Military straight talk

A recent diary in DailyKos pointed to Sunday's interview of General Anthony Zinni on Meet The Press. The entire interview is well worth reading (transcript-- the first interviewee was Sen. McCain; skip halfway down the page).

Zinni says resignations should "start with" Mr. Rumsfeld-- there are clear implications that they shouldn't end there. Interviewer Tim Russert gave a quote from a book co-authored by Zinni:

“In the lead-up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw, at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence, and irresponsibility; at worst, lying, incompetence, and corruption.”

And a bit later, Zinni said:

. . . those that have been responsible for the planning, for overriding all the, the efforts that were made in planning before that, that those that stood by and allowed this to happen, that didn’t speak out. And there are appropriate ways within the system you can speak out, at congressional hearings and otherwise. I think they have to be held accountable.

That's one military source. A reader of that Kos diary also pointed to another interview transcript with Lt. Col. (ret.) Karen Kwiatkowski, who had been a Pentagon intelligence analyst. [Update: See this DailyKos diary, too.] She figures in a current documentary film, Why We Fight, and testifies to the deceit and manipulation of intelligence regarding the (pre-programmed) justification for the invasion of Iraq.

I was actually against the war when I was in the Pentagon, and the reason had to do with what I felt to be lies, not so much lies told to the American people, but lies, in fact, promulgated on us inside the Pentagon. I worked in Near East-South Asia Policy. Doug Fyffe was our boss, over me and 1,000 other people in Policy. The Office of Special Plans had been formed from our office, staffed with political appointees, and they were producing, in the fall of 2002 and ’03, and the winter and spring of 2003, talking points for us to use in our own papers, and those talking points did not match the intelligence that we had previously used to put together our papers and our work. So, I felt that we were being lied to.
Now, it was made worse when I saw the president and vice president make speeches and heard what they were saying because it seemed as if they were also speaking from these same talking points. And so, that means, in my view, they were also lying to the American people.

And later, she names names.

Really, how much more evidence is needed? I wonder if Sen. Feingold is up to another censure resolution? Is anybody in power even listening?