American Leftist has produced a very effective and depressing piece of agitprop: a photomontage of GW Bush made up of photos of US service men and women who have died in Iraq.
Viewable in : small, medium, or large.
(found via Boing-Boing, which is on a roll this week).
Update: There's a clickable thumbnail in the right margin above, which I see fine on firefox (and in Movabletype preview mode)…but I don't see it in Explorer.
Via the elegantly redesigned Whiskey Bar, a pointer to Soldier for the Truth, the story of Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski (Ret.), who was in the Pentagon at the time that the Veep's office started running its own rogue intellegence analysis operation designed to slant reports in favor of the Iraq invasion. Disgusted by what she saw, she chose to resign when she hit the 20 year mark, and is now on a mission to expose what she calls “neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon.” And she has a way with words.
Q: You gave your life to the military, you voted Republican for many years, you say you served in the Pentagon right up to the outbreak of war. What does it feel like to be out now, publicly denouncing your old bosses?
Kwiatkowski: It feels like duty.
That said, she also has some very odd friends.
Connect the dots:
Conclusion: As noted in the Dreyfus Report, this is a major looming headache for the neoconservative tendency in US foreign policy. There is now a serious danger that a radical Islamic regime will win a free election. Meanwhile, the US's insistence of the fixity of it's June “handover” date — for all that the handover may be primarily semantic — severely weakens its hand in dealing both with the Governing Council and with opposition figures like Ayatollah Sistani. The Governing Council figures it can demand a hold on power in exchange for a status of forces agreement. Sistani surely figures that time is on his side, reducing his incentive to be cooperative.
Irony: The people in the US who were most vociferous about going into Iraq tend to be those most desperately anxious to find a way out, fast. The people, like me, who opposed the invasion, are now uncomfortable with a premature departure that might either entrench the power of the kleptocrats like Chalabi who suckered in the Bush admnistration and continue to profiteer from the positions our troops created for them. Even worse would be any sort of departure that would cause chaos or empower a militant, regressive, theocratic regime. In the abstract, transferring sovereignty ASAP to the Iraqi people sounds like a really good idea; in practice it seems there needs to be some legitimate institutions to exercise it, and to the extent that those institutions are in fact representative, they may not be very pretty. And the only possible way out may involve some crawling to France and to the UN.
So it seems the CIA lied when it told Congress it was giving the UN Inspectors the info they needed to do a good hunt for the alleged WMD. That means that US policy was to hamstring the inspectors, then blame them for doing a bad job.
Smart Washington insiders always release the really bad news late on Friday in the hopes that everyone will forget it by Monday.
I've boldfaced the key point in the quote from the New York Times below. This would be a major bombshell were it not for the fact that we've already had so many bombshells about Bush administration falsifications about Iraq/WMD/threat-to-the-USA not to mention false al Queda ties, that we're all a bit, well, shellshocked.
Then again, agencies that lie to Congress and get caught doing it, usually get at least a nice public grilling.
Intelligence: C.I.A. Admits It Didn't Give Weapon Data to the U.N.: The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged that it did not provide the United Nations with information about 21 of the 105 sites in Iraq singled out by American intelligence before the war as the most highly suspected of housing illicit weapons.
The acknowledgment, in a Jan. 20 letter to Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, contradicts public statements before the war by top Bush administration officials.
Both George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said the United States had briefed United Nations inspectors on all of the sites identified as “high value and moderate value” in the weapons hunt.
The contradiction is significant because Congressional opponents of the war were arguing a year ago that the United Nations inspectors should be given more time to complete their search before the United States and its allies began the invasion. The White House, bolstered by Mr. Tenet, insisted that it was fully cooperating with the inspectors, and at daily briefings the White House issued assurances that the administration was providing the inspectors with the best information possible.
In a telephone interview on Friday, Senator Levin said he now believed that Mr. Tenet had misled Congress, which he described as “totally unacceptable.”
Here's today's compare and contrast: an item in the UK Daily Telegraph with an item in The Dreyfuss Report, which looks to be yet another great blog without an RSS feed (grrr).
Telegraph, Chalabi stands by faulty intelligence that toppled Saddam's regime:
Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. “We are heroes in error,” he told the Telegraph in Baghdad.
“As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. …”
…
Last week, US State Department officials admitted that much of the first-hand testimony they had received was “shaky”.
“What the INC told us formed one part of the intelligence picture,” a senior official in Baghdad said. “But what Chalabi told us we accepted in good faith. Now there is going to be a lot of question marks over his motives.”
Mr Chalabi is now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, but his star in Washington has waned.
Dreyfuss Report, Chalabi Scandal (Yes, Another One):
Thanks to Newsday, and to Knut Royce, one of the all-time great reporters, we now know that Chalabi is not just a liar. He's also on the take. Royce reports that Chalabi-connected cronies—including members of his enormous family—have pocketed contracts from the Pentagon worth more than $400 million. One of them, Royce reports, allows former INC militiamen to provide security for Iraq's oil industry, giving huge power to a “private army” and giving Chalabi a lot of clout over Iraq's single most important source of cash. The second one is a deal to supply Iraq's fledgling armed forces.
Interestingly, one of Chalabi's named cronies in the Newsday story also was the beneficiary during the 1980s of millions of dollars from Chalabi's Jordan-based Petra Bank. It was Chalabi's looting of Petra Bank back then that led to the seizure of the bank by Jordanian authorities, Chalabi's fleeing from justice, and his eventual conviction (in absentia) for embezzling and fraud, for which he was sentenced to 22 years at hard labor. (The sentence still stands.)
A very interesting interview of an anonymous journalist working in Iraq: “People are forgetting Iraq and focusing on hooking up with each other…” (the title refers to US civilians working at the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq).
Jotwell Blenderlaw
