[A-List] RE: Who's Accountable?

["Boyle, Francis" <FBOYLE@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Doing my best to hold him accountable. Fab.

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954(voice)
217-244-1478(fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu
(personal comments only)
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Christopher Black [mailto:bar@idirect.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2003 2:24 PM
To: Boyle, Francis; a-list@lists.econ.utah.edu
Subject: Fw: Who's Accountable?



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "D. Dostanic" <kdnlist@hotmail.com>
To: <decani@egroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2003 2:14 PM
Subject: NYT: Who's Accountable?


> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/10/opinion/10KRUG.html
>
> THE NEW YORK TIMES, Tuesday, June 10, 2003 OP-ED
>
> Who's Accountable?
>
> By PAUL KRUGMAN
>
> The Bush and Blair administrations are trying to silence critics - 
> many of them current or former intelligence analysts - who say that 
> they
exaggerated
> the threat from Iraq. Last week a Blair official accused Britain's 
> intelligence agencies of plotting against the government. (Tony 
> Blair's government has since apologized for January's "dodgy 
> dossier.") In this country, Colin Powell has declared that questions 
> about the justification for war are "outrageous."
>
> Yet dishonest salesmanship has been the hallmark of the Bush 
> administration's approach to domestic policy. And it has become
increasingly
> clear that the selling of the war with Iraq was no different.
>
> For example, look at the way the administration rhetorically linked 
> Saddam to Sept. 11. As The Associated Press put it: "The implication 
> from Bush on down was that Saddam supported Osama bin Laden's network. 
> Iraq and the
Sept.
> 11 attacks frequently were mentioned in the same sentence, even though 
> officials have no good evidence of such a link." Not only was there no
good
> evidence: according to The New York Times, captured leaders of Al 
> Qaeda explicitly told the C.I.A. that they had not been working with 
> Saddam.
>
> Or look at the affair of the infamous "germ warfare" trailers. I don't
know
> whether those trailers were intended to produce bioweapons or merely 
> to inflate balloons, as the Iraqis claim - a claim supported by a 
> number of outside experts. (According to the newspaper The Observer, 
> Britain sold
Iraq
> a similar system back in 1987.) What is clear is that an initial 
> report concluding that they were weapons labs was, as one analyst told 
> The Times, "a rushed job and looks political." President Bush had no 
> business
declaring
> "we have found the weapons of mass destruction."
>
> We can guess how Mr. Bush came to make that statement. The first teams 
> of analysts told administration officials what they wanted to hear, 
> doubts
were
> brushed aside, and officials then made public pronouncements greatly 
> overstating even what the analysts had said.
>
> A similar process of cherry-picking, of choosing and exaggerating 
> intelligence that suited the administration's preconceptions, unfolded
over
> the issue of W.M.D.'s before the war. Most intelligence professionals 
> believed that Saddam had some biological and chemical weapons, but 
> they
did
> not believe that these posed any imminent threat. According to the
newspaper
> The Independent, a March 2002 report by Britain's Joint Intelligence 
> Committee found no evidence that Saddam posed a significantly greater
threat
> than in 1991. But such conclusions weren't acceptable.
>
> Last fall former U.S. intelligence officials began warning that 
> official pronouncements were being based on "cooked intelligence." 
> British intelligence officials were so concerned that, The Independent 
> reports,
they
> kept detailed records of the process. "A smoking gun may well exist 
> over W.M.D., but it may not be to the government's liking," a source 
> said.
>
> But the Bush administration found scraps of intelligence suiting its
agenda,
> and officials began making strong pronouncements. "Saddam Hussein 
> recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons - 
> the very
weapons
> the dictator tells us he does not have," Mr. Bush said on Feb. 8. On 
> March 16 Dick Cheney declared, "We believe he has, in fact, 
> reconstituted
nuclear
> weapons."
>
> It's now two months since Baghdad fell - and according to The A.P.,
military
> units searching for W.M.D.'s have run out of places to look.
>
> One last point: the Bush administration's determination to see what it 
> wanted to see led not just to a gross exaggeration of the threat Iraq
posed,
> but to a severe underestimation of the problems of postwar occupation.
When
> Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, warned that occupying 
> Iraq might require hundreds of thousands of soldiers for an extended 
> period,
Paul
> Wolfowitz said he was "wildly off the mark" - and the secretary of the
Army
> may have been fired for backing up the general. Now a force of 150,000 
> is stretched thin, facing increasingly frequent guerrilla attacks, and 
> a
senior
> officer told The Washington Post that it might be two years before an
Iraqi
> government takes over. The Independent reports that British military
chiefs
> are resisting calls to send more forces, fearing being "sucked into a 
> quagmire."
>
> I'll tell you what's outrageous. It's not the fact that people are 
> criticizing the administration; it's the fact that nobody is being 
> held accountable for misleading the nation into war.
>
>
> letters@nytimes.com
>
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