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A pet rat is suckling on my nipple
Wrong species, wrong sex, Monte.. I may feed you, but I am not your mother.
Well, haven't things become interesting on the Hutton Inquiry et. al. front? Increasingly it becomes obvious that Hutton was certainly the wrong man to lead the inquiry, not just professionally, but because of his past history. To me, this requires yet another rereading of Hannah Arendt's opening chapter in "Crises of the Republic" entitle "Lying in Politics", but I've been saying that for over a year now.
The basic line of thinking is this. Intelligence services are, at the end of the day, bureaucrats. Yes, they do have institutional interests and they do seek to maintain their funding and relative institutional power. They may even occassionaly engage in falsehoods to protect their funding and power. But in the main, they tell their masters the truth of their research.
"Lying in Politics" portrays how the intelligence services consistently informed the US governments accurately about the situation in Vietnam, but how their information was misused and ignored in favour of public relations and sectional powers within the government: "That concealment, falsehood and the role of the deliberate lie became the chief issues of The Pentagon Papers, rather than error miscalculation, and the like, i smainly due to the strange fact tyhat the mistaken decsions and lying statements consistently violated the astoundly accurate factual reports of the intelligence community.."
It has been my constant proposition for over a year that this is the case with Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction. I believe the professional intelligence agents told the truth to their respective governments on Iraq and their weapons of mass destruction and I believe that the respective government deliberately lied to their population about the information they received.
This is of course not new. Gabriel Kolko recites in The Vietnam War reconsidered how it has been a feature of US politics in the post-wwII era (and obviously beforehand one imagines). What is interesting is that political leadership in the US has introduced its own political intelligence organization, the "Office of Special Plans", bypassing the more "neutral" civilian ones, whom of course, Bush, Blair and Howard blamed for fault intelligence.
Evidently sick of being used as a political football, it seems that even the CIA intends to fight back. The bottom line is clear. It was not the intelligence services that failed the world on Iraq - it was the decision makers.
I really know too much about intelligence services than is healthy. Seriously, it will get me into a lot of trouble one day, I'm sure...
In other news, I'm finishing the Asia-Pacific Journalism Centre website today (hopefully) after the director completely changed his mind about the layout (yeah, thanks). I've also picked up another employer on the website design front - Arte Moris, the art school in East Timor. Pays peanuts, but it's for the aesthetic good.
This weekend I'm off to Wangaratta to meet up with my old friend Glenn Kneebone. We're planning on co-authoring a book - tentative title is "The Messiah Complex", a study of both negative (godlike delusions) and positive (redemtive convictions) aspects. Speaking of which, a member on the convert_me community, started deleting all my replies to his posts apparently because found my criticism of his "prophecies" disconcerting. However, through the force of many, the moderators and the rest of the community came out on my side. I mean what's the point of a religious debating group if you can't take a bit of polite criticism?
I should also be meeting up with tabouli today to discuss contributions to an Asian names database, but our email correspondence has been hampered by dodgy mailservers.. Hopefully it will sort itself out.
Well, haven't things become interesting on the Hutton Inquiry et. al. front? Increasingly it becomes obvious that Hutton was certainly the wrong man to lead the inquiry, not just professionally, but because of his past history. To me, this requires yet another rereading of Hannah Arendt's opening chapter in "Crises of the Republic" entitle "Lying in Politics", but I've been saying that for over a year now.
The basic line of thinking is this. Intelligence services are, at the end of the day, bureaucrats. Yes, they do have institutional interests and they do seek to maintain their funding and relative institutional power. They may even occassionaly engage in falsehoods to protect their funding and power. But in the main, they tell their masters the truth of their research.
"Lying in Politics" portrays how the intelligence services consistently informed the US governments accurately about the situation in Vietnam, but how their information was misused and ignored in favour of public relations and sectional powers within the government: "That concealment, falsehood and the role of the deliberate lie became the chief issues of The Pentagon Papers, rather than error miscalculation, and the like, i smainly due to the strange fact tyhat the mistaken decsions and lying statements consistently violated the astoundly accurate factual reports of the intelligence community.."
It has been my constant proposition for over a year that this is the case with Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction. I believe the professional intelligence agents told the truth to their respective governments on Iraq and their weapons of mass destruction and I believe that the respective government deliberately lied to their population about the information they received.
This is of course not new. Gabriel Kolko recites in The Vietnam War reconsidered how it has been a feature of US politics in the post-wwII era (and obviously beforehand one imagines). What is interesting is that political leadership in the US has introduced its own political intelligence organization, the "Office of Special Plans", bypassing the more "neutral" civilian ones, whom of course, Bush, Blair and Howard blamed for fault intelligence.
Evidently sick of being used as a political football, it seems that even the CIA intends to fight back. The bottom line is clear. It was not the intelligence services that failed the world on Iraq - it was the decision makers.
I really know too much about intelligence services than is healthy. Seriously, it will get me into a lot of trouble one day, I'm sure...
In other news, I'm finishing the Asia-Pacific Journalism Centre website today (hopefully) after the director completely changed his mind about the layout (yeah, thanks). I've also picked up another employer on the website design front - Arte Moris, the art school in East Timor. Pays peanuts, but it's for the aesthetic good.
This weekend I'm off to Wangaratta to meet up with my old friend Glenn Kneebone. We're planning on co-authoring a book - tentative title is "The Messiah Complex", a study of both negative (godlike delusions) and positive (redemtive convictions) aspects. Speaking of which, a member on the convert_me community, started deleting all my replies to his posts apparently because found my criticism of his "prophecies" disconcerting. However, through the force of many, the moderators and the rest of the community came out on my side. I mean what's the point of a religious debating group if you can't take a bit of polite criticism?
I should also be meeting up with tabouli today to discuss contributions to an Asian names database, but our email correspondence has been hampered by dodgy mailservers.. Hopefully it will sort itself out.
no subject
Yeah - I've been feeling rather sorry for the CIA the last year or so, which isn't a situation I'm familiar with ;-)
Oh, and don't forget the outing of Valerie Plame as a high-level CIA operative, shortly after her husband accused the Bush administration of lying about WMDs in Iraq. I can't imagine George Tenet would've been too happy about that...
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They're now sure (http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/02/17/National/Cheneys.Staff.Focus.Of.Probe-598606.shtml) it was Cheney's office that was responsible for the leak.
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Some media commentators believe there are very good reasons for this (e.g., Chomsky, whom I've been reading a lot of recently). Of course, despite the empirical backing of what they say, they're considered crackpot conspiracy theorists by ummm... yeah, the establishment..
Hmmm... Almost seems like more evidence, doesn't it?
On conspiracy theories...
(Example: rather than consciously thinking "The Plame affair could hurt us, let's distract them with a bit of nipple", Rupert & co. convince themselves that it just isn't that important, and then they report what they believe. It's easier to persuade others of what you've already persuaded yourself.)
The result of this, again all IMHO, is that conspiracy theories are often right about the effects of this influence, but commonly wrong about the mechanism.
Although one of my favourite quotes recently - I don't remember the source, though I think it was on 'Making Light': "I resent the current administration for making me feel like a crackpot conspiracy theorist". Sometimes, there really are deliberate conspiracies.
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Interesting about Hutton's background, isn't it?
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This journal is a testimont to my use of relative links in the wrong places.
Give it another go. It's the inquiry itself.
no subject
Like all good public servants the intelligence services feed the political leadership those parts of the information that supports the policies it has decided upon. The job of the higher levels is only to filter the information and tailor it to fit the policy. The idea that public servants should take the rap for bad policy is the antithesis of democratic government.
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I suspect that they assumed that the intelligence services were their natural (or rather, institutional) allies and were therefore an easy target to pass on the rap. It is interesting they've turned around so stridently...
The Intelligence Community
1) The Puzzle Palace
2) The Body of Secrets (outstanding follow-up to the above -- details Your Pine Gap)
3) The U.S. Intelligence Community
4) a subscription, to AWST (aka Aviation Leak -- famous Cold War publication that was translated en route to Moscow AND still provides excellent insights into "developments" ;) -- i get it here in Prague along with this (really!).
see, if we ever met up for drinks someday/somewhere, we'd have a lot more than just Pedestrian Wireless Stuff to kibitz about.. ;)
Re: The Intelligence Community
Hey, thanks a lot for the links. I'll follow them up and give a report back on what I think.
see, if we ever met up for drinks someday/somewhere, we'd have a lot more than just Pedestrian Wireless Stuff to kibitz about.. ;)
Indeed! Prague is a good location to talk about spooks ;-) There are possibilities...