Ned Hodgman

At a certain point, ignoring evidence of a truth you don’t want to believe becomes morally reprehensible.  Ignoring the best information available on a given question becomes a matter of personal responsibility.  Now, individual citizens who have led our country astray must face the facts on their own time and in their own hearts and minds. The question for Understanding Government is how the opinion of agency experts – people doing their jobs with the best tools available — can beat back opinions derived through ideologically-driven wishful thinking at the top of the executive branch.

An April 6, 2007 article by R. Jeffrey Smith in The Washington Post makes clear how the paragons of Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department – Rumsfeld himself, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Wolfowitz’s deputy Douglas Feith (and obviously a host of staffers who worked for these men), made their decisions about Iraq’s ties to Al Qaeda in the face of the facts.  They were joined in this imaginative exercise by the people running the show at the White House – namely Vice President Cheney and his top staffer I. Lewis Libby.   

By mid-2002, both the CIA and the Defense Department’s own intelligence arm, the DIA, had stated in plain English that Iraq was not cooperating in any notable way with Al Qaeda.  “Overall, the reporting provides no conclusive signs of cooperation on specific terrorist operations,” the CIA reported in June 2002.  The DIA reached a similar conclusion. 

But Wolfowitz had written Feith in January that “we don’t seem to be making much progress pulling together intelligence on links between Iraq and Al Qaida,” and giving him three days to start pulling.  By July 2002, Feith had built up enough steam to note that the CIA’s views “’ought to be ignored’”, a convenient enough way to dismiss the work of hundreds of analysts and people in the field.  Feith’s willingness to ignore the work of trained government specialists went right up the line.  After all, Feith was often cited as “smart,” “bright,” and Rumsfeld stated in an AP interview with Barry Schweid, “without question, one of the most brilliant individuals in government” and “one of the intellectual leaders in the administration.” Maybe his impressive mind made it easy for him to ignore specific recommendations from the nation’s top intelligence organizations.  Why bother with government intelligence when you have so much of your own?

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