By Hank Stram, July 2008

It’s the N.I.E., Stupid

With every other justification for the blunder in Babylon having gone up in smoke, the Bushies and their defenders have returned to the dusty old canard that “everyone believed Saddam Hussein had WMDs – even Congress, which had access to the same information as the White House. That’s why even a bunch of Democrats authorized the use of military force against Iraq.” 

Aw, shucks. I guess we should let bygones be bygones, then. I mean, people can make mistakes, right? They were only looking out for us, after all. Besides, it’s understandable that our intelligence was so badly flawed after eight years of Bill Clinton eviscerating our intelligence agencies’ ability to collect meaningful information, right? WRONG. Utterly wrong. The information to which Congress had access – and upon which they voted for the authorization to use military force (AUMF) – was a heavily edited version of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). The NIE, which is a compilation and distillation of the information gathered by all sixteen of our intelligence agencies, was actually quite sober in its analysis of whether or not Iraq was the most dangerous nation on the planet. And their analysis was consistent with earlier statements made by administration officials that Saddam Hussein had been de-fanged, contained, and unlikely to have been in cahoots with Islamic terror organizations. Unfortunately, the NIE’s message clashed with the one that the bellicose Bushies wished to convey. Without the Casus, there’s no Belli. So Cheney had his “special” intelligence agency, the Office of Special Plans – a shadow group of lunatics working in the Pentagon basement, run by loons and goons like Douglas Feith and Richard Perle – go through the NIE with a word-processor and globally delete “objectionable” words and phrases such as may, might, could, slight chance, questionable, probable, small chance, and unlikely. I suppose one could make the argument that this was only light editing. A few words, here, a few words there… But the light editing in many cases removed any sense of equivocation. In other cases, entire meanings of the NIE’s conclusions were altered. Congress based their yea vote on the AUMF on the redacted NIE, which painted a much bleaker and unequivocal picture than the real NIE. So, if you’re playing along at home and you still insist on engaging in verbal sparring with a Bush-supporting dead-ender (sadly, President 24 percent still has a few of them), you might want to bring this up.

What if they Gave an Impeachment and Nobody Noticed?

Once again, the Bush administration seems to have gotten “lucky.” With gas at well over $4 a gallon, much of the Midwest under water, and much of the media still humping Tim Russert’s corpse, nobody seems to have noticed that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) presented 35 articles of impeachment on the House floor. They were good ones, too, not just ticky-tacky little procedural things that require a background in constitutional law to understand. Stuff like lying to Congress in order to start a war, horribly mismanaging a war and getting a bunch of Americans killed, stealing elections, failing to protect Americans, war profiteering, torturing prisoners, etc. Dennis was more than a bit peeved that nobody seemed to notice his broadside against the most corrupt and incompetent administration in history. So much so that he plans to introduce another 60 articles of impeachment in a few weeks. Let’s hope BushCo doesn’t get lucky again;

we can do without that kind of “luck.”

Guess Who Said This:

“It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god- awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay. No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.”

If you guessed presumptive Republican presidential nominee John Sidney McCain, give yourself a pat on the back and a tiny little American flag.