Was the problem was in the Oval Office?

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Was the problem was in the Oval Office?
4
Sun, 07-18-2004 - 11:16am
Decoding the Senate Intelligence Committee Investigation on Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/opinion/18SUN3.html


The Senate Intelligence Committee's report on American intelligence failures in Iraq has produced a rare and curious thing — agreement between left and right. For opposite reasons, both are pushing the absurd notion that the report told us that President Bush was not to blame for giving Americans false information about Iraq.


The left has denounced the report as a whitewash that unfairly clears Mr. Bush of charges that he or his aides prodded the Central Intelligence Agency into hyping the Iraqi weapons programs, and purposefully misrepresented the threat from Saddam Hussein. The right agrees with the conclusion, and calls it a vindication of the president.


In fact, the sadly incomplete report does nothing of the kind. It takes the public up to the question of Mr. Bush's involvement and then ducks, announcing that an examination of the president's role is due after the election. Thanks to that compromise, the Republicans did not block it, and Democrats could justify endorsing it as an unfinished work.


The 511-page report, which was released by the committee last week after about 20 percent was censored by the administration, does not tell us what the C.I.A. and other agencies told Mr. Bush before he concluded that Iraq had dangerous weapons and that Saddam Hussein had to go. It focuses on something called a "National Intelligence Estimate," which came out in October 2002, months and months after the administration had already set its face toward war. The estimate was requested by Congress, and it was supposed to summarize the views of the C.I.A., along with those of the Defense Department's intelligence experts and other agencies, like the State Department and Department of Energy, that might have important information to offer.


Three versions of the report on Iraq were prepared, all of them concluding that Saddam Hussein was a major threat. But the first, long, classified one was peppered with reservations. A declassified version that was given to Congress erased most of the doubts. The even shorter public version had no caveats at all.


What we need to know now is how the report came up so positive. The Senate committee said its staff "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." Republican members in particular have repeatedly assured the public that no one reported any direct arm-twisting. But that is a lot less meaningful than it sounds.


The people helping to prepare the report worked for officials like Vice President Dick Cheney; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; George Tenet, the director of central intelligence; and to a lesser degree Secretary of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. By the time they began working on the intelligence estimate, most of their bosses had already advised the president that Saddam Hussein needed to go, and some had also taken a public stand.


On Aug. 26, for instance, Mr. Cheney told the V.F.W. National Convention that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and was working on a nuclear weapon. "Simply stated," he added, "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors."


Simply stated, there was plenty of doubt about all of these things and most of them were not true. In fact, members of the intelligence community were voicing doubts at the time that Mr. Cheney spoke. We do not know for certain whether these dissenting voices were heard by Mr. Cheney or Mr. Bush. But certainly, Mr. Tenet, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Powell and Ms. Rice had access to them.


So while the Senate report has told us that no government employee complained of direct pressure from the White House to give the intelligence estimate a positive spin, it has not told us how so much negative assessment got left out or how top Bush officials came to make public statements that contradicted information that was readily available within the administration. The Department of Energy categorically refuted the claim that the Iraqis were working on nuclear weapons in April 2001, 16 months before Mr. Cheney's V.F.W. speech, according to the Senate report. The C.I.A. knew it, the Defense Department knew it, the State Department knew it. But these dissenting views did not make it into the intelligence estimate.


So it's not exactly true, as Mr. Bush said on Wednesday, that "the United States Congress, including members of both political parties, looked at the same intelligence" that he had. And we have still not seen the intelligence reports Mr. Bush got. We do not even know what Mr. Bush was told about the intelligence estimate. The C.I.A. gave him his own, one-page summary, which the White House will not show to the Senate.


One of Mr. Bush's central charges against Saddam Hussein was his supposed link with Al Qaeda, which Mr. Bush still mentions even though the Senate report said there was no evidence of a link. On this point, the report said, the intelligence community's negative view was widely disseminated among top officials.


Mr. Cheney likes to refer to a meeting between the hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi official that supposedly took place in Prague in April 2001. But the C.I.A. does not believe it happened. In a memo recently released by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, Mr. Tenet said the agency did not have "any credible information that the April 2001 meeting occurred."


In today's political climate, it took some courage for the Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Pat Roberts, to do any investigating at all. But he was ultimately overwhelmed by the politics of Iraq.


The British report on the intelligence debacle, also released last week, made it plain that the push for war was political, not based on new urgency about a threat from Iraq. Even with fears justifiably heightened after the 9/11 attacks, it said, "there was no recent intelligence that would itself have given rise to a conclusion that Iraq was of more immediate concern than the activities of some other countries."


So how did the Bush administration wind up passing out so much disinformation? Americans are going to have to wait for the Senate's judgment on this crucial question until after the election.

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Sun, 07-18-2004 - 11:22am

White House refuses to release summary of Iraq WMD


http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3578483&thesection=news&thesubsection=world


The White House has refused to release a prewar intelligence summary compiled for US President George W Bush of Iraq's banned weapons that Democrats said on Wednesday had given him none of the dissenting views included in more comprehensive intelligence reports.


Senate staff were allowed to review the one-page presidential summary of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi weapons programmes, but Democrats said the document should be declassified and publicly released.

The White House responded with a complaint that some Democrats were now playing politics with the issue even though the document had been made available as part of the Senate intelligence panel's review.

However, Democrats said staff notes show the summary prepared for the president made no mention of the dissent within the government over Iraq's illicit weapons capabilities as was detailed in full report.

"I don't know if the president would have changed his mind based on what was said in the presidential summary," said Senate Intelligence Committee Democrat Richard Durbin of Illinois.

But he added: "If the president received a summary which was not complete, that did not contain this (dissenting) information, then we should know that."

On the campaign trail in several battleground states this week, Bush defended his decision to go to war despite a Senate intelligence committee report that said US intelligence agencies overstated the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, a chief White House reason for the invasion.

In a conference call with reporters organised by Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry's campaign, Durbin said: "We have requested, through the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the White House produce this document and they have refused. I think that's wrong," the Illinois senator told reporters.

"We have to have accountability -- and accountability goes beyond the intelligence agencies," Durbin added.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan countered: "The Democrat and Republican staff members on the intelligence committee were able to review the document. They had access to the document as part of their review."

Democrats accused the White House of using executive privilege to keep the one-page summary secret even though it was widely disseminated within the administration.

Kerry's campaign also questioned whether Bush and his top advisers read the full National Intelligence Estimate, or just the one-page summary.

But Durbin told reporters he did not know if Kerry had read the full National Intelligence Estimate before voting to authorise the use of force.

The document summed up the contents of the National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons but noted dissent from the State Department's intelligence service and other agencies.

- REUTERS

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Sun, 07-18-2004 - 1:36pm

So how did the Bush administration wind up passing out so much disinformation? Americans are going to have to wait for the Senate's judgment on this crucial question until after the election.


This just makes me sick.


iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Sun, 07-18-2004 - 2:31pm
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Well, isn't that special!! What more can we expect from politicians. Lucky we have a report at all, seems the administration would like to continue the charade.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Sun, 07-18-2004 - 2:39pm
<>

Because he could!! Im with you I didn't trust BUSH before he was elected and he has lived up to my expectations. I wonder if he will ever be held accountable, or will he slither under a big protective rock. If he gets re-elected, I think we should move forward on impeachment. He was willful and irresponsible.