Tenet: Iraq Not Imminent Threat

Faulty Evidence And an Eager Victim

By William Raspberry
Monday, February 2, 2004; Page A17


When President Bush is asked whether he regrets attacking Iraq on what now turns out to be bad information, he always answers to the effect that the world is better off with Saddam Hussein out of power.



Which is no answer at all. I can think of many world leaders (and even a few members of the Bush administration) whose absence from power would leave the world better off. But that does not justify turning thought into violent action.

The president wants us to forget this awkward truth: The justification he offered for attacking Iraq was not that Hussein was a bad guy but (1) that he was contemptuously in violation of U.N. resolutions and (2) that he and his weapons of mass destruction were an urgent danger to the United States -- so ominous, in fact, that if we waited for more inspections and negotiations, it might be too late.

Former weapons inspector David Kay now says, to the obvious embarrassment of the administration, that he believes Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction when American bombers struck Baghdad almost a year ago. Does that mean that we launched the war on false pretenses?

No, in Kay's view; yes, in mine.

Kay explains that he thought at the time that the WMDs existed and were a menace. The problem, he has been at pains to say, is not Bush administration mendacity but failure of the intelligence apparatus. Bush, by that explanation, is not villain but victim.

Well, he was a most eager victim, practically begging for justification -- any justification -- for the war he was determined to have. He was only temporarily stalled when Secretary of State Colin Powell persuaded him to take the case to the U.N. Security Council. But the administration's chapter-and-verse accounting of how Hussein had violated U.N. agreements and directives did not produce a call for war.

The Bush administration was left with a single rationale: Iraq's urgent threat to America.

Thus came Powell's Feb. 5 multimedia extravaganza before the Security Council. You may remember it.

"Let's look at one [satellite image]. This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji. This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. . . .

"Here, you see 15 munitions bunkers in yellow and red outlines. The four that are in the red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers."

Again:

"At this biological-weapons-related facility, on November 25, just two days before inspections resumed, this truck caravan appeared, something we almost never see at this facility, and we monitor it carefully and regularly . . . five large cargo trucks appeared along with the truck-mounted crane to move missiles. We saw this kind of housecleaning at close to 30 sites."

Oh, and enough anthrax (one spoonful of which was enough to shut down the U.S. Senate in the fall of 2001) to "fill tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of teaspoons."

And this: "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."




Well, not so solid after all, it turns out.

The question -- to give Powell the benefit of the doubt Kay gives the president -- is: Did the intelligence agencies serve the secretary of state a batch of cooked evidence?

Or was Colin, my personal hero, in the kitchen?

Does it matter? Perhaps the administration oversold the evidence. Perhaps the war was, in retrospect, too hasty, even unnecessary. But, hey, it happened, so let's just get on with it. What's the point of raking through the ashes of year-old decisions?

Maybe there is no point -- if you believe, as Kay claims to believe, that it's all about failed intelligence.

But there is a vital point if you believe, as I'm increasingly inclined to believe, that the administration lied to us in calculated and quite deliberate ways. If that happened, if it still is happening, I want to know as much about it as can be discovered. After all, there's an election coming up.





© 2004 The Washington Post Company

 

Powell seemed like someone you could trust. I'm very disappointed in him.

As for Dubya...well, as he himself said..."Fool me once, shame on you...fool me...er...again....er....uhhh.......................mmmm.....don't get fooled again.

duh bya

ges

 

Today's News
NEWSWEEK POLL: Bush's Approval Rating Slips to New Low (48%); Fifty Percent of Voters Say They Don't Want to See Him Re-Elected (45% Do);

Kerry Strengthens Lead to 48 Percent, 35 Points Ahead of Nearest Rival Dean;
Wins in Match-Up With Bush (50% To 45%)

Fifty-Eight Percent Say Gay Marriage Should Not Be Legal;
Majority Says Issue of Gay Marriage Very Important (22%) or Somewhat
Important (32%) in Determining Their Vote for President

NEW YORK, Feb. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- President George W. Bush's approval
rating has slipped to 48 percent, the lowest level since February 2001,
according to the Newsweek poll. Fifty percent of registered voters say they
would not like to see Bush re-elected to a second term (45% say they would).
And if the election were held today, Democratic frontrunner Sen. John Kerry
would win over Bush by 50 percent to 45 percent among registered voters.
However Bush would have clear wins over Democratic contenders Sen. John
Edwards (49% to 44%), former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (50% to 44%) and retired
General Wesley Clark (51% to 43%).
Sen. Kerry has also strengthened his lead among Democrats and Democratic-
leaning voters in the race for the Democratic nomination. Kerry places first
in the field with 48 percent, while Dean, his closest rival, follows with
13 percent (last week Kerry led with 45% to Dean's 14%). Edwards is in third
place with 10 percent, followed by Clark with nine percent (an improvement of
four points for Clark who last week received 5%). Almost two-thirds (65%) of
Democrats and Democratic-leaners say Kerry is their first or second choice,
followed by Dean (32%) and Edwards (31%).
Meanwhile, following the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's ruling
last week that its landmark decision in support of gay marriage meant full
marriage rights and not civil unions, almost half (45%) of Americans say
efforts to protect the rights of gays and lesbians have gone too far; 25
percent say more effort is needed, 22 percent say the right amount of effort
has been made. Fifty-eight percent of Americans says there should not be
legally-sanctioned gay marriages (33% disagree), while 51 percent say there
should not be legally-sanctioned gay and lesbian unions or partnerships
(40% disagree).
Americans, however, are more deeply and more evenly divided on whether
they support an amendment to the Constitution. Forty-seven percent say they
would favor a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in all states,
with 45 percent opposing it. (Of those numbers 43% would strongly favor it,
while 35% would strongly oppose it).
Despite their views on gay marriage, Americans are almost evenly split on
whether gays and lesbians should have the right to legally adopt children;
47 percent say they should not, while 45 percent disagree. When it comes to
economic issues, a large majority (60%) says gay spouses should have health
insurance and other employee benefits (33% disagree). Sixty percent also say
gay spouses should have inheritance rights (30% disagree) and 55 percent say
they should have social security benefits (36% disagree). An overwhelming
majority of Americans (87%) says that there should be equal rights for gays
and lesbians in terms of job opportunities (10% disagree) and 60 percent say
gays and lesbians should be able to openly serve in the military (29%
disagree).
Fifty-four percent of registered voters say the issue of gay marriage will
be either very important (22%) or somewhat important (32%) in determining
their vote for president this year. Twenty percent say it won't be too
important and 21 percent say it's not at all important. Thirty-eight percent
say Bush comes closer to reflecting their own views on gay marriage, while
29 percent say Kerry does.
Asked about Bush and Kerry's stance on gay marriage, a majority (54%) of
registered voters respond "don't know" when asked Kerry's views, compared with
29 percent who say the same of Bush. Forty-nine percent say, based on what
they've seen in the news, Bush would support a Constitutional amendment, if
necessary, to ban gay marriage in all states (7% say Kerry would do the same).
Twelve percent say Bush believes the issue should be left up to individual
states (14% say this of Kerry); nine percent say Bush supports gay civil
unions but not gay marriage (17% say this of Kerry); and one percent says Bush
favors full marriage rights for gays and lesbians (8% say this of Kerry).
Turning to the role of candidates' wives in the presidential race, almost
a third (31%) of Americans say former First Lady Hillary Clinton comes closest
to their image of what a first lady should be; in a three-way tie for second
place are First Lady Laura Bush and former First Ladies Barbara Bush and Nancy
Reagan, with 20 percent each. Almost two thirds (62%) say a first lady should
be involved in politics, while 32 percent disagree; 75 percent of Democrats
feel this way (21% disagree); and 50 percent of Republicans feel this way
(44% disagree).
When deciding which presidential candidate to support, 67 percent say it
is either very important (25%) or somewhat important (42%) for them to learn
about the candidate's spouse. Seventy-two percent say the relationship between
a candidate and his spouse tells voters either a lot (40%) or something (32%)
about how good a president he would be; 13 percent say it tells you not much
and 12 percent say it tells you nothing.
For this Newsweek poll, Princeton Survey Research Associates interviewed
1,004 adults aged 18 and older on February 5-6, 2004. The margin of error is
plus or minus three percentage points. This poll is part of the February
16 issue of Newsweek (on Newsstands Monday, February 9).

 

Britain spied on UN allies over war vote
Security Council members 'illegally targeted' by GCHQ after plea from US security agency

Martin Bright and Peter Beaumont
Sunday February 8, 2004
The Observer

Britain helped America to conduct a secret and potentially illegal spying operation at the United Nations in the run-up to the Iraq war, The Observer can reveal.

The operation, which targeted at least one permanent member of the UN Security Council, was almost certainly in breach of the Vienna conventions on diplomatic relations, which strictly outlaw espionage at the UN missions in New York.

Translators and analysts at the Government's top-secret surveillance centre GCHQ were ordered to co-operate with an American espionage 'surge' on Security Council delegations after a request from the US National Security Agency at the end of January 2003. This was designed to help smooth the way for a second UN resolution authorising war in Iraq.

The information was intended for US Secretary of State Colin Powell before his presentation on weapons of mass destruction to the Security Council on 5 February.

Sources close to the intelligence services have now confirmed that the request from the security agency was 'acted on' by the British authorities. It is also known that the operation caused significant disquiet in the intelligence community on both sides of the Atlantic.

An operation of this kind would almost certainly have been authorised by the director-general of GCHQ, David Pepper. But the revelation also raises serious questions for Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, who has overall responsibility for GCHQ.

Details of the operation were first revealed in The Observer on the eve of war last year, after the leaking of a top-secret memo from the NSA requesting British help.

But until today it was not known whether British spy chiefs had agreed to participate. The operation was ordered before deliberations over a second UN resolution and targeted the so-called 'swing nations' on the Security Council - Chile, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Angola, Guinea and Pakistan - whose votes were needed to proceed to war.

The first evidence has also emerged that China, a perma nentmember of the Security Council, was a likely target of the operation.

The Observer has discovered that a GCHQ translator, Katherine Gun, 29, who faces trial after leaking details of the US request, was hired by the surveillance centre as a Chinese language specialist. Documents of this level of secrecy are circulated on a strict 'need-to-know' basis. Security experts have said that it is highly unlikely that someone as junior as Gun would have seen the memo had she not been expected to use her language expertise in the operation.

She is thought to be an expert translator of Mandarin, the language of Chinese officialdom.

The memo, dated 31 January, 2003, stated that the security agency wanted to gather 'the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises'.

It was sent out four days after the UN's chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, produced his interim response on Iraqi compliance with UN resolutions.

In the wake of the Hutton report and the establishment of inquiries into intelligence failures on both sides of the Atlantic, the Gun case represents a further risk to government credibility over the Iraq war, showing how far the US and Britain were prepared to go in their ultimately unsuccessful attempts to persuade the world of the case for UN support for war against Iraq.

The Gun trial will reopen embarrassing questions for the Government over the conflicting views on the legality of war which were debated in the run-up to the conflict. At the time when the memo was received at GCHQ, officials at the Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence and in the intelligence services - including senior legal advisers - were expressing serious doubts over the legality of any invasion.

At the time, The Observer was told by Foreign Office officials of serious doubts that the war was legal.

When the GCHQ revelations were first published in The Observer last March, the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, had still not publicly announced his final advice to Downing Street.

At the time, it was expected that he would agree with most experts in international law that intervention would be unlawful without a second resolution.

The legality of the war was a highly sensitive issue for senior military officers on the eve of war, who were wary of being accused of war crimes in the aftermath of the conflict.

The former assistant chief of defence staff Sir Timothy Garden said that the legal basis of the war is all the more important now that Britain has signed up to the International Criminal Court.

'We did it on the best advice that was available in a democratic country. But following an order is not an excuse in the end.'

 

I'm not trying to bash Clinton, only point out that Tenet was not Bush's man.

I think ideally the Director of Central Intelligence should be a professional nonpartisan. Unfortunately this was not the case with Tenet, who was a Democrat Senate staffer, hardly ideal preparation for a spymaster. My point however is that Bush is suffering a self-inflicted wound here. No one would have blamed him for canning Tenet, but for some reason Bush seems to like and trust him, depsite a series of embarrassing foulups, including Iraq, North Korea surprises, the whole Joe Wilson affair and a torrent of leaks designed to make Bush look bad and the CIA good.

Bush has suffered similar damage at the Department of Transportation, headed by former Dem Representative Norman Mineta, whose defining life experience apparently was FDR's internment of Japanese/Americans during WW II. Mineta was totally opposed to any kind of rational profiling of likely terror suspects, so instead the administration incurred the justifiable anger of millions of inconvenienced, harrassed and humiliated air passengers who clearly posed no threat whatsoever.

In addition, The TSA under Mineta's control has done its best to thwart the law allowing commercial pilots to carry defensive weapons for last resort action. This idiotic program subjects pilots who are willing to carry guns to intrusive psychological "evaluations" run by government bureaucrats. Former military pilots who were trusted to carry bombs have been rejected as "unsuitable." The pilots are also required to use their own time for a week long training course. All of this might be reasonable if they were expected to be air marshals, but they are not. The whole idea is that an armed pilot just might make the difference in another 9/11 situation, but we will never know because this administration has been unwilling to follow the spirit of the law and public opinion.

 

Commissions and Clarity

By William Raspberry
Monday, February 9, 2004; Page A21


President Bush, his credibility in the balance, has appointed a commission to investigate the failures of prewar intelligence on Iraq.



His opponents, sensing an opportunity, are saying it's nothing but a trick. Since there's no way the commission would report its findings -- certainly not anything negative -- before the presidential election, the commission only buys the president time to ride out the crisis.

The skeptics are probably right. But even they miss what may be the most important point raised by the Iraq war. We are arguing now about what the president knew and when he knew it. What might be more helpful in the long term is a discussion of what he did and why he did it.

It's a point Robert L. Oorthuys of Snohomish, Wash., wants to make.

"A protracted examination of the CIA is purely a red herring," he told me. "There is no indication that a few more accuracy points on the part of the CIA would have prevented this mistake. The real issue has to do with the standards and justifications we allow our leaders to use when making the decision to let loose our troops on foreign shores."

In other words, we mustn't get so involved with replaying the video to see how much Janet Jackson exposed, and how deliberately, that we miss the fact that the Super Bowl was being played.

The Super Bowl, in the Iraq war case, is the matter of when, how and under what circumstances America will make war.

This is what Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) was saying a year ago -- to such deafening silence:

"This coming battle, if it materializes, represents a turning point in U.S. foreign policy and possibly a turning point in the recent history of the world," Byrd said before our warplanes struck Iraq with the obvious intention of killing its president.

"The doctrine of preemption -- the idea that the United States or any other nation can legitimately attack a nation that is not imminently threatening but may be threatening in the future -- is a radical new twist on the traditional idea of self-defense."

Byrd, dean of the Senate Democrats, saw the danger before the war. Oorthuys, who describes himself as "a 53-year-old lightly employed software consultant," worries that we will be distracted from it now -- in part by the very commission that is supposed to clear things up.

"We need to clearly understand and agree on how the U.S. makes the decision to go to war," he says. "We face similar circumstances in Syria, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea and other places. With Iraq, we have made an enormous mistake that has cost thousands of lives and huge amounts of money, while drawing into question our very motivations and values.

"So we need to examine how this administration came to the conclusion that war was finally and absolutely required. And we need to know what parts were played by members of the administration and Congress."

Americans, for all our imagined sophistication, can be incredibly naive and manipulable. Let an earnest-looking political leader tell us that what he proposes is in the interest of good old American values and we might be led into repealing the Bill of Rights, requiring prayer in our public schools, denying civil rights to "heathens and infidels" -- or making war on "evil" countries that are no particular menace to us. Someone needs to remind us of the things we used to learn in junior high civics classes.

That doesn't make the president's commission a bad idea -- though it's hard to see how it could bring much clarity. Already, we have the secretary of state saying that he might have recommended differently about going to war if he'd known what he now knows; we have the head of the CIA acknowledging some intelligence shortcomings and predicting that the agency will be revealed as neither completely wrong nor completely right.

And it won't matter any more than if, some weeks hence, it is determined definitively that Janet Jackson indeed had a "wardrobe malfunction." It's still just a distraction.

But we also have a former Treasury secretary saying the administration was determined to have this war long before Sept. 11, 2001, provided a pretext and some pretty good evidence that some in the administration wanted the war as a first step in rearranging the geopolitics of the Middle East.

We need to know whether our government was hijacked, or nearly so, by a small cabal of ideologues. That could be the whole ballgame.

 

They at least have a lot of influence. Too much influence. They have a dangerous mindset...end justifies the means thinking.

g

 

The Khan Artist

By MAUREEN DOWD - NY Times

Published: February 12, 2004



WASHINGTON

I think President Bush has cleared up everything now.

The U.S. invaded Iraq, which turned out not to have what our pals in Pakistan did have and were giving out willy-nilly to all the bad guys except Iraq, which wouldn't take it.

Bush officials thought they knew what was going on inside our enemy's country: that Iraq had W.M.D. and might sell them on the black market. But they were wrong.

Bush officials thought they knew what was going on inside our friend's country: that Pakistanis were trying to sell W.M.D. on the black market. But they couldn't prove it — until about the time we were invading Iraq.

"The grave and gathering threat" turned out to be not Saddam's mushroom cloud but the president's mushrooming deficits.

The president is having just as hard a time finding his National Guard records as Iraqi W.M.D. — and those pay stubs look as murky as those satellite photos of trucks in Iraq.

Mr. Bush said yesterday that smaller developing countries must stop developing nuclear fuel, even as the U.S. develops a whole new arsenal of smaller nuclear weapons to use against smaller developing countries that might be thinking about developing nuclear fuel.

After he weakened the U.N. for telling the truth about Iraq's nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush now calls on the U.N. to be strong going after W.M.D.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf pardoned the Pakistani hero and nuclear huckster Abdul Qadeer Khan after an embarrassing debacle, praising the scientist's service to his country. Mr. Bush pardoned George Tenet after an embarrassing debacle, praising the spook's service to his country. (So much for Mr. Bush's preachy odes to responsibility and accountability.)

The president warned yesterday that "the greatest threat before humanity" is the possibility of a sudden W.M.D. attack. Not wanting nuclear technology to go to North Korea, Iran or Libya, the White House demanded tighter controls on black-market sales of W.M.D., even while praising its good buddy Pakistan, whose scientists were running a black market like a Sam's Club for nukes, peddling to North Korea, Iran and Libya.

Mr. Bush likes to present the world in black and white, as good and evil, even as he's made a Faustian deal with General Musharraf, perhaps hoping that one day — maybe even on an October day — the cagey general will decide to cough up Osama.

The president is spending $1.5 billion to persuade more Americans to have happy married lives, but plans to keep gay Americans from having happy married lives.

Mr. Bush said he wouldn't try to overturn abortion rights. But John Ashcroft is intimidating women who had certain abortions by subpoenaing records in six hospitals in New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere.

The president set up the intelligence commission (with few intelligence experts) because, he said, the best intelligence is needed to win the war on terror. Yet he doesn't want us to get the panel's crucial report until after he's won the war on Kerry.

Mr. Bush said he had balked at giving the 9/11 commission the records of his daily briefings from the C.I.A. until faced with a subpoena threat because it might deter the C.I.A. from giving the president "good, honest information." Wasn't it such "good, honest information" that caused him to miss 9/11 and mobilize the greatest war machine in history against Saddam's empty cupboard?

Mr. Bush says he's working hard to create new jobs in America, while his top economist says it's healthy for jobs to be shipped overseas.

The president told Tim Russert that if you order a country to disarm and it doesn't and you don't act, you lose face. But how does a country that goes to war to disarm a country without arms get back its face?

Mr. Bush said he was troubled that the Vietnam War was "a political war," because civilian politicians didn't let the generals decide how to fight it. But when Gen. Eric Shinseki presciently told Congress in February 2003 that postwar Iraq would need several hundred thousand U.S. soldiers to keep it secure and supplied, he was swatted down by the Bush administration's civilian politicians.

Yes, it all makes perfect sense, through the Bush looking glass.

 

Typical Mo Dowd nonsense.

What would she recommend that we do with the Pakistanis? Invade them? Bomb them? Give them a good strong lecture, perhaps from Janet Reno? She implies that it is Bush's fault they were able to spread nuke technology. Well, guess whose watch it was done on? Hint, not Bush's.

I have a lot of problems with the way this administration has handled things, but I am really getting sick of these lefties complaining about security issues, intelligence and terrorism when they have done their best for 30 years to make the country vulnerable.