Boot, Kondracke falsely suggested Bush administration has been cleared of manipulating Iraq intelligence
In his November 2 column, Los Angeles Times columnist Max Boot falsely claimed that the Robb-Silberman report and the Senate Intelligence Committee's Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq "euthanized" claims that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence in the buildup to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Similarly, on the November 1 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, Roll Call executive editor Morton M. Kondracke misleadingly claimed that there is no available evidence indicating that the administration "trumped the evidence up." In fact, neither the Robb-Silberman commission nor the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the Bush administration's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence. Indeed, Democrats say that it's the Senate Intelligence Committee's failure to investigate the issue of whether the administration "trumped the evidence up" that prompted their decision to force the Senate into closed session on November 1. If there is little evidence that the administration trumped up its case for war, that may be because it didn't; or it may be because no formal investigation that might uncover such evidence has been done.
Senate Democrats held a closed-door November 1 session to discuss intelligence issues and demand that the Intelligence Committee, chaired by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), follow through on "phase two" of its inquiry into prewar intelligence -- an examination of the administration's use of the intelligence.
In his Times column, Boot attacked former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was sent to Niger by the CIA in 2002 to investigate a reported sale of yellowcake uranium to Iraq. Wilson found no evidence of such a transaction and reported his findings to the CIA. After President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, in which he referenced alleged efforts by Iraq to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger as justification for the impending invasion of Iraq, Wilson publicly announced his findings in a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed. Eight days later, syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, citing "[t]wo senior administration officials," identified Wilson's wife, undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame, in his column as "an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." The alleged leaking of Plame's identity is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation by special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Media Matters for America's coverage of the Plame controversy can be viewed here.
After falsely claiming that the Senate Intelligence Committee's 2004 report "was not kind" to Wilson's findings, Boot went on to write:
This is not an isolated example. Pretty much all of the claims that the administration doctored evidence about Iraq have been euthanized, not only by the Senate committee but also by the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission. The latest proof that intelligence was not "politicized" comes from an unlikely source -- Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, who has been denouncing the hawkish "cabal" supposedly leading us toward "disaster." Yet, in between bouts of trashing the administration, Wilkerson said on Oct. 19 that "the consensus of the intelligence community was overwhelming" that Hussein was building illicit weapons.
On Special Report, Kondracke was asked by host Brit Hume, "was the intelligence community, at the end of the day, as a community, in support of what the administration was claiming or not?" Kondracke responded:
KONDRACKE: Yes. Yes. Yes. Fundamentally, they were. I mean, you don't see -- except on this whole issue about what Joe Wilson found and didn't find, because obviously there were people in both the State Department and the CIA who bitterly opposed what the Bush administration is doing. But there is no proof that the administration -- now, and the Democrats would like to find it -- that somehow they trumped the evidence up. There's no evidence of that.
As Media Matters for America noted, the Robb-Silberman commission -- led by Charles S. Robb, former Virginia governor and U.S. senator, and Laurence R. Silberman, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit -- was charged with "reviewing the intelligence capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community ... with respect to threats such as those posed to the United States by Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)." The commission did not examine how the intelligence was handled by the administration, as Silberman made clear in a March 31 press conference: "We did not -- our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry." Similarly, the Senate Intelligence Committee decided that the first phase of its inquiry would not include analysis of the Bush administrations use or misuse of the intelligence. It is the completion of "phase two" -- which was to include an investigation and analysis of the administration's handling of pre-war intelligence -- that the Democrats are demanding.
"Yet, in between bouts of trashing the administration, Wilkerson said on Oct. 19 that "the consensus of the intelligence community was overwhelming" that Hussein was building illicit weapons." If it was so "overwhelming", then how could we have been so wrong? Probably because hard evidence that it was "overwhelming" really didn't exist. I also wonder how the "consensus of the intelligence community" on this matter was determined.
[i]If it was so "overwhelming", then how could we have been so wrong? Probably because hard evidence that it was "overwhelming" really didn't exist. I also wonder how the "consensus of the intelligence community" on this matter was determined.[/i]
Typically, it's determined by the creation of a National Intelligence Estimate on the subject, a summary of the consensus views of the various branches of the intelligence community. Usually, an NIE is done as a precursor to policy decisions with regard to another country or region. In the case of Iraq, however, the administration decided upon a war policy without ever preparing one. The Iraq NIE that was eventually created in October 2002 came about only because congress demanded it. It was a sloppy piece of work, thrown together in only three weeks. Its conclusions largely supported the administration's case for war but last year's much-cited (but little read) report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence eviscerated those findings as unsupportable given the available evidence at the time.
When faced with the charges of manipulating the intelligence, the administration has tried to hide behind this NIE, just as it tried to hide behind George Tenet's much-repeated "slamdunk" line. The NIE, however, was only prepared in October 2002--8 months after the administration had already made the decision to start a war (Tenet's comment came even later, in Dec. 2002).
Further, the NIE is NOT the real consensus view on Iraq. That fact resides between every line of that committee report, and, even then, the Republicans on the committee refused to acknowledge it. Rather than a genuine assessment of Iraq, the NIE is the end-product of months of relentless pressure placed upon the intelligence community by the war-hakws to make their product conform to the outlandish public comments of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and co. This pressure, denied by the Republican senators, was documented, in real time, by hundreds of press reports from dozens of press agencies. The Iraq NIE is the intelligence communities' attempt to tell the story the administration wanted told, rather than an honest assessment.
classicliberal:
Let's face it, intelligence information is hardly EVER a "sure thing". Always, there is some doubt about sources, contrary reports that would tend to cast doubt, and a TIME element that tells us what was surely true YESTERDAY may no longer be true.
The critical ANALYSIS of this mountain of information, almost NONE of which is a sure thing, falls to our elected leadership. THEY take on the serious and meticulous task of sorting through all this information, and forming their "VERY BEST GUESS" on what is TRUE.
Once a TRUE thing is decided on, it is never forgotten that it is at best a good guess. It's a GAMBLE.
(Side note: When Saddam invaded Kuwait, THAT was a "sure thing" ... you know them when you see them.)
Armed with this information, then POLICY is considered. Should something be DONE about a "believed" situation? If so, WHAT? Diplomacy, further investigation, involving allies, "surgical" strikes, black ops, all can be considered, and a myriad of other possible alternatives.
WAR is the absolute LAST resort, because of the enormous expense in life and money, and the tremendous destruction involved. For WAR, the level of certainty MUST be the highest.
To use a Poker analogy, you go for diplomacy if you have the certainty of a single pair. For a black op, your certainty level on the "gamble" should be like a straight. For WAR, you better be holding the Royal Flush of certainty.
Bush told us he had the Royal Flush. REALITY called his hand, and he didn't even hold a single pair. In poker, this is called "bluffing". In Leadership, it's called catastrophic incompetence.
I think everyone is seeming to forget that PRESIDENT CLINTON believed the same intelligence when he bombed Iraq:
PRESIDENT CLINTON, Dec. 16, 1998: "Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors ... Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons ... And mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them. " [link to www.cnn.com]
It's a biiig stretch to say Bush "lied" or something similar ("manipulated intelligence") without saying the same of Clinton.
C'mon left 045, don't you know by know that Clinton destroyed not only his Chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and programs, Clinton also destroyed his even remotest desires to build them in the future. When Clinton was done with Saddam, he was no longer an evil man, helping terrorists and killing his own people, but his life's desire had become to win the nobel prize for nice guy. Bush, of course, knew that and lied because that's just what Republicans do, don't ya know.
The difference is that Clinton, in response to the Iraq resolution, ordered the bombing of Saddam's last known WMD facilities and did just that. Bombed them, destroyed them, and rendered Saddam a toothless threat to the world. But then like magic, even after Powell and Rice BOTH proclaimed Saddam incapable of waging a conventional or biochemical or nuclear war against his people or his neighbors in Feb. and July 2001 respectively, he was the Boogie Man of the Middle East. Biggest difference, of course, is that once again Clinton's potential exaggerations didn't cost THOUSANDS of American lives or BILLIONS of American dollars.
It wasn't the same intelligence. Your quote was from four years previous. Nice try.
left045 - Thursday November 3, 2005 01:47:36 PM EST
No it isnt first of all I have shown many times on this site at least one absolute LIE by Bush on WMDs (when he pulled an IAEA report that didnt exist directly out of his ass) and several distortions, the aluminum tubes, the drones that WERENT for spreading WMDs, and the mobile bioweapons trucks that werent in each case ALL of the experts disagreed with what Bush was shovelling as for your quote I notice the timeframe was 1998. What had changed was the inspectors were IN Iraq and giving us new intelligence which had MANY people doubting the old claims of WMDs.
It's a biiig stretch to say Bush "lied" or something similar ("manipulated intelligence") without saying the same of Clinton.
What you've offered is a fairly standard Bush apologist tactic aimed at taking the crowd's eyes off the ball. Clinton isn't President now, and isn't the issue. He didn't drag the country into an invasion; Bush did. Bush did NOT say "Iraq has WMDs, therefore we must invade." He made very specific charges in this area: aluminum tubes, Niger uranium, IAEA reports, sattelite photos of former weapons facilities, mobile bio-weapons labs, an alliance with al Qaida (probably the biggest lie of all), etc. These items, he said, added up to a case that Iraq is an imminent and growing threat and must be taken out. That's the Bush case for war, and not some generalized claim that Iraq had WMDs.
And, of course, we know that all of those items (and countless others) were b***s**t, and Bush and his thugs were, in most cases, fully aware of this, or, in some cases, would have been aware of it had they taken three minutes to look into the matter.
One example will suffice to put the words of these clowns in perspective. Anyone remember those pesky aluminum tubes? The administration became very fond of telling us these were intended for use in a gas centrifuge program--it was one of a handful of data points they placed at the center of their argument for war.
The facts?
1) Aluminum hadn't been used in centrifuges in that manner since the 1950s, due to their inefficiency, and both of the earlier known Iraqi designs were far more advanced.
2) The tubes featured an anodized coating. The administration argued that the presence of this coating was evidence that they were intended for centrifuge work. In fact, the coating rendered them useless for centrifuge work--it would have to be completely removed before they could have been put to such use. On the other hand, it would be an ideal feature if the tubes were intended for use as rockets, which brings me to
3) "Iraq was manufacturing copies of the Italian-made Medusa 81 [rocket]. Not only the Medusa's alloy, but also its dimensions, to the fraction of a millimeter, matched the disputed aluminum tubes." (Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2003) This machining, likewise, rendered them useless for centrifuge work--they'd have to be completely re-milled from scratch for such use.
4) "Experts from U.S. national labs, working temporarily with U.N. inspectors in Iraq, observed production lines for the rockets at the Nasser factory north of Baghdad. Iraq had run out of body casings at about the time it ordered the aluminum tubes, according to officials familiar with the experts' reports. Thousands of warheads, motors and fins were crated at the assembly lines, awaiting the arrival of tubes." (Ibid.)
5) The punchline: Every expert on the subject, both within and outside the administration, told Bush and his thugs all of this. The administration consistently tried to portray those who disagreed with their assertions as a minority of professionals, and publicly repeated their own tale over and over again. The truth?
"...the government's centrifuge scientists--at the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and its sister institutions--unanimously regarded this possibility [that they could be intended for use in centrifuge work] as implausible.
"In late 2001, experts at Oak Ridge asked an alumnus, Houston G. Wood III, to review the controversy. Wood, founder of the Oak Ridge centrifuge physics department, is widely acknowledged to be among the most eminent living experts.
"Speaking publicly for the first time, Wood said in an interview that 'it would have been extremely difficult to make these tubes into centrifuges. It stretches the imagination to come up with a way. I do not know any real centrifuge experts that feel differently.'" (Ibid.)
Peter D. Zimmerman, former chief scientist at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency:
"In this case, the experts were at Z Division at Livermore [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] and in DOE intelligence here in town, and they were convinced that no way in hell were these likely to be centrifuge tubes." (Quoted in Ibid.)
A report issued in Sept. 2002 by the Institute for Science and International Security, whose director had worked on Iraqi disarmament at the IAEA in the 1990s, underscored the same conclusion. (Washington Post, Sept. 19, 2002). A little later, the experts at IAEA, charged with monitoring disarmament of Iraq's nuke program, reached exactly the same conclusion about the tubes. "While it would be possible to modify such tubes for the manufacture of centrifuges, they are not directly suitable for it." The words of IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei, who, in an interview, told the Associated Press that any such modification process would be, in the words of the AP, "expensive, time-consuming and detectable." (Associated Press, January 30, 2003)
This was the story Bush and his gang were being told behind the scenes.
That was not, however, what they were telling the public.
Instead, we got things like this:
On Sept. 12, in his performance before the UN General Assembly, Bush asserted that the tubes were to be "used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." In Sept. 2002, Condoleeza Rice appeared on CNN's "Late Edition" to tell the world "We do know that there have been shipments going into of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to--high-quality aluminum tubes that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." Bush's State of the Union address: "Our intelligence sources tell us that he [Saddam Hussein] has attempted to purchase high strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
And the truth shall set you free.
Another pesky talking-point removed from the air in a Miyagi-esque chopstick gesture by the tireless research of MMFA.
Awesome.
Mort is so loved by his friends at Fox because, as MMFA has shown, he's such a wizard when it comes to turning un-asked questions into exoneration.
Employing this alchemy, Mort could righteously argue that after 5 years, Congress has found Duhhbya guilty of not one impeachable offense.
In all the discussions about WMD on FNC here is few phrases never to be uttered on FOX:
A.) Hans Blix was right!! B.) Scott Ritter was correct! C.) Mohamed Al Bariday was also right!
How come these 3 have disappeared from the discussion? If memory serves me correct FOX spent the fall and winter of 2002-3 savaging these people on a daily basis. Am I correct?
I know who 1 and 2 are. 3 I am unfamiliar with. But 2 out of 3 ain't bad. And no, I'm not a Meatloaf fan.
"But 2 out of 3 ain't bad. And no, I'm not a Meatloaf fan."
You took the words right out of my mouth!
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
fantagor - Thursday November 3, 2005 03:11:20 PM EST
I think he meant El Baradei Inspector General of the IAEA
I read the Max Boot column, and it took me 4 tries to get through it. I kept having to put it down because I was so disgusted with his distortions.
He has definitely been trained in the Bush Administration School of Deception. He is quite good, as the Bush Administration has shown they are, in not exactly lying, but certainly not telling the truth either.
It has upset me for over 2 years when Liberals have claimed that Bush lied, and tried to use that as an attack. It is true that in a couple of ways, Bush and his administration lied about the reasons for invading Iraq. But it is a much more accurate accusation to say that they misled us and failed to inform us of the caveats and questions that they had about their intelligence. Too many times GWB or his representatives gave us information without the qualifiers. They acted sure, and misled the American public, and for that they should have paid a high price long ago.
The allegation that Bush lied is true, but it is much more effective to stress the deceptive way that they presented the evidence that they did give us. They did manipulate the evidence, and there is no way that the Bush administration has been cleared of these charges.
The best these pundits can do is smear Wilson and then claim "the Democrats said Saddam was a threat, TOO".
Boot, Kondracke and the rest of the right wing may very well believe the Bush administration is "cleared of manipulating intelligence". The poll numbers suggest voters feel differently.
Enough information has been generated to raise sufficient doubts in even the most ardent Bush supporter's mind, even as they try to defend the various reasons for the war.
But Clinton and his advisors don't come out unscathed in all of this, either. Ritter pretty much spells out in his latest book that his efforts were stifled or interrupted during that administration as well.
There is enough doubt to warrant an investigation as to why we got it as wrong as we did. It is pathetic that oversight of our national security has become a partisan ping pong ball in the interest of protecting either political party.
The Democrats have finally shown some spine this week. Better late than never. But the Republicans have had control over the House and the Senate. The Senate has done little and the House still refuses to do anything.
starwheel:
I'm trying to imagine how I would have felt if, during the Rightwing's most ardent attempt to get rid of Clinton, impeachment, Clinton's popularity hadn't been up around 70%.
It would have felt dreadful if Clinton's numbers had been down around 50-50, or worse yet, in the 40's.
Bush is now at 35% job approval, with his PERSONAL rating EVEN LOWER. How terrible it must feel to be a GOPer long about now.
It has been clear Bush administration has been manipulating Iraq inteligence. Must be what was ment can't belive anyone would intentionaly be full of .... about beeing full of ....
If the news media supporting the Bush policies are taking their strategies from the White House and Rove, then they might want to consider other strategies because the ones they are using are not working too well.
Bush Poll Numbers
The funny part of the recent polls is that the Republican presidental candidate-in-waiting Cheney has a 19% approval rating, which is still falling.
How I hope the Republicans put up Cheney for President.
by sluggo - Friday November 4, 2005 02:35:50 PM EST -----------------------
Some interesting notes on those poll numbers. If you go to the survey sample, you will see that only 27% of respondents considered themselves Republican vs 31% that considered themselves Democrat. Also 52% said they leaned Democrat vs 41% that leaned Republican. Unless the numbers for the parties have changed drastically, in which case the Dems should sweep everything for the forseeable future, then I doubt whether this poll is a true reflection of the breakdown of the population. With a margin of error of 3%, I would suggest adding 3% to that approval rating. It's still bad, I agree.
Also, interesting to note that in the spectrum of liberal-moderate-conservative, while the moderate view naturally had the highest percentage, the conservative view beat the liberal view by 9 points. Thats remarkable when looking at the Democrat-Republican breakdown of the survey. There are apparently a lot of conservative Democrats out there. It also shows (to me at least) that a large reason that this administration is getting clobbered in the polls is that they are NOT governing in a conservative fashion. IMHO.