Common Dreams: Memo for the President

[Raster]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0824-32.htm

Published on Wednesday, August 24, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

Memo for the President
by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

SUBJECT: Recommendation: Try a Circle of "Wise Women"

By way of re-introduction, we begin with a brief reminder of the analyses we provided you before the attack on Iraq. On the afternoon of February 5, 2003, following Colin Powell’s speech before the UN Security Council that morning, we sent you our critique of his attempt to make the case for war. (You may recall that we gave him an “A” for assembling and listing the charges against Iraq and a “C-“ for providing context and perspective.) Unlike Powell, we made no claim that our analysis was “irrefutable/undeniable.” We did point out, though, that what he said fell far short of justification for war. We closed with these words: “We are convinced that you would be well served if you widened the discussion beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”

To jog your memory further, the thrust of our next two pre-war memoranda can be gleaned from their titles: “Cooking Intelligence for War” (March 12) and “Forgery, Hyperbole, Half-Truth: A Problem” (March 18). When the war started, we reasoned at first that you might had been oblivious to our cautions. However, last spring’s disclosures in the “Downing Street Memo” containing the official minutes of Tony Blair’s briefing on July 23, 2002—and the particularly the bald acknowledgement that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of war on Iraq—show that the White House was well aware of how the intelligence was being cooked. We write you now in the hope that the sour results of the recipe—the current bedlam in Iraq—will incline you to seek and ponder wider opinion this time around.

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http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0824-32.htm