Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Amen, brother.

"When a Deputy to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency--or somebody at that level--refuses to do his job, saying that he is not going to provide intelligence to the Secretary of State because the Secretary of State is uninterested in whether what he is about to say to the United Nations is true or not, it is not appropriate to 'wince.'"

Do they have no honor?

Forget about Impeachment. Let's just get the bum unelected a second time this November and rid ourselves of the whole rat's nest...

Sometimes I think I am in the middle of a long sleep and I am dreaming all this.

The other feeling is that like a lot of other readers and posters here, I could have been that CIA agent in a different life that put me in government rather than in academe.

The final observation is that if Kerry wins, there has to be a thorough investigation of the whole process that led to war, with subpoenas, witnesses, and a full report naming names. Whether the named do hard time is irrelevant. They have to be outed and the history has to be put on the record so that hopefully it happen again in our lifetimea. Reputations have been ruined, but not the ones that should be ruined.

> it is not appropriate to "wince." It is appropriate to be outraged.

Except as cartoonist Tom Tomorrow had already pointed out by then, we are all suffering from outrage overload:

http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=14485

I was a little disappointed to see The Onion ripping off this idea recently http://www.onion.com/news/index.php?issue=4027&n=3

Maybe they came up with the idea independently, but surely someone on their staff is familiar with Tom Tomorrow.

What I don't get is the idea that any of this is news. Anyone paying attention could figure out that the war was going to happen no matter what and that the evidence was After Blix got in and Saddam started sort of cooperating in fits and starts, I remember thinking that Bush might be considered a master of brinksmanship--except that he probably doesn't understand that you're not supposed to go over the brink.

I meant to say "and the evidence was exaggerated" above. I was groping for the right word and I guess I moved on to the next thought.

I have thought for years that newspapers were full of stuff that wasn't new -- and therefore not "news." This is particularly true of the front page. If something appears on p. 13 it might be new. If it is on p. 1, it's just passed a number of gatekeepers and now has been designated "officially important (today)."

Within the next year it will be all over the papers that the US intervention in Iraq has offcially failed. However, that's been true for months and in the past month some columnists have even said it out loud. Even so, this evening I surfed past a web site (WP?) that classified several stories under the heading "Post-War Iraq."

Why isn't "The CIA official" who "quickly responded" named ? He is clearly not a source of the story. Brad seems to suspect that he is the currently acting CIA director (who dared challenge Richard Clarke's word). It is very clear that this person should not be employed by the US government and that Isikoff knows who he is.

On the other hand, I don't think that Colin Powell was one of the "powers that be". I see no evidence in the article that he didn't want to hear about intelligence or that he should be fired. Personally I would be in favour of impeaching Bush and Cheney "convincing" Hastert (and Frist ?) to spend more time with his family and seeing if Powell can sort out the mess that the real powers that be made.

We see that Tom Tomorrow and Micheal Moore's perspectives have more substance than their conservative and repectability-seeking liberal critics give credit for. Look at the story of how the "white paper" had all the caveats removed. Who prepared the white paper - the OSP? Anyone know?

:
Key Revisions Were Made to CIA Document

Sun Jul 11, 7:55 AM ET - Los Angeles Times

By Mark Mazzetti Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — In a classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared before the Iraq (news - web sites) war, the CIA (news - web sites) hedged its judgments about Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) and weapons of mass destruction, pointing up the limits of its knowledge.

But in the unclassified version of the NIE — the so-called white paper cited by the Bush administration in making its case for war — those carefully qualified conclusions were turned into blunt assertions of fact, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar intelligence.

The repeated elimination of qualifying language and dissenting assessments of some of the government's most knowledgeable experts gave the public an inaccurate impression of what the U.S. intelligence community believed about the threat Hussein posed to the United States, the committee said.
...

scowlpundit wrote, "We see that Tom Tomorrow and Micheal Moore's perspectives have more substance than their conservative and repectability-seeking liberal critics give credit for."

But Tom Tomorrow is far less "radical" than Michael Moore.

Paul Callahan wrote: I was a little disappointed to see The Onion ripping off this idea recently http://www.onion.com/news/index.php?issue=4027&n=3
:Maybe they came up with the idea independently, but surely someone on their staff is familiar with Tom Tomorrow.

Note that, on the second page, it mentions Tom Tomorrow by name. "'I clipped cartoons by Tom Tomorrow and Ted Rall.'" So yeah, I'd say someone there is familiar with his work.

It still disconcerting that so much of the information everyone posts here, is still not in the mainstream news media. Their should be national outrage, but our news media fails to inform. It's all profit motivated w/o any thought/concern,anything, to true public service in turn for our airwaves and regulations that protect their monopolies.

Moore will go a long way with a certain crowd,as does Stearn, but so many people trust Rush (I know), and FOX, and whatever. When polls come out with such low figures for basic knowledge of current events and issues,...

I'm worried.

Robert Waldman makes the exact point I was going to make: the article doesn't imply that Powell wasn't interested, just that the unnamed CIA official assumed that Powell didn't care or would be overruled by someone who didn't care.

Idiots. Washington is a one-word joke. They don't deserve respect.

Creeping fascism to boot.

What is the evidence that there was any actual misrepresentation to Powell? He may not have wanted to go to war, but surely he knew all the real intelligence, or lack thereof. He was once Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs, I believe... Probably has All Sorts of connections...

Why are people buying the line that anyone in the Administration was misled, or even that the CIA didn't step up to bat, or failed its mission through "broken corporate culture"? (And how many times have we heard THAT phrase, through the decades? Think it’ll show up in Lay’s Enron trial?)

The CIA is not charged with telling the truth to the American public. It tells the truth, always, to the President and the NSA, and then goes along with whatever pose the President, Defense, State wish to present. This is what their job is. That job was being done, just as the principals all agreed to it. Tenet's outgoing remarks to his troops, and McLaughlin's current remarks in press conference, confirm this between the lines.

The bigger picture is, over the last week we have been treated to a number of stories from several angles, all aimed at blaming others for this fiasco: “The CIA was telling us what they thought we thought they should say, and heck, we bought it!” or: “It was those goofy Iraqi defectors, pumping up their case!”

It’s an orchestrated part of the election campaign, and was predicted in these threads months ago. There are too many dead soldiers. Bush needs excuses for what happened, and, with no simple excuse making much headway, the White House strategy clearly is to provide such a Deluge of excuses that it will be impossible to have time to run them all down. They’re going for “preponderance of evidence” on Bush’s non-culpability.

Next up: having to explain the Iraqi occupation debacle. (“It wasn’t poor planning. It was that we didn’t think we needed GOOD planning, and that’s how our planners complied.” or: "It's the Iraqi's fault, we didn't know they weren't the same as us 'mericans." --Any guesses as to how they'll spin it?)

So one possible response might be: “Well, he’s either lying and covering up for it, or the biggest goddamn dingbat who’s ever been in the White House: which explanation do YOU prefer?”

While I agree with non economist's pragmatism, I am deeply worried by the fact that there is no strong movement to impeach Bush. Frankly, I want it to happen for my kids to be able to say: no, what Bush did was not American. So we didn't just wait for time to run on out on him. Once we realized he started a war for no good reason, we did the only thing we could and deep-sixed him.

They're going for preponderance of evidence on Bush's non-culpability, at the same time as he himself steps out like Little Boy Blue, saying, "No matter what, it was a good idea to get rid of Saddam!"

It's their best possible psychological strategy, and it may work.

Re Lee A's comment: I heard in the news that the chairman of the committee said the the finding on the CIA and WMD "lets Bush off the hook". Never mind that the committee decided not to investigate the administrations use or abuse of evidence at all until after the election. Clearly, the Bush loyalist Republicans are trying to spin this, and I am surprised that there is so little resistance ofr the Democratic members (and maybe the non-loyalist Republicans, if any exist). The question is whether anyone will buy the story. I don't see how it will spin very well or long. Seems like it will just kind of flop over and lie there for most people.

Check out "The Onion" today and the headline on how the twicky White House rose garden wabbit fooled Bush into signing a gun control bill. If most people have good memories going back for 18 months, and are willing to think things through, I think this story indicates about about how well the "CIA made us do it!" line will go down with the public. I don't have time to get the link. Look for "The Onion" in a search engine.

"if Kerry wins, there has to be a thorough investigation of the whole process that led to war, with subpoenas, witnesses, and a full report naming names"

Kerry is a good investigator--it's the thing he's done most in his career. Maybe he is the man for the job, after all. But ABB.

I agree that the proper response is "outrage" not "wincing." I also note that the Onion's article of this week, "Liberals suffering from outrage fatigue," is really, really correct and should not even be considered a satire. I have problems summoning up outrage for each new horrible piece of evidence that our leadership is hopelessly corrupt, venal and to top it off, stupid.

There is much more then "just getting Bush out of office and then be done with it." There is the concept of justice must be served for this nation to regain it's honor and credibility with it's people and with the community of nations through the framework of the Constitution.

Was justice served when hundreds of Arab Americans and foreign nationals were rounded up and locked away without due process or writ of habeus corpus by an out of control INS under guidance of Ashcroft's DoJ?

Was justice served when Padilla and Hamdi were apprehended and locked away in solitary confinement? Without access to lawyers until very recently.

Does the Constitution and Bill of Rights reign as the law of this nation? Or does Bush believe in the divine annointing him to rule?

Every administration legal argument that has come to light from Abu Ghraib argues for the latter and not the former under the guise of "war powers".

The American people must have justice served to Bush and those that have enabled his policies from Dick Cheney to Steve Cambone. Even SCOTUS justices must face justice for their essential treason to the Constitution that had sworn to uphold.

Wincing vs. outrage, upthread:

"Do they have no honor?"

Isikoff, honor, you're talking about? What are you smoking?

Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" (for which I'd suggest his lecture before you dive into his book) postulates a new science that revolves around the cellular automata of simple sequences, Boolean logic if you will, if A and B then C, describing a series of black and white cells and their inter-relation over time.

Even for black vers white and simple operators, some sets of rules generate impossibly complex series. For black and white and gray, and more comple operators up to about four choices, the complexity increases, both statistically and in persistence. 10,000,000's of alternate paths.

Last, and not to in any way limit the profound conclusions of Wolfram's tome, but over four operators or choices does not generate greater complexity, which is the absolute opposite of logical inference, and media tattle-tailing.

It follows from that theory several things.

Even the most simple choices and fundamental operators can generate highly complex results. Osama and a small band of followers choosing white (death) over black and right (wrong) over left, leads to a David vers Goliath statistical improbability of twin towers that collapse near vertically, an event never before seen in nature or in history, a complexity beyond the power of man's most powerful computers to decipher.

Simple operators.

Reagan, Poindexter and North is another example. Simple operators, a fundamentalist white over black point of view, some few rules and suddenly trade in hostages is generating heroin deaths in New York City and thousands disappeared, raped and murdered in Central America. All so simple.

The butterfly in Brazil syndrome.

It also follows that something as simple as the word "yellow cake" and a fluff memo from British intel can, under the right sort of weird and strange operators, generate deaths of 100,000's of innocent Iraqi civilians, the largest bombing campaign (GW I and II) in all of history, and closer to home, the greatest budget deficit in all of history as well.

"Yellow cake", "yellow cake", "yellow cake"!
Turn around, click your heels twice and poof!
A $TRILLION tax dollars gone in an instant,
never to be repaid. That trillion of our hard-earned taxes is literally gone into a bank in the Isle of Man under someone else's name.

The Pentagon was ready to use nukes in Iraq.

Wolfram's theory points up one additional idea. When things seem impossibly complex and almost completely indecipherable, when the homeland security code is red and the stock market has just lost 520 points, when AIDS is climbing as fast as SAT scores are falling, the number of operators and rules of choice in action may be as few as four ... or three ... or even two.

Good versus Evil. Go figure.

This July 31st is that once in a blue moon.
Anything can happen this November. And will.
All it takes are two desparate CIA spooks, one to set the bomb fuse to blow up on the other, the other to kill the spook that sets the fuse.

Kaboom! Two dead bodies with no papers, and a sports stadium, a public water supply, a train
station filled with anthrax, or NYC-DC shuttle.
Anything. From those few simple operators we
can gain our freedom, or end up in chains.

Solzhenitsyn said it this way: "You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power -- he's free again."

You're free. A simple operator. Vote. And if they find a premise to delay the elections, or intimidate voters by extreme security measures, vote any way. Write in. Blog in. Water cooler.
Even simple choices can generate impossibly profoundly wonderfully beautiful complexity.

"In the intoxication of my youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first strivings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart — and then all human hearts. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained."

Hear that, Kenny Boy?

Brad quotes: He wrote an urgent e-mail to a top CIA official warning that there were even questions about whether Curve Ball "was who he said he was." Could Powell really rely on such an informant as the "backbone" for the U.S. government's claims that Iraq had a continuing biological-weapons program? The CIA official quickly responded: "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say," he wrote. "The Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about."

I do not beleive this story. No intelligence official would be so dumb to go on record with this kind of statement.

a - This really happened. Isikoff sourced this from the Sen Intel Committee report. I read about this in some other paper (wapo or NYT) also in the last couple of days.

Haven't any of you ever been in an organization that was making a decision you disagreed with?
There comes a time when futher argument or resistence becomes futile. The decision has been made and the others have decided your arguments are not strong enough to overrule their
arguments. If you expect to continue in the organization you have to keep your mouth shut and let things go. After your judgement has been proven correct your influence will grow. But if you keep harping on your argument your influence in the organization will drop sharply. Even though it is wrong, I can understand and appreciate the position of the CIA officer that made that statement. It reflected his correct judgement and a knowledge that he would live to fight another day.

In defense of Isikoff, IMO he got right to the point by opening by going after the core of Powell's 'defense' presentation to the UN. Powell spun this by nothing his meetings with the analyst but failed to tell us how weak the evidence presented during those meetings really was. OK, Isikoff's struggle for the right word ended by with the tame 'wince' but his presentation of the facts has given us yet another reason to demand Powell resign.

Apparently, some official at the Agency is actually accused of telling an analyst that "they're going to war anyway." The full SSCI report says as much (and it is on line at www.intelligence@senate.gov IIRC). Did this literally happen? I don't know, but you can be sure they've looked into it.

But to be fair, this official is probably a mid-level manager, not the Deputy Director for Intelligence, who would never have done such a thing. Let's be careful about throwing titles around; these are real people, and they mostly try to do the right thing.

Even so, the SSCI report is a pretty remarkable document. Definitely worth a read, especially by anyone who really has an interest in the sausage making that is national security policy.

The "impeach Bush" idea crops up here a lot. Let's review what we know. Impeachment is a political act, not a fair-minded effort to produce a just outcome. Both Houses remain in the hands of Republicans, so from a partisan point of view, we are a very long way from a situation in which Bush can be impeached - public support is still running north of 40%, and jerimandering means that a good many Republicans don't really care what Democrat voters think. What else we know is that Democrats running for office are being told to put as little sunlight between themselves and Bush as they can on Iraq. He has "handled" it wrong, but that's all.

The Washington Monthly also has an interesting piece on the sources of polarity in our public discourse, and where it comes from. Congressional Democrats may simply not be suited for demanding impeachment, while Congressional Republicans seemed hell-bent on it.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0406.glastris.html

So, even though the world should see that, when confronted with the facts, we can act to correct our political mistakes and do our best to put things right with our allies, it isn't going to happen. The best we can hope is that Kerry takes the White House, and that Democrats can win one chamber in Congress, to give Kerry's legislative agenda a home. Bush will end up as our 43rd President, with his picture sandwiched between Clinton and Kerry in textbooks and encyclopedias. "Shrill" historians will deal with him justly, but there is an army of "scholars" at rightwing think tanks who will end up writing books saying he was Reagan's heir, a good president, just not a great one. And if the Washington Monthly is right, the press will treat those "scholars" as if they were honest and true blooded seekers of truth.

> at the same time as [Bush] himself steps out like Little Boy Blue, saying, "No matter what, it was a good idea to get rid of Saddam!"

I was thinking a good question that nobody will ever ask Bush in a press conference would be:

In light of the current consensus that there was no WMD program or significant al Qaeda links, how would you make the case to the American people if you had to do it over again?

Probably he'd just repeat the stock "answer": Saddam was evil; he gassed his own people; he was a threat to America.

It's clear that Bush fails to understand that he is responsible not only for "deciding" to invade but also for making a strong factual case to Americans.

On another note, I have this strong urge to send a letter to Sen. Feinstein requesting that she publicly acknowledge that her anti-war constituents were right--Saddam, while evil, was not a threat to the US--and that she should have given them some credit. I can't find a link, but I am pretty sure that she used an argument along the lines of "If you only could see the evidence I saw..." Anyway, a similar letter could apply to most Democrats who voted for the October 2002 resolution.

http://feinstein.senate.gov/Releases02/r-iraq10.htm
Feinstein: "While the distance between the United States and Iraq is great, Saddam Hussein's ability to use his chemical and biological weapons against us is not constrained by geography"

For instance she could note that in retrospect, she neglected to add that it was constrained by the non-existence of such weapons (at least in militarily significant quantities) a point that some of her constituents made to her at the time.

Why did Isikoff wince? Because Powell's speech wasn't as true as he once believed it to be.

Why is DeLong outraged? Because the decision of a Deputy to the Director of the CIA refused to do his job and furthered a process that has resulted in thousands (the coalition number alone has now topped 1,000) of deaths.

Too bad journalists like Isikoff seem to be incapable of outrage at these deaths.

The whole report is a sham. The D&R's in Congress are embarrased by their sheep like attitude in the March to War, so they agreed to shoot one person, the CIA. Actually beautiful strategy for all those currently in power. Fascism, I guess.

There are two things I would like to know.

Why George Tenet did it? Is the CIA filled with Oil boys and he recognized the Control of the Economic pipeline was of great American interest?

What will be the blow back to American Intelligence officers in the CIA? How many lost faith by the sellout or are all the spooks on the same page when it comes to Muslims and Oil? concerned.

Feh, De Long! Does this mean you refuse to let the media calibrate your emotions for you? Are you so terribly un-American?

Does anyone think there is the slightest chance that Tenet will talk? Or will he be a martyr, sit on boards, not worry about college tuitions?

Amen, KHarris.

The correct question to ask "has the invasion of Iraq help or hindered the WoT?" In my mind at least it has massively hurt the WoT and that should be the theme to run with. The invasion of Iraq has not made the US safer. Everytime Bush says so everyone should use every means at their disposal to get out the message thant the invasion has hurt the WoT and that Bush is wrong.

For all pratical purposes everything else is secondary.

I for one have been wincing since back in the Carter Administration when Stansfield Turner, then CIA Director, started the uninterrupted process of scaling back CIA operatives in non-Soviet Bloc countries around the world in order to save money for satellite systems and other such electronic sensors.

This egregious choice of scaling back sources of HUMINT has finally come home to roost whith the intelligence debacle in Iraq.

Isikoff also wrote this:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5411741/site/newsweek/

July 19 issue - American counterterrorism officials, citing what they call
"alarming" intelligence about a possible Qaeda strike inside the United
States this fall, are reviewing a proposal that could allow for the
postponement of the November presidential election in the event of such an
attack, NEWSWEEK has learned.

The prospect that Al Qaeda might seek to disrupt the U.S. election was a
major factor behind last week's terror warning by Homeland Security
Secretary Tom Ridge. Ridge and other counterterrorism officials concede
they have no intel about any specific plots. But the success of March's
Madrid railway bombings in influencing the Spanish elections—as well as
intercepted "chatter" among Qaeda operatives—has led analysts to conclude
"they want to interfere with the elections," says one official.

As a result, sources tell NEWSWEEK, Ridge's department last week asked the
Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to analyze what legal steps
would be needed to permit the postponement of the election were an attack
to take place. Justice was specifically asked to review a recent letter to
Ridge from DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the newly created U.S.
Election Assistance Commission. Soaries noted that, while a primary
election in New York on September 11, 2001, was quickly suspended by that
state's Board of Elections after the attacks that morning, "the federal
government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and
reschedule a federal election." Soaries, a Bush appointee who two years ago
was an unsuccessful GOP candidate for Congress, wants Ridge to seek
emergency legislation from Congress empowering his agency to make such a
call. Homeland officials say that as drastic as such proposals sound, they
are taking them seriously—along with other possible contingency plans in
the event of an election-eve or Election Day attack. "We are reviewing the
issue to determine what steps need to be taken to secure the election,"
says Brian Roehrkasse, a Homeland spokesman.

—Michael Isikoff
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

You see, Brad, if you had enough moral clarity, you'd see that rampant mendacity in service of an offensive war is just. But, being the circumstantialist, relativist type you are, you just think lying is wrong, so you don't get it.

One odd thing that shouldn't go unconsidered is the idea that the Pentagon analyst was wrong. He had one meeting with a German intelligence source. The Germans no doubt had many meetings, lots of time and effort spent evaluating "Curve Ball" and figuring out whether his stuff was any good.

In this instance, "Curve Ball" provided information which doesn't seem to have panned out. But that says nothing about what "Curve Ball's" batting average was, as a source. Nor does it say anything about how responsible or irresponsible it was to depend on his stuff, nor what other sources confirmed "Curve Ball's" information about the mobile labs.

Take it out of politics for a moment, ladies and gentlemen. Given what you actually know, does the quoted section provide any proof of anything further than there is at least one analyst at the Pentagon that is against "Curve Ball"? That isn't to say that the analyst is wrong. He may be entirely right. "Curve Ball" may never have given any proven accurate material at all, or it might have been worthless junk, far outweighed by the false information he gave.

Given the fragmentary nature of the actual evidence we've got to work with, the hyperventilating, over the top charges are just silly and sad.

German intelligence had warned the Bush administration long ago that "Curve Ball" was unreliable:

Germans Accuse US Over Iraq Weapons Claim
by Luke Harding

An Iraqi defector nicknamed Curveball who wrongly claimed that Saddam Hussein had mobile chemical weapons factories was last night at the center of a bitter row between the CIA and Germany's intelligence agency.

German officials said that they had warned American colleagues well before the Iraq war that Curveball's information was not credible - but the warning was ignored.

It was the Iraqi defector's testimony that led the Bush administration to claim that Saddam had built a fleet of trucks and railway wagons to produce anthrax and other deadly germs.

In his presentation to the UN security council in February last year, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, explicitly used Curveball's now discredited claims as justification for war. The Iraqis were assembling "mobile production facilities for biological agents", Mr Powell said, adding that his information came from "a solid source".

These "killer caravans" allowed Saddam to produce anthrax "on demand", it was claimed. US officials never had direct access to the defector, and have subsequently claimed that the Germans misled them.

Yesterday, however, German agents told Die Zeit newspaper that they had warned the Bush administration long before last year that there were "problems" with Curveball's account. "We gave a clear credibility assessment. On our side at least, there were no tricks before Colin Powell's presentation," one source told the newspaper.

Officially, Germany's intelligence agency, the BND, has refused to comment.

The revelation is embarrassing for the Bush administration and appears to bolster the contention that it used dubious intelligence in a partisan manner in the critical few weeks before the invasion of Iraq.

It has now emerged that Curveball is the brother of a top aide of Ahmad Chalabi, the pro-western Iraqi former exile with links to the Pentagon.

According to the Los Angeles Times, it was UN inspectors who came up with the idea that Saddam might have developed mobile factories to try to evade weapons inspections. They asked Mr Chalabi, a bitter enemy of Saddam, to find evidence to support the theory.

Recently, American officials have admitted that Curveball's information was false. Meanwhile, David Kay, who resigned as head of the Iraqi survey group in January after a fruitless nine-month search for weapons of mass destruction, said in an interview that Curveball had been "absolutely at the heart of the matter", but had turned out to be an "out and out fabricator".

US and British intelligence officials have acknowledged since the war that much of the information supplied by Mr Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and other Iraqi groups was wrong. Yesterday, German sources said they were bemused by the idea that they had tricked the US. "We ask ourselves, what are they on about?" one said.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0402-07.htm

If Kerry wins, I would fully expect a lot of leaks revealing how bogus white house information provided on the war was. I would love to see Cheney et al. in Leavenworth, but I think they may be able to get away with it.

"There is the concept of justice must be served for this nation to regain its honor and credibility with it's people and with the community of nations through the framework of the Constitution."

I think Kerry would actually be good for this job--he was a prosecutor. And his big achievements in the Senate have largely been in investigation.

"Isikoff, honor, you're talking about? What are you smoking?"

I wasn't just thinking of Isikoff. The whole case for war probably would have come apart like the house of cards it was if there were a substantial number of resignations at high government levels. Yet there were scarcely any.

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