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| 5/24 |
| 2004/1/29-30 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:12026 Activity:very high |
1/29 BTW, front page in the SF Chronicle today has David Kay saying that
he talked to all the CIA intel guys and *not one of them* said
they felt pressured although they admitted failure. They honestly
believed it as did the French and German intel they worked with.
\_ I'm sure none of the underlings at Enron felt pressure, either.
They thought there was just a lot of oil in the Cayman islands.
\_ Totally different situation. Get your oranges out of the
apple cart and we'll talk. No one at Enron in a decision
making role ever claimed to know nothing about what was going
on. They all hired lawyers.
\_ http://csua.org/u/5rq
Washington Post article says otherwise.
If someone did tell Kay they felt pressured, don't you think
that would be the end of their carreer with the CIA?
\_ Stop bringing common sense into the discussion! You are
just a Bush hater!
\_ no, I don't. the failure up front is enough to destroy their
careers already. common sense.
\_ France and Russia did *not* agree with the Bush Administration:
http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/usallieswmd.html
\_ No one said Russia did. French intel is another story.
\_ Here is a very good (and long) article that indicates that
pressure was applied. It also states that *everyone* thought
that Hussein had WMD:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/01/media-preview/pollack.htm
Start with "The Politics of Persuasion"
\_ Uh, he says so, but there's not much to tell me he's right.
Also, the guy wrote the book "The Threatening Storm: The Case
for Invading Iraq" in 2002, which a lot of neocons were
waving around prior to the war. In any case, I know what
Powell presented to the UN, and it was total crap, and that
was enough for me.
\_ The fact that he sees both sides of the issue makes him
more credible to me, not less.
\_ So if I told you a big fat lie from one side and at least
a partial truth from the other, you'd swallow that lie?
\_ if you know anything about Bush, he is the type who has repeatly
make decision, find out it wrong, and blame his subordinate so he
is free of all the responsibilities (George Tenet). This entire
David Kay drama is just a way to defuse pressure for Bush. And
yes, I am a Bush hater, and I hate him more for the fact that he
is a such soft shoulder than his undisguised political agenda to
enrich his friends and the wealthy.
\_ Oh really? Tell us about Bush. What is your secret source of
information about his "type" that you claim to know so well?
Your undying hatred? Good thinking. I feel your pain!
\_ Bush is a dumbass. This is how a smart dumbass runs the
country. By delegating responsibility and trying to look
like you know what you're doing. The interesting part is it's
arguable that this might be better than liberals running the
country.
\_ Vote Green! Seriously, though, no President has run this
country in that sense for a long time. There's a zillion
things going on that he might get a 5 second briefing on once
a month, if that. Without delegation you get a G.Davis style
micromanagement idiot who never gets anything done because one
person doesn't have the time or brain power to cope with it.
Pick any Fortune 1000 company. Do you think the CEO is
intimately aware of every product plan for the next 12 months?
Or even what might be happening next week or happened last
week? Not a chance in hell. The Federal Government dwarfs
any Fortune list company and always will. |
| 5/24 |
|
| csua.org/u/5rq -> www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A15019-2003Jun4¬Found=true With Cheney taking the lead in the administration last August in advocating military action against Iraq by claiming it had weapons of mass destruction, the visits by the vice president and his chief of staff, I. Lewis Scooter Libby, sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here, one senior agency official said yesterday. Other agency officials said they were not influenced by the visits from the vice presidents office, and some said they welcomed them. But the disclosure of Cheneys unusual hands-on role comes on the heels of mounting concern from intelligence officials and members of Congress that the administration may have exaggerated intelligence it received about Iraq to build a case for war. While visits to CIA headquarters by a vice president are not unprecedented, they are unusual, according to intelligence officials. The exact number of trips by Cheney to the CIA could not be learned, but one agency official described them as multiple. They were taken in addition to Cheneys regular attendance at President Bushs morning intelligence briefings and the special briefings the vice president receives when he is at an undisclosed location for security reasons. The vice president values the hard work of the intelligence community, but his office has a practice of declining to comment on the specifics of his intelligence briefings, said Cathie Martin, the vice presidents public affairs director. Concern over the administrations prewar claims about Iraq has been growing in Congress and among intelligence officials as a result of the failure to uncover any weapons of mass destruction two months after the collapse of the Iraqi government. Similar ferment is building in Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair is under pressure from within the Labor Party to explain whether British intelligence may have overstated the case of Iraqs covert weapons programs. Blair pledged yesterday to cooperate with a parliamentary probe of the governments use of intelligence material. In a signal of administration concern over the controversy, two senior Pentagon officials yesterday held a news conference to challenge allegations that they pressured the CIA or other agencies to slant intelligence for political reasons. Feith said a special Pentagon office to analyze intelligence in the wake of the Sept. Officials in the intelligence community and on Capitol Hill, however, have described the office as an alternative source of intelligence analysis that helped the administration make its case that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat. Government sources said CIA analysts were not the only ones who felt pressure from their superiors to support public statements by Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Former and current intelligence officials said they felt a continual drumbeat, not only from Cheney and Libby, but also from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Tenet, to find information or write reports in a way that would help the administration make the case that going into Iraq was urgent. They were the browbeaters, said a former defense intelligence official who attended some of the meetings in which Wolfowitz and others pressed for a different approach to the assessments they were receiving. In interagency meetings, he said, Wolfowitz treated the analysts work with contempt. Others saw the intervention of senior officials as being more responsible. Libby, who helped prepare intelligence analysis for the vice president, made several trips to the CIA with National Security Council officials during preparations for Powells Feb. He was described by one senior analyst as an avid consumer of intelligence and the asker of many questions. Such visits permitted Cheney and Libby to have direct exchanges with analysts, rather than asking questions of their daily briefers, who direct others to prepare responses that result in additional papers, senior administration sources said. Their goal was to have a free flow of information and not to intimidate the analysts, although some may well have misinterpreted questions as directives, said some sources sympathetic to their approach. A senior defense official also defended Wolfowitzs questioning: Does he ask hard questions? I dont think he was trying to get people to come up with answers that werent true. Hes looking for data and answers and he gets frustrated with a lack of answers and diligence and with things that cant be defended. A major focus for Wolfowitz and others in the Pentagon was finding intelligence to prove a connection between Hussein and Osama bin Ladens al Qaeda terrorist network. On the day of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center,Wolfowitz told senior officials at the Pentagon that he believed Iraq might have been responsible. I was scratching my head because everyone else thought of al Qaeda, said a former senior defense official who was in one such meeting. Over the following year, we got taskers to review the link between al Qaeda and Iraq. In the winter of 2001-02, officials who worked with Wolfowitz sent the Defense Intelligence Agency a message: Get hold of Laurie Mylroies book, which claimed Hussein was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and see if you can prove it, one former defense official said. The DIAs Middle East analysts were familiar with the book, Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Husseins War Against America. But they and others in the United States intelligence community were convinced that radical Islamic fundamentalists, not Iraq, were involved. |
| www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/usallieswmd.html Prior to the war in Iraq, some foreign countries questioned United States assertions on WMD presence in Iraq. Now, some in the United States Congress question whether or not the intelligence agencies manipulated intelligence to gain support for the war in Iraq. However, the White House insists that United States intelligence on Iraqs WMD were fairly presented. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said that the efforts of the Saddam Hussein regime to conceal its actions clearly give a picture of a regime that had weapons of mass destruction and was determined to conceal them. France, Russia, and Germany did not find Powells evidence strong enough to support the United Statess stance on the Iraqi threat. However, having already questioned the veracity of the dossier and CIA report, they instead concentrated on persuading the international community to continue UN inspections. Other experts said that the evidence is not sufficient enough to prove that Iraq has WMDs. However, what Secretary of State Powell did prove was that Iraq was capable of producing WMDs. |
| www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/01/media-preview/pollack.htm In the words of David Kay, the principal adviser to the Iraq Survey Group ISG, an organization created late last spring to search for prohibited weaponry, I think all of us who entered Iraq expected the job of actually discovering deployed weapons to be easier than it has turned out to be. Many people are now asking very reasonable questions about why they were misled. Democrats have typically accused the Bush Administration of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify an unnecessary war. The intelligence community did overestimate the scope and progress of Iraqs WMD programs, although not to the extent that many people believe. The Administration stretched those estimates to make a case not only for going to war but for doing so at once, rather than taking the time to build regional and international support for military action. I began my career as a Persian Gulf military analyst at the CIA, where I saw an earlier generation of technical analysts mistakenly conclude that Saddam Hussein was much further away from having a nuclear weapon than the post-Gulf War inspections revealed. I later moved on to the National Security Council, where I served two tours, in 1995-1996 and 1999-2001. During the latter stint the intelligence community convinced me and the rest of the Clinton Administration that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs following the withdrawal of the UN inspectors, in 1998, and was only a matter of years away from having a nuclear weapon. In 2002 I wrote a book called Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq , in which I argued that because all our other options had failed, the United States would ultimately have to go to war to remove Saddam before he acquired a functioning nuclear weapon. Thus it was with more than a little interest that I pondered the question of why we didnt find in Iraq what we were so certain we would. What We Thought We Knew he United States intelligence communitys belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction pre-dated Bushs inauguration, and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure. It was first advanced at the end of the 1990s, at a time when President Bill Clinton was trying to facilitate a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians and was hardly seeking assessments that the threat from Iraq was growing. In congressional testimony in March of 2002 Robert Einhorn, Clintons assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, summed up the intelligence communitys conclusions about Iraq at the end of the Clinton Administration: How close is the peril of Iraqi WMD? Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors albeit attacks that would be ragged, inaccurate, and limited in size. If it managed to get its hands on sufficient quantities of already produced fissile material, these threats could arrive much sooner. In October of 2002 the National Intelligence Council, the highest analytical body in the United States intelligence community, issued a classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqs WMD, representing the consensus of the intelligence community. Although after the war some complained that the NIE had been a rush job, and that the NIC should have been more careful in its choice of language, in fact the report accurately reflected what intelligence analysts had been telling Clinton Administration officials like me for years in verbal briefings. A declassified version of the 2002 NIE was released to the public in July of last year. Its principal conclusions: Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction WMD programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; For instance, the production line at the Fallujah II facility the plant that intelligence officers believed was Iraqs principal site for making chlorine, an ingredient in some chemical-warfare agents turned out to be in derelict condition and had not operated since the Gulf War. Nevertheless, Iraqi officials seemed to believe that they could convert existing civilian pharmaceutical plants to chemical-weapons production, and that Saddam was interested in their ability to do so. Iraq made determined efforts to retain some capabilities for biological warfare. To disguise its biological-warfare programs Baghdad had scientists working on overt projects that were closely related to proscribed activities. Iraq seemed to have been most aggressive in pursuing proscribed missiles. In Kays words, detainees and cooperative sources indicate that beginning in 2000 Saddam ordered the development of ballistic missiles with ranges of at least 240 miles and up to 620 miles and that measures to conceal these projects from UN inspectors were initiated in late 2002, ahead of the arrival of inspectors. The Iraqis were also working on clustering liquid-fueled rocket engines in order to produce a longer-range missile, and were trying to convert certain surface-to-air missiles into surface-to-surface missiles with a range of 150 miles. Most troubling of all, the ISG uncovered evidence that from 1999 to 2002 Iraq had negotiated with North Korea to buy technology for No Dong missiles, which have a range of 800 miles. Overall, these findings suggest that Iraq did retain prohibited WMD programs, but that those programs were not so extensive, advanced, or threatening as the National Intelligence Estimate maintained. These analysts instead believed that Iraq had a just-in-time production capabilitythat it could churn out these weapons as needed, using hidden or dual-use facilities. But not even this more conservative scenario was borne out by the ISGs investigations. Sources told the group that Saddam and his son Uday had each, on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002, asked officials associated with Iraqs chemical-warfare program how long it would take to produce chemical agents and weapons. One official reportedly told Saddam that it would take six months to produce mustard gas among the easiest such agents to manufacture; The ISGs findings to date are most damning in the nuclear arenaas it happens, the segment of Iraqs WMD program in which the initial findings are most likely to be correct, because nuclear-weapons production is extremely difficult to conceal. The United States intelligence communitys belief toward the end of the Clinton Administration that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons led me and other Administration officials to support the idea of a full-scale invasion of Iraq, albeit not right away. The NIEs judgment to the same effect was the real linchpin of the Bush Administrations case for an invasion. What we have found in Iraq since the invasion belies that judgment. Saddam did retain basic elements for a nuclear-weapons program and the desire to acquire such weapons at some point, but the program itself was dormant. Saddam had not ordered its resumption although some reports suggest that he considered doing so in 2002. In all probability Iraq was considerably further from having a nuclear weapon than the five to seven years estimated in the classified version of the NIE. The View From Baghdad iguring out why we overestimated Iraqs WMD capabilities involves figuring out what the Iraqis, especially Saddam Hussein, were thinking and doing throughout the 1990s. The document was a report from a nuclear-weapons plant describing how it carried out this order. According to UNSCOMs final report, The facility was instructed to remove evidence of the true activities at the facility, evacuate documents to hide sites, make physical alterations to the site to hide its true purpose, develop cover stories, and conduct mock inspections to prepare for UN inspectors. A great deal of other information substantiates the idea that Saddam at first decided to try to keep a considerable portion of his WMD programs intact and hidden. His efforts probably included retaining some munitions, but mainly concerned production and research elements. In other words, ... |