Damaging reports finger CIA and MI6

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Registered: 03-18-2000
Damaging reports finger CIA and MI6
4
Thu, 07-08-2004 - 4:24pm
US and British spy chiefs to face calls for structural reform due to Iraq failures.


The imminent release of two highly critical reports on US and British prewar intelligence leading up to the Iraq war draw conclusions that will have "Spy chiefs facing accusations of 'worldwide intelligence failures' over the case for war in Iraq," reports the online news site ThisisLondon.
The findings are the most damaging attack yet on the intelligence used to justify the war and will be a blow for President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair.

But the impact of the findings will do more than fix or exonerate official blame.


"These conclusions literally beg for changes in the intelligence community," ThisisLondon quotes US Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chair of the US Senate intelligence committee. "What we had was a worldwide intelligence failure," says Roberts. 


The report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will be issued Friday, July 9. Its conclusion: the CIA botched the prewar intelligence, reports USA Today.


Sen. Richard Durbin, (D)of Illinois, who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, "The report is tough, direct and totally fair. It was approved with a unanimous bipartisan vote of the committee. I think the CIA is worried about the harsh reality of this report," reports the Palm Beach Post



The "Lord Butler" report, an official inquiry by former British cabinet secretary Lord Frederick Butler, goes public on July 14. It reports a wide range of concerns about intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, reports the Financial Times.



The MI6 intelligence inquiry is expected to assert, with British understatement, that "the intelligence to substantiate the claim was of insufficient quality, and that the intelligence material gathered on Iraq was generally inadequate," reports the Financial Times.



Speaking on BBC TV, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's representative to the UN in the runup to the Iraq war last year, said: "There's no doubt that the stockpiles that we feared might be there are not there," reports the Taipei Times. The prime minister's decision to go to war was "understandable" the Times quotes Greenstock as saying, because the intelligence about Iraq's banned weapons was "compelling:"


It's only, again with hindsight, when we saw that probably the Iraqis were cheating Saddam as well as misleading us, that the evidence is just not there. But the reason for doing this, through the UN resolutions and from intelligence assessments, were actually quite compelling. We were wrong on the stockpiles, we were right about the intention.


Lord Butler is expected to "comment sharply" on the way that John Scarlett, chairman of Whitehall's joint intelligence committee (JIC) interpreted secret information supplied by MI6, says the Times.



A similar charge will accompany the US Senate's intelligence findings, reports the New York Times.


'How the administration used the intelligence was very troubling,' Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said in an interview this week. 'They took a flawed set of intelligence reports and converted it into a rationale for going to war.'


Among Lord Butler's other areas of investigation was the issue of whether Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger. "People with knowledge of the report said Lord Butler has concluded that this claim was reasonable and consistent with the intelligence," reports the Financial Times.


President George W. Bush referred to the Niger claim in his state of the union address last year. But officials were forced into a climbdown when it was revealed that the only primary intelligence material the US possessed were documents later shown to be forgeries. The Bush administration has since distanced itself from all suggestions that Iraq sought to buy uranium. The UK government has remained adamant that negotiations over sales did take place and that the fake documents were not part of the intelligence material it had gathered to underpin its claim.


The inevitable "personal politics" stemming from each of these reports, especially in a presidential election year is not likely to sway the bigger point that structural change is needed at the CIA, reports USA Today.


The Senate report lays much of the blame on the CIA's failure to develop human spying networks in Iraq, where electronic espionage could never penetrate. It portrays the CIA as inept against terrorists and the nations that support them.... The report echoes a recent House Intelligence Committee analysis that concludes the CIA has ignored its chief mission of gathering human intelligence in favor of high-tech surveillance. The CIA is heading "over a proverbial cliff" after years of mismanagement, the House report said.


On or around July 26, an independent panel probing the intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks will report its findings, which also are sure to be highly critical of the CIA, says USA Today.

cl-Libraone~

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Fri, 07-09-2004 - 4:26pm
Blame it on the CIA, it's all their fault!

Taken from Talking Points by Josh Marshall:

July 9, 2004

I'm sure they'll show it again later on C-SPAN. So if you get a chance, definitely try to catch a bit of the Roberts-Rockefeller press the release of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on the Iraq intelligence failure.

Sen. Rockefeller and the rest of the Democrats on the Committee voted unanimously to approve the report that a) places all the blame for the intelligence failures on the CIA, b) specifically -- and quite improbably -- rules out administration pressure as a cause of the problem, and c) avoids any discussion of how or whether the administration manipulated or distorted intelligence community findings to build their case for war.

The very structure of the investigation, as Rockefeller noted, necessarily pushed any discussion of the administration's responsibility for or role in the debacle back until after the November election -- a veritable tour de force of political convenience.

Yet in his comments at the press conference Rockefeller seemed to say that each of these conclusions was either false or so incomplete as to be deeply misleading.

As one of the first reporters to get a question in perceptively asked, why exactly then did they vote for it?

Good question.

The reality is that the CIA is responsive to its president, its master. Its over-responsiveness is one of its key institutional flaws -- not just under this president, but under previous ones too. The CIA really did believe at least that Iraq continued to maintain some stocks of chemical and biological weapons. But its reports, analyses and judgments escalated dramatically in their certainty and scope after President Bush was sworn in to office (significantly, even before 9/11). Those at the CIA with more alarmist views gained favor at the White House, while those who were more skeptical lost it.

Remember in all of this that the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which Sen. Roberts noted was the focus of the Senate report, was hastily cobbled together after the White House had spent a year making its quite alarmist case about Iraq's illicit weapons.

There is no bright line separating the administration's hyping of the threat and manipulation of the evidence and the CIA's own misreading of the evidence and its institutional decision to service the president's needs.

The aim of the administration's defenders -- Senator Roberts, et al. -- is to draw such a bright line (I'm tempted to say 'forge' but let's say 'draw'), thus suggesting the reasoning that because the CIA is guilty, that the White House must be innocent. But that's not true. It is itself yet another deception. They're both guilty -- only of different things.

The CIA is guilty: of aiding and abetting.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

Text of a news conference by Senators Pat Roberts and John Rockefeller

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/politics/09TEXT-IRAQ-INTEL.html?pagewanted=all&position=

















conference this morning announcing

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Sat, 07-10-2004 - 11:36am

"Blame it on the CIA, it's all their fault!" No surprise.

 


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Avatar for baileyhouse
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Sat, 07-10-2004 - 1:10pm
This whole situation just totaly slays me...Do you realize if Clinton was still in office the Republicans would be YELLING for his head. Do you think Bush will take any resposibility for relying on out of date shotty intelligence? Doubt it. I ask myself everyday, how did we get to this point? Well I guess we got most of the answers but we will never get accountability until this administration is gone for good. I am so tired of his smirking at the camera and making excuses, he is like a spoiled child. Maybe there is an arguement that Clinton didn't do enough about Bin laden but either has Bush. He wanted what he wanted for whatever reasons that only he knows and now we are in a war we cannot afford. It's just insane if you ask me....Sorry for the tangent.
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Sat, 07-10-2004 - 1:54pm
<>

Sure it doesn't make sense why a president would put the country into a mess; until you realize that there is a portion of the Republican that wants to drain the government of its financial base so they can reverse the advances of the 20th century. How much better off would corporations be if there were no regulations to limit what they could do.

What kind of country we would have if the anti-trust laws were overturned, and all government programs were privatized. We would have the "wild west" of capitalism. What a free country we would be!