Medals of Myopia

Bush Bremer Frank, originally uploaded by Wazdat!.

The Self-Important Honor Themselves.

Ye see yon birkie ca'd 'a lord,'
Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that?
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a cuif for a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
His ribband, star, an' a' that,
The man o' independent mind,
He looks an' laughs at a' that.*


* Robert Burns "A Man's A Man For A' That"

So Dubya decided to honor his first class stupidity, for he said that it is good. One hundred thousand dead Iraqis didn't attend this noble function. They were busy thinking of all of the interrupted celebrations that they died at, and the ones that they will not be attending. But it's allright for Bremer, Franks, and Tenet. How easy it must be to get these medals. Let's see, why not invade a country? But then I'd want make sure that I had a sufficient amount of men to hold the damn thing with, not just take it! And I'd also make sure that no one from the enemy army goes home unitl he surrenders his weapon, and is properly paroled after at least two years as a POW! God, what a disorganized coward I am! And speak of intelligence, where did Tennant learn the spy trade, the George B. Mcllellan School of Espionage? Did he get the address for the "Reds Under The Beds School of Geopolitics" from a comic book? Let us review just to make sense, just what did these gents do to deserve their honors.

L. Paul Bremer - Chief Civil Administrator of Iraq, whose duties were to: Bring order to the country, ensure the economic stability of Iraq, and introduce democratic reforms into a new Iraqi government. And so, to these ends what does he do? Knowing he doesn't have enough men to continue a protracted war he virtually negotiates a surrender where he disbands the Iraqi Army, and allows the ex-soldiers to keep their arms! And what great economic plan of recovery is in place for the Iraqi people? The one that the neocons sneak in thinking to brainwash shell-shocked civilians into accepting unrestricted, unregulated capitalism on their persons, and international control over their economy. Hail the new economic dumping ground! He fired tens of thousands of government bureaucrats, teachers, laborers, practically the whole infrastructure of Iraq, and farmed out the job of rebuilding Iraq to foreigners! You know, SOMEBODY built those Presidential Palaces, airfields, schools, mosques, bases. You didn't need Haliburton to come over and put together your electrical grid when local boys could do it cheaper.

From Disinfopedia:

"Even among the religious opposition, philosophies and actions differ. Many Sunni Arabs are convinced that America is there to obliterate Iraq's identity and turn it into an economic colony. Some have chosen to confront these alleged U.S. machinations politically. Others have chosen the route of insurgency."

And now Mr. Tenet: From Disinfopedia:

Long before the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States, Tenet focused on the growing threat of terrorism, particularly from Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist group, and the nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran. On September 15, 2001, at Camp David, he presented the Worldwide Attack Matrix, an outline of an anti-terrorism campaign in 80 countries. However, the CIA was unable to prevent the attacks and this is seen as a major failure.


Furthermore the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq following the 2003 invasion by US, British and international forces has proved unproductive and no major stockpiles of WMD were found following the occupation of the country. The case of the invading governments for a legitimate war against Iraq had been based largely on the threat of WMDs in the hands of Saddam Hussein, supposedly on the strength of reliable intelligence assessments, including evidence that could not itself be made public. Thus a failure subsequently to find any banned weapons or programs became a considerable embarrassment for Tenet and the CIA.


The resignation of both Tenet and CIA Deputy Director James Pavitt in June 2004 is speculated by some to be directly related to this failure to find the WMDs that the United States used to justify invasion. For example, Admiral Stansfield Turner (retired), director of the CIA under President Carter, said (Boston Herald, June 4, 2004): "I think the president feels he's in enough trouble that he's got to begin to cast some of the blame for the morass that we are in Iraq on to somebody else and this was one subtle way to do it."


According to another report, by veteran investigative journalist Bob Woodward in his book Plan of Attack, Tenet privately lent his personal authority to the intelligence reports about WMDs in Iraq. At a meeting in December 2002 the is said to have assured the President that the evidence against Saddam amounted to a "slam dunk case".

And what about the "yellowcake" forgery?

The documents had long been suspected as frauds by US intelligence at the time of these 2003 presentations. In early 2002, Ambassador Joseph Wilson had been dispatched to Niger to investigate the documents. On February 22, 2002 Wilson reported to the CIA and State Department that the information was "unequivocally wrong" and that the documents had been forged.


On March 7, 2003, only days before the invasion, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released results of his analysis of the documents. Reportedly, it took IAEA officials only a matter of hours to determine that these documents were fake. Using little more than a Google search, IAEA experts discovered indications of a crude forgery, such as the use of incorrect names of Niger officials. As a result, the IAEA reported to the U.N. Security Council that the documents were "in fact not authentic."

"Under certain circumstances, the exposure of a covert government agent would violate the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years. The act applies itself to a person who "learns the identify of a covert agent and intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States." [2] The Novak column did describe Plame as an "operative", but did not use the description "covert". Novak has stated that the CIA made "a very weak request" that he not name Plame publicly. WSJ.com columnist James Taranto suggests that this indicates the absence of "affirmative measures to conceal" necessary for a violation of the law. [3]


The matter is currently under investigation by the Justice Department and the FBI. Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation in December 2003. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald currently heads the investigation. Because the Justice Department is a part of the Bush administration, some believe that rapid and effective action is unlikely.


David Corn had predicted that the investigation would die in the CIA -- that George J. Tenet would protect the Bush White House through his purported loyalty to it. Anonymous political weblog Just One Minute (JOM) writes : "Evidently not. One guess - Mr. Tenet, pondering Bush's declining poll numbers and faced with in-house annoyance, decided to do the right thing. One presumes that, with Congress back in town, Mr. Tenet checked with his supporters on both sides of the aisle before proceeding." Both Mark Kleiman and Josh Marshall have made recent comments on the matter, according to JOM."

And General Franks?

How could he calmly accept a plan miuscalculates the amount of troops necessary to hold a country, as well as invade it?

This from Disinfopedia:

"Following Turkey's decision to deny any use of its territory, the U.S. was forced to abandon a planned simultaneous attack from north and south, so the primary bases for the invasion were in Kuwait and other Persian Gulf nations. One result of this was that one of the divisions intended for the invasion was forced to relocate and was unable to take part in the invasion until well into the war. Many observers felt that the U.S. devoted insufficient troops to the invasion, and that this (combined with the failure to occupy cities) put them at a major disadvantage in achieving security and order throughout the country when local support failed to meet expectations."

And again from Wikipedia:

"Looting took place in the days following. It was reported that the National Museum of Iraq was among the looted sites. The assertion that US forces did not guard the museum because they were guarding the Ministry of Oil and Ministry of Interior is apparently true. According to U.S. officials the "reality of the situation on the ground" was that hospitals, water plants, and ministries with vital intelligence needed security more than other sites. There were only enough US troops on the ground to guard a certain number of the many sites that ideally needed protection, and so, apparently, some "hard choices" were made."



Wikipedia - George Tenet


Disinfopedia - Occupation Forces in Iraq


Disinfopedia - Iraqi Insurgency


Wikipedia - Duelfer Report



Wikipedia - 2003 Invasion of Iraq


Wikipedia - Valerie Plame