Lots of talk at Michelle Malkin: "About that National Intelligence Estimate" with comments from many other bloggers.
Obviously, without seeing the NIE, one cannot know if the NIE actually says what is "reported" by the mainstream press. I heard one newscaster on the WA DC news radio show report that we are now into our second generation of terrorists. That was reported as news, not opinion.
While reading Michele Malkin’s post, it struck me: This was done in April and just got leaked now!? What is this the September preempt of the October Surprise? Something smells
!
I was also struck by another possibility - in my one college logic course the professor talked about inductive logic fallacies. One of them was, "post hoc, ergo propter hoc." or this thing followed that thing, therefore it must have been caused by that thing.
What I’m thinking about here is that people can conclude that the threat of terrorism has grown because we invaded Iraq and miss the point that the terror threat was growing in any event. The threat of terrorism against Western interests, especially American interests, was growing not because of the invasion of Iraq, but because the terrorists had been emboldened by our lack of response to previous attacks.
Makes you wonder how the news and even the Intelligence Community would have reported on events in the Second World War. We broght Pearl Harbor on ourselves? Don’t execute the Doolittle raid for fear of enraging the Japanese and making them attack us in other parts of the Far East? Oh, wait, they were going to do that anyway.
