Huck: NIE Question Was An "Ambush"
Mike Huckabee in Greensboro, N.C. tonight tried to respond to concerns about his lack of familiarity with the National Intelligence Estimate. Digging a deeper ditch? You decide ...
"Well, first of all it was kind of an ambush question. It came out at ten in the morning, I think it was late that afternoon and the reporter said: Have you read it? You know, George Bush had had it for four years, and he hadn't read it yet, so I don't really know that it was a big deal that I had not yet seen it and read it because we had been on the campaign trail nonstop. In fact I was saying to the reporters, you know the reason I haven't seen it is because you guys have been tailing me all day asking me questions."
On NIE findings, per NBC/NJ's Adam Aigner-Treworgy:
"There were sixteen different agencies that had contributed to that report. It's four years old. The other thing about it is a lot of the material in it is classified, so I'm assuming only a handful of people have actually seen the full report. In a way the report tells us that we've got a serious problems with our intelligence agencies. The same intelligence agencies that told us that it was a slam-dunk, there were weapons of mass destruction, it would be no difficulty taking Iraq, were the ones who issued this report. So it's interesting to me that a lot of people who have now pilloried the intelligence community for that report that said Iraq would be a slam-dunk are now heralding this report as being the gospel truth. Well we can't have it both ways. So if you want to pound the intelligence agencies for that report, I think you have to do what perhaps was best said by Ronald Reagan, trust but verify. So, does Iran have an ongoing reactor program? The honest answer is we don't absolutely, positively know if our only source of information is the same body of agencies that gave us the WMD report before."
The problem isn't that he hadn't read it. The problem is that he hadn't heard about it. You would expect a candidate for the highest elected political office in the world to be informed on current events.
He sure heard about the HuffingtonPost article about him quick enough. His problem is his advisors aren't giving him good information. Now that he's in front in some polls, he's becoming defensive. He's looking out for stories that might hurt him.
And Bush hasn't had it for 4 years. Wherever did *that* idea come from. The info about Iran having stopped its bomb development 4 years ago is only months--at most a year--old. Maybe he's confusing those two 4 year intervals. Which makes him look even dumber.
Utopia
This guy is an idiot. "Slam-dunk" wasn't in a report at all - it was a remark made by George Tenet when he was sucking up to Bush.
The pity of Huckabee's candidacy is that it will flounder not on the basis of his woeful lack of readiness for national office, which is clearly on display here, his record a governor, which is mixed (Keith Richards's pardon and some concern for the plight of disadvantaged Arkansans on the plus side and pressure to parole a rapist-murderer on the minus side) nor his dubious ethics. Instead it will go down because he's going to run out of money.
Adam Aigner-Treworgy sees to lack the ability to make a simple simple distinction. The report which highlighted Iraq's WMDs had been passed through the Cheney neocon filter before it was released. It wasn't an intelligence report. It was a political document supporting the warmongers.
This NIE seems to have been held up for at least a year by Cheney's maneuvering, but escaped to the public relatively intact.
WOW, Huckabee only continues to exhibit how provincial & ill-informed he is!
The Iraq WMD allegations were absolutely *not* laid out in that fashion in any NIE, and this is documented in any number of best-sellers re the Iraq debacle and the lies behind it. Has good ole' Huck ever heard of "Curveball," or of Ahmed Chalabi, or of Judith Miller...or of Joseph Wilson/Valerie Plame, yellowcake, and forged docs?? I suppose he hasn't looked too closely at any of these (lest his GOP pedigree seem weak); and it's for sure that he has little-to-no idea of the shakeup which occurred through all branches of intelligence after the start of the war (documented, once again, very fully in the press and in well-known books)...
I think that it's very telling when Huckabee states that we can't rely on "the same intelligence agencies that told us that it was a slam-dunk, there were weapons of mass destruction, it would be no difficulty taking Iraq"....
Besides being grammatically incorrect, "it would be no difficulty TAKING Iraq" goes right to the heart of the matter. Bush didn't go there to "free" the people of Iraq, but, rather, he went to TAKE Iraq, and its oil. Even the Huckster can't deny it.
The Republicans think any country is theirs for the taking, even ours.
The convoluted history of the Iraq War run-up is one for the history books. Suffice it to say that on numerous occasions afterwards, George Tennent reports that he does not remember ever using the term "Slam Dunk", and that it was a second hand quote from Mr. Cheney on "Meet The Press" and from others looking to reassure the American press and public of the soundness of their decision making.
Having said that Americans should also know that largely the information regarding what CIA/DIA and NSA had produced regarding pre-war intelligence was largely doctored or disregarded in favor of the one source boiler-room operation over at the "Office for Special Plans" an adjuct of Secretary Rumsfeld's office.
I think in all fairness that CIA/FBI communication prior to 9/11 certainly could have been better, and that MI6/CIA/FBI collaboration could have been closer prior to the 7/7 incidents nevertheless, the plain reading of the declassified version of the NIE is completely traditional , and appears remenicient of the usual high quality work that normally comes out of these agencies.
We must simply be reminded that inter agency failures not withstanding that the free-elements here are in fact the recipients of this information, who consistently have mislead the US citizenry and are (in my estimation) criminally responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens.
While certainly high crimes tribunals would befit the various parties of the administration, the advocates of war in the private sector are the ones who richly deserve to be publicly eviscerated as far as I'm concerned, (rhetorically speaking of course).
I've found multiple books on the subject illuminating -
"The One Percent Doctrine"
"Imperial Hubris"
"Neoconservativism" - Kristol and Douglass (separate books).
These tend to most interestingly illuminate the racist policies our administrative branch has been operating under for the last several years now.
Sadly, we live in a day of politicized information. When I heard about the NIE release, which was before Huckabee did, I was hoping that it was true. I didn't take it as it was because news and information is politicized these days. Iran suspened their nuclear program in 2003... for a week? We don't know the full report or even how credible that report it is.
Huckabee does make a good point in that we took the WMD information as the truth so why should we be so quick to take this information in 100% as well. Pardon us for trusting our government. I would love for this report to be true and for the GOP to be dismantled due to this information, but I'm not making the mistake of jumping to conclusions right away. Go America.
Adam Aigner-Treworgy did not read the memo on this NIE story with comprehension. It's a stretch for him to quote Reagan's "trust but verify" in reference to those same agencies that do most of that verification. And weren't they verifying that information since August ?
America has fallen down that slope where no one in our government will trust its own intelligence unless it supports their own positions, viewpoints, biases and agendas.
And to Huckabee, how can any question about an important current event having been splayed all over the electronic and paper mediums be an 'ambush' question ?
Huckabee reminds me in many way of the Huckleberry who is currently in the White House: a good ole boy, not very curious and somewhat lazy. Bush rides his bike while Cheney makes policy; Huckabee plays his guitar. Like Bush, Huckabee is a political panderer. This was evidenced by his horrible decision regarding Wayne Dumond so that Arkansas repuglicans could take a slap at Clinton. Huckabee has shown me all I need to know and the answer is NO!
What is so demented is that the people who say 'trust but verify' fail to realize that our sixteen intelligence agencies ARE the verifiers. Who the hell is in a position to verify our entire intelligence community? That's absurd - as though some congressional hearing is going to get at some truth that the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus somehow missed - all the top secret materials, agents etc. etc. -- and throw in the international atomic energy commission - all those guys need to be verified too according to the right wing. i mean, what planet are these guys living on?
Question: Who is the least informed?
1) George Bush
2) Mike Huckabee
3) Fred Thompson
Bush would read the damn NIE if it just had a few more pictures in it, a comic strip or two, some baseball scores...
When did we become so exacting as a democracy that we actually expect our president to read?
Mike Huckabee will implode precisely because he is now geting close scrutiny that he escaped earlier. His support from the God Squad notwithstanding, Mr. Huckabee will turn out to be another affable dolt, much like Dubya, except that Mike can actually pronounce the word "nuclear."
Enough with the public displays of piety, chastity and/or religiousity; tell us how you're going to extract the US from Iraq, how you'll turn the economy around, how you'll combat global warming, how you'll deal with the lack of healthcare and how you'll heal the fractures among our fellow Americans!
Simply spooning pap, pablum and platitudes and claiming to be Jesus' Choice just won't do it.