My friends at Lucianne.com put this article in a prominant position on the site, and had quite a lot to say about it. I guess one wonders, with the CIA reporting directly to the President of the United States, i.e. Dubya, it is just a short hop from George Tenet to George Bush when looking for where the buck might stop.
Report: Iraq Intelligence Was Careless
Associated Press, by Katherine Pfleger Shrader
| WASHINGTON - The key U.S. assertions leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq — that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was working to make nuclear weapons — were wrong and based on false or overstated CIA analyses, a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee report asserted Friday. Updated |
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Reply 1 - Posted by: 7/9/2004 10:17:03 AM
It doesn't take a CIA Agent to realize that the CIA is not very effective anymore. It has turned into another bureaucracy that is more interested in political backstabbing and C-Y-A than in intelligence work. It really does need to be overhauled in a major way. |
Of course, as all my friends at Lucianne.com know, I think the big story is the part that was left out.. the role the Republican administration had, influencing the intelligence and spinning it to the public. The report about that aspect of the Iraq war has been put off until after the elections. We all know there was a problem there.. we know the NSC staffers were arguing with the CIA regarding what was to go into the State of the Union Address and other keynote speeches involving the subject. Here is the original article:
Report: War Rationale Based on CIA Error
By KATHERINE PFLEGER SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
"In a scathing indictment of the nation's intelligence services, a Senate report concluded Friday the CIA (news - web sites) provided false and unfounded assessments of the threat posed by Iraq (news - web sites) that the Bush administration relied on to justify going to war.
Following release of the findings of a yearlong inquiry by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the panel's Republican chairman said Congress might not have approved the Iraq war had lawmakers known the truth.
The committee's top Democrat said he had no doubt: There resolution authorizing war would not have gotten the sweeping approval, if the threat had been understood.
The report, which was highly critical of departing Director George Tenet, said the CIA kept key information from its own and other agencies' analysts, engaged in "group think" by failing to challenge the assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and allowed President Bush (news - web sites) and Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) to make false statements.
"Most, if not all of these problems, stem from a broken corporate culture and poor management" — which won't be fixed simply by giving the agency more money or people, the report said.
Although senators from both parties agreed in harshly criticizing the CIA, Democrats and Republicans clashed over whether Bush administration officials had pressured intelligence analysts to overplay the Iraq threat. Democrats said there was pressure; Republicans said there were tough questions but no inappropriate influence.
Democrats also said the investigation should have examined whether the White House had twisted the intelligence it received — a second phase of the probe that probably won't be finished until after the November elections.
Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites), the Democratic presidential candidate, said, "The fact is that when it comes to national security, the buck stops at the White House, not anywhere else."
The report follows more than two years of criticism of the intelligence community since the Sept. 11 attacks, including calls by people inside and outside the government for major changes in the structure of the intelligence community that was created after World War II.
Bush called the report a useful accounting of intelligence agencies' shortcomings. He defended the decision to go to war, however, as well as his prewar assertions about Saddam's government and weapons of mass destruction.
"We haven't found the stockpiles, but we knew he could make them," Bush said during a campaign stop Friday in Kutztown, Pa. "The world is better off without Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) in power."
Tenet has resigned and leaves office Sunday. His temporary successor, deputy John McLaughlin, said Friday the agency is learning from its mistakes and has already made changes, including adding reviews from a "devil's advocate" perspective to all future national intelligence estimates.
"We get it," McLaughlin said at a rare news conference at CIA headquarters. "Although we think the judgments were not unreasonable when they were made nearly two years ago, we understand with all we have learned since then that we could have done better."
Bush has not yet named a permanent successor for Tenet. The report's across-the-board criticism of the CIA could indicate that any nominee from within the intelligence community would have a tough time winning confirmation by the Senate.
The report was yet another blow to the credibility of both the Bush administration and U.S. intelligence agencies. The committee concluded that key assertions used to justify the Iraq war — that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was working to build nuclear weapons — were either wrong or overblown.
"In short, we went to war in Iraq based on false claims," said the committee's top Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. He said the Senate would not have authorized that war with three-quarters of lawmakers approving "if we knew what we know now."
The panel's Republican chairman, Pat Roberts of Kansas, said he didn't know if Congress would have approved the war had it known the report's findings. He said that without the immediate weapons threat, military action against Iraq still could have been justified on humanitarian grounds but that the battle plan might have been different from a full-scale invasion.
The report left some questions unresolved, including differences between a classified 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and a version made public.
The public report, for example, said Saddam was trying to build unmanned aerial vehicles that could potentially attack the United States with biological weapons — a contention that was not in the classified version of the national intelligence estimate.
The CIA could not provide an explanation for that change, said a Democratic committee staff member, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity.
As they scrutinized Iraq before the war, intelligence analysts either ignored or discounted conflicting information because of their assumptions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the report said. Intelligence collectors also worked from that assumption and set out to find the weapons, it said.
"This 'group think' dynamic led intelligence community analysts, collectors and managers to both interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program as well as ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding weapons of mass destruction programs," the report concluded.
For example, speculation that the presence of one specialized truck could mean an effort to transfer chemical weapons was puffed up into a conclusion that Iraq was actively making chemical weapons, the report said.
Analysts concluded that Iraq had a mobile biological weapons program based mainly on the since-discredited claims of one Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball." The report said American agents did not have direct access to Curveball or his debriefers, but the source's information was expanded into the conclusion that Iraq had an advanced and active biological weapons program.
According to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a CIA official wrote to a subordinate who had raised questions about the source: "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about."
Roberts, Rockefeller and other lawmakers have called for changes in the intelligence community, and Bush said he looks forward to working with Congress on ideas. But McLaughlin urged caution against disruptions while the nation is in the middle of the anti-terror fight.
"Some sort of reordering of the boxes here will not bring you perfection in the intelligence business," he said."
I also found an article, published in 2003, that highlights some of the aspects that the Senate Intelligence Committee is deferring until after the elections:
electronicIraq.net
The Media
Intelligence experts speak out against the war in a new documentary
Maureen Clare Murphy, Electronic Iraq
2 December 2003
"The Bush administration made up its mind to go to war [with Iraq] on September 11, 2001. From that time on you were dealing with rationalization and justification for the war; you weren't dealing with real causes for the war or real reasons for the war. There was never a clear and present danger, there was never an imminent threat," explains Mel Goodman, who served for 20 years as a CIA analyst, in the documentary Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War.
A slew of other former CIA officials, ambassadors, weapons inspectors, and high ranking governmental figures make similar statements about the illegality and sheer irrationality of the war in the hour-long documentary that has been promoted by the Internet-based lobby group MoveOn. The various interviewees dissect the "intelligence" put forth by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech, and the fuzzy photos used in Colin Powell's February speech to the UN, which is described by one former intelligence expert as a piece of "theater."
Washington Editor of The Nation magazine David Corn explains how former CIA deputy chief Richard Kerr told the few reporters who asked that the intelligence produced by the CIA and manipulated by the Bush administration was circumstantial. And Dr. David MacMichael, who worked 13 years as a CIA analyst, tells how the White House heavily influenced CIA reports to provide the language used to support going to war on Iraq.
Various intelligence experts interviewed in Uncovered state, quite frankly, that the Bush administration exploited Americans' fears after September 11 by using the mother of all trump cards - the fear of nuclear war. In between news segments of President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld telling reporters that Saddam Hussein has resumed the manufacturing of nuclear weapons, the former CIA officials debunk their statements, and explain that the intelligence community made it clear that the evidence was simply not there regarding the claims for Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program.
But it is made clear in the news clips included in the documentary how calculated the Bush administration's capitalization on America's fear of nuclear terrorism was during the buildup to the war on Iraq. Condoleezza Rice soberly says, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Bush and Rumsfeld make similar statements in press conferences, and seem amazed that anyone would even question their claims.
However, as Former Assistant Secretary to defense Philip Coyle explains, "A lot of people who supported the war on Iraq actually believed that Iraq had the capability to fire missiles that could reach the United States carrying payloads of nuclear or biological weapons. Iraq has never had the capability to do that, they didn't have it in the first Gulf War, they didn't have it in this war in Iraq, and they don't have any way of getting it in the future."
The interviewees also refute the neoconservative administration's claims regarding the supposed biological and chemical weapons believed to be in Hussein's possession. After a clip of President Bush solemnly stating that Iraq may potentially have enough sarin nerve gas to kill thousands of Americans, Former Chief Scientist of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Peter Zimmerman explains that Bush's case for the existence of Iraq's sarin was based on the knowledge that Iraq possessed sarin in 1990, but it was also known that that the sarin had only a shelf life of two months. Stating that the sarin wouldn't be safe to eat but would be completely ineffective as a nerve gas, Zimmerman says that there's "no way that the [Central Intelligence] Agency could not have known that."
Equally as dubious are the U.S. administration's claims that Iraq is a hotbed for al Qaeda terrorists, and the implication that Iraq was somehow involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Mel Goodman, the 20 year CIA analyst explains, "Iraq, and we have very good intelligence for this, was not in the picture of terrorism before we invaded it. Saddam Hussein and bin Laden were enemies. Bin Laden considered and said that Saddam Hussein was a socialist infidel. These were very different kinds of individuals competing for power in their own way, and Saddam Hussein made very sure that al Qaeda couldn't function in Iraq.'
"The ties with al Qaeda were just a scare tactic to exploit the trauma, the very real trauma, that the American people have felt since 9/11 and to associate that trauma with Iraq. As you know from the polls, most Americans believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and there was a very successful, very deliberate, and very unethical and immoral operation on the part of the PR people of this administration," states Ray McGovern, former Chairman for the National Intelligence estimate.
Former CIA Director of the Office of Regional and Political Analysis Bill Christison says, "That very first day on September 12, one day after September 11, the meeting that was held in the White House, in the situation room, led to Rumsfeld asking the question, 'Shouldn't we use this as an opportunity to do something about Iraq as well?'"
Also explored in the documentary are the sources for the various claims that were used to support the war on Iraq by Bush and Powell. Regarding weapons of mass destruction, John Brady Kiesling, former Political Counselor to the United States Embassy in Athens, says, "Unfortunately, every reliable source of our own was unable to find anything convincing, so we were dependent on the defectors provided by Mr. Chalabi at the Iraqi National Congress. It's fascinating to see that he's been providing intelligence for many years and every checkable piece of that information that has come to the public's notice has been proven to be false or at least self-serving in the extreme."
Interviewed is Former Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq Joseph Wilson, whose CIA officer wife's name was leaked repeatedly to the press by the U.S. government earlier this year. Wilson states that his wife's name and career was tarnished in a deliberate "smear campaign" after Wilson probed the authenticity of now known to be forged Yellowcake Niger documents that were used by Vice President Cheney's office to "prove" that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons. Leaking his wife's name "was a very vengeful act against the ambassador," explains former White House Counsel to president Nixon John Dean. Milt Bearden, former CIA Station Chief in Pakistan, asks, "The question remains - who forged the documents and why?"
The interviewed intelligence experts and foreign relations scholars paint a bleak picture for the future of U.S. foreign relations and the war on terrorism. Former CIA Operative Robert Baer, who served in Iraq and Lebanon, and says he was "studiously ignored" during the build-up to war, explains, "If you attacked another country without justification, people are going to say, 'This isn't a war on terrorism. This is imperialism, this is colonialism.'"
"Having invaded Iraq, we are likely to make it a focus of terrorism. We are likely to produce what the president has said Iraq represents, namely the central battlefield for the war on terrorism. Why? Because we've sent a lot of Americans in a place where they're sitting ducks for people who think the only good American is a dead one," says Chas Freeman, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, a prediction confirmed by daily news reports of U.S. casualties in Iraq.
The documentary is a lucid expose on what can only be described as the total misinformation the U.S. administration fed the American public, as well as congress, in order the rally support for the war. But while watching the documentary, one can't help but wonder what the twenty-plus interviewees were doing to publicly disprove the neocons' claims. Certainly, Joseph Wilson tackled the Niger documents, and Baer said that he was studiously ignored, and surely other interviewees made efforts to stop the war. But this is a part of the story that Uncovered fails to provide.
However, the film will hopefully be seen by many, as it shows the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz administration for what it is - a deceptive bunch of neoconservatives who have not been truthful regarding the intelligence used to support a war that's killed thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans for no justifiable reason. MoveOn is making great efforts to make sure people do see this documentary. It is using it as part of its fundraising campaign to defeat Bush in the 2004 U.S. presidential elections, and it has organized 2,000 "house parties" that will take place around the U.S. on December 7, during which the film will be screened. "
8:15:19 PM 
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