Certainly looks like the WaPo blew it, and blew it big time, on the report about Doug Feith that I linked to and discussed yesterday: A Feb. 9 front-page article about the Pentagon inspector general’s report regarding the office of former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith incorrectly attributed quotations to that report. References to …
Faulty Intelligence
Certainly interesting: Intelligence provided by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith to buttress the White House case for invading Iraq included “reporting of dubious quality or reliability” that supported the political views of senior administration officials rather than the conclusions of the intelligence community, according to a report by the Pentagon’s inspector general. Feith’s …
Cooking Headlines 101
The headline: Pentagon says pre-war intel not illegal The backstory: Some of the Pentagon’s prewar intelligence work, including a contention that the CIA underplayed the likelihood of al-Qaida connections to Saddam Hussein, was inappropriate but not illegal, a Defense Department investigation has concluded. […] [Sen. Carl] Levin [D-Mich.] in September 2005 asked the inspector general …
Contractors
For various reasons I don’t automatically think that contracting government work is a bad idea. If a reasonably empirical analysis suggests that we would benefit from transferring a job to the lowest bidder then I’m all for it. So that’s not why it concerns me that the GOP has shunted government jobs to a record-breaking …
Blinded by Science
The Bush Administration is: A senior Bush political appointee at the Interior Department has rejected staff scientists’ recommendations to protect imperiled animals and plants under the Endangered Species Act at least six times in the past three years, documents show. In addition, staff complaints that their scientific findings were frequently overruled or disparaged at the …
Monday Thread
My time is limited today, but these deserve a wider airing: * The Army only recorded the serial numbers of just over 12,000 out of 500,000 weapons delivered to the Iraqi departments of Interior and Defense. No paper trail, nada. That means that any Iraqi who turns around and sells US heavy weapons to his …
A Metaphor
This pretty much says it all about the War in Iraq: $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found. The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to …