Lindsey Graham is pissed at Obama. So pissed that he issued a statement unwittingly reminding everyone precisely how the Bush administration manipulated the intelligence and mislead America into an illegal war of aggression in Iraq.
If Benghazi is not an example of system failure before, during and after the attack what would be? If Boston is not an example of a pre-9/11 stovepiping mentality what would be?
I can't think of an example of pre-9/11 stovepiping mentality, but
I can think of one after.
The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.
And we all know how that turned out.