a letter to undecided voters (from my roommates) (Score 1, Informative)

Hey all,

My roommates here at Harvard spent hours and hours this weekend doing research and writing a letter to undecided voters (especially in swing states). Since they spent so much time on this letter, I thought I'd pass it along to slashdot and see what all of you thought of it (and of course, please do pass it along to anyone you think would benefit from reading it). Hope all of you have a good week, and go vote!

-Sheel

What follows is a letter to undecided voters, expressing our belief that there are certain important members of the Bush administration whose critiques need to be heard. These people have made important statements that cannot be missed by anyone that wants to get the whole picture about this election.

Please send this to any undecided voters you know. The election is approaching fast, and we appreciate any help you can provide.

We're writing this letter to any person who is still undecided about this election and anyone who is willing to reflect upon the issues that will decide their vote. There are all kinds of partisan voices out there that are trying to convince you to vote their way. We're just as sick of this stuff as you are, but in the course of reading about the major issues of this campaign we've come upon a number of voices that have convinced us precisely because their arguments have nothing to do with partisanship. Their statements present verifiable fact, grounded in expertise. These authorities have informed our decision to vote against George W. Bush. However, we're not here to convince you that our decision is the right one. We want to encourage you to be aware of what these people have said, whatever effect it has on your vote. We believe it is a great responsibility for every voter to be well-informed before casting his or her vote.
The experts we cite, like Richard Clarke, General Eric Shinseki, and Greg Thielmann, are authorities on national security. They all worked in the Bush administration, and many have since left government service. All have made statements that contradict Bush policies in a fundamental way. We haven't included just anyone who quit the administration and who dislikes Bush's policies - there are such people in any administration. The people we've included are the experts on their respective issues, and they all served successfully under other presidents. We encourage you not to take us at our word, but to go to Google News and type in their names for yourself.
Perhaps the most important decision of the Bush administration was to invade Iraq. We're not arguing as to whether or not we should be there - this is not the issue, and we respect whatever position you have on this. The issue is the fundamentally flawed way in which they justified and carried out the war, and not whether democratizing Iraq is worth the cost or whether deposing Saddam Hussein has made us safer.
In the time leading up to the decision to invade, Greg Thielmann was acting director of the Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs, which was responsible for analyzing the Iraqi weapons threat for Colin Powell and the State Department. Thielmann served for 25 years in the State Department's Foreign Service.
In a PBS interview, Thielmann said, "As reluctant as I am to try to understand the motives of people using the intelligence, my bottom line on this subject is that while the intelligence community did not do a good job, in my view, in being very careful to be precise for both decision makers and for the American public, the primary blame is in the way that senior officials of the administration made statements -- which I can only describe as dishonest statements -- about the nature of what the intelligence was saying." He also stated, "[A]ll things considered, it's very hard for me to think of any example of systematic, across-the-board exaggeration and misleading statements about an important war and peace subject. Nothing quite matches what I've seen in the Iraqi WMD area in the last couple of years."
For example, in a speech to the UN Security Council, Colin Powell said, "Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. He is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries even after inspections resumed." CIA analysis said these tubes were parts for a centrifuge to enrich uranium. However, scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who enriched uranium for American bombs, explained that the tubes could not have been used for a bomb program. Around the same time, Thielmann's office discovered the tubes' dimensions perfectly matched an Iraqi conventional rocket, and concluded that this was the correct interpretation of the evidence. "This is one of the most disturbing parts of Secretary Powell's speech for us ... The aluminum was exactly, I think, what the Iraqis wanted for artillery," says Thielmann, who had reported this conclusion to the Secretary of State months before.
It's often said that the administration's justification for war was solidly grounded in the intelligence available at the time. However, Thielmann's group had the same information that everyone else did, and they came up with the correct conclusions, which directly contradicted the administration's eventual decisions. So, the intelligence and the information available did not justify the decision that was made to go to war. Colin Powell's own intelligence bureau said that Iraq did not present a WMD threat.
Thielmann said, "Senior officials made statements which I can only describe as dishonest. They were distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem more alarmist and more dangerous."

References:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/front line/shows/trut h/interviews/thielmann.html
http://www.cbsnews.co m/stories/2003/10/14/60II/mai n577975.shtml

Along the same lines, Charles Duelfer, as the man appointed by Bush to find WMDs in Iraq, has confirmed that indeed, there was no WMD capability - the State Department's intelligence bureau was right, and Bush in his State of the Union address was wrong. These findings are reported in detail in the Duelfer Report:
"While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG [Iraq Survey Group] judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad's desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered."
"In practical terms, with the destruction of the Al Hakam facility, Iraq abandoned its ambition to obtain advanced BW weapons [biological weapons] quickly. ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specific work for military purposes. Indeed, from the mid-1990s, despite evidence of continuing interest in nuclear and chemical weapons, there appears to be a complete absence of discussion or even interest in BW at the Presidential level."
"Iraq Survey Group (ISG) discovered further evidence of the maturity and significance of the pre-1991 Iraqi Nuclear Program but found that Iraq's ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after that date ... Initially, Saddam chose to conceal his nuclear program in its entirety, as he did with Iraq's BW program. Aggressive UN inspections after Desert Storm forced Saddam to admit the existence of the program and destroy or surrender components of the program."

Reference:
The Duelfer Report:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2 004/Comp_ Report_Key_Findings.pdf

Thielmann's revelation that the State Department was telling the White House directly that the WMD threat was nonexistent is crucial, because it leads to an important question that must be asked. Was there a flaw in the way the Bush administration made the decision to invade Iraq? Thielmann thinks so: "The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show."
As further illustration that there was indeed this type of flawed decision-making, consider the White House's association of Iraq with the war on terror and the 9/11 attacks. Richard Clarke is the former head of counter-terrorism at the White House, a registered Republican who served under four presidents, and he argues that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way the Bush administration made decisions regarding Iraq. His statements bear out Thielmann's observation that conclusions were decided prior to debate.
Richard Clarke described a conversation with Paul Wolfowitz, Bush's Deputy Secretary of Defense. "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Wolfowitz said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'
"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States.' "
Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraqwas supporting al Qaeda, ever."
Richard Clarke states, "The [Bush] administration has squandered the opportunity to eliminate al Qaeda....A new al Qaeda has emerged and is growing stronger, in part because of our own actions and inactions. It is in many ways a tougher opponent than the original threat we faced before September 11, and we are not doing what is necessary to make America safe from that threat."

References:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/terr orism/jan-june0 4/clarke_03-22.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/storie s/2004/03/19/60minute s/main607356.shtml
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ frontline/shows/inva sion/interviews/
http://www.informationclearingho use.info/article63 20.htm
(Book) Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies. Free Press, 2004.
(On Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/deta il/-/0743 260244/103-4084005-9976654?v=glance)

Once again, this doesn't have anything to do with whether or not you believe
Iraq or the US will be made better off by deposing Saddam Hussein, as that decision's been made and both major candidates are committed to carrying Iraq through to democracy. At issue is the Bush administration's ability to make honest decisions regarding our national security, and both the State Department's head of WMD analysis and the White House's head of counter-terrorism say that the administration has made these decisions in bad faith.
Thielmann and Clarke both illustrate, from their unique perspectives, that the administration was led to assert falsehoods not by simply being presented with a false assessment by the intelligence community, but rather through a flawed decision making process that caused the correct assessments to be ignored. This indictment by two top government officials leads us to conclude that the current administration makes even the most critical, expensive decisions irresponsibly. We strongly encourage you to explore everything these men have said and draw your own conclusions.
This picture of the administration's national security decision-making is further fleshed out by several sources that have discussed the actual handling of the war in Iraq: the planning that was done, and the way that it was carried out by the Bush administration. General Eric Shinseki was the Army Chief of Staff at the time the war was being planned.
Shinseki advocated sending many more troops for the occupation of postwar Iraq than Bush would eventually send. His testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on this topic reads as follows:
Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI): General Shinseki, could you give us some idea as to the magnitude of the Army's force requirement for an occupation of Iraq following a successful completion of the war?
Gen. Shinseki: In specific numbers, I would have to rely on combatant commanders' exact requirements. But I think --
Sen. Levin: How about a range?
Gen. Shinseki: I would say that what's been mobilized to this point - something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We're talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground- force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is disturbed (sic), all the normal
responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this.

Reference:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl ine/shows/inva sion/etc/script.html

Paul Bremer, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, said the same thing. The Washington Post reports, "In a Sept. 17 speech at DePauw University, Bremer said he frequently raised the issue within the administration and 'should have been even more insistent' when his advice was spurned because the situation in Iraq might be different today. 'The single most important change -- the one thing that would have improved the situation -- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout' the occupation, Bremer said." This finding is confirmed by Kenneth Pollack, an expert on Iraq who served in the CIA from 1988 to 1995, served on the National Security Council, and authored the book "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq." He writes, "Part of that failure lies in the size of the U.S. force in Iraq. There are not enough American and Coalition troops in Iraq -- and particularly not enough infantry, civil affairs personnel, and military police -- to provide the kind of security that is needed. If Generals Abizaid and Sanchez were authorized tomorrow to begin patrolling the streets, they probably would not have the troops to do it."

References:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy n/articles/A705 3-2004Oct4.html
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/200 40109faupdate8317 5/kenneth-m-pollack/after-saddam-assessing-the-rec onstruction-of-iraq.html

So, during the planning stages of the war, the Army Chief of Staff advised the administration of the need for many more troops than they ended up sending. Paul Bremer and others have now confirmed that the Bush administration is indeed mishandling this fundamental aspect of the occupation of Iraq.
We'd like to outline the conclusions that we draw from Thielmann, Duelfer, Clarke, Shinseki, Bremer, and Pollack. However, we should first say that much more important than our conclusions are your conclusions. We encourage people to do their own research. It is important for every person that casts a vote in this country to do so on a basis of good information. The distortion of WMD evidence in Iraq, the lack of focus on the war on terror and Al Qaeda, and the poor implementation of the war in Iraq are issues that are extremely crucial to us and our security, and are precisely the issues on which these men criticize the administration. Whether or not you think we should have invaded Iraq because of reasons other than WMD, it's important to see that the original justification for war was counter-factual. Whether or not you think we should still be in Iraq, it's important to see that it's not being handled properly. Finally, it is solidly established that Iraq had no connection to 9/11 and had no significant link to Al Qaeda. To us, the administration's actions in light of these facts are unacceptable. The voices of these experts have convinced us that we cannot re-elect George W. Bush. We encourage you to decide for yourself.

Once again, we appreciate any help in sending this letter to undecided voters you know. Thank you very much for your consideration.

Charles Frogner, Rohit Gupta, Nick Rozenblyum, and Peter Williams
October 31, 2004

Note: For non-partisan analysis, factcheck.org and snopes.com are good sources.