[Newspoetry] National Intelligence Estimates

[emerick at chorus.net]

    CIA Admits Lack of Specifics on Iraqi Weapons Before Invasion
     Agence France Presse <<ala TRUTHOUT.COM>>
<Translation <T>: Admitting that you lacked specifics makes it sound as if you 
were still, more or less, correct in essential matters.  But here, where the 
CIA was also wrong on the essential matter, as to whether Iraq had any WMD at 
all and whether war could be justified, legally, if never morally, the CIA was 
completely wrong.  So, this so-called admission is yet another part of a 
continuing cover-up in the big lie propaganda technique that has become all the 
rage among the most self-deceiving administration in this country since Johnson-
McNamara.  [At least, 30 years later and far too late by my own judgment, 
McNamara now admits the truth of what the anti-war movement said about "Why we 
were in Vietnam...".]   It is debatable whether an administration that knows 
that it does not know what the truth is is truly lying when it makes claims 
about what might be truth.  Cheney and Bush certainly do not think that they 
are lying, not essentially anyway, not about the big things !
 that matter most.  Instead, they think that they are gambling that this is the 
right time to do something about possible truth.  It is highly possible, so 
they think, that Iraq could someday have these WMD.  And, it is highly possible 
that they hate America now.  And it is highly possible that someday we may not 
be as militarily advantaged as we are today.  And it is highly possible that we 
will not be in office in the future, especially if we do not have some dramatic 
war program that shows how vital we are to the nation .  And it is highly 
possible that most Americans will believe almost anything that we tell them.  
And it is highly possible that nothing too awful bad will happen to our cause, 
during this campaign because we can blame everything bad thing on the enemy, 
counting on our own people to rally round the flag even more patriotically when 
adversities become more specific...>

     Sunday 30 November 2003

     (AFP) - The US Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged it "lacked 
specific information" about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction when it 
compiled an intelligence estimate last year that served to justify the US-led 
invasion of Iraq (news - web sites).
<Perhaps, the estimate should say that knowing what the facts are never 
supports any particular kind of action -- nor even a policy direction.  For all 
action ought to be a matter of what we ought to desire.  Facts indicate the 
quality of the effort that we must expect to expend in pursuing our dreams -- 
but facts otherwise have no relationship to our dreams.>

     But it said that and other uncertainties surrounding the case had been 
fully presented to President George W. Bush and other US policymakers in the 
October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a document often referred to by 
members of the Bush administration as a basis of their claim that Iraq had an 
arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
<Then someone should have said, "Mr. President, if you make that wild claim, 
you'll be ignoring the fact that the facts do not support that wild a 
speculation.">

     US Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN Security Council last 
February that Saddam Hussein and his regime were "concealing their efforts to 
produce more weapons of mass destruction" and that their weapons programs "are 
a real and present danger to the region and to the world."
<We think they are hiding things because we can't find any evidence.  The much 
more probable inference, after such due searches as Intelligence constantly 
performs, is that the lack of evidence means the suspicion is simply 
unwarranted.  Nobody believes in the alleged reality of ghosts and spooks 
except, so it would seem, our spy agencies.>

     However, an explanation issued over the weekend by veteran CIA analyst 
Stuart Cohen, who was in charge of putting together the 2002 intelligence 
estimate and currently serves as vice chairman of the National Intelligence 
Council, made clear the case against Iraq, as presented by the CIA behind 
closed doors, was much less clear-cut and more nuanced.  <Having fuzzed the 
boundary between warranted cklaims and wild speculations, the CIA redacts its 
fuzz, to spin its own spin.  "We retract the specificity of our admission that 
Iraq, specifically, clearly and presently, specifically, had some specific 
WMD.  Rather, we, the CIA, think things are not clear cut and nuanced, because 
it is justa matter of details, and details are always, per definition, nuanced 
and subtle -- and knowledge of such things can never be specific, but only 
general, in the very way itself that things will have always already have 
happened to be when they come to mind to be known.  So let us be more spec!
 ific; more precisely, we never wanted to be understood, any more specifically, 
or even more specifically, than this, because otherwise we jeopardize our 
intelligence operations and the operatives who operate those operations, 
operatively speaking, of course, to  be more generally specific, in a secretly 
operative sort of way, covertly and all that, speaking in code and tongues of 
coded tongues..">

     "Any reader would have had to read only as far as the second paragraph of 
the Key Judgments to know that as we said: 'We lacked specific information on 
many key aspects of Iraq's WMD program,'" Cohen wrote in an article posted on 
the agency's Web site.
<Here, the CIA imagines the "reader" as a kind of person who might read, were 
able to read, the CIA report.  The cover-up here is the entwined suggestive 
thema that plays on double-bogie falsehoods.  Bush can not, in fact, read at 
all, as the CIA may have learned, given all of the intelligence opportunities 
that it has had to figure this simple man out.  And, the CIA should also know 
by now that W never listens to a report, anyway, beyond the first paragraph, 
and that latter listening happens only provided that the first paragraph is (1) 
not all that long, and (2) glib, superficial, trite and (3) otherwise 
correlated with his prejudices.  The hyperactive never take time to think 
things through.  So, the CIA knew W would be misled by an Intelligence Report.  
For instance, W did think that it meant that he was intelligent to receive an 
Intelligence Report.  W was troubled by the title of the report: National 
Intelligence Estimate:  was he to be compared to the Nation?  or, rat!
 her, was he, as Louie, Louie, said "Lestates moi" -- which rather means, W, 
though, this is my state -- and how could they only estimate my intelligence -- 
for what they estimate, they could underestimate, or overestimate as well.  
But, no W thought such as these need detain us here, as we only are only 
forming estimates, ourselves, of W's Mental Defects (ie, WMD).>

     The document still concluded that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons 
as well as missiles with ranges in excess of the 150-kilometer (93-mile) limit 
imposed by the UN Security Council. It also said that Baghdad did not have 
nuclear weapons.
<How did we conclude that they 'still' had weapons?  Well, it's a fact that 
they once had such WMD.  And, despite 10 years during which we bombed every 
interesting military target in Iraq, in alleged reaction to alleged violations 
of the so-called Protective Reaction Strike to Maintain a FreeFire and 
FlightFree Zone.  The USA utterly estroyed the Iraqi CIA buildings several 
times, over the course of that decade, for instance --  and then Colin Powell, 
ever an agency joker in the bureaucratic deck, wondered why the Iraqi had no 
idea and almost no evidence of when and how they had destroyed their vintage 
and antique WMD.  They 'still' have such weapons -- and they must yet, even 
now, be in hiding -- because the absense of an auditable paper trail means that 
the thing itself still exists.  It's like you're not really if no death 
certificate is procured -- and if the death certificate is missing lost or 
destroyed, why then you must still be alive: Jesus Christ!  I've heard this !
 nonsense before.>

     Cohen said he still stood by those judgments. But he insisted the estimate 
he produced had "uncertainties" that "were highlighted in the Key Judgments and 
throughout the main text."
<Stand by judgements.  I know what being on stand-by means: it means I get to 
go when no one else wants to go.  Cohen thus volunteers to be the fall guy, the 
next guy in line in a domino theory of truth telling.  Only when you tip the 
last domino-man over do you find out that they were all blocking the truth, 
hiding it so that they could have jobs of finding out what the government 
secret is.   In other industries, we call this featherbedding -- and fire the 
lazy bastards who only draw pay without doing useful work.  So, here, we could 
fire all of the CIA and all of the other so-called intelligence people, and 
make government more efficient, and put the tax-payers' money to some better 
use.>

     Moreover, specialists from three US government agencies -- the State and 
Energy Departments and the Air Force -- vocally disagreed with at least some of 
the findings, according to the CIA analyst, who denied that these expressions 
of dissent had been somehow suppressed or buried in footnotes.
<It's vitally important for no bureacracy to agree, completely, or to disagree, 
completely -- especially when there is no way to see what might be right or 
wrong, anyway.  Hedging is the best strategy, in the face of uncertainty.  And, 
if you make it sound as if the uncertainty could be made to vanish, or diminish 
-- as intelligence analysts always must pretend that they can do, just like 
their counterparts on Wall Street -- then you preserve your agency and 
yourself, in a labor-saving self-sacrificial move.>

     "All agencies were fully exposed to these alternative views, and the heads 
of those organizations blessed the wording and placement of their alternative 
views," Cohen insisted.
<Bless me, Father, for I have sinned: we circle-jerked this estimate: there is 
no one to blame (but not no one to praise, of course).>

     The veteran CIA analyst stressed that all major conclusions about Iraq's 
weapons of mass destruction had been drawn on the basis of information 
"overwhelmingly" gleaned from a combination of human intelligence, satellite 
imagery and communications intercepts.
<Yes, we "overwhelmingly" drew our conclusions from all kinds of sources.   
That drawing rather conclusively proves my point: disband the CIA and all such 
agencies -- or else send them to Art School so that they might learn how to 
draw.>

     But made clear that in the murky world of intelligence, hard and 
unequivocal evidence was often hard to come by.
<The wrongness would be the unfaithful expectation that such evidence is ever 
come by, asa matter of intelligence.  When the evidence is hard and 
unequivocal, it is not a matter of spying.  Look at how many Americans have 
failed to realize that a failure of the facts to correspond to the "reality" of 
Bush's rhetoric means that he dreams or else he lies.  His dreams are perverted 
and unnatural;  I damn his lies.>

     "There is a reason that the October 2002 review of Iraq's WMD programs is 
called a National Intelligence Estimate and not a National Intelligence 
factbook," Cohen argued. "On almost any issue of the day that we face, hard 
evidence will only take intelligence professionals so far."
<Here, in a nutshell, is what intelligence agenices really do: we sell scripts 
to executives, just like the writers out in Hollywood do.  Truth has nothing to 
do with it, unless you mean, by truth, how does it play at the box-office.  
That's all there is to it, this intelligence is but a growing forecast of what 
dreams may come.>

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TODAY'S ESTIMATE OF THE ESTIMATE IS BROUGHT TO YOU, PRESIDENTIALLY,
BY THE STATE OF THE UNION AS INTERPOLATED, APPROXIMATED, GUESSED
Thanks for listening, Donald L Emerick, who bites at sound bytes, once bitten 
before.