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| 2003/11/2-3 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:10906 Activity:very high |
11/2 So you all read this right?
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact
and here Seymore Hersh gives an interview on it:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?031027on_onlineonly01 - danh
\_ Read what? Maybe you'd like to give a short summary before we
all rush off to read the link? Your name on the URL is not enough.
\_ Look, deleting a post because your response was overwritten by
some jackass not using motdedit is not helpful. |
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| www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact HERSH How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraqs weapons. Issue of 2003-10-27 Posted 2003-10-20 Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administrations prewar assessment of Iraqs weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years worth of reports by the CIA Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily, he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went on, was that the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraqs nuclear-weapons programs, were far more accurate than the CIA estimates. Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was, the official said. If you look at them side by side, CIA versus United Nations, the United States agencies come out ahead across the board. In addition, there were widespread doubts about the efficacy of the United States inspection teams, whose operations in Iraq were repeatedly challenged and disrupted by Saddam Hussein. Iraq was thought to have manufactured at least six thousand more chemical weapons than the United States could account for. And yet, as some former United States inspectors often predicted, the tons of chemical and biological weapons that the American public was led to expect have thus far proved illusory. As long as that remains the case, one question will be asked more and more insistently: How did the American intelligence community get it so wrong? Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the governments customary procedures for vetting intelligence. A retired CIA officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reportssensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authoritiesa process known as stovepipingwithout the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny. The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematicand potentially just as troublesome. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them. They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information, Pollack continued. They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didnt have the time or the energy to go after the bad information. The Administration eventually got its way, a former CIA official said. The analysts at the CIA were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenetthe CIA directorfor not protecting them. A few months after George Bush took office, Greg Thielmann, an expert on disarmament with the State Departments Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, was assigned to be the daily intelligence liaison to John Bolton, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control, who is a prominent conservative. Thielmann understood that his posting had been mandated by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who thought that every important State Department bureau should be assigned a daily intelligence officer. Bolton was the guy with whom I had to do business, Thielmann said. We were going to provide him with all the information he was entitled to see. Thats what being a professional intelligence officer is all about. But, Thielmann told me, Bolton seemed to be troubled because INR was not telling him what he wanted to hear. Thielmann soon found himself shut out of Boltons early-morning staff meetings. I was intercepted at the door of his office and told, The Under-Secretary doesnt need you to attend this meeting anymore. When Thielmann protested that he was there to provide intelligence input, the aide said, The Under-Secretary wants to keep this in the family. Eventually, Thielmann said, Bolton demanded that he and his staff have direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign-agent reports and electronic intercepts. In previous Administrations, such data had been made available to under-secretaries only after it was analyzed, usually in the specially secured offices of INR. The whole point of the intelligence system in place, according to Thielmann, was to prevent raw intelligence from getting to people who would be misled. Bolton, however, wanted his aides to receive and assign intelligence analyses and assessments using the raw data. In essence, the under-secretary would be running his own intelligence operation, without any guidance or support. He surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get CIA information directly, Thielmann said. In a subsequent interview, Bolton acknowledged that he had changed the procedures for handling intelligence, in an effort to extend the scope of the classified materials available to his office. I found that there was lots of stuff that I wasnt getting and that the INR analysts werent including, he told me. Bolton told me that he wanted to reach out to the intelligence community but that Thielmann had invited himself to his daily staff meetings. There was no place for INR or anyone elsethe Human Resources Bureau or the Office of Foreign Buildings. There was also a change in procedure at the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy. In the early summer of 2001, a career official assigned to a Pentagon planning office undertook a routine evaluation of the assumption, adopted by Wolfowitz and Feith, that the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, could play a major role in a coup dtat to oust Saddam Hussein. They also assumed that Chalabi, after the coup, would be welcomed by Iraqis as a hero. An official familiar with the evaluation described how it subjected that scenario to the principle of what planners call branches and sequelsthat is, plan for what you expect not to happen. Whats Plan B if you discover that Chalabi and his boys dont have it in them to accomplish the overthrow? When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the studys exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads, the official told me. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime had been a priority for Wolfowitz and others in and around the Administration since the end of the first Gulf War. For years, Iraq hawks had seen a coup led by Chalabi as the best means of achieving that goal. After September 11th, however, and the militarys quick victory in Afghanistan, the notion of a coup gave way to the idea of an American invasion. Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi defector, who declared that Saddam Hussein, in response to the 1981 Israeli bombing of the Osiraq nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, had ordered future nuclear facilities to be dispersed at four hundred sites across the nation. Eve... |
| www.newyorker.com/online/content/?031027on_onlineonly01 Behind the Mushroom Cloud Posted 2003-10-21 This week in the magazine and here online see Fact, in The Stovepipe, Seymour M. Hersh reports on how the Bush Administration led the intelligence community on a chase for weapons of mass destruction. Here Hersh discusses his article and the current state of the Bush Administration. AMY DAVIDSON: Your story in the magazine this week is called The Stovepipe. HERSH: Well, inside the military, stovepiping is slang for the practice of taking a piece of intelligence or a request that should be pushed through the chain of commandchecked at levels and sent from one level to anotherand bringing it straight to the highest authority. One of the things that people in the intelligence community have learned over the years is that early reports are often wrong. And so, before you respond to the first piece of information you have, you analyze it, you vet it, you study it, and then you make a decision about what youre going to do with it. When you stovepipe stuff, you leave yourself open to the worst kinds of results. Is that what happened when the Bush Administration was building its case against Iraq? One basic problem is that the Bush Administration changed the process in a very dramatic way. They worked it so that the raw intelligence, the reports that they wanted to hear, got to the top right away. The pro-war hawks rigged the system so that negative information about Iraq, no matter where it came fromand in many cases, we now know, much of it came from defectors who were relayed through the Iraqi National Congress, the group run by Ahmad Chalabiwas stovepiped directly to the leadership without any assessment. And so you had a situation in the Pentagon, and in the State Department, in the office of Under-Secretary John Bolton, and in the Vice-Presidents office, too, in which the professionals were cut out of the process. Thats how you get to a position where Secretary of State Colin Powell can show up at the United Nations, as he did in February, and make a series of very boisterous claims about Iraq, most of which now appear to be wrong. Was this, then, a matter of the Administration lying to itself as much as to anyone else? And the answer, I think, to a large degree, is that, whatever they may have suspected, they didnt know the truth, because the truth was simply impossible for them to see. The system had been set up so that they saw only what they wanted. And, you know, these people, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in particular, came to the office openly suspicious of the intelligence community and the bureaucracy. They thought they were too soft on Iraq, not tough enough with Saddam, not able to make the decisive choices. One official I talked to reminded me what happened in the mid-nineteen-eighties, when Ronald Reagan was convinced that Cuba was behind everything going on in Central Americathat all of the aspiration for freedom in Central America, the unrest there, was the work of Communist outside agitators. The community fought them for a long time, but they eventually gave up, and the analysts began to write it the way they wanted. The fact of the matter is that unless theres very strong independent leadership on top the analysts will break and fold. Hes a decent man, a kind man, and a perfectly honorable man, but after 9/11 he was in trouble, and the way he held on to his job was by going along and not telling the White House anything they didnt want to hear. In your story, you look into the origins of the so-called Niger documents, which purported to reveal an attempted purchase of uranium by Iraq but turned out to be forgeries. It becomes clear in your story that these papers, illegitimate as they were, didnt even appear until months after the Administration began talking about African uranium. The initial report about Iraq buying uranium ore from Niger surfaced only after September 11, 2001, and even that was an old report. We had apparently asked other allied intelligence services to look for any information they might have related to terrorism, and out of Italy came a report of a visit to Niger by an Iraqi diplomat in February of 1999. It was seemingly a pretty benign visit, but the Italian service picked up some gossip that maybe they wanted to talk about uranium. And so this information got into the White House, and it was stovepiped, as I write, to Vice-President Dick Cheney, who asked the CIA about it. They came back and said, We dont think its much, and what seems to have happened is that Cheney kept on pushing. It was, as I say in the story, the freshest piece of meat they had to bolster what was going to be their mantra in 2002. After all, the prospect of Saddam with a nuclear weapon is scary to anyone. But, ironically, even more than was the case with chemical or biological weapons, the United States had been able to say, as strongly as the United States ever says anything, They dont have it. If Iraq was attempting to get uranium in Niger in 1999, it would indicate that it was reconstituting its system. The Italian report appeared in late 2001, and then there was a decision to send retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger in early 2002. Wilson went in February and checked out the Italian report, talked to people, looked into it, and discovered that there was nothing to it. Because President Bush and the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitzthey still began to talk about Iraq as if they were in the process of buying and establishing a nuclear facility. Then, when the papers finally appeared, in October, 2002, they seized on themthey were just what they were waiting for. You looked into the question of who actually fabricated the papers. When I was in Italy, there were people who thought that the documents might have been written by the Italian military intelligence service, whose acronym is sismi . But one of the most compelling theories was relayed to me by a former senior CIA official, a very high-level guy. And it goes back to the issue of how broken the intelligence system was, so much so that you couldnt get at the truth. What he said represented the frustration and rage felt by many in the intelligence community, the notion that a group of retired officers actually got together and drafted the Niger papers. First, you have to understand that CIA stations around the world, not so much now but during the Cold War, falsified documents all the time. Second, if youre in the CIA and its last fall, youre almost frozen, youre powerless. The papers are hopeless, and even the Italian reporter who looked at them, Elisabetta Burba, was able very quickly to determine that they were false. And I think the idea was simply to embarrass the government internally. Dont forget, Niger had already been a source of great dispute between the CIA and the Pentagon and the Vice-Presidents office. And so the thought was that somebody like Cheney or Rumsfeld and their aides would flash them at a meeting, and then the other side could counterattack. It would be an embarrassment, because the papers were such obvious fakes. Or Rumsfeld or somebody would go public with the papers, not vet them, not analyze them, and the press would go after them. Instead, lo and behold, the President used the Niger story to make the case against Iraq in his State of the Union speech in January. Less than two months after that speech, in March, the Niger papers were revealed to have been forged. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed them as fakes, and you and a few other journalists wrote in-depth articles on them that monthbefore the war. You constantly see newspaper stories saying, We know the identity of this person, but were not going to mention it. The only explanation I have is that Bob Novak, who is a very excellent reporter, didnt know how sensitive her job was. Whether he should have checked or not, its awfully hard to check, because the CIA does not tell you anything about its employees. Well, for one thing, it matters because we have a system set up, a stovepipe system, thats still in place. Were sti... |