There Was Nothing to Preempt

[Tiger Al 0]

Ooo, a scathing article by Ray McGovern, a 27-year career analyst with the CIA. One of the interesting things I found was how the Bush administration is more than happy to allow the hunt for non-existent WMD's to continue as long as necessary, but they want to quickly close the book on the 9/11 Commission. One of those things that make you go, "Hmm." Could there be something, or things, they want to remain unknown for as long as possible??? Methinks so.

You will not have heard this on FOX news, but the Australian Senate has already formally censured Prime Minister John Howard for misleading the country on Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) and for suppressing a key report from Australian intelligence warning that still more widespread terrorism could be expected to follow any attack on Iraq.

The fact that Kay came up empty-handed also means that the transparently disingenuous remarks of President George W. Bush and his senior aides in attempting to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq will fall far short of what the White House needs in order to defend the most misguided and destructive U.S. foreign policy decision since Vietnam.

Most of the answer is to be found in a novel, faith-based approach to intelligence analysis—an approach that applies the theorem propounded by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Secretary of State Colin Powell rang a change on that theme last week when he provided this explanation: "What we demanded of Iraq was that they prove the negative of our hypothesis."  

Vice President Dick Cheney and the true believers working in the sizable intelligence apparat in his office have kept faith with the Rumsfeld theorem—Kay's and Duelfer's apostate comments notwithstanding. In an interview with National Public Radio last week, Cheney insisted that inspectors in Iraq may still find WMD. (Someone needs to drop a drug screen on him!) This expression of faith was accompanied by a litany of other assertions discredited by Kay and others; for example, that trailers found in Iraq posed "conclusive evidence" that Saddam Hussein "did in fact have programs for WMD."

Kay made short shrift of that lingering canard when he alluded to a new intelligence community consensus that the trailers were actually designed to produce hydrogen for weather balloons, or perhaps rocket fuel.

For good measure, Cheney threw in the old saw about a link between one of the 9/11 hijackers and Iraq, and cited the compendium of unconfirmed reports on such links that was prepared by Rumsfeld disciple Douglas Feith, sent to the Senate, and then leaked immediately to the right-wing Weekly Standard. Powell, however, recently admitted there is no concrete evidence of such ties, despite his conjuring up a "sinister nexus" in his UN speech on Feb. 5, 2003. And, in a highly unusual move, the Defense Department disavowed Feith's litany when it hit the press.

On WMD Cheney insisted, "It's going to take some additional considerable period of time in order to look in all the cubbyholes (sic) and ammo dumps... where you'd expect to find something like that." (What happened to you knowing exactly where all of these HUGE stockpiles were, liar?) This is not the first hint that Cheney has dropped that he would like to string out the quest for WMD until after the November election, while asking the American people in the interim to keep faith.

Other senior officials appear to be hedging their faith in the gullibility of American voters. They are urging the president to say, "The CIA made me do it."  (That'll play well!!!)

Quizzed on WMD by reporters last week, Powell explained that his UN speech was based on "what our intelligence community believed was credible." (This is a far cry from the "solid sources" he earlier said were the underpinning of that speech.) Powell complained to the reporters, "If they (the Iraqis) didn't have any (WMD), then why wasn't that known beforehand?" Why indeed? (Doesn't Powell know that you can't prove a negative?)

[TrueBlue72 0]

Looks like another case of the Lib's having 20/20 hindsight!!!!!

[Tiger Al 0]

Looks like another case of the Lib's having 20/20 hindsight!!!!!

Sorry, it isn't. Known intelligence before war.

[Donutboy 0]

The White House is not only trying to deny them ample time to do their work but is even refusing to fully cooperate with the commission!!

White House Holding Notes Taken by 9/11 Commission

The White House, already embroiled in a public fight over the deadline for an independent commission's investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is refusing to give the panel notes on presidential briefing papers taken by some of its own members, officials said this week......

Of course, this republican Congress that saw the need for eight years of investigations of the Clinton sex scandal doesn't think the 9/11 commission should need extra time to thoroughly do their job!!

9/11 Commission Says It Needs More Time

....The White House and Republican Congressional leaders have said they see no need to extend the congressionally mandated deadline, now set for May 27, and a spokesman for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert said Tuesday that Mr. Hastert would oppose any legislation to grant the extension.....

Of course, with bits and pieces coming out about the failings of this administration in the leadup to 9/11, it could be politically embarrassing for the White House and their puppet Congress to deny the commission the chance to finish their investigation!!

Battle Over 9/11 Panel's Deadline Intensifies

Long-simmering tensions with the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks became a more immediate problem for the White House this week as the panel released a series of damaging revelations about missed opportunities to stop the al Qaeda hijackers ......

Of course, the Valerie Plame investigation will probably last longer than the 9/11 investigation. I predict we won't hear anything on that investigation until after November 2004 and it'll be some flunky at the White House that takes the fall. The Bush administration is facing another investigation over bribery.....

Here's the link!! Inquiry Sought in House Vote on Drug Plan for Medicare

It just keeps getting better every day!! What's the old saying? "The chickens are coming home to roost!!"

[Tiger Al 0]

Looks like another case of the Lib's having 20/20 hindsight!!!!!

Hey TrueBlue, I found some more "hindsight" for you.

Seven months before two-dozen or so al-Qaida terrorists hijacked three commercial airplanes and flew two of the aircrafts directly into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, killing 3,000 innocent civilians, CIA Director George Tenet, testified before Congress that Iraq posed no immediate threat to the United States or to other countries in the Middle East.

But immediately after the terrorist attacks on 9-11, which the Bush administration claims Iraq is partially responsible for, the President and his advisers were already making a case for war against Iraq without so much as providing a shred of evidence to back up the allegations that Iraq and its former President, Saddam Hussein, was aware of the attacks or helped the al-Qaida hijackers plan the catastrophe.

It was then, after the 9-11 attacks, that intelligence reports from the CIA radically changed from previous months, which said Iraq posed no immediate threat to the U.S., to now show Iraq had a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and was in hot pursuit of a nuclear bomb. The Bush administration seized upon the reports to build public support for the war and used the information to eventually justify a preemptive strike against the country in March.

In just seven short months, beginning as early as February 2001, Bush administration officials said Iraq went from being a threat only to its own people to posing an imminent threat to the world. Indeed, in a Feb. 12, 2001 interview with the Fox News Channel Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said: “Iraq is probably not a nuclear threat at the present time.”

Still, in early 2001, while hardliners in the Bush administration were privately discussing ways to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Secretary of State Powell said the U.S. successfully “contained” Iraq in the years since the first Gulf War and that because of economic sanctions placed on the country Iraq was unable to obtain WMD.

“We have been able to keep weapons from going into Iraq,” Powell said during a Feb 11, 2001 interview with “Face the Nation. “We have been able to keep the sanctions in place to the extent that items that might support weapons of mass destruction development have had some controls on them… it's been quite a success for ten years…”

Moreover, during a meeting with Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, in February 2001 on how to deal with Iraq, Powell said the U.N., the U.S. and its allies “have succeeded in containing Saddam Hussein and his ambitions.”

We only appear to have 20/20 hindsight because we weren't so enamored with Bush that it blinded us to the facts. Don't worry, it'll get better.

LINK

[CCTAU 3,536]

So what. The majority of Americans aren't even listening to the drivel spouted out there anymore. Just more straws. The more you demoncrats grab, the better you get at sucking wind.

[Tiger Al 0]

So what. The majority of Americans aren't even listening to the drivel spouted out there anymore. Just more straws. The more you demoncrats grab, the better you get at sucking wind.

I'd much prefer that you just say, "Yes, sir. You're right," and then be on your way.

[AUloggerhead 2,516]

... This expression of faith was accompanied by a litany of other assertions discredited by Kay and others; for example, that trailers found in Iraq posed "conclusive evidence" that Saddam Hussein "did in fact have programs for WMD."

Kay made short shrift of that lingering canard when he alluded to a new intelligence community consensus that the trailers were actually designed to produce hydrogen for weather balloons, or perhaps rocket fuel.

Something about this conclusion by Kay strikes me as odd too. You know ... whenever I need hydrogen or rocket fuel to meet my non-WMD needs, the first thing I like to do is see if my mobile trailers are in production mode. :roll:

And another thing: why do they need rocket fuel to power their weather balloons?

[Tigermike 3,711]

And another thing: why do they need rocket fuel to power their weather balloons?

Yeah, they didn't have any planes left did they?

[AUloggerhead 2,516]

Looks like another case of the Lib's having 20/20 hindsight!!!!!

Sorry, it isn't. Known intelligence before war.

From the list of all those articles, I found this reference from former CIA military analyst Kenneth Pollack: Link

Pollack worked as a CIA military analst for 15 years and was 1 of only 3 analysts who predicted Hussein would invade Kuwait in 1990. He also authored the 2002 book, Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Here are some excerpts from that article:

...

Democrats have typically accused the Bush Administration of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify an unnecessary war. Republicans have typically claimed that the fault lay with the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, which they say overestimated the threat from Iraq—a claim that carries the unlikely implication that Bush's team might not have opted for war if it had understood that Saddam was not as dangerous as he seemed.

Both sides appear to be at least partly right. The intelligence community did overestimate the scope and progress of Iraq's WMD programs, although not to the extent that many people believe. The Administration stretched those estimates to make a case not only for going to war but for doing so at once, rather than taking the time to build regional and international support for military action.  ...

...

What We Thought We Knew

The U.S. intelligence community's belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction pre-dated Bush's inauguration, and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure. It was first advanced at the end of the 1990s, at a time when President Bill Clinton was trying to facilitate a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians and was hardly seeking assessments that the threat from Iraq was growing.

In congressional testimony in March of 2002 Robert Einhorn, Clinton's assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, summed up the intelligence community's conclusions about Iraq at the end of the Clinton Administration:

"How close is the peril of Iraqi WMD? Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors (albeit attacks that would be ragged, inaccurate, and limited in size). Within four or five years it could have the capability to threaten most of the Middle East and parts of Europe with missiles armed with nuclear weapons containing fissile material produced indigenously—and to threaten U.S. territory with such weapons delivered by nonconventional means, such as commercial shipping containers. If it managed to get its hands on sufficient quantities of already produced fissile material, these threats could arrive much sooner."

In October of 2002 the National Intelligence Council, the highest analytical body in the U.S. intelligence community, issued a classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's WMD, representing the consensus of the intelligence community. Although after the war some complained that the NIE had been a rush job, and that the NIC should have been more careful in its choice of language, in fact the report accurately reflected what intelligence analysts had been telling Clinton Administration officials like me for years in verbal briefings.

A declassified version of the 2002 NIE was released to the public in July of last year. Its principal conclusions:

"Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade." (The classified version of the NIE gave an estimate of five to seven years.)

"Since inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons effort, energized its missile program, and invested more heavily in biological weapons; most analysts assess [that] Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."

"If Baghdad acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year ... Without such material from abroad, Iraq probably would not be able to make a weapon until the last half of the decade."

"Baghdad has begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents, probably including mustard, sarin, cyclosarin, and VX ... Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents."

"All key aspects—R&D, production, and weaponization—of Iraq's offensive BW [biological warfare] program are active and most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf war ... Baghdad has established a large-scale, redundant, and concealed BW agent production capability, which includes mobile facilities; these facilities can evade detection, are highly survivable, and can exceed the production rates Iraq had prior to the Gulf war."

U.S. government analysts were not alone in these views. In the late spring of 2002 I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: Did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).

Other nations' intelligence services were similarly aligned with U.S. views. Somewhat remarkably, given how adamantly Germany would oppose the war, the German Federal Intelligence Service held the bleakest view of all, arguing that Iraq might be able to build a nuclear weapon within three years. Israel, Russia, Britain, China, and even France held positions similar to that of the United States; France's President Jacques Chirac told Time magazine last February, "There is a problem—the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq. The international community is right ... in having decided Iraq should be disarmed." In sum, no one doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. ...

What We Think We Know Now

But it appears that Iraq may not have had any actual weapons of mass destruction. A number of caveats are in order. We do not yet have a complete picture of Iraq's WMD programs. Initial U.S. efforts to seek out WMD caches were badly lacking: an American artillery unit that had too few people for the task and virtually no plan of action had been hastily assigned the mission. Not surprisingly, its efforts garnered little useful information. According to Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter who was embedded with the unit, by mid-June—nearly two months after the end of major combat operations—the United States had interviewed only thirteen out of hundreds of Iraqi scientists. Documents relating to the programs are known to have been destroyed. Much of Iraq is yet to be explored; as David Kay, of the Iraq Survey Group, which took over the search for WMD in June, told Congress, only ten of Iraq's 130 major ammunition dumps had been thoroughly checked as of early October (the time of his testimony). Now that Saddam Hussein is in custody, it is possible that new information may be forthcoming, or that closemouthed Iraqis will offer fresh details.  ...

So, if we are to believe Pollack, then the consensus of pre-war intelligence concluded that Iraq was a major threat, and not only our from our own analysts but from other countries as well. Quite an interesting comment on the German Intelligence assessment and also, Chirac's comments as well. The rest of the article goes on to list a number of recommendations at the end. Most of them are designed to depoliticize the intelligence community so that they can concentrate on performing their jobs instead of being kicked around like a political football. It's a good read. Fair and balanced ... or maybe I should say, unbiased.

[ib4au 0]

Looks like another case of the Lib's having 20/20 hindsight!!!!!

Yep! Now if we could only get Dubya to develop 20/20 hindsight maybe we could stop tax cuts and job loss!

[TitanTiger 21,237]

He'd need more than 20/20 hindsight to have stopped an economic slowdown that began 9 months before he took office and a recession that officially began less than 3 months after he took over (before any of his economic policies had been implemented).

[Tiger Al 0]

So, if we are to believe Pollack, then the consensus of pre-war intelligence concluded that Iraq was a major threat, and not only our from our own analysts but from other countries as well.  Quite an interesting comment on the German Intelligence assessment and also, Chirac's comments as well.  The rest of the article goes on to list a number of recommendations at the end.  Most of them are designed to depoliticize the intelligence community so that they can concentrate on performing their jobs instead of being kicked around like a political football.  It's a good read.  Fair and balanced ... or maybe I should say, unbiased. 

The case for war was wholly predicated on the assumption that Iraq had WMD's at the time based on intelligence that was at least five years old. Much of what we knew about Iraq's WMD's came from UNSCOM inspectors who were there until they were withdrawn in 1998 prior to Operation Desert Fox. If that's all we had available in the way of intelligence, then making the decision to go to war would be strictly a judgement call based on the information available. That wasn't the case.

From December 2002-March 2003, Hans Blix and UNMOVIC inspectors were on the ground in Iraq searching all of the sites that Colin Powell referred to in his speech to the UN and time after time the inspectors found no WMD's or evidence of reconstitution of WMD capabilities. The bio trailers were found not to be bio trailers at all. One site they were sent to was full of cobwebs as it hadn't been entered in years. UNMOVIC went to these sites under the direction of the US based on the "smoking gun" intelligence used to make the case for war by Powell at the UN, Bush in the SOTU address, Rumsfeld and Cheney on their various promotional tours. Our "best intelligence at the time" was turning out to be wrong before the first tank ever crossed into Iraq.

Again, the case for war was wholly predicated on the assumption that Iraq had WMD's at the time. UNMOVIC was disproving our "best intelligence at the time" on a daily basis and prudence would dictate that you don't start a war where not only troops will be injured and killed, but civilians as well, based on information that is totally wrong. Prudence would dictate that when UNMOVIC was not only proving your "best intelligence at the time" to be totally wrong but was in a position to update your intelligence, you should let them continue their work until they actually find WMD's or Saddam stonewalls them or they declare Iraq to be in compliance. Bush's disdain for prudence became obvious when he instructed the UN to withdraw UNMOVIC and attacked Iraq.