Report blames CIA for Iraq intelligence failure
 

Committee Chairman Pat Roberts told reporters that intelligence used to support the invasion of Iraq was based on assessments that were "unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence."



No ****.... If reasonable every day citizens came to the conclusion there were no WMDs months ago as many of us have then this statement is wonderful and makes the CIA, Bush's government, Blairs stance and even MI6 (whom I always had a higher regard for being "intelligent" than I ever did for the CIA, despite them building a £600 million eyesore on the Thames) a total laughing stock in the global community..



Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the leading Democrat on the 18-member panel said
"Our credibility is diminished. Our standing in the world has never been lower,". "We have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in the Muslim world, and that will grow. As a direct consequence, our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before."


Does Bin Laden need to strike again now or is that report a greater embarassment to the USA than failing to prevent another terrorist attack? It's a disgrace and saddening to former and retired intelligence people that such a stupid and flawed modern CIA could behave in this way on such a large scale event as an invasion that shouldn't have occured in the first place.


Truer words were never spoken and I'm quite surprised that Rockefeller was given so much room for speaking the truth today. No doubt Bush will bury his meathead in the sand on this one.



The top-ranking members of the Senate committee offered different interpretations on political pressures on the intelligence community.

"The committee found no evidence that the intelligence community's mischaracterization or exaggeration of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result of politics or pressure," Roberts said.


Hmmmmmmmm....... :rolleyes:

Interesting.

Clinton weighs in on bin Laden, war in Iraq
Friday, July 9, 2004 Posted: 3:16 PM EDT (1916 GMT)


WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former President Clinton sat down this week for a wide-ranging interview with Christiane Amanpour, CNN's chief international correspondent.

Amanpour asked Clinton about some of the decisions he took in the White House and what he would do differently if he were leading the country now. Throughout the conversation, Osama bin Laden was never far from the former U.S. president's mind.

AMANPOUR: I want to ask you about Osama bin Laden. You say in your book you made several efforts to kill him. In retrospect, do you believe though that you should have marshaled some kind of special mission, even though many of your senior military advisers opposed that at the time? Do you think you should have done it?

CLINTON: What I wish now is that I had had a more vigorous military debate. One of the discussions that I had with the 9/11 commission involved the question of the reorganization of the military in the 1980s under the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which has done a lot of good.

It has helped us to downsize the military. It's helped to rationalize military spending and spend more on the areas where we need it -- but essentially it made the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff much more powerful. It centralized authority there. ...

People began to second-guess the fact that I didn't send the Special Forces there, even though, concededly, nobody knew where bin Laden was. Nobody knew. We had a general idea.

After 9/11, I wished that I had had a military debate because basically the Pentagon and Gen. [Henry] Shelton [former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] were strongly opposed to it.

They thought the chances of those guys getting killed were high. And that's what they signed on to do -- to risk their lives -- but they didn't want to get killed with no reasonable prospect of accomplishing the missions. But I'm the commander in chief, or I was then, and they would have gone, had I ordered them to. I wish that I debated it more thoroughly.

The other issue I'm asked about is slightly different, and it's this -- after the USS Cole was bombed [in October 2000 in Yemen], do I wish I had ordered the Special Forces in, and the answer to that is, I would have done it in a heartbeat, with Special Forces and more, with or without international support, once I got the CIA and FBI finding that Osama bin Laden did it.

I just assumed he did from the day it happened, and everyone else did. But it wasn't until after I left office that the CIA made a finding. If they had given me a finding beforehand, I would have gone after him.

AMANPOUR: In one of your farewell interviews as president, you told an interviewer that one of your most difficult and challenging issues as president was Iraq. In retrospect, do you wish that you had mustered a large invasion force like President Bush? And if not, do you think the threat you faced from Iraq was any different than the one President Bush faced from Iraq?

CLINTON: The answer to the first question is no. I basically believe that the policy that I inherited, which was basically to keep Saddam Hussein in a box and under sanctions, unless and until he fully complied with the U.N. resolutions, was the right policy. It wasn't so great for the Iraqis, but he didn't present a substantial threat to anyone else.

AMAMPOUR: You intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo to stop genocide, and the war was also coupled with a very robust, postwar plan, with very heavy armored U.S. forces and a political plan.

Given the instability in Iraq, post the formal war there, what do you think could and should have been done differently to stabilize Iraq in much the same way Bosnia and Kosovo were after the war?

CLINTON: First of all, we had a very different situation because NATO wasn't with us in Iraq and the Russians didn't come into Iraq. Keep in mind, the Russians nominally opposed what we did in Bosnia and Kosovo, but they knew we were right, and they came in and helped us with postwar planning. ...

So we lost a lot of soldiers there after the mission was declared accomplished in Iraq, hundreds of them. And it made [former Army Chief of Staff] Gen. [Eric] Shinseki -- whose military career was cut short because he committed candor testifying before Congress that we needed more troops -- it made Gen. Shinseki look like a seer, like he knew what he was predicting, so you can say we needed more troops there.

But it was a constant to-and-fro because we had troops in other parts of the world. We already had 15,000 troops in Afghanistan, which is clearly not enough for us within any confidence to look like we're going to stabilize the whole country or find bin Laden or his top lieutenants. So we got 15,000 there, 140,000 or more in Iraq already.

I think the main thing is we should have moved more quickly to internationalize it. And we should have moved early on to let the United Nations have more say in the political decisions, opening the contracts up to people other than Americans and their allies and basically, say, "OK, Saddam's gone now. We need everybody's help to make it right."

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/...ton/index.html

I think the biggest thing we can deduce from this report is one of these two things:

1. This administration was given all of the intelligence and sources of the intel, went through the intel, then made a decision to use the intelligence...even though the intel came from very suspicious sources. This would explain why they would not disclose any of the sources of the intel to the Senate.

2. This administration was given all of the intelligence, but not the sources of the intel. In that event, they were obviously asleep at the wheel and didn't do their jobs to investigate the sources to an extent.

This is not all the doing of the CIA. That suggestion is utter ****. The WH knew the intel was bogus, but used it anyways in order to kick the shiite out of Iraq.

Who can say whether they knew it was 100% false. Certainly the prior administration and the current D nominee used it (TWICE) to kill innocent Iraqi's in the name of stopping SH :shrug:

I think it really does not matter to me whether W knew or did not know because that issue will never be provable. To me, the buck stops at W. he knew or should have taken the time to know. Instead, he rushed to war. At worst, he did it with premeditated malice (which I have a hard time believing - but I cannot disprove that theory) or at best, he made a mistake. Well, I do not want people who make such costly and deadly mistakes in the WH. - PERIOD. It could be argued that Kerry supported that mistake - so there is no difference in the two. But, Kerry clearly says he would have waited for the UN inspectors to conclude, W's timing was wrong, etc. So, although I think Kerry knew exactly that W would go to war ASAP when he voted to give W the authority to do so, I think the distiction is in Kerry's professed caution, which W did not have. So, I do not see how ANYONE can excuse W's actions no matter on what level his knowledge really was :shrug: Put it this way, would you keep an employee whose even honest mistake killed thousands of innocent people as well as about a thousand of your workers and injured countless others and also maligned the reputation of your company :shrug: I think any reasonable employer would fire that employee no matter the intentions (good or bad) of the employee.

P.S. Once again, Rove proves to be VERY smart. The vast majority of people will see W as the victim and Tenet as the bad guy. Sad and wrong, but true.

Joe Wilson. :)

I am waiting, I am waiting (oh yeah, oh yeah)
I am waiting, I am waiting (oh yeah, oh yeah)
Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere
Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere
You can't hold out, you can't hold out
Oh yeah, oh yeah
You can't hold out, you can't hold out
Oh yeah, oh yeah
Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere
Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere
See it come along and
don't know where it's from
Oh, yes you will find out
Well, it happens all the time
It's censored from our minds
You'll find out
Slow or fast, slow or fast
Oh yeah, oh yeah
End at last, end at last
Oh yeah, oh yeah
Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere
Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere
Stand up coming years
and escalation fears
Oh, yes we will find out
Well, like a withered stone
Fears will pierce your bones
You'll find out
Oh we're waiting, oh we're waiting
Oh yeah, oh yeah
Oh we're waiting, oh we're waiting
Oh yeah, oh yeah
Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere
Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere
Oh we're waiting, oh we're waiting
Oh we're waiting, oh were waiting...




If that wasn't so long, I'd make it my sig line. :laugh:

From www.nytimes.com

IMO a good article that proves once again that although SH was a bad and inpredictable person who refused to comply with the UN, he was not an immediate and direct threat to the US. According to W when he was first advocating this, SH must habe been an immeditate and direct threat to justify the invasion of Iraq. Now that we know that is not true, W does not apologize. Instead he essentially says "Oh what the hell, SH was a bad guy anyway so who cares." Again and sadly, most or at least a significant number of American voters this Fall will see only towel headed OBL clones as the ones affected by this mistake and they do not matter. Sad, but true.
_________________________________________________________________

July 11, 2004
Panel Describes Long Weakening of Hussein Army
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

WASHINGTON, July 10 — The Senate's report on prewar intelligence about Iraq, which asserts that warnings about its illicit weapons were largely unfounded and that its ties to Al Qaeda were tenuous, also undermines another justification for the war: that Saddam Hussein's military posed a grave threat to regional stability and American interests.

In a detailed discussion of Iraq's prewar military posture, the report cites a long series of intelligence reports in the decade before the war that described a formerly potent army's spiral of decay under the pressures of economic sanctions and American military pressure.

The main risks, these reports indicated, was the unpredictable nature of Mr. Hussein's government, especially in the face of possible American-led attacks. But the Senate Intelligence Committee called this analysis relatively weak.

The committee's report implies that opponents of the war were essentially correct when they argued that Iraq posed little immediate threat to the United States. Before the war, those who held this view, both in Congress and at the United Nations, argued that continued containment was a course preferable to invading Iraq.

Although the report described a profound breakdown in the American intelligence system, both White House and Congressional officials say the political calendar will prevent any serious action until after the November elections. [Page 10.]

In discussing the committee's report, the Bush administration has emphasized that the war was worthwhile because it removed a threatening dictator from power. "He was a dangerous man," President Bush said Friday. "The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. America is safer."

In the debate before the war, administration officials sometimes made the same argument, but not with the prominence that they gave to threats from chemical weapons or terrorism. They sometimes mentioned risks that Iraq would use Scuds or other shorter-range conventional missiles, or its air-defense attacks on American air patrols over the no-flight zones in the north and south of the country. They also spoke of continuing military dangers to Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

In a speech in January 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld interspersed claims about chemical and biological weapons and terrorism with conventional military threats to argue that "Iraq poses a threat to the security of our people and to the stability of the world."

"Iraq has invaded two of its neighbors, and has launched ballistic missiles at four of its neighbors," he said, adding that it "is the only country in the world that fires missiles and artillery at U.S. and coalition aircraft on an almost daily basis."

The intelligence agencies should have offered Congress and other policymakers a comprehensive, unified view of these risks before the war, the Senate Intelligence Committee said, but they never did so.

After reviewing about 400 analytical documents written by the intelligence agencies from 1991, after the first gulf war, to 2003, when the Hussein rule was toppled, the committee unanimously concluded that "the body of assessments showed that Iraqi military capabilities had steadily degraded following defeat in the first gulf war in 1991. Analysts also believed those capabilities would continue to erode as long as economic sanctions remained in place."

The intelligence agencies, though, were much less certain about Mr. Hussein's intentions, the committee said.

"The assessments came to the same general conclusions that Saddam Hussein: was unpredictable and aggressive; retained the capability to strike militarily in the region; and, would probably not choose to use force against neighbors as long as U.S. and Coalition forces were in the region."

"Clearly, the issue of Saddam's intentions to use force against his neighbors and U.S. and Coalition forces was a high-interest matter," the report said, "and, unfortunately, the main area where the intelligence community was least confident in its analysis."

It criticized the agencies for failing "to clearly characterize changes in Iraq's threat to regional stability and security, taking account of the fact that its conventional military forces steadily degraded after 1990."

In September 1991, a report on Mr. Hussein's "prospects for survival over the next year" found that Iraq would have "only limited capabilities to endanger U.S. interests."

By 1993, an intelligence assessment said Mr. Hussein's basic goals were to maintain power "by any means," to regain internal control, to rebuild the military, including illicit weapons, and to make Iraq "the dominant regional power." But the agencies warned that they were "hindered by the dearth of solid information."

An assessment in early 1995 called Iraq "an immediate source of concern and a long-term threat to U.S. strategic interests in the Persian Gulf," but the State Department's view in the document called it "impossible to predict with confidence whether Saddam will choose confrontation or opt for a period of quiescence and cooperation." The military's view in the document was that Iraq had "at least some chance" of striking quickly into Saudi oil fields.

Other reports that year warned of Mr. Hussein's "unpredictability and proclivity for dramatic and rash behavior" but said only "marginal" rebuilding of the military had occurred. Without a "large, standing coalition military presence" in the region, one said, there could be "no guarantee" of deterring him.

From about 1999 on, though, assessments "noted that the condition of all Iraqi military branches was poor," the Senate committee found.

In 2002, a report judged "that Iraqi military morale and battlefield cohesion are more fragile today than in 1991."

By January 2003, an assessment found that "Saddam probably will not initiate hostilities for fear of providing Washington with justification to invade Iraq. Nevertheless, he might deal the first blow, especially if he perceives that an attack intended to end his regime is imminent."

By March 17, 2003, before the American attack commenced, President Bush promised that the time of such risks was about to end. "In a free Iraq there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors," he said. "The tyrant will soon be gone."

Also from www.nytimes.com and this one is harsher than the previous one.
___________________________________________________________

July 10, 2004
The Senate Report

In a season when candor and leadership are in short supply, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the prewar assessment of Iraqi weapons is a welcome demonstration of both. It is also disturbing, and not just because of what it says about the atrocious state of American intelligence. The report is a condemnation of how this administration has squandered the public trust it may sorely need for a real threat to national security.

The report was heavily censored by the administration and is too narrowly focused on the bungling of just the Central Intelligence Agency. But what comes through is thoroughly damning. Put simply, the Bush administration's intelligence analysts cooked the books to give Congress and the public the impression that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear arms, that he was plotting to give such weapons to terrorists, and that he was an imminent threat.

These assertions formed the basis of Mr. Bush's justifications for war. But the report said that they were wrong and were not a true picture of the intelligence, and that the intelligence itself was not worth much. The freshest information from human sources was more than four years old. The committee said the analysts who had produced that false apocalyptic vision had fallen into a "collective groupthink" in which evidence was hammered into a preconceived pattern. Their bosses did not intervene.

The report reaffirmed a finding by another panel investigating intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks in saying that there was no "established formal relationship" between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. It also said there was no evidence that Iraq had been complicit in any attack by Osama bin Laden, or that Saddam Hussein had ever tried to use Al Qaeda for an attack. Although the report said the C.I.A.'s conclusions had been "widely disseminated" in the government, Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have repeatedly talked of an Iraq-Qaeda link.

Sadly, the investigation stopped without assessing how President Bush had used the incompetent intelligence reports to justify war. It left open the question of whether the analysts thought they were doing what Mr. Bush wanted. While the panel said it had found no analyst who reported being pressured to change a finding, its vice chairman, Senator John Rockefeller IV, said there had been an "environment of intense pressure." But the issue was glossed over so the report could be adopted unanimously.

The panel's investigation into how President Bush handled the intelligence has been postponed until after the election. But the bottom line already seems pretty clear. No one had to pressure analysts to change their findings because the findings were determined before the work started.

By late 2002, you'd have had to have been vacationing on Mars not to know what answer Mr. Bush wanted. The planning for war had begun. The C.I.A. was under enormous pressure over getting it wrong before 9/11. And the hawkish defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to set up his own intelligence agency to get the goods on Iraq that the wishy-washy C.I.A. couldn't seem to deliver.

Both political parties see all this as an election issue, and the international community will see the committee report as another reason to decry Mr. Bush's go-it-alone foreign policy. But the report also speaks to a critical long-term security threat. We cannot afford to have the public become too cynical about the government's assessment of danger.

There may well come a time when Mr. Bush, or another president, will have to ask the nation and its allies to back a pre-emptive military strike against terrorists, or a country that poses a real threat. And he's probably going to have to rely on intelligence that is hardly the "slam dunk" that George Tenet reportedly called these shoddy reports on Iraq. The public will have to believe that the president is acting against a real threat, not one manufactured to justify a political agenda.

This administration has not made it easier for people to have that confidence. Its continuing insistence on linking Iraq and Al Qaeda is not aimed at helping the public understand the situation in the Middle East, but at providing political cover for an increasingly unpopular invasion.

Then there are the news conferences that administration officials hold periodically to warn us that we're about to be attacked. Everyone is aware of the danger out there, but there is no reason to go on television and repeat vague warnings that seem to be intended to frighten everyone, but are more likely to lull people into complacency by their familiarity and repetition. When Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland defense, holds a news conference to warn the nation of dire peril and it winds up as fodder for comedy shows, there's something very wrong somewhere./>

The Senate Intelligence Committee's report ought to be the first move back from the brink of destructive public cynicism. The next must come from the president, who could help restore confidence in the government's risk assessment by simply being frank about the errors his administration made and the lessons it learned. That would do more to prepare the country for the next crisis than a full season of scary press conferences by Mr. Ridge.

W's response

Notice he repeats that SH was a bad guy and threat to the world order, etc. That is true and it really is all he can say - Notice he does not address in any way the exigent nature of the threat when a year or so ago, he could not shout the exigent nature of the threat loud or often enough. What a jerk. I would actually have respect for him if he said, the hell with the other people who saw it, I saw the intelligence, I knew it was shaky, but I thought given 9/11, I could not take the chance it was right AND SH sure as hell did not lift a finger to disprove it. So, it was wrong, I am sorry about that but I would do it again. Instead, he refuses to acknowledge any error and instead spins it.
______________________________________________________

Bush defends stance on WMDs
Report slams CIA for Iraq intelligence failures
Saturday, July 10, 2004 Posted: 9:19 AM EDT (1319 GMT)


WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush has defended his decision to go to war following the release of a report criticizing the intelligence used to justify invading Iraq.

A U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report released on Friday blasted the CIA's prewar estimates of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as overstated and unsupported. (Full story)

Bush said the United States was "right to go into Iraq. America is safer today because we did," he told a cheering crowd of supporters in Pennsylvania.

"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."

The report by the Senate panel faulted intelligence analysts for having a "collective presumption" that Iraq already had weapons of mass destruction.

That presumption, the report said, clouded analysts' interpretation of data.

"The committee found no evidence that the intelligence community's mischaracterization or exaggeration of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result of political pressure," Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts said.

The 18-member panel approved the 500-plus-page report unanimously.

He said Bush and Congress sent the country to war based on "flawed" information "provided by the intelligence community."

Vice chairman Sen. John Rockefeller said the Senate "would not have authorized that war with 75 votes if we knew what we know now."

But Bush told the Republican rally that he was not alone in perceiving Iraq as a threat.

"My administration looked at the intelligence, and we saw a threat. Members of Congress looked at the intelligence, and they saw a threat.

The United Nations Security Council looked at the intelligence, and it saw a threat. The previous administration and Congress looked at the intelligence -- and made regime change in Iraq the policy of our country," the president said.

When Saddam Hussein refused to heed U.N. resolutions, the United States had no choice but to make good on its promise of action, Bush said.

Bush: I will defend America
"We had a choice to make: Either take the word of a madman, or take action to defend America. Faced with that choice, I will defend America every time."

"Because we acted, its dictator is now in a prison cell, and will receive the justice he denied so many for so long," Bush added.

Although he approved the report, Rockefeller said it "fails to fully explain" the pressures on the intelligence community "when the most senior officials in the Bush administration had already forcefully and repeatedly stated their conclusions publicly."

"It was clear to all of us in this room who were watching that -- and to any others -- that they had made up their mind that they were going to go to war," he said.

Critics of the war had been concerned about visits to the CIA by Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials, but the report says it found no evidence that "policymakers" asked inappropriate questions of the analysts or tried to pressure them into changing their views.

Conservatives on the panel successfully blocked Democratic efforts to finish the second part of the report -- how the administration used the information from the intelligence community -- until after the November elections.

At times, the Senate report appears to contradict other reports, stating flatly that the intelligence analysts were "accurate and not affected by a lack of relevant source or operational detail" in making a connection between Iraq and terrorism.

It did, however, say that contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in the 1990s "did not add up to an established formal relationship."

The report also criticizes both the CIA and the Defense Human Intelligence Service's handling of an informer code-named "Curveball," noting that the DHIS "demonstrated serious lapses in handling such an important source."

Report says analysts exaggerated
Over and over, the report noted that the analysts exaggerated what they knew and left out, glossed over or simply dismissed dissenting views.

Regarding Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5, 2003, speech to the United Nations -- in which he presented the U.S. case for war -- the report said that "much of the information" included in the speech from the CIA "was overstated, misleading or incorrect."

Adding to the problems, the report said, was further analysis based on the initial flawed analysis, creating what it called "a layering effect" and what Roberts called "the intelligence assumption train."

The report does not, however, speculate about why the intelligence community might have chosen to ignore reports that, for example, Iraq's military capability had "steadily degraded after 1990" or that Iraq had not reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.

CNN's David Ensor contributed to this report.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/...nce/index.html