CIA failures
First they were criticized for not having enough data that linked Al-Qaeda with Saddam, or that proved Saddam had, and continued to develop, WMD. Then, all of a sudden, they're being skewered for providing too much false data that the Preznit and the Congress relied upon to go to war in Eye-rak. Poor saps. Emphases below are mine.
(Two-faced) Jim Hoagland, writing in the Washington Post, Oct 20, 2002
Imagine that Saddam Hussein has been offering terrorist training and other lethal support to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda for years. You can't imagine that? Sign up over there. You can be a Middle East analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Or at least you could have been until recently. As President Bush's determination to overthrow the Iraqi dictator has become evident to all, a cultural change has come over the world's most expensive intelligence agency: Some analysts out at Langley are now willing to evaluate incriminating evidence against the Iraqis and call it just that.
Richard Clarke, March 21, 2004
After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.
"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.
"Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking.
"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection."
Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush.
"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.
"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'
"He came back at me and said, 'Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."
Jim Lehrer Newshour, July 9, 2004
JIM LEHRER: Senator Roberts, do you agree with that, that the president wanted to do it and that somehow this... the bad intelligence information or whatever it was just fed what he wanted to do anyhow?
SEN. PAT ROBERTS: I don't think the president is that disingenuous, and I don't think the president had a foregone conclusion in his mind. I think what the administration received, whether it be Colin Powell, Condi Rice, the president, whomever, basically what they said was very declarative, it was very positive, but they got that information from the intelligence community and the national intelligence estimate, and the intelligence estimate was wrong.
[...]
JIM LEHRER: Yeah. The group think, what was the group think that caused this flawed intelligence, and where did it come from?
SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER: I think it came from several reasons. One is that the Berlin Wall went down in 1989; then during the '90s that was also close to the end of the Iran-Iraq War. During the '90s you had this sort of absence of American presence except in the skies over Iraq. And people... there wasn't really any weapons of mass destruction to be found, but there were these constant barrage of messages coming from our national leaders saying that weapons of mass destruction are there, that the link between al-Qaida and... or Saddam Hussein and 9/11 is there, and that... that's a kind of a pressure.
I mean, the pressure can be applied individually by one person to another, but it could also be applied psychologically by the environment in which you work and what you read and see on television every single day. And I think that pressure has had a substantial effect, and I think that's the pressure which caused the American people to support the president when he went to war, and then when they discovered that the reasons for going to war were not there, I think that's the reason for the drop.
And there you have it. I believe that the Dubya Gang is going to use this for all they're worth. I believe that they're going to lay the blame on the CIA and say, "We relied on them for intelligence. What they gave us was faulty. We can't be blamed. It's their fault. 'Cause you know, since we've got a God-Given Mandate to Rule, we can't ever be wrong."
posted by claudine |Added at
11:38 AM| |
politics, iraq, faulty intelligence
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