What an excellent group of guest bloggers we have lined up for Sunday! Wow! I get a chance to mention Bob Koehler, Bob Fitrakis and Clint Curtis — all in one sentence. And we’ll all have a chance to blog with them, too.
The standard is getting uncomfortably high. We can’t keep raising the bar forever.
We need to lower it once in a while. And there’s no time like the present, is there?
Guest blogged by Winter Patriot
Famous sentences, these:
Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.
There’s been plenty of discussion about what those sentences might mean, and some of the debate has hinged around the word “fixed”.
Michael Smith, the reporter to whom the memos were leaked, seemed to settle the question when he wrote:
There are number of people asking about fixed and its meaning. This is a real joke. I do not know anyone in the UK who took it to mean anything other than fixed as in fixed a race, fixed an election, fixed the intelligence. If you fix something, you make it the way you want it. The intelligence was fixed … the intelligence was being cooked to match what the administration wanted it to say to justify invading Iraq. Fixed means the same here as it does there.
But “fixed” also means the opposite of “broken”, and in the war-is-peace world of bushspeak, the term couldn’t be more appropriate.
Ron Suskind’s watershed piece in the New York Times Magazine, “Without A Doubt”, introduced us to “the reality-based community” this way:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Even if we hadn’t read Suskind, finding a phrase like “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” would send up a red flag for lunacy, or [what is equivalent] tell us that our so-called leaders are not reality-based.
In a reality-based policy-making environment, intelligence comes first. Policy-makers want to find out as much as they can about their problem before they decide what to do about it. This is a reality-based approach beacuse it works. Science is based on exactly the same idea. Knowledge is power and so on.
Fixing the policy around the intelligence would be a reality-based thing to do. Doing the opposite is an indication that we’re in Lala Land … unless it happens more than once. Then it begins to look a bit more sinister.
In the opinion of this lowly and nearly frozen blogger, “intelligence” has repeatedly been “fixed” and “intelligence agencies” have repeatedly been “broken”. And this has not been an accident.
But who would plan such a thing? Who do you think?
Not everyone knows these things, but from where I sit they all appear to be true…
Osama bin Laden is a puppet disguised as a patsy. His so-called terrorist network, Al Qaeda, is a creation of the CIA, perhaps even a fictional one. Their modus operandi reads like a CIA “tradecraft” manual. Al Qaeda is Operation Gladio reborn with an Asian face, if it exists at all.
What’s in a name? In this case the name is a joke. “Al Qaeda” means many things in Arabic: “the base”, “the foundation”, “the fundament”, “the toilet”. This name could only have been chosen by someone who was barely fluent in Arabic, someone who wasn’t aware of all the meanings. No self-respecting Arab would ever name his terrorist group “The Toilet”. And no self-respecting Arabic terrorist wanna-be would ever join a group with such a demeaning name.
The so-called terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, were an inside job, a black op, the grandchild of Operation Northwoods and a cousin once-removed of Operation Gladio. Osama bin Forgotten and The Toilet certainly played their parts, as orchestrated. But there was much more going on behind the scenes than we will ever know.
The FBI’s failure to prevent the so-called terrorist attacks on 9/11 was a direct result of political pressures, repeatedly applied, closing off all investigative avenues which might possibly have compromised the plan. Sibel Edmonds knows way too much about this for the liking of the criminals who control this administration, and that’s why she’s been denied the basic rights of due process.
The bombing attack on and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan were based on pretexts at least as bogus as the pretexts supporting the attack on Iraq. We’re only just beginning to learn about these things, for we have all these other layers of deception which we need to peel back first, and we’re having trouble taking off more than one layer at a time. We will never see Afghanistan clearly until we can see Iraq, and we will never see 9/11 clearly until we see Afghanistan.
It’s like an onion: we’re dealing with an enormous multi-layered onion made of deception piled on deceit, stacked upon lies and wrapped in falsehoods. And we haven’t been able to peel off the layers as fast as they have been sprouting; at least not so far.
But things are starting to change. The country is slowly waking up to the reality that the war we are waging against Iraq was “justified” by a tangled web of deliberate lies, sold to a gulllible population by a massive, expensive and still-ongoing propaganda barrage. The fact that the pro-war national news media are complicit in crimes against humanity does not seem to have dawned on pro-war middle America — not yet anyway. The fact that pro-war middle America is complicit in crimes against humanity may never dawn on pro-war middle America. But this does not make the complicity any less real.
The propaganda campaign supporting the war has been based on the same false “evidence” that was used to “justify” the war in the first place.
So it makes some sense to ask a few questions. Like:
Where did the “faulty intelligence” come from? The CIA!
Why did the CIA deliver bogus intelligence? Because it was ordered to do so!
Who ordered it to do so? Dick Cheney.
How do we know that? We have reports of Cheney spending several days watching mid-level analysts at work.
Why would he do that? Aha! Now you’re getting it!
Listen: Something similar happened to the FBI. And big changes followed.
Now we have a Department of “Homeland Security”. What does it do? Mostly it raises and lowers color-coded threat levels for political purposes. But that’s not all; it also wastes a lot of money.
Now we have a Director of National Intelligence. What a position! And what a selection!! That the first person selected for the position is a career diplomat has been well-trumpeted. That he has left a trail of death squads in his wake is often overlooked.
Nonetheless, Doctor Death Squad is now in charge of our national intelligence effort. And we have a new internal espionage agency as well. How comforting!
How did we get from there to here? Let’s recap:
First they leaned on the FBI. This got them their “New Pearl Harbor”, plus the so-called PATRIOT Act, plus an “opportunity” to invade Afghanistan.
But then they turned around and blamed the FBI for “its” “failure”. And of course they used this “blame” as leverage to support a virtual purge of the FBI leadership. No more stubborn reality-based FBI leaders, no more stubborn reality-based FBI problems.
And how did it work? It worked so well that they did it again.
They leaned on the CIA. This got them their “faulty intelligence” and their long-sought war on Iraq, with all its attendant horrors.
But then they turned around and blamed the “faulty” “intelligence” on the CIA. And they used this “blame” as more leverage, this time supporting a purge of the CIA leadership. Now there are no more reality-based leaders in either agency. Not that it matters; Doctor Death Squad commands both of them!
The “intelligence” was well and truly “fixed”.
And the “intelligence agencies” are well and truly broken.
"Lower the bar," Winter P? How much lower can this country go? If this brutal travesty is America, I am no longer an American.
I agree the intelligence agencies are well and truly broken, as well as the rest of the government, the Democratic party & the MSM. It’s disgusting.
P.S. Please share your thoughts on DKos banning and purging all "conspiracy theorists".
Good Q, Alison … I quit reading DK [among MANY others] during the first week of November 2004 [ahem] … and I have no idea what’s been going on over there … I do know that I’ve been invited to post the occasional note at a DK spinoff called Booman Tribune and while I don’t hang there much, I have been getting a much friendlier and more open “feel” than I used to experience at DK. The other day I read somebody’s diary who was saying “the most important rule here at BT is don’t be a prick” … which may shed some light on the reasons why there are so many DK spinoffs … don’t quote me or publish my speculation in a public place [like the internets] or anything because I’m only connecting the dots and there are not a lot of dots and they are not all that close either … so I’m drawing long fuzzy lines … if you want to know my most compelling feelings on the matter, please see Pick Up All The Pieces And Make An Island at please don’t read my blog.
I get all nervous when the thread is hoppin’ like this.
Wow, Winter!!! I just got through reading your article, and I must say, it’s excellent. I haven’t had a chance to follow the links, yet, but thanks for including them.
I’ve just emailed it to my list (they know your name by now!)
The most powerful paragraphs to me (initially) are those by Ron Suskind regarding his meeting (was he called in by the WH?) with the bu$h admin. I had forgotten that article — gee I live in a world of daily information overload because I traverse the Web rather than vegetate in front of CNN or other MSM news sources.
Oh yes — the RED FLAG about the "Toilet" name (Al Qaeda.) That’s the first time I’ve heard that and how true. Surely anybody with 2 brain cells to rub together could see that is preposterous for people who have an IMPORTANT agenda and respect for themselves to name their organization "The Toilet." Great catch.
Kira: Thanks for your kind words. 😉
When I read "The most powerful paragraphs to me", I thought you were actually going to compliment something I had written, as opposed to words I had quoted. Oh well … delusions of competence again …
BTW you can see that I have been holding back an article by Chris Floyd and the reason [related to the current discussion] is: His piece is so beautifully written that once I post it, I will be unable to type for at least a day, maybe two. [Kinda like the way I put my guitar down for a year and a half when I first heard Jimi. But I digress…]
Do you have a link for your statement that we have reports of Cheney watching mid-level analysts at work? I’d like to read up on Cheney [when I have 2 seconds of free time :hahaha!: ]
re #8: Sorry about that, Kira.
I’d like to have thrown in some more links … but I ran out of time too … maybe after the blogathon I can post a more-heavily-annotated version [considering that I won’t have anything else to do!] … and I’ve read the bit about cheney intimidating low-level analysts in so many different places that it shouldn’t be hard to find.
You could probably find it yourself — in less time than it just took me to correct about a dozen typing mistakes!
Winter — I didn’t mean to take away from what you wrote. I printed a copy of it and my husband picked it up and commented on what a well written, informative and interesting article it was. He doesn’t often say something like that, so just know you impressed a highly intelligent person who doesn’t say something unless he means it!
When I said most powerful, what I meant was that it proves what the plan is — straight from the horses mouth (or the elephant’s ass as the case must be!) Not really about the actual "writing" style.
Please — you are an excellent writer AND communicator AND researcher. Ok, enough — you won’t be able to get your head through the door before long
Whenever or if ever — it’s ok. I just thought if you had it handy. No prob — I’ll seek it out.
Just so nobody is confused about my little joke about the elephant’s ass — I meant the people Suskind was meeting with.
re #8: you might have to read between the lines but this LINK is almost good enough!
Of course if you like things all spelled out, try this explanation from Eric Margolis
re #10 KIRA!! DON’T!! I was kidding!!
But I am serious about Chris Floyd though!! Man is he ever a good writer!! More from him coming up… I have to run but if you leave more comments here I will surely get to them…
Be nice to Clint and I’ll catch up with you all later!
following up on #13, here’s the next paragraph after my unfortunate snip:
and the final 2 paragraphs of the article are also very interesting
Go ahead and read the whole piece here.
Thank you WP. Oh my … there is sooo much information on these Blogathon threads my head is hurting! It’s going to take days to absorb it all.
Thanks for helping!
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Hey KIRA My brain hurts too!
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