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Saturday, February 8, 2003
08:27 p.m.
Blair's plagiarised report - didn't Powell get it fact-checked?
Pondering the whole sorry mess, the point I keep coming back to is this:
I'm Secretary of State, making probably the most important speech of my life - the best bits seen by half a billion people . The purpose of the speech is to show that the claims my government is making about Iraqi past actions and future intentions are based on the exercise of sound and expert judgement in evaluating clear and compelling evidence. In other words, to impart credibility to the case for war that it was widely supposed to lack.
My President has asked me to pledge my reputation to stand behind the conclusions that I state. And I know certain of my senior colleagues will not be reluctant to exploit any difficulties arising in order to undermine my position in the Administration.
This said, I'm presented with a draft of the speech (a week in advance, say), which I read through and find that I'm supposed to refer to a report to be produced by HMG on various Iraq-related matters in the following glowing terms: I would call my colleagues' attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed yesterday, which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities.
I recall - how could I not? - that the last time that HMG released a report on Iraq (accompanied by much ballyhoo), it was, on mature reflection by those competent to judge, generally rated as not worth the paper it was printed on [1].
What do I do? Surely, I'm going to be putting some considerable effort into testing the assertions in the British paper. If he has the slightest sense, Powell will have, in addition his State Department officials, a private office of hungry young men (I suppose it would mostly be) whose primary loyalty is to him. Surely the first thing I, Powell, would do would be to fling my copy of the draft British report over to these guys and tell them to take it apart word by word and do their best to destroy its credibility before it destroyed mine.
(While I'm putting hapless CIA Director George Tenet - he of the unhappy two-shot - under the cosh to cross-check the report with intelligence held by the US.)
Clearly, nothing like that ever happened. Because, if Powell and his team had done one-tenth as good a job in preparing for this speech as they should have, they would have found HMG's report to be fatally flawed, and he would have omitted all reference to it in his big speech. (Depending on timing, his findings might even have got Blair to stop the report before it was issued.)
Which leads to the question, what sort of a Fred Karno's Army are they running over there that fails to take elementary precautions to safeguard the reputation of a key member of the team which, most likely, will be managing a war some time very soon? Does the incompetence lie only in a failure to check? Or also in a lack of expertise in the checking process sufficient to raise the questions necessary to finger the report as hackwork?
And what of the integrity of the rest of the Powell presentation? Were the tapped phone calls rigged up with a couple of Lebanese waiters from a DC restaurant? Or was the photo-reconnaissance (which was deliberately degraded, I believe, so as to make independent checking of the US interpretation of photos difficult, if not impossible) 1991 images doctored with Photoshop? How, when he cleared his throat at 1040 EST on Wednesday, could Powell have been sure they were not? Only by having made the sort of systematic investigation that would have fingered the UK report as a phoney.
All told, some might think that, in the light of the latest information, the glowing assessments of Powell's performance such as this from Fred Kaplan run a tad on the naive side......
- A cursory search brings up this and this and this: one would hope the research tools at State are a little more sophisticated!
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