Experts Deny Bush Claims Of Violence Drop In Iraq

The U.S. military top brass–who lied to Americans to get us into Iraq–now appear to be lying to us to keep us there.Experts Deny Bush Claims Of Violence Drop In IraqBy Cliff Montgomery – Sept. 7th, 2007The Bush Administration’s contentious claim that there has been a sharp decrease in Iraqi violence in recent months is rejected by numerous experts both inside and outside the U.S. government.They declare that the American military’s underlying statistics for Bush Administration claims are questionable at best, and selectively deny any numbers which do not fit George W. Bush’s pre-arranged script for Iraq.Such lying is of course what got us into Iraq in the first place. Douglas Feith, the former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, is the man whom many say is the principal  architect of the false intelligence which first conned America into Iraq.In other words, the false intelligence which got us into Iraq primarily came from a member of the U.S. military’s top brass.A February 2007 review by the Defense Department Inspector General (DoD IG) clearly stated that Feith’s office did not provide a mere intelligence review on Iraq, but instead “developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaida relationship–which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community–to senior decision makers.””This condition,” the report continued, “occurred because of an expanded role and mission of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from policy formulation to alternative intelligence analysis and dissemination.”The IG’s report also found that “the CIA and DIA disavowed any ‘mature, symbiotic’ relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida,” a pretended relationship which was one of Feith’s major falsehoods.So the U.S. military top brass–who lied to Americans to get us into Iraq–now appear to be lying to us to keep us there.Violence reduction in Iraq is the current centerpiece of George W. Bush’s claim that this week’s war strategy is somehow working. But many experts who’ve examined all the U.S. government’s statistics on Iraqi violence accuse American military brass of again cherry-picking the data which best suits their bosses’ political hopes. That the data are primarily classified can only aid such half-truths.”Let’s just say that there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree,” said Comptroller General David Walker to Congress on Tuesday during a discussion on the release of a new, rather damning Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on Iraq.Senior American military brass denied the accuracy of the primarily negative GAO report. Perhaps tellingly, the GAO is well-known as one of the few Bush Administration agencies which  retains a fair degree of independence from the Duce in the White House.In what may be an even more telling gesture, military brass claim the GAO wrongly utilized a ‘flawed’ statistical methodology–which is employed by both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), perhaps two of the most experienced American intelligence agencies.So U.S. military brass are claiming that some of our most expert American intelligence departments–including the DIA, which is the Pentagon’s own intelligence agency–doesn’t know how to read the intelligence on Iraqi violence as well as they. Douglas Feith had claimed the same thing…Many conclusions from this so-called ‘flawed’ methodology were mirrored in August’s disheartening National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq.Among the worst problems documented by the NIE?  The clearly escalating state of war between competing Shi’ite militias in southern Iraq. The violence has taken over the southern port city of Basra, which last month resulted in the murder of two provincial governors.A Baghdad-based spokesman for the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) recently told The Washington Post that such killings are not counted by U.S. military statisticians.”Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances,” the spokesman told the Post, “we do not track this data to any significant degree.”The December 2006 report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group likewise identified a “significant underreporting of violence” by Bush administration officials, adding that “a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the sources of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the data base.”The report declared that “good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.”University of Michigan Middle East specialist Juan R.I. Cole agrees that most independent studies “do not agree with Pentagon estimates about drops in civilian deaths.”Last week the Associated Press (AP) tallied 1,809 civilian deaths for August alone, which would make it the highest monthly body count this year, according to AP figures. The wire service says that 27,564 Iraqi civilians have been murdered since AP began its data collection of Iraq war civilian deaths in April 2005.Like what you’re reading so far? Then why not order a full year (52 issues) ofe-newsletter for only $15? 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