s
I believe George told a fib
Top Stories - Reuters
U.S. Insiders Say Iraq Intel Deliberately Skewed
Fri May 30, 7:18 PM ET
By Jim Wolf
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A growing number of U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq (news - web sites).
A key target is a four-person Pentagon (news - web sites) team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) to banned weapons or terrorist groups.
This team, self-mockingly called the Cabal, "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence.
The DIA was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD," or weapons of mass destruction, he added in a phone interview. He said the CIA (news - web sites) had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy.
Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) counterterrorist operations, said he knew of serving intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for playing up "fraudulent" intelligence, "a lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi."
The INC, which brought together groups opposed to Saddam, worked closely with the Pentagon to build a for the early use of force in Iraq.
"There are current intelligence officials who believe it is a scandal," he said in a telephone interview. They believe the administration, before going to war, had a "moral obligation to use the best information available, not just information that fits your preconceived ideas."
CHEMICAL WEAPONS REPORT 'SIMPLY WRONG'
The top Marine Corps officer in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway, said on Friday U.S. intelligence was "simply wrong" in leading military commanders to fear troops were likely to be attacked with chemical weapons in the March invasion of Iraq that ousted Saddam.
Richard Perle, a Chalabi backer and member of the Defense Policy Board that advises Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, defended the four-person unit in a television interview.
"They established beyond any doubt that there were connections that had gone unnoticed in previous intelligence analysis," he said on the PBS NewsHour Thursday.
A Pentagon spokesman, Marine Lt. Col. David Lapan, said the team in question analyzed links among terrorist groups and alleged state sponsors and shared conclusions with the CIA.
"In one case, a briefing was presented to Director of Central Intelligence Tenet. It dealt with the links between Iraq and al Qaeda," the group blamed for the Sept. 2001 attacks on the United States, he said.
Tenet denied charges the intelligence community, on which the United States spends more than $30 billion a year, had skewed its analysis to fit a political agenda, a cardinal sin for professionals meant to tell the truth regardless of politics.
"I'm enormously proud of the work of our analysts," he said in a statement on Friday ahead of an internal review. "The integrity of our process has been maintained throughout and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong."
Tenet sat conspicuously behind Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) during a key Feb. 5 presentation to the U.N. Security Council arguing Iraq represented an ominous and urgent threat -- as if to lend the CIA's credibility to the presentation, replete with satellite photos.
Powell said Friday his presentation was "the best analytic product that we could have put up."
SHAPED 'FROM THE TOP DOWN'
Greg Thielmann, who retired in September after 25 years in the State Department, the last four in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research working on weapons, said it appeared to him that intelligence had been shaped "from the top down."
"The normal processing of establishing accurate intelligence was sidestepped" in the runup to invading Iraq, said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security and who deals with U.S. intelligence officers.
Anger among security professionals appears widespread. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group that says it is made up mostly of CIA intelligence analysts, wrote to U.S. President George Bush May 1 to hit what they called "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions."
"In intelligence there is one unpardonable sin -- cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy," it wrote. "There is ample indication this has been done with respect to Iraq."
Here is the lie, Geli, from today's Washington Post. George waited until he arrived in "New Europe" to announce this one:
"We found the banned weapons....and we will find more..."
How many will believe this?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60140-2003May30.html?nav=hptop_tb
Whew -- what a harvest of dinky-dickering since yesterday afternoon! What to do about Scrat? Those of us who know that style (demand but never give) from Abuzz do our best to follow the old (Abuzz) adage: Scroll. Hard to do sometimes, but.... scroll.
Remember Edith Ann (Lily Tomlin)?
And that's the truth!
a
Cheney calling Bush ......
one ringy dingy ...... two ringy dingys
Georgge .... ixnay with the uckstra
rosanne rosanna dana "never mind"
You guys are hot this morning!
One thing about a lie is that when it's questioned, the alternative is to carve up another fabrication to rationalize the lie. This administration is piling it on.
(And Craven is too old to be caught in a perambulator!)
my god in heaven.....a LW sighting in politics!!!!
I see what the problem is in a nutshell. Scrat wants to see this administration say, "I lied about WMD's in Iraq." Well, we're never going to see that kind of statement coming out of any administration. So to continue this argument is futile. Some of us observe the inconsistency of what this administration has claimed for justification of this war, and we call it a "lie." Scrat will not go that far, because he wants proof. The only proof we have thus far are the statements made against the nonproduction of those claims. 1. WMD's, 2. al Qaida connection, 3. for the Iraqi people, and 4. for the security of the American people. As I've said before, some people will never distrust their government without them saying, "I lied." I'm unwilling to wait until hell freezes over. c.i.
I understand Ari Fleischer is going back into the private sector -- selling Kinkaids.
Well, I go back to believing that Wolfowitz was saying, "Hey, we lied, we rationalize it, and t' hell with you if you think otherwise." Yes, I've forgotten his exact words. I also think it was one of those deliberate tosses to see if there were any serious catches. Some of the press picked up on it; others didn't.*
So it was probably a successful way of planting an admission which an be por trayed later as "an open and honest statement" accompanied by an "I told you so." Rove and Wolfowitz put this together in about 3 minutes over a drink.
*What do I know? Nothing. My press is delayed these days due to the changeover in the delivery system of the NYTimes. We're in the "you'll get it when we feel like it" phase of the changeover...
It's really the old "means to and end" gambit. The problem is, nobody really knows what the "end" is until ten or twenty years from now when we get to look back and see what a mess they made of things. I'd be optimistic if our politicians had anything resembling a good record but they do more harm and than good for the most part. The political manipulation and machinations make Machiavelli seem even more like a prophet. I like your Ustinov quote, Tart (sic) -- one of our more brilliant thinkers in the Hollywood vein. Sounds like something Oscar Levant could have uttered.
Oh, sorry about the new nickname -- it was a Fruedian slip of the fingers (and if you believe that, there's no country next to Iraq that we can attack next).
Light, Do you ever wish, as I do, that we had a mandatory "clean sweep" each hundred years, remove every pretentious physical sign of government in Washington, demand that all government suppliers be dropped in favor of new contracts... Well, rather than go on, I'd settle for a "Fargo" type ending for all lobbyists while Godzilla takes care of the buildings and all I mean all documents are declassified.
Tartar, The key words here is the literal admission, "I lied." Otherwise, it's all conjecture on our part. c.i.
What you call conjecture, CI, I call a lie (though I'm at a disadvantage, not having Wolf's exact words front of me). The administration lied because it said it was doing something for one reason and then, having done what it wanted to do, said "That wasn't the real reason -- that was just the reason we thought you'd find easiest to swallow." Wolf was in the position of owning up on that, admitting there had been a lie.
Cherry tart, Light -- my favorite. Freshly pick, just cooked cherries, not too much sugar, light crust.