The CIA Says They Didn't Buckle

[newsports]

After assertions by the Bush administration and the recently resigned weapons investigator in Iraq David Kay, that the US intelligence agencies were to blame for the lax in accurate information regarding the amounts of chemical and biological arms that were in Iraq. A new probe by Congress says that CIA analyst did not shade their findings on these issues in order to placate to a hawkish administration. Does this and the fact that Iraq did previously have and use WMD on northern Iraqi Kurds justify the use of the doctrine of the unilateral pre-emptive strike?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64626-2004Jan30.html?nav=hptop_tb
http://newsports.us

 

[modman]

Love that Rumsfeld quote!

 

[Lefty Wilbury]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...ashpost/20040131/ts_washpost/a64626_2004jan30

No Evidence CIA Slanted Iraq Data
Sat Jan 31,12:00 AM ET Add Top Stories - washingtonpost.com to My Yahoo!


By Dana Priest, Washington Post Staff Writer

Congressional and CIA (news - web sites) investigations into the prewar intelligence on Iraq (news - web sites)'s weapons and links to terrorism have found no evidence that CIA analysts colored their judgment because of perceived or actual political pressure from White House officials, according to intelligence officials and congressional officials from both parties.

Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy CIA director who is leading the CIA's review of its prewar Iraq assessment, said an examination of the secret analytical work done by CIA analysts showed that it remained consistent over many years.

"There was pressure and a lot of debate, and people should have a lot of debate, that's quite legitimate," Kerr said. "But the bottom line is, over a period of several years," the analysts' assessments "were very consistent. They didn't change their views."

Kerr's findings mirror those of two probes being conducted separately by the House and Senate intelligence committees, which have interviewed, under oath, every analyst involved in assessing Iraq's weapons programs and terrorist ties.

The panel chairmen, Sen. Pat Roberts (news, bio, voting record) (R-Kan.) and Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), and other congressional officials said in recent interviews that they found no evidence that analysts shaded their findings to more closely fit the White House's known desire to create the strongest, most urgent case for war with Iraq.

The conclusion that analysts did not buckle under political pressure does not answer the question of why the intelligence reports were so flawed. Nor does it address allegations -- made by Democrats in Congress and Democratic presidential candidates -- that top Bush administration officials misused intelligence and exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq.

On Wednesday, former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay told a Senate committee that he no longer believed Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) had weapons of mass destruction in the months leading up to the war. And he called for an independent inquiry into why U.S. intelligence agencies believed the opposite.

The White House, which has said it opposes such an outside inquiry, has said final conclusions about Iraq's weapons programs and U.S. intelligence cannot be made until the Iraq Survey Group, the inspection agency Kay used to lead, completes its work.

"I want the American people to know that I, too, want to know the facts," Bush told reporters yesterday. "I want to be able to compare what the Iraq Survey Group has found with what we thought prior to going into Iraq." Bush added that Hussein was a danger and "we dealt with the danger. And, as a result, the world is a better place and a more peaceful place, and the Iraqi people are free."

There were instances before the war in which intelligence analysts said they sensed pressure to reach certain conclusions, but the House and Senate investigators said there was no indication they bowed to such wishes.

Last year, for example, some analysts at the CIA complained to senior officials when Vice President Cheney made multiple trips to CIA headquarters to question their studies of Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to al Qaeda.

And analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency told investigators they sensed pressure when civilian Defense Department leaders constantly questioned why their analysis had found only tentative links between al Qaeda and Iraq.

But "their constant message" to congressional investigators was "they didn't buckle to pressure," another congressional official said.

Neither the CIA inspector general nor the agency's ombudsmen received any complaints about outside meddling, a senior intelligence official said. Added one congressional official: "There were no anonymous calls, no letters, nothing."

The CIA, congressional intelligence committees, Kerr's team and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board are investigating how the CIA analysis missed the mark so widely.

That is a more difficult question to answer and a much more complex problem to fix than situations in which analysts are improperly influenced by elected officials, intelligence experts said. The congressional committees have found that CIA analysts relied too heavily on outdated, circumstantial intelligence and on information from unreliable informants.

Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee (news - web sites) this week that he had talked to CIA analysts and had found no evidence of "inappropriate command influence."

"And, you know, almost in a perverse way," Kay added, "I wish it had been undue influence, because we know how to correct that. We get rid of the people who in fact were exercising that. The fact that it wasn't tells me that we've got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong. And we've got to figure out what was there. And that's what I call fundamental fault analysis."

Kerr said the "analysts believed that the evidence supported their judgment. Whether it did or not is another question."

The CIA maintains that it is still too early to say that its assessment was wrong because the search for weapons is not over. There are still millions of pages of documents to be read, hundreds of sites to visit and thousands of Iraqis to be interviewed, the agency says.

CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said Kerr's and the committees' findings mirror the CIA's view of its analysts' work: "We have long said and still say that our analysts didn't change their assessment of Iraq because of any outside pressure."

In fact, some analysts have told Kerr and congressional investigators that they welcomed the attention of Cheney on his visits.

"Analysts are very independent people," Kerr said. "When they get pressure, they tend to react the other way. They find it quite easy to stand up" to superiors. "It's kind of the culture."

 

[Palestinian Jew]

Robert Baer, co-author of "See No Evil" and former member of the CIA, has said that the people at ground level, actually in Iraq prior to the invasion, said that they were being pressured to find evidence.

It all depends on who you want to believe. And fortunately, as of this moment, Bush is saying the independent inquiry can go ahead.

 

[bamthin]

Haha PJ, I love those Rush Limbaugh quotes in your sig! Check out this one. Rush is a moronic fat slob.

"Too many whites are getting away with drug use . . . The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river." -Rush Limbaugh 1995

-Bam

 

[Bullypulpit]

<h1>The Lie Factory</h1>

Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.

Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest
January/February 2004 Issue

It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.

So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence—it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials—including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February—that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.

Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews—some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity—exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.

Robert Dreufuss is a longtime Washington journalist and a contributing writer for Mother Jones. His last cover story for the magazine focused on the neoconservative plan ot topple Saddam Hussein and reshape the Middle East ("The Thirty-Year Itch," March/April 2003).

Jason Vest is a Washington reporter whose work has appeared in the Washington Post,U.S. News & World Report, the American Prospect, and the Village Voice.

 

[jimnyc]

<h1>The Idiot Factory</h1>

Why do you insist on bringing up things that have already been discussed at length? It's already been found that the Bush administration just continued the efforts that were already started by the Clinton administration.

As usual, you bring us absolutely nothing.

 

[spillmind]

As usual, you bring us absolutely nothing.

how original!

it should be more like:

'you bring us nothing i WANT TO HEAR'.

if you run a board, be prepared for going over things that this admin bungles over, and has it keep haunting them.

just because you've talked about it at great length, doesn't mean the issue is dead. and why do you have to flatly insult people so?

why don't you agree with his post? there are no links to a bibliography?

 

[jimnyc]

Originally posted by spillmind
how original!

it should be more like:

'you bring us nothing i WANT TO HEAR'.

if you run a board, be prepared for going over things that this admin bungles over, and has it keep haunting them.

just because you've talked about it at great length, doesn't mean the issue is dead. and why do you have to flatly insult people so?

why don't you agree with his post? there are no links to a bibliography?

Spillmind, GO FUCK YOURSELF.

Don't worry about how I run the board. If you don't like it, run off like the little fucking fairy you are and don't return.

O'neill has since 'clarified' his statements and top officials confirmed all that was done was the continuation of what the Clinton administration already started.

So get out from under your rock, dickhead, and learn to read the news before commenting on something that makes you look like more of a fool than you already are.

 

[jimnyc]

For those that need assistance in keeping up with the news and have reading comprehension issues

"People are trying to make a case that I said the president was planning war in Iraq early in the administration," O'Neill said.

"Actually, there was a continuation of work that had been going on in the Clinton administration with the notion that there needed to be regime change in Iraq."

The idea that Bush "came into office with a predisposition to invade Iraq, I think, is a total misunderstanding of the situation," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon.

Retired Army Gen. Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he saw nothing to indicate the United States was close to attacking Iraq early in Bush's term.

Shelton, who retired shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, said the brass reviewed "on the shelf" plans to respond to crises with the incoming Bush administration.

But in the administration's first six months, "I saw nothing that would lead me to believe that we were any closer to attacking Iraq than we had been during the previous administration," Shelton told CNN.

"red meat frenzy" - How does your lunch taste?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/13/oneill.bush/index.html

 

[bamthin]

Originally posted by jimnyc
Spillmind, GO FUCK YOURSELF.

Don't worry about how I run the board. If you don't like it, run off like the little fucking fairy you are and don't return.

O'neill has since 'clarified' his statements and top officials confirmed all that was done was the continuation of what the Clinton administration already started.

So get out from under your rock, dickhead, and learn to read the news before commenting on something that makes you look like more of a fool than you already are.

There is actually alot of unanswered questions about Bush's pre-conceived plans of an Iraqi invasion. This issue is not dead and is still on the large pile of eyebrow-raising events that will be amplified as election day nears. In my opinion, Bush is in quite a pickle and many unbiased independant voters want answers before the election or they won't give Bush the benefit of the doubt and vote for him. Bush cannot depend on the republican base alone to re-elect him. He needs the swing voters.

No offense and it's just my opinion, but using profanity and launching direct insults at people really doesn't help your case. And it is especially cowardly in the anonymous world of internet message boards.

-Bam

 

[jimnyc]

Originally posted by bamthin
No offense and it's just my opinion, but using profanity and launching direct insults at people really doesn't help your case. And it is especially cowardly in the anonymous world of internet message boards.

Another dickhead heard from!

Do you mean saying things such as this:

"And you eat Bush's shit and then, after you shit it out, you eat it again. Fucking dumbass..."

http://pub40.ezboard.com/fdrinal28133frm12.showMessage?topicID=2916.topic&index=94

or this one maybe:

"Before I get started on your pathetic, uneducated, pre-adolescent ass, let me say this: Go fuck yourself, nobody gives a rat's ass what your views are."

"Now, I post articles from reputable news sources to back up my opinions and ideas. If you don't like them, scroll the fuck down and shut the fuck up."

http://pub40.ezboard.com/fdrinal28133frm12.showMessage?topicID=2916.topic&index=112

#1 - Those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones
#2 - I'll tell you the same thing, don't tell me how to run the board or how to post.
#3 - If you don't like it, fuck off and leave

 

[eric]

Hmmm, no reply I wonder why ?