www.thornwalker.com/ditch/dtw_debates_lte.htm


If you haven't read Mr. Wright's three-part article yet, here it is, from the top:
"The great debates: Aiming beer bottles at the telescreen."

Comment?

 

To the editor ...

Re: Same intelligence, Mr. Wright says "it was cooked up by Paul Wolfowitz's crew over in the Pentagon."

But isn't it true, that it actually is the same intelligence that Bill Clinton used to justify bombing the aspirin factory? Isn't it the same intelligence that led John Kerry to say "we need to disarm Sadam Hussein" during the Clinton years?

Re: Mr. Wright's "fictional Bin Laden-Saddam connection," everyone agrees because the evidence is overwhelming — including written documentation — that Sadam was connected to al Qaeda. What the 9/11 report said was that there was no evidence proving Sadam was specifically involved in the airplane attacks of 9/11.

So, Mr. Wright's report is full of inaccuracies. Were they purposeful, to try and fool me — just like Kerry and Bush try to fool me?

I also wonder how Mr. Wright could write — with indignation — about the debates, and not mention that Nader and Badnarik were shut out? Isn't that's the big story. That only the two major parties may control our Government — and all other ideas are shut out of our political system?

The bottom line is that both parties engage in the exact same policies once elected. It's only during the "debates" in an election year that they pretend to have different view points on issues.

Mr. Wright should take a look at the Libertarian party. All we need is 15 percent of the vote — and other ideas will be heard.

It was an entertaining piece though — and Mr. Wright made a lot of really good points I hadn't heard elsewhere.

I have bookmarked Mr. Wright's site — and am actually a new fan (in spite of my criticism!) I'll be reading everything there!

Have a good day!

John Dieter
October 20, 2004
 

Mr. Wright replies

I must admit I'm a bit confused about what Mr. Dieter means when he says it was the "same intelligence" used by Clinton. It was not the same "intelligence." It was different "intelligence," even though it was just as rotten and dishonest. Seymour Hersh wrote about how the "intelligence" was "cooked up" — my own term — by Wolfowitz's grisly crew in the Pentagon in his New Yorker article, "The Stovepipe":

Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book The Threatening Storm generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was "dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

"They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information," Pollack continued. "They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn't have the time or the energy to go after the bad information."

And also:
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long complained about the limits of American intelligence. In the late nineteen-nineties, for example, he had chaired a commission on ballistic-missile programs that criticized the unwillingness of intelligence analysts "to make estimates that extended beyond the hard evidence they had in hand." After he became Secretary of Defense, a separate intelligence unit was set up in the Pentagon's policy office, under the control of William Luti, a senior aide to Feith. This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials.
Feith, by the way, is a close friend and subordinate to Wolfowitz. In other words, this separate intelligence unit, dubbed the "Office of Special Plans" (how's that for an Orwellian title?) "cherry-picked" the information that supported their agenda and suppressed the rest, without regard for its possible accuracy or inaccuracy. That's "cooking up," in my book.

As far as "everyone agreeing" about a Saddam-bin Laden connection, I'm confused about that too. The only connection I've learned about was completely superficial — bin Laden's people asked Saddam for some help, and Saddam said no. That hardly qualifies as "being connected." Exactly what is that "overwhelming evidence"?

As to Nader and the other "candidates," I didn't write about them because I was writing about the debates. I didn't regard their being "shut out" as a major story, because it's just more of the same nonsense we see all the time. If Mr. Dieter hasn't noticed, The Last Ditch is dedicated to the proposition that the entire "democratic process" is a complete sham, that the two major "parties" are simply court factions, and that elections affect the Permanent Regime somewhere on a scale from little to not at all.

In keeping with that proposition, I'm very doubtful that the Libertarian Party can accomplish anything — except lend legitimacy to a thoroughly corrupt and vicious regime by participating in elections that will always be rigged to prevent those "other ideas" from "being heard."

October 20, 2004


To Mr. Wright's article.

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