Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community  

Go Back   Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community > The Academy > Tilted Politics


 
 
LinkBack Thread Tools
Old 07-12-2004, 10:51 AM   #1 (permalink)
Banned
 
The Senate Intelligence Committee Report

An interesting analysis of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on 9/11.

Note: rather long read.

From windsofchange.net:

Quote:
I spent the better part of Friday slogging through all 521 pages of the report and identifying the relevant sections of it for Michael Ledeen, which is something that I would seriously recommend that anybody who is genuinely interested in what went wrong on the subject of Iraq do as well. Even the partisan hacks. Especially the partisan hacks.

Ledeen is going to have an NRO piece up on a good chunk of this at some point, but in the meantime I thought I'd convey my own impressions of the document with respect to the terrorism aspects of it, seeing how I know far more about terrorism than I do about WMD, as well as perhaps some other things that you might find interesting. Because I'm accessing this report in PDF form, I can't do the whole copy/paste thing to provide quotations so instead I'll be providing page references.

* Joe Wilson
* Now, Onto The Red Meat...
* Iraqi Support for Terrorism
* Al-Qaeda
* Pressure on the CIA
* The Report's "Additional Views"
* The Bottom Line

So, about Joe Wilson ...

I see Instapundit as well as both the Associated Press and the Washington Post has already beaten me to the punch on this one, but it's a point that needs to be made. Joe Wilson is a liar and not a particularly good one at that. As the report, starting on p. 39 and going through p. 47 very carefully explains, the claims that Wilson during his media blitz and subsequent canonization as a representative of all that is righteous and pure within anti-war circles were every bit as misleading if not factually inaccurate as anything that one may charge that the administration had done. Even more so, I would argue, if only for the fact that he was making claims about a number of issues, for example the forged documents referring to Niger, of which he had no actual knowledge - a very polite way of saying that the man was blowing smoke out his ass.

In conventional anti-war mythology, the name of Wilson's wife was leaked to the press in order to punish him for having "debunked" the administration's claims with respect to Iraq attempting to purchase uranium from Africa. As the report very clearly indicates, this was simply not the case and while it is indeed puzzling why the administration allowed him to go on as long as he did during his 15 minutes of fame without airing some of this information to the public given the considerable damage that he did to the president's reputation during this period.

In any case, Wilson's trip to Africa did not "debunk" the administration position that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger - in fact it strengthened this position on the basis of Wilson's claim that an Iraqi delegation had traveled to Niger in 1999 and that Niger officials believed that they were interested in buying uranium.

Oh, and might I add that nowhere in the entire Niger section of the report is there any evidence whatsoever to assert that Michael Ledeen forged the Niger documents, as has been peddled by any number of folks with an axe to grind against the man. No doubt apologies will be pending from all those who have accused him of complicity in this will be pending ...

Now, onto the red meat ...

Most of my own personal attention within the report, as most people can probably find understandable, is based around statements concerning Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda. The report notes on p. 305 the difference of opinion within the CIA between the Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) and the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis (NESA) as far as the Iraqi relationship with al-Qaeda that I've written about here before. In other words, the CTC believed (and still does) that there were definite ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, whereas the NESA is far more skeptical on this count. One might reasonably guess where our pal Mike "Anonymous" is working these days on the basis of his opinion of the relationship.

The CTC position was essentially that a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda developed over time to where it was prior to the war, whereas the NESA saw the contacts as more of a sporadic, wary phenomenon. As I wrote in my last special analysis, the evidence is frequently such in these types of instances where reasonable people can conclude things one way or another entirely without any accusations of warmongering or bad motivations. If these are going to come up every time someone takes a different position on these issues, then we may as well scrap our intelligence services altogether. Feith's office also gets added into the equation on p. 307 and basically states the same as what I've said before on the subject and I would also note the instance of the DIA detailee on p. 308 as well with regards to finding various pieces of information that fell through the bureaucratic cracks in the CIA analysis but were subsequently incorporated into the broader intelligence picture as a direct result of the work of Feith and his people over at the Pentagon. The complaint listed on p. 309 that the CIA (in particular the analysis wing) was relying on requiring "juridical evidence" concerning ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda is an entirely valid one to make with regard to the issue of intelligence. In many cases what you have to go off of is not going to be of the same standard that one would use in a court of law - this is simply the way that intelligence works.

The idea that the CTC, NESA, NSA, and DIA should review its information with what Feith's people had come up with through their alternate means of analysis on p. 310 is likewise entirely reasonable under the circumstances. As the report shows, they compared evidence and there was some disagreements, this is far from the "Feith cooked the intelligence books" claims that have been floating around in the press for the better part of the last 2 years.

The committee is going to evaluate Feith's work in the next phase of its review and given how phenomenonally wrong that the press coverage has been in this particular area (as demonstrated by this report, I would argue) I would strongly recommend that journalists allow the committee to do its work unless they get a chance to actually see or at least read a summary the data that Feith looked at and the conclusions that he reached with respect to issues like Iraq and al-Qaeda. Sounds reasonable enough, yes?

What we already knew about Iraqi support for terrorism

From p. 315-317, we get a nice review of the failed attempts by the Mukhabarat to perpetrate terrorist attacks against US targets during the first Gulf War as well as assassination attempts carried out against Iraqi dissidents and opposition leaders living in Jordan and Iraqi Kurdistan well into the mid-1990s. Of particular interest is p. 316's summary of the Iraqi plans to bomb Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague from 1998-2003, which would tend to rather strongly contradict Richard Clarke's claim that Iraq had not been involved in anti-US terrorism since the failed 1993 plot to assassinate the first President Bush in Kuwait. Page 317 also covers attempts by the Mukhabarat to go after US installations in Turkey and Azerbaijan in late 2002, though I notice they blacked out info on a plot that was actively thwarted.

From p. 317-19, we get a nice recap of a number of known Iraqi proxies ranging from the PLF, 15 May, MEK, Abu Nidal Organization, and the PFLP-GC, though they blacked out the reports concerning Iraq assisting the PFLP-GC in its attacks on Israel during the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada.

Hamas rebuffed the Iraqi overtures to attack the US because they already had their hands full with fighting Israel, whereas Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad were ordered to decline Saddam's overtures at the behest of their Iranian backers. All the same, had the Iraqi efforts in this regard been successful Saddam Hussein would have put together quite a formidable terrorist coalition to aim at the US.

Al-Qaeda

The report, starting on p. 322, goes through what we already know concerning the poor intelligence that the CIA had on both the Iraqi and al-Qaeda leadership as well as a general summary of the ideological differences between the two, including a number of human intelligence reports noting Saddam Hussein's suppression of Wahhabism inside Iraq and his initial efforts to prevent Iraqi youth from joining al-Qaeda. On the al-Qaeda side of the equation, we have contradictory reporting from al-Qaeda leaders now in US custody, with some claiming that the organization hated Saddam Hussein and others claiming that they were more than happy to work with him to fight the United States. My own suspicion would be that the organization's alliance with the Baathists was a rather compartmentalized secret within the network (indeed, I've seen al-Qaeda recruiting videos which refer to Saddam Hussein as a bad Muslim), which is apparently also the way that Ansar al-Islam operated according to a leader within the group now in custody by the name of Qods ("Jerusalem").

The idea of a debate among the al-Qaeda leadership over the wisdom of working with al-Qaeda would seem quite plausible, though it would appear at least that the more pragmatic leaders within the terrorist network won out in the end.

At least some of the censorship that went into the report would appear to be somewhat shifty in my view, since among the detainees being referenced on the al-Qaeda relationship with Iraq are Ibn Sheikh al-Libi and Moammar Ahmed Yousef at the top of p. 324. The p. 324-325 recounting of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's interrogations on the subject of an alliance between Iraq and al-Qaeda also completely contradicts what various opponents of administration policy have attempted to caricature to as far as the press is concerned, as neither man denied the existence of a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda or even stated that the two were blood enemies.

Abu Zubaydah told the CIA that Abu Musab Zarqawi and others were known to have good relationships with the Mukhabarat, but that bin Laden would never ally with the Iraqi regime in the sense of something akin to what Abu Nidal had done in order to retain his operational independence, which tracks exactly with what is stated in the Feith memo.

The second detainee, whose name and statements are blacked out, is none other than Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, the head of al-Qaeda training program in Afghanistan who gave US interrogators a detailed account of how Iraq had trained al-Qaeda in poison gases. Isikoff and Hosenball from Newsweek have attempted to caricature al-Libi as a source of dubious credibility by noting that he has recently changed his story, but I would just note that if that's considered to be the test for credibility we would have long ago thrown out just about everything that any these high-level detainees say.

We also learn quite a bit more about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed with respect to his exact status within al-Qaeda. While I would be interested to note which definition of "al-Qaeda" the CIA is using here (it certainly isn't the International Front) when it claims that Mohammed didn't join the organization until the late 1990s despite his position as among the first of bin Laden's bodyguards circa 1991 and did not assume a position of administration within the group until well after 9/11.

The next section from p. 326 to 329 deals specifically with the meetings between the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda officials as far back as Sudan up into the late 1990s in Afghanistan and the caveats about taking the claims from governments and exile groups opposed to the Iraqi regime at face value are very much to be noted, a far cry from the whole "Chalabi suckered us all" canard that's been floating around the press. The training aspects of the report, beginning on p. 329, notes that there is indeed evidence that Iraq trained al-Qaeda fighters, and while the sources of the reporting concerning Iraq having provided assistance to Project al-Zabadi (al-Qaeda's WMD program) are indeed of varying credibility (of the 12, 2 reports were based on hearsay, 4 were merely accusations, and but the other 6 reports seem to have held up under scrutiny despite all the caveats), there are more than enough of them to have caused considerable worry within the intelligence community. They also blacked out the section that deals specifically with the al-Shifa plant in Sudan on p. 331.

On the issue of Salman Pak from p. 332-333, there appears to be a good deal of smoke there with respect to reports about al-Qaeda fighters being trained there alongside other Iraqi-sponsored terrorist groups since at least 1999, but the CIA censored the final analysis of what exactly was going on at Salman Pak.

The safe haven stuff from p. 334-338 is also quite juicy. A good chunk of it was censored, but it appears that Saddam Hussein issued a standing offer of safehaven for bin Laden in 1999, possibly in response to bin Laden's attempt to see how open the Iraqi government would to such an offer in the summer of 1998 in case he had to flee Afghanistan in the wake of the embassy bombings.

The Iraqi envoy in Afghanistan in 1999 was of course Farouk Hijazi and it seems that he was not authorized to discuss safe haven (which would tend to contradict some reports claiming that bin Laden turned down his offer of it) but instead turned the discussion back to areas of mutual cooperation. All of the stuff on Ansar al-Islam is censored, though the individual referenced on p. 336 who was identified by Ansar al-Islam detainees captured by the PUK as a Mukhabarat associate is none other than Abu Wael. It also appears, judging from the wording of the CIA report on p. 337, that the Mukhabarat could have sought to oppose the al-Qaeda presence in northern Iraq in some fashion but apparently chose not to.

A word on the issue of their being a formal agreement between the two parties, however. In Iran and Syria, for example, one can easily locate the offices of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, PFLP, PFLP-GC, and any number of other nasty organizations. These groups operate openly inside these states with both government sanction and funding, which was, clearly, not what al-Qaeda was doing inside Iraq by all accounts. However, if one considers this the standard by which state sponsorship or harboring of terrorists is to be judged by, I suspect that one will have an extremely difficult time of convincing anyone that Pakistan or Saudi Arabia were ever active in terrorist activities. And if you believe that, well, let's just say that I have a bridge to sell you ...

The information on Zarqawi's stay in Baghdad and medical treatment at the Olympic Hospital is almost completely censored, as is the size and composition of his entourage. The idea that Zarqawi expanded his organization inside Iraq between 2002 and 2003 almost certainly suggests the tacit acquiescence from the Iraqi security forces, whom as earlier reports have noted were quite ruthless in hunting down and eliminating Iraqi Wahhabis believed to constitute a threat to the regime. That last sentence on p. 337 is partially censored, but it's talking about the nature of the support Zarqawi and his entourage would have received from the Iraqi government during his stay in Baghdad, probably a reference to reports that Zarqawi received weaponry from the Mukhabarat during that period.

On the issue of the operational cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda that starts on p. 338, the CIA notes that it refrained from asserting such a link between the two entities not because they had anything substantively refuting such a link, but rather because of the nature of poor intelligence on the Iraqi regime. Iraq certainly did not possess command and control over al-Qaeda, which I very much doubt that anyone outside of perhaps Laurie Mylroie and her circle of followers seriously believes. I also very much doubt that one could ever demonstrate that the Taliban ever possessed command and control over al-Qaeda and they were almost certainly doing so.

However, one important element can be found in the middle of p. 339 that is well worth reading, which states that there are provocative elements in the 1993 WTC bombing, the 9/11 attacks, and the Foley assassination which appear to suggest Iraqi involvement in any one of them as well as evidence that runs counter to these beliefs.

This is an important thing to recognize, I would argue, because it means that people who hold to one position or another are not quite the kooks, obstructionists, political hacks, ect. that they've been painted as over the better part of the last several years. I'm not going to spend much time on all three of these because most of the alleged Iraqi connections and evidence against them in these particular because most of this has been known to the general public for some time now with the exception of the Foley assassination.

Unfortunately, the CIA chose to classify most of the commission's conclusions with respect to the nature of Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda are classified, leaving us pretty much in the same position that we were going into all of this, abeit with some new information. However, the report doesn't end there, as p. 350-356 deal with how the intelligence community's HUMINT assets were hampered as far as understanding the nature of Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda, forcing them to rely in many cases on detainee information and foreign government information for their HUMINT understanding of the relationship.

Oh yes, about all that pressure ...

It has likewise become something of a centerpiece of anti-war mythology that the CIA was deliberately pressured by the administration into manipulating intelligence data with respect to the nature of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. According to the findings in the report on p. 358, not only did no cooking the books occur but it was not once even attempted! The questioning of analysts on the Iraqi connection to al-Qaeda was, as the ombudsman investigation revealed, quite reasonable under the circumstances. In other words, nobody changed their analysis to conform to administration policy and nobody in the administration ever even sought for them to do so. Feith's office was likewise completely innocent on this count, according to p. 361-375, and apparently the intelligence folks who were present at the meeting in August 2002 in which they suggested additions to the draft of Iraqi Support for Terrorism all stated to the Committee that Feith's people all contributed to discussion, which is rather far cry from Josh Marshall's claim that what they said "didn't pass the laugh test" during his effort to shoot down the Feith memo when it got published in the Weekly Standard.

Unfortunately, the final conclusions of the committee on what the people in Feith's office added to the discussion have all be classified so we don't know anything more than this except to say that they weren't involved in politicizing intelligence or pressuring analysts.

Also, from p. 366-370, we learn that everything that Powell said at the UN Security Council with respect to Iraq and al-Qaeda was vetted through CIA and nothing he said differed very much from anything that the broader intelligence community was saying at around the same time.

No doubt apologies will be forthcoming from all those who have accused the administration and the people in Feith's office of engaging in any number of deplorable behaviors ...

The Additional Views

I'll be quite honest and say that most of these strike me as rather polemical in nature and seems more or less designed to set up the next phase of Washington politicking, with both Republican and Democratic senators making claims that, truth be told, are not supported or are in certain cases directly contradicted by the actual text of the document in question. I'll be quite honest and say that if one reads simply the additional views but not the body of the report that they're going to be left with an extremely skewed view as far as what the report actually says or the conclusions that were reached within it on a number of key points.

The bottom line

Everything Powell said at the UN regarding Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda (which is pretty much the same as what President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and others said going into the war) appears to have reflected the consensus of the broader intelligence community.

Joe Wilson's claims (along with, I suspect, his reputation within Democratic circles) have more or less gone down in flames, as have claims that intelligence analysts were pressured into making certain conclusions. The claim on p. 328 that "Wali Khan" (i.e. Wali Khan Amin Shah, one of Ramzi Yousef's two lieutenants in the proto-9/11 Oplan Bojinka plot) and Jamal al-Fadhl (whose name is blacked out in the last sentence in that paragraph) identified Abu Hajir al-Iraqi (aka Mamdouh Mahmoud Salim, a high-ranking al-Qaeda leader who was arrested in the wake of the 1998 embassy bombings and later stabbed a NYC prison guard with a comb in his left eye in an attempted prison break in 2000) as the chief liaison between Iraq and al-Qaeda is sure to keep Mylroie enthusiasts around for quite some time at any rate.

In general, this document is a lot better than that Staff Statement No. 15 that was churned out by the 9/11 commission. One other thing to be mentioned, incidentally, is that this report specifically undercuts some of the 9/11 Commission's key findings with respect to Iraq and al-Qaeda. It cites post-1999 contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda, which the 9/11 commission claims to possess no information on. Perhaps someone should hand the commission members a copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee report?

Also, this demolishes 2 of Richard Clarke's key claims with respect to Iraq: that there was no Iraqi involvement in terrorism post-1993, and that there is no evidence whatsoever of Iraqi support for al-Qaeda. Both of these claims, to put it quite simply, can now be shown to be factually untrue.

As I said, no doubt apologies will pending from all those concerned.
wonderwench is offline  
Old 07-12-2004, 12:58 PM   #2 (permalink)
Wah
 
Location: NZ
i tried to read this but my brain melted ... think i got the gist though ... i dunno who half the people in it are ... need to research ...

there's a British report on intelligence coming out in the next couple of days, I'll wait to comment until I've heard about that one ... it should deal with similar issues and I'll have more knowledge of context

so where were the WMDs? were the CIA just wrong? that's forgivable, it's a difficult job
__________________
pain is inevitable but misery is optional - stick a geranium in your hat and be happy
apeman is offline  
Old 07-13-2004, 01:12 PM   #3 (permalink)
Junkie
 
kutulu's Avatar
 
Quote:
Originally posted by apeman
were the CIA just wrong?
Also, were the CIA wrong because they were told to find evidence that supports a predetermined conclusion rather than just finding evidence?
kutulu is offline  
Old 07-13-2004, 01:16 PM   #4 (permalink)
Banned
 
cthulu23's Avatar
 
the entire question of whether or not the White House interfered with intelligence collection has been pushed back until after the election. Couldn't have anything to do with the Republican controlled committee, could it?

The CIA has definitely fallen on their sword for this one, but what about Rumsfeld and Cheney's own intelligence gathering apparatuses? Where did they fit in?
cthulu23 is offline  
Old 07-13-2004, 01:26 PM   #5 (permalink)
Junkie
 
kutulu's Avatar
 
Quote:
Originally posted by cthulu23
the entire question of whether or not the White House interfered with intelligence collection has been pushed back until after the election. Couldn't have anything to do with the Republican controlled committee, could it?
Isn't that convenient...
kutulu is offline  
Old 07-13-2004, 07:35 PM   #6 (permalink)
Dubya
 
Location: VA
"The culture of America is changing from one that has said 'If it feels good, do it, and if you've got a problem, blame somebody else' to a culture in which each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life."
-President Bush

Is it unreasonable to ask the President to apply these words to himself, instead of laying the blame at the CIA's doorfront?
__________________
"In Iraq, no doubt about it, it's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard. It's - and it's hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. But it's necessary work. We're making progress. It is hard work."
Sparhawk is offline  
Old 07-13-2004, 07:38 PM   #7 (permalink)
Banned
 
This report is from the high politicized Senate Foreign Intelligence Committee, which famously asked Bush and Cheney to testify. I doubt that the Bush Adminstration has such reach that they were able to convince the Democratic members to manufacture these findings.
wonderwench is offline  
Old 07-13-2004, 07:54 PM   #8 (permalink)
Muffled
 
Kadath's Avatar
 
Location: Camazotz
Information on the Select Committee on Intelligence:

Members (9 Republicans, 8 Democrats)

Conclusions excerpted from the full report

The full report is a 25 meg PDF -- kind of weighty.

Even the conclusions have a fair amount of classified material, but the upshot is that there was overreaction to "group think." To the left, this could easily indicate pressure by the administration to find a reason to go to war in Iraq.
__________________
it's quiet in here
Kadath is offline  
Old 07-13-2004, 07:58 PM   #9 (permalink)
Banned
 
The insinuation to which I was responding was the one that the CIA has fallen on its sword to take the blame and that somehow the Committee was pressured to not include that the CIA was pressured by Bush to falsify information. There is absolutely no evidence to support this suspicion.

Instead, what we see is that the intelligence was flawed - but it was believed by the prior administration and many other governments around the world.

The analysis I quoted in the original post, however, does not concern WMDs - the author concentrated on the terrorist elements of the report, which confirm that Saddam supported terrorism and had links to AQ.
wonderwench is offline  
Old 07-13-2004, 08:01 PM   #10 (permalink)
Banned
 
cthulu23's Avatar
 
Here's a different take on the report as found on Alternet. I'm only posting a portion as the original is very long:

Quote:
The CIA did it ... or was it Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the rope? On Friday the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee issued its 511 page report – an estimated 20% already censored out by the CIA (so assume this was the best news available) – and as all press reports in this country indicate, it savaged the Agency. Its essential implied conclusion was that the CIA more or less single-handedly led a misinformed Congress and a misadvised administration into war. ("The committee did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure [CIA] analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.") The committee Democrats signed off on this and then held edgy press conferences or like House minority leader Nancy Pelosi released statements indicating that it probably wasn't this way at all.

So, gee, like they used to say when I was a kid about those drawings that had five-legged cows floating through the clouds, what's wrong with this picture? To make sense of all this, it helps to compare the shameful CIA intelligence record on Saddam's Iraq to the various pretzled legal memos the Defense Department, the CIA, and others solicited from working groups of administration legal brains on the issue of torture and the president's power to create an offshore torture system. Like the CIA's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, with its even more doctored, unclassified public version (a White House construct which took much heat in the Committee report), these were essentially after-the-fact efforts to bolster decisions already taken or in the process of being taken by top administration officials who had, until then, largely consulted each other.

Remember, long before that NIE was produced, top administration figures were already out on the national and international hustings selling their wares and their prospective war with their own "intelligence" right at the tips of their tongues. As Dick Cheney, for instance, said in August 2002 speech to the VFW, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction"; while the President addressed the UN General Assembly thusly in September of that year, "Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons," and so on, ad nauseam. And keep in mind, they already had their own outfit, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans (OSP), set up in the Pentagon in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to create a perfect storm of intelligence exactly to the administration's liking.

In the case of our offshore mini-gulag of injustice, we know that essential decisions were taken quickly in late 2001 and early 2002 – including the creation of a new category of prisoners, "unlawful" or "illegal combatants" – by top Bush administration officials, including the President, without resort to any corps of lawyers. In the case of intelligence on Saddam's Iraq, we know from various kiss-and-tell memoirs that, within nanoseconds of the 9/11 attacks, the administration was readying itself for a long-desired invasion of Iraq. Though its urge to go to war had nothing to do with Saddam's actual danger to us, excuses were needed – wmd threatening the world, ties to al-Qaeda, and so on – and when that's what they wanted, as the legal memos on torture indicate, that's what they got. In fact, what they got was the Agency's already infamous "unfounded 'group think' assumptions." Whether the CIA's top officials leapt on board or were shoved on board by the neocons and the vice president, whether those vice presidential visits to Langley, Virginia did or did not push CIA analysts over the brink ("The committee found no evidence that the vice president's visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to pressure analysts...") – these aren't small points, but they're not the largest points either.

Really, if you think about it, our President made this clear in his response to the Senate report: He indicated that, report or not, he had no regrets about his war with Iraq: "Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons, I believe we were right to go into Iraq. America is safer today because we did. We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass destruction, and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take." With or without weapons. With or without those ties.

It was a point made no less strongly just after the war by Paul Wolfowitz in a Vanity Fair magazine interview, "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction [as justification for invading Iraq] because it was the one reason everyone could agree on." He meant, of course, the main reason everyone in the administration could agree on that would sell the war to Congress and the American public.

If you take a longer view, it's clear that the most essential aspects of the CIA's terrible intelligence, which supposedly bedazzled this administration and misled us into war, had long been in the hands of the Bush warriors. A quick peek, for instance, at the website of the neocon Project for a New American Century (PNAC) makes clear that Wolfowitz's "bureaucratic reason" was already well established when, in their out-of-power years, seventeen of them, most with remarkably familiar names (Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, R. James Woolsey), wrote Republican congressional leaders Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott an open letter in May 1998 forcefully suggesting what would come to be called "regime change" in Iraq: "We recommended," they said, referring to an earlier letter the group had sent President Clinton, "a substantial change in the direction of U.S. policy: Instead of further, futile efforts to 'contain' Saddam, we argued that the only way to protect the United States and its allies from the threat of weapons of mass destruction was to put in place policies that would lead to the removal of Saddam and his regime from power..." And they warned that, failing to do so, "The administration will have unnecessarily put at risk U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf, who will be vulnerable to attack by biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons under Saddam Hussein's control."

See rest of article
I don't normally quote straight from the blogosphere, but wonderwench started it
cthulu23 is offline  
Old 07-13-2004, 08:07 PM   #11 (permalink)
Banned
 
(I am so tempted to scream for Mom right now.)

I don't want to engage in dueling blogs, but your source is suspect in that it does not refute any of the findings in the report but just huffs the fog of conspiracy theories (citing PNAC etc.)

Considering the extremely partisan nature of the hearings, I find it inconceivable that the Dems just rolled over and fell in with the GOP to falsify the findings.
wonderwench is offline  
Old 07-13-2004, 08:24 PM   #12 (permalink)
Banned
 
cthulu23's Avatar
 
PNAC is relevant because it highlights the long-standing desire to invade Iraq well before 9-11 handed the opportunity to Bush and Co. Anyone puzzled as to why Iraq was mentioned in the direct aftermath of 9-11 should know this.

So is your source suspect because it only upholds the findings of the commision without questioning them? We could do this all day, but it wouldn't be fun for either of us.

The Dems probably never found the smoking gun, which may be directly related to the loyalty of the CIA to the executive. This is where "falling on their swords" becomes relevant.

Last edited by cthulu23; 07-13-2004 at 08:47 PM..
cthulu23 is offline  
Old 07-13-2004, 08:46 PM   #13 (permalink)
Banned
 
cthulu23's Avatar
 
Please erase.
cthulu23 is offline  
 

Tags
committee, intelligence, report, senate

Thread Tools

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Trackbacks are On
Pingbacks are On
Refbacks are On



All times are GMT -8. The time now is 04:41 AM.

Tilted Forum Project

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.
Search Engine Optimization by vBSEO 3.6.0 PL2
© 2002-2012 Tilted Forum Project

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360