Did The Bush Administration Distort Intelligence? http://cbs2chicago.com/topstories/topstories_story_158105109.html Jun 7, 2003 9:45 am US/Central (CBS) President Bush's 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." Separately, the chief of the Pentagon's intelligence agency said it had no hard evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons last fall but believed Iraq had a program in place to produce them. The assessment suggests a higher degree of uncertainty about the immediacy of an Iraqi threat, which was the main justification for war. Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, discussed the matter at a Capitol Hill news conference Friday as the administration scrambled to respond to news reports about excerpts from a September 2002 DIA report on facilities and other pieces of Iraq's arms-building infrastructure. And the New York Times reports in its Saturday editions that American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs. In interviews with the Times over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment. "Everyone has wanted to find the 'smoking gun' so much that they may have wanted to have reached this conclusion," said one intelligence expert who has seen the trailers and, like some others, spoke to the newspaper on condition that he not be identified. He added, "I am very upset with the process." 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 Qaeda terrorists. Evidence was lacking for both, despite claims by Mr. Bush and others, Thielmann said in an Associated Press interview this week. Suspicions were presented as fact, and 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 Qaeda network. Mr. Bush has said administration assertions on Iraq will be verified in time. The CIA and other agencies have vigorously defended their prewar performances. 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. 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." 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 Qaeda and Saddam's government. Yet, the implication from Mr. 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. Jacoby said his agency concurred in an intelligence community consensus last fall that Iraq had a program for weapons of mass destruction. But the DIA was unable to pinpoint any locations. "We could not specifically pin down individual facilities operating as part of the weapons of mass destruction program, specifically the chemical warfare portion," Jacoby said at a joint news conference with Sen. John Warner and Stephen Cambone, the Pentagon's intelligence chief. They spoke after the Senate Armed Services Committee met privately with Jacoby, Cambone and an unidentified CIA representative to discuss prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs. For his part Warner, chairman of the armed services panel, 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." In his description of the still-classified DIA report, Jacoby drew a distinction between the level of certainty about Iraq's pursuit of weapons and the existence of actual chemical weapons. "As of 2002, in September, we could not reliably pin down - for somebody who was doing contingency planning - specific facilities, locations or production that was under way at a specific location at that point in time," he said. The report "is not in any way intended to portray the fact that we had any doubts that such a program existed," he said. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently raised the possibility that Iraq destroyed such weapons before the war started March 20. He also has said he believes some remain and will be discovered when U.S. search teams find knowledgeable Iraqis who are willing to disclose the locations. In making its case for invading Iraq, the administration also argued that Iraq was seeking to develop nuclear weapons and that it might provide mass-killing weapons to terrorists. On Friday, a small team of United Nations nuclear experts arrived in Baghdad to begin a damage assessment at Iraq's largest nuclear facility, known as Tuwaitha. It was left unguarded by American and allied troops during the early days of the war and was pillaged by villagers. The arrival of the team - whose members are not weapons inspectors - marked the first time since the Iraq war began that representatives from the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency returned to the country. The agency had long monitored Iraq's nuclear program. The DIA's analysis is just one piece of an intelligence mosaic that Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials could consider in making their own assessment of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons capability. Congress is reviewing the prewar intelligence to determine whether the administration overplayed the weapons threat in order to justify toppling the Iraqi government. In Britain, Parliament is investigating the government's use of intelligence material on Iraqi weapons amid reports that Prime Minister Tony Blair's office redrafted an intelligence dossier, published in September, to emphasize a single-source report about the threat of chemical and biological weapons. As for the trailers, which allied forces found in Iraq in April and May, the Bush administration has cited them as evidence that Saddam Hussein was hiding a program for biological warfare. In a white paper last week, it publicly detailed its case, even while conceding discrepancies in the evidence and a lack of hard proof. Now, says the Times, intelligence analysts stationed in the Middle East, as well as in the United States and Britain, are disclosing serious doubts about the administration's conclusions in what appears to be "a bitter debate" within the intelligence community. Skeptics told the Times their initial judgments of a weapon application for the trailers had faltered as new evidence came to light. Bill Harlow, a spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, said to the Times that the dissenters "are entitled to their opinion, of course, but we stand behind the assertions in the white paper."
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - Before the war, the Bush administration portrayed Iraq as full of killer poisons with strange names and deadly effects, which terrorists could get hold of and unleash on U.S. cities. Those claims and fears have not been borne out so far. Was the intelligence regarding Iraq inaccurate or distorted between when it was gathered and presented to the world? Congress is looking into the matter. Prime Minister Tony Blair 's government in Britain is facing similar scrutiny. A former State Department intelligence official, who viewed classified intelligence gathered by the CIA and other agencies about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear programs during the run-up to the war, accused the administration of distorting intelligence and presenting conjecture as fact. "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 in September. He was director of the strategic, proliferation and military issues office in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. 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. The assessment suggests greater uncertainty about the Iraqi threat than the administration indicated publicly. CIA Director George Tenet, Secretary of State Colin Powel and top Pentagon officials have defended their pieces of the intelligence picture, saying they provided accurate assessments. Many top U.S. officials contend their prewar assertions will yet be borne out. They say Iraq remains too dangerous to conduct a thorough search, but a new hunt is getting under way. Prewar statements from President Bush, Powell and intelligence officials offered many of the specific conclusions that drove the United States and Britain to invade Iraq. Most have yet to be validated. "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent," Powell said at the United Nations in February. In a paper released in October, U.S. intelligence agencies said that Iraq had begun "renewed production of chemical warfare agents," probably including mustard, sarin, cyclosarin and VX. Chemical weapons have not been found in the part of Iraq that was controlled by President Saddam Hussein 's government. Intelligence officials said Saddam would disperse his chemical weapons among his Iraqi Republican Guard units, which would use them if the government were about to fall. This apparently did not happen. Powell suggested military units had biological weapons in the field. On May 30, Lt. Gen. James Conway, the top Marine in Iraq, said, speaking about the hunt for chemical and biological weapons: "We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there." The prewar intelligence paper said Iraq had established "a large-scale, redundant and concealed" biological weapon agent production capability, which included mobile facilities. Allied forces in Iraq have found two truck trailers equipped with fermenters. The CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency said last week they concluded the vehicles probably are parts of a mobile biological weapons production facility. Bush seized on the finds as proof Iraq had prohibited weapons. "So far it seems as if all the leads that have been followed up have come to nothing. ... So many false claims have been made in the past, it can only be politically driven. Responsible governments take time to investigate," said Alex Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest in London. "It's like the boy who cried wolf. The credibility of these claims is shot." Powell also had told the United Nations that "numerous intelligence reports over the past decade from sources inside Iraq" indicated "a covert force of up to a few dozen Scud-variant ballistic missiles." None has been found. U.S. allegations that Iraq was trying to develop a nuclear weapon have also not been verified. Much discussed were some high-strength aluminum tubes Iraq tried to import. The CIA argued they were for centrifuges essential to a nuclear weapons program. Experts from the State and Energy departments said they were for conventional artillery rockets, Thielmann said. No centrifuges have been reported found. In his State of the Union address, Bush said that Britain had learned that Saddam "recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The claim rested significantly on a letter or letters between officials in Iraq and Niger that were obtained by European intelligence agencies. The communications are now accepted as forged. The administration also suggested Iraq supported terrorists, including members of al-Qaida. The al-Qaida connection was built around the movements of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a senior associate of Osama bin Laden. Zarqawi received medical treatment in Baghdad in 2002 and supported an Islamic extremist movement in Kurdish Iraq, outside Saddam's reach. A midlevel associate of Zarqawi was detained near Baghdad after the war. Zarqawi himself remains at large. Some reports indicated al-Qaida operatives had sought chemical and biological weapons expertise from Iraq, but there was little evidence Iraq supplied any. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...30608/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/iraq_weapons_evidence
Bush Certainty On Iraq Arms Went Beyond Analysts' Views http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26487-2003Jun6.html?nav=hptop_tb By Dana Priest and Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, June 7, 2003; Page A01 During the weeks last fall before critical votes in Congress and the United Nations on going to war in Iraq, senior administration officials, including President Bush, expressed certainty in public that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, even though U.S. intelligence agencies were reporting they had no direct evidence that such weapons existed. In an example of the tenor of the administration's statements at the time, the president said in the Rose Garden on Sept. 26 that "the Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons. The Iraqi regime is building the facilities necessary to make more biological and chemical weapons." But a Defense Intelligence Agency report on chemical weapons, widely distributed to administration policymakers around the time of the president's speech, stated there was "no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons or whether Iraq has or will establish its chemical agent production facilities." The disparities between the conviction with which administration officials portrayed the threat posed by Iraq in their public statements and documents, and the more qualified reporting on the issue by intelligence agencies in classified reports, are at the heart of a burgeoning controversy in Congress and within the intelligence community over the U.S. rationale for going to war. The failure of the United States to uncover any proscribed weapons eight weeks after the end of the war is fueling sentiment among some Democrats on Capitol Hill and some intelligence analysts that the administration may have exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq. The White House yesterday defended the administration's prewar claims. "We continue to have confidence in our statements about Iraq's possession of chemical and biological weapons," spokesman Ari Fleischer said. He added that "the precise location of where Iraq had chemical and biological weapons was never clear, but the fact they had it was never in doubt, based on a reading of the intelligence." The controversy over the administration's handling of the Iraq intelligence continued, however, as two senior defense intelligence officials discussed the issue behind closed doors with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The officials, Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, were asked by reporters afterward about the classified Defense Intelligence Agency report on Iraq's chemical weapons. "What we're saying is that as of 2002 in September, we could not reliably pin down, for somebody who was doing contingency planning, specific facilities, locations or production that was underway at a specific location at that point in time," Jacoby said. The existence of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document was reported in this week's U.S. News and World Report. The administration declassified a summary page of the document last night. The report said that "although we lack any direct information, Iraq probably possesses chemical agent in chemical munitions" and "probably possesses bulk chemical stockpiles, primarily containing precursors, but that also could consist of some mustard agent and VX," a deadly nerve agent. As the administration built its case for war last fall, some policymakers used caveats in describing Iraq's weapons holdings that mirrored the caution built into the DIA and other intelligence reports. In early September, for example, Bush used words such as "likely" or "suggests" in making the case that Iraq had a covert weapons program. But many of the president's speeches, as well as statements by Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, went without caveats. Among those concerned by the discrepancy is Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who routinely asked at committee meetings on Iraq whether officials were certain they would find weapons of mass destruction if the United States toppled the Iraqi government. Warner's committee and the Senate and House intelligence committees are deciding whether to launch an independent investigation of the administration's handling of Iraqi intelligence by their staffs. The CIA is already conducting an internal probe. Cheney kicked off the administration's campaign to win congressional and U.N. support for military action in a speech on Aug. 26 to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville. "Simply stated," Cheney said, "there's no doubt that [Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction." Before his Rose Garden statement in late September, Bush had used more measured language about Iraq's chemical weapons program, in line with the Defense Intelligence Agency conclusion. At the United Nations on Sept. 12, when he urged the world body to join the United States in confronting Iraq, Bush said that previous U.N. inspections revealed "that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents." But on Sept. 26, as the campaign to win congressional and U.N. Security Council approval for military action intensified, the president told congressional leaders Iraq "possesses" such weapons. On the same day, Rumsfeld told reporters that Iraq has "active development programs for those weapons, and has weaponized chemical and biological weapons." On Oct. 1, the CIA released a "white paper" on Iraq's weapons programs derived from a broader, classified National Intelligence Estimate that had been sent to the White House and shared with members of Congress in briefings. Among the "Key Judgments" in the first two pages of the National Intelligence Estimate that were meant to summarize the details that followed were statements in the white paper that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons," and "Baghdad has begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents, probably including mustard, sarin, cyclosarin and VX." However, the more detailed backup material later in the document did not support those assessments. The intelligence paper contained more qualified language, stating, for example, that "gaps in Iraqi accounting and current production capabilities strongly suggest Iraq has the ability to produce chemical warfare agents within its chemical industry." It also said Iraq "has the ability to produce chemical warfare agents" -- a softer formulation than the summary section of the document, which said that Iraq "has begun" producing the agents. On Oct. 7, Bush echoed without qualification the white paper's "key judgment" conclusion when he said that Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons." He went on to say, "Saddam Hussein has chosen to build and keep these weapons despite international sanctions, U.N. demands, and isolation from the civilized world." Asked about the president's comments on the Iraq intelligence yesterday, Fleischer said: "Intelligence comes in the form of a mosaic. The president's description of the complete picture resulted from an interagency process in which every statement was vetted and approved by each agency." A senior administration official, who consulted with analysts familiar with the white paper, said the document's judgments "were a bit more categorical" than later statements "but the overall burden of the evidence pointed to that conclusion." He added that the president's statements were "based on the preponderance of the evidence" as he and policymakers saw it. Throughout the run-up to war, according to senior intelligence officials, intelligence agencies had no direct evidence such as photographs or stolen Iraqi documents to support a firm conclusion about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. They said the case was circumstantial, largely because U.N. weapons inspectors had left Iraq in 1998, shutting off the last bit of direct knowledge available to the United States. Inspectors returned last November and remained in Iraq until March. Some officials have said privately that, while they could influence the content of intelligence documents, they had no control over what administration policymakers said in interpreting the material.
Here here. I guess it's easier to blindly support an unjustified war when you or yours aren't out there fighting it.
Tony Blair might be in trouble. It appears that his intelligence guys kept records of his attempts to pressure them into giving him the intelligence he and Bush wanted to support the war. **************** Spies threaten Blair with 'smoking gun' over Iraq Senior intelligence officers kept secret records of meetings after pressure from No 10 By Kim Sengupta and Andy McSmith 08 June 2003 Intelligence officers are holding a "smoking gun" which proves that they were subjected to a series of demands by Tony Blair's staff in the run-up to the Iraq war. The officers are furious about the accusation levelled by the Leader of the Commons, John Reid, that "rogue elements" are at work in the security services. They fear they are being lined up to take the blame for faulty intelligence used to justify the Iraq war. The intelligence services were so concerned about demands made by Downing Street for evidence to use against Iraq that extensive files have been built up detailing communications with Mr Blair's staff. Stung by Dr Reid's accusations about misinformation over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, intelligence officials have given veiled warnings about what may emerge in the two official inquiries into the affair. "A smoking gun may well exist over WMDs, but it may not be to the Government's liking," said one senior source. "Minuted details will show exactly what went on. Because of the frequency and, at times, unusual nature of the demands from Downing Street, people have made sure records were kept. There is a certain amount of self-preservation in this, of course." It is believed some of the minutes relate to conversations involving the Joint Intelligence Committee, Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's communications director, Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair's chief of staff, and Sir David Omand, the Government's security and intelligence co-ordinator. However, records had also been made, it is claimed, by individual officers in communications within the intelligence services. The intelligence services are also seething about Dr Reid's claims of spies trying to undermine an elected government. Although the Prime Minister and the Cabinet have been careful not to repeat the allegations, some security officials feel Dr Reid should apologise. "I don't know about the other [intelligence] services, but he certainly has not apologised to the chief of defence intelligence," said a Ministry of Defence official. "The mood is very fractious at the moment. Intelligence officials are keen that the inquiries should establish the demarcation between what was supplied to Downing Street by them, and what it received from the Americans." Mr Blair has defended the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by saying that the occupying authorities have a more urgent task in bringing security and humanitarian aid to the country. "In Northern Ireland we were searching for IRA weapons for the best part of 40 years and that is a tiny country. Iraq is almost the size of France," he said yesterday. The failure to uncover WMDs in Iraq is costing Mr Blair political support even among Labour and Conservative MPs who backed the war but are angry at the possibility that MPs may have been misled. Michael Portillo, the former Tory Cabinet minister who effusively praised the Prime Minister in March for renouncing spin to fight for what he believed to be right, has now changed his mind. Writing in today's Independent on Sunday, Mr Portillo said: "How could I have been so naive? Spin is the making of Blair, and it will be his demise. He's given his opponents a dream slogan - 'You can't believe a word he says'. But that may not worry the Prime Minister. "The opposition has never shown self-discipline, so maybe he'll give them the slip again." Other MPs who backed the war have warned that the issue could blow up very quickly into a major constitutional row between the Government and the House of Commons if, as expected, Tony Blair and senior officials refuse a request to give evidence to a committee of MPs. The Labour chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Donald Anderson, has written to a number of senior politicians and civil servants, warning them that they may be called before committee hearings later this month. Unlike the Intelligence and Security Committee - a group of MPs appointed by Mr Blair, which meets secretly - the Foreign Affairs Committee will hold its hearings in public and intends to publish its findings before MPs break up for the summer. A number of the intended witnesses, including Tony Blair himself and some senior figures in the intelligence community, are likely to refuse to appear. The committee could then appeal for support to the House of Commons, forcing a highly embarrassing vote which the Government might lose. Andrew Mackinlay, a Labour member of the committee who backed the Iraq war, predicted: "They will say they can't give evidence on matters affecting the security services, then either the committee will buckle or - more likely - there will be a major confrontation." John Maples, a Tory member of the committee who also backed the war, warned: "It would be very embarrassing for the Prime Minister to be taking on a Commons committee, because people would ask, 'What has the Government got to hide?' and second, they might not win a vote." The continuing instability in Iraq was brought home yesterday when an American solider was killed and four others wounded in a skirmish involving grenades and small arms fire in Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit. 8 June 2003 08:51 blair
Transcript: Colin Powell Talks WMD on Fox News Sunday Sunday, June 08, 2003 Following is a transcribed excerpt from Fox News Sunday on June 8, 2003. TONY SNOW, FOX NEWS: Secretary Powell, the controversy of the week in Washington has to deal with weapons of mass destruction. First I want to play you a little clip of your testimony in February before the United Nations Security Council regarding weapons of mass destruction possessed by Saddam Hussein. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) POWELL: There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more, and he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction. Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons program. (END VIDEO CLIP) SNOW: Do you still stand by each of those statements? COLIN POWELL, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: Yes. I spent -- not only have I been studying this for many, many years, but, as I prepared that statement, I worked very closely with the director of central intelligence, George Tenet... SNOW: Who was sitting right behind you. POWELL: Sitting right behind me. That statement was vetted thoroughly by all of the analysts who are responsible for this account. We spent four days and nights out at the CIA, making sure that whatever I said was supported by our intelligence holdings. Because it wasn't the president's credibility and my credibility in line, it was the credibility of the United States of America. And we are sure of what we said, because he does have this kind of capability. Now, suddenly this week there's a big firestorm about, well, we haven't found anything yet. Well, we are going to intensify our search. In my statement, I also said they are masters of deception and hiding. So we are sending in an Iraqi survey group of 1,300 people who will be looking in all the places, they'll be exploiting all the documents, they'll be interviewing people. And I would put before you exhibit A, the mobile biological labs that we have found. Now, people are saying, well, are they truly mobile biological labs? Yes, they are. POWELL: And the DCI, George Tenet, director of central intelligence, stands behind that assessment. And my best justification for the fact that they are -- well, he said they were biological labs -- is, if they were not biological labs, I can assure you, the very next morning, the Iraqis would have pulled them out and presented them to UNMOVIC and presented them to the whole international press corps to demonstrate what they were, if they weren't that. SNOW: So you have no doubt that there were weapons before the war. How about now? POWELL: There can be no question there were weapons before the war. They have had weapons throughout their history. They have used chemical weapons. They have admitted that they had biological weapons. And they never accounted for all that they had or what they might or might not have done with it. And it is the considered judgment not only of this administration, it was the judgment of President Clinton's administration, it's the judgment of a number of nations around that world, that they had these weapons. And when we passed Resolution 1441 unanimously, it was the unanimous judgment of the Security Council that Iraq was in violation of its obligations. Now, we have to do the intensive search that is ahead of us, and the Iraq survey group will be adding that. And I'm sure more evidence and more proof will come forward as we go down this road. SNOW: There have been allegations in this town that the books were cooked. In fact, one of your former aides, Mr. Thielman (ph), is quoted as saying that he does not believe that the evidence was fitting. Let's pull up his quote, if we can, just to see if -- never mind, we don't have it with us, so we're not going to pull up that quote. In any event, there have been arguments that the intelligence was bogus, and that specifically, the vice president, by going over to the CIA was in fact inflicting political pressure on people to alter and to doctor their assessments. True or false? POWELL: False. I mean, the vice president, by going over to the CIA and spending a lot of time there, was delving in, as I know Dick Cheney does -- I've worked with him for many years. He delves into a subject. He wants to get to the bottom. He wants to get to the truth. And I have heard no suggestion that he went over there and said, "This is the answer I want." He went over there to learn. I can tell you stories from the Gulf War back in 1991, the first Gulf War, when he was my boss as secretary of defense and I was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He did the same thing with me. He would bore in and bore in on our military plans and what we were doing. It's his style to make sure that he has all the information available to us in his mind so that he knows what he's talking about. That isn't politicizing, that's doing a good job. SNOW: On Capitol Hill, a number of people have said throughout that they were promised intelligence that it would make it beyond a shadow of a doubt, clear to them that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, and they are saying that they never got that... POWELL: No, no, please. They were briefed consistently and repeatedly last year. George Tenet was up testifying. John McLaughlin went up there repeatedly. We have presented information. We have put out classified documents, the Central Intelligence Agency has. We have given briefings up on the Hill. I presume Congress knew what it was doing when it passed the resolution supporting the president last fall. And so if Congress needs more information now to reaffirm their judgment of last year, the administration stands ready to provide all the information that we have to them. SNOW: Have you seen the Defense Intelligence Agency report that... POWELL: I've seen the summary that has made all the news. SNOW: The summary that has made the news indicates that as of September, the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, was unable to pinpoint production sources for weapons of mass destruction and, furthermore, was unable to find any battlefield deployments. True? POWELL: No, not true. The sentence that has gotten all of the attention in this two-page, unclassified summary talked about not having the evidence of current facilities and current stockpiling. The very next sentence says that it had information that weapons had been dispersed to units. Chemical weapons had been dispersed to units. So there was a question as to whether or not you are talking about chemical weapons that are being dispersed or a production facility. And there is a judgment call there. But the considered judgment and the official judgment of the director of central intelligence, who is the one responsible for gathering all this information and in making a judgment is that they had weapons of mass destruction of the kind that we had described: Nuclear capability, in the form of individuals with the knowledge and the commitment on the part of Saddam Hussein to continue moving toward a nuclear capability, even though he wasn't close to one at the time, we don't believe; chemical weapons and biological facilities of the kind we have demonstrated with this lab. SNOW: You have talked about making available to Congress information. What about to the American public? When is the public going to see more of the kind of intelligence that led you and other senior White House officials to believe that Saddam had that... POWELL: Tony, I think we've put out a lot. And my presentation on the 5th of February was unclassified, on television, live around the country and the world. I think the American people got a good, solid assessment. I boiled down what could have been a presentation of many, many hours and days to one hour and roughly 20 minutes, where I presented the best information we had on weapons of mass destruction, on the terrorist activities of this regime, and the human rights abuses of this regime. And I stand by that presentation, and there is much more information that is available. And I'm sure that, as the intelligence community feels that it is appropriate to declassify this information, it'll be made available to the public. I don't think that the public is as upset about all this or as concerned about this as is the media, which has had a feeding frenzy for the last week. SNOW: Iran, big problem? POWELL: Beg your pardon? SNOW: Iran. POWELL: Iran is a problem. It continues to support terrorism. It continues to develop, we believe, the capability to produce nuclear weapons, and this is troublesome. But there is a lot of churning taking place inside of Iran. A very young population that realizes that its political and religious leaders are not pointing it in the right direction toward a better future. And I hope that, if we keep making the case to the Iranian people that we are not your enemy, that there is a better life awaiting you if you abandon terrorism, abandon weapons of mass destruction development and put pressure on your political leaders and your religious leaders to allow more innovation within the Iranian society, within the Iranian economy, to start changing the policies of the past, I hope the political and religious leaders will begin to respond to this kind of pressure. SNOW: All right. Secretary of State Colin Powell, I know you've got a lot of globetrotting to do. Thanks for joining us, and good luck. POWELL: Thank you, Tony. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,88863,00.html
DaDakota: Errrp... we're not allowed to attempt to understand wars, after they happen? I'd think careful study of the conditions that precipitated any war is necessary...
Sure, Go ahead and review why this war happened. Here are the facts. Saddam signed a deal to agree to inspections and conditions following the first gulf war. He ignored those conditions for 12 years, therefore the war started up again, and went to it's conclusion. DD
Newsflash, Wars over, we won. Time to move on, nothing to see here. Newsflash, While you apparently could care less about integrity, other people actually do care whether their government is honest and are interested to see if anything sketchy happened here. Deal with it.
This is really puzzling to me. If I was a war supporter, I would still be concerned that the officials I elected were less than honest about it. Do you like being lied to? No matter what position I have about something, I don't like being mislead, lied to, deceived etc. Why do you not care if someone lies to you?
I've been thinking about this also. I wonder why Bush hasn't come out with any statement about being concerned that he might have been manipulated or lied to. I mean if you were the president and all these questions started coming out, wouldn't you be calling for all kinds of inquiries? But so far nothing...
Even if he had called for an inquiry, it probably would have ended up like the 9/11 inquiry...a sham.
Yep, like Clinton and his hummers in the whitehouse, or whitewater scandel, or maybe Bush and the Iran Contra affair, or maybe Carter and the Iran Hostages and the Ayatollah. Get my drift, it has been going on forever, and will not soon change. We are a republic for a reason, we elect officials to make decisions for the good of the country. We do not know evreything. My point is that there is ZERO chance of proving that Bush lied, he may have concentrated more on certain bits of info than others, who cares. Deal with THAT !!! Who is mas macho, baby !!!!!! DD
