Frontline on PBS began the two-part series last night and continues tonight. If you missed it like me, you can watch it online.
From Reuters:
In dozens of interviews and with meticulous fact-gathering, “Frontline” makes a convincing case for two important aspects of the war. First, it was primarily orchestrated by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Bush was only “the decider” insofar as he signed off on their plans, often paying no heed to Secretary of State Colin Powell and others.
Second, practically every plan, idea, assumption and strategy advanced by Cheney and Rumsfeld was incorrect, once Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled. The level of incompetence uncovered by “Frontline” is stunning.
Right wing nut, Jules Crittenden, displays an ad for the program she calls a “sloppy hatchet job.”
New York Magazine is more judicious:
It is of course impossible to say how much Jane Mayer of The New Yorker; Elizabeth Bumiller and James Risen of the New York Times; and Karen DeYoung, Dana Priest, and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post have been edited, but their remarks here, as we used to say of mainstream magazine articles in the sixties, manage mostly to make the obvious less obscure. One wonders where these sardonic scribblers were during the run-up to the war…
The vice-president and the secretary of Defense do their best to undermine the CIA, nobody talks to Condoleezza Rice, everybody lies to Colin Powell, and the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator Cofer Black dreams of “heads on pikes … flies crawling across their dead eyes.” Nor are alpha males squeamish. From the Afghanistan wet dream of warlords on horseback to the Guantánamo nightmare of dog cages and waterboarding, they’ll do what it takes. If torture is a problem, get a memo from Gonzales. The president will sign anything.
The conclusion airs on WUNC tonight at 9:00.
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