NYT: Report Assails C.I.A. for Failure on Iraq Weapons

[DeepModem Mom]

Report Assails C.I.A. for Failure on Iraq Weapons
By DAVID E. SANGER and SCOTT SHANE

Published: March 29, 2005


WASHINGTON, March 28 - The final report of a presidential commission studying American intelligence failures regarding illicit weapons includes a searing critique of how the C.I.A. and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein's political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles, according to officials who have seen the report's executive summary.

The report also proposes broad changes in the sharing of information among intelligence agencies that go well beyond the legislation passed by Congress late last year creating a director of national intelligence to coordinate action among all 15 intelligence agencies....

***

The report particularly singles out the Central Intelligence Agency under its former director, George J. Tenet, but also includes what one senior official called "a hearty condemnation" of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, two of the largest intelligence agencies....

***

The report particularly ridicules the conclusion that Mr. Hussein's fleet of "unmanned aerial vehicles," which had very limited flying range, posed a major threat. All of those assertions were repeated by Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials in the prelude to the war. To this day, Mr. Cheney has never backed away from his claim, repeated last year, that the "mobile laboratories" were probably part of a secret biological weapons program, and his office has repeatedly declined to respond to inquiries about whether the evidence has changed his view....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/politics/29weapons.html?hp&ex=1112072400&en=c50323d01587d494&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[htuttle]

1. Sounds like it's time for another round of 'Medal of Freedom' recipients!

:woohoo:

I mean, that's what happens when you screw up in the Bush administration, right?

[creeksneakers2]

2. Not one thing in the Times article about

how we were promised the commission would investigate Bush's lies about the WMD. It looks like they never touched the subject. Nobody believed they were going to do anything in the first place. The Times says they only met 12 times.

[UpInArms]

3. nothing to see here - move along

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A39500-2003Aug9¬Found=true

excerpt:

The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied:

• Bush and others often alleged that President Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, but did not disclose that the known work of the scientists was largely benign. Iraq's three top gas centrifuge experts, for example, ran a copper factory, an operation to extract graphite from oil and a mechanical engineering design center at Rashidiya.

• The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 cited new construction at facilities once associated with Iraq's nuclear program, but analysts had no reliable information at the time about what was happening under the roofs. By February, a month before the war, U.S. government specialists on the ground in Iraq had seen for themselves that there were no forbidden activities at the sites.

• Gas centrifuge experts consulted by the U.S. government said repeatedly for more than a year that the aluminum tubes were not suitable or intended for uranium enrichment. By December 2002, the experts said new evidence had further undermined the government's assertion. The Bush administration portrayed the scientists as a minority and emphasized that the experts did not describe the centrifuge theory as impossible.

...more...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/02/03/nwmd103.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/02/03/ixnewstop.html

excerpt:

Sept 24, 2002: The Government's official dossier on the threat from Saddam's weapons - Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, The Assessment of the British Government - is published.

It states: "Intelligence shows that Saddam attaches great importance to the possession of chemical and biological weapons which he regards as being the basis for Iraqi regional power.

"He believes that respect for Iraq rests on its possession of these weapons and the missiles capable of delivering them.

<snip>

Feb 5: Colin Powell, US secretary of state, says in a presentation to the United Nations Security Council: "Iraq posseses a hidden factory equipped with thousands of centrifuges to make fissionable material for nuclear weapons."

In the same speech, during which he praises the British "dodgy dossier", he adds: "Iraq possesses at least seven mobile laboratories for producing biological warfare agents."

...more...

http://www.msnbc.com/news/973028.asp?cp1=1

excerpt:

MR. RUSSERT: If we go back and examine what administration officials had said prior to the war, Colin Powell said this back in February of 2001: ” has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction.”

And five days after September 11th, the vice president saying: “Saddam Hussein’s bottled up at this point.”

And now, front page of The Washington Post, “House Probers Conclude Iraq War Data Was Weak.”

This is Porter Goss, former CIA agent, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, a Republican, suggesting that perhaps because the CIA couldn’t determine that the weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed, that they therefore existed. Was the premise of the war based on faulty or hyped intelligence?

DR. RICE: The premise of the war was that Saddam Hussein was a threat, that he had used weapons of mass destruction, that he was continuing to try to get them and that was everyone’s premise, the United Nations intelligence services, other governments, that was the logic that led the Clinton administration to air strikes in 1998. And one would have had to believe that somehow, after Saddam Hussein made it impossible for the inspectors to do their work in 1998, that things got better, that he suddenly destroyed the weapons of mass destruction and then carried on this elaborate deception to keep the world from knowing that he destroyed the weapons of mass destruction. It’s just not logical.

...more...

[tuvor]

4. Bush ignored the evidence.

Take a trip down memory lane, before bush's war was declared...

Why the CIA thinks Bush is wrong
The president says the US has to act now against Iraq. The trouble is, his own security services don't agree.
13 October 2002
http://www.sundayherald.com/28384

CIA in blow to Bush attack plans
The letter also comes at a time when the CIA is competing with the more hawkish Pentagon, which is also supplying the White House with intelligence on the Iraqi threat.
October 10, 2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,808970,00.html

White House 'exaggerating Iraqi threat'
Bush's televised address attacked by US intelligence
October 9, 2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,807286,00.html

[Mountainman]

8. In this bizzaro world, those stories never happened.

If the press would tell the whole truth, with out such things as Faux news and it's propaganda, the people might know the facts. But the right has control of the message and so only folks like us who don't fall under the spell of the wingnut bullshit know and we are not enough to make a difference.

Our salvation lies in a press that is not controlled by the right.

[EFerrari]

5. Cool hit piece. Anyone buying it? n/t

[Moderator]

6. kick to combine

[emad]

7. Report cites flaws in CIA assessment of Saddam's threat

David E. Sanger and Scott Shane, New York Times
March 29, 2005 WMD0329



WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The final report of a presidential commission studying U.S. intelligence failures regarding illicit weapons includes a searing critique of how the CIA and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein's political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles, according to officials who have seen the report's executive summary.

The report also proposes broad changes in the sharing of information among intelligence agencies that go well beyond the legislation passed by Congress late last year creating a director of national intelligence to coordinate action among all 15 intelligence agencies. Those recommendations are likely to figure prominently in the confirmation hearings of John Negroponte, whom the president has nominated to be national intelligence director. Those hearings are scheduled to begin April 12. The report particularly singles out the CIA under its former director, George Tenet, but also includes what one senior official called "a hearty condemnation" of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, two of the largest intelligence agencies.

The unclassified version of the report, which is more than 400 pages long, devotes relatively little space to the holes in American intelligence about North Korea and Iran, the two countries now posing the largest nuclear challenge to the United States and its allies. Most of that discussion appears only in a much longer classified version. In the words of one administration official who has reviewed the classified version, "We don't give Kim Jong Il or the mullahs a window into what we know, and what we don't."

President Bush is expected to receive the report formally on Thursday morning, White House officials said.

http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/5317564.html

[UpInArms]

9. kick

:kick:

[gratuitous]

10. Gee, so all this time we were right?

You mean, just creaming information available on the internets in my spare time, I'm smarter than the entire $30+ billion apparatus of CIA?

I need a raise.