Report slams CIA for Iraq intelligence failures

Brandon


Is that like being half pregnant? Iran is a theocracy and is ruled by it's religious leaders. A nation branded by your leader as part of the axis of evil. They hate us and everything we stand for. Korea the other member of Bush's axis of evil met all your requirements for invasion. Yet the Bush administration invaded Iraq. Iraq the only one of the three that was basically contained and was no threat to the US. Yet we invaded them. Why. because they were the easy target? No. supposedly because of the CIA's faulty analysis. If you remember Flip Wilson used to say the devil made me do it. The Bush can now claim the CIA made me do it. If so how much pressure was put on the CIA to come up with that analysis. IMO it was tailored to meet the expectations and requirements of the Bush White House.

The Senate Report {Editorial from NY times}


Published: July 10, 2004
In a season when candor and leadership are in short supply, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the prewar assessment of Iraqi weapons is a welcome demonstration of both. It is also disturbing, and not just because of what it says about the atrocious state of American intelligence. The report is a condemnation of how this administration has squandered the public trust it may sorely need for a real threat to national security.

The report was heavily censored by the administration and is too narrowly focused on the bungling of just the Central Intelligence Agency. But what comes through is thoroughly damning. Put simply, the Bush administration's intelligence analysts cooked the books to give Congress and the public the impression that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear arms, that he was plotting to give such weapons to terrorists, and that he was an imminent threat.

These assertions formed the basis of Mr. Bush's justifications for war. But the report said that they were wrong and were not a true picture of the intelligence, and that the intelligence itself was not worth much. The freshest information from human sources was more than four years old. The committee said the analysts who had produced that false apocalyptic vision had fallen into a "collective groupthink" in which evidence was hammered into a preconceived pattern. Their bosses did not intervene.

The report reaffirmed a finding by another panel investigating intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks in saying that there was no "established formal relationship" between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. It also said there was no evidence that Iraq had been complicit in any attack by Osama bin Laden, or that Saddam Hussein had ever tried to use Al Qaeda for an attack. Although the report said the C.I.A.'s conclusions had been "widely disseminated" in the government, Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have repeatedly talked of an Iraq-Qaeda link.

Sadly, the investigation stopped without assessing how President Bush had used the incompetent intelligence reports to justify war. It left open the question of whether the analysts thought they were doing what Mr. Bush wanted. While the panel said it had found no analyst who reported being pressured to change a finding, its vice chairman, Senator John Rockefeller IV, said there had been an "environment of intense pressure." But the issue was glossed over so the report could be adopted unanimously.

The panel's investigation into how President Bush handled the intelligence has been postponed until after the election. But the bottom line already seems pretty clear. No one had to pressure analysts to change their findings because the findings were determined before the work started.

By late 2002, you'd have had to have been vacationing on Mars not to know what answer Mr. Bush wanted. The planning for war had begun. The C.I.A. was under enormous pressure over getting it wrong before 9/11. And the hawkish defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to set up his own intelligence agency to get the goods on Iraq that the wishy-washy C.I.A. couldn't seem to deliver.

Both political parties see all this as an election issue, and the international community will see the committee report as another reason to decry Mr. Bush's go-it-alone foreign policy. But the report also speaks to a critical long-term security threat. We cannot afford to have the public become too cynical about the government's assessment of danger.

There may well come a time when Mr. Bush, or another president, will have to ask the nation and its allies to back a pre-emptive military strike against terrorists, or a country that poses a real threat. And he's probably going to have to rely on intelligence that is hardly the "slam dunk" that George Tenet reportedly called these shoddy reports on Iraq. The public will have to believe that the president is acting against a real threat, not one manufactured to justify a political agenda.

This administration has not made it easier for people to have that confidence. Its continuing insistence on linking Iraq and Al Qaeda is not aimed at helping the public understand the situation in the Middle East, but at providing political cover for an increasingly unpopular invasion.

Then there are the news conferences that administration officials hold periodically to warn us that we're about to be attacked. Everyone is aware of the danger out there, but there is no reason to go on television and repeat vague warnings that seem to be intended to frighten everyone, but are more likely to lull people into complacency by their familiarity and repetition. When Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland defense, holds a news conference to warn the nation of dire peril and it winds up as fodder for comedy shows, there's something very wrong somewhere./>

The Senate Intelligence Committee's report ought to be the first move back from the brink of destructive public cynicism. The next must come from the president, who could help restore confidence in the government's risk assessment by simply being frank about the errors his administration made and the lessons it learned. That would do more to prepare the country for the next crisis than a full season of scary press conferences by Mr. Ridge.

I think blaming the CIA is a dangerous political move from the republicans and administration.

Right now we are hearing about threats that might take place around the election season in order influence the US election.

Other than the fact I find that too tidy for the administration to get people to vote republican or end up being like the "spaniards" it leaves the CIA and other intelligence agency is such a creditability gap that people won't know if down the road we will find that this terror warning was another intelligence failure. This is such a rotten trick because even for someone like me who always thinks (and is usually proven correct)about the administration; in the back of your mind you might be going, "well what if it is really true and we are attacked?"

Cheney made too many trips to the CIA before and up to Bush going to war with Iraq for me to believe that there wasn't pressure for the CIA to tell the administration what it obviously wanted to hear and I think most ordinary people who don't have such an investment in their defense of the war will see it that way too. But time will tell like it does everything sooner or later.

I think Bush will dump Cheney.

Bush defends stance on WMDs

Report slams CIA for Iraq intelligence failures

Saturday, July 10, 2004 Posted: 9:19 AM EDT (1319 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush has defended his decision to go to war following the release of a report criticizing the intelligence used to justify invading Iraq.

A U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report released on Friday blasted the CIA's prewar estimates of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as overstated and unsupported. (Full story)

Bush said the United States was "right to go into Iraq. America is safer today because we did," he told a cheering crowd of supporters in Pennsylvania.


http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/10/senate.intelligence/index.html


And I did it MY WAY.

Were those supporters athletic?

LW


Must be because Bush has pretty big balls making that statement.

Your responses to my posts continue to give me the impression that you haven't read the post you're responding to.

The fact that the CIA's analysis was faulty doesn't mean that there was no likelihood Iraq had WMD or intended to continue trying to create them.

We simply can't invade North Korea, because they already have nuclear weapons. There is no option to do so. We didn't want Iraq to achieve this level of near invulnerability.

My understanding was that Iran has elections, but that they're not fair, which was why I called them a halfway democracy. We could debate terminology for years, but it's a reasonable description.

Furthermore, Iraq was only the top of the iceberg. Since these are weapons that in some cases one single use of which can kill a million people, and since Hitler/Stalin/Hussein type dictators or terrorists will try to obtain them in the future and probably not cooperate with diplomatic efforts to induce them to stop, we will probably have to use force again more than once.

Brandon
I think it is you who can not read or possibly comprehend what you read. You are like a train on a single track railroad.

Once again, you have run away from my arguments. I give specific arguments for my point of view, you respond with a generality about me personally. To me that is as good as an admission that you cannot address what I have said.

What we are having is not a debate, because you simply ignore the other person's argument and restate your case or change the subject. I guess I win just by default.

Yes Brandon you win the booby prize. You are the prime Booby. It is awarded to he can state and restate the most rediculous and distorted and foolish statements on an ongoing basis.

Since I have stated my arguments very specifically, and you have declined to address any of them, but engage only in name calling, I presume that your position must be indefensible.

Brandon, that is usually the case.

Yes. They flee from our arguments and then claim that it's because they are so very right that they won't lower themselves to discuss it. To my way of thinking, that's a loss by default.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/11/wsept11.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/11/ixnewstop.html

"Fury over Pentagon cell that briefed White House on Iraq's 'imaginary' al-Qaeda links
By Julian Coman in Washington
(Filed: 11/07/2004)


A Senior Pentagon policy maker created an unofficial "Iraqi intelligence cell" in the summer of 2002 to circumvent the CIA and secretly brief the White House on links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'eda, according to the Senate intelligence committee.

The allegations about Douglas Feith, the number three at the Department of Defence, are made in a supplementary annexe of the committee's review of the intelligence leading to war in Iraq, released on Friday.

According to dramatic testimony contained in the annexe, Mr Feith's cell undermined the credibility of CIA judgments on Iraq's alleged al-Qa'eda links within the highest levels of the Bush administration.

The cell appears to have been set up by Mr Feith as an adjunct to the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon intelligence-gathering operation established in the wake of 9/11 with the authority of Paul Wolfowitz. Its focus quickly became the al-Qa'eda-Saddam link.

On occasion, without informing the then head of the CIA, George Tenet, the group gave counter-briefings in the White House. Sen Jay Rockefeller, the most senior Democrat on the committee, said that Mr Feith's cell may even have undertaken "unlawful" intelligence-gathering initiatives.

The claims will lead to calls by Democrats for the resignation of Mr Feith, the third-ranking civilian at the Department of Defence and a leading "neo-con" hawk. "Tenet fell on his sword," said one Democrat official, "even though it's clear that he was placed under tremendous pressure to come up with the 'right' intelligence product for the administration on Iraq....."

Brandon
Your so called arguments


Analysis of the data indicates that not to be so. Are we now into attacking nations on a supposed possibility



Where is the evidence that Iraq was on the way to nuclear invulnerability? Or for that matter any nuclear capability. All evidence was to the contrary. No one suggested that we attack North Korea. However, of the three nations labeled as Axis of evil North Korea tops the list with Iran running second and Iraq a distant third.


.

Ha. Are you aware of the fact that your so called halfway democracy in the last election had all its reform delegates disqualified for reelection by the governing religious leaders. It is no more a democracy than Nazi Germany was. It is a dictatorial theocracy.




Top of the iceberg. Are you aware that 7/8's of an iceberg is under water. Who should we attack next. I guess Bush will have to pick out the easiest target.

Your so called arguments are so ridiculous they almost defy reasonable refutation
Again mister booby you win the prize.

As I explained clearly in prior posts, Iraq had had WMD, used them, and lied about them. The only question is how recently it did these things, not whether it did. Yes, we are to attack based on a possibility. In a world in which one single use of one single weapon can kill a million people, a reasonable probablity that a latter day Hitler is developing them, and a failure of years of diplomacy is sufficient grounds. Absolute certainlty might come in the form of the use of a WMD in an American city.


Here is an article about Iraq's attempts to obtain nuclear weapons: http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1992/a92/a92.albright.html
Clearly Hussein wanted the bomb.


I was answering this question by you:



Whatever you like. My only point was that one must be more reluctant to invade a country that has some sort of quasi-elected government than a country like Iraq which had a leader who was merely imposed by force. It was not my intention to defend the Iranian electoral process.


It is likely that we will have to invade other countries to stop their WMD programs more than once in the future. A reasonable choice would be a country with these attributes:

1. Believed to have an active WMD program.
2. Run by a dictator whose various actions demonstrate great evil, e.g. murdering hundreds of thousands of his own people.
3. Has attempted to forcibly annex neighboring countries.
4. Years of negotiation to persuade it to stop its development of WMD have failed to achieve the desired result.
5. Sympathetic to terrorists.
6. Is believed not to have completed its development of nuclear weapons.

That is who we should attack next.


Childish name calling, which only serves to detract from anything else you have to say.

Thank God Brandon doesn't run the country!

Another liberal who answers specific political arguments with personal attacks. I must presume that none of you can take me on point by point.

Oh, I apologize if you took that as a personal attack. Maybe it was... Sorry.
Your thread is long and I had to go to work.
I can take you on point by point, but I'll bet somebody has already done so on previous threads anyway. Time and again. The points you make are not new to the forum and have been addressed before, no doubt. And I hate to repeat myself or anyone else. Sometimes I simply choose not to waste my time doing so. It's not like I'm going to change your mind.
However, I have a problem with your last point.
"Is believed not to have completed its development of nuclear weapons"
You think we should go to war with any nation that is trying to develop nuclear weapons? I mean, we have them. Why shouldn't other nations be allowed to protect themselves? I would prefer that they don't have them either, but really, who are we to say they can't? I think that it's attitudes like this that make other nations "hate" us. If we want to be top dog, we need to give better incentives than that! All that is, is an ultimatum. A threat.