Sometimes the MSM gets the story right, and even understates a case against the Bush administration. This seems to be the case in Michael Isakoff’s A Wicked Curveball in Newsweek.
Isakoff reports the doubts of a Pentagon analyst about an Iraqi émigré source nicknamed “curveball”.
”The CIA had evidence that Curveball was a shameless fabricator months before Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the Iraqi's reports before the United Nations. But in the Feb. 4, 2003, e-mail—written a day before Powell's U.N. appearance—the senior CIA official sharply rebuked one of those skeptical analysts. "Keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," the CIA official wrote.” Isakoff left out the next sentence: However, in the interest of Truth, we owe somebody a sentence or two of warning, if you honestly have reservations."
When a writer refers to a “Higher Power” with a circumlocution using upper case letters rather than naming the power, it us usually out of a fear of offending. I’ve provided my own speculative account for this here.
It gets more interesting. Isakoff reports “Yet the new panel conspicuously omitted the "Powers That Be" e-mail that appeared in the Senate report. In fact, commission leaders seemed to not even know of its existence. "What e-mail are you talking about?" Judge Lawrence Silberman, the chairman, testily responded when asked by a NEWSWEEK reporter why it wasn't included in the report. "I'm mystified."
The Judge would not have been mystified if he had read the Washington Post on July 13, 2004 .
David Kay had made the point that the Iraqi émigré community wanted the administration to believe that the WMD threat existed.
As Kay reported, the intelligence community was determined not to repeat its previous error of underestimating the Iraqi WMD threat. This combined with Saddam’s deceptive behavior and a mindset flowing downward from high-level administration officials made account for the CIA email. The only thing we don’t know is the identity of the unnamed “Powers that Be”.
Judge Silberman's mystification and the President’s award of a Medal of Freedom to George Tenet give us a clue.
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