house of cards fallingThis morning, someone at the non-partisan Government Accountability Office leaked its "strikingly negative" Iraq War assessment in an attempt to get the information contained therein out to the public before the White House and Pentagon could run interference on it. Has it gotten that bad, that people interested in telling the truth have to do cloak-and-dagger end runs around the Administration?

Why, yes, it has.

But in case you were at all doubtful that the White House and its enablers will spin even the most basic facts and data for political purposes, let me remind you of the things former Surgeon General Richard Carmona had to say about his tenure under the Bush administration:

[A]lthough most Americans believe that their Surgeon General has the ability to impact the course of public health as “the nation’s doctor,” the reality is that the nation’s doctor has been marginalized and relegated to a position with no independent budget, and with supervisors who are political appointees with partisan agendas. Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological, or political agenda is ignored, marginalized, or simply buried.

But surely they wouldn't go in there and start mucking around with the actual data and micro-managing the SG's reporting, would they? Oh, you betcha!

He said the administration often edited his speeches for politically controversial content and encouraged him to attend internal "political pep rallies," the Wall Street Journal reports (Meckler, Wall Street Journal, 7/11). In addition, Carmona said he was required to mention Bush three times on every page of his speeches and was asked to make speeches to promote Republican political candidates, the New York Times reports. Carmona did not disclose the names of the administration officials who pressured him to support a political agenda over a scientific one. However, he said the officials included assistant HHS secretaries and top political appointees outside the department (Harris, New York Times, 7/11).

So what if people's lives are endangered? BushCo knows that there's no power on god's green earth like PR. It's how they run domestic policy and it's how they're running their apocalyptic cock-up of a war.

When Jerry McNerny came by to mumble and equivocate last week, I asked the following:

TRex View this users Facebook profile says:

August 24th, 2007 at 6:21 pm

Also, with regards to the security situation in Iraq, the NIE scuttlebutt is that there basically is no Iraqi government. Reading in between the lines of the paper-thin “positive” talking points, it appears that yes, there is a group of people who meet and call themselves the Iraqi government (when they aren’t on vacation), but that basically the area that used to be known as Iraq has dissolved into a loose aggregation of violent caliphates, each one with its own warlords and militia.

It was pretty clear to me that in spite of the O'Hanlon set's insistence that the NIE was chock full of good news, that what we were hearing was basically the extended dance mix of the Iraq Study Group's "grave and deteriorating" assessment of Iraq from November, but with some happy talk inserted as window dressing for the benefit of the overly credulous wahoos up in the cheap seats.

A couple of days ago came proof that I was right.

Last week, a declassified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq said there has been “measurable but uneven improvements in Iraq’s security situation,” in the midst of what was otherwise a gloomy and depressing report. Indeed, the NIE added that, despite some security improvements, severe violence in Iraq was likely to continue over the next six to 12 months.

As it turns out, the NIE may have intended to go further, but Gen. Petraeus gave the report a little touch-up.

The NIE, requested by the White House Iraq coordinator, Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, in preparation for the testimony, met with resistance from U.S. military officials in Baghdad, according to a senior U.S. military intelligence officer there. Presented with a draft of the conclusions, Petraeus succeeded in having the security judgments softened to reflect improvements in recent months, the official said.

In other words, intelligence agencies were poised to paint an even bleaker picture of Iraqi’s security situation, but Petraeus apparently lobbied for wording such as “measurable but uneven improvements.”

I think it might be time to call up a quote from Holly Hunter in Broadcast News.

Paul Moore: It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you're the smartest person in the room.
Jane Craig: No. It's awful.

My sentiments exactly.

So, yeah, Petraeus, the Pentagon, and the White House are all conspiring to polish the turd that is the Clusterf*&k in Iraq in hopes that the Democrats and everyone else in Washington will swoon and cave in when Petraeus presents his assessment of the war in September. Seriously, is there anyone who actually believes that he's going to say anything other than, "We're making real progress in Iraq. We've turned a corner. Things are getting better all the time. Now, we're going to need another fifty billion dollars and if any of you have a problem with that, you're an Al Qaeda loving traitor who hates our troops and wants to see them slaughtered and humiliated in the field."?

No wonder the GAO felt like they had to sneak this report out under the radar. The truth about Iraq is too scalding to be openly spoken without inflicting major damage on the administration and all the craven, leg-humping sycophants like Brian Baird and Joe Lieberman who keep insisting that Iraq is just few months, a few thousand more soldiers, and fifty billion dollars away from being a vacation paradise.

What, you're still not convinced? Well, then clearly you just don't want to believe. You've got Bush Derangement Syndrome and Hate America. You want our troops to lose. Even "anti-war liberals" like Mike O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack agree, things are just fucking peachy in Iraq and all the truck bombs and mountains of dead are wee speed-bumps on the road to Peace, Liberty, and Democracy for the Whole Region. The DoD told them so. It must be true.

Just ignore those veterans and the members of the 82nd Airborne behind the curtain. They don't know what they're talking about.