Node Of Evil - Fair And Balanced Reporting

Monday, March 03, 2003

 
This article over at The Register quoting the Observer points to where our intelligence resources are being used -- the United Nations. U.S. governments have a history of bugging political rivals and even allies, and in this case Condalezza Rice ordered the bugging of U.N. member states' offices so the U.S. could get a leg up on the competition. There was an interesting interview on NPR this morning with the authors of "Bush's Brain", a book about Karl Rove, in which they posit that Karl was responsible for a number of dirty tricks that helped his candidate win elections. In other intelligence news, we've got this story about Senator Bob Graham's experiences with the 9/11 inquiry commission, and how the truth about CIA/FBI intelligence faliures has been covered up. All of this has the Node's head spinning with visions of the Nixon whitehouse, with its wiretaps and secrecy and general mistrust of everyone. As the full story of what we know and don't know about Iraq continues to surface (see Atrios for some more intelligence-related news), it appears that we've got a lemon on our hands. We're diverting intelligence resources that could be used to figure out where those weapons of mass destruction actually are hiding to the task of getting political intelligence on our allies in the Security Council and around the U.N., which wouldn't be necessary if we had decent intelligence on Iraq in the first place (i.e., we'd be able to provide several smoking guns to prove that military action was required immediately). For links to the Observer articles (and a short discussion thread), click here.

Andrew 9:56 AM : |

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