Fred Kaplan:What Did Bush Know?And what did he think ?

[jbfam4]

What Did Bush Know?
And what did he think his intelligence agencies knew about Iraqi WMD?
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, July 14, 2004, at 2:46 PM PT

A one-page wonder

http://slate.msn.com/id/2103847/


The first question: The "President's Summary" was one page? This CIA estimate was a 93-page document, filled with caveats, qualifiers, and footnotes of interagency dissent on several key points. It would take a dedicated master of pith to whittle the NIE's findings and equivocations to a single page. (By the Times' account, the summarizer didn't bother with the equivocations.) Which leads to the second question: Who wrote this summary? And what position had he or she taken on the estimate's controversies?


This is why the Senate Intelligence Committee wants the summary released. It's the same reason the 9/11 commission wanted the White House to release the president's daily intelligence briefing of Aug. 6, 2001 (the one headlined, "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S."). They want to know what the president knew. Did he have reason to see Osama Bin Laden's attack coming—and, if so, should he have done something about it? Did he know about internal disputes over the evidence of Iraqi weapons programs—and, if so, should he have thought twice about going to war?

If all George W. Bush knew about the Iraqi threat was gleaned from a one-page summary that stated the case for WMD—and that did not even acknowledge the existence of a case for skepticism—that's important to know. It's important for citizens who want some insight on why we went to war. And it's important for the president, who may decide to read a longer document the next time there's trouble.

A similar story could be told about Iraqi's WMD—except for the ending. "Everybody" assumed Iraq possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons; some also believed Saddam Hussein was trying to rebuild his nuclear program. The CIA, which shared this assumption, kept coming up short on supporting evidence and even found some evidence to dispute it. Footnotes of dissent and ambiguity crept into the NIE. But this time, the president did not side with the dissenters. The question is: Did he know there were dissenters? And: Did he care?

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. What was clear to me,

and I am just a nobody guy, is that there were no WMD in Iraq prior to the war. My conclusion was based simply on the weight of the evidence provided by the media, Colin Powell, Rumsfeld and the others. It is absolutely absurd that they could be making some half assed case that the WH would have somehow been fooled by this same information. No sir, the WH has been in on this scam from the beginning and chimp had better pay.