Yes! Michigan!
I've known that Senator Carl Levin is a national treasure ever since he sent me a personalized letter congratulating me on winning a Fulbright. But if that doesn't convince you, check this out: Levin, head of the Armed Services Committee, just filed a report specifically accusing Douglas Feith, #3 guy at the Dept. of Defense, of having misled Congress on the issue of Iraqi ties to terrorism.
(Feith, you will remember, is second only to Wolfowitz in pure hawkish neoconism, and is also the man that Gen. Tommy Franks, now a hired gun for the Bush-Cheney election campaign, called "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.")
According to the article, this was something Levin and other dems wanted included in the Senate Intelligence Report, but were blocked by Republicans who bargained to postpone issues of political misinterpretation of intelligence until after the elections (wonder why). So Levin just went and issued his own report.
It's pretty damning. There is the whole bit about the Prague meeting of Mohammad Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official, which the CIA already knew was bogus while Feith (and the rest of the Bush crew) were still hawking it. It also -- Kerry operatives take note -- destroys the president's argument that "Kerry saw the same intelligence I saw." The juiciest bit, I think, is this communication from Feith to Congress:
A classified annex sent by Feith to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Oct. 27, 2003... asserted in part that "Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003," and concluded that "there can be no longer any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to plot against Americans."
But Levin discovered that
...the CIA, in December 2003, had sent Feith a letter pointing out corrections he should make to the document before providing it to Levin, who had requested the document as part of the investigation.
If this all seems like minutiae, it bears remembering that Bush and co. spun the intelligence community and Congress the way they are currently spinning the media -- by fabricating counterclaims (Prague, the Niger forgeries, Zarquawi-had-an-operation-in-Baghdad, etc.), relativising questions of objective fact (we must take all claims equally seriuosly regardless of the evidence because the threat is grave), and then insisting that preferring one version of reality (Iraq had operational ties to Al-Qaeda) to another (an on-going relationship since the 1990s) is simply a matter of partisan bias.
Levin, to his inestimable credit, seems to recognize the gravity of what has happened, and has taken it upon himself to try, in a not particularly vicious or partisan way, to stop this perilous landslide into insanity. And don't doubt that it is insanity: there really are terrorists out there and the only way we will ever be able to avert or minimize that threat is by having first-rate intelligence gathering and by listening to what that intelligence says, whether we like it or not.
(Feith, you will remember, is second only to Wolfowitz in pure hawkish neoconism, and is also the man that Gen. Tommy Franks, now a hired gun for the Bush-Cheney election campaign, called "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.")
According to the article, this was something Levin and other dems wanted included in the Senate Intelligence Report, but were blocked by Republicans who bargained to postpone issues of political misinterpretation of intelligence until after the elections (wonder why). So Levin just went and issued his own report.
It's pretty damning. There is the whole bit about the Prague meeting of Mohammad Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official, which the CIA already knew was bogus while Feith (and the rest of the Bush crew) were still hawking it. It also -- Kerry operatives take note -- destroys the president's argument that "Kerry saw the same intelligence I saw." The juiciest bit, I think, is this communication from Feith to Congress:
A classified annex sent by Feith to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Oct. 27, 2003... asserted in part that "Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003," and concluded that "there can be no longer any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to plot against Americans."
But Levin discovered that
...the CIA, in December 2003, had sent Feith a letter pointing out corrections he should make to the document before providing it to Levin, who had requested the document as part of the investigation.
If this all seems like minutiae, it bears remembering that Bush and co. spun the intelligence community and Congress the way they are currently spinning the media -- by fabricating counterclaims (Prague, the Niger forgeries, Zarquawi-had-an-operation-in-Baghdad, etc.), relativising questions of objective fact (we must take all claims equally seriuosly regardless of the evidence because the threat is grave), and then insisting that preferring one version of reality (Iraq had operational ties to Al-Qaeda) to another (an on-going relationship since the 1990s) is simply a matter of partisan bias.
Levin, to his inestimable credit, seems to recognize the gravity of what has happened, and has taken it upon himself to try, in a not particularly vicious or partisan way, to stop this perilous landslide into insanity. And don't doubt that it is insanity: there really are terrorists out there and the only way we will ever be able to avert or minimize that threat is by having first-rate intelligence gathering and by listening to what that intelligence says, whether we like it or not.
posted by Benjamin Lessing at 10:42 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home