Notes

1. See the Washington Post, June 12, 2005.

2. See my article, "The Secret Way to War," The New York Review, June 9, 2005.

3. In an interview with Gwen Ifill on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, June 7, 2005.

4. See "The Downing Street Memo," the Washington Post, June 16, 2005; interview with Michael Smith, Washington Post online.

5. For example, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, commonly known as the Robb-Silberman Commission, notes that the executive order which established it "did not authorize us to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence they received from the Intelligence Community on Iraq's weapons programs." This prohibition, also included in the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee's report, derived, as the Times remarked on the report's release, "from the mandate [the President] gave it more than a year ago, when the White House feared the issue could affect the election." See Scott Shane and David Sanger, "Bush Panel Finds Big Flaws Remain in US Spy Efforts," the New York Times, April 1, 2005.

6. See, for publicly available documents, the excellent early report, "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications" (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003), and also John Prados, Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (New Press, 2004).

7. Even the Robb-Silberman report notes, in the words of an unidentified national intelligence officer, "a ‘zeitgeist' or general ‘climate' of policymaker focus on Iraq's WMD that permeated the analytical atmosphere" and "was formed in part, the NIO claimed, by the gathering conviction among analysts that war with Iraq was inevitable...." Elsewhere the commissioners conceded that "it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom." See the Report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, pp. 190 and 11.

8. The text can also be found widely online, including at downingstreetmemo.com.

9. See "President Reaffirms Strong Position on Liberia," July 14, 2003, available at the White House Web site.

10. See Michael Massing, "Now They Tell Us," the New York Review, February 26, 2004.

11. The exact number is 52 percent, an increase of nine points in three months. See The Washington Post/ABC poll, and the report by Richard Morin and Dan Balz, "Survey Finds Most Support Staying in Iraq," the Washington Post, June 28, 2005.

12. See Ron Suskind, "Without a Doubt," the New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.

Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker Staff writer and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, which collects his pieces on torture and Iraq that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. His work can be found at markdanner.com

This exchange will appear in the August 11 issue of the New York Review of Books

Copyright 2005 Mark Danner

Courtesy of TomDispatch.com

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