Weekend Leftovers

Well, it's been a couple of days. I hit the Friday wall on Thursday night, and then last night I had all kinds of homework to do. So now I'm back to my regularly scheduled drivel.

A lot of times when I come across something that might be worth blogging about - a news story or someone else's blog entry - I'll save the URL in the Notepad section of Yahoo Mail and get around to writing about it later. But I am starting to get a backlog in there, so I wanted to address some of what I've accumulated over the last few weeks for your reading pleasure.

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Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel

In a President's Daily Brief (PDB) on September 21, 2001, the president was told that the U.S. intelligence community had "scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda." The alleged ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were presented as one of the public rationales for the war in Iraq. "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002. Despite repeated requests by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the White House has refused to turn over the September 21, 2001 PDB.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

The article is lengthy, but very interesting in laying out some of the discrepancies between information gathered by the intelligence community and the public message put forward by the Bush Administration. This is an important point, because it show that the march to war was not simply based on "intelligence failures." There definitely were failures of intelligence, and even the contents of the mystery PDB's might be erroneous. But this is the information the administration had to work with, and they chose to present their case selectively. (More about that here.)

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Facts vs Punditry; the Liberal-Conservative Debate

This is an elaboration of stuff I've talked about in the past, but written much more coherently. The reason the American MSM is seen to slant left is that facts and knowledge are liberal by definition.

The countermeasures that the Right demanded of the "mainstream" media, in outrage at the terrible liberality of a New York Times or Big Three network, is that factual journalism include conservative opinions about the story at hand, as "balance" to the presumed slant of each article. And they got it, in spades: there are few stories in today's press that don't include a conservative talking point from a conservative think-tank-based talking head to balance even a patently obvious and accepted fact. In the years of the Bush administration, much of factual "journalism" has positively devolved into a Monty Pythonesque Argument Sketch, with few scientific or other unambiguously factual stories that do not contain at least a token conservative figure to proclaim an unsupportable "No it isn't."

Conservatives like to point to studies about how many "negative" stories are on the news about Bush. But a story that reports bad news that actually occurred is just a reporting of facts. As Yogi would say, you can look it up. (Take note of the link within the link for an excellent expose of Michelle Malkin's dubious journalistic credentials.)

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Whistleblower's Iraq claims to be investigated

A whistleblower's claims that reconstruction in Iraq has been rife with waste, fraud and abuse -- particularly in regard to a division of Halliburton -- will be turned over to the Justice Department, a U.S. senator said Friday.

We'll see what comes of this, if anything. The allegations of gouging and waste on the part of Halliburton subsidiary KBR aren't anything new, and the Republican Congress has not wanted anything to do with them. Having the Bush/Cheney Justice Department investigate this is like having the Liberal Justice Ministry investigating AdScam. In other words, this will likely be the last you read of this story.

(BTW, Canadian Conservative readers, fiascos surrounding fiscal mismanagement in Iraq make the Liberal scandals and mismanagement look like peanut shells. I'm not defending the Libranos in any way shape or form, but just putting things into proper perspective for you folks who look at the Bush administration as the Utopian model for our government to follow.)

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I know I've left you with a large reading assignment today, but I had to catch up. Tomorrow I'll have something lighter. Or perhaps not.