Year: 2003

Of course, this is from veteran Bush-hater, Elisabeth Bumiller:

In the summer, the conflict broke into the open when Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said that Mr. Tenet had been primarily responsible for not stripping from the president’s State of the Union address an insupportable claim that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger. Mr. Tenet and his allies were enraged, and Stephen J. Hadley, Ms. Rice’s deputy, eventually took the blame.

Untrue: the claim was about Africa, not Niger, for the umpteenth frigging time. And, of course, the claim was not insupportable. It was, in fact, supported by British intelligence agencies, who still stand by their work. Correction? Don’t bet on it.

From Newsweek:

Wilson’s report seems to have vanished into the bureaucratic maw. In his January ’03 State of the Union address, President Bush, citing British intelligence reports, repeated the charge that the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium from Niger.

Not true. He said Africa. There’s an important difference. The writers of this story are excellent journalists. If they cannot get this right, what hope for the rest of the crew? The truth is: they have internalized this stuff. They don’t even see their own biases any more. Please keep sending me media mentions of Bush’s citation of Niger in his 2003 SOTU. If we can’t stop them spreading untruths, we can at least monitor them.

Some disturbing details about some of Arnold’s enemies.

Worth watching what the BBC does on its website. It often dramatically alters copy after it’s posted – and not for legitimate reasons, like typos or minor amendments. In an earlier draft of this piece, for example, the following sentence appeared: “Syria is, of course, Israel’s enemy. The two countries are still in an official state of war, caused by Israel’s occupation and illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights.” Now it reads:

Syria is, of course, Israel’s enemy. The two countries have been in a state of war since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The Israelis have long charged that Damascus uses the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah as a proxy army to launch attacks along Israel’s border with Lebanon. And since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising, Israel has increasingly focused on the Palestinian opposition groups hosted by Syria. It accuses the exiled leaderships of planning attacks carried out by their military wings in the occupied territories, and accuses Syria (as well as Iran) of backing them.

An improvement, no? But still no mention of the 1967 or Yom Kippur wars. What you see in the first draft, I think, is what the BBC really believes: that the Jews are responsible for all the ills in the Middle East. But even they feel obliged to respond to public pressure. Which is good news, after all. If we can’t get rid of them, we can at least moderate their extremism. Keep sending me BBC lies and propaganda. Exposure works.

“While the players and their bats had a lot to say about the Cubs 5-1 victory, the fans, their love and positive vibes, deserve at least a bit of credit. Not to mention the array of superstitions. Take Marianne Scott of Tinley Park, for example. In the left field bleachers of Turner Field in Atlanta, she gripped her good luck charm, a hollowed-out baseball that holds her mother’s ashes.” – from the Chicago Tribune.

Hugh Hewitt on the Los Angeles Times and the recall.

Pity she can’t even spell his name right.

“It’s me. I’m still alive.” – the boyfriend at 11.44 am. These Cubs fans are a strange bunch, aren’t they?

“I’m sort of amazed at what was powerful information about both their intent and their actual activities that were not known and were hidden from UN inspectors seems not to have made it to the press. This is information that, had it been available last year, would have been headline news.” – David Kay, Fox News.

From a balanced assessment in the Washington Post today:

The apparent absence of existing weapons stocks, therefore, does not mean Hussein did not pose a WMD threat. In fact, fragments of evidence in Kay’s report about ongoing biological weapons research suggest that Hussein may have had a quick “break-out” capacity to threaten his neighbors and, indeed, the United States with biological agents (possibly including infectious agents).

The author goes on to say that the presence of actual WMDs widely assumed before the war has nevertheless been debunked (at least, so far). What we need is an analysis of why we got wrong what we got wrong. There’s no question that we were led to believe that there were stockpiles of WMDs unaccounted for in Saddam’s Iraq before the war. And we still don’t have a good explanation for that. But this does not mean that the war was not justified in the terms under which it was waged: that Iraq had an obligation to account fully for its WMD program (it didn’t), that it cease all such research and development (it didn’t), that it stop deceiving U.N. inspectors (it didn’t), and, above all, that it posed a threat, via intermediary terrorists, that was intolerable after 9/11 (it did without a shadow of a doubt, as the Kay report shows). Is this kind of nuanced assessment – important for our future intelligence and war-making capacity as well as democratic accountability – possible in today’s polarized culture? We better hope it is.