captainalias
Dedicated LVC Member
MonsterMark said:
Give me the direct quote from the bipartisan intelligence committee report, and I'll believe you.
Dems playing games in Senate now
- Thread starter MonsterMark
- Start date
Give me the direct quote from the bipartisan intelligence committee report, and I'll believe you.
captainalias
Dedicated LVC Member
JANE'S INTELLIGENCE REVIEW - JUNE 01, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Report finds no evidence of WMD transfers to Syria
Anders Strindberg
There is no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) having been transferred to Syria for safekeeping before the US-led invasion of the country in March 2003.
The findings were released in the final report of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) on 25 April.
In October 2004, an initial ISG report concluded that the Iraqi government did not possess chemical or biological weapons and only had aspirations for a nuclear programme. The ISG determined that the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent UN sanctions destroyed Iraq's illegal weapons capabilities and that there was no evidence of "concerted efforts to restart the programme".
Edited: B/c it's a subscription service, I'll not post teh whole thing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Report finds no evidence of WMD transfers to Syria
Anders Strindberg
There is no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) having been transferred to Syria for safekeeping before the US-led invasion of the country in March 2003.
The findings were released in the final report of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) on 25 April.
In October 2004, an initial ISG report concluded that the Iraqi government did not possess chemical or biological weapons and only had aspirations for a nuclear programme. The ISG determined that the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent UN sanctions destroyed Iraq's illegal weapons capabilities and that there was no evidence of "concerted efforts to restart the programme".
Edited: B/c it's a subscription service, I'll not post teh whole thing.
FreeFaller
USAF LS8
raVeneyes said:
Never wore that shoe to begin with. I was in Basic Training in 96. That whole year of my life is void :biggrin:
But seriously. Do I think we should have wasted our money on finding out if President Clinton was an adulterer. No... we all knew the answer. However, if I were to get into an extramarital affair in the USAF and I were convicted I would be discharged. Without all the congressional hearings. Is that fair? You all seem to think that his disloyalty to his wife was his own buisness. But it has a direct affect on this country and how it is run. He should have had some f*cking integrity. Because if I can't trust him with his own wife...how the hell can I trust him with his executive duties?
But this is off topic...and you dodged my question.
captainalias
Dedicated LVC Member
Heck, this is getting to the point where you could even attempt to justify the war by saying aliens transferred the WMD to Syria, but we don't know where the WMD is b/c we lack alien technology to locate them.
Without evidence you have nothing.
Without evidence you have nothing.
MonsterMark
Dedicated LVC Member
Senate Intelligence Committee Unanimously Approves Pre-War Intelligence Report
JUNE 17, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC– Senator Pat Roberts, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the Committee's Vice Chairman, issued the following joint statement:
"Today, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted unanimously to approve its report on pre-war intelligence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, ties to terrorists, threat to regional stability and violations of human rights. Today's vote is the culmination of over one year of intense scrutiny by the Committee of the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments. The Committee is currently engaged with the Central Intelligence Agency over the issue of classification. The Committee is extremely disappointed by the CIA's excessive redactions to the report. Our goal is to release publicly as much of the report's findings and conclusions as soon as possible. We will work toward that goal, as we continue our work on phase two of the Committee's review."
JUNE 17, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC– Senator Pat Roberts, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the Committee's Vice Chairman, issued the following joint statement:
"Today, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted unanimously to approve its report on pre-war intelligence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, ties to terrorists, threat to regional stability and violations of human rights. Today's vote is the culmination of over one year of intense scrutiny by the Committee of the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments. The Committee is currently engaged with the Central Intelligence Agency over the issue of classification. The Committee is extremely disappointed by the CIA's excessive redactions to the report. Our goal is to release publicly as much of the report's findings and conclusions as soon as possible. We will work toward that goal, as we continue our work on phase two of the Committee's review."
captainalias
Dedicated LVC Member
MonsterMark said:
Why are you posting an article from 2004? We're discussing a report released in 2005.
MonsterMark
Dedicated LVC Member
Senator Roberts’ Statement on the Niger Documents
JULY 11, 2003
WASHINGTON, DC - U.S. Senator Pat Roberts, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence today issued the following statement:
“Senator Rockefeller and I are committed to continue our close examination of all of the issues surrounding the Niger documents.
“So far, I am very disturbed by what appears to be extremely sloppy handling of the issue from the outset by the CIA.
“What now concerns me most, however, is what appears to be a campaign of press leaks by the CIA in an effort to discredit the President.
“Unnamed ‘intelligence officials’ are now claiming that they told the White House that attempts by Iraq to acquire uranium from countries in Africa were unfounded. I understand, however, that as late as mid-January, 2003, approximately ten days before the State of the Union speech, the CIA was still asserting that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium from Africa and that those attempts were further evidence of Saddam’s efforts to reconstitute his nuclear program.
“I have seen no documentation that indicates that the CIA had reversed itself after January 17th and prior to the State of the Union. If the CIA had changed its position, it was incumbent on the Director of Central Intelligence to correct the record and bring it to the immediate attention of the President. It appears that he did not.
“This is not the type of responsibility that can be delegated to mid-level officials. The Director of Central Intelligence is the President’s principal advisor on intelligence matters. He should have told the President and it appears that he failed to do so.”
JULY 11, 2003
WASHINGTON, DC - U.S. Senator Pat Roberts, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence today issued the following statement:
“Senator Rockefeller and I are committed to continue our close examination of all of the issues surrounding the Niger documents.
“So far, I am very disturbed by what appears to be extremely sloppy handling of the issue from the outset by the CIA.
“What now concerns me most, however, is what appears to be a campaign of press leaks by the CIA in an effort to discredit the President.
“Unnamed ‘intelligence officials’ are now claiming that they told the White House that attempts by Iraq to acquire uranium from countries in Africa were unfounded. I understand, however, that as late as mid-January, 2003, approximately ten days before the State of the Union speech, the CIA was still asserting that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium from Africa and that those attempts were further evidence of Saddam’s efforts to reconstitute his nuclear program.
“I have seen no documentation that indicates that the CIA had reversed itself after January 17th and prior to the State of the Union. If the CIA had changed its position, it was incumbent on the Director of Central Intelligence to correct the record and bring it to the immediate attention of the President. It appears that he did not.
“This is not the type of responsibility that can be delegated to mid-level officials. The Director of Central Intelligence is the President’s principal advisor on intelligence matters. He should have told the President and it appears that he failed to do so.”
captainalias
Dedicated LVC Member
FreeFaller said:
Of course, I wholly supported the prosecution of Clinto, because perjury, under any circumstance, should not be condoned, especially if it involves a high ranking official. If there is the potential of perjury, we need to investigate, regardless of political party.
captainalias
Dedicated LVC Member
MonsterMark said:
That's still not direct from the bipartisan committee's report. That's the best, 'unnamed sources.' Might as well be Libby who told them that.
FreeFaller
USAF LS8
Still...nobody has answered my query.
captainalias
Dedicated LVC Member
FreeFaller said:
What was your query? It got lost in all the arguments.
FreeFaller
USAF LS8
Yeah...that happens in these threads... :biggrin:
I asked what your solution to the current situation in Iraq and Afganistan would be if the President were lying and he was impeached.
I asked what your solution to the current situation in Iraq and Afganistan would be if the President were lying and he was impeached.
MonsterMark
Dedicated LVC Member
HERE YOU GO!captainalias said:
Please take the time to read this. I TOOK THE TIME to find it. The truth is NOT in the report because the Democraps wouldn't allow it. Why do Democrats hate this Country so much and why do they want to do it harm?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - July 9. 2004
Iraq Pre-War Intelligence Report: Additional Views of Chairman Pat Roberts joined by Senator Christopher S. Bond, Senator Orrin G. Hatch
Despite our hard and successful work to deliver a unanimous report, however, there were two issues on which the Republicans and Democrats could not agree: 1) whether the Committee should conclude that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s public statements were not based on knowledge he actually possessed, and 2) whether the Committee should conclude that it was the former ambassador’s wife who recommended him for his trip to Niger.
Niger
The Committee began its review of prewar intelligence on Iraq by examining the Intelligence Community’s sharing of intelligence information with the UNMOVIC inspection teams. (The Committee’s findings on that topic can be found in the section of the report titled, “The Intelligence Community’s Sharing of Intelligence on Iraqi Suspect WMD Sites with UN Inspectors.”) Shortly thereafter, we expanded the review when former Ambassador Joseph Wilson began speaking publicly about his role in exploring the possibility that Iraq was seeking or may have acquired uranium yellowcake from Africa. Ambassador Wilson’s emergence was precipitated by a passage in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address which is now referred to as “the sixteen words.” President Bush stated, “. . . the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The details of the Committee’s findings and conclusions on this issue can be found in the Niger section of the report.
What cannot be found, however, are two conclusions upon which the Committee’s Democrats would not agree. While there was no dispute with the underlying facts, my Democrat colleagues refused to allow the following conclusions to appear in the report:
Conclusion: The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador’s wife, a CIA employee. That makes Wilson a Liar
The former ambassador’s wife suggested her husband for the trip to Niger in February 2002. The former ambassador had traveled previously to Niger on behalf of the CIA, also at the suggestion of his wife, to look into another matter not related to Iraq. On February 12, 2002, the former ambassador’s wife sent a memorandum to a Deputy Chief of a division in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations which said, “[m]y husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” This was just one day before the same Directorate of Operations division sent a cable to one of its overseas stations requesting concurrence with the division’s idea to send the former ambassador to Niger.
Conclusion: Rather than speaking publicly about his actual experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the former ambassador seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the Intelligence Community would have or should have handled the information he provided.
At the time the former ambassador traveled to Niger, the Intelligence Community did not have in its possession any actual documents on the alleged Niger-Iraq uranium deal, only second hand reporting of the deal. The former ambassador’s comments to reporters that the Niger-Iraq uranium documents “may have been forged because ‘the dates were wrong and the names were wrong,’” could not have been based on the former ambassador’s actual experiences because the Intelligence Community did not have the documents at the time of the ambassador’s trip. In addition, nothing in the report from the former ambassador’s trip said anything about documents having been forged or the names or dates in the reports having been incorrect. The former ambassador told Committee staff that he, in fact, did not have access to any of the names and dates in the CIA’s reports and said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct. Of note, the names and dates in the documents that the IAEA found to be incorrect were not names or dates included in the CIA reports.
Following the Vice President’s review of an intelligence report regarding a possible uranium deal, he asked his briefer for the CIA’s analysis of the issue. It was this request which generated Mr. Wilson’s trip to Niger. The former ambassador’s public comments suggesting that the Vice President had been briefed on the information gathered during his trip is not correct, however. While the CIA responded to the Vice President’s request for the Agency’s analysis, they never provided the information gathered by the former Ambassador. The former ambassador, in an NBC Meet the Press interview on July 6, 2003, said, “The office of the Vice President, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked and that response was based upon my trip out there.” The former ambassador was speaking on the basis of what he believed should have happened based on his former government experience, but he had no knowledge that this did happen.
These and other public comments from the former ambassador, such as comments that his report “debunked” the Niger-Iraq uranium story, were incorrect and have led to a distortion in the press and in the public’s understanding of the facts surrounding the Niger-Iraq uranium story. The Committee found that, for most analysts, the former ambassador’s report lent more credibility, not less, to the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal.
During Mr. Wilson’s media blitz, he appeared on more than thirty television shows including entertainment venues. Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the President had lied to the American people, that the Vice President had lied, and that he had “debunked” the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. As discussed in the Niger section of the report, not only did he NOT “debunk” the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it may be true. I believed very strongly that it was important for the Committee to conclude publicly that many of the statements made by Ambassador Wilson were not only incorrect, but had no basis in fact.
In an interview with Committee staff, Mr. Wilson was asked how he knew some of the things he was stating publicly with such confidence. On at least two occasions he admitted that he had no direct knowledge to support some of his claims and that he was drawing on either unrelated past experiences or no information at all. For example, when asked how he “knew” that the Intelligence Community had rejected the possibility of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal, as he wrote in his book, he told Committee staff that his assertion may have involved “a little literary flair.”
The former Ambassador, either by design or through ignorance, gave the American people and, for that matter, the world a version of events that was inaccurate, unsubstantiated, and misleading. Surely, the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has unique access to all of the facts, should have been able to agree on a conclusion that would correct the public record. Unfortunately, we were unable to do so.
I hope this satisfies you. I'll patiently wait for the appropriate ...you know... ahem.
captainalias
Dedicated LVC Member
FreeFaller said:
Last reply, before I leave. Spent far too much time debating here.
Actually, perhaps it would be best if he weren't impeached, to prevent Cheney from becoming President.
Honestly, I would never have gotten involved with Saddam in the first place in the 80s. First, I'd put an end to the 'black' torture sites that the CIA has around the world on non-US soil. Physical torture is unproductive, and doesn't yield the best information. And, it's hurting our image in the Muslim world.
Second, I'd just be honest about the WMD situation, the world could always use more honesty. Since we're already in this mess, no other option but to withdraw in the future, but give a timetable. Everyone likes a timetable, instead of this vague handwaving.
Third, give the Iraqi police and Army some armored vehicles. Those poor guys are getting massacred in their Dodge pickups. There must be a bunch of surplus M113s that can be dug up and outfitted with slat or ERA armor.
captainalias
Dedicated LVC Member
send me the link, MM.
MonsterMark
Dedicated LVC Member
It is all right here.
Stick around. You might learn something.
We need to hear more left-of-center arguments. It helps us on the right to keep our skills sharp.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
The truth shall set you free.
I predict by the time you hit 35, with a wife, house, kids, and a job, you'll join our side. It is inevitable. Trust the force Luke.
Stick around. You might learn something.
We need to hear more left-of-center arguments. It helps us on the right to keep our skills sharp.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
The truth shall set you free.
I predict by the time you hit 35, with a wife, house, kids, and a job, you'll join our side. It is inevitable. Trust the force Luke.
FreeFaller
USAF LS8
captainalias said:Last reply, before I leave. Spent far too much time debating here.
Actually, perhaps it would be best if he weren't impeached, to prevent Cheney from becoming President.
I didn't has what you would have done but what you would do now. And lack of involvement in world affairs is what got us into this situation in the first place.
captainalias said:
True...but if it's "black" than that means nobody knows about it...where's your proof?
captainalias said:
How can we have a timetable? It's not like saying "I'm gonna mow the lawn on friday". It isn't that simple. We didn't have a timetable during any conflict. We didn't have a timetable to leave Japan...we still haven't. We didn't have a timetable to leave Korea...we still haven't. Germany...nope. Where did all this timetable crud come from? You wanna ask the enemy when it's timetable is for not killing innocents anymore? I wonder what theirs is? Furnishing a hard timetable is not only impractical, it is impossible.
captainalias said:
You mean like this?
97silverlsc
Dedicated LVC Member
The spies who pushed for war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html
Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force
Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian
As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war.
It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses.
This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of intelligence.
According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.
The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.
The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war.
Mr Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's unsubstantiated claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been trying to buy uranium in Africa, but he also said his agency was under pressure to justify a war that the administration had already decided on.
How much Mr Tenet reveals of where that pressure was coming from could have lasting political fallout for Mr Bush and his re-election prospects, which only a few weeks ago seemed impregnable. As more Americans die in Iraq and the reasons for the war are revealed, his victory in 2004 no longer looks like a foregone conclusion.
The White House counter-attacked yesterday when new chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, accused critics of "politicising the war" and trying to "rewrite history". But the Democratic leadership kept up its questions over the White House role.
The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. Such hands-on involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the appropriate results.
Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican party leader who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his official title.
An intelligence official confirmed Mr Gingrich made "a couple of visits" but said there was nothing unusual about that.
Rick Tyler, Mr Gingrich's spokesman, said: "If he was at the CIA he was there to listen and learn, not to persuade or influence."
Mr Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace.
Mr Gingrich gained access to the CIA headquarters and was listened to because he was seen as a personal emissary of the Pentagon and, in particular, of the OSP.
In the days after September 11, Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, mounted an attempt to include Iraq in the war against terror. When the established agencies came up with nothing concrete to link Iraq and al-Qaida, the OSP was given the task of looking more carefully.
William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Mr Cheney, runs the day-to-day operations, answering to Douglas Feith, a defence undersecretary and a former Reagan official.
The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in part from "report officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job is to sift through reports from agents around the world, filtering out the unsubstantiated and the incredible. Under pressure from the hawks such as Mr Cheney and Mr Gingrich, those officers became reluctant to discard anything, no matter how far-fetched. The OSP also sucked in countless tips from the Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups, which were viewed with far more scepticism by the CIA and the state department.
There was a mountain of documentation to look through and not much time. The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in Afghanistan to deal with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of temporary "consultants". They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in Washington. Few had experience in intelligence.
"Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire individuals, without specifying a job description.
As John Pike, a defence analyst at the thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, put it, the contracts "are basically a way they could pack the room with their little friends".
"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it."
In fact, the OSP's activities were a com plete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon.
"The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."
The civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. "They were a pretty shadowy presence," Mr Thielmann said. "Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."
Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, said: "That office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees."
The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.
In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.
The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.
The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.
In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads.
The big question looming over Congress as Mr Tenet walked into his closed-door session yesterday was whether this shadow intelligence operation would survive national scrutiny and who would pay the price for allowing it to help steer the country into war.
A former senior CIA official insisted yesterday that Mr Feith, at least, was "finished" - but that may be wishful thinking by a rival organisation.
As he prepares for re-election, Mr Bush may opt to tough it out, rather than acknowledge the severity of the problem by firing loyalists. But in that case, it will inevitably be harder to re-establish confidence in the intelligence on which the White House is basing its decisions, and the world's sole superpower risks stumbling onwards half-blind, unable to distinguish real threats from phantoms.
Cheney visiting Langley, let alone leaning on the agents there to give the "proper" intel, was not done previously. Sounds hokey to me and lends credence to the charges of lying to go to war.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html
Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force
Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian
As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war.
It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses.
This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of intelligence.
According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.
The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.
The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war.
Mr Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's unsubstantiated claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been trying to buy uranium in Africa, but he also said his agency was under pressure to justify a war that the administration had already decided on.
How much Mr Tenet reveals of where that pressure was coming from could have lasting political fallout for Mr Bush and his re-election prospects, which only a few weeks ago seemed impregnable. As more Americans die in Iraq and the reasons for the war are revealed, his victory in 2004 no longer looks like a foregone conclusion.
The White House counter-attacked yesterday when new chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, accused critics of "politicising the war" and trying to "rewrite history". But the Democratic leadership kept up its questions over the White House role.
The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. Such hands-on involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the appropriate results.
Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican party leader who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his official title.
An intelligence official confirmed Mr Gingrich made "a couple of visits" but said there was nothing unusual about that.
Rick Tyler, Mr Gingrich's spokesman, said: "If he was at the CIA he was there to listen and learn, not to persuade or influence."
Mr Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace.
Mr Gingrich gained access to the CIA headquarters and was listened to because he was seen as a personal emissary of the Pentagon and, in particular, of the OSP.
In the days after September 11, Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, mounted an attempt to include Iraq in the war against terror. When the established agencies came up with nothing concrete to link Iraq and al-Qaida, the OSP was given the task of looking more carefully.
William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Mr Cheney, runs the day-to-day operations, answering to Douglas Feith, a defence undersecretary and a former Reagan official.
The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in part from "report officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job is to sift through reports from agents around the world, filtering out the unsubstantiated and the incredible. Under pressure from the hawks such as Mr Cheney and Mr Gingrich, those officers became reluctant to discard anything, no matter how far-fetched. The OSP also sucked in countless tips from the Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups, which were viewed with far more scepticism by the CIA and the state department.
There was a mountain of documentation to look through and not much time. The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in Afghanistan to deal with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of temporary "consultants". They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in Washington. Few had experience in intelligence.
"Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire individuals, without specifying a job description.
As John Pike, a defence analyst at the thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, put it, the contracts "are basically a way they could pack the room with their little friends".
"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it."
In fact, the OSP's activities were a com plete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon.
"The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."
The civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. "They were a pretty shadowy presence," Mr Thielmann said. "Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."
Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, said: "That office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees."
The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.
In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.
The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.
The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.
In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads.
The big question looming over Congress as Mr Tenet walked into his closed-door session yesterday was whether this shadow intelligence operation would survive national scrutiny and who would pay the price for allowing it to help steer the country into war.
A former senior CIA official insisted yesterday that Mr Feith, at least, was "finished" - but that may be wishful thinking by a rival organisation.
As he prepares for re-election, Mr Bush may opt to tough it out, rather than acknowledge the severity of the problem by firing loyalists. But in that case, it will inevitably be harder to re-establish confidence in the intelligence on which the White House is basing its decisions, and the world's sole superpower risks stumbling onwards half-blind, unable to distinguish real threats from phantoms.
Cheney visiting Langley, let alone leaning on the agents there to give the "proper" intel, was not done previously. Sounds hokey to me and lends credence to the charges of lying to go to war.
TheDude
Dedicated LVC Member
FreeFaller said:
I wouldn't do anything, but It would show the world that we can hold ourselves accountable for our own mistakes. Otherwise, we just look like the bully waving the biggest stick and you can't sell the thought of freedom when doing that.
You might have not been for the witch hunt on Clinton, but the conservatives here were aching to see him hang for lieing about a measly b-job (yes it was wrong). Now they are willing to turn a blind eye on the possibility of a concocted war (I think it was so).
MonsterMark
Dedicated LVC Member
Anybody remember the Rockefeller Memo?
Looks like the Democrats are running it play by play.
Here is the full text of the memo from the office of Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WVa.) on setting a strategy for pursuing an independent investigation of pre-war White House intelligence dealings on Iraq.
Rockefeller memo
We have carefully reviewed our options under the rules and believe we have identified the best approach. Our plan is as follows:
1) Pull the majority along as far as we can on issues that may lead to major new disclosures regarding improper or questionable conduct by administration officials. We are having some success in that regard.
For example, in addition to the President's State of the Union speech, the chairman [Sen. Pat Roberts] has agreed to look at the activities of the office of the Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, as well as Secretary Bolton's office at the State Department.
The fact that the chairman supports our investigations into these offices and cosigns our requests for information is helpful and potentially crucial. We don't know what we will find but our prospects for getting the access we seek is far greater when we have the backing of the majority. [We can verbally mention some of the intriguing leads we are pursuing.]
2) Assiduously prepare Democratic 'additional views' to attach to any interim or final reports the committee may release. Committee rules provide this opportunity and we intend to take full advantage of it.
In that regard we may have already compiled all the public statements on Iraq made by senior administration officials. We will identify the most exaggerated claims. We will contrast them with the intelligence estimates that have since been declassified. Our additional views will also, among other things, castigate the majority for seeking to limit the scope of the inquiry.
The Democrats will then be in a strong position to reopen the question of establishing an Independent Commission [i.e., the Corzine Amendment.]
3) Prepare to launch an independent investigation when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority. We can pull the trigger on an independent investigation of the administration's use of intelligence at any time. But we can only do so once.
The best time to do so will probably be next year, either:
A) After we have already released our additional views on an interim report, thereby providing as many as three opportunities to make our case to the public. Additional views on the interim report (1). The announcement of our independent investigation (2). And (3) additional views on the final investigation. Or:
B) Once we identify solid leads the majority does not want to pursue, we would attract more coverage and have greater credibility in that context than one in which we simply launch an independent investigation based on principled but vague notions regarding the use of intelligence.
In the meantime, even without a specifically authorized independent investigation, we continue to act independently when we encounter footdragging on the part of the majority. For example, the FBI Niger investigation was done solely at the request of the vice chairman. We have independently submitted written requests to the DOD and we are preparing further independent requests for information.
SUMMARY: Intelligence issues are clearly secondary to the public's concern regarding the insurgency in Iraq. Yet we have an important role to play in revealing the misleading, if not flagrantly dishonest, methods and motives of senior administration officials who made the case for unilateral preemptive war.
The approach outlined above seems to offer the best prospect for exposing the administration's dubious motives.
Looks like the Democrats are running it play by play.
Here is the full text of the memo from the office of Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WVa.) on setting a strategy for pursuing an independent investigation of pre-war White House intelligence dealings on Iraq.
Rockefeller memo
We have carefully reviewed our options under the rules and believe we have identified the best approach. Our plan is as follows:
1) Pull the majority along as far as we can on issues that may lead to major new disclosures regarding improper or questionable conduct by administration officials. We are having some success in that regard.
For example, in addition to the President's State of the Union speech, the chairman [Sen. Pat Roberts] has agreed to look at the activities of the office of the Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, as well as Secretary Bolton's office at the State Department.
The fact that the chairman supports our investigations into these offices and cosigns our requests for information is helpful and potentially crucial. We don't know what we will find but our prospects for getting the access we seek is far greater when we have the backing of the majority. [We can verbally mention some of the intriguing leads we are pursuing.]
2) Assiduously prepare Democratic 'additional views' to attach to any interim or final reports the committee may release. Committee rules provide this opportunity and we intend to take full advantage of it.
In that regard we may have already compiled all the public statements on Iraq made by senior administration officials. We will identify the most exaggerated claims. We will contrast them with the intelligence estimates that have since been declassified. Our additional views will also, among other things, castigate the majority for seeking to limit the scope of the inquiry.
The Democrats will then be in a strong position to reopen the question of establishing an Independent Commission [i.e., the Corzine Amendment.]
3) Prepare to launch an independent investigation when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority. We can pull the trigger on an independent investigation of the administration's use of intelligence at any time. But we can only do so once.
The best time to do so will probably be next year, either:
A) After we have already released our additional views on an interim report, thereby providing as many as three opportunities to make our case to the public. Additional views on the interim report (1). The announcement of our independent investigation (2). And (3) additional views on the final investigation. Or:
B) Once we identify solid leads the majority does not want to pursue, we would attract more coverage and have greater credibility in that context than one in which we simply launch an independent investigation based on principled but vague notions regarding the use of intelligence.
In the meantime, even without a specifically authorized independent investigation, we continue to act independently when we encounter footdragging on the part of the majority. For example, the FBI Niger investigation was done solely at the request of the vice chairman. We have independently submitted written requests to the DOD and we are preparing further independent requests for information.
SUMMARY: Intelligence issues are clearly secondary to the public's concern regarding the insurgency in Iraq. Yet we have an important role to play in revealing the misleading, if not flagrantly dishonest, methods and motives of senior administration officials who made the case for unilateral preemptive war.
The approach outlined above seems to offer the best prospect for exposing the administration's dubious motives.
fossten
Dedicated LVC Member
Nice body of work, Bryan. The Dems just sound desperate to me. Pitching a fit like little children.
MonsterMark
Dedicated LVC Member
Shows pretty clearly how the Democrats use the Mainstream Biased Liberal Media to play the average American citizen.
Too bad there is a new kid in town. The RWW blogger here to defend and inform the average American citizen.
Too bad there is a new kid in town. The RWW blogger here to defend and inform the average American citizen.
Vitas
Dedicated LVC Member
captainalias said:
And...