Author: Jonathan Schwarz

You’ve probably seen the New Republic has published a long piece about blogtopia by Jonathan Chait, a senior editor there. It somehow manages to be intensely irritating while still vaguely laudatory about what the online world has accomplished. Here’s my favorite part:

[P]ropaganda should not be confused with intellectual inquiry. Propagandists do not follow their logic wherever it may lead them; they are not interested in originality…

At the narrow level, the netroots take part in a great deal of demagoguery, name-calling, and dishonesty. Seen through a wider lens, however, they bring into closer balance the ideological vectors of propaganda in our public life.

Take the case of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a slain soldier who camped out at Crawford, Texas, in August 2005, demanding to meet with President Bush. The press corps did not treat her as a serious story, and understandably so–there were many parents of fallen soldiers with strong views on Iraq, so why should hers hold such weight? But the netroots took hold of the Sheehan story, harping on it for days, and forced it onto the national agenda. This is the sort of thing conservatives have been doing for years. The Swift Boat Veterans For Truth deserved no special credibility, either, but, in 2004, the right-wing media apparatus elevated them onto the national stage. Was the veneration of Sheehan intellectually shabby? Without a doubt. Was it, considered as a whole, a bad thing? That is not so clear.

Yes, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and Cindy Sheehan are exactly the same “sort of thing.” Just compare:

• Swift Boat Veterans for Truth garnered attention by falsely claiming Kerry was “lying about his record” in Vietnam

• Cindy Sheehan garnered attention by falsely claiming her son is dead

Thank you, Jonathan Chait, for following your logic wherever it led you. It’s this type of original intellectual inquiry that blogs—hampered as they are by their demagoguery and dishonesty—just can’t touch.

So Henry Waxman is going to be delving more deeply into the uranium-from-Niger crap. But I don’t think anyone knows anything at all about these other forgeries, described in George Tenet’s new book, p. 356:

The Iraq-al-Qa’ida controversy continued, even after Saddam was long gone from power. Once U.S. forces reached Baghdad, they discovered—stacked where they could easily find them—purported Iraqi intelligence services documents that showed much tighter links between Saddam and Zarqawi and Saddam and al-Qa’ida. CIA analysts worked with the U.S. Secret Service to have the paper and ink checked and tried to verify the names and information in the documents. Time and again, documents that were supposedly produced in the early 1990s turned out to be forgeries. CIA officers interviewed Iraqi intelligence officers in Baghdad who also discounted the authenticity of the documents. It was obvious that someone was trying to mislead us. But these raw, unevaluated documents that painted a more nefarious picture of Iraq and al-Qa’ida continued to show up in the hands of senior administration officials without having gone through normal intelligence channels.

It might be nice if someone, you know, looked into this.

From George Tenet’s new book, p. 310:

In the spring of 2005 some documents dating back to July 2002 were leaked to the British press. The documents, which came to be known as “the Downing Street Memo,” reported on a “perceptible shift” in the attitude in Washington, saying that military action was now seen as “inevitable.” One memo records “C,” the designation the Brits use for the head of the British Secret Secret Intelligence Service, as saying that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

Sir Richard later told me that he had been misquoted. He reviewed the draft document, objecting to the word “fixed” in particular, and corrected it to reflect the truth of the matter. He said that upon returning to London in July of 2002, he expressed the view, based on his conversations, that the war in Iraq was going to happen. He believed that the momentum driving it was not really about WMD but rather about bigger issues, such as changing the politics of the Middle East.

Dearlove recalled that he had a polite but significant, disagreement with Scooter Libby, who was trying to convince him that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qa’ida. Dearlove’s strongly held view, based on his own service’s reporting, was that any contacts between the two had come to nothing and that there was no formal relationship. He believed that the crowd around the vice president was playing fast and loose with the evidence. In his view, it was never about “fixing” the intelligence itself but rather about the undisciplined manner in which the intelligence was being used.

It all makes sense now! Richard Dearlove was misquoted, and corrected it in the final draft. But the British government never released the final draft, because…well, it’s not clear, but I assume because they’re shy and rather than speaking up would prefer to have a massive, incredibly damning falsehood be entered into history for all eternity. Furthermore, the Bush administration would never ask about this and certainly would never press the British to declassify the exculpatory draft. They’re very shy too.

Finally, don’t ever believe that “playing fast and loose with the evidence” is the same thing as “fixing” intelligence. Those are two totally different things and you should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking that.

Accounts of the Bush administration always speak of the “close bond” shared by George Bush and George Tenet.

With Tenet’s appearances surrounding his new book, we can finally see why: he and Bush both possess a love of taking personal responsibility, particularly when it involves giving clear, concise answers to tough questions:

TIME: How come the CIA trusted the source, codenamed Curveball, who turned out to be a fabricator? How does that happen? Did you know even who he was?

TENET: Well, I didn’t know his name, no. I mean, I know a lot about Curveball. So, you know, we’re working throughout this period. We’re trying to get direct access to him, and we can’t have direct access to him? But so you’ve got this, you know, indirect access, analysts doing the validation, lots of what he was saying made sense? The implication, of course, as you look at this, is this an organization in some sort of meltdown or something? Well, no, because the whole ethos of the place is report what you’ve got. If it’s not good news, when someone says fabricate in our business, you push it up, you stop the train. At the end of the day, we could have saved a lot of pain in the estimate. We could have saved the Secretary of State a whole lot of pain.

To be sure he had answered the question precisely, Tenet then added: “Fufffffffffffffffffffeeeefffffffffff.”

Dahr Jamail: “‘I Am Now a Refugee’: The Iraqi Crisis That Has No Name”

John Brown: “The Cho in the White House: An Ex-Diplomat Considers the World and Virginia Tech”

Karen J. Greenberg: “Can Guantanamo Be Closed?: What a New President Could Do”