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Tetrachloride · 2005-11-19 6:53 pm

A thread just for these guys. Today via Raw Story:

Byron Calame, the public editor for The New York Times, slams the use of an anonymous source on the front page just a few days ago which denied that President Bush and two other officials weren't the source for the leak to Bob Woodward, RAW STORY has learned. From Calame's column set to appear in Sunday's New York Times:

After an internal committee on credibility came up with more recommendations early this year, Bill Keller, the executive editor, further tightened the guidelines for the use of anonymous sources in June. The most notable change, at least for me: Readers are to be told why The Times believes a source is entitled to anonymity -- a switch from the previous practice of stating why the source asked for it.

There clearly is work to be done. A Page 1 article just three days ago, for instance, offered no explanation for attributing to "a senior administration official" the assurance that President Bush and two other White House officials hadn't told Bob Woodward about Valerie Plame Wilson. Woodward had disclosed earlier in the week that a current or former Bush administration official had told him Wilson worked at the CIA.

hmm

Last edited by Tetrachloride (2005-11-19 6:53 pm)

Tetrachloride · 2005-11-20 8:06 am

Washington Post somewhere

"The public must have access to truth as much as possible, but reporters can't become agents of government prosecutions or civil litigants."

Followup comment by a blogger http://sideshow.me.uk/snov05.htm#11201303

No, instead they should be agents of government criminality, eh?
Reporters testifying as witnesses aren't "agents of government prosecutions or civil litigants" when they are reporting to the public - and in Plame and Wen Ho Lee cases, the court represents the public - about serious criminal activities that the government is perpetrating against individual American citizens and against the American people.

If these reporters had been doing their jobs, these confessions in court would not be necessary, because that criminality would have been exposed in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post when it actually mattered - before the administration lied us into war, and before the general election last November....

What on earth did reporters at the Post and the Times think they had to report on that was more important than that?

MysticCow · 2005-11-20 11:59 am

I love how bloggers scream about how Bush lied to us, even though every other person on the planet had the exact same intelligence about Iraq that Bush did and that Clinton had the same intelligence. In other words, if Bush lied, why were several thousand soldiers sent out to find these WMD's and embarrass Bush by not finding anything?

Tetrachloride · 2005-11-20 12:11 pm

Why did Bush lie ? Oil, Halliburton, Cheney underhandedness, revenge for Bush Senior, land grab.

MysticCow · 2005-11-20 12:33 pm

Thanks for answering my question there...

if Bush lied, why were several thousand soldiers sent out to find these WMD's and embarrass Bush by not finding anything?

Tetrachloride · 2005-11-20 12:53 pm

Was Bush embarrassed ? Ashamed ?

Troutski · 2005-11-20 2:03 pm

MysticCow wrote:
I love how bloggers scream about how Bush lied to us, even though every other person on the planet had the exact same intelligence about Iraq that Bush did and that Clinton had the same intelligence. In other words, if Bush lied, why were several thousand soldiers sent out to find these WMD's and embarrass Bush by not finding anything?

Sorry for rewritting the history you and Bush invent but:

But while Bush accused his critics in the speech of "rewrit[ing] the history of how that war began," it is those who are pushing the "same intelligence" argument who are engaging in revisionism. As Media Matters documented, the White House had access to intelligence assessments such as the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) that Congress never was able to review, and the administration failed to provide lawmakers with certain dissenting views within the intelligence community. The administration also received information directly from two alternative intelligence sources that were doubted by the Intelligence Community at the time and have since been discredited: The Office of Special Plans and Iraqi National Congress. Even among the intelligence that Congress did ultimately receive, most lawmakers did not see a full assessment of the Iraqi threat prior to the delivery of the National Intelligence Estimate, the classified October 2002 document summarizing the intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs, whereas the Bush administration began making definitive claims about the Iraqi threat months earlier. Democrats have alleged that the administration's early public pronouncements may have contributed to the intelligence community's faulty judgments on Iraq, and more recent evidence -- such as the Downing Street Memo -- has further suggested that the administration participated actively in the interagency debates concerning what information would be included in intelligence reports on Iraq. Moreover, the White House's failure to declassify the caveats and dissenting views in the NIE limited lawmakers' ability to speak publicly about discrepancies between the administration's statements and the underlying intelligence.

More on Mystic's misrepresentation

Ever hear of a PDB? Didn't think so. Bush probably didn't know what they were either.

BTW: One of the PDBs said,"Bin Laden determined to strike in US." That was 8/6/01 a month before that very thing happened.

But it is all the fault of Clinton's Penis!

Jaligard · 2005-11-20 2:11 pm

MysticCow wrote:
I love how bloggers scream about how Bush lied to us, even though every other person on the planet had the exact same intelligence about Iraq that Bush did and that Clinton had the same intelligence. In other words, if Bush lied, why were several thousand soldiers sent out to find these WMD's and embarrass Bush by not finding anything?

Well, I don't know about Bush, but I'm pretty sure Clinton didn't share all of the intelligence U.S. agencies had amassed on Iraq with the entire world population. I'm fairly certain that would be gross misuse of our intelligence agencies, not to mention the great personal risk it would add to our intelligence agents who operate on our behalf to find difficult-to-get information.

The reason you never share this kind of raw information is because--often--the exact nature of the information reveals how the information was obtained and who obtained it. You can't be giving this raw information to every member of Congress--let alone every person on the planet--Would you really give the raw report of an Iraqi defector to a Saddam loyalist who knows where his grandparents live?

This assertion that everyone--a huge step up from Congress, by the way--had the same intelligence as Bush is preposterously ridiculous. It's phenomenally absurd. The President is briefed daily by members of our intelligence agencies. He can ask questions, cut out middlemen if he wants to; heck, he can even direct the agencies to put resources into finding information he'd like to have.

The Congress is entirely reliant on the executive branch for such information. It is condensed, cleaned, expunged of revealing details that would put agents at risk. The chairs of the intelligence committees get the best intelligence, then the chair members, and the rest of Congress gets the least raw information. Everything they request goes through the machinery of the executive branch--and often, members of the executive branch will fight such requests. Information is not often volunteered; so even information they can ask for it isn't asked for because nobody in the Congress knew we were running secret detention camps in Azerbaijan*.

Anyway, if the idea that Congress gets the same information as the President is ridiculous--it is--the idea that everyone on the planet gets the same information is so completely laughable that...I can't even come up with a metaphor, but I'm very certain my ten-year-old niece didn't think Saddam was a grave threat to America because of the mobile weapons trailers (which turned out to be for hydrogen production) as mentioned by an Iraqi defender whose parents live at 423 Second St., Baghdad.

*Note: I don't know if Azerbaijan is one of the countries we're running once-secret detention facilities in. It was the first minor Asian nation that popped into my head.

Last edited by Jaligard (2005-11-20 2:12 pm)

Jaligard · 2005-11-20 2:25 pm

Here's an example of the kind of tug-of-war that often happens as the Congress tries to get the same information that the President has access to (subscription probably required):

Bob Graham, former Chair Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wrote:
At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.

Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein's capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.

...

Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States' removing Hussein, by force if necessary.

Sassy · 2005-11-20 3:10 pm

This may have been already reported, but the following from the Los Angeles Times appeared in my morning Corpus Christi Caller Times today.

Germans: Bush misused intel to justify Iraq war
Berlin -The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush Administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the Iraq war.

Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with the Los Angeles Times that they warned U.S. Intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's claims in his pre-war presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.

Curveball's German handlers for the past six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm.

"This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."

Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate pre-war U.S. claims that Baghdad had a biological weapons arsenal, a commission appointed by President Bush reported earlier this year. U.S. investigators did not interview Curveball, who still insists his story was true, or the German officials who handle his case.

(emphasis is mine)
So much for the Administration's claim that other countries' intelligence was agreed to be the same as the U.S. The NeoCons 'chose' to tell only 'part' of the intelligence, not the fact that neither they nor the Germans could not verify the accuracy of the intelligence. That's a lie of omission. So, they lied!

Further, it's obvious that if Saddam had WMD of any kind, he would have used them in Desert Storm, Bush 41's war. It would thus seem that EVERYONE in the intelligence business was asleep at the wheel. If our intelligence guys, Defense and State officials are so incompetent to figure that out, it's a sure bet that everything else they came up with was less than 'reasonably accurate.'

The conclusion is equally obvious: This Administration 'decided' to invade Iraq long before 9/11; and, to make their cause plausible and credible to Congress and the nation, 'selected' the most inflammable intelligence evidence they could muster to insure they had 'reason' to take such an extreme action. They knew they wouldn't get the votes or support to go for any other reason. They were so 'sure' they were right, their pig-headed arrogance became hubris of the first order.

They have no excuse. They have no credibility. They have no regrets. They fully deserve the low poll numbers and the loss of confidence of the majority of the American people. Full recompense here is impeachment for all concerned. Enough is enough. It's time to get tough! cool

after-life · 2005-11-20 3:39 pm

MysticCow has been taken by the "Big Lie" technique.

If you repeat a simple lie over and over again, no matter how completely outrageous and improbable it is, over time people will believe it.

I could have had the SAME intelligence the president of the most powerful country in the world?! Right...

Even Congress is basically at the mercy of the president for information, because he controls the executive agencies.

mattm · 2005-11-20 3:49 pm

If Bush lied, so did Kerry, until he changed his mind. France and Germany said the said the same things about Saddam's WMD they just kney that taking Saddam out would expose the corruption at the Lib's favorite UN.

Where was the dems outrage when Clinton bombed Iraq to destroy the WMD material that he said exsisted. So when Clinton blmbs Iraq it is a threat, but when Bush does the same he lied? And the dems wonder why the keep loosing elections.

Tallgeese · 2005-11-20 5:20 pm

Hello and welcome to the thread.

Sassy · 2005-11-20 5:34 pm

mattm wrote:
If Bush lied, so did Kerry, until he changed his mind. France and Germany said the said the same things about Saddam's WMD they just kney that taking Saddam out would expose the corruption at the Lib's favorite UN.

Where was the dems outrage when Clinton bombed Iraq to destroy the WMD material that he said exsisted. So when Clinton blmbs Iraq it is a threat, but when Bush does the same he lied? And the dems wonder why the keep loosing elections.

Did you read my post? You couldn't have and still post what you just did.

Why do you hate Clinton? It makes no sense to be so personal, vehemently and irrationally vindictive about someone whose been out of office over 5 years and remain supportive of a mediocre, thoroughly documented, insenstive, spend-thrift, war mongering Administration that deserves nothing more noble than impeachment. I don't hate the President, but his record is so dismal it is seriously embarrassing to me as an American. I pity him, and those who surround him for their poor understanding of American ideals and yes, American values. They are disturbingly distorted in their thinking and justifications for actions a 6th grader would judge to be temporary insanity.

You look to be a troll. And, a poor one at that. big_smile

Tallgeese · 2005-11-20 5:39 pm

Sassy, save your breath. Just ask a simple question:
Who is President of the United States, Bush or Kerry?

resedit · 2005-11-20 6:05 pm

If Bush were the liar everyone says he was, and manufactured evidence (or had it manufactured) like everyone says he did, then we would have found WoMD in Iraq. They may not have really been there, but they would have been found.

Bush is a hell of a lot more honest than most of you want to admit.

mo' ron · 2005-11-20 6:13 pm

resedit wrote:
If Bush were the liar everyone says he was, and manufactured evidence (or had it manufactured) like everyone says he did, then we would have found WoMD in Iraq. They may not have really been there, but they would have been found.

Bush is a hell of a lot more honest than most of you want to admit.

Hahaha, is this a joke? Are you saying that Bush is more honest than we think, because we don't give him enough credit for NOT outright forging and planting actual WMDs?

Haha... I want someone to give me an award for not flipping out and murdering people, and also for not urinating on the homeless. I think I deserve it.

Jaligard · 2005-11-20 6:13 pm

resedit wrote:
If Bush were the liar everyone says he was, and manufactured evidence (or had it manufactured) like everyone says he did, then we would have found WoMD in Iraq. They may not have really been there, but they would have been found.

Bush is a hell of a lot more honest than most of you want to admit.

The difference you're looking at is explicit lying and indirect lying. They've been very careful with their lies because they know they can't be caught lying.

So they tell very selective versions of the truth. For instance, at the State of the Union, they'll say [paraphrasing] "We've learned from British intelligence that Iraq sought uranium from Africa." That's technically true, but also deceptive. At that time, we knew the information to be false.

They never say "Saddam was directly in league with Al'Qaeda" but they pushed every possible connection they could and didn't mind implying it. Even when they knew, for instance, that possible meetings didn't take place, they kept pushing the bad intelligence.

They are very willing to push bad information, make indirect associations and convey falsehoods. They are quite deceptive, but at the same time, very unwilling to tell direct and obvious lies.

Planting evidence of WsMD would simply and completely end the Bush presidency, if they were caught at it.

mo' ron · 2005-11-20 6:18 pm

^ It's called "Plausible Deniability" and doesn't usually work in the real world.

hal9k · 2005-11-20 6:27 pm

To me, I guess we're moving to a brave new world, where newspapers are dinosaurs. It troubles me that the two iconic institutions that broke the Pentagon Papers and Watergate are more and more resembling 'emporer's new clothes'.

It might take me awhile to get my sea legs under me, while sifting thru the detritus of the 'information society.'

ShnickyShnack · 2005-11-20 6:58 pm

Here's a story that hasn't gotten much coverage: German Intel warned the CIA about "Curveball's" unverified claims

"This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."

The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate pre-war U.S. claims that Baghdad had a biological weapons arsenal, a commission appointed by President Bush reported earlier this year. U.S. investigators did not interview Curveball, who still insists his story was true, or the German officials who handle his case.

The White House, for example, ignored evidence that United Nations weapons inspectors disproved nearly all of Curveball's accounts before the war. President Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's germ weapons as the invasion neared, even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed.

At the Central Intelligence Agency, senior officials embraced Curveball's claims even though they could not verify them or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability, punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after invasion.

The BND supervisor said he was aghast when he watched Powell misstate Curveball's information as a justification for war.

"We were shocked," the German official said. "We had always told them it was not proven. ... It was not hard intelligence."

So it seems what "other" people had was actually more reliable than what the White House told the world.

How'd a source go from being highly dubious among the Germans to becoming hard, verified evidence in the US Government?

That's the question I wish we could answer.

Jaligard · 2005-11-20 7:02 pm

ShnickyShnack wrote:
How'd a source go from being highly dubious among the Germans to becoming hard, verified evidence in the US Government?

That's the question I wish we could answer.

It's pretty simple. If it supported the claim that iraq was a danger to the world and us, it went into the speech pile. If it didn't, they ignored it.

bratboy · 2005-11-20 7:03 pm

MysticCow wrote:
I love how bloggers scream about how Bush lied to us, even though every other person on the planet had the exact same intelligence about Iraq that Bush did and that Clinton had the same intelligence.

False.

In other words, if Bush lied, why were several thousand soldiers sent out to find these WMD's and embarrass Bush by not finding anything?

Question: When Bush spoke of uranium in his State of the Union . . . had the Administration been previously informed that the information was suspect and possibly false?

Question: When members of the Bush Administration continued to make claims connecting Al-Qaeda to Iraq, were not not already receiving warnings that the sources of those pieces of intelligence questionable?

You can easily find information on both, if you're uninformed.

ShnickyShnack · 2005-11-20 7:09 pm

Jaligard wrote:
ShnickyShnack wrote:
How'd a source go from being highly dubious among the Germans to becoming hard, verified evidence in the US Government?

That's the question I wish we could answer.
It's pretty simple. If it supported the claim that iraq was a danger to the world and us, it went into the speech pile. If it didn't, they ignored it.

Damn, as an openly-labeled 100% hater of America, I should have known that.

MysticCow · 2005-11-20 9:25 pm

bratboy wrote:
MysticCow wrote:
I love how bloggers scream about how Bush lied to us, even though every other person on the planet had the exact same intelligence about Iraq that Bush did and that Clinton had the same intelligence.
False.

Care to give source, or are you going to pontificate?

In other words, if Bush lied, why were several thousand soldiers sent out to find these WMD's and embarrass Bush by not finding anything?
Question: When Bush spoke of uranium in his State of the Union . . . had the Administration been previously informed that the information was suspect and possibly false?

Question: When members of the Bush Administration continued to make claims connecting Al-Qaeda to Iraq, were not not already receiving warnings that the sources of those pieces of intelligence questionable?

You can easily find information on both, if you're uninformed.

So you answered the question with distracting questions. Great job!

Forums | MacLife

#1 2005-11-19 6:53 pm

Washington Post, New York Times

#2 2005-11-20 8:06 am

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

#3 2005-11-20 11:59 am

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

#4 2005-11-20 12:11 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

#5 2005-11-20 12:33 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

#6 2005-11-20 12:53 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

#7 2005-11-20 2:03 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

MysticCow wrote:

#8 2005-11-20 2:11 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

MysticCow wrote:

#9 2005-11-20 2:25 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

Bob Graham, former Chair Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wrote:

#10 2005-11-20 3:10 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

#11 2005-11-20 3:39 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

#12 2005-11-20 3:49 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

#13 2005-11-20 5:20 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

#14 2005-11-20 5:34 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

mattm wrote:

#15 2005-11-20 5:39 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

#16 2005-11-20 6:05 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

#17 2005-11-20 6:13 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

resedit wrote:

#18 2005-11-20 6:13 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

resedit wrote:

#19 2005-11-20 6:18 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

#20 2005-11-20 6:27 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

#21 2005-11-20 6:58 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

#22 2005-11-20 7:02 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

ShnickyShnack wrote:

#23 2005-11-20 7:03 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

MysticCow wrote:

#24 2005-11-20 7:09 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

Jaligard wrote:

ShnickyShnack wrote:

#25 2005-11-20 9:25 pm

Re: Washington Post, New York Times

bratboy wrote:

MysticCow wrote:

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