CBC's "The National" rips the neo-cons HARD, re: Iraq planning. Vid here.

[Wonk]

http://media.cbc.ca:8080/ramgen/cbc.ca/national/real/thenational.rm
(this link will work for the next 23 hours, roughly)

Fast forward to about 21:30. Synopsis: Rumsfeld, Rice, Perle etc (and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans) are ideologues who intentionally ignored any intelligence that contradicted what they wanted to hear, and simply lied about the parts they couldn't ignore.

(snips, my quick transcriptions)

"Rumsfeld was more daring than his own Generals"

"They failed to plan adequately for the peace."

"That group (Rummy and the neo-cons) are people that share a view of the world that's not proving to be correct, but, they reinforce one another. And it's insular, so it didn't really advocate or allow different points of view that you might have gotten if you'd broadened the circle to include, for instance, military people that have done this sort of work before."

more...

[lebkuchen]

1. What does CBC stand for?

on edit: Canadian Broadcast....they just identified themselves.

Thanks for posting.

[morgan2]

2. canadian broadcasting company

[glarius]

3. Actually it's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation....

:)

[Spazito]

4. The CBC is excellent!

Their documentaries are hard hitting and their news coverage is in-depth.

[ironflange]

10. I've pre-set my car radio to only two stations

CBC Radio 1 and Radio 2

[Bozita]

5. CBC sets the standard for excellence in broadcast journalism...

...in North America.

Nothing in the US even comes close.

Thanks, Wonk.

[JohnyCanuck]

6. Too bad CNN would never have the cojones to do something like this.

I guess it would be too disturbing for the media whores to have to admit that after all they hype and hoopla President Alfred E. Newman and his gang that can't steal straight really didn't know what the hell they were doing.

[HEyHEY]

7. dang, I missed it

[Bozita]

8. It's still available for viewing. The documentary on Iraq is superb.

link is in the lead post by Wonk.

[HEyHEY]

9. yeah..but it's bedtime

And that would take some time to DOwnload I'm sure

[LeftistGorilla]

14. I watched it.....

it was great ( I think the piece could have been longer)...
CBC is hard hitting and has some of the best reporters on the planet
Joe Schlesinger, Neil Macdonald and Adrienne Arsenault to name a few..
Its too bad Americans consider CNN and Fox as news....

[devilgrrl]

11. I'll be watching it in few moments!

Gotta love Newsworld International!

[Wonk]

12. Interesting sigline gif :-) nt

nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. Now they're saying the post-war chaos is the UN's fault too!

In the piece, Feith said that the reason the US did so little post-war planning was that if the UN saw they were doing it, it would have made them think that the US had already decided on war, and so the UN would get pissed off.

Gee, Doug, do you think that hundreds of thousands of troops on the Iraqi border might have been a bit more of a clue? Or a year of anti-Iraq propaganda?

[JohnyCanuck]

15. I caught that too.

I also liked this bit. They were interviewing Perle and he was doing his best to downplay the optimisitic prediction he and the other neo-cons had made about welcoming Iraqi's throwing flowers and dancing in the streets. Then the interviewer read back to Perle's his own statement in which he specifically said how there'd be dancing in the streets by joyful Iraqis when the US liberators arrived.

[Lisa]

16. yup, they kicked Dick and Rummy pretty hard ...

Showed the two of them living in a fool's paradise re: an easy victory and no need to worry much about the postwar rebuilding. And Bush also gets slapped (as well he should be) for not knowing or caring enough to overrule those guys.

They sure piled on the evidence showing that the WH had ample warning about how bad things would get. Very compelling, seeing the reporter in the DC shots, emphasizing that this is NOT a case of Monday-morning quarterbacking -- he clearly recalled a lot of experts expressing concern!

The backroom strategists interviewed come off as incredibly self-absorbed and clueless.


I LOVED the bit where Perle is going off about how he never compared the likely postwar scenario to "a Breughels painting" with "happy peasants dancing around" -- and then they promptly replay that clip where he talks about "dancing in the streets".

[Bozita]

17. It's still available for viewing

a great lead-in for PBS's Frontline tonight.