Last Night Lawrence gave Condoleeza Rice what just might the Interview of her life. Or at least since her last big interview on Face the Nation & This Week
That was good, but this one had bite!.
Part 1
Part 2
For the record I count 49 Countries in the Iraq War Coalition during it's entire course - but Lawrence's point is that most of them aren't some of the more powerful nations in NATO like France or Germany. Also some of those 49 are rather suspicious and flaky.
The original list of coalition members provided by the White House included many nations that had no intention to participate in any actual fighting. Many of them do not even have an army, such as Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau. The government of one country, Solomon Islands, listed by the White House as a member of the coalition was apparently unaware of any such membership. In fact, they promptly denied it.
So exactly who was in the Coalition, who wasn't, and who actually provided combat troops is still not entirely clear to this day.
Overall Lawrence does a good job of digging at the Truth with Condi, but he doesn't get specific enough.
Condi claims that no one serous believes that it might be possible for the kind of Islamic Spring we've been seeing across the Arab would, couldn't have possibly happened with Saddam. That bringing "Democracy" to Iraq wasn't the point or the goal, neutralizing Saddam as a threat was. Well, that's interesting, because the Iraq Force Resolution that the Bush Administration used to justify the war mentions this.
The Iraq Liberation Act (P.L. 105–338) expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.
There's a lot more she says that's just plain patently wrong. Just as I previously critiqued Donald Rumsfeld's claim that the problem wasn't a failure of Intelligence, the truth is that besides a basic "Failure to Communicate" the problem we see here is Confirmation Bias.
In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors.
Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study. Confirmation bias is a phenomenon wherein decision makers have been shown to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or underweigh evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis.
Every answer Condi gives is a case study in Confirmation Bias. Everything that confirms Saddam as dangerous she emphasizes, everything that didn't or doesn't she ignores. Time and time again this can be shown to be the case.
She says that Saddam was trying to reconstitute his weapons programs. That is False as the Duelfer Report showed that Saddam had destroyed his WMD stockpiles all the way back in 1991.
But this wasn't News to the Bush Administration, they'd already been told all about it.
Suskind reports that the head of Iraqi intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush, met secretly with British intelligence in Jordan in the early days of 2003. In weekly meetings with Michael Shipster, the British director of Iraqi operations, Habbush conveyed that Iraq had no active nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs and no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
When Tenet was informed of the findings in early February, he said, “They’re not going to like this downtown,” Suskind wrote, meaning the White House. Suskind says that Bush’s reaction to the report was: “Why don’t they ask him to give us something we can use to help make our case?”
Rather than accept this as the truth or even try to confirm it - the Bushies Ignored and Rejected It.
Lawrence goes after Condi on the "Mushroom Cloud" claim, and she counters that was what the "Intelligence Said" - but that is a LIE.
In the Iraq NIE the State Department argued that the "Yellowcake" story was wrong because the document backing it up was a Forgery. Within the Classified version of the report the State Dept disputed the Niger Yellowcake Report.
The newly released report, however, also included a dissenting view from the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as the INR.
"The claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR's assessment, highly dubious," read the dissent.
Another U.S. official said the intelligence on uranium in the NIE never rose to the level that it could be "stated flatly" by the United States.
The official also said the Niger information was included in the 90-page report because it "was out there," and for "an effort at completeness." The official said the NIE contained six main arguments supporting the case that Iraq was continuing its efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction, but uranium from Africa was not one of them.
When it came to the Aluminum Tubes the Energy Dept. stated in the same report that they were the wrong type for centerfuges, because they included the anondyne coating. This is a fact that the Bush Administration knew and Condoleeza's Deputy Stephan Hadley tried to hide from the public during the 2004 Election
Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although "most agencies judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."
And they were intended for Conventional Weapons. WIthout Uranium to enrich and a centerfuge to do the enriching - Saddam wouldn't have had any fissionable material, and without that - he wouldn't have any Nuclear program or mushroom clouds.
Not only did the Bushies ignore the head of Iraq Intelligence, the State Dept and the Energy Dept when they told them anything that didn't Confirm their Bias - they ignored the Weapons Inspectors themselves when they said U.S. WMD intel was "garbage after garbage".
U.N. sources have told CBS News that American tips have lead to one dead end after another.
Example: satellite photographs purporting to show new research buildings at Iraqi nuclear sites. When the U.N. went into the new buildings they found "nothing."
Example: Saddam's presidential palaces, where the inspectors went with specific coordinates supplied by the U.S. on where to look for incriminating evidence. Again, they found "nothing."
Example: Interviews with scientists about the aluminum tubes the U.S. says Iraq has imported for enriching uranium, but which the Iraqis say are for making rockets. Given the size and specification of the tubes, the U.N. calls the "Iraqi alibi air tight."
So frustrated have the inspectors become that one source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they've been getting as "garbage after garbage after garbage." In fact, Phillips says the source used another cruder word. The inspectors find themselves caught between the Iraqis, who are masters at the weapons-hiding shell game, and the United States, whose intelligence they've found to be circumstantial, outdated or just plain wrong.
Of course the reason that the information they provided the Inspectors about the location of WMD stockpiles was false - was because they got it from a liar code-named "Curveball".
And each time someone tried to correct the flawed information coming from Curveball, or based on the Niger Forgery - the Bushies would stick it right back into the narrative
Vanity Fair has found at least 14 instances prior to the 2003 State of the Union in which analysts at the C.I.A., the State Department, or other government agencies who had examined the Niger documents or reports about them raised serious doubts about their legitimacy--only to be rebuffed by Bush-administration officials who wanted to use the material. "They were just relentless," says Wilkerson, who later prepared Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations General Assembly. "You would take it out and they would stick it back in. That was their favorite bureaucratic technique--ruthless relentlessness."
That's Ruthless Relentless Confirmation Bias in Action right there. They had their belief and they found what fit that belief while anything that didn't fit that belief was ignored and minimized. Anyone who brought up an issue they didn't want to hear had to be crushed, like Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame.
All the information they had that was bad - they choose to believe - even when it came from subjects who were obviously lying like Ibn Sheik al-Libi who said Saddam had actually Trained the 9-11 Hijackers - after he was Tortured!
Meanwhile all the good information from Habbush, from the State Dept, from the Energy Dept, from the Inspectors and even European Station Chief Tyler Drumheller who told Langley - Curveball is a Liar - was ignored.
Probably the worst thing that Condi says - besides her clearly sad accusation that Lawrence made a wrong statement that "We didn't have the Coalition we would have wanted", not that we "Didn't have a coalition" which Lawrence didn't say - is that even if you don't have good intelligence, you have to ACT. Well, that's just a pile of bull, No. You. Don't.
If we hadn't invaded Iraq, over 4,000 Americans, a hundred thousand Iraqis and $1 Trillion wouldn't have been lost for no good reason.
Could the Arab Spring have even brought down Saddam eventually? Well, let's put it this way - it would probably have been a lot more like Libya than Egypt, only in this case the Insurgents that we fought for years we would have been supporting because that's what America had pledged to do all the way back in 1998 with the original Iraqi Liberation Act. We already had a No-Fly Zone in Iraq, and there had already been and armed violent rebellion in Iraq back in 1991. Yes, Saddam responded by implementing a genocide - in fact, that was probably the primary reason he kept th destruction of his WMD stockpiles a secret. If the truth had been revealed, the Sunnis and Khurds would have rebelled again and turned him into Toast.
And Condi should know that, except that it doesn't Confirm what she already thought, or at least what she still wishes desperately for us to believe.
Vyan