October 2003

October 27, 2003

In Case You Missed It

While the damn media filter was focusing on a shot down Black Hawk helicopter, an assassination attempt on a senior US administration official, multiple car bombings in Baghdad, and the deaths of several more US soldiers, you may have missed Barton Gellman's definitive piece on the state of Iraq's nuclear weapons program in which he says, "... it is now clear he (Saddam Hussein) had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either."

Once again, David Rees says it all:

October 24, 2003

NYT MIA

It's days like these I wonder about the value of Rational Enquirer when all you really need to know is at the Washington Post in article after article after article.

The NYT has been almost completely absent on the Plame affair, but what's the excuse for not covering the prewar intelligence failures that make A1 at the Post?

Required Reading

It may seem at first like a long, hard slog, but Sy Hersh's "Stovepipe" article gives great insight into the cooking of intelligence by the nuts that manage US foreign policy. And it's funnier than hell. Also, don't miss his follow up Q&A about the article here.

October 17, 2003

Like A Cheap Suit

Just as Colin Powell's UN presentation completely fell apart after further analysis, the same thing is slowly happening to David Kay's report of two weeks ago.

The LA Times' Bob Drogin picks it apart today, and tells us that the hidden vial of botulinum sitting in a fridge for 10 years is unsuitable for making bioweapons, and was legally exported to Iraq under a Commerce Department license in the late 1980s.

October 15, 2003

Like, Duh

Tonight on 60 Minutes II Greg Thielmann tells correspondent Scott Pelley that Colin Powell "misinformed" Americans during his speech to the UN last February.

No kidding?

I've asked this here before, but I'll ask it again: Is there a single claim among the 44 claims that Powell made that has panned out? What's even worse is that Powell parsed out a lot of the "bullshit" given to him by Condi and Libby.

As usual, the situation can best be summed up by a David Rees cartoon from months ago:

October 09, 2003

Must-See TV

As George and best pal Condi go on the offensive trying to justify the mistake that was Operation Iraqi Freedom, Frontline's 1.5 hour season premiere takes a look at the selling of the war. Tonight at 9 CDT. Check local listings.

October 03, 2003

Crow. It's What's for Dinner

In the weeks after the "discovery" of those two "mobile labs" back in April, David Kay was on NBC's evening news, with the trailers in the background, forcefully declaring that yes, absolutely, these were mobile bioweapons labs.

It must really sting like a bitch to later write:

We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile BW production effort. Investigation into the origin of and intended use for the two trailers found in northern Iraq in April has yielded a number of explanations, including hydrogen, missile propellant, and BW production, but technical limitations would prevent any of these processes from being ideally suited to these trailers.

Judywatch

If you're interested in Judy Miller news, you cannot miss William E. Jackson, Jr.'s editorial in Editor and Publisher. (Hat tip to Sven for the link.)

And Another Thing

Remember how conventional wisdom (in the US media) said that the killing of Hussein's sons would reduce the number of attacks on US troops? Well...

Attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq have escalated over the past several months, and insurgents are now launching an average of 17 assaults a day against patrols, convoys and bases, an analysis of coalition security reports shows. The data also show insurgents are using more sophisticated tactics and weapons.

October 02, 2003

Sweet Irony, Week 2

Last week Judith Miller's byline appeared on an article that said, "An early draft of an interim report by the American leading the hunt for banned weapons in Iraq says his team has not found any of the unconventional weapons cited by the Bush administration as a principal reason for going to war..."

This week her byline appears on another WMD article that says, "The search so far has turned up no solid evidence that Iraq had chemical, biological or nuclear weapons when the American invasion began in March..."

October 01, 2003

Beyond The Pale

As the previously ballyhooed "Autumn Surprise" regarding Saddam's weapons programmes, forthcoming from David Kay, has in fact turned up, well, nothing, the Bush Administration is trying to revive the shuck-'n'-jive postulate.

The SNJP works like this: having "put in place a double-deception program aimed at convincing the world and his own people that he was more of a threat than he actually was," sneaky Saddam was "bluffing, pretending he had distributed them to his most loyal commanders to deter the United States from invading."

There's only one problem with the SNJP: Saddam forgot to pull off the "double" half of his dastardly "deception". When in the fuck did he ever imply that he was in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction? Never, that's when.

Unless, you know, the entire world missed the "double-deception" when Saddam, during his Dan Rather interview, said something like, "Well, you see, I don't have any WMD on me, because I distributed them to my most loyal commanders [nudge nudge, wink wink, snigger snigger]." Following which, Saddam, having failed to notice the world's failure to notice his "slip" of the tongue, and having failed to notice that his "double-deception" had not succeeded in "deterring" the United States (indeed, having suffered hallucinations to the effect that the massive military force surrounding his country had turned around and gone back home), popped open a bottle of champagne to celebrate his wisdom and cunning.

In point of fact, Saddam repeatedly, consistently, and unambiguously denied having retained a WMD programme. As it turns out, these claims were more less corroborated by the pre-war inspections, by UNSCOM's pre-"Desert Fox" activities, and by high-level defectors.

While we now know he was "mostly telling the truth", it was certainly within the realm of possibility (or at least, conceivability) that he could have been lying.

If he did have the weapons, and assuming his "aim" was to prevent an attack by snookering the world into believing that he didn't have the weapons, lying would have been a logical course of action.

But if his "aim" was to deter an attack by duping the world into believing that he did indeed possess, say, weapons in the quantities suggested by Colin Powell on February 5, why the fuck would he need to pull a "double-deception" when he could simply sign off on Powell's testimony?

The postulate becomes even more bizarre when we learn that it apparently derives from "pre-war Iraqi communications collected by U.S. intelligence agencies indicating that Iraqi commanders...were given the authority to launch weapons of mass destruction against U.S. troops as they advanced north from Kuwait."

So in order for Saddam's "double-deception" to work, he has to know either that his group of "most loyal commanders" has been infiltrated, or, if he's given this authority through radio communications, that U.S. intelligence will be able to intercept and decode the communications. And he has to trust that, once armed with this "knowledge", the United States will share it with the world, and the world will accept that the United States' intelligence (the same intelligence that failed to prevent September 11, and that made such a botch-job of the February 5 presentation, remember) is competent to obtain such information, and that George Bush is telling the truth in the first place.

All this rigamarole in order to convince the world that he has the weapons!

Furthermore, given that Bush and Blair were accusing him all along of lying -- that is to say, accusing him of actually retaining a weapons programme -- and were planning to invade anyway, where in the fuck would Saddam get the idea that pulling a "double-deception" (or, assuming his logical facilities were intact, a "single-deception") would deter an attack?

Are we really expected to swallow this garbage? Could the Bush Administration possibly be further off its meds?