Pundit Pap (APJ): "The CIA did it... yeah, that's the ticket!"

In light of the recent announcements by many in the Bush administration that "the president should not have used that piece of intelligence in his State of the Union address," and in hopes of clearing his legacy completely, former President Bill Clinton has issued a statement: "I should not have had sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky."

Well, that should clear that up.

An absurd supposition?

Why?

If a sitting president can wipe the slate clean at a time when he was trying to convince the American people that invading Iraq was in our national security interests and misleading the country into a war in which our men and women as well as thousands of Iraqi civilians would die, certainly an admission of having sex should put an end to the diatribe that still fills the AM dial.

It seems like the entire administration is in lockstep over this little "oversight."

Donald Rumsfeld testified in front of a congressional hearing last week saying that he just found out about the Niger report being false in the last couple days. And he said it with a straight face.

White House Chief of Staff Jon Lovitz... yeah... that's the ticket!

Is Saturday Night Live alum Jon Lovitz running this administration?

more...

http://www.americanpolitics.com/20030713punditpap.html

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=151012&category=NATIONAL&BCCode=HOME&newsdate=7/13/2003

Planners faulted in Iraq chaos
Officials describe a secretive circle of senior civilians that shut out advice of CIA, State Department experts

By JONATHAN S. LANDAY and WARREN P. STROBEL, Knight-Ridder
First published: Sunday, July 13, 2003

WASHINGTON -- The small circle of senior civilians in the Defense Department who dominated U.S. planning didn't prepare for the chaos and violence embroiling postwar Iraq, according to senior government officials.
The officials didn't develop any real postwar plans because they believed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms and Washington could install a favored Iraqi exile leader as the country's leader. The Pentagon civilians ignored CIA and State Department experts who disputed them, resisted White House pressure to back off from their favored exile leader, and had no backup plan when their scenario collapsed amid increasing violence and disorder.

Today, American forces face instability in Iraq, where they are losing soldiers almost daily to escalating guerrilla attacks, the cost of occupation is exploding to almost $4 billion a month and withdrawal appears untold years away.

The story of the flawed postwar planning process was gathered in interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior government officials.

"There was no real planning for postwar Iraq," said a former senior U.S. official who left government recently.

Ultimately, the responsibility for ensuring that post-Saddam planning anticipated all possible complications lay with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, current and former officials said.

The Pentagon planning group, directed by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, the department's No. 3 official, included hard-line conservatives who had long advocated using the American military to overthrow Saddam. Its day-to-day boss was William Luti, a former Navy officer who worked for Vice President Dick Cheney before joining the Pentagon.

The Pentagon group insisted on doing it its way because it had a visionary strategy that it hoped would transform Iraq into an ally of Israel, remove a potential threat to the Persian Gulf oil trade and encircle Iran with U.S. friends and allies. The problem was that officials at the State Department and CIA thought the vision was badly flawed and impractical, so the Pentagon planners simply excluded their rivals from involvement.

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