I Cogitate

For those of you who dispute that President Bush operates out of a 'build your own' determinitive perspective, evidence continues to arrive that he has does exactly that.

His decision-making process operates thusly: make a decision, form policy and then create and collect 'facts' to 'support' such a decision/policy.

It's reminiscent of going to a restaurant where diners can select the ingredients for an omelette or crepe (probably shouldn't use any French items in this article). The patrons know what they want, it's just a matter of selectively building it.

Remember the item in Ron Suskind's October 17, 2004 New York Times Magazine article where Suskind and a senior White House aide butt heads:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

May. 05, 2005
British memo indicates Bush made intelligence fit Iraq policy
By Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - A highly classified British memo, leaked in the midst of Britain's just-concluded election campaign, indicates that President Bush decided to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by summer 2002 and was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy.

The document, which summarizes a July 23, 2002, meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair with his top security advisers, reports on a visit to Washington by the head of Britain's MI-6 intelligence service.

The visit took place while the Bush administration was still declaring to the American public that no decision had been made to go to war.

"There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable," the MI-6 chief said at the meeting, according to the memo. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD," weapons of mass destruction.

The memo said "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

The White House has repeatedly denied accusations made by several top foreign officials that it manipulated intelligence estimates to justify an invasion of Iraq...

A former senior U.S. official called it "an absolutely accurate description of what transpired" during the senior British intelligence officer's visit to Washington. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

A White House official said the administration wouldn't comment on leaked British documents.

Afraid to tell the truth
A secret memo publicized in Britain confirms the lies on which Bush based his Iraq policy. Why has it received so little notice in the U.S. press?
By Joe Conason
May 6, 2005

...There is a "smoking memo" that confirms the worst assumptions about the Bush administration's Iraq policy, but although that memo generated huge pre-election headlines in Britain, its existence has hardly been mentioned here...

...the most important lines in the July 23 minutes are those attributed ts Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, who in spy jargon is to be referred to only as "C." The minutes indicate that Sir Richard had discovered certain harsh realities during a visit to the United States that summer:

"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the U.N. route ... There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

At the same meeting, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw confirmed Sir Richard's assessment:

"The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

...When Bush signed the congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force against Iraq on Oct. 16, 2002 -- three months after the Downing Street memorandum -- he didn't say that military action was "inevitable." Instead, the president assured Americans and the world that he still hoped war could be avoided.

"I have not ordered the use of force. I hope the use of force will not become necessary," he said at a press conference. "Hopefully this can be done peacefully. Hopefully we can do this without any military action." He promised that he had "carefully weighed the human cost of every option before us" and that if the United States went into battle, it would be "as a last resort."

...But "C" heard something very different from Blair's allies in Washington.

According to him, Bush, determined to oust Saddam, planned to "justify" a preventive war by tying the terrorist threat to Iraq's WMD arsenal -- and manipulating the intelligence to fit his policy instead of determining the policy based on the facts.

That is precisely what happened, and precisely the opposite of what the president vowed to do. Not only did Bush and his top aides lie about their approach to the alleged threat posed by Iraq, but they continued to lie about that process in the war's aftermath.

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