NYTimes: Intelligence officials pressured on iRaq...Not!

Looks to me like they are leading with the lede.

 

They haven't finished the investigation yet, either.

Someone should tell Rumsfeld, Wolfie and Tony Blair so they can quit lying now, it's embarrassing.

 

the best way to spot a liar is to see who takes the least responsibility for their actions. you're saying that someone isn't a liar and shouldn't take responsibility if it was someone else who lied to them? maybe in high school, but this is the POTUS we are talking about, there needs to be a sense of professionalism. There is no, "but HE said it....don't blame me!"

this lack of responsibility in our presidents disgusts me, and i'm not solely talking about Bush, but Clinton as well, and it is getting worse and worse.

If Bush is going to take the responsibility and credit for telling the american people that we had to go to war, then he had better take the responsibility if it turns out we were wrong.

However, I still doubt that any CIA officials will admit that they were pushed to tell, seeing how Bush has treated those who have spoken out against him in the intelligence committee.

Glad to see that you are finally realizing the war was built on shoddy evidence, basso.

 

I think he understood the context, but enjoyed the further implication, assuming you agree with the report.

 

Did you see the pc today? Not exactly as written: the definition of 'pressure' was extremely narrow, and applied only if an intel operative had already reached a conclusion and was then told directly to change it. Didn't include pressure before the conclusion, overall pressure, or indirect influence.

And, more to the point, this element wasn't even dealt with in this report, aside from that narrow question. That report will be the 2nd of 4 reports the SIC is putting together on the whole issue. But here's the kicker:

Despite encouragment and offers to work on past their end of session date by their Democratic counterparts, the Republican members wouldn't allow an extension of term to finish the 2nd report; ie the one dealing with administrative pressure, before the election. This in spite of several precednets of doing just that if the need was sufficient, and as noted, has there ever been a greater need? MSNBC stated that, off record, Republican members of the SIC said there was no way they'd allow that part of the invesitgation to take place before the election. Wonder why. They had previously quashed Rockefeller's ( I think) movement to have that included in the 1st report. Pat Roberts said it " wasn't the time to be looking back and assessing blame, but time to look forward and correct problems." Hmmmm...[/b]

 

Does this mean we can put an end to those fallacious "WMD found threads" now?



We need a hall of shame for those.

 

what? no way! this respectable forum is devoid of such selective belief, buffet-style fact selection and hypocrisy. There's nothing wrong with using a part of an article to support your beliefs while disagreeing with the whole. It's like believing that Iraq had no WMDs while believing that the CIA and Bush were telling the truth, nothing wrong with that.

 

From wh.gov... Wow, Kerry really needs that brief... no way he can talk as well on this topic as W. Curiously, he doesn't mention Plame when talking about assets,
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President Bush Discusses Senate Intelligence Committee Report

I appreciate the Senate's work. And I'll tell you why. Because one of the key ingredients to winning the war on terror is to make sure that our intelligence agencies provide the best and possible intelligence to the chief executive -- to the executive branch, as well as to the legislative branch. And so the idea that the Senate has taken a hard look to find out where the intelligence-gathering services went short is good and positive. And I commend the chairman of the committee for doing that.

We need to know. I want to know. I want to know how to make the agencies better, to make sure that we're better able to gather the information necessary to protect the American people. One of the key ingredients and one of the vital ingredients of keeping us safe is to gather the best intelligence we can gather.

And so this is a useful report. There's going to be a lot of talk about reform in Washington, reforms of the agencies. And I look forward to working with members of Congress to put out reforms that will work. A couple of ideas that I think make sense: One, we need to bolster human intelligence. In other words, one of the best ways to figure out what the enemy is thinking is to get to know the enemy firsthand, I guess is the best way to put it -- is to have as much human intelligence as possible. Good quality intelligence and enough human intelligence agents, assets out there so that we can cover the globe.

Secondly, one of the key ingredients is to use our technologies to listen and look better. And so we've got to always make sure our intelligence agencies are on the cutting edge of change. And thirdly, there are quite a few intelligence-gathering agencies within Washington, and there needs to be better coordination between the agencies.

Now, having said that, I want -- I haven't seen the report yet. I know it's quite critical. It's very important for our fellow citizens to know there's some really good people working hard in our intelligence-gathering agencies, taking risks for their lives, doing the very best job they can. I will remind them that there has been some failures -- listen, we thought there was going to be stockpiles of weapons. I thought so; the Congress thought so; the U.N. thought so. I'll tell you what we do know. Saddam Hussein had the capacity to make weapons. See, he had the ability to make them. He had the intent. We knew he hated America. We knew he was paying families of suiciders. We knew he tortured his own people, and we knew he had the capability of making weapons. That we do know. They haven't found the stockpiles, but we do know he could make them. And so he was a dangerous man. He was a dangerous man. The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. America is safer. (Applause.)

I want to know the truth. I want to know the facts. I appreciate the fact-finders working hard, and I want to work to make it the very best system we can possibly have. Because we've got a duty to do for the American people. This war goes on. There's a mighty ideological struggle taking place. Remember, it is really -- the better way to describe what's happening is, this is a war against an ideology which stands exactly opposite of what we believe. It's an ideology that can -- if you just think, remember the Taliban -- it's an ideology that brutalized people because of what they thought. It brutalized people because of how they worshiped. It brutalized people because of their gender. The exact opposite of what America stands for.

You see, we believe that you're as big a patriot if you worship the Almighty as if you don't. You have the freedom to do so. And if you choose to worship, whether it be as a Christian, Jew or Muslim, you're equally as patriotic as your neighbor. That's what we believe. You have the freedom to worship as you see fit in America.

That's the exact opposite of the dim view of the people who are trying to cause us harm. They use terror as a tool. So this is really a ideological struggle where the enemy is willing to use terror as a tool. And they kill innocent life because they know our good hearts break every time we see an innocent soldier die, and an innocent citizen die. They know the compassion we all feel. Forget political parties; all Americans grieve when we see a son or a daughter, a husband or wife, go down in combat. We weep when we see that. We care when suiciders bomb innocent children inside Iraq. That's the nature of our soul. And they know that.

And see, they want to use terror as a tool to drive us out. They want us to forget our duty. They want us to get scared and pale in the face of their horrific acts. They do not understand the American people. Yeah, we'll weep, but we will never cower in the face of killers and thugs.

 

Is it the same Senate report that said this?:

Senate Report Sees No Formal Iraq-Qaeda Ties
Fri Jul 9, 4:39 PM ET
By Caroline Drees, Security Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Contacts between Iraq (news - web sites) and al Qaeda in the 1990s never led to a formal relationship and there is no evidence Iraq helped conduct an al Qaeda attack, a report by a bipartisan Senate committee said on Friday.

The findings by the Senate Intelligence Committee came less than a month after the government-established commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said there was no evidence of a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s Islamic militant network.

Assertions that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and could provide chemical or biological agents to al Qaeda for attacks on the United States were a main justification for President Bush (news - web sites)'s decision to invade and occupy Iraq.

No such weapons have been found, and the Senate panel said most of the U.S. intelligence community's judgments about Iraqi WMD were overstated or unsupported by underlying intelligence.

Bush and his top aides have stood firm on assertions of links between Iraq and al Qaeda, with Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) forcefully maintaining that evidence may yet emerge depicting an Iraqi role in the Sept. 11 attacks carried out by al Qaeda.

"The Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) reasonably assessed that there were likely several instances of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda throughout the 1990s, but that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship," the report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said.

"The Central Intelligence Agency's assessment that to date there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an al Qaeda attack was reasonable and objective. No additional information has emerged to suggest otherwise," said the committee's "Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq."

Following the Sept. 11 commission's report last month, Cheney suggested in a television interview he might have more information than the panel. The commission issued a terse statement on Tuesday saying the vice president had no more information than commission investigators.

As part of the White House response to the Sept. 11 commission's report, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) also said she believed what the panel was actually saying was that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) did not control al Qaeda. The commission's chairmen flatly rejected her interpretation.

The Senate report, which focused primarily on the intelligence community's reporting on suspected Iraqi WMD, said Saddam might have used al Qaeda to conduct attacks in the event of war if he were sufficiently desperate.

But it said, "No information has emerged thus far to suggest that Saddam did try to employ al Qaeda in conducting terrorist attacks."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm.../nm/20040709/pl_nm/iraq_intelligence_qaeda_dc

 

More...
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July 11, 2004
Panel Describes Long Weakening of Hussein Army
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

WASHINGTON, July 10 — The Senate's report on prewar intelligence about Iraq, which asserts that warnings about its illicit weapons were largely unfounded and that its ties to Al Qaeda were tenuous, also undermines another justification for the war: that Saddam Hussein's military posed a grave threat to regional stability and American interests.

In a detailed discussion of Iraq's prewar military posture, the report cites a long series of intelligence reports in the decade before the war that described a formerly potent army's spiral of decay under the pressures of economic sanctions and American military pressure.

The main risks, these reports indicated, was the unpredictable nature of Mr. Hussein's government, especially in the face of possible American-led attacks. But the Senate Intelligence Committee called this analysis relatively weak.

The committee's report implies that opponents of the war were essentially correct when they argued that Iraq posed little immediate threat to the United States. Before the war, those who held this view, both in Congress and at the United Nations, argued that continued containment was a course preferable to invading Iraq.

Although the report described a profound breakdown in the American intelligence system, both White House and Congressional officials say the political calendar will prevent any serious action until after the November elections. [Page 10.]

In discussing the committee's report, the Bush administration has emphasized that the war was worthwhile because it removed a threatening dictator from power.

"He was a dangerous man," President Bush said Friday. "The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. America is safer."

In the debate before the war, administration officials sometimes made the same argument, but not with the prominence that they gave to threats from chemical weapons or terrorism. They sometimes mentioned risks that Iraq would use Scuds or other shorter-range conventional missiles, or its air-defense attacks on American air patrols over the no-flight zones in the north and south of the country. They also spoke of continuing military dangers to Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

In a speech in January 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld interspersed claims about chemical and biological weapons and terrorism with conventional military threats to argue that "Iraq poses a threat to the security of our people and to the stability of the world."

"Iraq has invaded two of its neighbors, and has launched ballistic missiles at four of its neighbors," he said, adding that it "is the only country in the world that fires missiles and artillery at U.S. and coalition aircraft on an almost daily basis."

The intelligence agencies should have offered Congress and other policymakers a comprehensive, unified view of these risks before the war, the Senate Intelligence Committee said, but they never did so.

After reviewing about 400 analytical documents written by the intelligence agencies from 1991, after the first gulf war, to 2003, when the Hussein rule was toppled, the committee unanimously concluded that "the body of assessments showed that Iraqi military capabilities had steadily degraded following defeat in the first gulf war in 1991. Analysts also believed those capabilities would continue to erode as long as economic sanctions remained in place."

The intelligence agencies, though, were much less certain about Mr. Hussein's intentions, the committee said.

"The assessments came to the same general conclusions that Saddam Hussein: was unpredictable and aggressive; retained the capability to strike militarily in the region; and, would probably not choose to use force against neighbors as long as U.S. and Coalition forces were in the region."

"Clearly, the issue of Saddam's intentions to use force against his neighbors and U.S. and Coalition forces was a high-interest matter," the report said, "and, unfortunately, the main area where the intelligence community was least confident in its analysis."

It criticized the agencies for failing "to clearly characterize changes in Iraq's threat to regional stability and security, taking account of the fact that its conventional military forces steadily degraded after 1990."

In September 1991, a report on Mr. Hussein's "prospects for survival over the next year" found that Iraq would have "only limited capabilities to endanger U.S. interests."

By 1993, an intelligence assessment said Mr. Hussein's basic goals were to maintain power "by any means," to regain internal control, to rebuild the military, including illicit weapons, and to make Iraq "the dominant regional power." But the agencies warned that they were "hindered by the dearth of solid information."

An assessment in early 1995 called Iraq "an immediate source of concern and a long-term threat to U.S. strategic interests in the Persian Gulf," but the State Department's view in the document called it "impossible to predict with confidence whether Saddam will choose confrontation or opt for a period of quiescence and cooperation." The military's view in the document was that Iraq had "at least some chance" of striking quickly into Saudi oil fields.

Other reports that year warned of Mr. Hussein's "unpredictability and proclivity for dramatic and rash behavior" but said only "marginal" rebuilding of the military had occurred. Without a "large, standing coalition military presence" in the region, one said, there could be "no guarantee" of deterring him.

From about 1999 on, though, assessments "noted that the condition of all Iraqi military branches was poor," the Senate committee found.

In 2002, a report judged "that Iraqi military morale and battlefield cohesion are more fragile today than in 1991."

By January 2003, an assessment found that "Saddam probably will not initiate hostilities for fear of providing Washington with justification to invade Iraq. Nevertheless, he might deal the first blow, especially if he perceives that an attack intended to end his regime is imminent."

By March 17, 2003, before the American attack commenced, President Bush promised that the time of such risks was about to end.

"In a free Iraq there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors," he said. "The tyrant will soon be gone."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/international/middleeast/11MILI.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

 

Here's the other NYTimes article mentioned in the one above...
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July 11, 2004
Despite Terror Risk, Washington Is Unlikely to Press Reform of C.I.A. This Year
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, July 10 — Despite a scorching Senate report that describes a profound breakdown of the American intelligence system at a time of increasing terror threats, both White House officials and Congressional leaders say the political calendar will prevent any serious action until after the November elections.

President Bush's staff is already sorting through a series of proposals that he is likely to endorse but not spell out in detail when he appoints a new director of central intelligence, probably in the next two weeks. Mr. Bush, senior officials said, will probably wait until after the release of a second report, expected to be equally searing in its criticism, about the intelligence failures surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks.

One senior administration official characterized the two reports as almost mirror-image descriptions of a deeply dysfunctional intelligence apparatus, with Friday's report describing, in this official's words, "a system that assumed the presence of threats that didn't exist," and next week's report detailing "a system that failed to see threats that that were coming at us."

Yet any major changes would require far-reaching legislation. And some of the proposals now being considered inside the White House do not directly address what the Senate Intelligence Committee described on Friday as a system marked by the "lack of information sharing, poor management and inadequate intelligence collection." One such proposal is the creation of an intelligence czar who could have control over the $40-billion intelligence budget now dominated by the Pentagon.

Senate leaders like John D. Rockefeller IV, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, and intelligence experts said the need for action was urgent given the list of imminent threats facing the country — from reports that Al Qaeda may be planning attacks on the nation before the election to a race by North Korea and Iran to speed their nuclear programs.

But even if the reform proposals now being debated at the White House and in Congress were enacted immediately, the Senators and experts said, it would take years to change a culture that the Senate committee report said failed to put much emphasis in penetrating Iraq with human spies, that relied too much on foreign intelligence systems and that made claims about Iraq's weapons capability that were "not supported by the intelligence."

Mr. Bush said Friday that his goals included improving human and technical intelligence collection abilities. But he discussed no specifics, and several officials who advise the White House on intelligence policy said they doubted the president would risk beginning a prolonged debate about reforming the system now.

"The president hasn't decided how deeply he wants to take this on now," said one senior official involved in the internal debate. "Everyone knows that serious reform is going to be strongly opposed by the Pentagon and the armed services committees," which could lose some of their budgetary control. "And the fact is that no one in Washington — not the president, not the Congress — will have the time to take this on until next year."

Given the unpredictability of politics in an election year, however, the Democrats will most likely force the issue to the forefront of the political agenda. It it becomes a significant issue, Mr. Bush could be forced to act, just as political forces pressed him to action in creating both the Department of Homeland Security and the Sept. 11 commission.

Arguing over such reforms during a campaign against Senator John F. Kerry, Mr. Bush's political advisers said, might remind Americans about the specific charges that both Mr. Bush and Vice President Cheney made almost weekly about Iraq's alleged nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs.

The Senate committee report on Friday confirmed what has been known for months — that many of those charges were "not supported by the intelligence." But the report went further, saying that the assumptions that Saddam Hussein must have revived those programs were fueled by a "group think" dynamic.

Though Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the information was based on current, reliable intelligence, the committee concluded that "the intelligence community appears to have decided that the difficulty and risks inherent in developing sources or inserting operations officers into Iraq outweighed the potential benefits."

Congress has been urged by several commissions in the past decade to act on the intelligence structure, but it has quickly gotten mired in committee politics and rivalries between the intelligence agencies.

But several Congressional leaders said the debate would not even begin until Mr. Bush declares his own views on several critical issues, including separating the job of running the C.I.A. from the job of overseeing the nation's intelligence operations.

The Senate committee charged that George Tenet, the director of central intelligence who left his post this weekend, had confused the two roles, biasing his advise to Mr. Bush about Iraq to fit the C.I.A.'s views and giving far too little credence to doubts raised by other intelligence agencies.

"We cannot get an answer about what ideas they like and what they can't stand," said Representative Jane Harmon, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who is the co-author of one of several bills calling for a reorganization of the intelligence system that would include a new director of national intelligence. Her proposal, however, would not be as radical as one recommended to Mr. Bush by the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which would give far greater authority to the new intelligence czar.

That is one of several proposals, submitted by the board and developed inside the National Security Council that have been on Mr. Bush's desk for nearly two years,

Most of the proposals that Mr. Bush is expected to discuss with his senior aides, according to officials involved in the debate, have met with little enthusiasm within the White House. Mr. Bush has not decided on the even least controversial ones, like giving a new director of central intelligence a term of five to seven years, similar to the decade-long term for the F.B.I. director.

Such a fixed term, the theory goes, would insulate the intelligence director from political pressures, though the Senate panel concluded they saw no evidence that politics had led to the intelligence community's over-estimation of Iraq's weapons programs.

In conversations among one another, several of Mr. Bush's top national security officials have expressed concern that a prolonged reorganization could disrupt intelligence operations inside the Pentagon, which controls nearly all of the nation's intelligence agencies except for the C.I.A., and smaller units at the State and Energy departments.

And there is still disagreement within the intelligence community about whether the Senate committee put together the right diagnosis.

On Friday John E. McLaughlin, the soft-spoken and scholarly career analyst who takes over on Sunday as the acting director of central intelligence, argued that the agency's errors were largely in how it presented intelligence, not in a fundamental failure to gather it. Mr. McLaughlin said "one significant error" was in publishing an executive summary of the intelligence estimate about Iraq "without sufficient caveats and disclaimers where our knowledge was incomplete."

Yet referring to Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, he said: "I think Senator Roberts called this an `assumption train.' If it was an assumption train, we were not the engine. I'm not even sure we were the coal car. I don't know where we were on it, but people all around the world made the assumption that this country had weapons."

Others say the Iraq experience is already engendering more caution, perhaps too much caution. They cite as an example a recently produced, highly classified assessment of North Korea's nuclear weapons program. When international inspectors were thrown out of the country 18 months ago, it said they possessed enough plutonium to produce six or eight weapons. Yet the new report hedges the question of how many nuclear weapons the country produced, giving a range for the number of weapons that one official said was "so big as to be almost entirely useless."

Within hours of the report's release on Friday, for example, White House officials were sending e-mail messages to one another citing specific conclusions from the report that they read as exonerating Mr. Bush's top aides for the president's claim that Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Africa. For weeks last summer, C.I.A. officials argued that the White House had ignored warnings that the intelligence was suspect.

In background conversations, White House officials paging through the report expressed anger at what one official called "remarkably sloppy work" by the C.I.A., insisting that Mr. Bush never uttered claims about Iraq's weapons that had not first been vetted by the agency.

"You could argue it's the same kind of group-think that led them to miss the fall of the Soviet Union and the India-Pakistan nuclear tests," the official said.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/international/middleeast/11INTE.html?pagewanted=print&position=