| Kathleen 2006-05-08, 1:30 am |
|
Kathleen wrote:[vbcol=seagreen]
> The Intelligence Business
>
> *
> E-Mail
> * Print
> * Save
>
> Article Tools Sponsored By
> Published: May 7, 2006
>
> We've been waiting for well over two years for the Senate Intelligence
> Committee to finally hold the Bush administration accountable for the
> fairy tales it told about Saddam Hussein's weapons. Republican leaders
> keep saying it is a waste of time to find out whether President Bush
> and other top officials deliberately misled the world. But Defense
> Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's bizarre responses the other day to
> questions about that very issue were a timely reminder of why this
> investigation needs to be completed promptly, thoroughly and fairly.
>
> Unfortunately, Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate panel, is
> running it in a way that makes it unlikely that anything useful will
> come of it.
>
> It is bad enough that Mr. Rumsfeld and others did not tell Americans
> the full truth - to take the best-case situation - before the war.
> But they are still doing it. Just look at the profoundly twisted
> version of events that the defense secretary offered last week at a
> public event in Atlanta.
>
> Ray McGovern, an analyst for 27 years at the Central Intelligence
> Agency, stood in the audience and asked why Mr. Rumsfeld lied about
> weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The secretary shot back, "I did
> not lie." Then, even though no one asked about them, he said Colin
> Powell and Mr. Bush offered "their honest opinion" based on "weeks and
> weeks" of time with the C.I.A. "I'm not in the intelligence business,"
> he said, adding, "It appears that there were not weapons of mass
> destruction there."
>
> First, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Period.
> Second, neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Powell spent long weeks with the
> C.I.A., whose analysts were largely cut out of the decision making. And
> that was because, third, Mr. Rumsfeld was, and is, very much in the
> intelligence business.
>
> The Defense Department controls most of the intelligence budget and is
> the biggest user of intelligence. Mr. Rumsfeld also set up his own
> intelligence agency within the Pentagon when the C.I.A. and the State
> Department refused to tell him what he wanted to hear about Iraq. It
> was that office's distortions that formed the basis for what the
> administration told Congress and the public.
>
> In Atlanta, Mr. Rumsfeld denied ever saying flatly that there were
> dangerous weapons in Iraq. Actually, he did, many times, even as late
> as March 30, 2003. On Sept. 27, 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld said there was
> "bulletproof" evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq, including
> that Iraq had trained Qaeda agents in chemical and biological warfare,
> and he repeated that myth in response to Mr. McGovern.
>
> Which brings us back to the Senate committee. In 2004, Democratic
> members agreed to split the investigation of Iraq intelligence. The
> committee issued a report on how bad the information was, but put off
> until after the 2004 election the question of whether the
> administration deliberately hyped the evidence. Mr. Roberts tried to
> kill the investigation entirely, and after the Democrats forced him to
> proceed, he set rules that seem a lot like the recipe for a whitewash.
>
> The investigation, known as Phase 2, is divided into five parts: Did
> officials' public statements reflect the actual intelligence? Why did
> the government fail to anticipate the postwar disaster in Iraq? Were
> there actually any W.M.D. in Iraq? Was the Pentagon's mini-C.I.A. a
> proper and legal operation? And did any of the disinformation provided
> by the Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi get into any "intelligence
> product"?
>
> Mr. Roberts has so gummed up the first part of the investigation that
> it is going to take forever to complete and is unlikely to be of much
> clarity. The only public statements that matter are those by Mr. Bush
> and his top aides. But Mr. Roberts included any statement, by any
> public official, including members of Congress, going back to 1991.
>
> Beyond dragging out the process further, the intent, obviously, is to
> suggest that Mr. Bush said the same things that Democratic senators and
> others did. That has no significance. They did not decide to have a war
> and had access only to the sanitized intelligence fed to them by the
> administration. Bill Clinton and Mr. Bush's father did think there were
> dangerous weapons in Iraq - back in the 20th century. By the time the
> war started, those weapons had long been eliminated by inspections and
> sanctions.
>
> It is worth knowing why policy makers failed to anticipate the
> insurgency and other postwar nightmares, but the structure of this part
> of the investigation is flawed as well. The Senate investigation of Mr.
> Chalabi's involvement is limited to "intelligence products," which the
> C.I.A. produces. But it was not the C.I.A. that predicted rose petals
> in Baghdad and a virtually problem-free transition to democracy; it was
> Mr. Chalabi and his henchmen, creatures of Mr. Rumsfeld's team at the
> Pentagon. And it was the intelligence business that Mr. Rumsfeld now
> pretends not to run that used Mr. Chalabi's myths in an attempt to
> rebut the skeptical State Department and make dubious information seem
> more reliable.
>
> It was helpful of Mr. Rumsfeld to remind us why this inquiry is still
> so important. The least Mr. Roberts and his committee can do is to
> finish the flawed investigation and make the results public.
> Next Article in Opinion (5 of 9) =BB
> Related Articles
> Kathleen wrote:
|