"Dot Con," a secret CIA Task Force assembled after 9/11, was instructed to connect the dots, wherever they might lead. According to information released by the 9/11 Commission, the Task Force occupied a windowless room in the northwest section of Washington DC. Populated by four junior research-reading bureaucrats, the group was largely forgotten for months, until plans for the Iraq war were put on the front burner.
The Commission reports that the "Dot Con Task Force did little useful work for six months after 9/11. From the information we have seen, their office was more like a romper room than a serious research institute. We have rough sketches showing a line of dots connecting the Vice President's nose to a particular area of the President's anatomy. Another sketch showed the connection between Saudi oil money and the trouser pockets of the 9/11 hijackers. Still another one showed Christ showering thunderbolts and dots from the heaven's on top of Islam's head.
The walls of the romper room were filled with dots connecting other dots, like stars in the heavens. Pluto was connected to Polaris which was connected to bin Laden's turbin which in turn was connected to Mickey Mouse. The ceiling of this playpen looked like a universe of dots that had become road kill after an Abrams tank wandered by. The floor was embossed with a giant mural showing the Republican Congress clapping like seals after the President had given a late afternoon speech on the dark philosophy of Hegel. In our opinion this was a shocking waste of taxpayer money.
But that's not the worst of it. When Bush decided to go to war (after he had already decided), someone remembered this group and asked the members where the dots led. The Dot Con Task Force had only twenty four hours to get it dots right. The time was more than enough. They simple drew an enormous numbers of dots connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and its cells in two hundred other countries. The group embellished the dotting by connecting the interior dots into a shape of WMDs. Held up to the light the chart hinted at the embossed figure of a god-like figure emerging from a burning Bush. When moved, the dots said "Mission Accomplished."
The Commission thinks, if this is the quality of research used to justify the Iraq war, then the Americna people have been conned."
An art gallery in New York has offered $1 million for the original dot con sketches. The Task Force members, who are still employed by the government, sold the sketches and donated the proceeds to the Bush reelection campaign, minus their 15% commission.
Posted by Chuck at April 29, 2004 02:15 PM | TrackBack