Seymour Hersh: The Stovepipe (CIA, Pentagon & Whitehouse)

Glad you posted that, BBB. I just heard about it on NPR, also just picked up my latest NYer and believe it may be in that issue, so I will hold off and read it this evening... See, we all KNEW these things, they are taken as exaggerations by those who don't want to believe them, and then they prove to be true. I'm tired of this cycle. As Hersh himself pointed out in the interview, once the lie is out there, it takes on a life of its own and is hard to get rid of.

Earlier NYer came in -- I've just read the above, BBB. It's important stuff -- I also heard interviews with Hersh on his article.

It's important to get this information out to the "general public" in language which describes well the decision on the part of the admin to channel only politically supportive information -- and how dangerous this is. And I think there should be a link to to this article in the US, UN, Iraq thread, don't you?

Tartarin
Tartarin, feel free to post such a link anywhere you wish---and on other forum sites as you thing suitable.

BumbleBeeBoogie

CIA May Have Been Out of Loop confirmed
CIA May Have Been Out of Loop
By Greg Miller - Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 25, 2003

Top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel says some officials in the administration appear to have bypassed agency in gathering Iraq data.

WASHINGTON -- Officials in the Bush administration appear to have bypassed the CIA and other agencies to collect their own intelligence overseas on Iraq, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Friday.

Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV's comments came as bipartisan cooperation on the committee's inquiry into prewar intelligence appeared to be unraveling. Democrats complained that Republicans are out to pin blame on the CIA and shield the White House from criticism that intelligence used to make the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated.

After reviewing tens of thousands of pages of intelligence documents, the committee staff has begun drafting a report that sources said would harshly criticize the CIA for prewar judgments that congressional investigators believe were unfounded, thinly sourced or lacked adequate caveats.

Democrats, who have been rebuffed by Republicans in their efforts to widen the probe's scope, threatened Friday to launch a separate investigation. Several committee Democrats said it is now all but inevitable that they will produce a separate report.

Making the case for an expanded inquiry, Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the committee's vice chairman, said some in the administration appeared to have been collecting intelligence "without the knowledge of the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department or anybody else" in the intelligence community.

Such operations, if verified, would be highly unusual and would bolster critics' claims that the administration has short-circuited the normal flow of intelligence to search for facts that support its assumptions.

Rockefeller's comments appeared designed to pressure Republicans to expand the probe's scope at a time when both parties are struggling to control the course of the investigation as next year's presidential election looms.

His remarks culminated a week of uncharacteristic outbursts from a committee that has traditionally sought to steer clear of the partisan rancor that often characterizes other legislative panels.

Rockefeller declined to elaborate on his comments to reporters on Capitol Hill. But congressional sources said the senator was referring to questions about the activities of a controversial Pentagon unit known as the Office of Special Plans. That office was in charge of drafting Pentagon policies and plans in connection with the war in Iraq.

Its activities have been harshly criticized by some in the intelligence community. The office has come under closer scrutiny on Capitol Hill since defense officials acknowledged this year that representatives from Special Plans met with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile and discredited figure involved in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

At the time, officials said Ghorbanifar was part of a group claiming to have information that might be helpful to the U.S. in the war on terrorism, and that Pentagon officials agreed to the meeting merely to assess that information. Asked to explain the matter during an August news conference, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that "people come in offering suggestions or information or possible contacts, and sometimes they're pursued."

But the contacts aroused suspicion on Capitol Hill. According to congressional testimony from the 1980s, Ghorbanifar was among those proposing that money from the Reagan administration's arms-for-hostages deal with Iran be diverted to aid the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Even before that scandal, Ghorbanifar was a notorious figure in the intelligence community. The CIA had issued a "burn notice" to other agencies advising them to have nothing to do with him.

An intelligence committee source said the Pentagon's contacts with Ghorbanifar point to the possibility of rogue intelligence operations.

"That's already one validated case in point that [the administration] doesn't deny," said a committee source. "How much more of that stuff is there? How do you know until you turn over the rock?"

Sources said some members of the committee also are increasingly questioning the activities of senior State Department official John R. Bolton, who recently acknowledged that his office routinely went outside normal department channels to request raw intelligence from the CIA and other agencies.

Bolton, undersecretary for arms control and international security, has denied any wrongdoing, as has Douglas J. Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy and head of the Office of Special Plans. The administration has strongly defended prewar intelligence and insists that its claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction will eventually be vindicated.

The Intelligence Committee's Democrats were angered by comments made this week by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the committee, to USA Today and the Washington Post. Roberts said that the inquiry was 90% to 95% complete and suggested that the panel had already reached certain conclusions.

USA Today quoted Roberts as saying that the committee had found no evidence that analysts in the intelligence community were pressured to tailor their work to conform to administration views on Iraq. The issue has been fueled by a series of news stories citing unnamed intelligence officials complaining that the administration pressured them to alter views about the threat posed by Iraq. It goes to the heart of whether the administration abused the intelligence process.

Democrats acknowledge that no one from the intelligence community has come to the committee complaining of being pressured. But many argue that given Roberts' perceived ties to the Bush administration, and the fact that most of the interviews with intelligence community officials have been conducted in the presence of minders from the various agencies, such complaints would be unlikely.

"There is no justification for that conclusion at this time," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a Democrat on the committee. "We still don't know" whether there was pressure, she said.

Seeking to defuse the matter, Roberts issued a statement Friday saying the committee "has not finished its review of the intelligence and has not reached any final conclusions or finished a report." Roberts has given some ground to Democrats in recent days, allowing the committee to submit questions to Feith and possibly seek testimony from him at a future hearing.

But Roberts has also clung to his position that it would be improper to expand the inquiry to examine the role of the White House and other executive entities. An aide to Roberts said moving the probe in that direction would be "laced with partisanship."

"We'd never reach consensus" on questions of whether the White House abused the intelligence process, he said. "The best you could get is a partisan divide. The chairman doesn't think that's useful."

As chairman, Roberts controls most of the committee's resources and directs all but a handful of the members of its staff. But Democrats have limited means of working around Roberts' objections. Rockefeller said Friday that he has enough votes from Democratic members to take the unusual step of launching a separate investigation. He could enlist Democratic staffers on the committee and, as vice chairman, he could request documents and testimony from agencies without Roberts' signature.

"What the chairman is really doing is saying the blame is with the intelligence community and there will be no questions about the White House," Rockefeller said. The senator vowed that Democrats will examine the administration's handling of intelligence "one way or another, I guarantee you."

So far, the committee has pored over 19 volumes of intelligence documents on Iraq turned over by the CIA. It has also interviewed more than 100 witnesses. Committee sources from both parties say investigators have been dismayed at the shoddiness of much of the intelligence community's work on Iraq.

"We're having difficulties in substantiating things that showed up in their assessments," one committee source said, adding that the CIA often seemed quick to draw damaging conclusions that other intelligence agencies resisted. "It's just bad work," the source said.

Another source said "there were clearly failures in our ability to penetrate the regime and get ground truth [accurate data] on what was happening." That problem, the source added, "was amplified by an inability to correctly interpret the information that we did have, as scattered and indirect as it often was."

The committee is particularly focused on claims that highlighted last fall's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Such a report is supposed to represent the comprehensive view of the intelligence community.

But committee sources said many of the claims in the report simply don't add up, including an assertion at the top of the document that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions." Though the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq recently reported finding no chemical weapons, and scant evidence of existing biological stocks, the CIA says it stands behind its judgments.

"There may be places where if we had more time to vet the language we would have put another caveat or two in there," a U.S. official said. "But the overarching theme of it is something we continue to stand behind."

I'm so glad JR is doing this. Frankly was surprised he didn't get narky earlier.

The negative effect of minor scandals such as the Iraq 'intelligence' is that they obfuscate the major scandals that go on every day in intimate schemes between the White House and CIA directors George Bush Sr. and George Tenet.

The CIA is not an intelligence agency as such. It's rather a FULL TIME propaganda (read constructive lying) agency, and this in an international network of pro-CIA agencies (US embassies, befriended intelligence agencies, military umbrellas like NATO etc...), which do their domestic work through hidden political coups in democracies north, east, south and west of the globe. Since the CIA went to work on this, hundreds of thousands of people died by direct or indirect instigation of the agency's actions. The Iraq intelligence scandal is but a minor drop on a very, very hot plate.

The major CIA operations go on every day behind the scenes, but will never come out, just as David Copperfield's tricks won't ever come out.

The problem with CIA adherents is that they see the inhabitants of the world as enmities. Peace and international cooperation, in their viewpoint, are romantic wishes that can not be sustained -- men are inherently bad. Hence, an imperium must be constructed, to keep the order and values of western culture. With deceit and bloodshed as necessary recipes. Some call that 'real' politics.

I think it's 'easy' politics. I believe the CIA's prerogative of international animosity is wrong. Although it may require more moral endeavour and persistence of principle, the building of peace and friendship on a planetary scale is not utopian. Not any more.

It all depends on our personal character whether we choose the route of hate, or of love. Both attitudes can be cultivated and disciplined. The second, however, will bring both yourself and the world further into history.

Exactly. The US creates enemies and is doing so at present for internal political reasons (that's usually the reason), demonizing the UN, trying to create rifts among allies...

Molly Ivins: Can't wash out this stain easily
Posted on Sun, Oct. 26, 2003
Can't wash out this stain easily
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate

SEATTLE - What a gully-washer. What a frog-strangler. You ain't seen rain until you've seen record rain in Seattle. My wetness awareness has shot up, thanks to this town. But the next day, the sun came out -- and you could hardly tell the deluge had occurred.

And so it is in our public life -- the finger of fate writes, and having writ, moves on, leaving today's horrendous scandal back there with the snows of yesteryear, while we all focus on The Latest.

But there is one deception that will not go away. What happened to the weapons of mass destruction?

"The intolerable reality is that they blatantly twisted intelligence information to fit preconceived policies," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. "They lied to promote public relations, from the Jessica Lynch ordeal to the president's campaign landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln -- and about what war would cost our country."

"Before the war, week after week after week, we were told lie after lie after lie," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.

"The point is not that the president and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic -- and potentially just as troublesome," writes Seymour Hersh in a recent edition of The New Yorker, in a long, detailed account about our intelligence failures and the politically motivated "stovepiping" -- shooting unconfirmed intelligence reports, without analysis, up to decision-makers.

Among the horrific results, reports Hersh: "By March 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the president had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing war against terrorism. The Bush administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives were reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed."

Although it is certainly not in the same category as the deceptions described above, there was something so sad about the episode a few weeks back in which it was discovered that hundreds of letters had been sent to American newspapers in the names of serving soldiers without their knowledge or permission. That's not so much horrific as it is low.

The faked letters said in identical language that everything was hunky-dory over there in Iraq -- we are doing much good and are greatly appreciated. According to a survey published in Stars and Stripes (not an anti-war rag), about a third of Americans serving in Iraq have already concluded that the war had little or no value.

If administration officials want to lie, they should at least lie under their own names.

But with this administration, one cannot spend much time fretting about past deceptions, because fresh horrors keep looming.

Last week, the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany persuaded Iran to accept stricter international inspections of its nuclear sites and to stop production of enriched uranium. This might seem, to the simple-minded, to be good news indeed.

But according to The New York Times: "In Washington, the State Department reacted skeptically to the agreement, with officials privately voicing concerns that Teheran would not fully comply. Officials there only grudgingly praised the work of their European colleagues. … Bush administration officials dismissed the notion that a less confrontational approach by the Europeans had yielded more tangible results than the administration's policy of ultimatums."

Now, some might consider that petty, small-minded or just bad manners on the part of the administration, but the more serious question is whether it's the beginning of another intelligence gap.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has been working since midsummer to figure out how the Bush administration's prewar assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction turned out to be so wildly at variance with what has been found.

According to Hersh's report: "One finding … was that the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq's nuclear programs, were far more accurate than the CIA estimates. … One official said, 'If you look at them side-by-side, CIA versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board.'"

Iran now agrees to U.N. inspections, and according to the Times, the United States "reluctantly endorsed the European initiative, with Secretary of State Colin Powell telling his European counterparts what the U.S. wanted was an unambiguous document that left no room for negotiation or second-guessing."

Iran has yet to ratify an additional agreement under the U.N. Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968 that would allow surprise inspections of its nuclear installations. (Remember when right-wingers used to sneer at the "liberal wusses" who favored nonproliferation?)

Those who consider this the beginning of the Same Song, Second Verse would do well to ponder the track records of American vs. U.N. intelligence. As you recall during the lead-up to Iraq War II, anyone who cited U.N. findings on Iraq was stigmatized as "unpatriotic." Who would believe the sorry old United Nations, as opposed to our very own Bush administration?

It's not going to be easy to run that play again.

BBB -- For those who have been monitoring the past and present relationship of Bush/Carlyle to bin Laden family business, the rationale for withdrawing operatives from terrorism will be seen as the original goal. The invasion of Iraq (which they wanted anyway) will be seen to have had an unstated purpose: drawing attention away from those allegedly involved in 9/11. It will be interesting to see if there's a reaction from these theorists to Hersh's (and Ivins') contentions.