When you make up your mind on lickety-split perception alone: In what parallel universe does that qualify as critical thinking? Ann Baker’s article beautifully captures what critical thinking is and is not:
Indeed, nowadays, we tend to take in and repeat whatever the values and beliefs of those around us have rather than forming our own independent thought and stopping to organize and evaluate the information we are receiving.
You tell me — just what would it take to get this much straight?
After 20 years, no less!
By Design
America Remains Mired in the Murky
What does it say to you: That on evidence claimed as components to build a nuclear bomb — the “debate” was hijacked by 10-second sound bites? Shouldn’t any debate establish what the debate is actually about? What does it say about a country that can’t even establish that much on a matter of this magnitude?
As I said in my doc:
All the sarin gas shells in the world would have no bearing on the aluminum tubes and other intel, but loyalists to logical fallacies are not burdened by the inconvenience of FACT.
They will nitpick over pebbles while refusing to even glance at the mountain of evidence that crushes their “convictions.”
— Richard W. Memmer: Act V
For the sake of argument: Let’s say Saddam had full-blown active WMD programs on chemical & biological weapons. The tubes would still be a lie — whether the war would have been justified in that scenario or not. I’ll go one further: Let’s say he had a uranium enrichment program in operation as well, but that the rotors were carbon fiber — not aluminum.
Once again, the tubes would still be a lie.
Getting lucky in finding something you didn’t know about — does not absolve you from a case that was woven out of whole cloth.
The road to reality is blocked by detours designed to keep you going in circles.
Purveyors of poppycock reroute you with narratives that avoid detail like Black Death. The way out is to start with an inconsistency or two that’s narrow in scope and take the trail where it leads.
To ascertain the truth on any topic: If you’ve got something concrete to go on — that’s your point of entry. By all means, keep the door open in every direction. But by nailing down the definitive first, it paves a clearer path to all the rest. This country does the exact opposite on everything:
Lumping it all together and never even approaching where you should have started in the first place:
“And now, even now” . . .
The cat . . . TOTALLY out of the BAG!
America’s in perennial pursuit of ideologies: Warfare waged with galactic levels of baggage & bullshit bolstered by:
opinions lightly adopted but firmly held . . . forged from a combination of ignorance, dishonesty, and fashion
— Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom
For instance:
You’ve probably heard of yellowcake: How about uranium hexafluoride?
Does calling someone a “Bush hater” strike you as a valid counter to that question? Never mind this story goes straight to the top with who’s in the White House right now — on very specific culpability to boot. How so?
How I’d love to live in a world where you’d ask not out of party-line pursuits — but because it’s on the trail to the truth.
My surgical specificity in this clip puts this lie in its place in 5 minutes alone.
Trillion Dollar Tube
To take a story this complex and convoluted and boil its essence down to a few minutes was no small feat:
Imagine what I did with 160
“There is no skimming over the surface of a subject with [Hamilton]. He must sink to the bottom to see what foundation it rests on.”
— Major William Pierce (Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton)
Wouldn’t it be absurd to share that quote if my clip contained nothing but trite talking points? Some circles are not burdened by squaring their walk with their talk. They seem to think that advertising virtue equates to embodying it.
Anybody can rail on Rice, Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, and Powell. But the real story is in the machinery behind the scenes:
Including people and places you’ve never heard of.
As I said in my doc:
Notice how he turned the entire issue around to casually claim the exact opposite of reality even seven months after the war started. Perhaps the most telling moment in that interview was when Feith said, “Some people took one view; some people took another” — once again with the false equivalence of “experts” that was so craftily perpetrated by Powell.
As for that mathematical absurdity about “50 times the price” — the tightened tolerances added just a few extra dollars per tube. The sheer sloppiness in his answers alone should speak volumes about Feith’s integrity.
And the more you look, the worse it gets.
— Richard W. Memmer, Act III
Half the country took the word of professional know-it-alls over nuclear scientists. And when your camp came up empty on WMD — you just bought more bullshit from the same people who sold you the first batch:
Shrewd!
Preach Responsibility and Take None!
You can’t seem to comprehend that I don’t care what damage the truth inflicts upon politicians of any brand. I have this crazy idea that across-the-board accountability is always in the best interests of the nation.
As for my frustration — I have this thing about people who regurgitate nonsense in the face of overwhelming evidence that counters their baseless beliefs.
— Richard W. Memmer: Act II
For instance:
Never mind this . . .
And this . . .
When you can peddle this . . .
AFTERBURNER WITH BILL WHITTLE, September 13, 2011: But since we now know that the fear of the invasion caused Saddam to destroy his stockpiles before the invasion, WMDs were not in fact found. And you’ve been told that this means that the war was based on a lie — despite the fact that every intelligence agency in the world thought that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
Those tortured talking points need to be put out of their misery:
And I know of no one better for that than Greg Thielmann. I emailed him to ask how he would respond to Whittle’s common claim, and one of the most telling aspects to his answer was the technicality of literal truth in the manufactured myth.
Greg Theilmann should know — he had been Powell’s own Chief of Intelligence when it came to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Thielmann acknowledged that nearly everybody thought that Saddam had hidden away some mustard agent left over from the 1980s, but he added that the Bush administration did not make its case for war on the strength of suspicions that Iraq retained World War One-era munitions.
It’s the second half of that statement that Whittle & Company conveniently ignore.
— Richard W. Memmer: Epilogue
Thielmann elucidates one fine point after another for over a page: Germans on the unreliability of Curveball. I.A.E.A. on the tubes and “uranium from Africa” reports. D.I.A. reversing its position on the drones before the invasion. And as Thielmann talked about on P.B.S. FRONTLINE, a senior Australian intelligence analyst resigned in protest over the fabricated intelligence. . . .
Thielmann also pointed out that few intelligence agencies had independent means of evaluating U.S. intelligence. He brings up the infamous Downing Street Memos that explicitly state that:
Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action — justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.
“The British said so”, Mr. Sowell?
Stirring Defense
That you even think that a story so complex and convoluted could be explained away so easily — is a monumental problem all by itself. And without even the most basic insight into anything on this story:
That camp has a habit of glossing over global issues of catastrophic consequences with . . .
“Seems”
It’s impossible to overstate how egregiously uninformed these people are on this issue. Shouldn’t we be addressing what the disagreement is about before you decide on what’s a “long way” and “willfully disregarding evidence”?
Sowell never addressed the marquee evidence used to sell the war (or anything else of substance of this endless saga of absurdity).
If that’s not “willfully disregarding evidence,” what is?
Jan 22, 2014 . . .
I emailed Greg Thielmann to ask him the following question:
If you were in an interview, how would you respond to someone raising the claim that ‘every intelligence agency in the world thought Iraq had WMD?’
The following is his response to that question:
From: Greg Thielmann
Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2014 5:03 PM
To: Rick Memmer
Subject: Re: fairly quick question for you
Rick:
Happy New Year!
Returning to that thrilling Iraq saga of yesteryear, here’s how I would answer the question you posed at the end of your message: To say that “every intelligence agency in the world thought Iraq had WMD,” is misleading to the listener/reader.
First, few intelligence agencies had independent means of evaluating many of the claims and analyses made by the US intelligence community; they had to rely on the huge intelligence establishments of their close allies, and would run risks of future intelligence sharing if they were too skeptical of US claims.
What does it mean to assert that Denmark also thought Iraq had WMD?
Secondly, the statement about Iraqi WMD would be literally true because nearly everybody thought that Saddam had hidden away some mustard agent left over from the 1980s, largely because the verified destruction numbers did not add up to the known production numbers. (We now know that some of the CW was destroyed in secret after the 1991 war.)
But the Bush administration did not make its case for war on the strength of suspicions that Iraq retained WWI-era munitions that would not critically impede a modern military.
It waved the red flag of nuclear weapons program reconstitution with “mushroom clouds” imagery, files of anthrax, and reports of mobile anthrax laboratories and nerve gas allocated to front-line troops.
The Bush administration and its UK co-dependent further spun questionable intelligence judgments by dropping careful qualifiers about confidence levels and contrary evidence in the information provided to the public.
The Downing Street Memo’s infamous characterization about US “fixing” the “intelligence and the facts” around the policy is an implicit acknowledgement that it was a witting coconspirator in the distortions rather than an independent validator of US conclusions. Moreover, there was certainly not consensus between all foreign intelligence agencies on some of the critical WMD claims — “uranium from Africa,” mobile BW labs, the U.S. on the use of aluminum tubes, the U.S. (in Fall 2002) on CW/BW warheads for drones, etc.
For example, the Germans warned the US Government in Dec. 2002 that it could not validate the claims of its own source on the mobile BW labs, “Curveball.” IAEA experts expressed strong skepticism about the alleged use of the aluminum tubes and the veracity of the “uranium from Africa” reports.
The DIA itself reversed its position on the drones before the invasion.
Moreover, the appropriate period of time for critical scrutiny is not the weeks leading up to the UK’s “dodgy dossier” in Sept. 2002 and the unclassified summary of the US NIE in Oct 2002.
It is the 12 weeks between the return of the UN inspectors in November 2002 and the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The truth is that all evidentiary legs of the stool collapsed during that period of time, but by then, the books were closed by the US Congress, most of the press and the American public, whatever the evolving views of other foreign intelligence agencies may have been.
Regards,
–GT
Greg Thielmann
Senior Fellow
Arms Control Association
Greg Thielmann said the following in 2013:
It will be up to Iraqis to debate whether their country now has a brighter future than it otherwise would have had without foreign invasion and occupation in the first decade of the new century. But it is uniquely incumbent on Americans to understand who and what were responsible for an enterprise that proved so costly in terms of U.S. lives lost, money spent, international reputation tarnished, and a campaign against al Qaeda diverted.
America just casually moved on . . .
I didn’t — as I knew then what few know now:
The immeasurable value in the willingness to be wrong, understanding why, and looking to learn from it. And that not doing so — increasingly compounds the consequences of no accountability.
Look around!
You think the end justifies the means — I say your means make damn sure it will never end. I took a look-see for what others have said along those lines. Mine’s minor league compared to this:
If that title doesn’t tell you something about my commitment to objective scrutiny, what would?
The rotor speed required to separate uranium isotopes doesn’t care who’s president, and when it comes to ascertaining the truth, neither do I. In order to maintain such speeds, the material properties of centrifuges are as critical as it gets. You don’t need to interview a world-renowned nuclear scientist to figure that out, but I like to be thorough.
To claim that Iraq WMD wasn’t a lie should be like saying we didn’t land on the moon. As I wrote and produced the most exhaustive documentary ever done on WMD, I would know.
People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results. They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar — and I’m not and never have been familiar.
— Michael Burry, The Big Short
If that were not overwhelmingly true, this site would not exist. I would not have been practically spit on for 20 years of telling undeniable truth of mathematical certainty: Painfully obvious deception shaped everything you see today. No rational person would repeatedly deny the undeniable, and just minutes into anything I’ve written on this issue — you should know something’s not right.
But you find it’s with me . . .
[As] I’m not and never have been familiar
If I came across this and hadn’t done my homework, on the title alone — my first thought would be “I must be missing something pretty big!”
America has other ideas:
Button your lip and don’t let the shield slip
Take a fresh grip on your bulletproof mask
And if they try to break down your disguise with their questions
You can hide hide hide behind Paranoid Eyes
I put it all on a silver platter for you 10 years ago:
When I Saw the Writing on the Wall
I took on the automatons of the time (Left & Right). No one listened — and lo and behold:
Automatons exponentially multiplied.
Those times were tame compared to today.
The toxicity of venom has been taken to a whole other level with pride. We’re not talking about your love of talking about your love affair with facts — we’re talking about having a history of objective scrutiny that shows your commitment.
And for people who flaunt their love for facts — you sure have a helluva lot of hate for irrefutable facts that fly in the face of your calcified convictions. Anyone entering this discussion with sincerity — would come away realizing that there is no debate and there never was.
They just made it up:
Red Team Paper: Nevertheless, by September 2001, the matter had more or less been settled. There was no serious debate within the intelligence community. One stubborn WINPAC analyst does not constitute a debate.
Richard W. Memmer: Then 9/11 happened — and whad’ya know, the tubes were resurrected.
— Act I
On that note:
