Powell was under pressure to use shaky intelligence on Iraq: report

[The Evil Genius]

Powell was under pressure to use shaky intelligence on Iraq: report

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) was under persistent pressure from the Pentagon (news - web sites) and White House to include questionable intelligence in his report on Iraq (news - web sites)'s weapons of mass destruction he delivered at the United Nations (news - web sites) last February, a US weekly reported.

US News and World Report magazine said the first draft of the speech was prepared for Powell by Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in late January.

According to the report, the draft contained such questionable material that Powell lost his temper, throwing several pages in the air and declaring, "I'm not reading this. This is bull****."

Cheney's aides wanted Powell to include in his presentation information that Iraq has purchased computer software that would allow it to plan an attack on the United States, an allegation that was not supported by the CIA (news - web sites), US News reported.

The White House also pressed Powell to include charges that the suspected leader of the September 11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer prior to the attacks, despite a refusal by US and European intelligence agencies to confirm the meeting, the magazine said.

The pressure forced Powell to appoint his own review team that met several times with Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) to prepare the speech, in which the secretary of state accused Iraq of hiding tonnes of biological and chemical weapons.

US News also said that the Defense Intelligence Agency had issued a classified assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons program last September, arguing that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons."

However, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress shortly after that that the Iraqi "regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas," according to the report.

[Yomar]

This administration is tearing apart

[chiefhogskin48]

Despite the fact that you two love to crow about every administration "failure", this article is extremely troubling. Powell is my favorite person in this administration. They aren't doing a good job recasting republicans as benevolent rather than sinister.

[Yomar]

Originally posted by chiefhogskin48

Despite the fact that you two love to crow about every administration "failure", this article is extremely troubling. Powell is my favorite person in this administration. They aren't doing a good job recasting republicans as benevolent rather than sinister.

yeah, thanks real insightful jack

not that mine was mind you, but screw you anyway

and in an effort to make somewhat of a positive response, this isn't new, and its been discussed before, so for you to find this in particular troubling is laughable, its just another drop in the bucket as far as the rift within the administration and between the State Department and Pentagon, with the CIA also taking issue. Better late than never though

[redman]

Yet another "unnamed sources" piece that tries to use Powell's percieved virtue against the Administration. I have no doubt that Powell has differences of opinion at times with the Administration at large; it's because he heads the diplomatic branch of the government during war time. His is not the tool box that the government is going to first right now. But honestly, they need to try another angle as I have yet to see how this theory is valid.

Besides, if anything the article supports the credibility of Powell's speech. If I read it right, while he might have been asked to incoroporate certain information into his speech, the article makes clear that he refused some items and reworked the speech. What's the problem?

[Yomar]

One definately wonders how US News got this story.

[fansince62]

so Powell is a virtuous former 4 star, hero of Gulf War I, but wilted under the pressure and sold his integrity........which is he? man of virtue or weak reed that bends in the wind?

let's strip away all the rhetoric.......how does the removal of Hussein affect the strategic situation in the Middle East? has it improved or deteriorated the conditons and lives of the Iraqi people? both short-run and long-run......

sidebar...the editor who ran with the story was just on CNN being interviewed....the cabal has apparently been asleep at the wheel...they need to tighten their grip over the media for god's sake! they are frankly becoming an embarrassment to fascists everywhere. just as they were earlier today when a story broke that the DoJ IG had issued an internal finding that illegal immigrants detained immediately following 9/11 were in some instances treated roughly........

[Yomar]

Originally posted by fansince62

so Powell is a virtuous former 4 star, hero of Gulf War I, but wilted under the pressure and sold his integrity........which is he? man of virtue or weak reed that bends in the wind?

Politics is not that simple, sometimes you have to be both.

[fansince62]

Yomar....maybe...but you're talking about a guy who has been to the proverbial mountaintop and whose whole reputation is staked on his integrity..........

[chiefhogskin48]

Originally posted by Yomar

yeah, thanks real insightful jack

not that mine was mind you, but screw you anyway

Thanks, but the name's hogskin.

And are you disputing the fact that you negatively comment about the administration (which you certainly have the right to do)? If not, perhaps my comment's dead on "jack".

[codeorama]

I guess until proven otherwise, I'm tending to believe this, it was rumored earlier and now is showing up in the main stream media, where there's smoke there's fire.

redman, you asked what's the problem... In my opinion, I look at the problem as being that the Bush admin was/is content to mislead the general public by "pressuring" Powell. Personally, I think it's fair to say that of all the people in the Bush admin, Powell is the one guy that the left might give some credibility, therefore if the other's are pressuring him to pass off false info, that's pretty deceitful. Like I said, I don't know if it's fact or not, but it makes sense to me. I have belived that bush and admin have mislead the public on other counts to get support.. (claiming that Iraq was an immediate threat to the US)... I've said before as well, if the support wasn't important, they why so many national address' and why wait so long?

1+1 is starting to add up to 2 in my opinion.

[Yomar]

I have criticzed the administration, I have also praised it at times, there are actions the administration has taken that I am critical of but it isn't a hobby of mine, and I don't appreciate dismissive comments because I have in the past disagreed with what the administration is doing, jack.

[fansince62]

Code...cool...if someone one day reports that you are guilty of a terrible lie or transgression.....I won't bother asking you for confirmation....I'll believe it, right? Because you would lie about it anyway, right?

[Yomar]

Originally posted by fansince62

Yomar....maybe...but you're talking about a guy who has been to the proverbial mountaintop and whose whole reputation is staked on his integrity..........

His reputation will be based on the success or failure of President Bush, he has to fight for what he believes is right and so does everyone else in the room, that in and of itself isn't news, but the way it is being done semi-publicly I think must make things far more bitter and personal than they otherwise would be.

[codeorama]

Originally posted by fansince62

Code...cool...if someone one day reports that you are guilty of a terrible lie or transgression.....I won't bother asking you for confirmation....I'll believe it, right? Because you would lie about it anyway, right?

I understand what you are saying, but let me add that I'm not presiding on a jury nor do I have any authority/power to harm or defame Powell or the bush admin. I'm just a lowly Skins fan that figures it probably true. If I were on a jury and had to "convict", then obviously that's a different story.

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

Here's the actual U.S. News article referenced by AFP.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030609/usnews/9intell.htm

Nation & World 6/9/03

Truth and consequences

New questions about U.S. intelligence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass terror

By Bruce B. Auster, Mark Mazzetti and Edward T. Pound

On the evening of February 1, two dozen American officials gathered in a spacious conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. The time had come to make the public case for war against Iraq. For six hours that Saturday, the men and women of the Bush administration argued about what Secretary of State Colin Powell should--and should not--say at the United Nations Security Council four days later. Not all the secret intelligence about Saddam Hussein's misdeeds, they found, stood up to close scrutiny. At one point during the rehearsal, Powell tossed several pages in the air. "I'm not reading this," he declared. "This is bulls- - -."

Just how good was America's intelligence on Iraq? Seven weeks after the end of the war, no hard evidence has been turned up on the ground to support the charge that Iraq posed an imminent threat to U.S. national security--no chemical weapons in the field, no Scud missiles in the western desert, no biological agents. At least not yet. As a result, questions are being raised about whether the Bush administration overstated the case against Saddam Hussein. History shows that the Iraqi regime used weapons of mass terror against Iraqi Kurds and during the war against Iran in the 1980s. But it now appears that American intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs was sometimes sketchy, occasionally politicized, and frequently the subject of passionate disputes inside the government. Today, the CIA is conducting a review of its prewar intelligence, at the request of the House Intelligence Committee, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has conceded that Iraq may have destroyed its chemical weapons months before the war.

The dossier

The question remains: What did the Bush administration know-- or think it knew--on the eve of war? In the six days before Powell went to the U.N., an intense, closed-door battle raged over the U.S. intelligence dossier that had been compiled on Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction and its links to terrorists. Holed up at the CIA night and day, a team of officials vetted volumes of intelligence purporting to show that Iraq posed a grave threat. Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, were among those who participated in some sessions. What follows is an account of the struggle to find common ground on a bill of particulars against Saddam. Interviews with more than a dozen officials reveal that many pieces of intelligence--including information the administration had already cited publicly--did not stand up to scrutiny and had to be dropped from the text of Powell's U.N. speech.

Vice President Cheney's office played a major role in the secret debates and pressed for the toughest critique of Saddam's regime, administration officials say. The first draft of Powell's speech was written by Cheney's staff and the National Security Council. Days before the team first gathered at the CIA, a group of officials assembled in the White House Situation Room to hear Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, lay out an indictment of the Iraqi regime--"a Chinese menu" of charges, one participant recalls, that Powell might use in his U.N. speech. Not everyone in the administration was impressed, however. "It was over the top and ran the gamut from al Qaeda to human rights to weapons of mass destruction," says a senior official. "They were unsubstantiated assertions, in my view."

Powell, apparently, agreed. So one week before he was to address the U.N. Security Council, he created a team, which set up shop at the CIA, and directed it to provide him with an intelligence report based on more solid information. "Powell was acutely aware of the need to be completely accurate," says the senior official, "and that our national reputation was on the line."

The team, at first, tried to follow a 45-page White House script, taken from Libby's earlier presentation. But there were too many problems--some assertions, for instance, were not supported by solid or adequate sourcing, several officials say. Indeed, some of the damning information simply could not be proved.

One example, included in the script, focused on intelligence indicating that an Iraqi official had approved the acquisition of sensitive software from an Australian company. The concern was that the software would allow the regime to understand the topography of the United States. That knowledge, coupled with unmanned aerial vehicles, might one day enable Iraq to attack America with biological or chemical weapons. That was the allegation. Tenet had briefed Cheney and others. Cheney, says a senior official, embraced the intelligence.

The White House instructed Powell to include the charge in his presentation. When the Powell team at the CIA examined the matter, however, it became clear that the information was not ironclad. CIA analysts, it turns out, couldn't determine after further review whether the software had, in fact, been delivered to Iraq or whether the Iraqis intended to use it for nefarious purposes. One senior official, briefed on the allegation, says the software wasn't sophisticated enough to pose a threat to the United States. Powell omitted the allegation from his U.N. speech.

It had taken just one day for the team assembled at the CIA to trip over the fault line dividing the Bush administration. For months, the vice president's office and the Pentagon had been more aggressive than either State or the CIA when it came to making the case against Iraq.

Veteran intelligence officers were dismayed. "The policy decisions weren't matching the reports we were reading every day," says an intelligence official. In September 2002, U.S. News has learned, the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a classified assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons. It concluded: "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons . . . ." At about the same time, Rumsfeld told Congress that Saddam's "regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas." Rumsfeld's critics say that the secretary tended to assert things as fact even when intelligence was murky. "What we have here is advocacy, not intelligence work," says Patrick Lang, a former top DIA and CIA analyst on Iraq. "I don't think [administration officials] were lying; I just think they did a poor job. It's not the intelligence community. It's these guys in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who were playing the intelligence community."

Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's top policy adviser, defended the intelligence analysis used in making the case for war and says it was inevitable that the "least developed" intelligence would be dropped from Powell's speech. "With intelligence, you get a snippet of information here, a glimpse of something there," he said. "It is inherently sketchy in most cases."

In a written statement provided to U.S. News, the CIA's Tenet says: "Our role is to call it like we see it--to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think, and what we base it on. . . . The integrity of our process was maintained throughout, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong."

In those first days of February, the disputed material was put under the microscope. The marathon meetings, which included five rehearsals of the Powell presentation, lasted six days. According to a senior official, Powell would read an item. Then he would ask CIA officers there--including Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin--for the source of the information. "The secretary of state insisted that every piece of evidence be solid. Some others felt you could put circumstantial evidence in, and what matters is the totality of it," says one participant. "So you had material that ended up on the cutting-room floor."

And plenty was cut. Sometimes it was because information wasn't credible, sometimes because Powell didn't want his speech to get too long, sometimes because Tenet insisted on protecting sources and methods. At the last minute, for instance, the officials agreed to drop an electronic intercept of Iraqis describing the torture of a donkey. On the tape, the men laughed as they described what happened when a drop of a lethal substance touched the animal's skin.

Thin gruel

The back and forth between the team at the CIA and the White House intensified. The script from the White House was whittled down, then discarded. Finally, according to several participants, the National Security Council offered up three more papers: one on Iraq's ties to terrorism, one on weapons of mass destruction, one on human-rights violations. The document on terrorism was 38 pages, double spaced. By the time the team at the CIA was done with it, half a dozen pages remained. Powell was so unimpressed with the information on al Qaeda that he decided to bury it at the end of his speech, according to officials. Even so, NSC officials kept pushing for Powell to include the charge that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. He refused.

By Monday night, February 3, the presentation was taking final shape. Powell wanted no doubts that the CIA stood behind the intelligence, so, according to one official, he told Tenet: "George, you're coming with me." On Tuesday, some members of the team decamped to New York, where Powell took a room at the Waldorf-Astoria. Participants ran two full dress rehearsals complete with place cards indicating where other members of the Security Council would be sitting. The next morning, Powell delivered his speech, as scheduled. Tenet was sitting right behind him.

Today, the mystery is what happened to Iraq's terror weapons. "Everyone believed they would find it," says a senior official. "I have never seen intelligence agencies in this government and other governments so united on one subject."

Mirages

Were they right? Powell and Tenet were convinced that chemical agents had been deployed to field units. None have been found. War planners used the intelligence when targeting suspected weapons of mass destruction sites. Yet bomb-damage assessments found that none of the targets contained chemical or biological weapons. "What we don't know at this point," says an Air Force war planner, "is what was bad intelligence, what was bad timing, what was bad luck."

As for the al Qaeda tie, defense officials told U.S. News last week they had learned of a potentially significant link between Saddam's regime and Osama bin Laden's organization. A captured senior member of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, has told interrogators about meetings between Iraqi intelligence officials and top members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group that merged with al Qaeda in the 1990s. The prisoner also described $300,000 in Iraqi transfers to the organization to pay for attacks in Egypt. The transfers were said to have been authorized by Saddam Hussein. "It's a single-source report," says one defense official. "But is this the first time anyone has told us something like this? Yeah."

Senior administration officials say they remain convinced that weapons of mass destruction will turn up. The CIA and the Pentagon reported last week that two trucks seized in Iraq were apparently used as mobile biological weapons labs, though no biological agents were found. A senior counterterrorism official says the administration also believes that biological and chemical weapons have been hidden in vast underground complexes. "You can find it out in the open, but if you put this stuff underground or underwater," he says, "there is no signature and it doesn't show up." He added that the Pentagon is using small robots, outfitted with sensors and night-vision equipment, to get into and explore "heavily booby-trapped" underground complexes, some larger than football fields. "People are getting discouraged that they haven't found it," he says. "They are looking for a master source, a person who can say where the stuff is located."

Some 300 sites have been inspected so far; there are an additional 600 to go, and the list is growing, as captured Iraqis provide new leads. But what if those leads turn up nothing? "It would be," says a senior administration official, "a colossal intelligence failure."

[phishhead]

ASF,

What is your opinion on planting WMD?

And if its important(which it is), why haven't we?

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

Originally posted by phishhead

ASF,

What is your opinion on planting WMD?

And if its important(which it is), why haven't we?

I'm sure senior administration officials (Cheney / Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz) would like to plant such evidence, and they would do it if they felt they could get away with it. At this point, they could argue it was in the national interest to do so (for U.S. credibility in the continuing "war on terror").

They would be stymied in this effort if the U.S. military and CIA did not share their view that the ends justify the means. I happen to have more respect for the military and CIA at the moment than the senior administration (excepting Powell), so this could be an interesting faceoff.

The loophole would be to use foreign intelligence operatives to accomplish the planting of evidence. The way that Bush and Blair keep trumpeting how "sure" they are that WMDs will turn up -- against all empirical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis who could flip for a lucrative squeal -- tells me that Bush and Blair know something about the end of this story.

At this point, Bush and Blair are too out of step with everyone else in the military and CIA, who by all accounts are just going through the motions looking for WMDs. People closest to the situation don't believe they will find WMDs, but the leaders with the most power (Bush and Blair) haven't waivered in the slightest. If they were worried, they'd be hedging their bets more in public.

So, if I were betting money, I'd bet that something will turn up, and that "something" will be WMDs planted by us, likely through foreign intelligence operatives.

As to which "foreign intelligence operatives" could do this, there is a rich list of possibilities. They include the "Iraqi National Congress" headed by that fugitive from justice, Chalabi, who's on the Rumsfeld payroll for many millions of dollars. That money isn't for charity and goodwill.

[panel]

When it comes down to it, It all comes down to the sorce, I will trust the US government, before I trust a USnews.com artical with no hints to where it got its leads.

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

Originally posted by Atlanta Skins Fan

Here's the actual U.S. News article referenced by AFP.

Some 300 sites have been inspected so far; there are an additional 600 to go, and the list is growing, as captured Iraqis provide new leads. But what if those leads turn up nothing? "It would be," says a senior administration official, "a colossal intelligence failure."

This is spin by a senior administration official, pinning it on an "intelligence failure". There was never solid evidence for WMDs: that lack of evidence is not the source of the failure.

The "colossal failure" was the drive by this administration to attack Iraq, with or without WMDs, with or without Hussein.

They wrote this down in their PNAC think-tank days, in September 2000 -- long before 9/11. It's not a surprise.

[codeorama]

Originally posted by panel

When it comes down to it, It all comes down to the sorce, I will trust the US government, before I trust a USnews.com artical with no hints to where it got its leads.

What part of US history would allow you to use "trust" and "government" in the same sentance...

[fansince62]

asf....friend to genocide everywhere.......

[JimboDaMan]

Here's some commentary that expresses quite well what a lot of people are thinking. This ain't Sean Penn or Barbara Bignose either, Mark Bowden is the author of Black Hawk Down and generally a friend to this administration.

link

The Point | U.S. has gained little if Bush lied about reason for war

By Mark Bowden

For The Inquirer

It has been two months since the United States and Britain went to war against Saddam Hussein, and coalition forces have yet to discover convincing evidence of the weapons programs that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair said were its primary cause.

Some of those who supported the war beforehand did so solely on the basis of ending tyranny. The mass graves found throughout Iraq, and widespread stories of torture and atrocity, come as no surprise to those who had studied or endured the Baathist dictator's regime. Those who opposed the war for any reason ought to be doing some soul-searching about the kind of horrors they were prepared to leave in place.

But it is true that Hussein represented only one of many thuggish regimes, and that the United States is not about to go to war against them all. I supported this war because I believed Bush and Blair when they said Iraq was manufacturing and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons in the hands of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations that shared Hussein's hostile designs made such a threat a defense priority - or so the argument went.

Early this month, the U.S. military announced that it had found three mobile laboratories that were most likely designed to manufacture chemical or biological weapons, the types of labs that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred to in making his argument for war before the U.N. Security Council. The discoveries were suggestive but hardly convincing evidence of the specific, tangible threat repeatedly outlined by the President. With the authors of Iraq's illicit-weapons program now in custody, we should expect to see soon, or to have seen already, the facilities and stockpiles we and most of the rest of the world believed Hussein possessed.

They may yet be found, but it is beginning to look as though the skeptics in this case were right. If so, I was taken in by this administration, and America and Great Britain were led to war under false pretenses.

Events have moved so swiftly, and Hussein's toppling has posed so many new pressing problems, that it would be easy to lose sight of this issue, but it is critically important. I can imagine no greater breach of public trust than to mislead a country into war. A strong case might have been made to go after Hussein just because he posed a potential threat to us and the region, because of his support for suicide bombers, and because of his ruthless oppression of his own people. But this is not the case our President chose to make.

Truth in public life has always been a slippery commodity. We expect campaigning politicians or debating journalists to pitch and spin. Facts are marshaled to support arguments and causes; convenient ones are trumpeted and inconvenient ones played down or ignored. This is the political game.

But when the President of the United States addresses the nation and the world, I expect the spinning to stop. He represents not just a party or a cause, but the American people. When President Bush argued that Hussein possessed stockpiles of illicit and deadly poisons, he was presumably doing so on the basis of intelligence briefings and evidence that the public could not see. He was asking us to trust him, to trust his office, to trust that he was acting legitimately in our self-defense. That's something very different from engaging in a bold policy of attempting to remake the Middle East, or undertaking a humanitarian mission to end oppression. Neither of these two justifications would have been likely to garner widespread public support. But national defense? That's an argument the President can always win.

I trusted Bush, and unless something big develops on the weapons front in Iraq soon, it appears as though I was fooled by him. Perhaps he himself was taken in by his intelligence and military advisers. If so, he ought to be angry as hell, because ultimately he bears the responsibility.

It suggests a strain of zealotry in this White House that regards the question of war as just another political debate. It isn't. More than 100 fine Americans were killed in this conflict, dozens of British soldiers, and many thousands of Iraqis. Nobody gets killed or maimed in Capitol Hill maneuvers over spending plans, or battles over federal court appointments. War is a special case. It is the most serious step a nation can take, and it deserves the highest measure of seriousness and integrity.

When a president lies or exaggerates in making an argument for war, when he spins the facts to sell his case, he betrays his public trust, and he diminishes the credibility of his office and our country. We are at war. What we lost in this may yet end up being far more important than what we gained.

[Kilmer17]

I yearn for the days when the white house was full of yesmen and coverup artists. A white house not focused on protecting the US and our interests, but only interested in protecting the power of the man behind the desk.

Im glad they all have different opinions. Im glad they all feel passionate and strong about those opinions. Im glad that they come to a consensus and even if one side wins, all players stand united behind the decision.

[codeorama]

Great find Jimbo... he sums up my views in 2 parts..

1. Saddams not the only "psyco dictator" and we surely are not going after all of them and

2. We were lied to about the cause for war.

Well Said..