Incompetence begets Incompetence

There are a couple interesting things that are not being talked about very much. The anticipated report "by a group of former diplomats and military officials highlighted the stark divide that has opened among foreign policy experts over the administration's national security strategy.... Bush abandoned alliance-based strategies that had provided the foundation of U.S. security since World War II... 'Today, we see that structure crumbling under an administration blinded by ideology and a callous indifference to the realities of the world around it,' said Phyllis Oakley, a former State Department official in the Reagan and Clinton administrations and a group member."

From a story on Xinuanet: "Bush adopted an overbearing approach to America's role in the world, relying upon military might and righteousness, insensitive to the concerns of traditional friends and allies, and disdainful of the United Nations," the group said in a statement.

From the LA Times: "A pair of British-recruited spies in Iraq, whose alarming reports of Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons were rushed to the White House shortly before the U.S.-led invasion last year, were never interviewed by the CIA and are now viewed as unreliable, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say." -- another embarrassing example of the gullibility (or deviance) of Donald "Doing a Good Job" Rumsfeld.

Officials said the report criticizes the Pentagon's creation of an independent intelligence "cell" called the Office of Special Plans to review raw intelligence about Baghdad's alleged ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist network, and to funnel its analysis to the White House without going through normal channels.

It also reviews the CIA's insistence before the war that Iraq's attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes — using websites and faxes — was proof that Iraq was seeking to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Evidence found since the war confirms that, as Iraqi officials had insisted, the tubes were designed for conventional artillery rockets.

CIA leaders refused to accept Kay's stark assessment when he returned from Iraq last December that most prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons were wrong. Kay was assigned a tiny office far from the executive suites, without a working computer or secure telephone.

"I heard about meetings after the fact," Kay recalled. "It was like a bad novel."

After several weeks of isolation, Kay quit and went public with his concerns.

U.N. inspectors who scoured Iraq for four months before the war and U.S.-led teams who have investigated for the last 15 months have found no arsenals of poison gases or germ weapons and no resurgent nuclear program, contrary to CIA predictions.

The CIA's record in Iraq was never strong. The agency not only failed to predict Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, but then could not evacuate its operatives from Baghdad. Poland's spy service ultimately got them out under cover of a Polish industrial project in Iraq, officials said.

In summation, the President presided over the worst intelligence failures in the history of this country, yet all his subordinates are doing a superb job, according to Bush. The informants, CIA operatives and information used to justify preemption, establish claims, and prepare war strategy were questionable at best. Many were crooked, incompetent, uninformed to begin with, or completely falsified. The information they received that was sound and accurate was disregarded and the people who provided it suffered character assassinations.

Also, Kerry has been raising over $1 million dollars a day in funding... Bush told them to shop, they gave money to Kerry.

Also, and possibly most disturbing, from US Newswire, the atrocities being committed at prisons in Cuba, Afghanistan, and Iraq are not isolated incidents by any means. According to a report by Human Rights First, "The abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib cannot be addressed in isolation," said Deborah Pearlstein, the Director of Human Rights First's U.S. Law and Security Program. "The United States government is holding prisoners in a secret system of off- shore prisons beyond the reach of adequate supervision, accountability, or law."

Here is an earlier article from the Washington Post: Secret World of U.S. Interrogation: Long History of Tactics in Overseas Prisons Is Coming to Light. Here, they say that this "Ghost Detainee" thing is legal, AND yet another CIA official said it was inappropriate.

"In Afghanistan, the CIA used to conduct some interrogations in a cluster of metal shipping containers at Bagram air base protected by three layers of concertina wire. It is unclear whether that center is still open, but the CIA's main interrogation center now appears to be in Kabul, at a location nicknamed "The Pit" by agency and Special Forces operators.

"Prisoner abuse is nothing new," said one military officer who has been working closely with CIA interrogators in Afghanistan. A dozen former and current national security officials interviewed by The Washington Post in 2002, including several who had witnessed interrogations, defended the use of stressful interrogation tactics and the use of violence against detainees as just and necessary.

The CIA general counsel's office developed a new set of interrogation rules of engagement after the Sept. 11 attacks. It was vetted by the Justice Department and approved by the National Security Council's general counsel, according to U.S. intelligence officials and other U.S. officials familiar with the process. "There are very specific guidelines that are thoroughly vetted," said one U.S. official who helps oversee the process. "Everyone is on board. It's legal."