Cooking the Books and Politicizing Intelligence

I have to second the comments of work-at-home mom, ckennedy. I also have no experience in foreign policy or intelligence gathering, yet I also knew the books were being cooked? How? First, it was obvious that the administration was intent on going to war no matter what Saddam did. Second, while Judith Miller in the NY Times was reporting the administration’s lies, Knight-Ridder was reporting the stories of analysts who were being pressured into pre-determined conclusions. The stories were there if you looked hard enough.

Conspiracy to aid and abet those who committed treason should take care of Cheney, Bush, and crew.

tricky dicky II(cheney),is likely the central figure in this leak. if everything is true (which is likely the case), he gave marching orders to the hatchet men, libby-the aggressive driving force- and rove & co.
they betrayed the greatest democracy on earth. i agree with easyrider.

For Cheney and Rove, EVERYTHING is politics. Going into war for them looked like a standard political problem of manipulating the facts to “put the best face on” the case for war. Same with global warming. Same with economic policy. Same with educational policy, Same with energy policy. same with health care and health issues (see Plan B). Science and intelligence only plays a role when it reinforces the ideology and the desired end. Science and intel are ignored when they advance facts that conflict with the desired end. It’s ALL politics. It’s ALL campaigning. It’s, afterall, what Rove is good at.

Just want to get your take on this. It is from Factcheck.org. Here’s the link. They are non-partisan.

http://www.factcheck.org/article222.html

Bush’s “16 Words” on Iraq & Uranium: He May Have Been Wrong But He Wasn’t Lying

Two intelligence investigations show Bush had plenty of reason to believe what he said in his 2003 State of the Union Address.

July 26, 2004

Modified: August 23, 2004

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Summary

The famous “16 words” in President Bush’s Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address turn out to have a basis in fact after all, according to two recently released investigations in the US and Britain.

Bush said then, “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa .” Some of his critics called that a lie, but the new evidence shows Bush had reason to say what he did.

* A British intelligence review released July 14 calls Bush’s 16 words “well founded.”
* A separate report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee said July 7 that the US also had similar information from “a number of intelligence reports,” a fact that was classified at the time Bush spoke.
* Ironically, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who later called Bush’s 16 words a “lie”, supplied information that the Central Intelligence Agency took as confirmation that Iraq may indeed have been seeking uranium from Niger .
* Both the US and British investigations make clear that some forged Italian documents, exposed as fakes soon after Bush spoke, were not the basis for the British intelligence Bush cited, or the CIA’s conclusion that Iraq was trying to get uranium.

None of the new information suggests Iraq ever nailed down a deal to buy uranium, and the Senate report makes clear that US intelligence analysts have come to doubt whether Iraq was even trying to buy the stuff. In fact, both the White House and the CIA long ago conceded that the 16 words shouldn’t have been part of Bush’s speech.

But what he said – that Iraq sought uranium – is just what both British and US intelligence were telling him at the time. So Bush may indeed have been misinformed, but that’s not the same as lying.
Analysis

The “16 words” in Bush’s State of the Union Address on Jan. 28, 2003 have been offered as evidence that the President led the US into war using false information intentionally. The new reports show Bush accurately stated what British intelligence was saying, and that CIA analysts believed the same thing.

The “16 Words”

During the State the Union Address on January 28, 2003, President Bush said:

Bush: The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

The Butler Report

After nearly a six-month investigation, a special panel reported to the British Parliament July 14 that British intelligence had indeed concluded back in 2002 that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy uranium. The review panel was headed by Lord Butler of Brockwell, who had been a cabinet secretary under five different Prime Ministers and who is currently master of University College, Oxford.

The Butler report said British intelligence had “credible” information — from several sources — that a 1999 visit by Iraqi officials to Niger was for the purpose of buying uranium:

Butler Report: It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible.

The Butler Report affirmed what the British government had said about the Niger uranium story back in 2003, and specifically endorsed what Bush said as well.

Butler Report: By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” was well-founded.

The Senate Intelligence Committee Report

The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported July 7, 2004 that the CIA had received reports from a foreign government (not named, but probably Britain) that Iraq had actually concluded a deal with Niger to supply 500 tons a year of partially processed uranium ore, or “yellowcake.” That is potentially enough to produce 50 nuclear warheads.

Wilson: Bush’s Words “The Lie”

(From a web chat sponsored by Kerry for President Oct. 29, 2003)

*** Joe Wilson (Oct 29, 2003 11:24:53 AM)
I would remind you that had Mr.. Cheney taken into consideration my report as well as 2 others submitted on this subject, rather than the forgeries

*** Joe Wilson (Oct 29, 2003 11:25:06 AM)
the lie would never have been in President Bush’s State of the Union address

*** Joe Wilson (Oct 29, 2003 11:25:14 AM)
so when they ask, “Who betrayed the President?”

*** Joe Wilson (Oct 29, 2003 11:25:30 AM)
They need to point the finger at the person who inserted the 16 words, not at the person who found the truth of the matter
The Senate report said the CIA then asked a “former ambassador” to go to Niger and report. That is a reference to Joseph Wilson — who later became a vocal critic of the President’s 16 words. The Senate report said Wilson brought back denials of any Niger-Iraq uranium sale, and argued that such a sale wasn’t likely to happen. But the Intelligence Committee report also reveals that Wilson brought back something else as well — evidence that Iraq may well have wanted to buy uranium.

Wilson reported that he had met with Niger’s former Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki, who said that in June 1999 he was asked to meet with a delegation from Iraq to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between the two countries.
Based on what Wilson told them, CIA analysts wrote an intelligence report saying former Prime Minister Mayki “interpreted ‘expanding commercial relations’ to mean that the (Iraqi) delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales.” In fact, the Intelligence Committee report said that “for most analysts” Wilson’s trip to Niger “lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal.”

The subject of uranium sales never actually came up in the meeting, according to what Wilson later told the Senate Intelligence Committee staff. He quoted Mayaki as saying that when he met with the Iraqis he was wary of discussing any trade issues at all because Iraq remained under United Nations sanctions. According to Wilson, Mayaki steered the conversation away from any discussion of trade.

For that reason, Wilson himself has publicly dismissed the significance of the 1999 meeting. He said on NBC’s Meet the Press May 2, 2004:

Wilson: …At that meeting, uranium was not discussed. It would be a tragedy to think that we went to war over a conversation in which uranium was not discussed because the Niger official was sufficiently sophisticated to think that perhaps he might have wanted to discuss uranium at some later date.

But that’s not the way the CIA saw it at the time. In the CIA’s view, Wilson’s report bolstered suspicions that Iraq was indeed seeking uranium in Africa. The Senate report cited an intelligence officer who reviewed Wilson’s report upon his return from Niger:

Committee Report: He (the intelligence officer) said he judged that the most important fact in the report was that the Nigerian officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Nigerian Prime Minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium, because this provided some confirmation of foreign government service reporting.

“Reasonable to Assess”

At this point the CIA also had received “several intelligence reports” alleging that Iraq wanted to buy uranium from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and from Somalia, as well as from Niger. The Intelligence Committee concluded that “it was reasonable for analysts to assess that Iraq may have been seeking uranium from Africa based on Central Intelligence Agency reporting and other available intelligence.”

Reasonable, that is, until documents from an Italian magazine journalist showed up that seemed to prove an Iraq-Niger deal had actually been signed. The Intelligence Committee said the CIA should have been quicker to investigate the authenticity of those documents, which had “obvious problems” and were soon exposed as fakes by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“We No Longer Believe”

Both the Butler report and the Senate Intelligence Committee report make clear that Bush’s 16 words weren’t based on the fake documents. The British didn’t even see them until after issuing the reports — based on other sources — that Bush quoted in his 16 words. But discovery of the Italian fraud did trigger a belated reassessment of the Iraq/Niger story by the CIA.

Once the CIA was certain that the Italian documents were forgeries, it said in an internal memorandum that “we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad.” But that wasn’t until June 17, 2003 — nearly five months after Bush’s 16 words.

Soon after, on July 6, 2003, former ambassador Wilson went public in a New York Times opinion piece with his rebuttal of Bush’s 16 words, saying that if the President was referring to Niger “his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them,” and that “I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” Wilson has since used much stronger language, calling Bush’s 16 words a “lie” in an Internet chat sponsored by the Kerry campaign.

On July 7, the day after Wilson’s original Times article, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer took back the 16 words, calling them “incorrect:”

Fleischer: Now, we’ve long acknowledged — and this is old news, we’ve said this repeatedly — that the information on yellow cake did, indeed, turn out to be incorrect.

And soon after, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice acknowledged that the 16 words were, in retrospect, a mistake. She said during a July 11, 2003 White House press briefing :

Rice: What we’ve said subsequently is, knowing what we now know, that some of the Niger documents were apparently forged, we wouldn’t have put this in the President’s speech — but that’s knowing what we know now.

That same day, CIA Director George Tenet took personal responsibility for the appearance of the 16 words in Bush’s speech:

Tenet: These 16 words should never have been included in the text written
for the President.

Tenet said the CIA had viewed the original British intelligence reports as “inconclusive,” and had “expressed reservations” to the British.

The Senate report doesn’t make clear why discovery of the forged documents changed the CIA’s thinking. Logically, that discovery should have made little difference since the documents weren’t the basis for the CIA’s original belief that Saddam was seeking uranium. However, the Senate report did note that even within the CIA the comments and assessments were “inconsistent and at times contradictory” on the Niger story.

Even after Tenet tried to take the blame, Bush’s critics persisted in saying he lied with his 16 words — for example, in an opinion column July 16, 2003 by Michael Kinsley in the Washington Post :

Kinsley: Who was the arch-fiend who told a lie in President Bush’s State of the Union speech? . . .Linguists note that the question “Who lied in George Bush’s State of the Union speech” bears a certain resemblance to the famous conundrum “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

However, the Senate report confirmed that the CIA had reviewed Bush’s State of the Union address, and — whatever doubts it may have harbored — cleared it for him.

Senate Report: When coordinating the State of the Union, no Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts or officials told the National Security Council (NSC) to remove the “16 words” or that there were concerns about the credibility of the Iraq-Niger uranium reporting.

The final word on the 16 words may have to await history’s judgment. The Butler report’s conclusion that British intelligence was “credible” clearly doesn’t square with what US intelligence now believes. But these new reports show Bush had plenty of reason to believe what he said, even if British intelligence is eventually shown to be mistaken.
Sources

President George W. Bush, “ State of the Union ,” 28 January 2003.

Chairman Lord Butler of Brockwell, “Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction,” 14 July 2004.

“Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq,” Select Committee on Intelligence United States Senate, 7 July 2004.

Walter Pincus, “ CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data; Bush Used Report Of Uranium Bid ,” Washington Post, 12 June 2003.

Mohamed ElBaradei, “ The Status of Nuclear Inspections in Iraq: An Update ,” Statement to the United Nations Security Council by International Atomic Energy Agency Director General, 7 March 2003.

Joseph Wilson, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” New York Times, 6 July 2003.

Joseph Wilson,The Official Kerry-Edwards BLOG: “Transcript of Chat with Ambassador Joe Wilson,” 29 Oct 2003.

Michael Kinsley, “…Or More Lies From The Usual Suspects?,” Washington Post, 16 July 2003: A23.

Ari Fleischer, “ Press Gaggle ,” 7 July 2003.

Ari Fleischer and Dr. Condoleeza Rice, “ Press Gaggle ,” 11 July 2003.

George Tenet, “Statement by George J. Tenet Director of Central Intelligence,” Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 11 July 2003.
Related Articles
Bush Contradicted On Iraq & al Qaeda? Or not?

Even the 9-11 comissioners don’t agree about whether their staff contradicted the Bush administration.
What Bush Left Unsaid in State of the Union Address

Forget Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now its “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.”

Bush and Rove are one and the same they have only one life between them.

Some people say history is bound to repeat itself.

George the first got into trouble when he went along with a tax increase and thereby reneged on his Watch-My-Lips pledge. With his polls dropping, he decided to try and focus the country’s attention on some “crisis” in an attempt to play down his inability to deal with the failing economy.

In late July 1990, US Ambassador April Glaspie met with Saddam Hussein and told him that Washington had “no opinion of Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”

Eight days later, Hussein invaded Kuwait.

Poppy used the invasion of Kuwait, as his diversionary “crisis.” His formidable task was building US support for “liberating” a country opposed to democratic values and yet make the war appear noble. However, the electorate was slow accepting a war where American soldiers would die for oil-rich sheiks.

Something was needed to sell the war. It came with an emotionally moving videotape of testimony from a sobbing 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah.
Network news broadcast Nayirah describing that she had worked in a hospital in Kuwait City and witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators and leaving them on the cold floor to die.

Poppy mentioned the incubator incident in no less than five speeches that week and seven senators referred to the story in speeches backing a pro-war resolution. It was especially recited at the UN Security Council.

It worked, as Poppy repeatedly called Hussein “the Butcher of Baghdad” and “a tyrant worse than Hitler ” over and over, he got Congress and the UN to fall in line behind his “crisis”, a war to free Kuwait.

The terrifying truth with Nayirah’s testimony came out after the Gulf War was over. The poor refugee girl was actually the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the US. Her entire testimony was one big lie. Actually, Nayirah’s presentation had been handled by the world’s largest public relations firm at that time. The firm’s director was Craig Fuller who had been the former chief of staff to Poppy when he was the Vice-President.

Ironically, during the Feb. 2, 1991 NBC Nightly News, Poppy said, “The US has a new credibility. What we say goes.”

Fast-forwarding to 2002, George the second gained creditably as he led the country following 9/11. He emerged from his ‘rally-around-the-president-in-times-of-crisis’ phenomenon that summer. Then, similar to Poppy’s post Gulf War slide, Dubya’s polls began dropping and he had to face the reality that his presidency was in serious danger of sinking into fiscal chaos and the ignominy of being another one-term Bush.

That September, Dubya opened his own weapons of mass communications campaign to transfer the public’s attention away from his failing domestic and economic problems and focus on yet another Bush “crisis.”

Dubya’s handlers knew the incubator story couldn’t fly again so they pursued a different scenario to make a case for waging another war against Hussein. This time, they pictured Hussein as so horrible that he gassed his own people with weapons of mass destruction.

Same old villain, brand new description.

Again and again, repeating and repeating, everywhere and any place, the same message was spread. Dubya’s handlers clearly understand the power of propaganda

To beef up the war sales pitch, Dubya added that Hussein was on the verge of producing a nuclear bomb. The ultimate scare tactic, play the nuclear card.

The marketing of the war was still not swaying the country or the UN Security Council. No matter how many times Dubya recited that Hussein used weaponsofmassdestruction (now one word) on his own people, Americans were not buying a US led preemptive war.

The next best hook was the most trusted (4 to 1 over Dubya), the most popular and the most respected cabinet member, Colin Powell. After 20 weeks of Dubya’s vague sermons about evildoer Hussein and the meaning of good over evil, Powell was sent before the Security Council as the deal closer. Our most senior diplomat’s 76-minute slide and video show resembled an ad agency’s product presentation and armtwisting to a skeptical and reluctant Council.

America’s peacekeeper and voice of moderation was center stage actually pleading and cajoling for carnage. And, one of the documents Powell offered his colleagues was a 19-page secret spy dossier published by the British government. It was billed as a ‘crucial plank’.

So desperate was Tony Blair’s aides to prove the case for war, they cut and pasted an outdated thesis by a postgraduate student and presented it as contemporary intelligence material.

Blair, Dubya’s brother in war, was in similar hot water in England as Dubya was here in the states. Blair was enormously popular when he was elected in 1997 but had seen his polls slide badly.

The damage of the discredited dossier has been widespread and not just for Downing Street, but also for Powell who praised it as a “fine paper.” Such mistakes have given ammunition to the large anti-war lobbies in England, the US and throughout the world. This was evidenced in mid-February with an unprecedented show of international solidarity as six million people around the world turned out to protest the invasion of Iraq.

In 1921, the famous American journalist Walter Lippmann said that the art of democracy requires what he called the “manufacture of consent.” The idea is that in a country such as the US, where the government can’t control the people by force, had better control what they think.

There has been too much propaganda to change the focus of the silent majority from our country’s problems here at home. Too much effort has been spent switching our attention instead toward a needless war in an attempt to redefine a failing Presidency.

Chalabi on Charlie Rose. Why does he have to come here and do the spin cycle?

Terrible vote of confidence on Oilraq, he’s here and not there. Must not be too safe…

As for his being here, it must extortion time for the enocons. Watch for any of this budget they’re trying to squeeze through going his way or to parallel interests especially re: foreign policy appropriations and war appropriations.

Chances are you’ll find a smoking gun.

Reuters:

Wilson to WashPo: Investigate Woodward

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-11-17T192800Z_01_EIC770061_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-LEAK.xml

LA Times article on Curveball

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-curveball20nov20,0,1753730.story?coll=la-home-headlines

“BERLIN — The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Five senior officials from Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball’s information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball’s accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.

Curveball’s German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm.

“This was not substantial evidence,” said a senior German intelligence official. “We made clear we could not verify the things he said.”

The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. “He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy,” said a BND official who supervised the case. “He is not a completely normal person,” agreed a BND analyst.

…”

If Jason Leopold is correct, January could spell doom for some folks in the WH with regards to hyping and spinning pre-war intel.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/printer_112305Z.shtml

” Democrats leading the charge into the second phase of a bipartisan investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence have said this week that they will spend the next month or so working with Pentagon officials who last week agreed to probe a top secret spy shop once headed by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith that many longtime CIA and FBI officials and other intelligence analysts believe was responsible for providing the Bush administration with bogus intelligence used to justify war with Iraq.

When the probe is complete, which aides to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) – both of whom are aggressively working to collect pre-war intelligence documents that undercut administration’s claims that Iraq posed a grave threat to national security – said will likely be in early 2006, there could be some sort of “public reprimand” brought against lower-level administration officials who work or worked at the Defense Department, the National Security Council, and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, for “cherry-picking” questionable intelligence on Iraq and using it to win public support for the war.

Based on the way the probe is starting to shape up, it’s clear the administration, particularly Feith, who resigned earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and possibly Cheney will bear the brunt of the blame, because the three of them sidestepped the usual intelligence gathering process that historically was handled by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency in favor of their own clandestine intelligence gathering operations in which questionable information on the so-called Iraqi threat was collected and used by administration officials to build a case for war but wasn’t vetted by career intelligence analysts, said a senior aide to McCain who requested anonymity for fear of angering members of the GOP.

Last month, under pressure from Democrats and some Republicans, and with public support for war eroding, the Pentagon’s Inspector General agreed to probe Feith’s secret spy group, the Office of Special Plans, and whether the operation played a role in manipulating pre-war Iraq intelligence in addition to knowingly passing dubious intelligence from defectors from Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress to the White House to convince lawmakers and the American public into backing the war. “