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but what size was the font?
Confirmation that Bush wasn't worrying about the details of uranium in Niger. The New York Times reports that the CIA's 93-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraqi WMD was boiled down to one page for President Bush. Naturally, the Senate would like to see it, and the White House doesn't want to cough it up.
It's hard to say that Bush was lying if he simply couldn't be bothered to hear what his people had to say, and saw his job as simply repeating whatever they stuck into the State of the Union. I guess it's easy to be a "firm" leader if that means making sure that you don't ever learn enough to change your mind.
- A National Intelligence Estimate is not an ordinary report. It marks the one occasion when the Central Intelligence Agency warrants its name, acting as a central entity that pulls together the assessments of all the myriad intelligence departments, noting where they agree and where they differ. Most NIEs are produced on an annual basis. Occasionally, the CIA is asked to produce what used to be called a "special" NIE. The 2002 estimate in question, titled "Iraq's Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction," was such a document. It was ordered so that the president could decide, in an informed manner, whether to go to war. The president is the main consumer of the NIE; it is written entirely for his benefit. To shrink the thing into a single page—to remove all distinctions between certainty and guesswork—is to evade the whole point.
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“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
Last edited by Tyrone Slothrop; 07-14-2004 at 07:49 PM..
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