Iraqi WMDs Revisited - The Redux

[OddjobXL]

Originally Posted by The Avon Lady

As I said, these 2 are not like one another.

Are you kidding me? The American public thought it was going after the people who attacked us on 9/11 when we invaded Iraq. Polls showed that well into 2004 over 50% of the American public believed Saddam was directly responsible for the attacks. How could this possibly be, you ask? Because the administration pushed like crazy to make that connection if in a mostly round-a-bout way.

Now, look at the polls today and the vast majority of the public believes the administration lied to them, that the war wasn't worth it and the troops should start coming home. You don't see the similiarities between the way both administrations manipulated evidence and sold the public a bill of goods?

Spend it as you please. However, most go home and get dinner on the table.

Let's look at the big claims the administration made to sell the congress and the public on the war. Aluminum tubes to be used in uranium purification process. Disputed internally by the Energy Department and the State Department. Additionally by the International Atomic Energy Agency of the UN. Claims that Iraqi agents met with one of the hijackers. Disputed by the FBI, CIA and the country that originally documented the supposed event. Purchasing uranium from Niger. Disputed internally and the source documents determined to be forgeries by several allied intelligence services. The person sent to double check the reports disputed their basis in fact as well. A wave of single-sourced intelligence from Curveball, a known disreputable source and a cohort of Ahmed Chalabi, which included claims of mobile weapons labs, WMD research and long range drone aircraft capable of bearing WMD.

Now, did President Bush know whether he was lying or not, personally? I don't know. What I suspect is that the epicenter of the misinformation that went on runs along a corridor from Feith and the OSP in the Pentagon, through an unofficial neocon network, and right into Cheney's office. Any internal warnings that disputed the claims tended to get shot down by Cheney's office, folks like Libby and Addington. These guys, along with Feith and likely his boss Wolfowitz, had to know they were using shakey intelligence. It was weilded like a club too beat dissenters into line or to ridicule them into obscurity. A fine case study, of course, is what happened to Joe Wilson and his wife but a much more important, and bloodier, example was what happened to the CIA when the administration appointed Porter Goss.

Does it matter whether these guys believed the conclusion so much that they felt compelled to only gather evidence to support it or whether they deliberately lied and distorted facts to suit their agenda? I think it doesn't. I think it doesn't when it gets the point our leaders are telling us things are facts which are at best speculation based on unreliable intelligence. That's a lie. Somebody knew it.

*snipped where we seem to agree - though I'm tempted to keep it as a souvenier. *

Temperatures will not be lowered either way. My concern is solely for the well-being of coalition forces taking a step back, so as not to get singed by the fireworks that will ensue.

Agreed for the most part, though I'd also like to see the Iraqis in a more stable situation. I suspect the forces chomping at the bit to go at each other are a minority of the population - of course they're not a very motivated element and more likely to gravitate to extremists that offer them protection. If we play things right we might be able to minimize the fallout they have to endure as well. If this area explodes into a holy war along the Shiite Cresent we'll have even bigger problems to worry about too.

*snipped - more agreement*

LOL!
My enemy's enemy is my friend.

One Al Qaeda suspect thrown at Syria, as if the US was doing Syria a favor. Big cooperation there! Syria - gotta love 'em!

Anything else you care to blwo out of context and proportion?

Just because there's only one we know about doesn't mean there weren't more. These things were ostensibly black operations. I've also read of security cooperation in Syria too at the time - the Shiite ruling class turns out, surprise surprise, to be no huge fan of Sunni jihadis (at least of the al Qaeda wahabbi school).

Now, I don't love these guys but I'm really tired of all the hair rending and teeth gnashing over Syria and Iran. We could talk to the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war, and if I recall correctly, we had a hotline installed so the leaders could resolve issues before they got out of control. I don't say we should go to that extreme with Syria and Iran but we damned well need to be talking to them if only to get results we want in Iraq. We don't have to trust them but we do have to deal.

Ah, the truth hurts.

No, counterproductive rhetoric and bullheadedness hurts.

There's that magic hookie-pookie word again.

If the word is good enough for them to describe themselves it works for me too. Now I don't believe all neocons are cut from the same cloth but there is an underlaying movement there.

Do moonbats have an agenda, too?

Fun with words.

The neoconservatives want to defend Israel against all comers by leveraging America's strength against her enemies. Now I believe most of them support this because they conflate Israel's interests, at least as seen through a Likudnik lense, with America's. This isn't treason I'm talking about but honest ideology. They're not the only ones - the Christian conservatives of the religious right make the same calculation but for very different reasons. I tend to sympathise more with the reasoning of Israeli moderates myself and I do believe America has a commitment to protect Israel that's important to honor. However, I think helping Israel sometimes may mean making compromises, and persuading Israel's leaders to make compromises, that will help the security situation.

There are ways to do things on the cheap.

I think they tried that. It was called Rumsfeld's new military. Worked great in Afghanistan. Got us into Baghdad. And now we're seeing why a lite force ain't gonna do it for long term occupations and reconstructions.

Yada, yada. Proxy shmoxy. Hizballah attacks inside Israel, triggering a war. Israel blew the oportunity to fight the war the way it should have been fought. Now the idiots at the helm here are in major damage/spin control to keep their tushes on their power cushions.

Israel couldn't win that war. Hezbollah had dug in with the sole purpose of surviving just such an invasion and making it last until international reaction forced Israel's troops to retreat. Ya'll walked into it. You actually had to win, to take and hold ground, to reduce enemy forces. All they had to do was lay low and take an occasional potshot to look like heroes to themselves and the Arab world. It wasn't remotely a fair fight. The people who ended up really screwed were the secular/moderate Lebanese hoping their new democratic government would have a chance and the Israelis who now look out upon an emboldened host of potential enemies.

Hezbollah snatched a couple troops. I'm given to understand this is a fairly tit-for-tat situation that goes on back and forth all the time. Sure, they started it. They were hoping to trade for Lebanese people Israel was holding who'd been grabbed at some point. In fact, in the tit-for-tat department does Lebanon tend to hold more Israeli hostages or does Israel hold more Lebanese?

If you can't tell, I'm not really amused with either side at this point.

Even I mostly agree with that, being a so-imagined little neocon meself. That's why the term is worthless.

Or maybe there are just different kinds of people who think of themselves as neocons? I know that for a fact. I used to believe, at least until this World Bank fiasco, that Wolfowitz as a true-blue idealist who believed in the higher goals he espoused. I certainly never got that feeling from Richard Pearle who comes off as a profiteering opportunist.

I thought it was self-explanatory.

Israel's 59th Independence Day here, beginning tonight. Don't know how much of a chance to go online I'll have until Wednesday.

Not so much, lay it out for me. And have a good independence day.

[The Avon Lady]

No one else could reply to this over the last 2 days? Very well....

Originally Posted by OddjobXL

Are you kidding me? The American public thought it was going after the people who attacked us on 9/11 when we invaded Iraq. Polls showed that well into 2004 over 50% of the American public believed Saddam was directly responsible for the attacks. How could this possibly be, you ask? Because the administration pushed like crazy to make that connection if in a mostly round-a-bout way.

Let's go down the memory hole again.

People still don't get it. US intelligence services stank. They have for years and I'm afraid they still do. This goes way back and is not necessarily the fault of this or that president. People believe(d) what they were told by an administration that themselves believed it, after having it reported as such for years. That includes the Clinton admin's own 1998 claims of cooperation between Saddam and Al Qaeda. What? You've never read the indictment? So can we safely say Clinton lied, people died? <set sarcasm off>

These 2 things are not the same.

Now, look at the polls today and the vast majority of the public believes the administration lied to them,

Yep. The media's lies worked just as easy on the populace.

that the war wasn't worth it

This is an opinion based on viewing actual circumstances. This could have occurred whether US intel data was right on the money or not.

and the troops should start coming home.

As above.

You don't see the similiarities between the way both administrations manipulated evidence and sold the public a bill of goods?

As I pointed out, try not to mix up cause and effect.

Let's look at the big claims the administration made to sell the congress and the public on the war. Aluminum tubes to be used in uranium purification process. Disputed internally by the Energy Department and the State Department. Additionally by the International Atomic Energy Agency of the UN.

Well that settles it. Anyone relying on the IAEA has got to be off their rocker. But obviously you haven't read or are ignoring David Kay's letter to the editor of the Washington Post.

Claims that Iraqi agents met with one of the hijackers. Disputed by the FBI, CIA and the country that originally documented the supposed event.

Once again, this or that detail may have been disputed but the overall picture of cooperation as presented to both Clinton and Bush adminstrations by US intel told them both otherwise.

Purchasing uranium from Niger. Disputed internally and the source documents determined to be forgeries by several allied intelligence services. The person sent to double check the reports disputed their basis in fact as well. A wave of single-sourced intelligence from Curveball, a known disreputable source and a cohort of Ahmed Chalabi, which included claims of mobile weapons labs, WMD research and long range drone aircraft capable of bearing WMD.

Tons and tons of bad intel, again and again. BTW, on this worn down story, what's your opinion of Mr. al-Zawahie? I'll let you google yourself, if the name's not familar.

Now, did President Bush know whether he was lying or not, personally? I don't know.

No you don't. So how does anyone insist otherwise?

BTW, did President Johnson knowingly lie? Neither one of us knows, either. Time to accurately set history straight there, too.

What I suspect is that the epicenter of the misinformation that went on runs along a corridor from Feith and the OSP in the Pentagon, through an unofficial neocon network, and right into Cheney's office.

z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z

Wake me up when you remove your aluminum foil hat.

z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z

Any internal warnings that disputed the claims tended to get shot down by Cheney's office, folks like Libby and Addington. These guys, along with Feith and likely his boss Wolfowitz, had to know they were using shakey intelligence. It was weilded like a club too beat dissenters into line or to ridicule them into obscurity. A fine case study, of course, is what happened to Joe Wilson

You mean Joe Wilson, the liar? Enough already of this garbage. Really.

and his wife but a much more important, and bloodier, example was what happened to the CIA when the administration appointed Porter Goss.

Again z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z. US intel's problems go way back at least to the Clinton 90's, as I've shown above.

I'm getting awfully bored at this point. I'll end off simply quoting you, since your attitude in writing sums you up quite nicely:

"Just because there's only one we know about doesn't mean there weren't more."

Call me when you decide to stick to facts and not to fantasies you wish were true.

[OddjobXL]

I just got a nice new shiny copy of Middle Earth Online so I'll have to cut this short. It has been fun.

For anyone wondering about the quality of the responses here I'll just leave you with a fun mix-tape of good links:


Bush's intent to invade superceded any issue of WMD:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/in...i=5088&partner

Here's Colin Powell's former chief of staff discussing the Rumsfeld-Cheney corridor:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...101902246.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4480638.stm

Here's another interesting take on the OSP and why one former member is probably going to jail:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/06/po...er=rssuserland
Conviction here:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/01/20/analyst.sentence/

General Zinni on the neoconservatives in the Pentagon:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in618896.shtml

So much for the tinfoil hat theory. It does tend to be an argument of last resort. A for effort.

Here's David Kay one year later than that letter was published:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3778987.stm

Drumheller, former CIA Station Chief Europe, Speaks Out on WMD Distortions:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/...n1527749.shtml

Lord, if I only had more time. But I don't. And there are better articles I've lost links to I'm sure. Anybody out there who wants to learn more, there's more to learn.

Edit: Almost forgot, recent article on the forged Niger letter:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews

[NEON DEON]

There are two sides to every story and somewhere in the middle lies the truth.

[geetrue]

If I had to read all of those links Oddjob I'd go crazy ...
your suppose to read them for me and then I read your post and discern if your right or not.

How can ya'll find time to do the same things everyone else does, go to bed, go to the bathroom, go to work or school, go to lunch, go back to work or school, come home, go to the bathroom, fix dinner, read the news, surf the web, play a game and care about National Security all at the same time?

This amazes me ... we need more team work just to thrive in a world full of mis-information, which I feel Avon Lady and Oddjob are giving us a better slant on than the national news.

Keep up the good work gang ... I have to go to the bathroom now

[OddjobXL]

To make a long story short, I work for a company where sometimes things are crazy busy and sometimes things are real slow. When they're slow I've got time to surf the web and keep up on things. I've been debating politics and tracing stories on another gaming site for some time in their politics forums. Most of the above are pulled from things I looked at ages ago. After 9/11 I went a bit nuts reading up on Afghanistan and al Qaida trying to sort out what was going on. When the President made it clear he was going after Iraq, well, in light of what I understood about the nature of the threat this made no sense to me. So I kept on reading.

I didn't know what I know now back then. As for why I post on gaming sites and not political ones, well, most people on political sites just go back and forth with talking points and the discussion never goes anywhere. On gaming sites people are here for games not to score points in debates. We all at least have that much in common. Avon Lady's a really smart character and it's fun talking to her so I kept it in play. But I do have to bail for now.

[The Avon Lady]

Let's see how you let your imagination run wild.

Originally Posted by OddjobXL

I just got a nice new shiny copy of Middle Earth Online so I'll have to cut this short. It has been fun.

For anyone wondering about the quality of the responses here I'll just leave you with a fun mix-tape of good links:


Bush's intent to invade superceded any issue of WMD:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/in...i=5088&partner

The issue of WMD's went way back into prior administrations, as I already pointed out. This article - assuming the memo is authentic in the first place - says at the most:

"The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq."

So, what else is new? The whole argument was that the UN inspectors were useless, with Hussein playing cat & mouse. So how does this show that the intent to invade superceded any issue of WMDs, when WMDs was the concern pronounced by Bush and all prior admistrations as well, bi-partisan down the line?

Next........................................

Here's Colin Powell's former chief of staff discussing the Rumsfeld-Cheney corridor:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...101902246.html

Magic bean words like "corridor" and "cabal", uttered by yourself and an immensly disgruntled (verbatim quote: "Larry Wilkerson seethed quietly during President Bush's first term") former staffer make for a "cabal"?

Dictionary, please!

ca·bal /kəˈbæl/ [kuh-bal] verb, -balled, -bal·ling.
–noun 1. a small group of secret plotters, as against a government or person in authority.

And this one man's cabal conspiracy is brought to you by Democratic party mouthpiece WP columnist Dana Milbank? Why am I not surprised!

BTW, if you insist on relying on Larry Wilkerson, then you have to take it all. In this BBC interview, regading the ineptitude of "post invasion planning", Wilkerson states:

"It consisted of largely sending Jay Garner and his organisation to sit in Kuwait until the military forces had moved into Baghdad, and then going to Baghdad and other places in Iraq with no other purpose than to deliver a little humanitarian assistance, perhaps deal with some oil-field fires, put Ahmed Chalabi or some other similar Iraqi in charge and leave."

So, then, if Iraq wasn't invaded for oil after all, and if the administration's ultimate wishful thinking was to decisively defeat Saddam, install a civilian government and leave, then what was Bush lying about and whatever for? :hmm:

Once again, I'll claim that every bungle we've seen, both pre and post war, both in analysis and in military strategy, is symtomatic of an extremly sick intel system. And our enemies know it.

Sorry. I am bored beyond boredom to go on having to point out the details you smudge over.

So if we're not playing "false but accurate", we'll play "inaccurate but true" instead? I don't want to play.

The bottom line is none of this shows WMDs to be a false excuse. Well, surprise, surprise. Again, that's a separate issue from whether the WMDs do or don't exist. Intel Inside - NOT.

[cobalt]

Iraq and "WMD" don't even belong in the same sentence anymore.

mein gott.

[OddjobXL]

Quick post-script. When did I say it was about oil? It didn't even make my list of reason we attacked Iraq in reality, nor did WMD of course. That's not to diminish the obvious fact that at least indirectly everything we do in the middle east ultimately has to do with domestic energy security on some level but it doesn't explain why we went after Iraq rather than some other place. Iraq was low-laying fruit. Some people believed we had to make a violent statement to the "Muslim world" to prove we were serious and not to mess with us. Neocons were among them and also provided the philosophical rationalizations so they sounded much higher-minded than they really were on TV. Neither group would have gotten very far without the other.

Here's Wolfowitz on WMD:

The decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for "bureaucratic reasons", according to the US deputy defence secretary.


But in an interview with the American magazine Vanity Fair, Paul Wolfowitz said there were many other important factors as well. The famously hawkish Mr Wolfowitz has been a long-time proponent of military action against Iraq.
Picking weapons of mass destruction was "the one reason everyone could agree on", he says in the interview.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2945750.stm

He goes on to cite the opportunity to pull American troops out of Saudi Arabia as a big reason for the war, so we could lower tensions with the wahabbis over the presence of foreign pariahs from the holy land. Of course, given all the other reasons we've seen tossed at the wall hoping they'd stick this strikes me as just another one. You don't see anyone else really mentioning that claim much elsewhere. It also strikes me as very naive, to the point of disingenuous, to think an American invasion and overt occupation of a Muslim power would be less disruptive, somehow, than a peaceful security force somewhere else - it's not as if we actually had troops in Mecca and Medina no matter how al Qaida was trying to spin it. Iraq's been infinitely better for recruiting for them in the long run.

If you don't like the word cabal you should be more careful about tossing out phrases like tin-foil helmet or mouthpiece. Makes ya look a bit desperate.

Also check this out from that very useful Wilkerson interview you linked to:

I have basically been supportive of the administration's point that it was simply fooled - that the intelligence community, including the UK, Germany, France, Jordan - other countries that confirmed what we had in our intelligence package, yet we were all just fooled.


Lately, I'm growing increasingly concerned because two things have just happened here that really make me wonder.

And the one is the questioning of Sheikh al-Libby where his confessions were obtained through interrogation techniques other than those authorised by Geneva.
It led Colin Powell to say at the UN on 5 February 2003 that there were some pretty substantive contacts between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. And we now know that al-Libby's forced confession has been recanted and we know - we're pretty sure that it was invalid.

But more important than that, we know that there was a defence intelligence agency dissent on that testimony even before Colin Powell made his presentation. We never heard about that.
Follow that up with Curveball, and the fact that the Germans now say they told our CIA well before Colin Powell gave his presentation that Curveball - the source to the biological mobile laboratories - was lying and was not a trustworthy source. And then you begin to speculate, you begin to wonder was this intelligence spun; was it politicised; was it cherry-picked; did in fact the American people get fooled - I am beginning to have my concerns.

[The Avon Lady]

Why don't you read past the interview to understand how the crackpots at Vanity Fair twisted and corrupted what Wolfowitz said?

Go running around the Internet to see what a hatchet job Vanity Fair has been consistantly doing when it comes to scalping anything not leftist at any price.

Well, what other way was there to save the dying magazine from Chapter 11!

UPDATE: See What Wolfowitz Really Said.

[OddjobXL]

My first reaction, of course, is that you link to a DoD press release, where Wolfowitz worked, rather than the real article? And then you claim Vanity Fair is hopelessly biased? Alright, let's have a look.

Priceless.

Wolfowitz: Well, there've been disputes within the intelligence community on the exact nature of that one. There's been very little dispute about the WMD, except for some of the borderline issues.

Oh, boy.

Wolfowitz: Well, but they hadn't had 12 years to build mobile production facilities

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy:

DeYoung: Okay, let me just... But do you think that you might have oversold the whole WMD thing last fall? With the sort of, not only do they have production facilities, they actually have weapons that are ready to be used?

Wolfowitz: I don't think so. I mean, I think we were working from, as I told you, one of the most widely shared intelligence assessments I kn
ow of.

DeYoung: And even if we end up not finding...?

Wolfowitz: We're a long way from...

Kellems: We can't go there. Karen, come on! [Laughter] That was a trick question.

Ahahaha...cough, cough.

Look, I can't read that transcript the same way you do. It's impossible. I've seen too much evidence about Wolfowitz's hard shoving behind this war. When someone in the administration questioned it, it was always Wolfowitz pushing back. When someone changed their mind the saying was "Wolfowitz got to him." He was Douglas Feith's boss - the guy who ran the Office of Special Plans, he signed off on PNAC's main report and the In Defense of the Realm (sic - not sure that's the exact title) study done for Israel.

If there was anyone who knew how shaky the case for war based on WMDs was, and how unlikely Saddam's implied ties to al Qaida were, and did more to promote all of it than Wolfowitz then it could only be Dick Cheney. Was there anyone else pulling nearly the used car salesmen act with Congress than Wolfowitz? "It will pay for itself." "We don't need many troops." "They'll welcome us as liberators."

They had to know better. They were in the goddamn Pentagon. They had serious career, military, analysts around. Either they ignored them all without even looking at the homework or they deliberately lied.

So if you're capable of believing a word out of Wolfowitz's mouth, more's the power to you, but I can't. I see him as inherently deceitful. He may have believed he was merely achieving a means to a good end but I personally don't much like being played. If they had an argument they should have come out and made it instead of scaring people with boogeymen so they, and the politicians who depend on their votes, were forced into compliance.

[The Avon Lady]

See my additional link to the Weekly Standard article.

[OddjobXL]

Weekly Standard? Wait, that sounds oddly familiar. Now why would that be? Oh, right - William Kristol's magazine. Now why would I be any more at ease trusting material this guy gave a thumbs up to (correction actually wrote!)? Isn't there a link to the original article anywhere? I'm guessing not, or at least not easily found. Seems these two links, when you google, are precisely the first two that come up defending Wolfowitz. Hey, I do that too sometimes. It's part of why I get into these debates. You always learn something new and sometimes that means hitting the old google to defend a point you might have stepped too far out on.

...reading...reading...reading...

Alright, seems to me that once you wade through the defensiveness and rhetoric, and if you trust a secret tape recording the Pentagon made of the interview and only entrusted William Kristol with, Kristol has something of a point. He claims the interviewer made Wolfowitz sound like a nut because he conflated the answer about Saudi Arabia with that about WMD. I'm even willing to grant that this tape is probably legitimate because this is such a minor point if you were really going to distort evidence you'd do something much more useful than this.

Ultimately, the statement that deciding to make the focus on WMD because it was convenient stands. Now I don't doubt that many intelligence services, including our own and even the CIA, suspected there were probably chemical weapons in Iraq. But that never was the whole WMD case. The stuff people actually remember has to do with mushroom clouds and Saddam's association with al Qaida. Hell, Kristol even sings that song when he talks about the al Qaida people killed in Northern Iraq without bothering to mention that is Kurdish controlled Iraq which even back then was known. What wasn't common knowledge at the time was that our intelligence services asked permission to take them out before the invasion, before they could scatter, and they were told no because it would undermine the case for war.

You starting to see where I'm coming from? I'm not some freak wearing a papermache Uncle Sam head and prancing around in protest marches to pick up hairy chicks. I'm no actual expert on these issues either. But I am a guy who has been reading waaaay too much for too long to believe alot of stuff some people still insist on seeing as the gospel truth.

[Heibges]

If Iraq was a credible threat regarding WMD's, Israel would have taken care of it long before the the United States got around to invading. Afterall, Israel has always taken care of it's own dirty laundry.

As they did when they bombed the Osiraq Nuclear Reactor in 1981.

As they did when they assassinated Dr. Gerald Bull in Brussel's outside his apartment with 5 shots to the back of the head in 1990.

[Ishmael]

I found this little strip amusing four years later. But then "This Modern World" is one of my favorites. It's called,"What They Really Said"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-to...d_b_46907.html

Regarding intelligence failures:

Look at this BBC Documentary called "The Power Of Nightmares" for more info:

http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmaresDVD

We know that PNAC called for a US invasion of Iraq in 1994. We know that most of the PNAC members obtained positions in the White House & Defense Dept. policymaking branches , including the Pentagon Office of Special Plans.

We know from Richard Clarke that the Bush transition team didn't want to hear briefings about Al Qaeda, only Iraq in late 2000.

We know from one of the few records released from Cheney's secret Energy Task Force meetings was a map of Iraqi oil fields.

We know from the Downing Street Memos that the intelligence on Iraq was being fixed around the policy.

We know that the intelligence services determined the Niger memo was a fake as did Joe Wilson who was sent there as a result of a direct request from the Vice-President's office not, as widely propogated in the Right Wing press & blogosphere, by his wife.

We know that, as a result of Joe Wilson's report and later op-ed, his wife, a covert intelligence operative was compromised by the Bush Admin. to marginalize him befroe the war.

We know that Valerie Wilson's front company, Brewster-Jennings which had spent 15 years constructing a human intelligence network in the Mideast to track WMDs & various governments & groups efforts to obtain them including Al-Qaeda, Iraq & Iran, was neutralized in a matter of hours and putting who knows how many lives in jeopardy.

An interesting side note in the Niger memos. Wayne Madsen has found links between the forgery, a burglary of the Niger Embassy where the only things taken were official stationary and a government seal, SISME the Italian Itelligence Service & Michael Ledeen of the aforementioned Office of Special Plans.

So my question to my conservative friends still stands. After all of the demonstrable lies, falsehoods, misjudgements & incompetence of these guys, how can you believe anything they say?