In an address before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council today, Congresswoman Jane Harman, the ranking democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HiPSI), described how after study of 19 volumes of pre-war intelligence, she believes "group think" warped the administration and intelligence community's Iraq intelligence assessments. "A troubling example of groupthink, as we are coming to learn, was the unquestioned assumption that the failure to prove that Saddam Hussein destroyed weapons of mass destruction after 1991 was proof that they still existed." Harman called for reform to start at the top: "Quite frankly, this willingness to learn lessons should start at the top. The President should lead the effort to improve his intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. I urge him in his State of the Union address next Tuesday to acknowledge the problems and outline specific steps to fix them." Read the whole thing here.

In his address to the same council on Wednesday, Vice President Cheney championed the administration's policy of preemptive war: "Our national security strategy also recognizes that the doctrines of deterrence and containment, which served us so well during the Cold War, are not sufficient to meet the threat of terrorism. It's hard to deter an enemy that has no territory to defend, no standing army to counter, and no real assets to destroy in order to discourage them from attacking you. Containment is meaningless in the case of terrorists. And neither containment nor deterrence offers protection against rogue regimes that develop weapons of mass destruction and are willing to pass along those weapons secretly to a terrorist on a suicide mission.

"Given these realities, there can be no waiting until the danger has fully materialized. By then it would be too late. And so we are waging this war in the only way it can be won -- by taking the fight directly to the enemy."

You can read Cheney's speech here.

Posted by Laura at January 16, 2004 06:20 PM