Why, if our intelligence was so vague and shitty

[eileen from OH]

regarding 911, did we believe it so wholeheartedly when it came to the threat posed by Iraq - enough to go to war.

There's a few other PDBs I'd love to see. Specifically, the ones that demonstrated that the Iraqi threat was "actionable" since "Bin Laden Determined to Strike In US" was NOT.

eileen from OH

[Melodybe]

1. Nice, that is a good point.

Of course the repub answer to that would be that everything changed after 9/11.

Hi, Eileen how's it going?

Did you ever get in touch with the Ohio Kerry people?

[eileen from OH]

2. No. . .

But one of the guys in my group called 'em repeatedly and left messages and finally got a callback a month later, which basically said "uh and um" and that Kerry is planning on working through the county Dem organizations. The same county Dems that have been so effective in reducing the Republican stranglehold on Ohio. (sarcasm).

Matter of fact, I'm posting something here tomorrow listing some of the truly stoopid things that the Kerry team is doing, or rather NOT doing, in Ohio. Gonna ask DUers to join us in a big push to get the Kerry HQ to get us professional help and a real live Ohio headquarters, etc.

Thanks for remembering and asking, Melodybe!

eileen from OH

[Melodybe]

4. Arg, the college Democrats here are pointless too, they want to start

campaigning in September! I am about to get in touch with their president and push for summer meet ups and earlier Kerry campaigning.

Please don't give up on it though, people like us actually get things done.

[LunaC]

3. It isn't about our intelligence

It's what the Bush* Regime did with the intelligence they were given....they skewed it then turned it into propaganda to serve their own agenda.

(Excerpted from "The Whispering Campaign" - see link in sig line)

The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was a secret group of analysts and policy advisors with no status in the intelligence community who reported directly to the White House and National Security office with cherry-picked intelligence from questionable sources to support the case for invading Iraq. The OSP circumvented formal, well-established oversight procedures, ignored intelligence that didn't further their agenda, expanded the intelligence on weapons beyond what was justified and over-emphasized the national security risk. They became more influential than the C.I.A. or the Defense Intelligence Agency who didn't even know the ultra-secret OSP existed for at least a year.

Because they were based in the Pentagon, it was assumed that the OSP was an intelligence-gathering agency that was second-guessing the C.I.A. but in actuality it was the White House Military Marketing Machine charged with the task of writing the PNAC's "Get Saddam" sales pitch for the public. Shading and bending reality to suit their own purpose, it wasn't important for the OSP's stories about Saddam to be factual, only that the average American believed them to be - in true Hollywood fashion.

http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/030512fa_fact