The White House's Chilling Effect

[rodeodance]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/20/AR2006022001119.html

The White House's Chilling Effect

By Ruth Marcus
Tuesday, February 21, 2006; Page A15

The Bush administration is constantly telling us that it can't tell us too much, for fear of chilling debate among the president and his top advisers. This argument would be a lot more persuasive if -- on the rare occasions the public is permitted a peak behind the White House curtain -- there were more evidence of something to chill.

Five years and counting, the notion that this is an insular White House headed by an incurious president isn't exactly administration-bites-dog news. But recent developments have reinforced and even broadened this image: This White House is not just reluctant to hear anything that conflicts with its pre-set conclusions -- it's also astonishingly ineffective in obtaining and processing information it wants to have.
The classic version of this phenomenon -- the administration's disinterest in dissenting views -- is painfully detailed in Foreign Affairs article by former CIA official Paul R. Pillar describing how the administration failed to prepare for -- or, Pillar says, even inquire about -- the "messy aftermath" that intelligence analysts predicted for Iraq. Pillar's efforts to assign blame to Bush administration policymakers ought to be taken with a hefty pinch of salt, given the CIA's own shortcomings. Still, it's maddening to read that the administration's first request for an analysis of postwar Iraq didn't come until "a year into the war."

And had the we'll-be-greeted-as-liberators crowd asked? According to Pillar, the prewar analysis was depressingly prescient: a "long, difficult and turbulent transition" in which occupying forces become "the target of resentment and attacks" and Iraq "a magnet for extremists." The CIA and the White House may have the most publicly rocky relationship since Ben Affleck and J. Lo, but how is it possible this information wasn't sought and considered before the fact?

[Demeter]

1. NO Mystery There!

"This White House is not just reluctant to hear anything that conflicts with its pre-set conclusions -- it's also astonishingly ineffective in obtaining and processing information it wants to have."

What they want are fairy tales--that's why they can't obtain and process them.