Stephen Hadley is a Big, Fat Dissembling Piece of Shit
Steven Hadley, running from the twin scandals of TraitorGate and being the go-to guy on the Niger Forgeries, wants to make it a trifecta.
Says Atrios:
I think that the recent statements of Stephen Hadley are really all we need to put the final nail in the coffin of the Bush administration's credibility on anything. These people are just quite literally loathsome.He's absolutely right. And just so I won't feel I slogged through that 568 page SSCI report for nothing, I would like to add my two cents.
Hadley argues that Democrats had the same intelligence because "parts of" the NIE "had been made public."
Right, and the parts of the NIE which weren't made public were the parts which suggested that the parts which were made public were full of shit.
Any talking head who overlooks this fact to try to claim that "democrats had the same intelligence as Republicans" is just completely full of shit. They only the had the bits that made their case, not the bits which took away from it.
That NIE (or National Intelligence Estimate -- a compilation from the various intelligence departments of all the available information relating to a particular situation) was a crock from the git-go. BushCo. didn't even want to do one, even though they are typically done before launching any major military operation like oh, say, a war. Unbelievably, Dick Durbin had to make a special request to even get one prior to granting Dubya the authority to declare war (p. 12 of the SSCI).
National Intelligence Officers assert that ideally it takes three months to produce an accurate NIE, but Preznit Itchy Trigger Finger and the Stovepipe Posse claimed that the threat Sadaam posed was so imminent that they couldn't wait.
The NIE was produced in less than twenty days, and its findings were never sent out for peer review or to a panel of outside experts because Bush and company said there wasn't time. (p. 13, SSCI).
Hence the most specious claims about aluminum tubing and Curveball that had been waved through by the likes of mediocre-novelist-playing-spy Scooter Libby and his faithful sidekick Big Time as they poked their noses into raw intelligence never got vetted by professionals not under the thrall of the powerful who knew what they wanted to find long before they found it.
To say the Democrats had access to this intelligence is hogwash. Unless someone's got photos of Dick Durbin running around CIA headquarters sniffing at the britches of low-level analysts and eating Mu Shu Pork off Colin Powell's Chinese menu that claim is just bunk.
Dubya had a boner for war, a premature ejaculator who simply couldn't wait. In short order he quickly screwed the Iraqis, the intelligence process, the US military and the American people.
The Democrats had nothing to do with it. The end.
(graphic courtesy The Heretik)
posted by Jane Hamsher @ 11/11/2005 01:33:00 PM
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