The Washington Post on the latest Frontline documentary:
“Truth, War and Consequences” paints administration officials as dissemblers as well as arrogant conquerors who paid no heed to warnings about the collapse of security after the Iraq war. Whatever your politics and opinions about the war, this documentary is must viewing for those who seek to understand why the early scenes of liberation have given way to nearly daily reports of attacks against occupying troops.
If you missed this excellent 90 minute film, you can watch it online starting Oct. 11th. Transcripts of the interviews are online already. In one important interview, Greg Thielmann, a former director of the Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office at the State Department’s Intelligence Bureau, accuses the White House of “systematic, across-the-board exaggeration” of intelligence:
The conclusion that I ultimately came to was that this was a matter of, as I’ve called it, faith-based intelligence. Instead of our leadership forming conclusions based on a careful reading of the intelligence we provided them, they already had their conclusion to start out with, and they were cherry-picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it that fit their overall interpretation. Worse than that, they were dropping qualifiers and distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem more alarmist and more dangerous than the information that we were giving them.
