Ex-Official: Evidence Distorted for War

AP via Excite News ^ | Jun 7, 6:18 AM (ET) | JOHN J. LUMPKIN

[leadpencil1]

The Bush administration distorted intelligence and presented conjecture as evidence to justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a retired intelligence official who served during the months before the war.

"What disturbs me deeply is what I think are the disingenuous statements made from the very top about what the intelligence did say," said Greg Thielmann, who retired last September. "The area of distortion was greatest in the nuclear field."

Thielmann was director of the strategic, proliferation and military issues office in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. His office was privy to classified intelligence gathered by the CIA and other agencies about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear programs.

In Thielmann's view, Iraq could have presented an immediate threat to U.S. security in two areas: Either it was about to make a nuclear weapon, or it was forming close operational ties with al-Qaida terrorists.

Evidence was lacking for both, despite claims by President Bush and others, Thielmann said in an interview this week. Suspicions were presented as fact, contrary arguments ignored, he said.

The administration's prewar portrayal of Iraq's weapons capabilities has not been validated despite weeks of searching by military experts. Alleged stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons have not turned up, nor has significant evidence of a nuclear weapons program or links to the al-Qaida network.

Bush has said administration assertions on Iraq will be verified in time. The CIA and other agencies have vigorously defended their prewar performances.

CIA Director George Tenet, responding to similar criticism last week, said in a statement: "The integrity of our process was maintained throughout, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong." On Friday, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency acknowledged he had no hard evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons last fall but believed Iraq had a program in place to produce them.

Also Friday, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was not prepared to place blame for any intelligence shortcomings until all information is in.

"There are always times when a single sentence or a single report evokes a lot of concern and some doubt," Warner told reporters after a closed hearing of his committee. "But thus far, in my own personal assessment of this situation, the intelligence community has diligently and forthrightly and with integrity produced intelligence and submitted it to this administration and to the Congress of the United States."

Thielmann suggested mistakes may have been made at points all along the chain from when intelligence is gathered, analyzed, presented to the president and then provided to the public.

The evidence of a renewed nuclear program in Iraq was far more limited than the administration contended, he said.

"When the administration did talk about specific evidence - it was basically declassified, sensitive information - it did it in a way that was also not entirely honest," Thielmann said.

In his State of the Union address, Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The Africa claim rested on a purported letter or letters between officials in Iraq and Niger held by European intelligence agencies. The communications are now accepted as forged, and Thielmann said he believed the information on Africa was discounted months before Bush mentioned it.

"I was very surprised to hear that be announced to the United States and the entire world," he said.

Thielmann said he had presumed Iraq had supplies of chemical and probably biological weapons. He particularly expected U.S. forces to find caches of mustard agent or other chemical weapons left over from Saddam's old stockpiles.

"We appear to have been wrong," he said. "I've been genuinely surprised at that."

One example where officials took too far a leap from the facts, according to Thielmann: On Feb. 11, CIA Director Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iraq "retains in violation of U.N. resolutions a small number of Scud missiles that it produced before the Gulf War."

Intelligence analysts supposed Iraq may have had some missiles because they couldn't account for all the Scuds it had before the first Gulf War, Thielmann said. They could have been destroyed, dismantled, miscounted or still somewhere in Saddam's inventory.

Some critics have suggested that the White House and Pentagon policy-makers pressured the CIA and military intelligence to come up with conclusions favorable to an attack-Iraq policy. The CIA and military have denied such charges. Thielmann said that generally he felt no such pressure.

Although his office did not directly handle terrorism issues, Thielmann said he was similarly unconvinced of a strong link between al-Qaida and Saddam's government.

Yet, the implication from Bush on down was that Saddam supported Osama bin Laden's network. Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks frequently were mentioned in the same sentence, even though officials have no good evidence of any link between the two.

[Bigg Red]

Set the scope large enough to include the Sink Emperor and the Dems will drop it like a hot potato.

^^
Well said!

[RLK]

The Bush administration distorted intelligence and presented conjecture as evidence to justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a retired intelligence official who served during the months before the war.

-----------------------

This appears to be the truth.

[MizSterious]

The truth? Would these people--the liberals and the axis of weasels--know the truth if it exploded in their laps, like it did on 9/11?

What about all this stuff?

WARNING: Gathering WMD storm a crock. See what Clinton told nation in 1998...

The Guardian Fully Retracts BOTH Powell/Straw Story AND Wolfowitz "It's All About Oil" Story

CIA convinced truck-trailers held bioweapons labs ^

IRAQ: WMD source 'was senior Iraqi officer'

FAS (Fed Am Scientist) Report: Iraqi Precursor Chemicals Stored Separately for Weapon-side Mixing

THE ROAD ENDS FOR WMD ON WHEELS

Coalition forces enter possible WMD site

Initial tests suggest WMD "cocktail" found in Iraq (**Of special note--post #58, by Archy)

U.S. finds new evidence of Iraqi WMD (NBC training school, antidotes)

Chem-weapons lab believed discovered

BRITS' CHILLING CHEM-NUKE FIND

CAPTURED FOES FOUND WITH CHEM-WAR GEAR

EUPHRATES 'POISONED'

MSNBC - Cyanide & Mustard Agents Found in Euphrates River

Is the Activity at Al Qaim Related to Nuclear Efforts?

U.S. probing nuclear facility (Al Tuwaitha Follow Up)

Team Inspects suspected plutonium site (update by the journalist who broke original story, NEW info)

Underground Nuclear Facility Found in Iraq

Marines hold Iraqi nuclear site built by French

U.S. Marines Guard Secret Iraqi City with Very Hot Nuclear Radiation Levels

And from Freeper "HatSteel":

Terrorist devices, chemical weapons found in Iraq

Suspicious Iraqi Drums - UPDATE

Suspected bioweapons labs found

Searching for Weapons of Mass Destruction, Larry Elder

Iraq's Weapons and the Road to War

Iraqi Scientist Links Weapons to 'Dual Use' Facilities, White House Says

IRAQ: U.S. Analysts Link Iraq Labs to Germ Arms

Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert

Herald Sun: Soldiers find Iraqi chemical 'dump'

***Germany's leading role in arming Iraq

*Germany intercepts (30 tonnes) chemicals (may be used to make nerve gas) for N Korea

New DOD team to hunt for intel as well as weapons

***Chemical Weapons Programs

Capture of chemical expert could help U.S. weapons hunt in Iraq (Emad Husayn Abdulla al-Ani)

Belgium Finds Nerve Gas Ingredient in Letters

Banned missile programme found in Iraq

Administration to Announce 'Rollback' Strategy for WMD

Suspicious Iraqi Drums Preliminary Testing Suggests Chemical Agents; More Testing Needed

2 trailers deemed biological arms labs

***Table 2: Characteristics of Chemical Warfare Agents: Commercial Uses of Chemicals or Precursor Chemicals

******CENTAF IRAQ'S CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS PROGRAM


And I should add--

October 1998:Senate Democrats Signed Letter Urging Clinton To Attack Saddam Over WMDs, just posted today.

We've found wmds, we and the axis of weasels have known about the wmds--and the rest of this is just an excuse to attack what was a just and a successful war. The ones telling the "big lie" are not the President and his admin, but the weasels. Pity that some freepers are buying into it.

[nothingnew]

John Culver was JFK's college roomate.

Yeah, and I think Thielmann was Ritters' roomate.

FMCDH

[gaspar]

Failed Foreign Service Officers are either asked to retire -- or take a job in the State Department's Office of Intelligence and Research. Thielmann chose the latter, and as his graduation from the ultra-Liberal Grinell ('72) would suggest, he continued his losing ways until recent retirement while still in his fifties. Now we can expect a couple of decades of mushthought from this bozo (this article is a reprise of a previous interview he gave to Newsweek) until he goes into that great eternal purgatory where FSO's go -- and no one else.

[Grampa Dave]

More important, Greg Thielmann is probably a life long card carrying rat, who is very pro Islamofacist.

[MizSterious]

The headline should have read Evidence Distorted for Attacking the Successful and Just War, truth be told.

[snooker]

" ... The Bush administration distorted intelligence and presented conjecture as evidence to justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a retired intelligence official who served during the months before the war.

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This appears to be the truth. "

It's the truth, yeah sure it is. I'm an unamed source and I say this is crapola.

Put a face on the source. Have them available for questioning. Let's see the 'evidence'. I won't take any NYTs article as evidence.

So the UN and Hans Blix was lying all the time. Hmmmm got to think that one over.

This is getting hilarious. We'll see won't we. But personally I need more than 2 months to search all the sand in Iraq for WMDs.

Anyone care to contemplate how easy it would be to take a gps and go out in the desert, write down the coordinates, dig a hole, stick the WMDs in the hole and bury them. How would anyone find the WMDs except those who buried them in the first place and knew the coordinates.

We'll see won't we.

Has anyone else noticed the uptick in dumpo posts in this forum? Getting a bit much. Do we have a re-direct from the undergraound? These types are doing nothing but attacking Bush's character with lies. So sad to see so many so blinded by hatred.

[Mike4Freedom]

You didn't want to go to war at all ,did you?

Correct, I never fully believed the story. The evidence was "thin" at best and the Niger forgery was well known before the first missile flew. The down side risk was considerable as we see in the rejuvenation of Al Queda.

So, yes, I was against the war before it started. Does that mean that I cannot point out the need for finding the truth now.

I will be happy to congratulate the President for being smarter than I was if he turns out correct, though I will be unhappy if they were withholding good evidence. On the other hand, I expect all true conservatives of whatever party to put aside party loyalty and stop supporting the president if the facts show that the administration intentionally lied. Do we have a deal?

Remember that the truth will eventually come out. It may take some years but history will know the answer. Just like we all know now that the main escalation of the Viet Nam war was based on a non-existent Gulf of Tonkin incident. Fifty Thousand dead Americans and probably 2 or 3 times than number of Viet Namese dead because of that story. If Johnson was alive, we should be hanging him from the highest place.

[Mini-14]

John Culver was a far-left Democratic U.S. Senator from Iowa in the late 80s.

[gitmogrunt]

Wasn't Salman Pak, the training base with the aircraft fuselage, also a training base for Al Qaeda Hijackers located in Iraq?

How much more operational can you get in Mr. so-called ex-official?

[ladyinred]

I am so sick of this. No matter what these people's opinions are, they should keep their mouths shut! I don't care who they are, they would not be privy to the information the President of the United States has! This is NOT an attack on free speech, this is about national security. These second guessing, remaining secret so called officials are undermining our security!!! They don't even have the guts to reveal who they are!

[alnick]

It's not as if President Bush made up the WMD issue. It was there before he was.

The idea that you would jump to the conclusion that there was something sneaky going on on our side rather than see the more likely scenario, that SH hid, destroyed, and/or moved the weapons shortly before or even during the war, shows your bias. You trust Saddam Hussein more than you trust George W. Bush.

To accuse people of blindly following who use common sense rather than get hysterical three minutes after the WMD search begins is ludicrous.

[jammer]

It doesn't do any good. Check the irrelevant replies to you.

[F16Fighter]

MEMO TO DEMOCRATS:

The war is over.

America has destroyed your Ally, Saddam in the process.

We have shaken up the entire world AND international terrorism in the process.

Regardless of this petty and unsubstantiated "charge," of "deception" the War is STILL supported by 75% of the American people.

Ergo, in 2004 Dubya will slaughter ANY RAT candidate for President.

[jammer]

To accuse people of blindly following who use common sense rather than get hysterical three minutes after the WMD search begins is ludicrous.

Yes, but what relevance is that statement? The accusation was about people who have not even started to question the WMD search 2 months after we occupied Iraq. The statement was that common sense is not being used, and implied that it would be more productive to bolster the arguments made against critics rather than use ad hominem terms like "hysterical" and "ludicrous".

Hiding or moving is a reasonable argument, IMO. But the arguments of critics are not unreasonable either--better formulate some rebuttal.

[alnick]

The arguments of the critics are not reasonable, because their argument is that if large stocks of WMD were not uncovered and revealed with a few weeks of the war, then Bush was lying or at least exagerating. That's a huge leap.

There's an old saying, and I'm going to slaughter it because I remember the gist but not the actual saying. It basically says that if you know that there is a herd of horse-like animals without actually seeing them, you don't automatically assume that it's a herd of zebras. It's much more likely to be horses.

Bush's enemies are leaping to the conclusion that it's zebras. And guess what? They gain politically if it's zebras, but they lose politically if it's horses.

Common sense says that the accusers are suspect due to that.

Common sense tells me to believe that it's horses until I actually see those stripes.

[alnick]

I remember every week after the war, people said, "Just give it another month and we'll find WMDs."

Actually Bush admin officials said to give it at least a year.