Arthur Silber has pointed out several times that political leaders do not make major policy decisions (such as going to war) on the basis of “secret information,” but on the basis of political judgments. Here is a quote on this from him (from the above link):
Intelligence is completely irrelevant to major policy decisions. Such decisions are matters of judgment, and knowledgeable, ordinary citizens are just as capable of making these determinations as political leaders allegedly in possession of “secret information.” Such “secret information” is almost always wrong — and major decisions, including those pertaining to war and peace, are made entirely apart from such information in any case.
A case in point is the decision to invade Iraq, which at the time was publicly justified as necessary to protect us from weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein.
Well, A Tiny Revolution has compiled a handy set of excerpts from several recent books showing that the people in charge of analyzing WMD in Iraq over at the CIA considered it their job to provide the President with the “intelligence” he wanted to go to war. Specifically, Alan Foley, who was in charge of a department charged with analyzing WMD in Iraq, saw that has his department’s job. Here is the damning quote at A Tiny Revolution, taken from a book by Peter Eiser and Knut Royce called The Italian Letter:
One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He
had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of
the center’s analysts: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is
to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.” The directive was
not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion
that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might
even be rewarded.
The article at A Tiny Revolution excerpts several other books that corroborate this account. Do you think U.S. citizens should know this, that the top secret information provided by the intelligence community often just provides a rationale for decisions our political leaders want to make for other reasons? Keeping that in mind might help us judge whether to support the next war being sold to us by politicians.
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