President-elect's Queries to Briefers

[laststeamtrain]

President-elect's Queries to Briefers

By Ray McGovern

<snip>

The president-elect needs to start asking hard questions. Now. Here are some he might want to select for his next briefing:

1. The lead story in Friday’s New York Times undercuts the claims of Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili that he was acting in self-defense when he ordered his troops to fire artillery and rockets at the city of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. The new information comes from international monitors of the highly respected Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and, oddly, is much closer to the Russian version of what happened.

Task: A two-page memo on who started the fighting and why? Deadline: Monday

2. A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) produced last November concluded that Iran’s work on the nuclear-weapons part of its nuclear development program was suspended in mid-2003. National Intelligence Council director Thomas Fingar repeated that judgment publicly on Sept. 4, 2008.

I want to know how that squares — or doesn’t — with the claim by neoconservative icon Norman Podhoretz, just hours after the NIE’s key judgments were made public, that Iran is “hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons,” and why Podhoretz would go on to charge that the intelligence community was trying to “undermine George W. Bush.” I notice, incidentally, that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has parroted Podhoretz’s “hell-bent” phraseology, and that your boss, CIA Director Michael Hayden, has also publicly volunteered his “personal opinion” that this is so.

Task: A memo updating the judgments of the Nov. 07 NIE, as necessary. Deadline: Nov. 14

<more>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21174.htm

[parasim]

1. Well, I'll have to go back and reread that, because the first time I read it I didn't get it.

But in the process I thought I'd google info on what McGovern thinks about Obama's victory and when I saw a video of him, I didn't even recognize him. No beard, little hair... looking into it further I found out that he had cancer. Lymphoma. I did not know that. I'll never forget McGovern standing up up to Rumsfeld at some forum he was speaking at. I have always had a lot of respect for Ray McGovern and was sorry to read about his health issues...

anyway, thanks for the link.... I have to go back an read it again...