Depends on the Definition of "Fixed"
Here you have it, from the horse's mouth. Michael Smith, the British reporter who broke the Downing Street Memo story explains what "fixed" means in England:
There are number of people asking about fixed and its meaning. This is a real joke. I do not know anyone in the UK who took it to mean anything other than fixed as in fixed a race, fixed an election, fixed the intelligence. If you fix something, you make it the way you want it. The intelligence was fixed and as for the reports that said this was one British official. Pleeeaaassee! This was the head of MI6. How much authority do you want the man to have? He has just been to Washington, he has just talked to George Tenet. He said the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. That translates in clearer terms as the intelligence was being cooked to match what the administration wanted it to say to justify invading Iraq. Fixed means the same here as it does there.
posted by lifeintheG at 10:56 AM
3 Comments:
James:
To put Christopher Hitchens up as a counterpoint against Michael Smith is like putting a pot up against a kettle as a counterpoint to it's blackness. Hitchens is an idiot and a jackass more in love with himself than anything else.
If you believe the Bush made a "sincere" decision to go to war based on bad intelligence (i.e., the old "it was all the intelligence community's fault!" argument), how do you explain the fact that Cheney set up an office at CIA headquarters, and that the intelligence analysts said they felt pressured to come up with intelligence that fit the administrations desire to invade Iraq?
Jerry:
I too have read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and I have to say equating Iraq with Nazi Germany, is... well, baffling. It's like comparing Butterbean with Muhammad Ali. If you want to make a comparison to the early 1990'2 Iraq and Germany, fine. Saddam invaded Kuwait, the world stopped him. Then they contained him for over a decade. They disarmed him and destroyed his ability to invade anyone. By the time Bush decided to invade, Iraq had no WMDs (which the UN weapons inspectors told us time and again), they had no workable plan to invade or attack anyone, they HADN'T, in fact, invaded or attacked anyone. In fact, Saddam lacked the CAPACITY to attack anyone (successfully anyway), as we can tell by the fact that his army collapsed pretty quickly during the invasion. So, trying to draw a parallel between the industrial, technological, and militarily innovative Third Reich, and the toothless, broke-ass, lunatic Hussein regime in the late '90's and early 00's is ludicrous.
And I won't even get into the ridiculousness (is that even a word?) of your straw-man comaprison of Iraq to the Civil War. Suffice to say, I don't think anyone mentioned pulling out of Iraq. Doing so now would be disasterous. We broke it, we need to fix it. Unfortunately.
Emery -
You're going to have to do a lot better than "Hitchens is an idiot and a jackass more in love with himself than anything else" if you want to refute James. He's got citations and a complete analysis. You've got a citation (which, unfortunately, I can't read, unless you give me a password) that tells us that intelligence analysts felt pressured, which does not equate to "fixed," nor do you give us anything to tell us why Hichens is an idiot. I want more. Please give it to me.
Wazoo-
I figured that since "Michael Smith is Howard Dean with press credentials" was considered "citations and complete analysis" enough to pass, I could make a similar comment about Hitchens. Ok, well, there's this example of him acting like an asshole:
http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2005_05_29_dish_archive.html#111763334694112389
and there's this bizarre behavior on The Daily Show:
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/001745.html
And there's his testimony against one of his best friends for 15 years in the Clinton/Lewinsky case. He claimed that Sidney Blumenthal leaked information to him that Monica Lewinsky was a "stalker," when in fact he had mentioned to his friend and his wife over a private, friendly lunch that a lot of people THOUGHT of her as a stalker. I think you'll probably need a subscription for this, basically, he sold out his good friend because he so vehemently hated Clinton:
http://archive.salon.com/news/1999/02/09newsa.html
Below is a Washington Post article about Cheney pressuring intelligence analysts to come up with information that fit in with the administrations desire to attack Iraq:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A15019-2003Jun4¬Found=true
here's another article from Mother Jones:
http://www.howardlabs.com/2-04/The%20Lie%20Factory.html
So, how exactly does pressuring intelligence analysts to come up with information that supports a case for going to war with a country that hadn't attacked us NOT equate to "fixing" intelligence?
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