> At 03:35 PM 8/1/2003 -0700 Matt Grimaldi wrote: > >So then the President used information that ultimately > >came from French Intelligence, a country which his own > >administration has all but accused of having a conflict > >of interest wrt Iraq? This sounds worse than before. >
"John D. Giorgis" wrote: > > I love this. > > You get to nail Bush for not cooperating with our allies, > like the French. *AND* You get to nail Bush *for* > cooperating wth our allies, like the French. > Sorry, but I can't take your Catch-22 seriously. > I don't call using 3rd-hand soft info from France as "cooperating" with them. They didn't want the evidence to be used in the first place, and certainly didn't share the hard evidence with us, if there was any. If Bush hadn't used the evidence, the basic positions of the debate for and against invading Iraq would not have changed, and this particular facet would never have come up. Besides, why should Bush believe anything from France, over the objections of his own intelligence department, when he is suspicious of France's motives? If he's going to disregard them, why not *also* disregard soft evidence in the form of assurances passed through a 3rd party? Anything french, especially at the time the SOU was given, was tarred as suspicous by the administration and the media. Why should he take their assurances over his own CIA, and browbeat them into settling on a statement that is technically not untrue, yet misleading wrt the strength of the evidence supporting it. All this going into the most important and heavily reviewed speech he makes. It seems to me that the administration's standards should be getting tougher for things like this, not weaker. This is not a catch-22, but rather someone acting out of character. It suggests that he had an Agenda and anything he could get his hands on, regardless of its integrity, would be employed. -- Matt _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
