On NPR I yesterday (the 16th) heard an interview of Frank Pillar, who
retired from a high post at the CIA a year or two ago, and published a
piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The interviewer hewed to the mantra about the administration ignoring
and/or misusing intelligence information, repeating her phrase many
times, but Mr Pillar always answered diplomatically with a nuance-filled
reply, but didn't confront the assumptions built into her question
either.

If this had been a court proceeding, the interviewer would have been
slapped down for biased phrasing and for attempting to lead the witness.
But Mr Pillar didn't bite, so it was more an annoyance than a problem.

One thing that struck me is that Mr Pillar said that the decision to
invade was a forgone conclusion something like six to nine months before
the invasion, speaking as if this were a now-it-can-be-told revelation.
But I had gathered this from the newspapers at the time, and given the
logistics of projecting force to the other side of the world, it could
be no other way, so I don't know what his point was. Perhaps the
article is clearer.

I haven't yet read Mr Pillar's article, but the counterfire has begun:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007981

The CIA is a very big place, with more opinions than people, and between
Mr Pillar and Mr Christensen (who was of about the same rank as Mr
Pillar), we now have two of them. I expect that we will see more very
soon, if for no other reason than the CIA wanting not to take the entire
blame for Iraq and its difficulties.

On the matter of WMDs, Mr Pillar did say that at the time just before
the invasion, there was a worldwide consensus of intelligence agencies
that Iraq did have WMDs; the only dispute was over the likelihood that
Saddam would use them.

Mr Pillar then went on to say that this difference of judgement about
likelihood of use proved that WMDs could not be the real reason for
invasion. This is a non sequitur. Simply put, if the US
administration was not convinced that Saddam was a danger, nothing would
have happened, even if the Europeans were absolutely convinced that the
danger was real. Consensus is not required, and different countries
may well come to different policies.


Joe Gwinn

On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:08:02 -0500, the renowned Joseph Gwinn
wrote:

snip

I haven't yet read Mr Pillar's article, but the counterfire has begun:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/200603...r-in-iraq.html

snip

Joseph Gwinn wrote:
On NPR I yesterday (the 16th) heard an interview of Frank Pillar, who
retired from a high post at the CIA a year or two ago, and published a
piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The interviewer hewed to the mantra about the administration ignoring
and/or misusing intelligence information, repeating her phrase many
times, but Mr Pillar always answered diplomatically with a nuance-filled
reply, but didn't confront the assumptions built into her question
either.

If this had been a court proceeding, the interviewer would have been
slapped down for biased phrasing and for attempting to lead the witness.
But Mr Pillar didn't bite, so it was more an annoyance than a problem.

I have noticed that more and more of late. For a while NPR seemed to be
trying to be objective, but they don't appear to making that effort lately.

In article ,
Spehro Pefhany wrote:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/200603.../intelligence-
policy-and-the-war-in-iraq.html

Thanks. I've printed it out.

Joe Gwinn

Rex B wrote:
Joseph Gwinn wrote:
On NPR I yesterday (the 16th) heard an interview of Frank Pillar, who
retired from a high post at the CIA a year or two ago, and published a
piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The interviewer hewed to the mantra about the administration ignoring
and/or misusing intelligence information, repeating her phrase many
times, but Mr Pillar always answered diplomatically with a nuance-filled
reply, but didn't confront the assumptions built into her question
either.

If this had been a court proceeding, the interviewer would have been
slapped down for biased phrasing and for attempting to lead the witness.
But Mr Pillar didn't bite, so it was more an annoyance than a problem.

I have noticed that more and more of late. For a while NPR seemed to be
trying to be objective, but they don't appear to making that effort lately.

I think it's gone beyond "objective" being the reason for some
articles.

Look at this earlier comment:

On the matter of WMDs, Mr Pillar did say that at the time just before
the invasion, there was a worldwide consensus of intelligence agencies
that Iraq did have WMDs; the only dispute was over the likelihood that
Saddam would use them.

Now Mr. Pillar can feel, believe, think any way he wants to of course.
But I don't believe what he said is true. I remember it was England
and the US who told lies back and forth to each other until they
thought enough people believed them and then launched the attack.

Can anyone remember/show us anything to back-up his allegations
concerning the thoughts of the other world's security agencies? He
says this, I feel, to try to blunt the public's opinion; after all,
there's strength in numbers and if EVERYONE made the same blunders then
the CIA can't be so bad after all. Nice try.

If I were a reporter getting fed this drivel I'd be asking some pointed
questions as well. Hell, reporters are just like us, right? (Well, at
least they're not lawyers).

dennis
in nca

FWIW --
In any large organization there are always letters, memos,
documentation and advocates on every side of every issue. Thus
the organization is "right" no matter what happens. all they
need to do is produce the "right" letter, memo, document and trot
out the "right" advocate and say "I told you so."

This is SOP but the problems start when the suits start believing
in their own BS -- i.e. infallibility. The ancient Greek adage
"those who the gods would destroy they first make proud" applies
here in spades.

The suits aid and abet in this process [of their own downfall] by
refusing to accept probability estimates and demanding yes/no
answers. That is another danger of being a suit -- you get what
you demand even if its not what you want or need.

Uncle George




On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:08:02 -0500, Joseph Gwinn
wrote:

On NPR I yesterday (the 16th) heard an interview of Frank Pillar, who
retired from a high post at the CIA a year or two ago, and published a
piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The interviewer hewed to the mantra about the administration ignoring
and/or misusing intelligence information, repeating her phrase many
times, but Mr Pillar always answered diplomatically with a nuance-filled
reply, but didn't confront the assumptions built into her question
either.

If this had been a court proceeding, the interviewer would have been
slapped down for biased phrasing and for attempting to lead the witness.
But Mr Pillar didn't bite, so it was more an annoyance than a problem.

One thing that struck me is that Mr Pillar said that the decision to
invade was a forgone conclusion something like six to nine months before
the invasion, speaking as if this were a now-it-can-be-told revelation.
But I had gathered this from the newspapers at the time, and given the
logistics of projecting force to the other side of the world, it could
be no other way, so I don't know what his point was. Perhaps the
article is clearer.

I haven't yet read Mr Pillar's article, but the counterfire has begun:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007981

The CIA is a very big place, with more opinions than people, and between
Mr Pillar and Mr Christensen (who was of about the same rank as Mr
Pillar), we now have two of them. I expect that we will see more very
soon, if for no other reason than the CIA wanting not to take the entire
blame for Iraq and its difficulties.

On the matter of WMDs, Mr Pillar did say that at the time just before
the invasion, there was a worldwide consensus of intelligence agencies
that Iraq did have WMDs; the only dispute was over the likelihood that
Saddam would use them.

Mr Pillar then went on to say that this difference of judgement about
likelihood of use proved that WMDs could not be the real reason for
invasion. This is a non sequitur. Simply put, if the US
administration was not convinced that Saddam was a danger, nothing would
have happened, even if the Europeans were absolutely convinced that the
danger was real. Consensus is not required, and different countries
may well come to different policies.


Joe Gwinn

On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 12:51:26 -0600, Rex B
wrote:
I have noticed that more and more of late. For a while NPR seemed to be
trying to be objective, but they don't appear to making that effort lately.
====================
Or we have been so indoctrinated that we have begun to view
objective albeit contradictory points of view as subjective.

In many cases it *NOT* the isolated facts, but the context and
how these are connected and thus the conclusions that are the
problem.

For an interesting experience, use the internet and see what the
non-US english language papers have to say. Manchester Guardian
(UK) is a good place to start. see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/t...es/0,,,00.html

Time for deprogramming?

Uncle George

In article . com,
"rigger" wrote:

Rex B wrote:
Joseph Gwinn wrote:
On NPR I yesterday (the 16th) heard an interview of Frank Pillar, who
retired from a high post at the CIA a year or two ago, and published a
piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The interviewer hewed to the mantra about the administration ignoring
and/or misusing intelligence information, repeating her phrase many
times, but Mr Pillar always answered diplomatically with a nuance-filled
reply, but didn't confront the assumptions built into her question
either.

If this had been a court proceeding, the interviewer would have been
slapped down for biased phrasing and for attempting to lead the witness.
But Mr Pillar didn't bite, so it was more an annoyance than a problem.

I have noticed that more and more of late. For a while NPR seemed to be
trying to be objective, but they don't appear to making that effort lately.

I think it's gone beyond "objective" being the reason for some
articles.

My problem with these interviews is more basic. I'm not sure is the
core problem is bias so much as simple lack of interviewing skills.
Maybe it's both. Some of these interviewers seem incapable of letting
an interviewee answer a question.

Pattern: First, the long question, complete with two or three leading
answers proposed by the interviewer. Then a short answer. Most
interviewees don't question the the assumptions of the question,
probably from politeness, so we are really hearing what the interviewer
thinks, not what the interviewee thinks. It's very frustrating - I
wanted to know what the interviewee thinks, but he hardly gets a word in
edgewise.


Look at this earlier comment:

On the matter of WMDs, Mr Pillar did say that at the time just before
the invasion, there was a worldwide consensus of intelligence agencies
that Iraq did have WMDs; the only dispute was over the likelihood that
Saddam would use them.

Now Mr. Pillar can feel, believe, think any way he wants to of course.
But I don't believe what he said is true. I remember it was England
and the US who told lies back and forth to each other until they
thought enough people believed them and then launched the attack.

Can anyone remember/show us anything to back-up his allegations
concerning the thoughts of the other world's security agencies? He
says this, I feel, to try to blunt the public's opinion; after all,
there's strength in numbers and if EVERYONE made the same blunders then
the CIA can't be so bad after all. Nice try.

Mr Pillar was in a position to know from direct personal experience what
the CIA though, as well as what the other intelligence agencies thought
about the issue. He was in charge of all Middle East intelligence at
the CIA from 2000 to 2005, and as such would be talking to his
counterparts in those other intelligence agencies, probably daily. This
isn't something that someone in that sort of job would get wrong. Are
you saying that he is lying?


If I were a reporter getting fed this drivel I'd be asking some pointed
questions as well. Hell, reporters are just like us, right? (Well, at
least they're not lawyers).

There is a difference between a sharp question and a leading question.
Actually, I didn't hear any sharp questions. I for one would have asked
him to explain how the difference in opinion on the likelihood that
Saddam would use the WMDs proved that WMDs could not be the reason that
the US administration went to war. One can phrase such a question
neutrally, and politely, but it's still a sharp question. The answer
is likely to be very revealing.

Joe Gwinn

In article . com,
"rigger" wrote:

Can anyone remember/show us anything to back-up his allegations
concerning the thoughts of the other world's security agencies? He
says this, I feel, to try to blunt the public's opinion; after all,
there's strength in numbers and if EVERYONE made the same blunders then
the CIA can't be so bad after all. Nice try.

If ALL intelligence agencies made the same mistake, there was little
intelligence.

--
Free men own guns, slaves don't
www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5357/

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article . com,
"rigger" wrote:

Rex B wrote:
Joseph Gwinn wrote:
On NPR I yesterday (the 16th) heard an interview of Frank Pillar,
who
retired from a high post at the CIA a year or two ago, and published
a
piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The interviewer hewed to the mantra about the administration
ignoring
and/or misusing intelligence information, repeating her phrase many
times, but Mr Pillar always answered diplomatically with a
nuance-filled
reply, but didn't confront the assumptions built into her question
either.

I've listened to the interview (available online at NPR's site), and I think
the reason you got that impression is that you didn't read Pillar's article.
In fact, the interview was excellent, far superior to anything you'll hear
on commercial radio or television. And every "leading" question, as you
would have noticed if you'd read Pillar's article, was drawn directly from
what he said in that article. What Terry Gross faced was a fairly phlegmatic
Pillar, and what she did about it was what any really good interviewer would
do: go through the list of points that he made in his article, and ask him
to explain them.


If this had been a court proceeding, the interviewer would have been
slapped down for biased phrasing and for attempting to lead the
witness.
But Mr Pillar didn't bite, so it was more an annoyance than a
problem.

Maybe you listened to a different interview. g It's also clear that you
must have listened with enormous bias going in, because I don't believe any
reasonable person (unless he didn't know what Pillar had said, and what was
noteworthy and worth expanding upon in an interview) would have concluded
that Pillar was being "led" in any direction except the one he had laid out
in his own words.

Comparing the article and the interview, it appears that Pillar is a more
cautious speaker than he is a writer. The point of interviewing a man like
that, who wrote an article like that, is to flesh out the points he made in
the article. He dragged, but he eventually came around to explaining more
about what he had written. That's the product of an expert interview. The
average radio or TV interviewer would have gotten nothing much out of that
man. He didn't come in ready to talk on his own. He came in ready to answer
questions.


I have noticed that more and more of late. For a while NPR seemed to
be
trying to be objective, but they don't appear to making that effort
lately.

How much do you listen to NPR?


I think it's gone beyond "objective" being the reason for some
articles.

My problem with these interviews is more basic. I'm not sure is the
core problem is bias so much as simple lack of interviewing skills.
Maybe it's both. Some of these interviewers seem incapable of letting
an interviewee answer a question.

What are you comparing them with?


Pattern: First, the long question, complete with two or three leading
answers proposed by the interviewer.

In this case, the answers were those supplied by Pillar in his article.

Then a short answer. Most
interviewees don't question the the assumptions of the question,
probably from politeness, so we are really hearing what the interviewer
thinks, not what the interviewee thinks. It's very frustrating - I
wanted to know what the interviewee thinks, but he hardly gets a word in
edgewise.

He never spoke more than a few words without a question, and he never said
anything until he was reminded what he had written. That's being
phlegmatic -- an interviewer's nightmare. g



Look at this earlier comment:

On the matter of WMDs, Mr Pillar did say that at the time just before
the invasion, there was a worldwide consensus of intelligence agencies
that Iraq did have WMDs; the only dispute was over the likelihood that
Saddam would use them.

WHOAH! He said nothing of the kind. Here's what he actually said, in a quote
from his own article:

"A view broadly held in the United States and even more so overseas was that
deterrence of Iraq was working, that Saddam was being kept "in his box," and
that the best way to deal with the weapons problem was through an aggressive
inspections program to supplement the sanctions already in place. That the
administration arrived at so different a policy solution indicates that its
decision to topple Saddam was driven by other factors -- namely, the desire
to shake up the sclerotic power structures of the Middle East and hasten the
spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region.

"If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy
implication, it was to avoid war -- or, if war was going to be launched, to
prepare for a messy aftermath."

The "dispute" as you put it was between the Bush administration and the rest
of the world -- including the US's own intelligence community.

Pillar continues his point:

"The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in
using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using
intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant
selectively adducing data -- "cherry-picking" -- rather than using the
intelligence community's own analytic judgments. In fact, key portions of
the administration's case explicitly rejected those judgments."

Pillar's article can only be read as an indictment of the way the Bush
administration ignored the available intelligence, and as a confirmation
that the decision had been made to go to war before the intelligence was
even consulted. As Pillar said in his NPR interview, everyone in the
intelligence community knew, by May of 2002, that the administration had
already decided to go to war. The only purpose intelligence served was to
support the decision that had already been made.

--
Ed Huntress

On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:08:02 -0500, Joseph Gwinn
wrote:

On NPR I yesterday (the 16th) heard an interview of Frank Pillar, who
retired from a high post at the CIA a year or two ago, and published a
piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.


Did you see the recent ABC News report on this?

http://www.intelligencesummit.org/ne...s/JL010606.php

Btw..according to the original translators..ABC "softened" the content
of the tapes.

http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/156129.php


It appears that the Left may have to do some belly slitting when this
is over and done with.

Gunner



"A prudent man foresees the difficulties ahead and prepares for them;
the simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences."
- Proverbs 22:3

Joseph Gwinn writes:

One thing that struck me is that Mr Pillar said that the decision to
invade was a forgone conclusion something like six to nine months before
the invasion, speaking as if this were a now-it-can-be-told revelation.
But I had gathered this from the newspapers at the time, and given the
logistics of projecting force to the other side of the world, it could
be no other way, so I don't know what his point was. Perhaps the
article is clearer.


Wesley Clark said the same thing in his book. He was the one who
warned Bush about Al Qaeda 3 months before 9/11, but Bush dismissed
Clark's concerns as Bush was busy planning the invasion of Iraq in
June 2001.


--
Sending unsolicited commercial e-mail to this account incurs a fee of
$500 per message, and acknowledges the legality of this contract.

In article ,
Gunner wrote:

On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:08:02 -0500, Joseph Gwinn
wrote:

On NPR I yesterday (the 16th) heard an interview of Frank Pillar, who
retired from a high post at the CIA a year or two ago, and published a
piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.


Did you see the recent ABC News report on this?

http://www.intelligencesummit.org/ne...s/JL010606.php

Btw..according to the original translators..ABC "softened" the content
of the tapes.

http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/156129.php


It appears that the Left may have to do some belly slitting when this
is over and done with.

Probably not. These websites are not exactly authoritative sources,
especially to the Left. Or me for that matter. (The truth or falsity
of the claim is not the issue. The issue is the reliability of the
source, and with sources it's guilty until proven innocent.)

I think we need better sources, not just more sources.

The problem with WMDs was that Saddam would soon get nuclear weapons,
not that he already had them, so the administration decided to strike
while they still could.

Joe Gwinn

In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article . com,
"rigger" wrote:

Rex B wrote:
Joseph Gwinn wrote:
On NPR I yesterday (the 16th) heard an interview of Frank Pillar, who
retired from a high post at the CIA a year or two ago, and published a
piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The interviewer hewed to the mantra about the administration ignoring
and/or misusing intelligence information, repeating her phrase many
times, but Mr Pillar always answered diplomatically with a nuance-filled
reply, but didn't confront the assumptions built into her question
either.

I've listened to the interview (available online at NPR's site), and I think
the reason you got that impression is that you didn't read Pillar's article.
In fact, the interview was excellent, far superior to anything you'll hear
on commercial radio or television. And every "leading" question, as you
would have noticed if you'd read Pillar's article, was drawn directly from
what he said in that article. What Terry Gross faced was a fairly phlegmatic
Pillar, and what she did about it was what any really good interviewer would
do: go through the list of points that he made in his article, and ask him
to explain them.

I just finished reading the article, which is six pages long. In the
interview, there were many echoes of the article.

It's one thing for Pillar to make his points. He is the interviewee.
It's quite another for the interviewer to keep framing all questions
with a loaded phrase or two. It doesn't matter if the loaded phrase is
right or wrong.

It's not the interviewer's place to say such things during an interview.
If she wants to express herself, she is free to write her own opinion
piece. If she had simply asked Pillar to explain each point, I would
not have had this reaction. The issue is job description, not politics.


If this had been a court proceeding, the interviewer would have been
slapped down for biased phrasing and for attempting to lead the witness.
But Mr Pillar didn't bite, so it was more an annoyance than a problem.

Maybe you listened to a different interview. g It's also clear that you
must have listened with enormous bias going in, because I don't believe any
reasonable person (unless he didn't know what Pillar had said, and what was
noteworthy and worth expanding upon in an interview) would have concluded
that Pillar was being "led" in any direction except the one he had laid out
in his own words.

As I said in my original posting, I don't think that Terry was able to
lead Pillar anywhere he didn't want to go, so it was more an annoyance
than a problem.

Accused of "enormous bias". Hmm. This is basically an ad hominem
argument. I have an idea. Whenever you accuse me of bias,
automatically insert the standard reply "You're one too!" for me,
followed by our Mothers both calling out "Sticks and stones ...". Then
we can then get on with our lives, without undue waste of bandwidth.
This isn't a form of argument that gets us anywhere.

Alternately: My bias cancels your bias. As do our votes.


Comparing the article and the interview, it appears that Pillar is a more
cautious speaker than he is a writer. The point of interviewing a man like
that, who wrote an article like that, is to flesh out the points he made in
the article. He dragged, but he eventually came around to explaining more
about what he had written. That's the product of an expert interview. The
average radio or TV interviewer would have gotten nothing much out of that
man. He didn't come in ready to talk on his own. He came in ready to answer
questions.

So, Terry did lead the witness, or at least tried, but had no choice?


I have noticed that more and more of late. For a while NPR seemed to be
trying to be objective, but they don't appear to making that effort lately.

How much do you listen to NPR?

I've been listening for years, generally while driving. But your
question is really directed at rigger.


I think it's gone beyond "objective" being the reason for some
articles.

My problem with these interviews is more basic. I'm not sure is the
core problem is bias so much as simple lack of interviewing skills.
Maybe it's both. Some of these interviewers seem incapable of letting
an interviewee answer a question.

What are you comparing them with?

I don't see what that has to do with it. And I've had the same problem
with interviews of musicians, so the issue isn't simply that I disagree
with the interviewer. They just talk too much, and often put words into
the interviewee's mouth. As I said, I think it's at the very least a
skill issue.


Pattern: First, the long question, complete with two or three leading
answers proposed by the interviewer.

In this case, the answers were those supplied by Pillar in his article.

In this case, having read the article, I mostly agree that she wasn't
taking him anywhere he didn't want to go. But the audience cannot know
that, as most of them will never read the article.


Then a short answer. Most
interviewees don't question the the assumptions of the question,
probably from politeness, so we are really hearing what the interviewer
thinks, not what the interviewee thinks. It's very frustrating - I
wanted to know what the interviewee thinks, but he hardly gets a word in
edgewise.

He never spoke more than a few words without a question, and he never said
anything until he was reminded what he had written. That's being
phlegmatic -- an interviewer's nightmare. g

We don't actually know that he would not have given fine answers to
neutral get-him-talking questions, because no such questions were
attempted.


Look at this earlier comment:

On the matter of WMDs, Mr Pillar did say that at the time just before
the invasion, there was a worldwide consensus of intelligence agencies
that Iraq did have WMDs; the only dispute was over the likelihood that
Saddam would use them.

WHOAH! He said nothing of the kind. Here's what he actually said, in a quote
from his own article:

Sure he did, on page one for that matter:

"At the same time, an acrimonious and highly partisan debate broke out
over whether the Bush administration manipulated and misused
intelligence in making its case for war. The administration defended
itself by pointing out that it was not alone in its view that Saddam had
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and active weapons programs, however
mistaken that view may have been.

In this regard, the Bush administration was quite right: its perception
of Saddam's weapons capacities was shared by the Clinton administration,
congressional Democrats, and most other Western governments and
intelligence services."

The above (which immediately preceded your quote) clearly says that just
about everybody thought that Saddam had WMDs. He also says the same
thing during the interview. I think we can declare the point settled.


"But in making this defense, the White House also inadvertently pointed
out the real problem: intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs did not
drive its decision to go to war. "

"A view broadly held in the United States and even more so overseas was that
deterrence of Iraq was working, that Saddam was being kept "in his box," and
that the best way to deal with the weapons problem was through an aggressive
inspections program to supplement the sanctions already in place. That the
administration arrived at so different a policy solution indicates that its
decision to topple Saddam was driven by other factors -- namely, the desire
to shake up the sclerotic power structures of the Middle East and hasten the
spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region.

"If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy
implication, it was to avoid war -- or, if war was going to be launched, to
prepare for a messy aftermath."

The "dispute" as you put it was between the Bush administration and the rest
of the world -- including the US's own intelligence community.

As I said, the US and Europe came to different conclusions as to the
likelihood that Saddam would actually use his weapons. My point was
that it is a non sequitur to conclude that because Europe and the US
came to different conclusions on this issue, that the issue cannot be
the reason that the US chose to invade.

We should recall that of the world's tyrants, only Saddam had invaded
two neighbors, used poison gas on both Iranians and the Kurds, and
continued to make menacing moves and words. So, one would tend to take
him at his word.

I don't doubt that shaking up the Middle East was another reason
(President Bush has said as much in public), but Mr Pillar has not
proven that it was the *only* reason. And the non-sequitur weakens his
argument; one assumes if he had a better argument, we would have heard
it by now.


Pillar continues his point:

"The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in
using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using
intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant
selectively adducing data -- "cherry-picking" -- rather than using the
intelligence community's own analytic judgments. In fact, key portions of
the administration's case explicitly rejected those judgments."

You should have kept on quoting:

"In fact, key portions of the administration's case explicitly rejected
those judgments. In an August 2002 speech, for example, Vice President
Dick Cheney observed that "intelligence is an uncertain business" and
noted how intelligence analysts had underestimated how close Iraq had
been to developing a nuclear weapon before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
His conclusion -- at odds with that of the intelligence community -- was
that "many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons
fairly soon."

In other words, the Intel guys blew it in 1991, and so were disbelieved
in 2002.


Pillar's article can only be read as an indictment of the way the Bush
administration ignored the available intelligence, and as a confirmation
that the decision had been made to go to war before the intelligence was
even consulted. As Pillar said in his NPR interview, everyone in the
intelligence community knew, by May of 2002, that the administration had
already decided to go to war.

So did I, from reading the newspapers. As I said, given the logistics,
the decision would have to be 9-12 months in advance. In the first gulf
war, it took us six months to stand up the invasion force used to free
Kuwait.


The only purpose intelligence served was to
support the decision that had already been made.

One can read it that way, but one can also read it a bit differently.
When I was reading Pillar's article, it struck me as a bit of a
Pearl-Harbor memo. The intel community had a very basic problem - they
had blown their credibility in the first gulf war, and the policymakers
no longer cared what the intel people thought. That's one reason that
policymakers didn't buy what the intel folk were saying.

Another thing that struck me in the latter half of the article was that
by Pillar's description, the intel community is rather too fragile to
survive in the real world, or to be at all useful when the crunch comes.
I don't actually believe this to be true, and it's not going to happen
that the CIA will become a totally insulated agency like the Federal
Reserve.

Joe Gwinn

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article . com,
"rigger" wrote:

Rex B wrote:
Joseph Gwinn wrote:
On NPR I yesterday (the 16th) heard an interview of Frank
Pillar, who
retired from a high post at the CIA a year or two ago, and
published a
piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The interviewer hewed to the mantra about the administration
ignoring
and/or misusing intelligence information, repeating her phrase
many
times, but Mr Pillar always answered diplomatically with a
nuance-filled
reply, but didn't confront the assumptions built into her
question
either.

I've listened to the interview (available online at NPR's site), and I
think
the reason you got that impression is that you didn't read Pillar's
article.
In fact, the interview was excellent, far superior to anything you'll
hear
on commercial radio or television. And every "leading" question, as you
would have noticed if you'd read Pillar's article, was drawn directly
from
what he said in that article. What Terry Gross faced was a fairly
phlegmatic
Pillar, and what she did about it was what any really good interviewer
would
do: go through the list of points that he made in his article, and ask
him
to explain them.

I just finished reading the article, which is six pages long. In the
interview, there were many echoes of the article.

It's one thing for Pillar to make his points. He is the interviewee.
It's quite another for the interviewer to keep framing all questions
with a loaded phrase or two. It doesn't matter if the loaded phrase is
right or wrong.

I don't agree. It's Pillar's job to clarify both the perspective and the
details. It's the interviewer's job to get him to support what he said, or
not, if he can't support it, in the article that provoked the interview in
the first place.

This is not Pillar's show. This is NPR's show, and it's their responsibility
to get something out of Pillar that's illuminating, beyond what his article
said. If he doesn't have the goods, then it's NPR's job to make that clear.
If he does, then the purpose of the interview is to prove it. You have to
force him into corners where he has to put up or shut up. That's what Terry
did.


It's not the interviewer's place to say such things during an interview.
If she wants to express herself, she is free to write her own opinion
piece. If she had simply asked Pillar to explain each point, I would
not have had this reaction. The issue is job description, not politics.

It would be tedious to examine every point, but I don't think she was
"expressing herself." What she was doing was pushing Pillar to explain
himself. That she did.

His article was an indictment. Everyone who has read it and commented upon
it, that I have seen, agrees on that point. That's why it is news. If Pillar
is going to back off from that position, it should be exposed. He has to be
pushed to see where the limits of his claims actually lie. That, Terry did
as well. Her job is not to defend the administration. Her job, as is that of
all journalists, is to challenge authority, not to defend it.



If this had been a court proceeding, the interviewer would have
been
slapped down for biased phrasing and for attempting to lead the
witness.
But Mr Pillar didn't bite, so it was more an annoyance than a
problem.

Maybe you listened to a different interview. g It's also clear that
you
must have listened with enormous bias going in, because I don't believe
any
reasonable person (unless he didn't know what Pillar had said, and what
was
noteworthy and worth expanding upon in an interview) would have
concluded
that Pillar was being "led" in any direction except the one he had laid
out
in his own words.

As I said in my original posting, I don't think that Terry was able to
lead Pillar anywhere he didn't want to go, so it was more an annoyance
than a problem.

Well, you may dislike the style. I would like to see where an interview
conducted according to your preferences would have led. My guess is that it
would have spiraled down into vacuous equivocation.

Equivocation is not the purpose of radio interviews. Sharp, incisive
revelation of the subject at hand is the purpose. You don't get a result
like that by letting a phlegmatic interviewee like Pillar wind himself down
like a clock. You have to keep winding him up.


Accused of "enormous bias". Hmm. This is basically an ad hominem
argument. I have an idea. Whenever you accuse me of bias,
automatically insert the standard reply "You're one too!" for me,
followed by our Mothers both calling out "Sticks and stones ...". Then
we can then get on with our lives, without undue waste of bandwidth.
This isn't a form of argument that gets us anywhere.

That's an argument akin to saying that the proper balance is between two
sides of any issue, whether one of them is accurate or not. It doesn't fly.
If you feel my perspective is biased, you're free to explain your point of
view. Mine is that you can't claim that Pillar was "led" in a biased
interview without believing that his equivocations to be the important
subject. They are NOT the subject. His quite direct, accusatory assertions
ARE the subject. His equivocations are rhetorical noise. And to expect his
equivocations to get equal time, in an interview in which he's expected to
explain the rather direct accusations that he's made, is to prefer the
caveats to the thrust of his argument.

His article, Joseph, was a fairly strong indictment. Again, that is the
news, that is the subject. That he couched it with the rhetorical devices
common to policy-journal articles is not the news. The question, and the
news, revolves around whether his essential accusations are accurate and
whether he can defend them in an interview. If he backed off from Gross's
questions that provoked a clarification or documentation with examples, then
the news would be that he's not willing to defend what he wrote. He has to
be pushed into that corner. He's made serious accusations. The job of the
interviewer is not to give him cover. It's to see if he's really up to what
he's claimed, to see what the substance of his argument is.

And it's to give him an opportunity to clarify anything he said that may be
misleading or incomplete. That chance he was given. In a few cases, he
employed the bureaucrat's tendency to cover his ass. But for the most part,
he re-asserted them, in some cases more strongly, under provocation from the
interviewer. That's what such an interview is all about, or is supposed to
be. We see it done right all too seldom.


Alternately: My bias cancels your bias. As do our votes.

Again, if you want to make a case for my bias, feel free to do so. My bias
is mostly toward the things I've been trained to do as a writer and an
editor: to put the son of a bitch on the ropes and make him explain himself.

Comparing the article and the interview, it appears that Pillar is a
more
cautious speaker than he is a writer. The point of interviewing a man
like
that, who wrote an article like that, is to flesh out the points he made
in
the article. He dragged, but he eventually came around to explaining
more
about what he had written. That's the product of an expert interview.
The
average radio or TV interviewer would have gotten nothing much out of
that
man. He didn't come in ready to talk on his own. He came in ready to
answer
questions.

So, Terry did lead the witness, or at least tried, but had no choice?

The "leading" a journalist is responsible to do, as I've said, is toward a
confrontation with the statements and implications that brought the
interviewee into the studio in the first place. The job of the interviewer
is not to give the interviewee a forum for covering his butt.

I have noticed that more and more of late. For a while NPR seemed
to be
trying to be objective, but they don't appear to making that
effort lately.

How much do you listen to NPR?

I've been listening for years, generally while driving. But your
question is really directed at rigger.

I've been listening for years, too, while driving, and otherwise. I don't
see any evidence of a change in NPR's approach to interviews or to the news.
They've been steady at the helm for a few decades now.

I think it's gone beyond "objective" being the reason for some
articles.

My problem with these interviews is more basic. I'm not sure is the
core problem is bias so much as simple lack of interviewing skills.
Maybe it's both. Some of these interviewers seem incapable of
letting
an interviewee answer a question.

What are you comparing them with?

I don't see what that has to do with it. And I've had the same problem
with interviews of musicians, so the issue isn't simply that I disagree
with the interviewer. They just talk too much, and often put words into
the interviewee's mouth. As I said, I think it's at the very least a
skill issue.

If you have a good idea about what superior interviewing skills might be, it
would be interesting to hear them. I have been interviewing people for close
to 30 years, for print publication and for quotes for presentations. It's
not an easy skill. Hardly anyone I've ever known is better at it than the
old-timers at NPR.

Rather than mince around, let me explain what I see going on here. Most
people want journalists to cater to their points of view. THAT'S NOT THEIR
JOB. Their job, as Thomas Jefferson alluded to over 200 years ago, is to
question power, to question authority. Since power in the US tends to equate
with money and business, that means that the job is to put money's feet to
the fire. To the degree that politicians are in bed with money, it means
putting their feet to the fire, too. That means questioning and challenging
the established power and authority, which stems from economic power and
political manipulations. Economic power in the US tends to be in the hands
of the conservative establishment. Thus, journalists' primary job, in a
republic such as ours, is to question and challenge the establishment. It's
done far too seldom.

Pillar wrote an article that challenges the establishment point of view. If
there's anything to it, it's journalists' job to clarify it, to highlight
the argument, if it has substance. That's part of the process of challenging
the establishment. If he has something to contribute, they should be shining
a light on it.

If there is no challenge to established power, it's not journalism's job to
do PR for the establishment. They do that quite well on their own. That's
not journalism's business.

Pattern: First, the long question, complete with two or three leading
answers proposed by the interviewer.

In this case, the answers were those supplied by Pillar in his article.

In this case, having read the article, I mostly agree that she wasn't
taking him anywhere he didn't want to go. But the audience cannot know
that, as most of them will never read the article.

Then the audience doesn't know what the interview is about. It is NOT about
an explication of Pillar's article. It's about whether the thrust of the
article can stand scrutiny. The article is public record. It's the whole
reason for the interview.


Then a short answer. Most
interviewees don't question the the assumptions of the question,
probably from politeness, so we are really hearing what the
interviewer
thinks, not what the interviewee thinks. It's very frustrating - I
wanted to know what the interviewee thinks, but he hardly gets a word
in
edgewise.

Then you should have read the article.


He never spoke more than a few words without a question, and he never
said
anything until he was reminded what he had written. That's being
phlegmatic -- an interviewer's nightmare. g

We don't actually know that he would not have given fine answers to
neutral get-him-talking questions, because no such questions were
attempted.

He can write another article if he wants the nuances of his thoughts to be
handled as *he* wants them handled. And that, too, should be scrutinized, if
it amounts to an accusation, as his first one was.



Look at this earlier comment:

On the matter of WMDs, Mr Pillar did say that at the time just
before
the invasion, there was a worldwide consensus of intelligence
agencies
that Iraq did have WMDs; the only dispute was over the likelihood
that
Saddam would use them.

WHOAH! He said nothing of the kind. Here's what he actually said, in a
quote
from his own article:

Sure he did, on page one for that matter:

"At the same time, an acrimonious and highly partisan debate broke out
over whether the Bush administration manipulated and misused
intelligence in making its case for war. The administration defended
itself by pointing out that it was not alone in its view that Saddam had
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and active weapons programs, however
mistaken that view may have been.

In this regard, the Bush administration was quite right: its perception
of Saddam's weapons capacities was shared by the Clinton administration,
congressional Democrats, and most other Western governments and
intelligence services."

The above (which immediately preceded your quote) clearly says that just
about everybody thought that Saddam had WMDs. He also says the same
thing during the interview. I think we can declare the point settled.

That isn't the point that I was challenging. Of course, anyone who follows
this issue knows that most people, including the intelligence establishment,
thought Saddam had WMDs. The point I take issue with is your conclusion:
that there was an actual dispute over whether Saddam would use them. There
was no such dispute. There was the opinion of the experts around the world,
including the US intelligence community, and there was the Bush
administration, ignoring that opinion.

You've taken a rhetorical device used in Pillar's very formally constructed
article and you let it lie there, as if that was his conclusion. It was NOT
his conclusion. His conclusion was the points I quoted: that the Bush
administration ignored the analysis, ignored the general consensus that
containment was working, and went off on its own tangent.

Rhetorical style usually requires granting the minor points of your
opposition before bringing down the hammer. You ignored the hammer, and
implied that the rhetorical fillip was the conclusion. Not so.


As I said, the US and Europe came to different conclusions as to the
likelihood that Saddam would actually use his weapons.

No, it wasn't the "US and Europe" that came to different conclusions. It was
the world, plus the US intelligence establishment, versus a few neocons in
the US administration. Pillar makes that point clearly. So does practically
everyone else who isn't in the orbit of the current US administration.

My point was
that it is a non sequitur to conclude that because Europe and the US
came to different conclusions on this issue, that the issue cannot be
the reason that the US chose to invade.

Nobody said that it was. Pillar did not say that it was. Pillar said that
the knowledgable intelligence community, throughout the western world, knew
that there was no substance to the US administration's claims that
"intelligence" was indicating that Saddam was a threat that couldn't be
contained. Nearly everyone else in the world looked at the evidence and saw
that he WAS being contained. That included the US intelligence community.
That was Pillar's point.



We should recall that of the world's tyrants, only Saddam had invaded
two neighbors, used poison gas on both Iranians and the Kurds, and
continued to make menacing moves and words. So, one would tend to take
him at his word.

Nobody was taking Saddam at his word. The intelligence community was looking
at his capabilities, his non-relationship with Al Qaida, and concluded that
he did not have the capabilities or the relationships to do what Bush was
claiming was an imminent threat.


I don't doubt that shaking up the Middle East was another reason
(President Bush has said as much in public), but Mr Pillar has not
proven that it was the *only* reason. And the non-sequitur weakens his
argument; one assumes if he had a better argument, we would have heard
it by now.

Bush sold the American public on the idea that Saddam was an imminent
threat, that he was months away from having a nuclear bomb, and that he had
relationships with Al Qaida that would lead to the use of Iraqi chemical and
biological weapons by terrorists, on our soil. Pillar said that no
legitimate intelligence indicated that, and that no analysts were concluding
such a thing. That's all he said. And his argument is a strong one.



Pillar continues his point:

"The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not
only in
using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using
intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This
meant
selectively adducing data -- "cherry-picking" -- rather than using the
intelligence community's own analytic judgments. In fact, key portions
of
the administration's case explicitly rejected those judgments."

You should have kept on quoting:

"In fact, key portions of the administration's case explicitly rejected
those judgments. In an August 2002 speech, for example, Vice President
Dick Cheney observed that "intelligence is an uncertain business" and
noted how intelligence analysts had underestimated how close Iraq had
been to developing a nuclear weapon before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
His conclusion -- at odds with that of the intelligence community -- was
that "many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons
fairly soon."

In other words, the Intel guys blew it in 1991, and so were disbelieved
in 2002.

But you missed the point that Cheney had NO REASON at all to believe what he
said. None. Nada. No intelligence, no evidence. Pillar made the precise
point: Bush and the administration had nothing except the desire to destroy
Saddam for any reason he could imagine.



Pillar's article can only be read as an indictment of the way the Bush
administration ignored the available intelligence, and as a confirmation
that the decision had been made to go to war before the intelligence was
even consulted. As Pillar said in his NPR interview, everyone in the
intelligence community knew, by May of 2002, that the administration had
already decided to go to war.

So did I, from reading the newspapers. As I said, given the logistics,
the decision would have to be 9-12 months in advance. In the first gulf
war, it took us six months to stand up the invasion force used to free
Kuwait.

But that isn't what Bush said. If your conclusion was right, Bush was either
an idiot or a liar. Right?



The only purpose intelligence served was to
support the decision that had already been made.

One can read it that way, but one can also read it a bit differently.
When I was reading Pillar's article, it struck me as a bit of a
Pearl-Harbor memo. The intel community had a very basic problem - they
had blown their credibility in the first gulf war, and the policymakers
no longer cared what the intel people thought. That's one reason that
policymakers didn't buy what the intel folk were saying.

The point is, the policymakers had no reason to believe anything else,
except their own imaginations.

They intentionally ignored and hid the concerns coming from the intelligence
community. Pillar was in charge of some of them. He knew how the
administration was mishandling the analysis.


Another thing that struck me in the latter half of the article was that
by Pillar's description, the intel community is rather too fragile to
survive in the real world, or to be at all useful when the crunch comes.
I don't actually believe this to be true, and it's not going to happen
that the CIA will become a totally insulated agency like the Federal
Reserve.

He said the intel community can be undermined by politics and the
policymakers, as they were in this case. That appears to be the nature of
independent sources of information and analysis throughout governments
everywhere. Our own Federal Reserve would be useless if it was as subject to
the political policy establishment as our intelligence community is. It
needs something to shield it from policy directives, or we wind up with
policy driving the attention of intelligence and the very kind of screw-up
we just experienced.

I think his central point stands up to both reason and experience.

--
Ed Huntress

On 18 Feb 2006 20:10:15 GMT, Bruce Barnett
wrote:

Joseph Gwinn writes:

One thing that struck me is that Mr Pillar said that the decision to
invade was a forgone conclusion something like six to nine months before
the invasion, speaking as if this were a now-it-can-be-told revelation.
But I had gathered this from the newspapers at the time, and given the
logistics of projecting force to the other side of the world, it could
be no other way, so I don't know what his point was. Perhaps the
article is clearer.


Wesley Clark said the same thing in his book. He was the one who
warned Bush about Al Qaeda 3 months before 9/11, but Bush dismissed
Clark's concerns as Bush was busy planning the invasion of Iraq in
June 2001.

This the same Wesley Clark that allowed the bin Ladin family to boogie
right after 9-11?

His credibility on so many levels is rated in the minus numbers.

Gunner



"A prudent man foresees the difficulties ahead and prepares for them;
the simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences."
- Proverbs 22:3

On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 19:44:57 -0500, Joseph Gwinn
wrote:

As I said, the US and Europe came to different conclusions as to the
likelihood that Saddam would actually use his weapons.

By Europe..one assumes you mean France and Germany? The two countries
with the deepest covert business association with Saddam?

Or are you refering to the UK? Who is in Iraq with us..if you hadnt
noticed.

Gunner



"A prudent man foresees the difficulties ahead and prepares for them;
the simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences."
- Proverbs 22:3

Gunner writes:

On 18 Feb 2006 20:10:15 GMT, Bruce Barnett
wrote:

This the same Wesley Clark that allowed the bin Ladin family to boogie
right after 9-11?

Are you talking about this urban legend?

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/flights.asp



--
Sending unsolicited commercial e-mail to this account incurs a fee of
$500 per message, and acknowledges the legality of this contract.

Gunner writes:

This the same Wesley Clark that allowed the bin Ladin family to boogie
right after 9-11?

His credibility on so many levels is rated in the minus numbers.

Gunner

Well, let's talk about credibility, shall we?

Where WAS the link between Al-Qaeda and the Iragi government before
the invasion?

And WHERE are those weapons of mass destruction?

Where are those mobile vans that can generate biological attacks?
Where are those aluminum missle tubes used for nuclear weapons?


And let's not forget that Bush claimed the war was won after 7 days.
Is THAT credible?

If the President is going to start a war that costs 2 trillion
dollars, shouldn't he have CREDIBLE evidence? He was responsible for
GATHERING the evidence that started the war.


--
Sending unsolicited commercial e-mail to this account incurs a fee of
$500 per message, and acknowledges the legality of this contract.

"Bruce Barnett" wrote in message
...
Gunner writes:

On 18 Feb 2006 20:10:15 GMT, Bruce Barnett
wrote:

This the same Wesley Clark that allowed the bin Ladin family to boogie
right after 9-11?

Are you talking about this urban legend?

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/flights.asp

What are you trying to do, Bruce, confuse Gunner's lip-smacking delusions
with facts? d8-)

--
Ed Huntress

In article ,
Gunner wrote:

On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 19:44:57 -0500, Joseph Gwinn
wrote:

As I said, the US and Europe came to different conclusions as to the
likelihood that Saddam would actually use his weapons.

By Europe..one assumes you mean France and Germany? The two countries
with the deepest covert business association with Saddam?

Or are you refering to the UK? Who is in Iraq with us..if you hadnt
noticed.

The UK keeps on saying that they are European, but convince nobody?
I'll believe it when the Pound gives way to the Euro.

Anyway, I did mean the French and the Germans.

Joe Gwinn

In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article . com,
"rigger" wrote:

Rex B wrote:
Joseph Gwinn wrote:
On NPR I yesterday (the 16th) heard an interview of Frank Pillar, who
retired from a high post at the CIA a year or two ago, and published a
piece in the current [March-April 2006] issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The interviewer hewed to the mantra about the administration ignoring
and/or misusing intelligence information, repeating her phrase many
times, but Mr Pillar always answered diplomatically with a nuance-filled
reply, but didn't confront the assumptions built into her question
either.

I've listened to the interview (available online at NPR's site), and I think
the reason you got that impression is that you didn't read Pillar's article.
In fact, the interview was excellent, far superior to anything you'll hear
on commercial radio or television. And every "leading" question, as you
would have noticed if you'd read Pillar's article, was drawn directly from
what he said in that article. What Terry Gross faced was a fairly phlegmatic
Pillar, and what she did about it was what any really good interviewer would
do: go through the list of points that he made in his article, and ask him
to explain them.

I just finished reading the article, which is six pages long. In the
interview, there were many echoes of the article.

It's one thing for Pillar to make his points. He is the interviewee.
It's quite another for the interviewer to keep framing all questions
with a loaded phrase or two. It doesn't matter if the loaded phrase is
right or wrong.

I don't agree. It's Pillar's job to clarify both the perspective and the
details. It's the interviewer's job to get him to support what he said, or
not, if he can't support it, in the article that provoked the interview in
the first place.

This is not Pillar's show. This is NPR's show, and it's their responsibility
to get something out of Pillar that's illuminating, beyond what his article
said. If he doesn't have the goods, then it's NPR's job to make that clear.
If he does, then the purpose of the interview is to prove it. You have to
force him into corners where he has to put up or shut up. That's what Terry
did.

Well, I agree that an interviewer should ask some sharp questions, but I
don't agree that this requires loaded questions. In either direction.


It's not the interviewer's place to say such things during an interview.
If she wants to express herself, she is free to write her own opinion
piece. If she had simply asked Pillar to explain each point, I would
not have had this reaction. The issue is job description, not politics.

It would be tedious to examine every point, but I don't think she was
"expressing herself." What she was doing was pushing Pillar to explain
himself. That she did.

I don't agree, but we are going in circles here.


His article was an indictment. Everyone who has read it and commented upon
it, that I have seen, agrees on that point. That's why it is news. If Pillar
is going to back off from that position, it should be exposed. He has to be
pushed to see where the limits of his claims actually lie. That, Terry did
as well. Her job is not to defend the administration. Her job, as is that of
all journalists, is to challenge authority, not to defend it.

Did it again. First, we hear that the questions were not biased, then
we hear that it was biased in service of a higher calling. Can't have
it both ways.


If this had been a court proceeding, the interviewer would have been
slapped down for biased phrasing and for attempting to lead the witness.
But Mr Pillar didn't bite, so it was more an annoyance than a problem.

Maybe you listened to a different interview. g It's also clear that you
must have listened with enormous bias going in, because I don't believe any
reasonable person (unless he didn't know what Pillar had said, and what was
noteworthy and worth expanding upon in an interview) would have concluded
that Pillar was being "led" in any direction except the one he had laid out
in his own words.

As I said in my original posting, I don't think that Terry was able to
lead Pillar anywhere he didn't want to go, so it was more an annoyance
than a problem.

Well, you may dislike the style. I would like to see where an interview
conducted according to your preferences would have led. My guess is that it
would have spiraled down into vacuous equivocation.

Equivocation is not the purpose of radio interviews. Sharp, incisive
revelation of the subject at hand is the purpose. You don't get a result
like that by letting a phlegmatic interviewee like Pillar wind himself down
like a clock. You have to keep winding him up.

The thing that strikes me about this is that you don't seem to see the
problem with loaded words, alternately denying that the words are loaded
and saying that they are necessary to get the interviewee to talk.

I would submit that it's difficult to make a persuasive counterargument
to a position that one does not understand well enough to summarize
fairly, summarize well enough that an opponent would agree was correct.
Given that understanding, phrasing sharp questions that are not at the
same time loaded one way or another becomes possible.


Accused of "enormous bias". Hmm. This is basically an ad hominem
argument. I have an idea. Whenever you accuse me of bias,
automatically insert the standard reply "You're one too!" for me,
followed by our Mothers both calling out "Sticks and stones ...". Then
we can then get on with our lives, without undue waste of bandwidth.
This isn't a form of argument that gets us anywhere.

That's an argument akin to saying that the proper balance is between two
sides of any issue, whether one of them is accurate or not. It doesn't fly.

No, not at all. It matters not one wit if the accusation is true or
false. I'm saying only that ad hominem arguments are not particularly
persuasive, but are pretty time-consuming. And tend to degenerate into
pointless flamewars.


If you feel my perspective is biased, you're free to explain your point of
view. Mine is that you can't claim that Pillar was "led" in a biased
interview without believing that his equivocations to be the important
subject. They are NOT the subject. His quite direct, accusatory assertions
ARE the subject. His equivocations are rhetorical noise. And to expect his
equivocations to get equal time, in an interview in which he's expected to
explain the rather direct accusations that he's made, is to prefer the
caveats to the thrust of his argument.

The accusation of enormous bias was against me, not Mr Pillar, so I fail
to see the relevance.

Nor did I accuse Mr Pillar of bias. Error perhaps, but not bias.


His article, Joseph, was a fairly strong indictment. Again, that is the
news, that is the subject. That he couched it with the rhetorical devices
common to policy-journal articles is not the news. The question, and the
news, revolves around whether his essential accusations are accurate and
whether he can defend them in an interview. If he backed off from Gross's
questions that provoked a clarification or documentation with examples, then
the news would be that he's not willing to defend what he wrote. He has to
be pushed into that corner. He's made serious accusations. The job of the
interviewer is not to give him cover. It's to see if he's really up to what
he's claimed, to see what the substance of his argument is.

I certainly agree here. My complaint against Terry Gross is one of
technique, not objective. Sharp questions need not be loaded.


And it's to give him an opportunity to clarify anything he said that may be
misleading or incomplete. That chance he was given. In a few cases, he
employed the bureaucrat's tendency to cover his ass. But for the most part,
he re-asserted them, in some cases more strongly, under provocation from the
interviewer. That's what such an interview is all about, or is supposed to
be. We see it done right all too seldom.

Right. He did stand behind his article, on all points.


Alternately: My bias cancels your bias. As do our votes.

Again, if you want to make a case for my bias, feel free to do so. My bias
is mostly toward the things I've been trained to do as a writer and an
editor: to put the son of a bitch on the ropes and make him explain himself.

Finding the man without bias is right up there with going around with a
lantern seeking an honest man. We are all too human, and we all have
our biases and blind spots. Even writers and editors are human.


I think it's gone beyond "objective" being the reason for some
articles.

My problem with these interviews is more basic. I'm not sure is the
core problem is bias so much as simple lack of interviewing skills.
Maybe it's both. Some of these interviewers seem incapable of letting
an interviewee answer a question.

What are you comparing them with?

I don't see what that has to do with it. And I've had the same problem
with interviews of musicians, so the issue isn't simply that I disagree
with the interviewer. They just talk too much, and often put words into
the interviewee's mouth. As I said, I think it's at the very least a
skill issue.

If you have a good idea about what superior interviewing skills might be, it
would be interesting to hear them. I have been interviewing people for close
to 30 years, for print publication and for quotes for presentations. It's
not an easy skill. Hardly anyone I've ever known is better at it than the
old-timers at NPR.

It's been a while. Christopher Lyeden (sp?) of The Connection (before
he got into the tangle with the then manager of the local Boston NPR
station (FM 90.1)) is pretty good. He was on the street for a few
years, and is now back with a radio show called "Open Source" on a
different station (FM 89.7?). Unfortunately, it isn't on when I'm
driving most of the time, so I usually miss it.


Rather than mince around, let me explain what I see going on here. Most
people want journalists to cater to their points of view. THAT'S NOT THEIR
JOB. Their job, as Thomas Jefferson alluded to over 200 years ago, is to
question power, to question authority. Since power in the US tends to equate
with money and business, that means that the job is to put money's feet to
the fire. To the degree that politicians are in bed with money, it means
putting their feet to the fire, too. That means questioning and challenging
the established power and authority, which stems from economic power and
political manipulations. Economic power in the US tends to be in the hands
of the conservative establishment. Thus, journalists' primary job, in a
republic such as ours, is to question and challenge the establishment. It's
done far too seldom.

Be careful. Journalism is not a Mission from God, and journalists are
neither omniscient nor inerrant.


Pillar wrote an article that challenges the establishment point of view. If
there's anything to it, it's journalists' job to clarify it, to highlight
the argument, if it has substance. That's part of the process of challenging
the establishment. If he has something to contribute, they should be shining
a light on it.

If there is no challenge to established power, it's not journalism's job to
do PR for the establishment. They do that quite well on their own. That's
not journalism's business.

Agree on the general objective, but not necessarily on the means.


Pattern: First, the long question, complete with two or three leading
answers proposed by the interviewer.

In this case, the answers were those supplied by Pillar in his article.

In this case, having read the article, I mostly agree that she wasn't
taking him anywhere he didn't want to go. But the audience cannot know
that, as most of them will never read the article.

Then the audience doesn't know what the interview is about. It is NOT about
an explication of Pillar's article. It's about whether the thrust of the
article can stand scrutiny. The article is public record. It's the whole
reason for the interview.

Huh? Of course they don't know what it's about - they never read the
article. And when I went to the bookstore to get "the current issue", I
came up empty-handed, as the current issue was too new to be on the
shelves. I was saved when Sphero posted the URL.


He never spoke more than a few words without a question, and he never said
anything until he was reminded what he had written. That's being
phlegmatic -- an interviewer's nightmare. g

We don't actually know that he would not have given fine answers to
neutral get-him-talking questions, because no such questions were
attempted.

He can write another article if he wants the nuances of his thoughts to be
handled as *he* wants them handled. And that, too, should be scrutinized, if
it amounts to an accusation, as his first one was.

True enough, but how is this an answer to my point?


Look at this earlier comment:

On the matter of WMDs, Mr Pillar did say that at the time just before
the invasion, there was a worldwide consensus of intelligence agencies
that Iraq did have WMDs; the only dispute was over the likelihood that
Saddam would use them.

WHOAH! He said nothing of the kind. Here's what he actually said, in a quote
from his own article:

Sure he did, on page one for that matter:

"At the same time, an acrimonious and highly partisan debate broke out
over whether the Bush administration manipulated and misused
intelligence in making its case for war. The administration defended
itself by pointing out that it was not alone in its view that Saddam had
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and active weapons programs, however
mistaken that view may have been.

In this regard, the Bush administration was quite right: its perception
of Saddam's weapons capacities was shared by the Clinton administration,
congressional Democrats, and most other Western governments and
intelligence services."

The above (which immediately preceded your quote) clearly says that just
about everybody thought that Saddam had WMDs. He also says the same
thing during the interview. I think we can declare the point settled.

That isn't the point that I was challenging. Of course, anyone who follows
this issue knows that most people, including the intelligence establishment,
thought Saddam had WMDs.

Could you help me here? I don't know how else to interpret "WHOAH! He
said nothing of the kind".


The point I take issue with is your conclusion:
that there was an actual dispute over whether Saddam would use them. There
was no such dispute. There was the opinion of the experts around the world,
including the US intelligence community, and there was the Bush
administration, ignoring that opinion.

No, I didn't say that the Intel community thought that Saddam would use
his WMDs. I said that the dispute was between governments, specifically
those of the US and those of France and Germany.

Mr Pillar is saying that the US administration should have listened to
the intel community. Later he admits that the intel community blew it
in 1991, and so were having some trouble with credibility in 2002, three
years later.

Politicians judge each other's intentions all the time, and intel is
only one input. This time, the US administration judged that the intel
folk were wrong, judged that based on past behaviour, Saddam was likely
to use whatever weapons came to hand.


You've taken a rhetorical device used in Pillar's very formally constructed
article and you let it lie there, as if that was his conclusion. It was NOT
his conclusion. His conclusion was the points I quoted: that the Bush
administration ignored the analysis, ignored the general consensus that
containment was working, and went off on its own tangent.

Rhetorical style usually requires granting the minor points of your
opposition before bringing down the hammer. You ignored the hammer, and
implied that the rhetorical fillip was the conclusion. Not so.

Huh?


As I said, the US and Europe came to different conclusions as to the
likelihood that Saddam would actually use his weapons.

No, it wasn't the "US and Europe" that came to different conclusions. It was
the world, plus the US intelligence establishment, versus a few neocons in
the US administration. Pillar makes that point clearly. So does practically
everyone else who isn't in the orbit of the current US administration.

Well, we could go down the list. Not all of Europe agreed with the
French and Germans. But it's beside my point that the disagreement does
not prove that the issue disagreed about cannot have been the reason.
Quite the contrary, and the disagreements were quite loud and public at
the time. The French and Germans wanted to keep on trying with
diplomats and sanctions, while the US had concluded that this was
pointless, and that it was time for fire and sword.


My point was
that it is a non sequitur to conclude that because Europe and the US
came to different conclusions on this issue, that the issue cannot be
the reason that the US chose to invade.

Nobody said that it was. Pillar did not say that it was. Pillar said that
the knowledgable intelligence community, throughout the western world, knew
that there was no substance to the US administration's claims that
"intelligence" was indicating that Saddam was a threat that couldn't be
contained. Nearly everyone else in the world looked at the evidence and saw
that he WAS being contained. That included the US intelligence community.
That was Pillar's point.

I'm sorry, but Pillar did say exactly that, and also wrote that, so I
doubt that I misheard.


We should recall that of the world's tyrants, only Saddam had invaded
two neighbors, used poison gas on both Iranians and the Kurds, and
continued to make menacing moves and words. So, one would tend to take
him at his word.

Nobody was taking Saddam at his word. The intelligence community was looking
at his capabilities, his non-relationship with Al Qaida, and concluded that
he did not have the capabilities or the relationships to do what Bush was
claiming was an imminent threat.

The US administration didn't believe the Intel community on this, based
on the stellar performance of intel in 1991, where they totally missed
how close Iraq's atomic weapon program was to a bomb. It turned out to
have been a very close call. If Saddam had held off for another year
before invading Kuwait, things could have gone very differently.
Presidents tend to remember such things. For a very long time.


I don't doubt that shaking up the Middle East was another reason
(President Bush has said as much in public), but Mr Pillar has not
proven that it was the *only* reason. And the non-sequitur weakens his
argument; one assumes if he had a better argument, we would have heard
it by now.

Bush sold the American public on the idea that Saddam was an imminent
threat, that he was months away from having a nuclear bomb, and that he had
relationships with Al Qaida that would lead to the use of Iraqi chemical and
biological weapons by terrorists, on our soil. Pillar said that no
legitimate intelligence indicated that, and that no analysts were concluding
such a thing. That's all he said. And his argument is a strong one.

And the US administration simply didn't believe the intel folk on this,
as discussed above.


Pillar continues his point:

"The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in
using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using
intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant
selectively adducing data -- "cherry-picking" -- rather than using the
intelligence community's own analytic judgments. In fact, key portions of
the administration's case explicitly rejected those judgments."

You should have kept on quoting:

"In fact, key portions of the administration's case explicitly rejected
those judgments. In an August 2002 speech, for example, Vice President
Dick Cheney observed that "intelligence is an uncertain business" and
noted how intelligence analysts had underestimated how close Iraq had
been to developing a nuclear weapon before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
His conclusion -- at odds with that of the intelligence community -- was
that "many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons
fairly soon."

In other words, the Intel guys blew it in 1991, and so were disbelieved
in 2002.

But you missed the point that Cheney had NO REASON at all to believe what he
said. None. Nada. No intelligence, no evidence. Pillar made the precise
point: Bush and the administration had nothing except the desire to destroy
Saddam for any reason he could imagine.

As I said, the administration didn't trust the intel community to get it
right. And not without reason.


Pillar's article can only be read as an indictment of the way the Bush
administration ignored the available intelligence, and as a confirmation
that the decision had been made to go to war before the intelligence was
even consulted. As Pillar said in his NPR interview, everyone in the
intelligence community knew, by May of 2002, that the administration had
already decided to go to war.

So did I, from reading the newspapers. As I said, given the logistics,
the decision would have to be 9-12 months in advance. In the first gulf
war, it took us six months to stand up the invasion force used to free
Kuwait.

But that isn't what Bush said. If your conclusion was right, Bush was either
an idiot or a liar. Right?

Not so fast. One can stop on a dime. What one cannot do on a dime is
to whistle up an army in place and ready to go. The papers were full of
getting-ready stories at the time.


The only purpose intelligence served was to
support the decision that had already been made.

One can read it that way, but one can also read it a bit differently.
When I was reading Pillar's article, it struck me as a bit of a
Pearl-Harbor memo. The intel community had a very basic problem - they
had blown their credibility in the first gulf war, and the policymakers
no longer cared what the intel people thought. That's one reason that
policymakers didn't buy what the intel folk were saying.

The point is, the policymakers had no reason to believe anything else,
except their own imaginations.

They intentionally ignored and hid the concerns coming from the intelligence
community. Pillar was in charge of some of them. He knew how the
administration was mishandling the analysis.

Remember, the then consensus of the intel community was that Saddam had
or would soon have WMDs, and that Saddam had invaded two neighbors (Iran
and Kuwait) and had already used mustard and nerve gasses on the
Iranians and the Kurds. Should one then conclude that Saddam would have
held back if he happened to have a nuclear weapon, despite all his talk
of destroying Israel and purifying Saudi Arabia?


Another thing that struck me in the latter half of the article was that
by Pillar's description, the intel community is rather too fragile to
survive in the real world, or to be at all useful when the crunch comes.
I don't actually believe this to be true, and it's not going to happen
that the CIA will become a totally insulated agency like the Federal
Reserve.

He said the intel community can be undermined by politics and the
policymakers, as they were in this case. That appears to be the nature of
independent sources of information and analysis throughout governments
everywhere. Our own Federal Reserve would be useless if it was as subject to
the political policy establishment as our intelligence community is. It
needs something to shield it from policy directives, or we wind up with
policy driving the attention of intelligence and the very kind of screw-up
we just experienced.

How did US political interference cause the intel agencies of the rest
of the world (including France and Germany) come to the consensus that
Saddam had or would soon have WMDs?


I think his central point stands up to both reason and experience.

It should be apparent that I wouldn't go quite that far.


Joe Gwinn

On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 08:09:50 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

"Bruce Barnett" wrote in message
.. .
Gunner writes:

On 18 Feb 2006 20:10:15 GMT, Bruce Barnett
wrote:

This the same Wesley Clark that allowed the bin Ladin family to boogie
right after 9-11?

Are you talking about this urban legend?

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/flights.asp

What are you trying to do, Bruce, confuse Gunner's lip-smacking delusions
with facts? d8-)


Sorry. I confused Wesley Clark with Richard Clark. Shrug. Sue me.

Gunner



"A prudent man foresees the difficulties ahead and prepares for them;
the simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences."
- Proverbs 22:3

On 19 Feb 2006 12:51:36 GMT, Bruce Barnett
wrote:

Gunner writes:

This the same Wesley Clark that allowed the bin Ladin family to boogie
right after 9-11?

His credibility on so many levels is rated in the minus numbers.

Gunner

Well, let's talk about credibility, shall we?

Looks like we found a Wesley Clark for Prez supporter.


Where WAS the link between Al-Qaeda and the Iragi government before
the invasion?

which one? The one between Iraqi Intelligence and Mohammed Atta? Or
the one between bin Ladin himself and Saddam?
Or the ones that are turning up on various tapes recently discovered?
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Inve...ory?id=1616996
(hardly a right wing conspiracy blog...)

And WHERE are those weapons of mass destruction?

Likely..Syria
http://www.nysun.com/article/26514


Where are those mobile vans that can generate biological attacks?
Where are those aluminum missle tubes used for nuclear weapons?

No idea. Where is bin Ladin? Or are you claiming he didnt exist
either? DB Cooper?

And let's not forget that Bush claimed the war was won after 7 days.
Is THAT credible?

Cites????

If the President is going to start a war that costs 2 trillion
dollars, shouldn't he have CREDIBLE evidence? He was responsible for
GATHERING the evidence that started the war.

This evidence??

"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to
develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them.
That is our bottom line."
--President Bill Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is
clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction program."
--President Bill Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

"Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a
great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will
use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies
is the greatest security threat we face."
--Madeline Albright, Feb 18, 1998

"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten
times since 1983."
--Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998

"[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with
the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including,
if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to
respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its
weapons of mass destruction programs."
Letter to President Clinton, signed by:
-- Democratic Senators Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, and
others, Oct. 9, 1998

"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass
destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region
and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."
-Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998

"Hussein has ... chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass
destruction and palaces for his cronies."
-- Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999

"There is no doubt that ... Saddam Hussein has reinvigorated his
weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical and
nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf War
status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and
is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop
longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our
allies."
Letter to President Bush, Signed by:
-- Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL), and others, Dec 5, 2001

"We begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a
threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the
mandate of the United Nations and is building weapons of mass
destruction and th! e means of delivering them."
-- Sen. Carl Levin (D, MI), Sept. 19, 2002

"We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical
weapons throughout his country."
-- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002

"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible
to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as
Saddam is in power."
-- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002

"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and
developing weapons of mass destruction."
-- Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002

"The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are
confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course
to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities.
Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons..."
-- Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV), Oct. 3, 2002

"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the
authority to use force -- if necessary -- to disarm Saddam Hussein
because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction
in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."
-- Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002

"There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working
aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear
weapons within the next five years ... We also should remember we have
always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of
weapons of mass destruction."
-- Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002

"He has systematically violated, over the course of the past 11 years,
every significant UN resolution that has demanded that he disarm and
destroy his chemical and biological weapons, and any nuclear capacity.
This he has refused to do"
-- Rep. Henry Waxman (D, CA), Oct. 10, 2002

"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports
show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and
biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his
nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to
terrorists, including al Qaeda members ... It is clear, however, that
if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his
capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying
to develop nuclear weapons."
-- Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct 10, 2002

"We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that
Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing
capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass
destruction."
-- Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL), Dec. 8, 2002

"Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal,
murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a
particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to
miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to
his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass
destruction ... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass
destruction is real..."
-- Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003



Laugh laugh laugh

Gunner



"A prudent man foresees the difficulties ahead and prepares for them;
the simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences."
- Proverbs 22:3

"Gunner" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 08:09:50 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

"Bruce Barnett" wrote in
message
.. .
Gunner writes:

On 18 Feb 2006 20:10:15 GMT, Bruce Barnett
wrote:

This the same Wesley Clark that allowed the bin Ladin family to
boogie
right after 9-11?

Are you talking about this urban legend?

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/flights.asp

What are you trying to do, Bruce, confuse Gunner's lip-smacking delusions
with facts? d8-)


Sorry. I confused Wesley Clark with Richard Clark. Shrug. Sue me.

Gunner

Oh, jeez, that must be some collection of "news" sources you have, Gunner.
Maybe you shouldn't spend so much time at
www.make-it-up-as-you-go-along.com. g

--
Ed Huntress

On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 14:22:26 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

"Gunner" wrote in message
.. .
On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 08:09:50 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

"Bruce Barnett" wrote in
message
.. .
Gunner writes:

On 18 Feb 2006 20:10:15 GMT, Bruce Barnett
wrote:

This the same Wesley Clark that allowed the bin Ladin family to
boogie
right after 9-11?

Are you talking about this urban legend?

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/flights.asp

What are you trying to do, Bruce, confuse Gunner's lip-smacking delusions
with facts? d8-)


Sorry. I confused Wesley Clark with Richard Clark. Shrug. Sue me.

Gunner

Oh, jeez, that must be some collection of "news" sources you have, Gunner.
Maybe you shouldn't spend so much time at
www.make-it-up-as-you-go-along.com. g

So you are claiming that ABC is lying?

Gunner



"A prudent man foresees the difficulties ahead and prepares for them;
the simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences."
- Proverbs 22:3

Gunner writes:

Well, let's talk about credibility, shall we?

Looks like we found a Wesley Clark for Prez supporter.

Nope. Although I'd trust someone with REAL military experience to run
a military operation.



Where WAS the link between Al-Qaeda and the Iragi government before
the invasion?

which one? The one between Iraqi Intelligence and Mohammed Atta?


You mean the one where Cheney debunks this?

http://www.democracynow.org/article....3/09/16/168251


Or
the one between bin Ladin himself and Saddam?


Do you mean the one where Rumsfield questions the excistance of this relationship?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3715396.stm


Or the ones that are turning up on various tapes recently discovered?
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Inve...ory?id=1616996
(hardly a right wing conspiracy blog...)


You mean the one where we finally have proof that Sadam lies?

And WHERE are those weapons of mass destruction?

Likely..Syria
http://www.nysun.com/article/26514


The CIA's Iraq Survey Group acknowledged in its September 30, 2004,
"Comprehensive Report," "we cannot express a firm view on the
possibility that WMD elements were relocated out of Iraq prior to the
war. Reports of such actions exist, but we have not yet been able to
investigate this possibility thoroughly."

But when you want to start a war, who needs evidence, eh?
Shoot first. Ask questions later.

Where are those mobile vans that can generate biological attacks?
Where are those aluminum missle tubes used for nuclear weapons?

No idea. Where is bin Ladin? Or are you claiming he didnt exist
either? DB Cooper?


I'm talking about the "facts" Powell stated in the UN that was the
reason to start the war.

The FACTS that the INR evaluation marked as "WEAK" and "NOT CREDIBLE"

If the President is going to start a war that costs 2 trillion
dollars, shouldn't he have CREDIBLE evidence? He was responsible for
GATHERING the evidence that started the war.

This evidence??

[snip]

First of all - I see opinion, not evidence,
Did Powell use any of this "evidence" when he talked to the UN?
No. I guess he didn't think much of this "evidence."

I never knew Bush valued the democrat's opinion so much that he
started a war based on blind-faith trust on their "evidence."




--
Sending unsolicited commercial e-mail to this account incurs a fee of
$500 per message, and acknowledges the legality of this contract.

"Gunner" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 14:22:26 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


Oh, jeez, that must be some collection of "news" sources you have,
Gunner.
Maybe you shouldn't spend so much time at
www.make-it-up-as-you-go-along.com. g

So you are claiming that ABC is lying?

As for ABC, did you actually read what they said? Another dud, Gunner. You
dropped the hammer on another dud.

--
Ed Huntress

F. George McDuffee wrote:
On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 12:51:26 -0600, Rex B
wrote:
I have noticed that more and more of late. For a while NPR seemed to be
trying to be objective, but they don't appear to making that effort lately.
====================
Or we have been so indoctrinated that we have begun to view
objective albeit contradictory points of view as subjective.

In many cases it *NOT* the isolated facts, but the context and
how these are connected and thus the conclusions that are the
problem.

I do know how to spot a conclusion not supported by facts. I can also
recognize a leading question, or one that has no winning answer for the
respondent.
And I'm OK with different points of view. I can almost always argue both
sides of a question.

For an interesting experience, use the internet and see what the
non-US english language papers have to say. Manchester Guardian
(UK) is a good place to start. see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/t...es/0,,,00.html

I do that regularly, along with occasional SW radio broadcasts.

On 20 Feb 2006 12:40:13 GMT, Bruce Barnett
wrote:


Or the ones that are turning up on various tapes recently discovered?
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Inve...ory?id=1616996
(hardly a right wing conspiracy blog...)


You mean the one where we finally have proof that Sadam lies?

Interesting spin. I thought the current view was that he was a
harmless fuzzy bunny and we bad Yanks attacked him for no good reason
and killed his two eagle scout children?

Gunner



"A prudent man foresees the difficulties ahead and prepares for them;
the simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences."
- Proverbs 22:3

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 08:49:47 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

"Gunner" wrote in message
.. .
On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 14:22:26 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


Oh, jeez, that must be some collection of "news" sources you have,
Gunner.
Maybe you shouldn't spend so much time at
www.make-it-up-as-you-go-along.com. g

So you are claiming that ABC is lying?

As for ABC, did you actually read what they said? Another dud, Gunner. You
dropped the hammer on another dud.

Cites? And did you see the program?

Gunner



"A prudent man foresees the difficulties ahead and prepares for them;
the simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences."
- Proverbs 22:3

"Gunner" wrote in message
...
On 20 Feb 2006 12:40:13 GMT, Bruce Barnett
wrote:


Or the ones that are turning up on various tapes recently discovered?
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Inve...ory?id=1616996
(hardly a right wing conspiracy blog...)


You mean the one where we finally have proof that Sadam lies?

Interesting spin. I thought the current view was that he was a
harmless fuzzy bunny and we bad Yanks attacked him for no good reason
and killed his two eagle scout children?

Gunner

I think that was the California-wasteland interpretation, Gunner. It was
repackaged for people living within a certain radius of Bakersfield.

--
Ed Huntress

Ed Huntress wrote:
"Gunner" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 08:49:47 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

"Gunner" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 14:22:26 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


Oh, jeez, that must be some collection of "news" sources you
have, Gunner. Maybe you shouldn't spend so much time at
www.make-it-up-as-you-go-along.com. g



==========================

February 20, 2006, 7:20 a.m.
"He Shall Direct Thy Paths to the Weapons of Mass Destruction."
The former U.N. inspector behind the "Saddam Tapes" says God revealed
WMD sites to him.

William Tierney, the former United Nations weapons inspector who
unveiled the so-called "Saddam Tapes" at a conference in Arlington,
Virginia, Saturday, told National Review Online that God directed him
to weapons sites in Iraq and that his belief in the importance of one
particular site was strengthened when a friend told him that she had
a vision of the site in a dream.

In his presentation at the so-called "Intelligence Summit," Tierney,
an Arabic speaker, described how he received the "Saddam Tapes" from
federal authorities last year as part of his job as a contract
translator. It was supposed to be a routine assignment, but Tierney
said he soon realized the tapes had special significance and decided
to make them public. Tierney said he believes other tapes, which have
not yet been heard, will eventually reveal that Iraq was behind the
1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1995 Oklahoma City
bombing. Tierney also said that he believes Iraq orchestrated the
2001 anthrax attacks, with Saddam Hussein using American scientist
Steven Hatfill as a "proxy" to carry out the mission.

============================

"And the nutbags, go rolling, along..." (with Gunner in tow g)

Man oh Man. I've been working too hard Ed. Hadn't seen this but if I had I'd
have poked around.
Who says you can't find good comedy these days!

--
John R. Carroll
Machining Solution Software, Inc.
Los Angeles San Francisco
www.machiningsolution.com

"John R. Carroll" wrote in message
om...
Ed Huntress wrote:
"Gunner" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 08:49:47 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

"Gunner" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 14:22:26 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


Oh, jeez, that must be some collection of "news" sources you
have, Gunner. Maybe you shouldn't spend so much time at
www.make-it-up-as-you-go-along.com. g



==========================

February 20, 2006, 7:20 a.m.
"He Shall Direct Thy Paths to the Weapons of Mass Destruction."
The former U.N. inspector behind the "Saddam Tapes" says God revealed
WMD sites to him.

William Tierney, the former United Nations weapons inspector who
unveiled the so-called "Saddam Tapes" at a conference in Arlington,
Virginia, Saturday, told National Review Online that God directed him
to weapons sites in Iraq and that his belief in the importance of one
particular site was strengthened when a friend told him that she had
a vision of the site in a dream.

In his presentation at the so-called "Intelligence Summit," Tierney,
an Arabic speaker, described how he received the "Saddam Tapes" from
federal authorities last year as part of his job as a contract
translator. It was supposed to be a routine assignment, but Tierney
said he soon realized the tapes had special significance and decided
to make them public. Tierney said he believes other tapes, which have
not yet been heard, will eventually reveal that Iraq was behind the
1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1995 Oklahoma City
bombing. Tierney also said that he believes Iraq orchestrated the
2001 anthrax attacks, with Saddam Hussein using American scientist
Steven Hatfill as a "proxy" to carry out the mission.

============================

"And the nutbags, go rolling, along..." (with Gunner in tow g)

Man oh Man. I've been working too hard Ed. Hadn't seen this but if I had
I'd
have poked around.
Who says you can't find good comedy these days!

Stay tuned for more from Tierney on the Timothy McVeigh/Saddam Hussein
connection. It appears that they both got their Cuban cigars from the same
Uzbeckistanian mole in Timbuktu. God pointed the way for Tierney, in a
message encypted in a roll of Russian toilet paper.

--
Ed Huntress

In article , Ed Huntress says...

"Cites?" You mean, citations that nothing has come from the administration
or from real news sources to support the vague, ambiguous allegations made
by the right-wing blogs? In other words, you want cites of nothing?

No, he wants a visit from the citey-bird. You remember, that
nearly extinct bird whos call (cite-cite-cite-cite-cite!) heralds
the triumphant exhibition of yet another....

Dud.

Jim


--
==================================================
please reply to:
JRR(zero) at pkmfgvm4 (dot) vnet (dot) ibm (dot) com
==================================================

"jim rozen" wrote in message
...
In article , Ed Huntress says...

"Cites?" You mean, citations that nothing has come from the
administration
or from real news sources to support the vague, ambiguous allegations
made
by the right-wing blogs? In other words, you want cites of nothing?

No, he wants a visit from the citey-bird. You remember, that
nearly extinct bird whos call (cite-cite-cite-cite-cite!) heralds
the triumphant exhibition of yet another....

Dud.

I have been up to my bird in cites today, anyway. I helped my wife with a
college paper, involving three reference citations, and I'm at work on a
drug dossier with over 80 of them.

One more cite, and I'll start chirping along with Gunner...

--
Ed Huntress