WHITEWASH

So it was the intelligence on Iraq that was “dead wrong?” Oh, I see. What about this, from Alterman, back in fighting trim:

A former CIA agent quoted in The New Yorker: who resigned over his “sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with—to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.”

Alterman provides several other such quotes. Was the Office of Special Plans looked at in this intelligence report (honestly, I haven’t even looked at it, but why should I or anyone else bother—with the Republicans in power, anyone could have predicted before this commission even met for the first time what the result would be; the pure and innocent president was misled by the evil, bumbling intel people)? Here’s what an investigative piece on the OSP in Mother Jones had to say:

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials‚ -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February‚ -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.
Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews‚ -- some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity‚ -- exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.

This is a fucking outrage. Bush should be led out of the White House in handcuffs, if not worse, for lying us into war. And after the more than 10,000 killed and wounded in his evil war of choice, he has the nerve to say today that “the strong should protect the weak” and that that attitude is spawned by a “culture of life?” Every American should be laughing in his motherfucking face. As Mike Malloy says, Bush is a giggling killer—maybe that’s why everyone holds their tongue (Happy Birthday, Air America, by the way)...


TWO BIG STORIES?

And then Hardball comes on tonight and guest host David Gregory says they’re working on “two big stories” and what springs to my mind is Schiavo (R.I.P) and the intelligence report. I was half right. The two “big stories” are Schiavo and the friggin’ Pope. I mean, Jesus Christ almighty, we’re fighting an illegal war that Bush and co. lied us into and a whitewash report comes out today about it and the big story besides Schiavo is the fucking decrepit Holy Father? For God’s sake, the man is old! Old people die! Is an old man dying a bigger story than a motherfucking war?

And speaking of Schiavo, why in hell’s bells did the mainstream media never cover that godawful story fairly? Why were there no doctors on Scarborough and Hardball with CAT scans and X-rays and MRIs showing what Schiavo’s cerebral cortex looked like? Is it because Randall Terry’s smug, adulterous ass gets better ratings than actually enlightening people? What the fuck?

Maybe these damn religious freakos are right—the end times are upon us…