Wednesday, November 09, 2005

If Persistance is Devilish are We Becoming Satanic?

When you justify with belief instead of fact, you've already done more damage than Al Qaeda could ever do to a society you nor they will ever comprehend.

In early 2002, the Bush administration got word from a foreign intelligence service—thought to be Italy’s—that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Niger. Mr Cheney’s office took an interest, seeking to consolidate the case for war. It asked the CIA to follow up, and Joseph Wilson, a retired diplomat, was sent to Africa. He found no evidence for the claim, and after the war wrote as much, angrily, in the New York Times. In the ensuing flap, two “senior administration officials” talked to Bob Novak, a columnist. He wrote that Mr Wilson was sent at the request of his wife, Valerie (née Plame), a CIA “operative” working on weapons of mass destruction. Ms Plame had been an undercover spy. Though by the time of Mr Novak's column she had been based safely in Virginia for several years, the article nonetheless blew her cover. The resulting investigation sought to determine whether someone broke the law in outing her.From The Economist Global Agenda http://www.economist.com/agenda/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=5104737

A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’’

The newly declassified portions of the document were made available by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Mr. Levin said the new evidence of early doubts about Mr. Libi’s statements dramatized what he called the Bush administration’s misuse of prewar intelligence to try to justify the war in Iraq. That is an issue that Mr. Levin and other Senate Democrats have been seeking to emphasize, in part by calling attention to the fact that the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee has yet to deliver a promised report, first sought more than two years ago, on the use of prewar intelligence. Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts , http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/politics/06intel.ready.html?hp&ex=1131339600&en=0d091794b0c89f27&ei=5094&partner=homepage


If Watergate taught Americans that it wasn't the crime but the coverup. The Plame game should teach us that when you want to believe something in the worst way, you can tell untruths in the worst way.

When you decide you aren't going to let details like the facts or the truth get in the way of what you decide is right. When you've predetermined the outcome of what's supposed to be an independent investigation. You've already chosen coverup and crime.

When you justify with belief instead of fact, you've already done more damage than Al Qaeda could ever do to a society you nor they will ever comprehend.

Alfred Ingram…

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