shmaccountability
by John at 2/10/2006 07:28:00 AM
Conservatarians are big on accountability. You'd expect them to be upset about being lied to by elected officials. When do we start holding the lying architects of the Iraq war accountable?
It's great that Pillar is coming clean now - at least the historical record of the Bush administration's malfeasance will be mostly accurate. But why did these people (Pillar and Wilkerson) wait so long? Why didn't they say something when it might have made a difference to the course the country was going to take? Like most people high in the Bush administration, they were (and are) probably just looking out for their own interests, despite any protestations of patriotism they might make.
If you have some time, you can read the whole depressing thing.
Update: I didn't read to the end of the WaPo article! It turns out that Pillar spoke out against Bush's Iraq policy at a private dinner in the months before the 2004 election. This got him pegged by the conservative press as a troublemaker. Still, that's not blowing the whistle very loudly.
Ex-CIA official faults use of data on Iraq
The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade.
"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."
"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.
It's great that Pillar is coming clean now - at least the historical record of the Bush administration's malfeasance will be mostly accurate. But why did these people (Pillar and Wilkerson) wait so long? Why didn't they say something when it might have made a difference to the course the country was going to take? Like most people high in the Bush administration, they were (and are) probably just looking out for their own interests, despite any protestations of patriotism they might make.
If you have some time, you can read the whole depressing thing.
Update: I didn't read to the end of the WaPo article! It turns out that Pillar spoke out against Bush's Iraq policy at a private dinner in the months before the 2004 election. This got him pegged by the conservative press as a troublemaker. Still, that's not blowing the whistle very loudly.
