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Saturday, September 09, 2006

The Story Again 

In the news: Senate panel finds no prewar Iraq-Qaeda link. ...

The CIA report's assessment was similar to the conclusion reached by the bipartisan 9/11 commission, which found in 2004 there had been no "collaborative relationship" between Saddam and al Qaeda.

And some interesting comments from Juan Cole:

Intriguingly, the report says that the Defense Intelligence Agency warned the Pentagon off the INC on the grounds that it had been penetrated by a foreign intelligence agency, which might be using it to play the US.

The foreign country that had penetrated Chalabi's group? Iran.

What is really delicious is that it suggests that the influential Neoconservatives at the American Enterprise Institute who ceaselessly promoted Chalabi, like Richard Perle, David Rhode, and Michael Rubin, were duped by Tehran into doing its bidding

I think that's the real story after all, because it's the only thing that makes any sense. The whole thing has been truly amazing, and will probably serve as some kind of horrible example for future historians.

I can't think of another instance where the pattern and scope of misinformation have been this bad, or maybe this industrious, and it might get worse. I've only been following it a little bit, but story after story—in particular the New York Times business with Plame—indicates an awful lot of effort to create a political fiction about the war in Iraq. All that can be useful in the short term, but it causes so many problems that it's just no good, even for purely practical considerations. It's one of those fixes that really undermines the whoe mechanism. There must be lots of science fiction stories that illustrate this.



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Watching TV is a good way to tear yourself away from the computer.