PittsburghThoughts

In concurrence with last night's Frontline report, Bush's War Part 1, I found the following interesting. First, the NYT's article about a buried Rand, 2005 report:

Army Buried Study Faulting Iraq Planning - New York Times

And then, the video on the buried report, released, February 18th, 2008 for YouTube by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. and delivered by Phyllis Bennis, a Senior Analyst:



*******************************************
Last night's Frontline, Part 1 of Bush's War, explains more clearly than anything that I've seen to date, primarily through 1st hand accounts, how reason and doubt were steam rolled, how people were betrayed, how intelligence was manufactured and ironically how one of the prime justifications for war with Iraq, the missing link between Iraq and al-Qeada, was based on information extracted from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi after he had been captured in Afghanistan and shipped to Cairo to be tortured. After the Iraq invasion al-Libi was sent to Guantanamo where he recanted his Cairo confession and maintained that it was obtained through torture.

If I were asked to pick the one person most responsible for our unjustified invasion of Iraq it would be Dick Cheney. His distrust of the CIA, based on his earlier experiences while Secretary of Defense under the first Bush, had so blinded him that he felt forced to become his own intelligence agency, manufacturing the intelligence that he needed and disregarding the rest.

It was a major triumph in perversion, a small group of alpha males had successfully conspired to destabilize the Middle East, the United States and the world in one fell swoop. Colin Powell and Condaleezza Rice could almost be considered tragic figures if only they would have done their jobs or resigned in protest, but neither did.

One of the most shocking lessons of Bush's War is that good and decent individuals, trying to do the right thing in a critical situation, will not or can not resist the flux of a system that's been commandeered by arrogant bullies, even when the system is wrong and even when the consequences are fatal to millions.

Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell or George Tennant and others, at some point, could have made a significant effort to stop the madness that was sweeping us to war but they didn't. They fretted and complained but in the end, none of them were willing put everything on the line to do the right thing.

A recent poll shows that only 28% of Americans know that the Iraq death toll for American soldiers has reached 4000. Without a draft, a war tax or televised flag draped caskets, our shroud of ignorance is impenetrable. Once the world is set straight, history is recorded as precisely and correctly as it can be, how will we be able to look at ourselves and not feel shame? Gene