posted on August 15, 2004 01:30:57 PM
If desperation is ugly, then Washington, D.C. today is downright hideous.
As the 9/11 Commission recently reported, there was “no credible evidence” of a collaborative relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. Similarly, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. With U.S. casualties mounting in an election year, the White House is grasping at straws to avoid being held accountable for its dishonesty.
The whitewash already has started: In July, Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee released a controversial report blaming the CIA for the mess. The panel conveniently refuses to evaluate what the White House did with the information it was given or how the White House set up its own special team of Pentagon political appointees (called the Office of Special Plans) to circumvent well-established intelligence channels. And Vice President Dick Cheney continues to say without a shred of proof that there is “overwhelming evidence” justifying the administration’s pre-war charges.
But as author Flannery O’Conner noted, “Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” That means no matter how much defensive spin spews from the White House, the Bush administration cannot escape the documented fact that it was clearly warned before the war that its rationale for invading Iraq was weak.
Top administration officials repeatedly ignored warnings that their assertions about Iraq’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and connections to al Qaeda were overstated. In some cases, they were told their claims were wholly without merit, yet they went ahead and made them anyway. Even the Senate report admits that the White House “misrepresented” classified intelligence by eliminating references to contradictory
assertions. In short, they knew they were misleading America.
And they did not care.
- They Knew Iraq Posed No Nuclear Threat
- They Knew the Aluminum Tubes Were Not for Nuclear Weapons
- They Knew the Iraq-Uranium Claims were Not Supported
- They Knew There was No Hard Evidence of Chemical or Biological Weapons
- They Knew Saddam and bin Laden were Not Collaborating
- They Knew There was No Prague Meeting
- Conclusion: They Knew They were Misleading America
posted on August 15, 2004 02:08:51 PM
9/11 MYTH-BUSTERS
It's a good thing that the published ver sion of the 9/11 Commission's final re port appears to be flying off the bookshelves. Because the 567-page document explodes some of the more malicious myths surrounding the terrorist attacks.
Myth No. 1: There was no link between al Qaeda and Iraq (news - web sites).
The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes noticed a significant change between the commission's interim report — which garnered banner headlines — and the final version.
So he asked Chairman Tom Kean why the staff draft charged there was "no collaborative relationship" between al Qaeda and Iraq, while the final version qualified that to conclude there was "no collaborative operational relationship with regard to the attacks."
Kean's response: "Well, there is no question in our minds that there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. . . . There were conversations that went on over a number of years, sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessfully."
Indeed, he added, "there was a suspicion in the Clinton administration that when they fired that bomb at that factory, that if, in fact, there were chemicals there, they may have come from Iraq. So there was a relationship."
Contrast that to the media hysteria just a month ago when it was widely trumpeted that the commission had found "no link" between Iraq and al Qaeda, thus destroying "one of President Bush (news - web sites)'s central justifications of the Iraq war," as The New York Times put it — on Page One.
In fact, as Daniel McKivergan notes (on weeklystandard.com) the full report found that "the connection between Iraq and al Qaeda [was] more extensive than many critics of the administration have been willing to admit."
Despite the commission's stress on the lack of Iraqi involvement in 9/11, no one in the Bush administration ever alleged such a connection.
But the report cited numerous meetings into the late '90s, some involving bin Laden himself, with Iraqi intelligence officials.
Surely all this is significant. For as the CIA (news - web sites)'s Counterterrorism Center declared, "Any indication of a relationship between these two hostile elements could carry great dangers to the United States."
Yet President Bush — contrary to the popular myth — never used the Iraq-Osama connection as a primary reason for going to war. What he said was that Iraq's demonstrated ties to anti-American terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, along with its refusal to comply with U.N. resolutions on weapons of mass destruction, constituted a threat to U.S. security.
Myth No. 2: The Bush administration gave special treatment to 140 Saudis — including 26 members of bin Laden's family — by flying them to safety without any questioning immediately after 9/11.
This is one of the many blatant, but popular, falsehoods in Michael Moore's cinematic screed "Fahrenheit 9/11" — and the commission report exposes it as a wholesale lie.
Yes, the Saudis were allowed to leave, at the initial request of the Riyadh government. But only after FBI (news - web sites) agents conducted face-to-face questioning of 30 people deemed to be "of interest" — including 22 of the 26 bin Laden relatives.
The Saudis also were allowed to leave on chartered flights only after U.S. airspace was reopened on the morning of Sept. 13, following the nearly two-day shutdown following the attacks.
In short, there was no special treatment given to the fleeing Saudis — and especially not to Osama's family members (who long ago disowned him, anyway).
Sadly, there is still a huge market of gullible people for outlandish conspiracy theories; one of the most popular books now available contends that the Bush administration staged the 9/11 attacks and that no plane hit the Pentagon (news - web sites) but rather U.S. missiles.
That such noxious tripe continues to find an audience is dismaying. That the 9/11 Commission has managed to discredit some of it is welcome — but the sad fact is that there are many more lies still out there.
"The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities."
So reads Conclusion 83 of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar intelligence on Iraq. The Committee likewise found no evidence of pressure to link Iraq to al Qaeda. So it appears that some of the claims about WMD used by the Bush Administration and others to argue for war in Iraq were mistaken because they were based on erroneous information provided by the CIA.
A few apologies would seem to be in order. Allegations of lying or misleading the nation to war are about the most serious charge that can be leveled against a President. But according to this unanimous study, signed by Jay Rockefeller and seven other Democrats, those frequent charges from prominent Democrats and the media are without merit.
Or to put it more directly, if President Bush was "lying" about WMD, then so was Mr. Rockefeller when he relied on CIA evidence to claim in October 2002 that Saddam Hussein's weapons "pose a very real threat to America." Also lying at the time were John Kerry, John Edwards, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and so on. Yet Mr. Rockefeller is still suggesting on the talk shows, based on nothing but inference and innuendo, that there was undue political Bush "pressure" on CIA analysts.
The West Virginia Democrat also asserted on Friday that Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith has been running a rogue intelligence operation that is "not lawful." Mr. Feith's shop has spent more than 1,800 hours responding to queries from the Senate and has submitted thousands of pages of documents--none of which supports such a charge. Shouldn't even hyper-partisan Senators have to meet some minimum standard of honesty?
In fact, the report shows that one of the first allegations of false intelligence was itself a distortion: Mr. Bush's allegedly misleading claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had been seeking uranium ore from Africa. The Senate report notes that Presidential accuser and former CIA consultant Joe Wilson returned from his trip to Africa with no information that cast serious doubt on such a claim; and that, contrary to Mr. Wilson's public claims, his wife (a CIA employee) was involved in helping arrange his mission.
"When coordinating the State of the Union, no Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts or officials told the National Security Council (NSC) to remove the '16 words' or that there were concerns about the credibility of the Iraq-Niger Uranium reporting," the report says. In short, Joe Wilson is a partisan fraud whose trip disproved nothing, and what CIA doubts there were on Niger weren't shared with the White House.
The broader CIA failure on Iraq's WMD is troubling, though it is important to keep in mind that this was a global failure. Every serious intelligence service thought Saddam still had WMD, and the same consensus existed across the entire U.S. intelligence community. One very alarming explanation, says the report, is that the CIA had "no [human] sources collecting against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after 1998." That's right. Not one source.
When asked why not, a CIA officer replied "because it's very hard to sustain." The report's rather obvious answer is that spying "should be within the norm of the CIA's activities and capabilities," and some blame for this human intelligence failure has to fall on recently departed Director George Tenet and his predecessor, John Deutch.
The Senate report blames these CIA failures not just on management but also on "a risk averse corporate culture." This sounds right, and Acting Director John McLaughlin's rejection of this criticism on Friday is all the more reason for Mr. Bush to name a real replacement. Richard Armitage has been mentioned for the job, but the Deputy Secretary of State has been consistently wrong about Iran, which will be a principal threat going forward, and his and Colin Powell's philosophy at the State Department has been to let the bureaucrats run the place. We can think of better choices.
One real danger now is that the intelligence community will react to this Iraq criticism by taking even fewer risks, or by underestimating future threats as it has so often in the past. (The failure to detect that Saddam was within a year of having a nuclear bomb prior to the 1991 Gulf War is a prime example.) The process of developing "national intelligence estimates," or NIEs, will only reinforce this sense of internal, lowest-common-denominator, conformity. If the Senate is looking for a place to recommend long-term reform, dispensing with NIEs would be a good place to start.
Above all, it's important to remember that the Senate report does not claim that the overall assessment of Iraq as a threat was mistaken. U.N. Resolution 1441 gave Saddam ample opportunity to come clean about his weapons, but he refused. The reports from David Kay and his WMD task force have since shown that Saddam violated 1441 in multiple ways.
Saddam retained a "just-in-time" capability to make WMD, even if he destroyed, hid or removed the "stockpiles" that the CIA believed he had. It's fanciful to think, especially in light of the Oil for Food scandal, that U.N.-led containment was a realistic option for another 12 years, or that once containment ended Saddam wouldn't have expanded his weapons capacity very quickly. The Senate report makes clear we need a better CIA, not that we should have left in power a homicidal, WMD-using dictator.
posted on August 15, 2004 03:06:16 PM
Thanks Bear... but do you think the left has the intelligence to understand the meaning?
I mean come on it is the liberal left and this doesn't put President Bush in the negative... unless they want their savior Clinton to look like the moron he was...
posted on August 15, 2004 03:56:41 PM
Kraft, I liked the story about the birds menacing your roof better than this one!
(They were collecting nails for a coffin, right? oh, wait,....maybe thats something else and I've confused two seperate posters or two different threads again!)
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Each one sees what he carries in his heart - Goethe
posted on August 15, 2004 06:04:24 PM
I'll trust Bush & the boys over anything Kerry the flip flopping coward has to say. no matter many times he wants to change his mind.
