Posted on 07/18/2004 12:04:08 AM PDT by notforhire
The Senate Intelligence Committee's report on American intelligence failures in Iraq has produced a rare and curious thing — agreement between left and right. For opposite reasons, both are pushing the absurd notion that the report told us that President Bush was not to blame for giving Americans false information about Iraq.
The left has denounced the report as a whitewash that unfairly clears Mr. Bush of charges that he or his aides prodded the Central Intelligence Agency into hyping the Iraqi weapons programs, and purposefully misrepresented the threat from Saddam Hussein. The right agrees with the conclusion, and calls it a vindication of the president.
In fact, the sadly incomplete report does nothing of the kind. It takes the public up to the question of Mr. Bush's involvement and then ducks, announcing that an examination of the president's role is due after the election. Thanks to that compromise, the Republicans did not block it, and Democrats could justify endorsing it as an unfinished work.
The 511-page report, which was released by the committee last week after about 20 percent was censored by the administration, does not tell us what the C.I.A. and other agencies told Mr. Bush before he concluded that Iraq had dangerous weapons and that Saddam Hussein had to go. It focuses on something called a "National Intelligence Estimate," which came out in October 2002, months and months after the administration had already set its face toward war. The estimate was requested by Congress, and it was supposed to summarize the views of the C.I.A., along with those of the Defense Department's intelligence experts and other agencies, like the State Department and Department of Energy, that might have important information to offer.
Three versions of the report on Iraq were prepared, all of them concluding that Saddam Hussein was a major threat. But the first, long, classified one was peppered with reservations. A declassified version that was given to Congress erased most of the doubts. The even shorter public version had no caveats at all.
What we need to know now is how the report came up so positive. The Senate committee said its staff "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." Republican members in particular have repeatedly assured the public that no one reported any direct arm-twisting. But that is a lot less meaningful than it sounds.
The people helping to prepare the report worked for officials like Vice President Dick Cheney; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; George Tenet, the director of central intelligence; and to a lesser degree Secretary of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. By the time they began working on the intelligence estimate, most of their bosses had already advised the president that Saddam Hussein needed to go, and some had also taken a public stand.
On Aug. 26, for instance, Mr. Cheney told the V.F.W. National Convention that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and was working on a nuclear weapon. "Simply stated," he added, "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors."
Simply stated, there was plenty of doubt about all of these things and most of them were not true. In fact, members of the intelligence community were voicing doubts at the time that Mr. Cheney spoke. We do not know for certain whether these dissenting voices were heard by Mr. Cheney or Mr. Bush. But certainly, Mr. Tenet, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Powell and Ms. Rice had access to them.
So while the Senate report has told us that no government employee complained of direct pressure from the White House to give the intelligence estimate a positive spin, it has not told us how so much negative assessment got left out or how top Bush officials came to make public statements that contradicted information that was readily available within the administration. The Department of Energy categorically refuted the claim that the Iraqis were working on nuclear weapons in April 2001, 16 months before Mr. Cheney's V.F.W. speech, according to the Senate report. The C.I.A. knew it, the Defense Department knew it, the State Department knew it. But these dissenting views did not make it into the intelligence estimate.
So it's not exactly true, as Mr. Bush said on Wednesday, that "the United States Congress, including members of both political parties, looked at the same intelligence" that he had. And we have still not seen the intelligence reports Mr. Bush got. We do not even know what Mr. Bush was told about the intelligence estimate. The C.I.A. gave him his own, one-page summary, which the White House will not show to the Senate.
One of Mr. Bush's central charges against Saddam Hussein was his supposed link with Al Qaeda, which Mr. Bush still mentions even though the Senate report said there was no evidence of a link. On this point, the report said, the intelligence community's negative view was widely disseminated among top officials.
Mr. Cheney likes to refer to a meeting between the hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi official that supposedly took place in Prague in April 2001. But the C.I.A. does not believe it happened. In a memo recently released by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, Mr. Tenet said the agency did not have "any credible information that the April 2001 meeting occurred."
In today's political climate, it took some courage for the Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Pat Roberts, to do any investigating at all. But he was ultimately overwhelmed by the politics of Iraq.
The British report on the intelligence debacle, also released last week, made it plain that the push for war was political, not based on new urgency about a threat from Iraq. Even with fears justifiably heightened after the 9/11 attacks, it said, "there was no recent intelligence that would itself have given rise to a conclusion that Iraq was of more immediate concern than the activities of some other countries."
So how did the Bush administration wind up passing out so much disinformation? Americans are going to have to wait for the Senate's judgment on this crucial question until after the election.
Decoding? Uh... NYT, nothing needs decoding except maybe the brain of the person that wrote this article.
The stock piles of WMD's were not there, but the capability of manufacturing them was, which is detailed in the Kay report. The NYT's would be trashing this President right now if didn't act to remove Saddam Hussein. The fact of the matter is this..... Saddam was a sworn enemy of the United States and after 9/11 we have no choice but to confront these threats wherever they are, and preferably on a place an hour of our choosing
Wellll . . . good for them. Nice to know they're not just sitting around handing out contracts.
So, hey NY Times . . Wilson . . 'yellowcake' . . other contacts with other countries . . and no? Attempting to acquire completed nukes . . no? Had nuclear materials for dispersion bombs . . . no? I think they just carted out two tons or so of such material in recent months (back to the good ole USA, maybe on locomotive trains and everything).
One of Mr. Bush's central charges against Saddam Hussein was his supposed link with Al Qaeda, which Mr. Bush still mentions even though the Senate report said there was no evidence of a link.
I'm pretty sure every darned one of those reports, on both sides of the 'big pond' pointed to cooperation between 'Mr. Saddam' and Al-Qaida. SI might have been the one exception, and they had to work at it, if you read the text.
The sheer ignorant folly of this article from a newspaper that has shown irrevocably
that it has NO credibility is amazing.
Oh, man. What a lie to state there is no evidence of an AQ/Iraq link.
There are over 60 pages which connect Saddam to terrorism and AQ specifically.
Included in those 60 pages is the following (from FNC):
FNC on Monday night explored another area of the report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that other media outlets have skipped: Saddam Hussein-controlled Iraq’s role in helping terrorists. On the July 12 Special Report with Brit Hume, Bret Baier reported how “sixty-six pages of the report fall under the heading 'Iraq's Links to Terrorism'” and in it, Baier related, “multiple, credible sources are cited that Iraq provided al-Qaeda with various kinds of training, combat, bomb-making, along with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear training, backing up public and private statements by former CIA director George Tenet." Baier pointed out: “The details in the report seem to shoot down at least two of former White House counter-terrorism director Richard Clarke's bold claims.”
MRC analyst Megan McCormack noticed the story, which fill-in anchor Brian Wilson introduced: “There's been a lot of emphasis on the negative aspects of the Senate intelligence committee report on U.S. intelligence before the war in Iraq, the parts that show what the Senators believe the intelligence community got wrong. But there's another section of the report about the pre-war intelligence that was right. Fox News Pentagon correspondent Bret Baier reports."
Baier began: "Almost all of the media coverage on the Senate intelligence committee's report about pre-war assessments by the CIA has focused on how harshly critical it is on CIA analysts. However, Friday the acting director pointed to one positive view."
John McLaughlin: "They made the point that we had done very well at our assessment over the relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda and other terrorists."
Baier: "Sixty-six pages of the report fall under the heading 'Iraq's Links to Terrorism.' While the conclusion reads that the CIA correctly assessed there was no hard evidence of Iraq's command and control over al-Qaeda or no hard evidence of an established formal relationship, the report lays out the extent of the informal ties. A January 2003 CIA assessment from reliable, clandestine sources states that quote 'direct meetings between senior Iraqi representatives and top al Qaeda operatives took place from the early 1990s to the present,' meaning all the way up to January 2003. Multiple, credible sources are cited that Iraq provided al-Qaeda with various kinds of training, combat, bomb-making, along with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear training, backing up public and private statements by former CIA director George Tenet."
George Tenet: "Iraq has in the past provided training and document forgery and bomb-making to al-Qaeda. It has also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al-Qaeda associates."
Baier: "The report states that the CIA had multiple sources telling them that Saddam Hussein had issued a standing offer of safe haven to Osama bin Laden and his organization in 1999. The details in the report seem to shoot down at least two of former White House counter-terrorism director Richard Clarke's bold claims. Clarke told 60 Minutes in March quote, 'There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda. Ever.' Clarke also claimed that Iraq had not been involved in anti-U.S. terrorism since the failed 1993 plot to assassinate the first President Bush in Kuwait. But page 316 of the Senate report states that the CIA provided 78 reports from various sources that from 1996 to 2003, Saddam Hussein's regime was actively training Iraqi intelligence operatives for terrorist attacks against U.S. interests. Here's one particular reference, quote, 'Ten intelligence reports from multiple sources, indicated Iraqi Intelligence Service 'casing' operations against Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Prague began in 1998 and continued into early 2003. The CIA assessed, based on the Prague casings and a variety of other reporting that throughout 2002, the IIS was becoming increasingly aggressive in planning attacks against U.S. interests.'
“The ranking member of the committee, Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller, said on Fox News Sunday this weekend he still believes that political pressure was put on the CIA analysts by the Bush administration, despite the fact that the committee's report concluded that none of the analysts or other people interviewed said they were pressured to change their conclusions, and the committee did not find any changes in their analytical judgments."
Don’t count on seeing that kind of story elsewhere given how much the other networks have invested in the storyline that Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda.
-- Brent Baker
Dems have been uncharacteristically mum on the decision to examine the president's role until after the election. That leads me to believe there's information that will point to big screw ups from the clinton administration. Wouldn't want that sort of news out there while they're trying to get Kedwards elected.
Jutland was a naval battle, off the coast of Denmark. It took place during World War One. The Royal Navy and German Kreigsmarine slugged it out in more or less a draw, until both retired to port. The historic significance was that it was the last time navies fought a big battle with no participation at all from naval aircraft.
...It was the last stand for the Battleship, the Dreadnaught, before aircraft carriers became the primary naval capital ship.
I brought it up because I think we may be (possibly) approaching another sea change in history. These days the Internet really does allow people to hop over the competing claims of rival news agencies and check facts for themselves. So, the big broadsides fired by, say, FOXnews on the one hand, and the BBC, or The Gaurdian, on the other, remain "afloat", for quite some time.
They have to be able to sustain their draught, maintain their ballast, through the hindsight of cross-checking alternative sources. (Which is why we have so much money going into so many big PR firms, who keep generating counter-competing fog and smoke, long after the original shots were fired.)
That may be part of the reason that media outlets have become so shrilly divisive and partisan, with comedians and snakeoil pitchmen raised to prominence in the big turrets, making primarily emotional appeals. With so much ad revenue at stake, they don't want people to bother with considering opposing points of view, or trying to find their own balance points, in the daily tsunami of one sort of NewsProduct or the other.
Too many news consumers prefer to have their "balance and fairness" force-fed to them, by one side or the other, while securely tethered to a dependant anchor.
The alternative, "net-surfing solo", requires too much effort, practice, patience, education, and suspension of disbelief. ...And the pay-offs aren't nearly as quick and easy. Sometimes you just never really know who's telling the truth. You may have to keep trying to drill down the facts for weeks, months, or years.
Much easier just to remain an unthinking minion, or drone. Keep repeating the talking points that make you feel good.
Not at all unlike rooting for a sports team. I can scream at the TV that the "Bears Still Suck", about as well as any Cheesehead, but the fact that I spent so much time living in the Twin Cities makes it hard for me to be so harsh on the Vikings. That attitude of looking past the Rah-Rah is what you need to really understand What's Going On.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.