Cooking the intelligence, again - By Sidney Blumenthal at Salon

[applegrove]

Cooking the intelligence, again
The latest government estimate of the terrorist threat is just a rehash of the same old script, produced under pressure to support the president's efforts to sell the Iraq war.

By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon


July 19, 2007 | One of the more memorable and revealing statements explaining the nature of the Bush administration buildup to the invasion of Iraq was offered in September 2002 by then White House chief of staff Andrew Card. "From a marketing point of view," he said, "you don't introduce new products in August." Five years later, a period longer than the Civil War and World War II, the administration is preparing to present its case for continuing the surge in Iraq. But rather than waiting for September, when Gen. David Petraeus is scheduled to deliver his report, the administration has moved up the marketing to July.

The familiar props are rolled out, like the well-worn and peeling painted backdrop for a production of a traveling Victorian theatrical troupe, and members of the audience are expected to watch with rapt fascination, as though they had never seen this show before. The negative response to the preview does not alter the same old script.

The usual atmospherics are pumped up -- sudden panic and fear, an elusive and ubiquitous enemy that assumes many guises and shapes, cherry-picked information to provide a patina of verisimilitude to the danger, followed by a march of authority figures to rescue us. Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, held a press conference on July 11 to announce that he had a "gut feeling" that the terrorist threat was dire. Gen. Peter Pace, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on his final tour of Iraq Tuesday, proclaimed a "sea change." Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice frantically telephoned moderate Republican senators, urging them not to defect from support of the president's position.

Even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern supporting players wander through, like Frances Townsend, President Bush's homeland security advisor, who, Tuesday, entered right into the White House press room to declaim about the terrorist threat, only to confirm the administration's failure to destroy al-Qaida and expose her own bafflement: "You're assuming it's a zero-sum game, which is what I don't understand."

.......SNIP"

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/07/19/bush_iraq/