Blumenthal: Hear no evil, read no evil, speak drivel

[kskiska]

Bush's press conference shows just how ill-informed he is about Iraq

On April 21 1961, President Kennedy held a press conference to answer questions on the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles that he had approved. "There's an old saying," he said, "that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan ... I am the responsible officer of the government and that is quite obvious."

On Wednesday, President Bush held only his third press conference and was asked three times whether he accepted responsibility for failing to act on warning before September 11. "I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet," he said. "I just haven't - you just put me under the spot here and maybe I'm not quick - as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."

(snip)

Bush, in fact, does not read his President's Daily Briefs, but has them orally summarised every morning by the CIA director, George Tenet. President Clinton, by contrast, read them closely and alone, preventing any aides from interpreting what he wanted to know first-hand. He extensively marked up his PDBs, demanding action on this or that, which is almost certainly the likely reason the Bush administration withheld his memoranda from the 9/11 commission.

"I know he doesn't read," one former Bush national security council staffer told me. Several other former NSC staffers corroborated this. It seems highly unlikely that he read the national intelligence estimate on WMD before the Iraq war that consigned contrary evidence and caveats that undermined the case to footnotes and fine print. Nor is there any evidence that he read the state department's 17-volume report, The Future of Iraq, warning of nearly all the postwar pitfalls, that was shelved by the neocons in the Pentagon and Vice-President Cheney's office.

more…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1192218,00.html

[Dudley_DUright]

1. Thanks for posting KS

I love the title. Great read.

[kskiska]

2. I love Blumenthal's writing

His book was great, and he knows everyone he speaks of personally.

[opihimoimoi]

3. Thats it, he didn't read ANY of it. But he cannot admit it. So he

stonewalls and is faking his way through.

How in the world can his aides handle this?

Condi must know this guy is a Mega Dufus. How can she sleep?

He is the Mother of all Dufus Presidents. A Peter Gone Wild.

[Maat]

5. Great read.

At this point, I just want to bring our kids home from Iraq ASAP.

[kskiska]

4. How about this!

A revolt within the military against Bush is brewing. Many in the military's strategic echelon share the same feelings of being ignored and ill-treated by the administration that senior intelligence officers voice in private. "The Pentagon began with fantasy assumptions on Iraq and worked back," one of them remarked to me. Reflecting the developing consensus at that level, the Army War College has just issued a new monograph in which a senior Army strategist accuses the Bush administration of seeking to win "quickly and on the cheap" while having "either misunderstood or, worse, wished away" the predicted problems.