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A pet rat is suckling on my nipple
Feb. 6th, 2004 11:54 amWrong 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.