcel bombs; b) making bombs which could be placed on aircraft and detonated by changes in barometric pressure; and c) making false passport [sic]. Bin Laden specifically requested that [Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed], Iraqi intelligence's premier explosives maker--especially skilled in making car bombs--remain with him in Sudan. The Iraqi intelligence chief instructed Salim to remain in Sudan with bin Laden as long as required.

That's from the Feith summary.

And before you say it, no, the DOD never questioned the accuracy of Hayes's report - they in fact confirmed its accurary and sources. The DOD only questioned the conclusions which Hayes drew from that raw intelligence.

So. Now who is delusional?

"So. Now who is delusional?"
Feith

No, that report was a summary of many intelligence reports from CIA, DIA, foreign and other agencies. All Feith did was to pull it together and present it to a congressional committee. The accuracy and fairness with which it chose and represented those reports has never been challenged.

Try again.

surely "What the f*** ----".

OK, am, so why is it that "Senior intelligence officials said yesterday that they had no knowledge of this"?

"So. Now who is delusional?"

you am.

Most of what Feith wrote is from the "defectors" that Chalabi sent him. These folks were primed to tell Feith what he wanted to hear. That's why his document cannot be believed.

Well, AM, the obvious implication of your position is that "senior intelligence officials" are delusional. That's quite a claim.

Given that the White House and Defense Department no longer have any credibility at all, I trust senior intelligence officials over Doug Feith.

Eight years ago something may have happened, if we are to believe Feith.

"Long-established ties" is a way of saying "something happened a long time ago" while making seem that it continues into the present.

As I say from time to time, if you're looking for al-Qaeda / Iraq ties, you'll probably find them (you'll find al-Qaeda / U.S. ties too), but if you're trying to figure al Qaeda out, Iraq doesn't help much.

Using am's (and Feith's) standard of proof, George Bush has "long-established ties" with the Taliban, and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have "long-established ties" with Saddam. Except that we have photographic evidence establishing that those meetings took place.

You know, from what I know of Mary Beth Cahill, I have a lot of faith in her ability to run Kerry's campaign. They haven't been running the best campaign ever, at least not yet, but at the same time, they still need to find a good message that will stick, and at this point, it's better to be even than down in the dumps, which is where he could very welll be. For instance, if she is intentionally trying to get Kerry to lay low like a lot of people say, I see that as a wise move, since it will give him time to get that good message and let it stick.

They also need to attack Bush and Cheney a little bit - not so much that it makes them seem shrill, but enough so that they create an opening. I have yet to see any campaign ads, so I can't say whether they are effective. But as Brad makes clear with this post, they've given Kerry a lot of stuff to use. Can't they simply show Cheney saying this and then show a little piece of the statement by department officials that they don't know what he is talking about? If they are going to attack Kerry as a flip-flopper, why not send it right back at them? Besides, an ad using the material Brad describes would allow Kerry to attack them from the right, like a recent piece from the National Journal suggested.

Brian, I like the idea. While I agree with the low-profile strategy in general, it could be peppered with a few short-yet-powerful demonstrations of the shadiness and mendacity of the administration. It shouldn't be the main focus, but more of a way of saying to the American people that, if needed, we can beat them at their own game.

am, anyone who believes raw intelligence is delusional.

These are typically single-sourced accounts, often provided with people with axes to grind.

Erik has it correct. With standards of the kind Feith and Hayes used, one could prove anything.

Marshall posted an interview with Senator Biden that is telling.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_27.php#003118

Bottom line: the Neocons and Bush are operating from an ideology that most foreign policy analysts do not find compelling. Basically, the NeoCons believe that all actions that happen in the world can ultimately be tied to the responsibilities of states. Thus they believe that whacking states such as Iraq, etc. will end organisations like al Qaeda by ending state sponsorship. The NeoCons do not believe that rogue organizations such as al Qaeda have the ability to organize and carry out operations such as 9-11 without state sponsorship. The corollary is that even though al Qaeda may appear to you and I as a rogue organization that is independent of sovereign states, it is really a state sponsored organization.

Personally, I think this is akin to believing that the mafia does not kill people without the sponsorship of the state of New Jersey, but what do I know?

Obviously, The FBI should invade Sicily to clean up the New Jersey mob!

BIDEN: This is the point that I was trying desperately to make to my colleagues and I tried to articulate it on Stephanopoulos's show. The fundamental flaw --- forget flaw, the fundamental difference between Joe Biden, John Kerry on the one hand, and the neoconservatives on the other is that they genuinely believe --- and put it in the negative sense --- they do not believe it is possible for a sophisticated international criminal network that will rain terror upon a country, that has the potential to kill 3,000 or more people in a country, can exist without the sponsorship of a nation-state.

They really truly believe --- and this was the Axis of Evil speech --- if you were able to decapitate the regimes in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, you would in fact dry up the tentacles of terror.

I think that is fundamentally flawed reasoning. If every one of those regimes became a liberal democracy tomorrow, does anybody think we wouldn't have code orange again in the United States? Rhetorical question. Does anybody think we don't have to worry about the next major event like Madrid occurring in Paris or in Washington or in Sao Paulo? Gimme a break. But they really believe this is the way to do it.

See, these guys aren't stupid. It's not like these guys are a venal bunch of guys. These are really smart guys.

This thread should have been titled, "Why, Oh Why Can't We Have a Less Delusional Press Corps".

"Countering the staff of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, which found no "collaborative relationship" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda...'

Because that's not what the 9-11 Commission staff said. Nor is this accurate:

"An Army War College study argued in January that the Bush administration had mishandled the war on terrorism by invading Iraq..."

But Milbank doesn't need to write accurate stories as long as his readership is as credulous as the usual suspects.

Charles: "Erik has it correct. With standards of the kind Feith and Hayes used, one could prove anything."

No. What Erik said was that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld had "ties" to the Taliban and Saddam, in the sense of ties defined by that standard, and there is photographic evidence of those ties. And there is.

arm,

Feith is delusional.

Hassan Al Turabi is certainly an evil man -- or a saint of the Jihadi religion. He is also now under house arrest in Khartoum, thanks to the work of the Clinton State Department -- and had probably lost any secular influence by 1996.

To imagine this man planning letter bombs, however, is simply insane. For comparison try to imagine Pope John XXIII or Mother Theresa thinking up ways of dropping LSD into the water resevoirs or Beijing or Cairo. Doesn't happen. Al Turabi's main focus in life has beeen the Islamisation of Sudan itself, an effort at which he has notably failed, though at great expense in blood to his victims.

My guess is that the Bush Administration could greatly improve its Middle East policy simply by having the Doug Feiths of this world ride around Washington in taxis and talk to their varicolored drivers.

Slightly (?) off-topic: I don't know how widely reported this week's find of old Iraqi chemical weapons was in US mainstream news -- I found one reference on the USA-Today website, so I presume it was in the printed edition as well.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3861197.stm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-07-02-poland-iraq_x.htm

So finally, genuine WMD have been found! But wait, they are all harmless, according to US military statements.

If memory does not fail me, until a few months before the handover the spin on WMD was different. Although in all fairness, it was not the military who made the WMD claims and pushed the war, but the administration.

cm,

That story was widely reported; it made Yahoo!'s short list of headlines, IIRC.

9/11, apparently a massive attack by international criminals, was immediately treated as the opening salvo of war because that suited the fantasies of many within the Bush administration. A similar attack on, say, Tokyo or Rome would have been treated by the governments of those countries as international crime.

Then, one of the first memes or intentional distortions of the Bush administration was to make sure any reference to 9/11 as a "crime" -- vs. "an attack on American freedom" -- was labeled outrageous, unpatriotic. Remember? Remember how the scope of the debate was sharply limited from the first week or so after 9/11?

But we've neither won the war (with the wrong people)nor made this country safer. Ironically, we've come out of all this Patriot Acting realizing that we do not have an appropriately trained military, no more than we have up-to-date, informed and competent crime-fighting agencies. This self-knowledge could be a helpful: nothing like knowing where one's defenses are sorely inadequate. But it's only helpful when the nation has the kind of administration which turns its attention to real defense in the real, not fantasy, world. All this administration has done is to spend, posture, and make grandiose statements.

I wish Kerry would come at the real issue of defense head-on, promise to deal with it. Dream on.

They approach the problem in a top down manner. The assumption going in was that al Qaeda could not have done what it did without a state sponsor. Their solution was to search for a possible state sponsor and come up with the axis of evil. Their first target was Saddam. He had threatened Bush Sr in the past. Why not 9-11? Who can prove to the administration he was not involved?

They have never questioned their assumption going in. They refuse to consider that al Qaeda could indeed be a rogue organization operating outside the bounds and controls of state sponsorship.

They have had the same approach to economic policy. They assumed that tax cuts would lead to a massive economic boom. They are not particularly good at reassessing their assumptions.

Patrick R. Sullivan wrote, "Nor is this accurate: 'An Army War College study argued in January that the Bush administration had mishandled the war on terrorism by invading Iraq...' "

From http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pdffiles/00200.pdf :

"Of particular concern has been the conflation of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat. This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the GWOT, but rather a detour from it."

bakho: With the caveat that I don't know exactly who you mean by "they", I am willing to believe that there are forces who are misguided in their thinking and their concept of how the world and the economy works, but quite a few in the top echelons are by appearances driven by petty self-dealing and enrichment of their buddies, and I'm wondering whether you don't give them too much credence in their motives.

I can assure Patrick R. Sullivan that the Army War College is far more excoriating of Bush & Rumsfeld than is reflected in their damning studies, or has been reported in the press.

The debate, however, is far from over. Vice President Dick Cheney has sought to more vigorously defend the Iraq- Qaeda link, even reading to one TV interviewer from a U.S. intelligence report recounting a meeting between an Iraqi intel official and bin Laden on a farm in Sudan in the summer of 1996. (One possible problem: bin Laden had left Sudan for Afghanistan in May of that year.)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5305085/site/newsweek/

Feith-based intelligence is no damn good.

Wow, senior intelligence officers & I have something in common. I often have no idea what the h*** Cheney is talking about.

Is Cheney delusional or is he a psychopath, or both? A difficult diagnostic question. Delusions are most common in psychotic disorders and dementia, whereas psychopaths (antisocial personality disorder patients)typically knowingly lie. Could Cheney have ischemic encephalopathy or multi-infarct dementia? I'd like to see an MRI of his squash. Some neuropsych testing would also be in order. If someone has done this on Reagan in 1984 it could have spared us his second term.

Is Feith is delusional? Or does he have another agenda that supercedes the interests of the United States. Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith seem to march to the beat of a different drummer.

Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith seem to march to the beat of a different drummer.

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