Rice is Right About "Enrichment" of Intelligence

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice committed an act of plagiarism on the September 28 edition of Fox News Sunday.

In response to a fair-and-balanced question, she acknowledged that “there was an enrichment of the intelligence from 1998 over the period leading up to the war.” Note the key word: “enrichment.”

Now read the following passage from my pre-war essay “The Evidence Bush is Withholding Weakens, Not Strengthens the Case for War” ( http://commondreams.org/views03/0128-08.htm ), in reference to anonymous national-security bureaucrats who had been complaining to reporters about how the president and his top aides, including Dr. Rice, were misrepresenting the available intelligence on Iraq:

“A Congress truly interested in getting to the bottom of the administration’s campaign of deceit — a campaign directed at its members and their constituents, not Saddam Hussein — could bring our well-informed but frightened bureaucrats out of the closet. Congress could put them under oath and on camera, and guarantee them protection from retribution. Congress could use their testimony to force higher-ups to testify. Step by step, Congress could establish the process by which the Bush administration ‘enriches’ clean information and turns it into dirty disinformation.”

I’m delighted that Dr. Rice has confirmed this intelligence “enrichment” program. That term, however, is MY intellectual property. Whenever she publicly expresses any variation of the word “enrich” in reference to intelligence information on Iraq, copyright law requires that she not only cite me as the originator but toss some greenbacks my way.

Speaking of green, those of you with a thumb that hue should have a pretty good idea of how enrichment works. Let’s say the soil in your garden no longer has the get-up-and-go to produce red-ripe tomatoes and beautiful roses. Well, nothing revitalizes deadbeat dirt like a load of manure from one of our bovine friends — the cow or the bull, for instance. A barrel-full of bull poop will put the bloom back on the rose and the color back in the tomato.

By the same token, heaping helpings of bull poop will do absolute wonders for dull, lifeless intelligence. Whether you’re a president delivering a State of the Union address to Americans or a secretary of state at the U.N. trying to woo the world, ample scoops of bull poop can help you grow support even in those hard-to-reach places — like the “liberal media.”

Should you run short of bull droppings for your speech, you can make up the difference with a few quality clumps of defector doo-doo. Over at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz and admitted-overstater Donald Rumsfeld made a killing spreading the stuff.

If you’re really desperate and have nowhere else to turn, you can always import a low-grade B.M. from the British P.M. — Prime Minister Tony Blair, that is. In mid-2002, Italian intelligence agents fed their British counterparts a steady diet of Niger yellowcake tales. The tasty treats were digested and collected, but not quite disinfected. Brit spooks packaged and perfumed the tales for Mr. Blair’s dossier on Iraqi WMD, but they still didn’t smell like anything you’d want to enrich a State of the Union address with.

President Bush is learning the hard way that once that stink is on you, it’s hard to get it off.

Bio: Dennis Hans is a freelance writer who has taught courses in mass communications and American foreign policy at the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg. Prior to the Iraq war he published “Lying Us Into War: Exposing Bush and His ‘Techniques of Deceit’” ( http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/02/12_lying.html ) and “The Disinformation Age” ( http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0303/S00011.htm ). He can be reached at HANS_D@popmail.firn.edu

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