Skewed Intelligence Data in March to War in Iraq

In 2002, at a crucial juncture on the path to war, senior members of the Bush administration gave a series of speeches and interviews in which they asserted that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. In a speech to veterans that August, Vice President Dick Cheney said Mr. Hussein could have an atomic bomb "fairly soon." President Bush, addressing the United Nations the next month, said there was "little doubt" about Mr. Hussein's appetite for nuclear arms.

The United States intelligence community had not yet concluded that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program. But as the vice president told a group of Wyoming Republicans that September, the United States had "irrefutable evidence" -

As much as I don't like buying into the 'intelligence failure' theory being sold by the left, I must ask myself some rather interesting questions.

Intelligence not only failed to prevent 09/11, but it totally screwed the pooch on Iraq. These two facts are undeniable.

Now that doesn't mean that I think it was a mistake to enter Iraq and remove Husseiin. What it means is that our nation and the President were blindsided by a failure of domestic and internation information gathering.

We spend way too much money on clandestine operations both domesticly and internationally, to get burnt like this.

The left is using this information to trash the right. The fact is, heads should have rolled at the CIA, the NSA and a few other places after 09/11 and our resulting invasion of Iraq.

Right now we're hearing that there is a backlog of translations needed for information we have already gathered. What the hell are the CIA and NSA there for, if not to execute this duty?

My question is this. WTF is going on at CIA and NSA? Is anybody home?

Tenet. Spot on, from my perspective.

Clinton had a relish for only hiring incapable people. About the only exception to that, were his spinners. They were exceptional liars. In real life settings, they would also be incapable of doing much productive.

Why would anyone keep any of those folks around, down the the lowest postion? It's beyond me.

Day one, I would have fired the directors of the FBI and the CIA, others as well. The list would have been comprehensive.

Any foreign service appointments over the prior eight years would have been cashiered.

Here is what the NY Times says:

"The next month, Mr. Cheney told a group of Wyoming
Republicans the United States had 'irrefutable evidence' -
thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes
that the Bush administration said were destined for
clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were
seized at the behest of the United States."

Notice how the NY Times embeds two of Cheney's words in a long paraphrase. That is how you spin a quote. We need Cheney's whole quote to know what he said.

They also embed Rice's quote in a paraphrase: "The tubes were 'only really suited for nuclear weapons programs,' Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, asserted on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002.

They quote other things fully, but they embed in a paraphrase the most important quotes, the quotes that the article is about. That is a sign of spin.
When liberals embed a quote in a paraphrase, I always suspect spin. So I looked it up.
Here is a fuller version of Dr. Rice's quote"

“There have been shipments of high-quality aluminum tubes that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.... The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons, but we don't want the smoking gun to be
a mushroom cloud.” [Washington Post, 7/16/03; Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 10/27/03]

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=complete_timeline_of_the_2003_invasion_of_iraq_471

The quote was interested in is interrupted by ellipses (it could be a pause or missing words), and is not in the context of what she said before it. However, after that, you can clearly see that Dr. Rice is stating the tubes are NOT a smoking gun, and she is stating UNCERTAINTY. Now why would the NY Times imply that she was claiming the tubes meant nuclear certainty? Why would they leave her quote
about uncertainty out?

It seems some experts thought the tubes were used for a nuclear program and others thought they were not. And the NY Times gives no reason Rice should have sided with those who thought they were not used for nuclear weapons. She claimed uncertainty, what else could she have done?

The NY Times states: "Before Ms. Rice made those remarks, though, she was aware that the government's foremost nuclear experts had concluded that the tubes were most likely not for nuclear weapons at all, an examination by The New York Times has found. Months before, her staff had been told that these experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were probably intended for small artillery rockets."

She stated uncertainty.

Of course the Times does not tell us why SOME experts decided they were used for conventional weapons. Were the tubes usually suited for nuclear weapons, but were there other reasons SOME experts felt the tubes were used for conventional missiles while other did not?

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