Officer Says Military Blocked Sharing of Files on Terrorists

[5:01 am]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/politics/17intel.html?ei=5065&en=2aeff500108cbed3&ex=1124942400&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print

Officer Says Military Blocked Sharing of Files on Terrorists
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - A military intelligence team repeatedly contacted the F.B.I. in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a veteran Army intelligence officer who said he had now decided to risk his career by discussing the information publicly.

The officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said military lawyers later blocked the team from sharing any of its information with the bureau.

Colonel Shaffer said in an interview on Monday night that the small, highly classified intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified the terrorist ringleader, Mohamed Atta, and three other future hijackers by name by mid-2000, and tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the Washington field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to share its information.

But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the F.B.I. at the last minute, which left the bureau without information that Colonel Shaffer said might have led to Mr. Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 attacks were still being planned.

"I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued," Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001.

He said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Special Operations Command of the Defense Department had canceled the F.B.I. meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States.

"It was because of the chain of command saying we're not going to pass on information - if something goes wrong, we'll get blamed," he said.

The Defense Department did not dispute the account from Colonel Shaffer, a 42-year-old native of Kansas City, Mo., who is the first military officer associated with the program to acknowledge his role publicly.

At the same time, the department said in a statement that it was "working to gain more clarity on this issue" and that "it's too early to comment on findings related to the program identified as Able Danger." The F.B.I. referred calls about Colonel Shaffer to the Pentagon.

The account from Colonel Shaffer, a reservist who is also working part time for the Pentagon, corroborates much of the information that the Sept. 11 commission has acknowledged it received about Able Danger last July from a Navy captain who was also involved with the program but whose name has not been made public. In a statement issued last week, the leaders of the commission said the panel had concluded that the intelligence program "did not turn out to be historically significant."

The statement said that while the commission did learn about Able Danger in 2003 and immediately requested Pentagon files about it, none of the documents turned over by the Defense Department referred to Mr. Atta or any of the other hijackers.

Colonel Shaffer said that his role in Able Danger was as liaison with the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, and that he was not an intelligence analyst. The interview with Colonel Shaffer on Monday was arranged for The New York Times and Fox News by Representative Curt Weldon, the Pennsylvania Republican who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a champion of data-mining programs like Able Danger.

Colonel Shaffer's lawyer, Mark Zaid, said in an interview that he was concerned that Colonel Shaffer was facing retaliation from the Defense Department, first for having talked to the Sept. 11 commission staff in October 2003 and now for talking with news organizations.

Mr. Zaid said that Colonel Shaffer's security clearance was suspended last year because of what the lawyer said were a series of "petty allegations" involving $67 in personal charges on a military cellphone. He said that despite the disciplinary action, Colonel Shaffer had been promoted this year from major.

Colonel Shaffer said he had decided to allow his name to be used in part because of his frustration with the statement issued last week by the commission leaders, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton.

The commission said in its final report last year that American intelligence agencies had not identified Mr. Atta as a terrorist before Sept. 11, 2001, when he flew an American Airlines jet into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York.

A commission spokesman did not return repeated phone calls on Tuesday for comment. A Democratic member of the commission, Richard Ben-Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor, said in an interview on Tuesday that while he could not judge the credibility of the information from Colonel Shaffer and others, the Pentagon needed to "provide a clear and comprehensive explanation regarding what information it had in its possession regarding Mr. Atta."

"And if these assertions are credible," Mr. Ben-Veniste continued, "the Pentagon would need to explain why it was that the 9/11 commissioners were not provided this information despite requests for all information regarding Able Danger."

Colonel Shaffer said he had provided information about Able Danger and its identification of Mr. Atta in a private meeting in October 2003 with members of the Sept. 11 commission staff when they visited Afghanistan, where he was then serving. Commission members have disputed that, saying that they do not recall hearing Mr. Atta's name during the briefing and that the name did not appear in documents about Able Danger that were later turned over by the Pentagon.

"I would implore the 9/11 commission to support a follow-on investigation to ascertain what the real truth is," Colonel Shaffer said in the interview this week. "I do believe the 9/11 commission should have done that job: figuring out what went wrong with Able Danger."

"This was a good news story because, before 9/11, you had an element of the military - our unit - which was actually out looking for Al Qaeda," he continued. "I can't believe the 9/11 commission would somehow believe that the historical value was not relevant."

Colonel Shaffer said that because he was not an intelligence analyst, he was not involved in the details of the procedures used in Able Danger to glean information from terrorist databases, nor was he aware of which databases had supplied the information that might have led to the name of Mr. Atta or other terrorists so long before the Sept. 11 attacks.

But he said he did know that Able Danger had made use of publicly available information from government immigration agencies, from Internet sites and from paid search engines like LexisNexis.

[FORD]

Hmmm.... wonder why Agent Zimmerman is using an alias?

[DrMaddVibe]

http://homepage.mac.com/orosen/.cv/orosen/Public/Bill%20Clinton%20Turns%20Down%20Usa4484-binhex.hqx

Bill Clinton explaining in his own words, how the Sudan offered us Bin Laden on a silver platter, but we didn't take him because Bubba didn't think we could try and convict him in an American court.

The Sudan booted him out, and then Bin Laden goes to Afghanistan, forging a relationship with the Taliban and the rest is, well, history. Hey, at least he "pleaded with the Saudis to take him." If we couldn't convict a savage who declared war against us, perhaps Janet Reno wasn't the right man for the job.

[DrMaddVibe]

http://www.gsnmagazine.com/aug_05/dod_lawyers.html

“Congressman Weldon has met with several people who were working on Able Danger to identify where Al Qaeda was set up around the world,” said Caso. “They made the suggestion that this information be passed to the FBI, and lawyers within the Defense Department -- whether within Special Ops or within OSD, we don’t know -- and the lawyers said, ‘No’.”

[DrMaddVibe]

http://www.judicialwatch.org/archive/2005/Usama.pdf

Clinton State Department Documents Outlined bin Laden Threat to the United States in Summer 1996

“Top Secret” Analysis Warned Clinton Administration

"[bin Laden] has Wherewithal to Strike U.S. Interests"

(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released two declassified “Top Secret” State Department documents that warned Clinton administration officials of the activities and influence of Osama bin Laden following his alleged “expulsion” from Sudan in May 1996. The documents, authored by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, discuss bin Laden’s travels, his prolonged stay in Afghanistan, financial networks, anti-Western threats in press interviews, ties to the Khobar Towers bombing and bin Laden’s “emboldened” threats against U.S. interests.



The State Department documents were produced to Judicial Watch last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed with the State Department on December 11, 2001 concerning the government of Sudan’s reported offer to share intelligence files on Osama bin Laden. The Clinton administration also reportedly rebuffed an offer by Sudanese officials to turn bin Laden himself over to the U.S.



According to the declassified documents, bin Laden’s many passports and his private plane allow him considerable freedom to travel “with little fear of being intercepted or tracked.” Bin Laden reportedly even traveled to London where he gave a press interview subsequent to his departure from Sudan. The report also warns that bin Laden’s prolonged stay in Afghanistan “could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum.” One analysis document, dated July 18, 1996, asks the provocative question: “Terrorism/Usama bin Ladin: Who’s Chasing Whom.”



The documents predict that even if bin Laden were forced to keep on the move, it would prove no more than an inconvenience since, “. . . his informal and transnational network of businesses and associates remains resilient.” The report goes on to explain that bin Ladin on the move, “. . .can retain the capability to support individuals and groups who have the motive and wherewithal to attack U.S. interests almost worldwide.”



“This is not a case of hindsight being 20/20,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These documents prove the Clinton administration knew the danger Osama bin Laden posed to the United States back in 1996 and yet failed to take any meaningful action to stop him.”



Click here to read the actual Clinton State Department documents uncovered by Judicial Watch, and click here to read a New York Times article written about Judicial Watch’s discovery.

[Nickdfresh]

Myths Debunked
Clinton Didn't Fight Terrorism

Myth: Clinton Did Nothing To Fight Terrorism

PBS Frontline

Several days after the millennium celebrations, President Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, announced that in the weeks before the New Year, law enforcement had disrupted terrorist cells "in eight countries and attacks were almost certainly prevented." He didn't give details, but FRONTLINE has compiled the following list from intelligence sources and press reports… Click here for more.

The Center for Democracy and Technology

Clinton Administration Counter Terrorism Initiative

Washington Post

The Covert Hunt for bin Laden
Broad Effort Launched After '98 Attacks

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 19, 2001; Page A01

Beginning on Aug. 7, 1998, the day that al Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Clinton directed a campaign of increasing scope and lethality against bin Laden's network that carried through his final days in office.

• In addition to a secret "finding" to authorize covert action, which has been reported before, Clinton signed three highly classified Memoranda of Notification expanding the available tools. In succession, the president authorized killing instead of capturing bin Laden, then added several of al Qaeda's senior lieutenants, and finally approved the shooting down of private civilian aircraft on which they flew.

• The Clinton administration ordered the Navy to maintain two Los Angeles-class attack submarines on permanent station in the nearest available waters, enabling the U.S. military to place Tomahawk cruise missiles on any target in Afghanistan within about six hours of receiving the order.

• Three times after Aug. 20, 1998, when Clinton ordered the only missile strike of his presidency against bin Laden's organization, the CIA came close enough to pinpointing bin Laden that Clinton authorized final preparations to launch. In each case, doubts about the intelligence aborted the mission.

• The CIA's directorate of operations recruited, trained, paid or equipped surrogate forces in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and among tribal militias inside Afghanistan, with the common purpose of capturing or killing bin Laden. The Pakistani channel, disclosed previously in The Washington Post, and its Uzbek counterpart, which has not been reported before, never bore fruit. Inside Afghanistan, tribal allies twice reported to their CIA handlers that they fought skirmishes with bin Laden's forces, but they inflicted no verified damage.

• Operatives of the CIA's Special Activities Division made at least one clandestine entry into Afghanistan in 1999. They prepared a desert airstrip to extract bin Laden, if captured, or to evacuate U.S. tribal allies, if cornered. The Special Collection Service, a joint project of the CIA and the National Security Agency, also slipped into Afghanistan to place listening devices within range of al Qaeda's tactical radios.

The lines Clinton opted not to cross continued to define U.S. policy in his successor's first eight months. Clinton stopped short of using more decisive military instruments, including U.S. ground forces, and declined to expand the reach of the war to the Taliban regime that hosted bin Laden and his fighters after 1996.

Not until the catastrophe of Sept. 11 -- when terrorists used hijacked airliners to destroy the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon -- did President Bush obliterate those boundaries…

www.Salon.com

Don't blame Clinton
Conservatives who once ridiculed and obstructed the former president's aggressive efforts to fight terrorism are now trying to pin Sept. 11 on him. They have a lot of nerve. Part 2 of a debate.

By Joe Conason

Jan. 15, 2002 | When terrorists first tried to take down the World Trade Center with a truck bomb in February 1993, there was no organized outcry of recrimination against George Herbert Walker Bush, who had left the Oval Office a scant six weeks earlier. Nobody sought political advantage by blaming Bush for the intelligence failures that had allowed the terrorist perpetrators to conspire undetected for more than three years…

Tribune Media Services

Don't blame it on Bill Clinton

October 18, 2001 Posted: 12:24 PM EDT (1624 GMT)

By Bill Press

Gingrich and company derail the president and the country for two whole years over a minor sex scandal in the White House -- magnifying one act of oral sex into a full time, $50 million Independent Counsel investigation, weeks of House Judiciary Committee hearings, impeachment by the House of Representatives and trial in the Senate -- and then they accuse Clinton of not staying focused on government business!

Have they no shame?

The truth, of course, is just the opposite. Given how distracted he was by the Lewinsky scandal, (which was of his own making, but blown out of proportion by his political enemies), it’s amazing Clinton was able to continue governing at all. And during that time, as The Washington Post reveals, he did a great deal to combat terrorism, much of it behind the scenes.

Clinton’s most public response, of course, were the cruise missile attacks of 1998, directed against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and the Sudan, following the terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Operating on limited intelligence -- at that time, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tazikistan refused to share information on the terrorists whereabouts inside Afghanistan -- U. S. strikes missed bin Laden by only a couple of hours.

Even so, Clinton was accused of only firing missiles in order to divert media attention from the Lewinsky hearings. A longer campaign would have stirred up even more criticism.

So Clinton tried another tack. He sponsored legislation to freeze the financial assets of international organizations suspected of funneling money to bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network -- identical to orders given by President Bush this month -- but it was killed, on behalf of big banks, by Republican Senator Phil Gramm of Texas…

In 1998, Clinton also signed a secret agreement with Uzbekistan to begin joint covert operations against Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. U.S. Special Forces have been training there ever since, which is why the Pentagon was immediately able to use Uzbekistan as a staging area for forays into Afghanistan…

Clinton targeted bin Laden even before he moved to Afghanistan. In 1996, his administration brokered an agreement with the government of Sudan to arrest the terrorist leader and turn him over to Saudi Arabia. For 10 weeks, Clinton tried to persuade the Saudis to accept the offer. They refused. With no cooperation from the Saudis, the deal fell apart.

Conclusion: Rohrbacher, Limbaugh, Gingrich are dead wrong when they blame Bill Clinton for September 11. Did Clinton get Osama bin Laden “dead or alive?” No, but he came close, several times -- long before tracking down terrorists became a national priority.

Myth: Clinton bombed an Aspirin Factory

CNN

U.S. claims more evidence linking Sudanese plant to chemical weapons

September 1, 1998
plant

The destroyed Shifa Pharmaceutical facility


Web posted at: 7:01 p.m. EDT (2301 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The United States had been suspicious of the Shifa Pharmaceutical facility in Sudan for two years, a State Department official said Tuesday, after a December 1996 report showed heavy security around the plant…

"We had previously collected samples from other suspected sites in Sudan," the official said, "but only the sample from the Shifa facility tested positively for chemical weapons precursors. We know of no other factors in the environment that could result in a positive EMPTA signature." [Emphasis added.]

MSNBC

U.S. warms to ‘rogue’ Sudan regime

By Bob Arnot

Feb. 4, 2002

In August 1998, just after the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, the Clinton administration responded with Tomahawk missile strikes against alleged bin Laden training camps in Afghanistan, and a pharmaceutical plant outside Khartoum.
Image: Sudan-us-bombs-factory
U.S. missiles destroyed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum on
Aug. 20, 1998

Washington claimed that nerve gas precursors were found in soil samples taken there and the CIA stands by those claims. Sudan denied the charges and it emerged later that at least some of the U.S. evidence was very thin. [“Thin” does NOT mean nonexistent.]

Myth: The Sudanese offered to turn bin Laden over to the U.S., and Clinton refused

Washington Post Service

In '96, Sudan Offered to Arrest bin Laden

Barton Gellman

Thursday, October 4, 2001

Saudis Balked at Accepting U.S. Plan

WASHINGTON The government of Sudan, using a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in custody in Saudi Arabia, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.

The Clinton administration struggled to find a way to accept the offer in secret contacts that stretched from a meeting at hotel in Arlington, Virginia, on March 3, 1996, to a fax that closed the door on the effort 10 weeks later.

Unable to persuade the Saudis to accept Mr. bin Laden, and lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts, the Clinton administration finally gave up on the capture…

The New York Times

Many Say U.S. Planned for Terror but Failed to Take Action

By THE NEW YORK TIMES December 30, 2001

Diplomacy and Politics
A Growing Effort Against bin Laden

As Mr. Clinton prepared his re-election bid in 1996, the administration made several crucial decisions. Recognizing the growing significance of Mr. bin Laden, the C.I.A. created a virtual station, code-named Alex, to track his activities around the world.

In the Middle East, American diplomats pressed the hard-line Islamic regime of Sudan to expel Mr. bin Laden, even if that pushed him back into Afghanistan.

To build support for this effort among Middle Eastern governments, the State Department circulated a dossier that accused Mr. bin Laden of financing radical Islamic causes around the world.

The document implicated him in several attacks on Americans, including the 1992 bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen, where American troops had stayed on their way to Somalia. It also said Mr. bin Laden's associates had trained the Somalis who killed 18 American servicemen in Mogadishu in 1993.

Sudanese officials met with their C.I.A. and State Department counterparts and signaled that they might turn Mr. bin Laden over to another country. Saudi Arabia and Egypt were possibilities.

State Department and C.I.A. officials urged both Egypt and Saudi Arabia to accept him, according to former Clinton officials. "But both were afraid of the domestic reaction and refused," one recalled.

Critics of the administration's effort said this was an early missed opportunity to destroy Al Qaeda. Mr. Clinton himself would have had to lean hard on the Saudi and Egyptian governments. The White House believed no amount of pressure would change the outcome, and Mr. Clinton risked spending valuable capital on a losing cause. "We were not about to have the president make a call and be told no," one official explained.

Sudan obliquely hinted that it might turn Mr. bin Laden over to the United States, a former official said. But the Justice Department reviewed the case and concluded in the spring of 1996 that it did not have enough evidence to charge him with the attacks on American troops in Yemen and Somalia.

This article was reported by Judith Miller, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. and written by Ms. Miller.

[Jeff Gerth broke the Whitewater story in 1992, after listening only to Clinton’s Arkansas political enemies. He has never been a friend of Clinton, so it isn’t surprising how this article spins the Clinton administration’s inability to convince another government to take bin Laden.]

Link (http://www.makethemaccountable.com/myth/ClintonAndTerrorism.htm)

[DrMaddVibe]

Clinton Lawyers Fretted Over bin Laden's Comfort

The CIA's former bin Laden desk chief revealed Thursday night that Clinton administration lawyers warned counterterrorism agents that Osama bin Laden had to be kept as comfortable as possible if they captured him during planned raids into Afghanistan.

"The lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden`s safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him," former bin Laden desk chief Michael Scheuer told MSNBC's "Hardball."

"We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, [for] special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair," Scheuer explained. "They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn't irritate his beard."

"The lawyers are the bane of the intelligence community," the former CIA man lamented.

Concerns like that, as well as foot-dragging by the White House, resulted in one missed opportunity after another to get the al-Qaida terror mastermind, Scheuer said.

"We had at least eight to 10 chances to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in 1998 and 1999. And the government on all occasions decided that the information was not good enough to act," he claimed.

Although sharply critical of President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, the CIA counterterrorism specialist put the blame for bin Laden's escape firmly on Clinton.

"In terms of which administration had more chances, Mr. Clinton's administration had far more chances to kill Osama bin Laden than Mr. Bush has until this day," Scheuer said.

[DrMaddVibe]

Monday, Aug. 22, 2005 9:27 p.m. EDT

New Witness Backs Able Danger Claims

A second member of an elite military intelligence team has come forward to corroborate claims that the group, code named Able Danger, identified lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta more than a year before the 9/11 attacks.

"Atta was identified by Able Danger in January-February of 2000," Navy Capt. Scott J. Phillpott told Fox News and the New York Times.

"I will not discuss the issues outside of my chain of command and the Department of Defense," he insisted. "But my story is consistent . . . I have nothing else to say."

Phillpott's brief but emphatic comments back the statements of Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who came forward last week to confirm claims by Rep. Curt Weldon that the Able Danger group had identified Atta.

Updating reporters on the Pentagon's own investigation of Able Danger, spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said that material turned over by Phillpott contained no evidence to support the Atta claim.

But additional corroboration for Shaffer and Phillpott's accounts was provided by James D. Smith, a former Defense Department contractor who said he worked on a chart for Able Danger before the 9/11 attacks.

Smith told the New York Times that he kept a copy of the chart, including a photo of Mohamed Atta, on his office wall at Andrews Air Force Base.

[Nickdfresh]

Agent Defends Military Unit's Data on 9/11 Hijackers
Wednesday, August 17, 2005

WASHINGTON — Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer (search), a military intelligence specialist who worked on a secret pre-Sept. 11 investigative unit called Able Danger (search), has gone on the record, telling FOX News that he personally briefed staffers with the Sept. 11 commission in October 2003 about Mohamed Atta.

A statement from the commission — formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States — said that three staffers attended the meeting, but none, including Executive Director Phil Zelikow, remembers Shaffer mentioning Atta.

Still, the intelligence agent is standing by his claim that he told them that the lead hijacker in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks had been identified in the summer of 2000 as an Al Qaeda operative living in the United States.

"What we talked about to the Sept. 11 commission was we found that these guys matched a pattern, a pattern, which in this case with Atta and the other four terrorists, matched the Brooklyn location," Shaffer said in his first television interview.

He said the intelligence unit used algorithms based on many items of information that popped out patterns that linked individuals to a group or location. The other three terrorists linked were Khalid al-Mihdhar (search), Nawaf al-Hazmi (search) and Marwan al-Shehhi (search).

Shaffer's briefing with the staffers took place in Bagram, Afghanistan. A Sept. 11 commission spokesman said the commission made two broad requests to the Pentagon for information relating to Able Danger, but received nothing to back up Shaffer's claim.

"None of the documents turned over to the commission mention Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers," the spokesman said. Shaffer said the commission never received the whole story.

"I'm told confidently by the person who moved the material over, that the Sept. 11 commission received two briefcase-sized containers of documents. I can tell you for a fact that would not be one-twentieth of the information that Able Danger consisted of during the time we spent" investigating, Shaffer said.

Shaffer said in the late summer of 2000, he tried three times to set up meetings between the FBI's Washington field office and officials with Able Danger who believed the information about Atta should be shared with domestic law enforcement.

Michael Mason, head of the FBI field office, said it's possible the meetings were arranged, but that cannot be verified by any means.

It is "premature at best to suggest that the information gathered at such a meeting would have prevented the events of Sept. 11," Mason added.

Shaffer said each of the meetings was cancelled on short notice — by members of the special operations command.

"On these occasions when we had set up these meetings between the FBI and special operations command, special operations command pulled out of all three. They decided not to show up," he said.

Shaffer said the meetings were canceled for a variety of reasons, including concern about the military investigating individuals who were in this country legally. Some of the hijackers had valid visas. They also were concerned that if any fallout came from the FBI's activities, the special operations people feared they would take the hit.

According to two sources, Able Danger was set up in the late 1990s to track Usama bin Laden's terror network worldwide. Shaffer said its omission from the final Sept. 11 commission report makes it a "partial record."

"Leaving out a project targeting Al Qaeda as a global threat a year before we're attacked by Al Qaeda is equivalent to having an investigation into Pearl Harbor and leaving, somehow, out the Japanese," Shaffer said.

FOX News has learned that Shaffer's security clearance was suspended last year over a disputed phone bill and allegations that he had not gone through the proper chain of command to obtain an award for Able Danger. Shaffer's lawyer told FOX News that no formal action has ever been taken against Shaffer — and since then he was promoted by the Army to lieutenant colonel.

A military spokesman told FOX News that the Pentagon wants more clarity on the issue and continues to interview those involved. Shaffer said he has now spoken with senior defense officials.

FOX News' (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,165948,00.html) Catherine Herridge contributed to this report.

I saw this guy interviewed this morning on CNN. He seems very odd, and something tells me his story is increasingly shit....

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by DrMaddVibe
Clinton Lawyers Fretted Over bin Laden's Comfort

The CIA's former bin Laden desk chief revealed Thursday night that Clinton administration lawyers warned counterterrorism agents that Osama bin Laden had to be kept as comfortable as possible if they captured him during planned raids into Afghanistan.

"The lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden`s safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him," former bin Laden desk chief Michael Scheuer told MSNBC's "Hardball."

"We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, [for] special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair," Scheuer explained. "They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn't irritate his beard."

"The lawyers are the bane of the intelligence community," the former CIA man lamented.

Concerns like that, as well as foot-dragging by the White House, resulted in one missed opportunity after another to get the al-Qaida terror mastermind, Scheuer said.

"We had at least eight to 10 chances to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in 1998 and 1999. And the government on all occasions decided that the information was not good enough to act," he claimed.

Although sharply critical of President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, the CIA counterterrorism specialist put the blame for bin Laden's escape firmly on Clinton.

"In terms of which administration had more chances, Mr. Clinton's administration had far more chances to kill Osama bin Laden than Mr. Bush has until this day," Scheuer said.

Just curious, but what did BUSH's lawyers say about BIN LADEN, oh wait! BUSH didn't even know who he was....

Uhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh!

[Warham]

Clinton's not innocent, no matter how you spin it. Bush isn't either.

[FORD]

At least Clinton tried to kill the bastard. Chimpy acts like he never heard of him. Of course that's what he said about Ken Lay too.

[Warham]

Clinton had how many opportunities to have the Sudanese hand him over?

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Warham
Clinton's not innocent, no matter how you spin it. Bush isn't either.

Ahh, but only ONE of the 2 planned to invade and occupy Iraq BEFORE 9/11 even happened.

Even a kool-ade drinking warmonger knows that

[Warham]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
Ahh, but only ONE of the 2 planned to invade and occupy Iraq BEFORE 9/11 even happened.

Even a kool-ade drinking warmonger knows that

I don't disagree with invading Iraq. And what's your proof he planned it before 9/11? Because Poppy was in Saddam's crosshairs in the early 90's?

I do disagree with Clinton planning his daily blowjobs instead of worrying about nabbing bin Laden.

[FORD]

Originally posted by Warham
I don't disagree with invading Iraq. And what's your proof he planned it before 9/11?


http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm

[DrMaddVibe]

Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2005 9:53 a.m. EDT

Pentagon: We Can't Verify Able Danger 9/11 Claims

The Pentagon has been unable to validate claims that a secret intelligence unit identified Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta as a terrorist more than a year before the attacks, a Defense Department spokesman said Monday.

Larry Di Rita said that some research into the matter continues, but thus far there has been no evidence that the intelligence unit, called "Able Danger," came up with information as specific as an officer associated with the program has asserted.

"What we found are mostly general references to terrorist cells," Di Rita said, without providing detail.

That officer, Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said Able Danger identified as terrorists Atta and three other future Sept. 11 hijackers in 2000. But, Shaffer said, military lawyers stopped the unit from sharing the information with the FBI out of concerns about the legality of gathering and sharing information on people in the United States.

Shaffer's assertions have been publicized by Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees.

Di Rita said Pentagon researchers have found no evidence that Able Danger had Mohamed Atta's name. He said he was unsure whether the unit came up with the identities of the other three hijackers but then said that none of Shaffer's specific claims had been validated.

Shaffer himself has not provided any documentary proof, Di Rita said, and he said Shaffer has presented his information as second hand.

Shaffer's attorney, Mark Zaid, responded that Shaffer's assertions will be proven.

"Additional Able Danger team members are coming forward to specifically validate and support Mr. Shaffer's account that several of the 9/11 hijackers, including Mohammed Atta, were identified through their efforts prior to the terrorist attack," Zaid said.

On Monday, Navy Capt. Scott Philpott told Fox News Channel that he had also told the Sept. 11 commission about Atta and Able Danger. In a statement sent to Fox, Philpott wrote: "My story has remained consistent. Atta was identified by Able Danger in early 2000."

Zaid said the Pentagon is looking for documents in the wrong places and talking to the wrong people.

Last week, he said Shaffer does not have documentation related to Able Danger because his security clearance was suspended in March 2004 for "petty and frivolous" reasons. They include a dispute over mileage reimbursement and charges for personal calls on a work cell phone, Zaid said.

Shaffer also has said the Sept. 11 commission failed to investigate his assertions after he spoke to members of the panel in 2003. A statement Aug. 12 by former commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton said the commission did not obtain enough information on the operation to consider it historically significant.

© 2005 The Associated Press

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Warham
I don't disagree with invading Iraq. And what's your proof he planned it before 9/11? Because Poppy was in Saddam's crosshairs in the early 90's?



Are you fucking kidding me?

:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

whatever

[DrMaddVibe]

http://www.9-11pdp.org/press/2005-08-12_pr.pdf#search='able%20danger'

[lucky wilbury]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh

Myth: Clinton bombed an Aspirin Factory

CNN

U.S. claims more evidence linking Sudanese plant to chemical weapons

September 1, 1998
plant

The destroyed Shifa Pharmaceutical facility


Web posted at: 7:01 p.m. EDT (2301 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The United States had been suspicious of the Shifa Pharmaceutical facility in Sudan for two years, a State Department official said Tuesday, after a December 1996 report showed heavy security around the plant…

"We had previously collected samples from other suspected sites in Sudan," the official said, "but only the sample from the Shifa facility tested positively for chemical weapons precursors. We know of no other factors in the environment that could result in a positive EMPTA signature." [Emphasis added.]

MSNBC

U.S. warms to ‘rogue’ Sudan regime

By Bob Arnot

Feb. 4, 2002

In August 1998, just after the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, the Clinton administration responded with Tomahawk missile strikes against alleged bin Laden training camps in Afghanistan, and a pharmaceutical plant outside Khartoum.
Image: Sudan-us-bombs-factory
U.S. missiles destroyed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum on
Aug. 20, 1998

Washington claimed that nerve gas precursors were found in soil samples taken there and the CIA stands by those claims. Sudan denied the charges and it emerged later that at least some of the U.S. evidence was very thin. [“Thin” does NOT mean nonexistent.]




so thats what your going to use to back up bubba yet you proclaim iraq and al queda didn't work with each other? why don't you look at why that factory was targeted:

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040624-112921-3401r.htm

Clinton first linked al Qaeda to Saddam


By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


The Clinton administration talked about firm evidence linking Saddam Hussein's regime to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network years before President Bush made the same statements.

The issue arose again this month after the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States reported there was no "collaborative relationship" between the old Iraqi regime and bin Laden.

Democrats have cited the staff report to accuse Mr. Bush of making inaccurate statements about a linkage. Commission members, including a Democrat and two Republicans, quickly came to the administration's defense by saying there had been such contacts.

In fact, during President Clinton's eight years in office, there were at least two official pronouncements of an alarming alliance between Baghdad and al Qaeda. One came from William S. Cohen, Mr. Clinton's defense secretary. He cited an al Qaeda-Baghdad link to justify the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

Mr. Bush cited the linkage, in part, to justify invading Iraq and ousting Saddam. He said he could not take the risk of Iraq's weapons falling into bin Laden's hands.

The other pronouncement is contained in a Justice Department indictment on Nov. 4, 1998, charging bin Laden with murder in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

The indictment disclosed a close relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam's regime, which included specialists on chemical weapons and all types of bombs, including truck bombs, a favorite weapon of terrorists.

The 1998 indictment said: "Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."

Shortly after the embassy bombings, Mr. Clinton ordered air strikes on al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and on the Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

To justify the Sudanese plant as a target, Clinton aides said it was involved in the production of deadly VX nerve gas. Officials further determined that bin Laden owned a stake in the operation and that its manager had traveled to Baghdad to learn bomb-making techniques from Saddam's weapons scientists.

Mr. Cohen elaborated in March in testimony before the September 11 commission.

He testified that "bin Laden had been living [at the plant], that he had, in fact, money that he had put into this military industrial corporation, that the owner of the plant had traveled to Baghdad to meet with the father of the VX program."

He said that if the plant had been allowed to produce VX that was used to kill thousands of Americans, people would have asked him, " 'You had a manager that went to Baghdad; you had Osama bin Laden, who had funded, at least the corporation, and you had traces of [VX precursor] and you did what? And you did nothing?' Is that a responsible activity on the part of the secretary of defense?"

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by lucky wilbury
so thats what your going to use to back up bubba yet you proclaim iraq and al queda didn't work with each other? why don't you look at why that factory was targeted:

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040624-112921-3401r.htm

Clinton first linked al Qaeda to Saddam


By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


The Clinton administration talked about firm evidence linking Saddam Hussein's regime to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network years before President Bush made the same statements....

[/B]

Yeah, whatever? Did the IRAQIS get yellowcake from NIGER too? This is a clearly mischaracterized report for the MOONIE TIMES...

CLINTON did a hell of a lot more than BUSH ever did in regards to terrorism...And how did he act on the "connection?" Who did we invade as a result

In any case, I prefer to get my sources for real WASHINGTON newpapers...

The Iraq Connection
Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed

By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank
Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47812-2004Jun16.html) Staff Writers
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page A01

The Sept. 11 commission reported yesterday that it has found no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda, challenging one of the Bush administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq.

Along with the contention that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials have often asserted that there were extensive ties between Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network; earlier this year, Cheney said evidence of a link was "overwhelming."

But the report of the commission's staff, based on its access to all relevant classified information, said that there had been contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda but no cooperation. In yesterday's hearing of the panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, a senior FBI official and a senior CIA analyst concurred with the finding.

The staff report said that bin Laden "explored possible cooperation with Iraq" while in Sudan through 1996, but that "Iraq apparently never responded" to a bin Laden request for help in 1994. The commission cited reports of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda after bin Laden went to Afghanistan in 1996, adding, "but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

The finding challenges a belief held by large numbers of Americans about al Qaeda's ties to Hussein. According to a Harris poll in late April, a plurality of Americans, 49 percent to 36 percent, believe "clear evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda has been found."

As recently as Monday, Cheney said in a speech that Hussein "had long-established ties with al Qaeda." Bush, asked on Tuesday to verify or qualify that claim, defended it by pointing to Abu Musab Zarqawi, who has taken credit for a wave of attacks in Iraq.

Bush's Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), sought to profit from the commission's finding. "The administration misled America, and the administration reached too far," Kerry told Michigan Public Radio. "I believe that the 9/11 report, the early evidence, is that they're going to indicate that we didn't have the kind of terrorists links that this administration was asserting. I think that's a very, very serious finding."

A Bush campaign spokesman countered that Kerry himself has said Hussein "supported and harbored terrorist groups." And Cheney's spokesman pointed to a 2002 letter written by CIA Director George J. Tenet stating that "we have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade" and "credible information indicates that Iraq and al Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression." Cheney's office also pointed to a 2003 Tenet statement calling Zarqawi "a senior al Qaeda terrorist associate."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the commission finding of long-standing high-level contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq justified the administration's earlier assertions. "We stand behind what was said publicly," he said.

Bush, speaking to troops in Tampa yesterday, did not mention an Iraq-al Qaeda link, saying only that Iraq "sheltered terrorist groups." That was a significantly milder version of the allegations administration officials have made since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In late 2001, Cheney said it was "pretty well confirmed" that Sept. 11 mastermind Mohamed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official before the attacks, in April 2000 in Prague; Cheney later said the meeting could not be proved or disproved.

Bush, in his speech aboard an aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003, asserted: "The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda and cut off a source of terrorist funding."

In September, Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press": "If we're successful in Iraq . . . then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

Speaking about Iraq's alleged links to al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney connected Iraq to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing by saying that newly found Iraqi intelligence files in Baghdad showed that a participant in the bombing returned to Iraq and "probably also received financing from the Iraqi government as well as safe haven." He added: "The Iraqi government or the Iraqi intelligence service had a relationship with al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s."

Shortly after Cheney asserted these links, Bush contradicted him, saying: "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th." But Bush added: "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties."

In January, Cheney repeated his view that Iraq was tied to al Qaeda, saying that "there's overwhelming evidence" of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. He said he was "very confident there was an established relationship there."

The commission staff, in yesterday's report, said that while bin Laden was in Sudan between 1991 and 1996, a senior Iraqi intelligence officer made three visits to Sudan, and that he had a meeting with bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden was reported to have sought training camps and assistance in getting weapons, "but Iraq never responded," the staff said. The report said that bin Laden "at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan."

As for the Atta meeting in Prague mentioned by Cheney, the commission staff concluded: "We do not believe that such a meeting occurred." It cited FBI photographic and telephone evidence, along with Czech and U.S. investigations, as well as reports from detainees, including the Iraqi official with whom Atta was alleged to have met. On the 1993 trade center bombing, the staff found "substantial uncertainty" about whether bin Laden and al Qaeda were involved.

At yesterday's hearing, commissioner Fred F. Fielding questioned the staff's finding of no apparent cooperation between bin Laden and Hussein. He pointed to a sentence in the first sealed indictment in 2001 of the al Qaeda members accused of the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; that sentence said al Qaeda reached an understanding with Iraq that they would not work against each other and would cooperate on acquiring arms.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, now a U.S. attorney in Illinois, who oversaw the African bombing case, told the commission that reference was dropped in a superceding indictment because investigators could not confirm al Qaeda's relationship with Iraq as they had done with its ties to Iran, Sudan and Hezbollah. The original material came from an al Qaeda defector who told prosecutors that what he had heard was secondhand.

The staff report on Iraq was brief. Though not confirming any Iraqi collaboration with al Qaeda, it did not specifically address two of the other pieces of evidence the administration has offered to link Iraq to al Qaeda: Zarqawi's Tawhid organization and the Ansar al-Islam group.

In October 2002, Bush described Zarqawi, a Palestinian born in Jordan, as "one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks."

Zarqawi wrote a January 2003 letter to bin Laden's lieutenants, intercepted at the Iraqi border, saying that if al Qaeda adopted his approach in Iraq, he would swear "fealty to you [bin Laden] publicly and in the news media."

In March, in a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Tenet described Zarqawi's network as among groups having "links" to al Qaeda but with its own "autonomous leadership . . . own targets [and] they plan their own attacks."

Although Zarqawi may have cooperated with al Qaeda in the past, officials said it is increasingly clear that he has been operating independently of bin Laden's group and has his own network of operatives.

The other group, Ansar al-Islam, began in 2001 among Kurdish Sunni Islamic fundamentalists in northern Iraq, fighting against the two secular Kurdish groups that operated under the protection of the United States. At one point, bin Laden supported Ansar, as did Zarqawi, who is believed to have visited their area more than once. Tenet referred to Ansar as one of the Sunni groups that had benefited from al Qaeda links.

[Warham]

Clinton did NOTHING in regards to terrorism other than hand out indictments.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Warham
Clinton did NOTHING in regards to terrorism other than hand out indictments.

And bombing terrorist camps, and ordering BIN LADEN killed three times, and stationing missile firing subs off the African coast, and hiring PAKISTANI mercenaries, and devising the plan to overthrow the TALIBAN that was later used post-9/11, oh yeah, and revising war plans (The Eisenhower Plan) for the possible invasion of IRAN in 1996 after the KHOBAR Towers were hit...

[Warham]

You forgot about that aspirin factory he bombed, killing a janitor.

I don't think Clinton had the guts to launch ANY major invasion of any country without express written permission from Kofi Annan, that wonderfully ethical man who runs the UN.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Warham
You forgot about that aspirin factory he bombed, killing a janitor.

I don't think Clinton had the guts to launch ANY major invasion of any country without express written permission from Kofi Annan, that wonderfully ethical man who runs the UN.

Yeah, only the fearless carp about invasions, especially when it's other people's asses on the line.

[lucky wilbury]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Yeah, whatever? Did the IRAQIS get yellowcake from NIGER too?

well according to the brits and the senate committes yes:


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5458642



Reports bolster Bush Iraq-uranium claim
British report says assertion was ‘well-founded’

The Associated Press

Updated: 3:47 p.m. ET July 18, 2004

WASHINGTON - It was one of the first signs that the intelligence used to go to war in Iraq was wrong: White House repudiation of 16 words in last year’s State of the Union speech that had suggested Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium in Africa.

Yet even as two recent reports sharply criticized prewar intelligence, they also suggested President Bush’s claim may not have been totally off-base.

A British report has concluded that Bush’s statement and a similar one by Prime Minister Tony Blair were “well-founded.” In his speech, Bush had attributed the uranium claim to the British government.

A Senate Intelligence Committee report found inadequate evidence that deposed Iraqi President Saddam had been rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. It cited various reports, however, that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa. Thus, although Bush cited only British evidence that was determined to have been inconclusive, other intelligence files clearly contained other inconclusive evidence of the truth of the claim.

The committee chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, said he believed last year that the White House was correct in repudiating the uranium claim. “Now I don’t know whether it’s accurate or not. That’s the whole question,” Roberts, R-Kan., said in an interview.

The Wilson-Plame matter
The White House’s repudiation came after The New York Times published an op-ed column by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to Niger to determine if Iraq had been acquiring uranium. Wilson said it was unlikely any uranium transaction had taken place and the administration appeared to have been manipulating the intelligence.

Republicans said Wilson was trying to boost John Kerry’s presidential campaign and looked to discredit him and his mission.

Columnist Robert Novak, citing two unidentified Bush administration officials, wrote that Wilson’s wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame, had recommended Wilson for the trip. That has led to a criminal investigation into the leak of Plame’s identity.

The Senate report challenges Wilson’s denial that his wife had a role in the selection and questions his account of the intelligence available at the time of his trip. It also said that his trip, rather than discrediting the Iraq-Niger link, actually bolstered the views of some analysts who suspected Saddam was seeking uranium.

In an addendum to the report, Roberts and two other Republicans accused Wilson of providing “inaccurate, unsubstantiated and misleading” information. In a letter to committee leaders Thursday, Wilson said a thorough reading of the report supports his public comments.

Acting CIA chief takes no stand

On Sunday Wilson told CNN’s “Late Edition” he wants committee members to reinterview a CIA officer whose testimony, he said, had muddled the record about his mission.

Earlier Sunday, the CIA’s acting director, John E. McLaughlin, told “Fox News Sunday,” “I think there’s some debate about what his report said or didn’t say. I just don’t want to take a position on it.”

Bush, in his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003, used the uranium intelligence to help make the case that Saddam was pursuing nuclear weapons. “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” he said.

That claim came under scrutiny after the International Atomic Energy Agency determined that documents purportedly showing Iraq buying uranium from Niger were fake. After Wilson’s op-ed appeared, the White House said including the 16 words in the State of the Union was a mistake because it was based on the forged documents.

Additional intel suggests Iraq-uranium link

But the Senate committee disclosed other intelligence suggesting that Iraq was pursuing uranium.

The committee cited separate reports received from foreign intelligence services on Oct. 15, 2001, and Feb. 5, 2002, and March 25, 2002. The State Department doubted the accuracy of the reports, but the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency had more confidence in them.

Though Wilson reported to U.S. officials there was “nothing to the story” that Niger sold uranium to Iraq, the CIA and DIA were intrigued by one element of his trip. Wilson had said a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Mayaki, mentioned a visit from an Iraqi delegation in 1999 that expressed interest in expanding commercial ties with Niger, the world’s third largest producer of mined uranium. Mayaki believed this meant they were interested in buying uranium.

‘Intelligence was credible’
The British inquiry said it was generally accepted that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999, and there was intelligence from several sources that the visit was to acquire uranium. “Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible,” the report said.

The Senate committee also described various reports about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from French, British and unidentified foreign governments.

But how much credibility these reports had was not clear. The Senate committee criticized the CIA for “inconsistent and at times contradictory” reports to policy-makers on the uranium issue.

An internal CIA memo from June 17, 2003, said, “We no longer believe there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad.”

But beyond internal correspondence, “to date, the intelligence community has not published an assessment to clarify or correct its position on whether or not Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa,” the Senate committee said.


Originally posted by Nickdfresh
This is a clearly mischaracterized report for the MOONIE TIMES...

right peoples actual words are mischarcterizations :rolleyes: again lets go back to another thread shall we?
from the washington post piece from 1999 post number nine

http://www.rotharmy.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2718&highlight=clarke



Clarke did provide new information in defense of Clinton's decision to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles at the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, in retaliation for bin Laden's role in the Aug. 7 embassy bombings.

While U.S. intelligence officials disclosed shortly after the missile attack that they had obtained a soil sample from the El Shifa site that contained a precursor of VX nerve gas, Clarke said that the U.S. government is "sure" that Iraqi nerve gas experts actually produced a powdered VX-like substance at the plant that, when mixed with bleach and water, would have become fully active VX nerve gas.

Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at El Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to El Shifa's current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.

--------------

now that sounds an awe lot like what choen said in the earlier post you dismissed no?


Originally posted by Nickdfresh
CLINTON did a hell of a lot more than BUSH ever did in regards to terrorism

right :rolleyes: and how many chances did bubba get and do nothing with? you want me to bumb the thread on the predtor that had obl in its sites and clinotn didn't take the shot or better yet when we knew where obl was for two weeks and he didn't take the shot because lawyers said no?


Originally posted by Nickdfresh
...And how did he act on the "connection?" Who did we invade as a result

so you admit he did nothing then.


Originally posted by Nickdfresh
In any case, I prefer to get my sources for real WASHINGTON newpapers...


so then you won't dismiss what clarke said or what i posted above since after all it is from a "real" washingotn newspaper

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by lucky wilbury
well according to the brits and the senate committes yes:


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5458642



Reports bolster Bush Iraq-uranium claim
British report says assertion was �well-founded�

The Associated Press

Updated: 3:47 p.m. ET July 18, 2004

WASHINGTON - It was one of the first signs that the intelligence used to go to war in Iraq was wrong: White House repudiation of 16 words in last year�s State of the Union speech that had suggested Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium in Africa.

Yet even as two recent reports sharply criticized prewar intelligence, they also suggested President Bush�s claim may not have been totally off-base.

A British report has concluded that Bush�s statement and a similar one by Prime Minister Tony Blair were �well-founded.� In his speech, Bush had attributed the uranium claim to the British government.

A Senate Intelligence Committee report found inadequate evidence that deposed Iraqi President Saddam had been rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. It cited various reports, however, that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa. Thus, although Bush cited only British evidence that was determined to have been inconclusive, other intelligence files clearly contained other inconclusive evidence of the truth of the claim.

The committee chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, said he believed last year that the White House was correct in repudiating the uranium claim. �Now I don�t know whether it�s accurate or not. That�s the whole question,� Roberts, R-Kan., said in an interview.

The Wilson-Plame matter
The White House�s repudiation came after The New York Times published an op-ed column by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to Niger to determine if Iraq had been acquiring uranium. Wilson said it was unlikely any uranium transaction had taken place and the administration appeared to have been manipulating the intelligence.

Republicans said Wilson was trying to boost John Kerry�s presidential campaign and looked to discredit him and his mission.

Columnist Robert Novak, citing two unidentified Bush administration officials, wrote that Wilson�s wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame, had recommended Wilson for the trip. That has led to a criminal investigation into the leak of Plame�s identity.

The Senate report challenges Wilson�s denial that his wife had a role in the selection and questions his account of the intelligence available at the time of his trip. It also said that his trip, rather than discrediting the Iraq-Niger link, actually bolstered the views of some analysts who suspected Saddam was seeking uranium.

In an addendum to the report, Roberts and two other Republicans accused Wilson of providing �inaccurate, unsubstantiated and misleading� information. In a letter to committee leaders Thursday, Wilson said a thorough reading of the report supports his public comments.

Acting CIA chief takes no stand

On Sunday Wilson told CNN�s �Late Edition� he wants committee members to reinterview a CIA officer whose testimony, he said, had muddled the record about his mission.

Earlier Sunday, the CIA�s acting director, John E. McLaughlin, told �Fox News Sunday,� �I think there�s some debate about what his report said or didn�t say. I just don�t want to take a position on it.�

Bush, in his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003, used the uranium intelligence to help make the case that Saddam was pursuing nuclear weapons. �The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,� he said.

That claim came under scrutiny after the International Atomic Energy Agency determined that documents purportedly showing Iraq buying uranium from Niger were fake. After Wilson�s op-ed appeared, the White House said including the 16 words in the State of the Union was a mistake because it was based on the forged documents.

Additional intel suggests Iraq-uranium link

But the Senate committee disclosed other intelligence suggesting that Iraq was pursuing uranium.

The committee cited separate reports received from foreign intelligence services on Oct. 15, 2001, and Feb. 5, 2002, and March 25, 2002. The State Department doubted the accuracy of the reports, but the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency had more confidence in them.

Though Wilson reported to U.S. officials there was �nothing to the story� that Niger sold uranium to Iraq, the CIA and DIA were intrigued by one element of his trip. Wilson had said a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Mayaki, mentioned a visit from an Iraqi delegation in 1999 that expressed interest in expanding commercial ties with Niger, the world�s third largest producer of mined uranium. Mayaki believed this meant they were interested in buying uranium.

�Intelligence was credible�
The British inquiry said it was generally accepted that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999, and there was intelligence from several sources that the visit was to acquire uranium. �Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger�s exports, the intelligence was credible,� the report said.

The Senate committee also described various reports about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from French, British and unidentified foreign governments.

But how much credibility these reports had was not clear. The Senate committee criticized the CIA for �inconsistent and at times contradictory� reports to policy-makers on the uranium issue.

An internal CIA memo from June 17, 2003, said, �We no longer believe there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad.�

But beyond internal correspondence, �to date, the intelligence community has not published an assessment to clarify or correct its position on whether or not Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa,� the Senate committee said.



right peoples actual words are mischarcterizations :rolleyes: again lets go back to another thread shall we?
from the washington post piece from 1999 post number nine

http://www.rotharmy.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2718&highlight=clarke



Clarke did provide new information in defense of Clinton's decision to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles at the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, in retaliation for bin Laden's role in the Aug. 7 embassy bombings.

While U.S. intelligence officials disclosed shortly after the missile attack that they had obtained a soil sample from the El Shifa site that contained a precursor of VX nerve gas, Clarke said that the U.S. government is "sure" that Iraqi nerve gas experts actually produced a powdered VX-like substance at the plant that, when mixed with bleach and water, would have become fully active VX nerve gas.

Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at El Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to El Shifa's current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.

--------------

now that sounds an awe lot like what choen said in the earlier post you dismissed no?



right :rolleyes: and how many chances did bubba get and do nothing with? you want me to bumb the thread on the predtor that had obl in its sites and clinotn didn't take the shot or better yet when we knew where obl was for two weeks and he didn't take the shot because lawyers said no?



so you admit he did nothing then.




so then you won't dismiss what clarke said or what i posted above since after all it is from a "real" washingotn newspaper

Based on a forged documents that the Italians had..

Here, let's look at how the Administration spun us into war, and what the intelligence community really said about it:

Neglecting Intelligence, Ignoring Warnings

A chronology of how the Bush Administration repeatedly and deliberately refused to listen to intelligence agencies that said its case for war was weak

January 28, 2004
Updated January 29, 2004
Download: DOC, PDF, RTF

Former weapons inspector David Kay now says Iraq probably did not have WMD before the war, a major blow to the Bush Administration which used the WMD argument as the rationale for war. Unfortunately, Kay and the Administration are now attempting to shift the blame for misleading America onto the intelligence community. But a review of the facts shows the intelligence community repeatedly warned the Bush Administration about the weakness of its case, but was circumvented, overruled, and ignored. The following is year-by-year timeline of those warnings.

2001: WH Admits Iraq Contained; Creates Agency to Circumvent Intel Agencies

In 2001 and before, intelligence agencies noted that Saddam Hussein was effectively contained after the Gulf War. In fact, former weapons inspector David Kay now admits that the previous policy of containment – including the 1998 bombing of Iraq – destroyed any remaining infrastructure of potential WMD programs.

OCTOBER 8, 1997 – IAEA SAYS IRAQ FREE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS: "As reported in detail in the progress report dated 8 October 1997…and based on all credible information available to date, the IAEA's verification activities in Iraq, have resulted in the evolution of a technically coherent picture of Iraq's clandestine nuclear programme. These verification activities have revealed no indications that Iraq had achieved its programme objective of producing nuclear weapons or that Iraq had produced more than a few grams of weapon-usable nuclear material or had clandestinely acquired such material. Furthermore, there are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for t he production of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance." [Source: IAEA Report, 10/8/98]

FEBRUARY 23 & 24, 2001 – COLIN POWELL SAYS IRAQ IS CONTAINED: "I think we ought to declare [the containment policy] a success. We have kept him contained, kept him in his box." He added Saddam "is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors" and that "he threatens not the United States." [Source: State Department, 2/23/01 and 2/24/01]

Containment was the CLINTON policy BTW.:)

SEPTEMBER 16, 2001 – CHENEY ACKNOWLEDGES IRAQ IS CONTAINED: Vice President Dick Cheney said that "Saddam Hussein is bottled up" – a confirmation of the intelligence he had received. [Source: Meet the Press, 9/16/2001]

SEPTEMBER 2001 – WHITE HOUSE CREATES OFFICE TO CIRCUMVENT INTEL AGENCIES: The Pentagon creates the Office of Special Plans "in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true-that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States…The rising influence of the Office of Special Plans was accompanied by a decline in the influence of the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. bringing about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community." The office, hand-picked by the Administration, specifically "cherry-picked intelligence that supported its pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest" while officials deliberately "bypassed the government's customary procedures for vetting intelligence." [Sources: New Yorker, 5/12/03; Atlantic Monthly, 1/04; New Yorker, 10/20/03]

2002: Intel Agencies Repeatedly Warn White House of Its Weak WMD Case

Throughout 2002, the CIA, DIA, Department of Energy and United Nations all warned the Bush Administration that its selective use of intelligence was painting a weak WMD case. Those warnings were repeatedly ignored.

JANUARY, 2002 – TENET DOES NOT MENTION IRAQ IN NUCLEAR THREAT REPORT: "In CIA Director George Tenet's January 2002 review of global weapons-technology proliferation, he did not even mention a nuclear threat from Iraq, though he did warn of one from North Korea." [Source: The New Republic, 6/30/03]

FEBRUARY 6, 2002 – CIA SAYS IRAQ HAS NOT PROVIDED WMD TO TERRORISTS: "The Central Intelligence Agency has no evidence that Iraq has engaged in terrorist operations against the United States in nearly a decade, and the agency is also convinced that President Saddam Hussein has not provided chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda or related terrorist groups, according to several American intelligence officials." [Source: NY Times, 2/6/02]

APRIL 15, 2002 – WOLFOWITZ ANGERED AT CIA FOR NOT UNDERMINING U.N. REPORT: After receiving a CIA report that concluded that Hans Blix had conducted inspections of Iraq's declared nuclear power plants "fully within the parameters he could operate" when Blix was head of the international agency responsible for these inspections prior to the Gulf War, a report indicated that "Wolfowitz ‘hit the ceiling’ because the CIA failed to provide sufficient ammunition to undermine Blix and, by association, the new U.N. weapons inspection program." [Source: W. Post, 4/15/02]

SUMMER, 2002 – CIA WARNINGS TO WHITE HOUSE EXPOSED: "In the late summer of 2002, Sen. Graham had requested from Tenet an analysis of the Iraqi threat. According to knowledgeable sources, he received a 25-page classified response reflecting the balanced view that had prevailed earlier among the intelligence agencies--noting, for example, that evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program or a link to Al Qaeda was inconclusive. Early that September, the committee also received the DIA's classified analysis, which reflected the same cautious assessments. But committee members became worried when, midway through the month, they received a new CIA analysis of the threat that highlighted the Bush administration's claims and consigned skepticism to footnotes." [Source: The New Republic, 6/30/03]

SEPTEMBER, 2002 – DIA TELLS WHITE HOUSE NO EVIDENCE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS: "An unclassified excerpt of a 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency study on Iraq's chemical warfare program in which it stated that there is ‘no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has - or will - establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities.’" The report also said, "A substantial amount of Iraq's chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998 as a result of Operation Desert Storm and UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) actions." [Source: Carnegie Endowment for Peace, 6/13/03; DIA report, 2002]

SEPTEMBER 20, 2002 – DEPT. OF ENERGY TELLS WHITE HOUSE OF NUKE DOUBTS: "Doubts about the quality of some of the evidence that the United States is using to make its case that Iraq is trying to build a nuclear bomb emerged Thursday. While National Security Adviser Condi Rice stated on 9/8 that imported aluminum tubes ‘are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs’ a growing number of experts say that the administration has not presented convincing evidence that the tubes were intended for use in uranium enrichment rather than for artillery rocket tubes or other uses. Former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright said he found significant disagreement among scientists within the Department of Energy and other agencies about the certainty of the evidence." [Source: UPI, 9/20/02]

OCTOBER 2002 – CIA DIRECTLY WARNS WHITE HOUSE: "The CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa."[Source: Washington Post, 7/23/03]

OCTOBER 2002 — STATE DEPT. WARNS WHITE HOUSE ON NUKE CHARGES: The State Department’s Intelligence and Research Department dissented from the conclusion in the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD capabilities that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. "The activities we have detected do not ... add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquiring nuclear weapons." INR accepted the judgment by Energy Department technical experts that aluminum tubes Iraq was seeking to acquire, which was the central basis for the conclusion that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, were ill-suited to build centrifuges for enriching uranium. [Source, Declassified Iraq NIE released 7/2003]

OCTOBER 2002 – AIR FORCE WARNS WHITE HOUSE: "The government organization most knowledgeable about the United States' UAV program -- the Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center -- had sharply disputed the notion that Iraq's UAVs were being designed as attack weapons" – a WMD claim President Bush used in his October 7 speech on Iraqi WMD, just three days before the congressional vote authorizing the president to use force. [Source: Washington Post, 9/26/03]

2003: WH Pressures Intel Agencies to Conform; Ignores More Warnings

Instead of listening to the repeated warnings from the intelligence community, intelligence officials say the White House instead pressured them to conform their reports to fit a pre-determined policy. Meanwhile, more evidence from international institutions poured in that the White House’s claims were not well-grounded.

LATE 2002-EARLY 2003 – CHENEY PRESSURES CIA TO CHANGE INTELLIGENCE: "Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated trips to CIA headquarters in the run-up to the war for unusual, face-to-face sessions with intelligence analysts poring over Iraqi data. The pressure on the intelligence community to document the administration's claims that the Iraqi regime had ties to al-Qaida and was pursuing a nuclear weapons capacity was ‘unremitting,’ said former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro, echoing several other intelligence veterans interviewed." Additionally, CIA officials "charged that the hard-liners in the Defense Department and vice president's office had 'pressured' agency analysts to paint a dire picture of Saddam's capabilities and intentions." [Sources: Dallas Morning News, 7/28/03; Newsweek, 7/28/03]

JANUARY, 2003 – STATE DEPT. INTEL BUREAU REITERATE WARNING TO POWELL: "The Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the State Department's in-house analysis unit, and nuclear experts at the Department of Energy are understood to have explicitly warned Secretary of State Colin Powell during the preparation of his speech that the evidence was questionable. The Bureau reiterated to Mr. Powell during the preparation of his February speech that its analysts were not persuaded that the aluminum tubes the Administration was citing could be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium." [Source: Financial Times, 7/30/03]

FEBRUARY 14, 2003 – UN WARNS WHITE HOUSE THAT NO WMD HAVE BEEN FOUND: "In their third progress report since U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 was passed in November, inspectors told the council they had not found any weapons of mass destruction." Weapons inspector Hans Blix told the U.N. Security Council they had been unable to find any WMD in Iraq and that more time was needed for inspections. [Source: CNN, 2/14/03]

FEBRUARY 15, 2003 – IAEA WARNS WHITE HOUSE NO NUCLEAR EVIDENCE: The head of the IAEA told the U.N. in February that "We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq." The IAEA examined "2,000 pages of documents seized Jan. 16 from an Iraqi scientist's home -- evidence, the Americans said, that the Iraqi regime was hiding government documents in private homes. The documents, including some marked classified, appear to be the scientist's personal files." However, "the documents, which contained information about the use of laser technology to enrich uranium, refer to activities and sites known to the IAEA and do not change the agency's conclusions about Iraq's laser enrichment program." [Source: Wash. Post, 2/15/03]

FEBURARY 24, 2003 – CIA WARNS WHITE HOUSE ‘NO DIRECT EVIDENCE’ OF WMD: "A CIA report on proliferation released this week says the intelligence community has no ‘direct evidence’ that Iraq has succeeded in reconstituting its biological, chemical, nuclear or long-range missile programs in the two years since U.N. weapons inspectors left and U.S. planes bombed Iraqi facilities. ‘We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its Weapons of Mass Destruction programs,’ said the agency in its semi-annual report on proliferation activities." [NBC News, 2/24/03]

MARCH 7, 2003 – IAEA REITERATES TO WHITE HOUSE NO EVIDENCE OF NUKES: IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei said nuclear experts have found "no indication" that Iraq has tried to import high-strength aluminum tubes or specialized ring magnets for centrifuge enrichment of uranium. For months, American officials had "cited Iraq's importation of these tubes as evidence that Mr. Hussein's scientists have been seeking to develop a nuclear capability." ElBaradei also noted said "the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that documents which formed the basis for the [President Bush’s assertion] of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic." When questioned about this on Meet the Press, Vice President Dick Cheney simply said "Mr. ElBaradei is, frankly, wrong." [Source: NY Times, 3/7/03: Meet the Press, 3/16/03]

MAY 30, 2003 – INTEL PROFESSIONALS ADMIT THEY WERE PRESSURED: "A growing number of U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq . A key target is a four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or terrorist groups. This team, self-mockingly called the Cabal, 'cherry-picked the intelligence stream' in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a official at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The DIA was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD," or weapons of mass destruction, he said. Greg Thielmann, an intelligence official in the State Department, said it appeared to him that intelligence had been shaped 'from the top down.'" [Reuters, 5/30/03 ]

JUNE 6, 2003 – INTELLIGENCE HISTORIAN SAYS INTEL WAS HYPED: "The CIA bowed to Bush administration pressure to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs ahead of the U.S.-led war in Iraq , a leading national security historian concluded in a detailed study of the spy agency's public pronouncements." [Reuters, 6/6/03]

Link (http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=24889)

Then of course there is the DOWNING STREET MEMO, speaking of the Brits...

[lucky wilbury]

you crack me up you really do one post you try to discredit things as being mischraterized they you turn around and post one long shit list of mischarterizations. yet for all the claims of hyping reality shows there was none go read the hutton report or the senate report etc etc i see you didn't touch what i posted about iraq-sudan-al queda link and yes lets go to the memo which i doubt you actually read :

http://slate.msn.com/id/2120886/

Let's Go to the Memo
What's really in the Downing Street memos?
By Fred Kaplan
Updated Wednesday, June 15, 2005, at 3:00 PM PT


Listen to this story on NPR's Day to Day.

Blair, Bush: Should we be shocked?

Is there anything important in the Downing Street memo? This is the now-notorious secret transcript of a British ministerial meeting on July 23, 2002—obtained and published by the Sunday Times of London just this past May Day—which seems to suggest that, nine months before the war in Iraq got started, the Bush administration a) knew Saddam Hussein didn't pose a threat; b) decided to overthrow him by force anyway; and c) was "fixing" intelligence to sell the impending invasion to a duped American public.

Many critics see the memo as the ultimate proof of Bush's duplicity—and, given that no U.S. newspaper picked up the story for two weeks (and then buried it deep inside), as further evidence of the mainstream media's cravenness. Others, and not just Bush apologists, see the affair as overblown and the document's contents as no big deal.

So, let's go to the memo. Actually, let's go to seven memos: the famous minutes; a secret Cabinet Office report written two days before the ministers' meeting (published last weekend by the Sunday Times and the Washington Post); and five eyes-only memos, written around the same time, about various official British meetings with President Bush, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. (These memos, described in today's Los Angeles Times, have been available in full for some time now on the Think Progress Web site.)

What in these documents is new and significant? What's old hat or trivial? What do they say—and not say—about the Bush administration's prevarications? And should the mainstream media be pardoned or lashed for selling the story so short?

The "killer quote" in the original Sunday Times story is this passage from the July 23 ministers' meeting:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

"C" is the code name for Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, the British foreign intelligence service. His "recent talks in Washington" would almost certainly have been with his counterpart, George Tenet, then-director of the CIA. Tenet would have told him about the "perceptible shift in attitude." What accounts for it? "Bush wants to remove Saddam through military action."

This is about as solid as the evidence gets on these matters: By mid-summer 2002—at a time when Bush was still assuring the American public that he regarded war as a "last resort"—the president had in fact put it on his front burners.

Some who have read the memo shrug. Even former Slate Editor Michael Kinsley wonders what's new here. After all, we've read over and over that Bush was hellbent on war even earlier than this. The point has been made in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, and Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty, as well as in articles by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker and Walter Pincus in the Washington Post.

True, but let's get serious. When the scholars write the big tomes on this sordid saga, they'll want to base their findings on primary-source documents—and here is one, flashing right before us. The Downing Street Memo will be a key footnote in the history books; it should have made front-page headlines in the daily broadsheets of history's first draft.

In other respects, though, the memo doesn't make as strong a case against Bush as some have claimed. Read in conjunction with the six other British documents, the case weakens further. The memos do not show, for instance, that Bush simply invented the notion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam posed a threat to the region. In fact, the memos reveal quite clearly that the top leaders in the U.S. and British governments genuinely believed their claims.

For instance, at one point during the July 23 meeting, the British ministers are discussing some of the risks of going to war. Saddam might "use his WMD on Kuwait," one official cautions. "Or on Israel," adds the defense secretary.

An Iraq "options paper," dated March 8, 2002, states: "Despite sanctions, Iraq continues to develop WMD" (though it adds that intelligence on the matter is "poor").

The July 21 Cabinet Office report published by the Sunday Times last weekend—titled "Iraq: Conditions for Military Action"—raises an intriguing strategic concern: that a post-Saddam government might still want weapons of mass destruction. "Even if regime change is a necessary condition for controlling Iraqi WMD," the memo warns, "it is certainly not a sufficient one." The "options paper" makes the same point: "Even a representative [Iraqi] government could seek to acquire WMD … as long as Iran and Israel retain their WMD."

In a personal message to Blair, dated March 22, 2002, political director Peter Ricketts writes that, although Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs "have not, as far as we know, been stepped up," they "are extremely worrying." What has changed, he emphasizes, "is not so much the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programmes but our tolerance of them post-11 September."

The implicit point of these passages is this: These top officials genuinely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction—and that they constituted a threat. They believed that the international community had to be sold on the matter. But not all sales pitches are consciously deceptive. The salesmen in this case turned out to be wrong; their goods were bunk. But they seemed to believe in their product at the time.

What of the second half of the key quote from the Downing Street Memo of July 23—that Bush wanted war, justified by WMD and terrorism, but "the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy"? It's worth noting that "fixed around" is not synonymous with "fixed." To say that Bush and his aides "fixed" intelligence—as some Web sites claim the memo shows—would mean that they distorted or falsified it. To say "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" means that they were viewing, sifting, and interpreting intelligence in a way that would strengthen the case for their policy, for going to war.

Either way—"fixed" or "fixed around"—Bush and his aides had decided to let policy shape intelligence, not the other way around; they were explicitly politicizing intelligence.

But that doesn't necessarily mean they thought their claims were false. Murray Kempton, the late great New York newspaper columnist, once strolled out of a federal courtroom where some mobster was on trial and chortled to a colleague, "They're framing a guilty man in there." Something similar was probably happening with the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq. They just knew Saddam had WMD, and if the facts didn't quite prove he did, they would underscore and embellish the tidbits that came close. The problem was, their man wasn't guilty, at least on the charges of indictment. (For more on this view of intelligence errors, click here.)

Does this distinction matter? If all you want to know is whether Bush was deceptive, no; he was deceptive. If you want to know how government works, how officials make bad mistakes, yes; it matters a lot.

Reading the seven British memos, you see the Blair government wrestling with serious dilemmas. In a memo to the prime minister on March 14, 2002, David Manning, then Blair's foreign-policy adviser, lists some of the concerns: "how to persuade international opinion that military action against Iraq is necessary and justified; what value to put on the exiled Iraqi opposition … what happens the morning after?"

The tragedy embedded in these memos is that the Brits were mistaken in their two most basic premises: first, that Saddam Hussein really had WMD and really posed a threat; second, that just because Bush needed Blair's support, Blair could somehow influence him.

Their first mistake would be revealed after the war was over. The second should have been clear before it began. Manning's memo recounts raising some issues about political support, international law, postwar stability, and so forth at a recent dinner with Rice. "Condi's enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed," he reports, adding, "From what she said, Bush has yet to find the answers to the big questions." Two months later, the July 21 Cabinet Office report cited the same worry: "A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. … U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point."

At least the Brits clearly saw the difficulties ahead and tried to engage Bush on their implications. Had he listened, our biggest problems in Iraq today might be a great deal smaller. This is another lesson to be gleaned from the Downing Street memos.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by lucky wilbury
you crack me up you really do one post you try to discredit things as being mischraterized they you turn around and post one long shit list of mischarterizations...

Uh LUCKY, I mentioned the DOWNING ST MEMO in passing at the end of a long series of articles. I cited no text from it, so you blankly ignore the mountain of staggering evidence provided by the intelligence community that basically says that BUSH is an incompetent, self-serving idiot to highlight text which shows that...well...Bush is an incompetent idiot. He ignored his intelligence analysts that were telling him he was overstating his case...

In short, he's a moron that bases his policy decisions on what he wanted to believe, not what the evidence told him may be the case. In short, he "politicized the intelligence," something the NAZI's were guilty of as they underestimated their enemies by routinely characterizing them as inherently inferior regardless of numbers...

But the facts remain, BUSH was wrong, dead wrong, he's led AMERICA into one of it's biggest cluster-fucks in history...Because he, as you do, wanted to believe what there was little evidence to believe in.


Either way—"fixed" or "fixed around"—Bush and his aides had decided to let policy shape intelligence, not the other way around; they were explicitly politicizing intelligence.

He's still incompetent, and wrong, 1800+ dead wrong...

Well meaning or not, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

And he was surely aware that there was no connection between IRAQ and Al Qaeda, other than the one's they could invent based on flimsy, unsubstantiated evidence...

[lucky wilbury]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Uh LUCKY, I mentioned the DOWNING ST MEMO in passing at the end of a long series of articles.

you didn't post any articles posting things that are ......this person says this.......(reuters) is dismised around here becuase things are taken out of context


Originally posted by Nickdfresh
I cited no text from it, so you blankly ignore the mountain of staggering evidence provided by the intelligence community that basically says that BUSH is an incompetent, self-serving idiot to highlight text which shows that...well...Bush is an incompetent idiot. He ignored his intelligence analysts that were telling him he was overstating his case...

yet the last thing you post is :


Then of course there is the DOWNING STREET MEMO, speaking of the Brits...

which that was rebuffing. but you ignored that you've also seemed to ignore the facts that one or two "analyist" disagree with him most didn't. and thats their job to analyze some say this some say that but when the majority are telling bush the same thing they told clinton there were weapons. they don't stae facts just thier opinions



Originally posted by Nickdfresh
In short, he's a moron that bases his policy decisions on what he wanted to believe, not what the evidence told him may be the case. In short, he "politicized the intelligence," something the NAZI's were guilty of as they underestimated their enemies by routinely characterizing them as inherently inferior regardless of numbers...

But the facts remain, BUSH was wrong, dead wrong, he's led AMERICA into one of it's biggest cluster-fucks in history...Because he, as you do, wanted to believe what there was little evidence to believe in.

i'm serious when i say this but were you in rehab or was your head just up in the clouds from 1993-2000? i'm serious. did you just not follow the news or something really where were you because here you are claiming bush "politiczied intelligence"yet there is no difference between what he said and clinton said or blair , the french the germans madeline albright ted fucking kenndy john kerry everyone anyone pick any name and they said the same things as bush before bush took office the. he said and believed evrything they did for all those years. now it's either one of two things either their all lying or none of them are. it can be bush is lying but clinton was telling the truth during operation desert fox. it can't be bush is lying and and he's telling the truth. they said the same things. bush couldn't "politiczied intelligence" when he winds up saying almost this exact things as clinton. either they both did it or niether did it. two peolple. 5 years apart. saying the same thing. here's we'll do this you pick the politican house or senate cabinet member (famous ones not some odd ball cabinet member) on and on for the years 93-2000 and i'll post what they said they about wmd along with it i'll post a bush quote from 2001 on about wmd and iraq and i'll let you tell whose bush and whos the other person. i mean it should be simple for you to pick since bush "politiczied intelligence" on iraq




Originally posted by Nickdfresh
He's still incompetent, and wrong,

and thats your opinion



Originally posted by Nickdfresh
1800+ dead wrong...

Well meaning or not, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

And he was surely aware that there was no connection between IRAQ and Al Qaeda, other than the one's they could invent based on flimsy, unsubstantiated evidence...

so to be clear when richard clark,who you seemed to hold up to a high standard and use his words often, you now consider him a lier? correct? after all in 1998 and 1999 when he states that there is a connection between iraq and al queda he's lying right? simple answer yes or no. i mean after all any connection are "the one's they could invent based on flimsy, unsubstantiated evidence" so he's either lying or he's not

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by lucky wilbury
you didn't post any articles posting things that are ......this person says this.......(reuters) is dismised around here becuase things are taken out of context[/qoute]

Oh bullshit! Those articles are available at the link, by way of the website which has links to each of them...

[quote]yet the last thing you post is :


Then of course there is the DOWNING STREET MEMO, speaking of the Brits...

Yes, which I barely mentioned and did not use as any sort of basis to my argument, but it was the one thing you decided to latch onto since you can not dismiss the other articles so readily, and frankly, you can't really dismiss the DOWNING STREET MEMO either...

BUSH clearly "politicized" the intelligence in order to justify his little premeditated war plans...


which that was rebuffing. but you ignored that you've also seemed to ignore the facts that one or two "analyist" disagree with him most didn't. and thats their job to analyze some say this some say that but when the majority are telling bush the same thing they told clinton there were weapons. they don't stae facts just thier opinions[quote]

I seemed to have picked up on the fact that there is a general concensus, born out in the headlines and recent history, that BUSH fucked-up. Simple as that...Go ahead, disprove that!

CLINTON never used his statements as an impudeus to launch an invasion and sacrifice the flower of AMERICA...So there is a big difference!

[quote]i'm serious when i say this but were you in rehab or was your head just up in the clouds from 1993-2000? i'm serious. did you just not follow the news or something really where were you because here you are claiming bush "politiczied intelligence"yet there is no difference between what he said and clinton said or blair , the french the germans madeline albright ted fucking kenndy john kerry everyone anyone pick any name and they said the same things as bush before bush took office the. he said and believed evrything they did for all those years. now it's either one of two things either their all lying or none of them are. it can be bush is lying but clinton was telling the truth during operation desert fox. it can't be bush is lying and and he's telling the truth. they said the same things. bush couldn't "politiczied intelligence" when he winds up saying almost this exact things as clinton. either they both did it or niether did it. two peolple. 5 years apart. saying the same thing.[quote]

They weren't saying the "same thing." CLINTON's statements are fraut with uncertaindy, whereas BUSH had benefit of recent inspections which turned up nothing, is rather sure of himself...

CLINTON never launched a war to get the WMD's from IRAQ did he? So how can anything be the "same.'

When was CLINTON building a case to invade IRAQ to the UN and the COALITION of the WILLING? What a ludicrous statement...

[quote]here's we'll do this you pick the politican house or senate cabinet member (famous ones not some odd ball cabinet member) on and on for the years 93-2000 and i'll post what they said they about wmd along with it i'll post a bush quote from 2001 on about wmd and iraq and i'll let you tell whose bush and whos the other person. i mean it should be simple for you to pick since bush "politiczied intelligence" on iraq

Who gives a fuck what they said? BUSH INVADED IRAQ AND KILLED US SOLDIERS doing so!! Clinton didn't,. who gives a fuck about empty word games!! The point is how those words were used, quote people out of context as you will, I really don't care.


and thats your opinion

It's based on some pretty solid empirical evidence...


so to be clear when richard clark,who you seemed to hold up to a high standard and use his words often, you now consider him a lier? correct? after all in 1998 and 1999 when he states that there is a connection between iraq and al queda he's lying right? simple answer yes or no. i mean after all any connection are "the one's they could invent based on flimsy, unsubstantiated evidence" so he's either lying or he's not

When have I mention CLARKE tonight? I mentioned the 9/11 Commission! And CLARKE, whatever he said, wasn't tying SADDAM directly to the 9/11 attacks, was he? Big fucking difference there sunshine...

Again, semantics and spin WILBURY...

[lucky wilbury]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Yes, which I barely mentioned and did not use as any sort of basis to my argument, but it was the one thing you decided to latch onto since you can not dismiss the other articles so readily, and frankly, you can't really dismiss the DOWNING STREET MEMO either...

BUSH clearly "politicized" the intelligence in order to justify his little premeditated war plans...

yet you keep ignoring the facts the facts being hugh shelton,clinton appointee, chairman of the joint chiefs stated that we were no closer to attacking iraq in jan 27,2001- sept 10 2001 the we where pre bush being in office



Originally posted by Nickdfresh
I seemed to have picked up on the fact that there is a general concensus, born out in the headlines and recent history, that BUSH fucked-up. Simple as that...Go ahead, disprove that!

CLINTON never used his statements as an impudeus to launch an invasion and sacrifice the flower of AMERICA...So there is a big difference!

really he didn't? well read away

http://www.cnn.com/US/9812/16/clinton.iraq.speech/



Clinton: Iraq has abused its last chance

President Clinton addressed the nation from the Oval Office
Clinton spells out Iraq's non-compliance

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- From the Oval Office, President Clinton told the nation Wednesday evening why he ordered new military strikes against Iraq.

The president said Iraq's refusal to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors presented a threat to the entire world.

"Saddam (Hussein) must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons," Clinton said.

Operation Desert Fox, a strong, sustained series of attacks, will be carried out over several days by U.S. and British forces, Clinton said.

"Earlier today I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces," Clinton said.

"Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors," said Clinton.

Clinton also stated that, while other countries also had weapons of mass destruction, Hussein is in a different category because he has used such weapons against his own people and against his neighbors.


'Without delay, diplomacy or warning'

The Iraqi leader was given a final warning six weeks ago, Clinton said, when Baghdad promised to cooperate with U.N. inspectors at the last minute just as U.S. warplanes were headed its way.

"Along with Prime Minister (Tony) Blair of Great Britain, I made it equally clear that if Saddam failed to cooperate fully we would be prepared to act without delay, diplomacy or warning," Clinton said.

The president said the report handed in Tuesday by Richard Butler, head of the United Nations Special Commission in charge of finding and destroying Iraqi weapons, was stark and sobering.

Iraq failed to cooperate with the inspectors and placed new restrictions on them, Clinton said. He said Iraqi officials also destroyed records and moved everything, even the furniture, out of suspected sites before inspectors were allowed in.

"Instead of inspectors disarming Saddam, Saddam has disarmed the inspectors," Clinton said.

"In halting our airstrikes in November, I gave Saddam a chance -- not a license. If we turn our backs on his defiance, the credibility of U.S. power as a check against Saddam will be destroyed," the president explained.


Strikes necessary to stunt weapons programs

Clinton said he made the decision to strike Wednesday with the unanimous agreement of his security advisors.

Timing was important, said the president, because without a strong inspection system in place, Iraq could rebuild its chemical, biological and nuclear programs in a matter of months, not years.

"If Saddam can cripple the weapons inspections system and get away with it, he would conclude the international community, led by the United States, has simply lost its will," said Clinton. "He would surmise that he has free rein to rebuild his arsenal of destruction."

Clinton also called Hussein a threat to his people and to the security of the world.


"The best way to end that threat once and for all is with a new Iraqi government -- a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the rights of its people," Clinton said.

Such a change in Baghdad would take time and effort, Clinton said, adding that his administration would work with Iraqi opposition forces.

Clinton also addressed the ongoing impeachment crisis in the White House.

"Saddam Hussein and the other enemies of peace may have thought that the serious debate currently before the House of Representatives would distract Americans or weaken our resolve to face him down," he said.

"But once more, the United States has proven that although we are never eager to use force, when we must act in America's vital interests, we will do so."


----------------

seems an awefully like a bush sppech now doesn't it?


Originally posted by Nickdfresh
They weren't saying the "same thing." CLINTON's statements are fraut with uncertaindy, whereas BUSH had benefit of recent inspections which turned up nothing, is rather sure of himself...

CLINTON never launched a war to get the WMD's from IRAQ did he? So how can anything be the "same.'

bull fucking shit read what was posted above:

Timing was important, said the president, because without a strong inspection system in place, Iraq could rebuild its chemical, biological and nuclear programs in a matter of months, not years.


Originally posted by Nickdfresh
When was CLINTON building a case to invade IRAQ to the UN and the COALITION of the WILLING? What a ludicrous statement...

he tried but the chinese and the russians said no which is why as stated above the us and britain went after iraq



Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Who gives a fuck what they said? BUSH INVADED IRAQ AND KILLED US SOLDIERS doing so!! Clinton didn't,. who gives a fuck about empty word games!! The point is how those words were used, quote people out of context as you will, I really don't care.

who gives a fuck? your the one thats saying bush made it all up but how could he when everyone else says the SAME FUCKING THING. out of context? i'll post their whole fucking speech


Originally posted by Nickdfresh
When have I mention CLARKE tonight? I mentioned the 9/11 Commission! And CLARKE, whatever he said, wasn't tying SADDAM directly to the 9/11 attacks, was he? Big fucking difference there sunshine...

Again, semantics and spin WILBURY...

semantics my ass the whole iraq-al queda thing had NOTHING to do with the 9-11 commision. NOTHING your last post was the first time the 9-11 commision was mentioned. it was brought up over YOU posting the obl/sudan cnn article to which i responded with richard cohen linking iraq-obl-suddan. which you first dismmissed because it was cohen and the washington times then i post the clark thing because he said the same thing. the same info something you've denied. an iraq al queada connection.you've proclaimed there is no iraq-al queda connection but you idol proved you wrong

[Warham]

Lucky, liberals will never admit that Clinton had anything to do with 9/11, because Richard Clarke is a messenger of God.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by lucky wilbury
yet you keep ignoring the facts the facts being hugh shelton,clinton appointee, chairman of the joint chiefs stated that we were no closer to attacking iraq in jan 27,2001- sept 10 2001 the we where pre bush being in office

"At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp, physical pain that RUMSFELD and WOLFOWITZ were going to try to take advantage of a national tragedy to promote their agenda about IRAQ. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for war with IRAQ. My friends in the PENTAGON had been telling me that the word was we would be invading IRAQ sometime in 2002." -Richard CLARKE AGAINST ALL ENEMIES (p.30)

There, now I mentioned him for you so you can pull up meaningless quotes that have no bearing on reality...:D





really he didn't? well read away

http://www.cnn.com/US/9812/16/clinton.iraq.speech/



Clinton: Iraq has abused its last chance

President Clinton addressed the nation from the Oval Office
Clinton spells out Iraq's non-compliance

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- From the Oval Office, President Clinton told the nation Wednesday evening why he ordered new military strikes against Iraq....


----------------

seems an awefully like a bush sppech now doesn't it?

Uh yeah, when you completely remove it from it's historical context! CLINTON said "STRIKES", not I-N-V-A-S-I-O-N! Big difference.

Remember LUCKY, "You break it, you buy it" (as they say at POTTERY BARN) --Colin POWELL

So NO! It isn't the same..."BULL-FUCKING-SHIT" indeed...




bull fucking shit read what was posted above:

Ditto


Timing was important, said the president, because without a strong inspection system in place, Iraq could rebuild its chemical, biological and nuclear programs in a matter of months, not years.

BUSH undermined the inspectors every step of the way and he and his minions sought to marginialize HANS BLIX! Bush didn't give a shit about inspections, they were just a hinderance to his policy of unilateral interventionism...




he tried but the chinese and the russians said no which is why as stated above the us and britain went after iraq

They don't have to follow our policies...Perhaps they wanted an autonomous IRAQ to prevent IRAN's SHARIA Law from spreading into the IRAQ south like it is today--"MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!"





who gives a fuck? your the one thats saying bush made it all up but how could he when everyone else says the SAME FUCKING THING. out of context? i'll post their whole fucking speech

Like the CLINTON speech you completely mischaracterized and posted out of it's historical context ignoring it's intent as compared to BUSH and his speeches, yeah right/:rolleyes:




semantics my ass the whole iraq-al queda thing had NOTHING to do with the 9-11 commision.

So we invaded a country that didn't attack for no real reason? Yeah, I know, 9/11 was just an excuse to set about a plan of external "remaking" of the Middle East, but it's become a very ironic policy...

But there was NO connection between Iraq and Al Qaida (until well after we invaded), and SADDAM didn't attack us!


NOTHING your last post was the first time the 9-11 commision was mentioned. it was brought up over YOU posting the obl/sudan cnn article to which i responded with richard cohen linking iraq-obl-suddan. which you first dismmissed because it was cohen and the washington times then i post the clark thing because he said the same thing. the same info something you've denied. an iraq al queada connection.you've proclaimed there is no iraq-al queda connection but you idol proved you wrong

Who's my idol? I think CLARKE made some big mistakes, in fact he admits it...Pretty novel for someone who was in the BUSH Admin..Who cares what he said in 97' or 98'...The fact is that a lot of nations have "ties" to al Qaeda, so when do we invade SAUDI ARABIA or PAKISTAN (whose ISA supports the TALIBAN/al Qaeda and is training them to kill AMERICANS in AFGHANISTAN). Again, quoting out of context to prove and arcane, almost laughable point at this juncture...

[lucky wilbury]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
"At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp, physical pain that RUMSFELD and WOLFOWITZ were going to try to take advantage of a national tragedy to promote their agenda about IRAQ. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for war with IRAQ. My friends in the PENTAGON had been telling me that the word was we would be invading IRAQ sometime in 2002." -Richard CLARKE AGAINST ALL ENEMIES (p.30)

There, now I mentioned him for you so you can pull up meaningless quotes that have no bearing on reality

i'll still believe clinotn apointee and john edwards backer hugh shelton:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/13/oneill.bush/index.html
Retired Army Gen. Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he saw nothing to indicate the United States was close to attacking Iraq early in Bush's term.

Shelton, who retired shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, said the brass reviewed "on the shelf" plans to respond to crises with the incoming Bush administration.

But in the administration's first six months, "I saw nothing that would lead me to believe that we were any closer to attacking Iraq than we had been during the previous administration," Shelton told CNN.

---------

now i'll believe him. a man opposed to bush whos not pimping a book


Originally posted by Nickdfresh

Uh yeah, when you completely remove it from it's historical context! CLINTON said "STRIKES", not I-N-V-A-S-I-O-N! Big difference.

no there is no difference. you said bush "politczied intellignece" to justify his war. clinton said the same thing as bush and you know it. you just don't want to admit it. they both took military action but bush finished the job based on the same inteligence. two presidents same words but bush instead of only going half way he went all the way. why don't you just admit that because YOU in your opinion disagree with the actions you have to find some reason to justify disagreeing .


Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Remember LUCKY, "You break it, you buy it" (as they say at POTTERY BARN) --Colin POWELL

So NO! It isn't the same..."BULL-FUCKING-SHIT" indeed...

BUSH undermined the inspectors every step of the way and he and his minions sought to marginialize HANS BLIX! Bush didn't give a shit about inspections, they were just a hinderance to his policy of unilateral interventionism...

right:rolleyes:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/02/28/sprj.irq.main/index.html

Blix: Iraqi cooperation has been 'very limited'


------------------------

iraq was pulling the same shit as always



Originally posted by Nickdfresh
They don't have to follow our policies...Perhaps they wanted an autonomous IRAQ to prevent IRAN's SHARIA Law from spreading into the IRAQ south like it is today--"MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!"


actually they do in order to get a un mandate for war which they both threatend to veto for both bush and clinton which is why both acted by themselves with britian.


Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Like the CLINTON speech you completely mischaracterized and posted out of it's historical context ignoring it's intent as compared to BUSH and his speeches, yeah right/

not its not the intent its the content. you know where your claiming bush "politcized intelligence" even though he didn't abd he realy couldn't have done it because him and clinton said the same thing


Originally posted by Nickdfresh
So we invaded a country that didn't attack for no real reason? Yeah, I know, 9/11 was just an excuse to set about a plan of external "remaking" of the Middle East, but it's become a very ironic policy...

wmd,human rights,terrorists connections,un violations, holding of a us pow and on and on just pick your reason


Originally posted by Nickdfresh
But there was NO connection between Iraq and Al Qaida (until well after we invaded), and SADDAM didn't attack us!


Who's my idol? I think CLARKE made some big mistakes, in fact he admits it...Pretty novel for someone who was in the BUSH Admin..Who cares what he said in 97' or 98'...The fact is that a lot of nations have "ties" to al Qaeda, so when do we invade SAUDI ARABIA or PAKISTAN (whose ISA supports the TALIBAN/al Qaeda and is training them to kill AMERICANS in AFGHANISTAN). Again, quoting out of context to prove and arcane, almost laughable point at this juncture...[/B][/QUOTE]

your missing the point. iraq was tied to al queda and other terrorist orgs and the combination of iraq-al queda-wmd wasen't a risk bush was willing to take. afterall they WERE working together on wmd which is why that plant in sudan was hit in 98. that was the reason. in the end saddams time just ran out.plain and simple. not other country worked with al queda on devolping wmd together. notne of them.

[Guitar Shark]

Originally posted by lucky wilbury
i'll still believe clinotn apointee and john edwards backer hugh shelton:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/13/oneill.bush/index.html
Retired Army Gen. Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he saw nothing to indicate the United States was close to attacking Iraq early in Bush's term.

Shelton, who retired shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, said the brass reviewed "on the shelf" plans to respond to crises with the incoming Bush administration.

But in the administration's first six months, "I saw nothing that would lead me to believe that we were any closer to attacking Iraq than we had been during the previous administration," Shelton told CNN.


Funny how you'll believe a Clinton appointee when it happens to suit your purpose...

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by lucky wilbury
i'll still believe clinotn apointee and john edwards backer hugh shelton:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/13/oneill.bush/index.html
Retired Army Gen. Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he saw nothing to indicate the United States was close to attacking Iraq early in Bush's term.

Shelton, who retired shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, said the brass reviewed "on the shelf" plans to respond to crises with the incoming Bush administration.

But in the administration's first six months, "I saw nothing that would lead me to believe that we were any closer to attacking Iraq than we had been during the previous administration," Shelton told CNN.

---------

now i'll believe him. a man opposed to bush whos not pimping a book

Uh, check the dates. Sept. 11th was used to justify such a policy...2002 was the target date, not 2001.




no there is no difference. you said bush "politczied intelligence" to justify his war. clinton said the same thing as bush and you know it. you just don't want to admit it. they both took military action but bush finished the job

Whoa!!!! Wait a minute, BUSH DID WHAT??!! FINSIHED THE JOB! Oh, that has to be the funniest (or actually the saddest) shit I've read all day! He didn't even really begin the job...Try reading newspaper for recent news on Iraq to appear less like a partisan lackey...

http://waltonfeed.com/pic/ostrich.gif


based on the same inteligence. two presidents same words but bush instead of only going half way he went all the way. why don't you just admit that because YOU in your opinion disagree with the actions you have to find some reason to justify disagreeing .

Yeah, he went all the way and really fucked the whole thing up! Again, you're quite delusional if you actually believe this shit and can't recognize basic differneces in tone and policy. Tthanks for the laugh LUCKY...






right:rolleyes:

Yup. uh-huh!


http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/02/28/sprj.irq.main/index.html

Blix: Iraqi cooperation has been 'very limited'


------------------------

iraq was pulling the same shit as always


Well, since your a big fan of HANS BLIX, lets see what he has to say about unilateral US military action..

Blix Says Iraq War Stimulated Terrorism
By Patrick McLoughlin
Reuters

Wednesday 13 October 2003

Stockholm - Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix says the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had failed tragically in its aim of making the world a safer place and succeeded only in stimulating terrorism.

Blix, in implicit criticism of the main protagonists U.S. President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, said on Wednesday the action had also failed to deter any ambitions on the part of Iran or North Korea to develop nuclear weapons.

"The acknowledged gain of the war was that a treacherous and murderous dictator (Saddam Hussein) was removed, but the rest has been tragedy and failure," he told Reuters in an interview.

"It Has Stimulated Terrorism."

Many critics of the invasion argue it opened Iraq to Islamist militants involved in an insurrection against coalition forces, while distracting attention from a campaign against the al-Qaeda group blamed for September, 2001 attacks on the United States.

"Is the world safer? No. It's not safer in Iraq," he said in his native Stockholm. "If North Korea and Iran are contemplating going for weapons of mass destruction, then it hasn't stopped them. It has not solved the Middle East conflict."

Other Issues Neglected

Blix suggested Washington and London had lost perspective in focusing on Saddam who, it has since emerged, was not involved in developing nuclear arms.

"Of course they were concerned with North Korea and Iran. But...they focused a great deal of their efforts on Iraq while other things were left simmering."

Iran denies U.S. accusations it is developing nuclear arms. Experts say North Korea has an arsenal of between two and nine nuclear bombs.

...

Iraqi Science and Technology Minister Rashad Omar issued the invitation after an IAEA report on Monday said neither Baghdad nor Washington appeared to have noticed the disappearance of nuclear equipment and materials once closely monitored by IAEA.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/101504Y.shtml

Yeah, that's brilliant, "finishing the job" caused us to lose track of what materials IRAQ did have...



actually they do in order to get a un mandate for war which they both threatend to veto for both bush and clinton which is why both acted by themselves with britian.

not its not the intent its the content. you know where your claiming bush "politcized intelligence" even though he didn't abd he realy couldn't have done it because him and clinton said the same thing

No, I guess the 20+ article abstracts I posted that says that BUSH DID "politicize" the intelligence mean nothing compared to all the articles that you posted...say...you haven't posted any article that contradict those findings...


wmd,

There are none! They were long gone...But hey, "Don't stop, believin'...hold on to that special feelin...'":D



human rights

Like you even care about that...how many dictators around the world have abused "human rights" that are our allies (SAUDIS, Egyptians, PAKIS)...*yawn* Next...


terrorists connections

How many of our "friends have supported terrorism? And there was no real connection to Al Qaeda, pedestrian communiques don't count. They never worked together. Try again. The SAUDIS, PAKISTANIS (against us), The EL SALVADORAN Death Squads, The CONTRAS (all terrorists according to your definitions), yet we've supported all of the above.


un violations,

Why, we violated UN resolutions and conducted an illegal invasion, ISRAEL certainly has and we still support them...


holding of a us pow

Why didn't we invade the SOVIET UNION then during the cold war when they held over one-to-two hundred USAF POWs shot down on recon missions? Why attack IRAQ based on that, and there is little evidence regarding his fate, certainly not enough to sacrifice more kids...



and on and on just pick your reason

Yeah, and double standards. The moral inconsistency which causes the Western World to view us as self-serving hypocrites that will support dictators that will do our bidding, yet attack those that contradict our policies and hold significant natural resources within' their borders...

Oh, and you forgot OIL. They are our number six importer now, and if the insurgents aren't able to blow up the pipelines, then I imagine they'll only move right on up that list...

HALLIBURTON is having a record year also I think...




your missing the point. iraq was tied to al queda and other terrorist orgs and the combination of iraq-al queda-wmd wasen't a risk bush was willing to take. afterall they WERE working together on wmd which is why that plant in sudan was hit in 98. that was the reason. in the end saddams time just ran out.plain and simple. not other country worked with al queda on devolping wmd together. notne of them.

Define "TIED", what operations did they undertake against us with al Qaeda? What specific proof is there of this. What dioes "tied" mean? Can the CIA be "TIED" to al Qaida based on the AFGHAN war against the SOVIETS? You're missing the point, we're hypocrites to base an invasion on that when our PAKISTANI "allies" are continually supporting the TALIBAN and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan...

[Warham]

Let's just blame both Clinton and Bush for this and move on, alright?

My eyes hurt.

[lucky wilbury]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Uh, check the dates. Sept. 11th was used to justify such a policy...2002 was the target date, not 2001.

and you've stated that it was bush plan to invade since day one but it wasen't



Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Whoa!!!! Wait a minute, BUSH DID WHAT??!! FINSIHED THE JOB! Oh, that has to be the funniest (or actually the saddest) shit I've read all day! He didn't even really begin the job...Try reading newspaper for recent news on Iraq to appear less like a partisan lackey...

yes lets look at the papers and compare it to the goals of the iraq liberation act:

---------------
SEC. 3. SENSE OF THE CONGRESS REGARDING UNITED STATES POLICY TOWARD IRAQ.

It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.
-------------------

check saddams been out of power since april of 03 and in custody since dec of 03. next:
----------------
SEC. 6. WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL FOR IRAQ.

Consistent with section 301 of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1992 and 1993 (Public Law 102-138), House Concurrent Resolution 137, 105th Congress (approved by the House of Representatives on November 13, 1997), and Senate Concurrent Resolution 78, 105th Congress (approved by the Senate on March 13, 1998), the Congress urges the President to call upon the United Nations to establish an international criminal tribunal for the purpose of indicting, prosecuting, and imprisoning Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi officials who are responsible for crimes against humanity, genocide, and other criminal violations of international law.
-------------------

check. his trial starts in a few months

---------------
SEC. 7. ASSISTANCE FOR IRAQ UPON REPLACEMENT OF SADDAM HUSSEIN REGIME.

It is the sense of the Congress that once the Saddam Hussein regime is removed from power in Iraq, the United States should support Iraq's transition to democracy by providing immediate and substantial humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, by providing democracy transition assistance to Iraqi parties and movements with democratic goals, and by convening Iraq's foreign creditors to develop a multilateral response to Iraq's foreign debt incurred by Saddam Hussein's regime.

---------------

check elections were held in jan and a new constution is being written as we speak with more elections coming in the next few months. the job is almost done.




Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Yeah, he went all the way and really fucked the whole thing up! Again, you're quite delusional if you actually believe this shit and can't recognize basic differneces in tone and policy. Tthanks for the laugh LUCKY...

apparently you don't speak english but when a president that president being in this case clinton signs a loan that says quote:


(9) Since March 1996, Iraq has systematically sought to deny weapons inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) access to key facilities and documents, has on several occasions endangered the safe operation of UNSCOM helicopters transporting UNSCOM personnel in Iraq, and has persisted in a pattern of deception and concealment regarding the history of its weapons of mass destruction programs.

(10) On August 5, 1998, Iraq ceased all cooperation with UNSCOM, and subsequently threatened to end long-term monitoring activities by the International Atomic Energy Agency and UNSCOM.

(11) On August 14, 1998, President Clinton signed Public Law 105-235, which declared that `the Government of Iraq is in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations' and urged the President `to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations.'.



thats not "tone" thats policy. its the law of the usa.




Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Well, since your a big fan of HANS BLIX, lets see what he has to say about unilateral US military action

and thats his opinion of the action but when it comes to iraq he was stating a fact thats was backed up by iraqs actions



Originally posted by Nickdfresh


you would be refering to materials they weren't supposed to have




Originally posted by Nickdfresh
No, I guess the 20+ article abstracts I posted that says that BUSH DID "politicize" the intelligence mean nothing compared to all the articles that you posted...say...you haven't posted any article that contradict those findings...

bullshit clintons own words show it wasen't "politicized"

http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/02/17/transcripts/clinton.iraq/



Now, instead of playing by the very rules he agreed to at the end of the Gulf War, Saddam has spent the better part of the past decade trying to cheat on this solemn commitment. Consider just some of the facts:

Iraq repeatedly made false declarations about the weapons that it had left in its possession after the Gulf War. When UNSCOM would then uncover evidence that gave lie to those declarations, Iraq would simply amend the reports.

For example, Iraq revised its nuclear declarations four times within just 14 months and it has submitted six different biological warfare declarations, each of which has been rejected by UNSCOM.

In 1995, Hussein Kamal, Saddam's son-in-law, and the chief organizer of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, defected to Jordan. He revealed that Iraq was continuing to conceal weapons and missiles and the capacity to build many more.

Then and only then did Iraq admit to developing numbers of weapons in significant quantities and weapon stocks. Previously, it had vehemently denied the very thing it just simply admitted once Saddam Hussein's son-in-law defected to Jordan and told the truth. Now listen to this, what did it admit?

It admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs.

And I might say UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production.

As if we needed further confirmation, you all know what happened to his son-in-law when he made the untimely decision to go back to Iraq.

Next, throughout this entire process, Iraqi agents have undermined and undercut UNSCOM. They've harassed the inspectors, lied to them, disabled monitoring cameras, literally spirited evidence out of the back doors of suspect facilities as inspectors walked through the front door. And our people were there observing it and had the pictures to prove it.

Despite Iraq's deceptions, UNSCOM has nevertheless done a remarkable job. Its inspectors the eyes and ears of the civilized world have uncovered and destroyed more weapons of mass destruction capacity than was destroyed during the Gulf War.

This includes nearly 40,000 chemical weapons, more than 100,000 gallons of chemical weapons agents, 48 operational missiles, 30 warheads specifically fitted for chemical and biological weapons, and a massive biological weapons facility at Al Hakam equipped to produce anthrax and other deadly agents.

Over the past few months, as they have come closer and closer to rooting out Iraq's remaining nuclear capacity, Saddam has undertaken yet another gambit to thwart their ambitions.

By imposing debilitating conditions on the inspectors and declaring key sites which have still not been inspected off limits, including, I might add, one palace in Baghdad more than 2,600 acres large by comparison, when you hear all this business about presidential sites reflect our sovereignty, why do you want to come into a residence, the White House complex is 18 acres. So you'll have some feel for this.

One of these presidential sites is about the size of Washington, D.C. That's about how many acres did you tell me it was? 40,000 acres. We're not talking about a few rooms here with delicate personal matters involved.

It is obvious that there is an attempt here, based on the whole history of this operation since 1991, to protect whatever remains of his capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, the missiles to deliver them, and the feed stocks necessary to produce them.

The UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons.

-------------------


or better yet:
http://www.rotharmy.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=505&highlight=Portugal

Former US president Bill Clinton said in October during a visit to Portugal that he was convinced Iraq had weapons of mass destruction up until the fall of Saddam Hussein, Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso said.

"When Clinton was here recently he told me he was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime," he said in an interview with Portuguese cable news channel SIC Noticias.

Clinton, a Democrat who left office in 2001, met with Durao Barroso on October 21 when he travelled to Lisbon to give a speech on globalization.

The US justified going to war against Iraq last year citing the threat posed by Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction.

Republican President George W. Bush used Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes and Saddam Hussein's ties to terrorism as the main case to the United Nations for the US-led war against Iraq.

But since the US occupation of Iraq, American forces have failed to uncover any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons since the war. Hundreds of experts are still scouring Iraq in the hunt.

An influential Washington think-tank said Thursday the Bush administration "systematically" inflated the threat from Iraq's weapons programmes in a bid to strengthen its push for military action against Iraq last year.

In its report, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace also said it was unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden or moved out of the country hundreds of weapons of mass destruction without Washington detecting some sign of activity.
----------------------

now if clinton gave speeches about there presence and was "absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction" why would bush need to "politcized" info about an absolute fact according to clinton? it convienced clinton. albright. kennedy. kerry. and on and on. they all saw the same stuff. they all said he had them same as bush.



Originally posted by Nickdfresh
There are none! They were long gone...But hey, "Don't stop, believin'...hold on to that special feelin...'

according to your friend clinton they were there or was he just politicizing the info so he could attack iraq in 98



Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Like you even care about that...how many dictators around the world have abused "human rights" that are our allies (SAUDIS, Egyptians, PAKIS)...*yawn* Next...

and we're actually now working to reform those countries




Originally posted by Nickdfresh
How many of our "friends have supported terrorism? And there was no real connection to Al Qaeda, pedestrian communiques don't count. They never worked together. Try again.

did you not read the richard clark thing!! he said they we're working on wmd with respect to the sudan plant! clinton said the same thing! is this not making sense to you!




Originally posted by Nickdfresh
The SAUDIS, PAKISTANIS (against us), The EL SALVADORAN Death Squads, The CONTRAS (all terrorists according to your definitions), yet we've supported all of the above.


Why, we violated UN resolutions and conducted an illegal invasion, ISRAEL certainly has and we still support them...[/QUOTE]

under the uns own resolutions iraq was to be brought back into un complience and thats what we did.



Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Why didn't we invade the SOVIET UNION then during the cold war when they held over one-to-two hundred USAF POWs shot down on recon missions? Why attack IRAQ based on that, and there is little evidence regarding his fate, certainly not enough to sacrifice more kids...

not enough eviedence?!?! read up on it maybe you'll come across the pics of the intials in the jail cell never mind:

http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/news-article.aspx?storyid=3339
Investigators in Iraq find clue about missing pilot Speicher


JACKSONVILLE, FL -- There is new information in the search for missing Jacksonville pilot Scott Speicher. American investigators said they have found their first big clue on the walls of a Baghdad prison.

Some see it as proof that Scott Speicher was kept alive in an Iraqi prison by Saddam Hussein. Speicher's plane was shot down during the Gulf War over a decade ago.

As American troops storm empty Iraqi prisons, something has spoken to them from a silent cell -- the initials "M.S.S." The initials for Michael Scott Speicher were found etched on to a prison wall.

"We still believe he's alive," said Miriam Novelly, Friends of Speicher. "This makes us hopeful that soon they're going to find him. It seems like they're getting closer."

Speicher's friends have believed for years that he is alive and alone -- with no one trying to free him. That has all changed.

Florida Senator Bill Nelson believes once the top ranking Iraqi leaders are found, they will lead American forces right to Speicher's location.

"When we find one of the top 55 Iraqi leaders who will have the knowledge of this compartmentalized system of high-value prisoners that were kept in super secret prisons, then we'll know about the fate of Scott Speicher," said Senator Bill Nelson (D).
http://www.firstcoastnews.com/assetpool/images/03424212934_speicher1.jpg
The same prison where the initials "M.S.S" was found is the same one where earlier intelligence reports claimed an American pilot was being held. Senator Nelson believes Speicher was considered a high-value prisoner and that's why he was not released with the 7 former P.O.W.s.

Senator Nelson is hopeful that Scott Speicher will be found. He says every member of the military from the top brass to the foot soldiers knows about Speicher and are searching.

"This is such an American drama of having left a downed pilot which is something you don't do," said Senator Bill Nelson (D). "All those soldiers in Iraq -- they know about Scott Speicher."

However, U.S. officials stress even if the information is true, it does not tell them where Scott Speicher is right now or if he is alive. Speicher family attorney Cindy Laquidara said while she can't comment on the new find, she has received positive information in the past week and the family continues to be optimistic.

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you take this and the fact that saddam held a "dead" iranian pilot for 18 or 19 years things get interesting



Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Yeah, and double standards. The moral inconsistency which causes the Western World to view us as self-serving hypocrites that will support dictators that will do our bidding, yet attack those that contradict our policies and hold significant natural resources within' their borders...


what about panama? grenada? kosovo? bosnia? haiti? somiliea? to a lesser extent the ousting charles taylor in liberia. all countries who have resources that are of little value to us.


Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Oh, and you forgot OIL. They are our number six importer now, and if the insurgents aren't able to blow up the pipelines, then I imagine they'll only move right on up that list...

HALLIBURTON is having a record year also I think...

they would be doing well because of high oil prices and the construction on new oil rigs in the gulf of mexico



Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Define "TIED", what operations did they undertake against us with al Qaeda? What specific proof is there of this. What dioes "tied" mean? Can the CIA be "TIED" to al Qaida based on the AFGHAN war against the SOVIETS? You're missing the point, we're hypocrites to base an invasion on that when our PAKISTANI "allies" are continually supporting the TALIBAN and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan...

al queda didn't exist till the earlier 90's after the soviets war in afghanistan. the reasons listed were just one of many not to mention iraq used wmd when you add it all up it was time for hime to go.

[DrMaddVibe]

CIA 9/11 Review Suggests Disciplining Top Officials

WASHINGTON — The CIA's independent watchdog has recommended disciplinary reviews for current and former officials who were involved in failed intelligence efforts before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, The Associated Press has learned.

CIA Director Porter Goss now must decide whether the disciplinary proceedings go forward.

The proceedings, formally called an accountability board, were recommended by the CIA inspector general, John Helgerson. It remains unclear which people are identified for the accountability boards in the highly classified report spanning hundreds of pages. The report was delivered to Congress Tuesday night.

Following a two-year review into what went wrong before the hijackings, people familiar with the report say Helgerson harshly criticizes a number of the agency's most senior officials. Among them are former CIA Director George Tenet, former clandestine service chief Jim Pavitt and former counterterrorism center head Cofer Black. The former officials are likely candidates for proceedings before an accountability board.

The boards could take a number of actions, including letters of reprimand or dismissal. They could also clear them of wrongdoing.

Those who discussed the report with the AP all spoke on condition of anonymity because it remains highly classified and has been distributed only to a small circle in Washington.

Tenet and Pavitt declined to comment. Black could not be reached Thursday.

Those who know Goss well question whether the director, who took over the agency last September, will commission the displinary reviews.

Despite public outcries for accountability, many in the intelligence community believe Goss would be loathe to try to discipline popular former senior officials and cause unrest within the agency.

He may not want to go after less senior people still in the CIA's employ. Intelligence veterans say these CIA employees are the government's mostly highly trained in counterterrorism and before the Sept. 11 attacks, devoted their time to trying to stop al-Qaida. The hearings would force them to defend their careers rather than working against extremist groups.

In addition, the numerous investigations after Sept. 11 determined that an intelligence overhaul was essential to attack Muslim extremism.

Some Congress members — including California Rep. Jane Harman, the Intelligence Committee's senior Democrat — are pushing for the CIA to produce a declassified version of the report so the public can debate these and other issues. Some family members of 9/11 victims have also called for the report's immediate release.

"The findings in this report must be shared with all members of Congress and with the American public to ensure that the problems identified are addressed and corrected, thus moving to restore faith in this agency," a group called Sept. 11 Advocates said in a statement Thursday.

The final version comes after much internal debate at the CIA and new national intelligence director's office about whether to simply scrap the document because it looks backward and is so harsh, said one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Beth Marple, spokeswoman for National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, said, "As expected, there has been discussion between Director Negroponte and Director Goss about this report. But there were absolutely no efforts to kill it."

The CIA declined to comment on the substance of the report.

Accountability boards are normally made up of top CIA officials. In the case of the most serious issues, it would not be unusual for the agency's No. 3, the executive director, to lead the proceedings.

People familar with the inspector general's process said the document largely covers ground already plowed in the 9/11 commission's report and a House-Senate inquiry that issued its own report on the attacks in December 2002. Those 37 Congress members requested the inspector general's review to consider issues of accountability.

Among items that received significant attention in the past: the CIA's failure to put two known operatives, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, on government watchlists and to let the FBI know that the future hijackers had entered the United States.

The new report, however, comes at the events from a different perspective, focusing more narrowly on the agency's performance.

© 2005 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by lucky wilbury
and you've stated that it was bush plan to invade since day one but it wasen't

When? I stated that BUSH "fixed" or "politicized" the intelligence around doing so...

Uh nope...


yes lets look at the papers and compare it to the goals of the iraq liberation act:

LUCKY, answer this simple question and stop posting this redundant semantic cut an paste crap: When did BILL CLINTON propose invading IRAQ? It's that simple, any other comparisons are quite inauthentic completely nihilist...sorry.:rolleyes:


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SEC. 3. SENSE OF THE CONGRESS REGARDING UNITED STATES POLICY TOWARD IRAQ.

It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.
-------------------


And when was the planned invasion? This was designed to help the IRAQIS get rid of the prick...No tto get the US involved in a long term insurgency...


check saddams been out of power since april of 03 and in custody since dec of 03. next:
----------------


And now we have a new collection of Islamic tyrants taking over IRAQ...

There going to impose IRANIAN style SHARIA Law...

Wow LUCKY, meet the new boss, same as the old boss...


SEC. 6. WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL FOR IRAQ.


check. his trial starts in a few months


So what? Theres a lot of people that should be tried for murdering their people. The world is no safer without him there, in fact, many think we may have been better off with SADDAM in power...And when did CLINTON plan to invade IRAQ?


---------------
SEC. 7. ASSISTANCE FOR IRAQ UPON REPLACEMENT OF SADDAM HUSSEIN REGIME.

It is the sense of the Congress that once the Saddam Hussein regime is removed from power in Iraq, the United States should support Iraq's transition to democracy ...
---------------

check elections were held in jan and a new constution is being written as we speak with more elections coming in the next few months. the job is almost done.

Super! so when does the civil war erupt? oh yeah, it's going already...


So IRAQ has gone from a modernist, secular system (albeit forced via oppression) back to an Islamic state, great LUCKY, I'm glad that 'your pal' BUSH did so well and gave you a hard on. Long live "democratic reform" With friends like the "new" IRAQ, who needs IRAN...


We have now created another Islamic state with possible long-term prospects for terrorist support. How ironic!!




apparently you don't speak english but when a president that president being in this case clinton signs a loan that says quote:

Apparently you lack the ability of critical thinking. You know, the kind that would enable you top decipher the levels of military response...

So again, where was CLINTON calling for an invasion using large numbers of US ground forces? When did he decide to occupy the country and enforce "democracy" so they could vote in Islamicist politicians? Furthermore, how has this invasion prevented other countries such as NORTH KOREA or IRAN from developing Nukes? It hasn't...



thats not "tone" thats policy. its the law of the usa.

No shit, really? This wasn't about objectives, it was about means. But let me ask you the question for the 500th time, When was CLINTON's planned invasion?



and thats his opinion of the action but when it comes to iraq he was stating a fact thats was backed up by iraqs actions

Great, more semantic bullshit...:rolleyes:


you would be refering to materials they weren't supposed to have

We wouldn't know, they were stripped during the breakdown after the US "conquered" IRAQ...Remember the huge breakdown of law and order because we didn't have enough troops there?


bullshit clintons own words show it wasen't "politicized"

Ha ha!! CLINTON'S words mean nothing because he was advocating an entirely different policy of perpetual "Containment." For the 30th time...

Here's how he "politicized" the intelligence, and who gives a fuck about CLINTON, he never invaded IRAQ...

OCTOBER 8, 1997 – IAEA SAYS IRAQ FREE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS: "As reported in detail in the progress report dated 8 October 1997…and based on all credible information available to date, the IAEA's verification activities in Iraq, have resulted in the evolution of a technically coherent picture of Iraq's clandestine nuclear programme. These verification activities have revealed no indications that Iraq had achieved its programme objective of producing nuclear weapons or that Iraq had produced more than a few grams of weapon-usable nuclear material or had clandestinely acquired such material. Furthermore, there are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for t he production of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance." Source: IAEA Report, 10/8/98 (http://www.nci.org/i/iaea10-8-98.htm)



THE STOVEPIPE
How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2003-10-27
Posted 2003-10-20

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered.

The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went on, was that the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq’s nuclear-weapons programs, were far more accurate than the C.I.A. estimates. “Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,” the official said. “If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board.”

There were, of course, good reasons to worry about Saddam Hussein’s possession of W.M.D.s. He had manufactured and used chemical weapons in the past, and had experimented with biological weapons; before the first Gulf War, he maintained a multibillion-dollar nuclear-weapons program. In addition, there were widespread doubts about the efficacy of the U.N. inspection teams, whose operations in Iraq were repeatedly challenged and disrupted by Saddam Hussein. Iraq was thought to have manufactured at least six thousand more chemical weapons than the U.N. could account for. And yet, as some former U.N. inspectors often predicted, the tons of chemical and biological weapons that the American public was led to expect have thus far proved illusory. As long as that remains the case, one question will be asked more and more insistently: How did the American intelligence community get it so wrong?

Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.

A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: “Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings?” The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities—a process known as “stovepiping”—without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”

The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”

A few months after George Bush took office, Greg Thielmann, an expert on disarmament with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, was assigned to be the daily intelligence liaison to John Bolton, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control, who is a prominent conservative. Thielmann understood that his posting had been mandated by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who thought that every important State Department bureau should be assigned a daily intelligence officer. “Bolton was the guy with whom I had to do business,” Thielmann said. “We were going to provide him with all the information he was entitled to see. That’s what being a professional intelligence officer is all about.”

But, Thielmann told me, “Bolton seemed to be troubled because INR was not telling him what he wanted to hear.” Thielmann soon found himself shut out of Bolton’s early-morning staff meetings. “I was intercepted at the door of his office and told, ‘The Under-Secretary doesn’t need you to attend this meeting anymore.’ ” When Thielmann protested that he was there to provide intelligence input, the aide said, “The Under-Secretary wants to keep this in the family.”

Eventually, Thielmann said, Bolton demanded that he and his staff have direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign-agent reports and electronic intercepts. In previous Administrations, such data had been made available to under-secretaries only after it was analyzed, usually in the specially secured offices of INR. The whole point of the intelligence system in place, according to Thielmann, was “to prevent raw intelligence from getting to people who would be misled.” Bolton, however, wanted his aides to receive and assign intelligence analyses and assessments using the raw data. In essence, the under-secretary would be running his own intelligence operation, without any guidance or support. “He surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get C.I.A. information directly,” Thielmann said.

In a subsequent interview, Bolton acknowledged that he had changed the procedures for handling intelligence, in an effort to extend the scope of the classified materials available to his office. “I found that there was lots of stuff that I wasn’t getting and that the INR analysts weren’t including,” he told me. “I didn’t want it filtered. I wanted to see everything—to be fully informed. If that puts someone’s nose out of joint, sorry about that.” Bolton told me that he wanted to reach out to the intelligence community but that Thielmann had “invited himself” to his daily staff meetings. “This was my meeting with the four assistant secretaries who report to me, in preparation for the Secretary’s 8:30 a.m. staff meeting,” Bolton said. “This was within my family of bureaus. There was no place for INR or anyone else—the Human Resources Bureau or the Office of Foreign Buildings.”

There was also a change in procedure at the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy. In the early summer of 2001, a career official assigned to a Pentagon planning office undertook a routine evaluation of the assumption, adopted by Wolfowitz and Feith, that the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, could play a major role in a coup d’état to oust Saddam Hussein. They also assumed that Chalabi, after the coup, would be welcomed by Iraqis as a hero.

An official familiar with the evaluation described how it subjected that scenario to the principle of what planners call “branches and sequels”—that is, “plan for what you expect not to happen.” The official said, “It was a ‘what could go wrong’ study. What if it turns out that Ahmad Chalabi is not so popular? What’s Plan B if you discover that Chalabi and his boys don’t have it in them to accomplish the overthrow?”

The people in the policy offices didn’t seem to care. When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study’s exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. “Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads,” the official told me. “You need to think about what would happen if it comes up tails.”

Getting rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime had been a priority for Wolfowitz and others in and around the Administration since the end of the first Gulf War. For years, Iraq hawks had seen a coup led by Chalabi as the best means of achieving that goal. After September 11th, however, and the military’s quick victory in Afghanistan, the notion of a coup gave way to the idea of an American invasion.

In a speech on November 14, 2001, as the Taliban were being routed in Afghanistan, Richard Perle, a Pentagon consultant with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, Feith, and Chalabi, articulated what would become the Bush Administration’s most compelling argument for going to war with Iraq: the possibility that, with enough time, Saddam Hussein would be capable of attacking the United States with a nuclear weapon. Perle cited testimony from Dr. Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi defector, who declared that Saddam Hussein, in response to the 1981 Israeli bombing of the Osiraq nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, had ordered future nuclear facilities to be dispersed at four hundred sites across the nation. “Every day,” Perle said, these sites “turn out a little bit of nuclear materials.” He told his audience, “Do we wait for Saddam and hope for the best, do we wait and hope he doesn’t do what we know he is capable of . . . or do we take some preemptive action?”

In fact, the best case for the success of the U.N. inspection process in Iraq was in the area of nuclear arms. In October, 1997, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a definitive report declaring Iraq to be essentially free of nuclear weapons. The I.A.E.A.’s inspectors said, “There are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of amounts of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance.” The report noted that Iraq’s nuclear facilities had been destroyed by American bombs in the 1991 Gulf War.

The study’s main author, Garry Dillon, a British nuclear-safety engineer who spent twenty-three years working for the I.A.E.A. and retired as its chief of inspection, told me that it was “highly unlikely” that Iraq had been able to maintain a secret or hidden program to produce significant amounts of weapons-usable material, given the enormous progress in the past decade in the technical ability of I.A.E.A. inspectors to detect radioactivity in ground locations and in waterways. “This is not kitchen chemistry,” Dillon said. “You’re talking factory scale, and in any operation there are leaks.”

The Administration could offer little or no recent firsthand intelligence to contradict the I.A.E.A.’s 1997 conclusions. During the Clinton years, there had been a constant flow of troubling intelligence reports on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but most were in the context of worst-case analyses—what Iraq could do without adequate United Nations inspections—and included few, if any, reliable reports from agents inside the country. The inspectors left in 1998. Many of the new reports that the Bush people were receiving came from defectors who had managed to flee Iraq with help from the Iraqi National Congress. The defectors gave dramatic accounts of Iraq’s efforts to reconstituteits nuclear-weapons program, and of its alleged production of chemical and biological weapons—but the accounts could not be corroborated by the available intelligence.

Greg Thielmann, after being turned away from Bolton’s office, worked with the INR staff on a major review of Iraq’s progress in developing W.M.D.s. The review, presented to Secretary of State Powell in December, 2001, echoed the earlier I.A.E.A. findings. According to Thielmann, “It basically said that there is no persuasive evidence that the Iraqi nuclear program is being reconstituted.”

The defectors, however, had an audience prepared to believe the worst. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long complained about the limits of American intelligence. In the late nineteen-nineties, for example, he had chaired a commission on ballistic-missile programs that criticized the unwillingness of intelligence analysts “to make estimates that extended beyond the hard evidence they had in hand.” After he became Secretary of Defense, a separate intelligence unit was set up in the Pentagon’s policy office, under the control of William Luti, a senior aide to Feith. This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials.

In the fall of 2001, soon after the September 11th attacks, the C.I.A. received an intelligence report from Italy’s Military Intelligence and Security Service, or sismi, about a public visit that Wissam al-Zahawie, then the Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican, had made to Niger and three other African nations two and a half years earlier, in February, 1999. The visit had been covered at the time by the local press in Niger and by a French press agency. The American Ambassador, Charles O. Cecil, filed a routine report to Washington on the visit, as did British intelligence. There was nothing untoward about the Zahawie visit. “We reported it because his picture appeared in the paper with the President,” Cecil, who is now retired, told me. There was no article accompanying the photograph, only the caption, and nothing significant to report. At the time, Niger, which had sent hundreds of troops in support of the American-led Gulf War in 1991, was actively seeking economic assistance from the United States.

None of the contemporaneous reports, as far as is known, made any mention of uranium. But now, apparently as part of a larger search for any pertinent information about terrorism, sismi dug the Zahawie-trip report out of its files and passed it along, with a suggestion that Zahawie’s real mission was to arrange the purchase of a form of uranium ore known as “yellowcake.” (Yellowcake, which has been a major Niger export for decades, can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors. It can also be converted, if processed differently, into weapons-grade uranium.)

What made the two-and-a-half-year-old report stand out in Washington was its relative freshness. A 1999 attempt by Iraq to buy uranium ore, if verified, would seem to prove that Saddam had been working to reconstitute his nuclear program—and give the lie to the I.A.E.A. and to intelligence reports inside the American government that claimed otherwise.

The sismi report, however, was unpersuasive. Inside the American intelligence community, it was dismissed as amateurish and unsubstantiated. One former senior C.I.A. official told me that the initial report from Italy contained no documents but only a written summary of allegations. “I can fully believe that sismi would put out a piece of intelligence like that,” a C.I.A. consultant told me, “but why anybody would put credibility in it is beyond me.” No credible documents have emerged since to corroborate it.

The intelligence report was quickly stovepiped to those officials who had an intense interest in building the case against Iraq, including Vice-President Dick Cheney. “The Vice-President saw a piece of intelligence reporting that Niger was attempting to buy uranium,” Cathie Martin, the spokeswoman for Cheney, told me. Sometime after he first saw it, Cheney brought it up at his regularly scheduled daily briefing from the C.I.A., Martin said. “He asked the briefer a question. The briefer came back a day or two later and said, ‘We do have a report, but there’s a lack of details.’ ” The Vice-President was further told that it was known that Iraq had acquired uranium ore from Niger in the early nineteen-eighties but that that material had been placed in secure storage by the I.A.E.A., which was monitoring it. “End of story,” Martin added. “That’s all we know.” According to a former high-level C.I.A. official, however, Cheney was dissatisfied with the initial response, and asked the agency to review the matter once again. It was the beginning of what turned out to be a year-long tug-of-war between the C.I.A. and the Vice-President’s office.

As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President’s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq’s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence.

“It was an unbelievably closed and small group,” the former aide told me. Intelligence procedures were far more open during the Clinton Administration, he said, and professional staff members had been far more involved in assessing and evaluating the most sensitive data. “There’s so much intelligence out there that it’s easy to pick and choose your case,” the former aide told me. “It opens things up to cherry-picking.” (“Some reporting is sufficiently sensitive that it is restricted only to the very top officials of the government—as it should be,” Cathie Martin said. And any restrictions, she added, emanate from C.I.A. security requirements.)

By early 2002, the sismi intelligence—still unverified—had begun to play a role in the Administration’s warnings about the Iraqi nuclear threat. On January 30th, the C.I.A. published an unclassified report to Congress that stated, “Baghdad may be attempting to acquire materials that could aid in reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program.” A week later, Colin Powell told the House International Relations Committee, “With respect to the nuclear program, there is no doubt that the Iraqis are pursuing it.”

The C.I.A. assessment reflected both deep divisions within the agency and the position of its director, George Tenet, which was far from secure. (The agency had been sharply criticized, after all, for failing to provide any effective warning of the September 11th attacks.) In the view of many C.I.A. analysts and operatives, the director was too eager to endear himself to the Administration hawks and improve his standing with the President and the Vice-President. Senior C.I.A. analysts dealing with Iraq were constantly being urged by the Vice-President’s office to provide worst-case assessments on Iraqi weapons issues. “They got pounded on, day after day,” one senior Bush Administration official told me, and received no consistent backup from Tenet and his senior staff. “Pretty soon you say ‘Fuck it.’ ” And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted.

In late February, the C.I.A. persuaded retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson to fly to Niger to discreetly check out the story of the uranium sale. Wilson, who is now a business consultant, had excellent credentials: he had been deputy chief of mission in Baghdad, had served as a diplomat in Africa, and had worked in the White House for the National Security Council. He was known as an independent diplomat who had put himself in harm’s way to help American citizens abroad.

Wilson told me he was informed at the time that the mission had come about because the Vice-President’s office was interested in the Italian intelligence report. Before his departure, he was summoned to a meeting at the C.I.A. with a group of government experts on Iraq, Niger, and uranium. He was shown no documents but was told, he said, that the C.I.A. “was responding to a report that was recently received of a purported memorandum of agreement”—between Iraq and Niger—“that our boys had gotten.” He added, “It was never clear to me, or to the people who were briefing me, whether our guys had actually seen the agreement, or the purported text of an agreement.” Wilson’s trip to Niger, which lasted eight days, produced nothing. He learned that any memorandum of understanding to sell yellowcake would have required the signatures of Niger’s Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Minister of Mines. “I saw everybody out there,” Wilson said, and no one had signed such a document. “If a document purporting to be about the sale contained those signatures, it would not be authentic.” Wilson also learned that there was no uranium available to sell: it had all been pre-sold to Niger’s Japanese and European consortium partners.

Wilson returned to Washington and made his report. It was circulated, he said, but “I heard nothing about what the Vice-President’s office thought about it.” (In response, Cathie Martin said, “The Vice-President doesn’t know Joe Wilson and did not know about his trip until he read about it in the press.” The first press accounts appeared fifteen months after Wilson’s trip.)

By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing struggle against terrorism. The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed.

Chalabi’s defector reports were now flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President’s office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When INR analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found. “They’d pick apart a report and find out that the source had been wrong before, or had no access to the information provided,” Greg Thielmann told me. “There was considerable skepticism throughout the intelligence community about the reliability of Chalabi’s sources, but the defector reports were coming all the time. Knock one down and another comes along. Meanwhile, the garbage was being shoved straight to the President.”

A routine settled in: the Pentagon’s defector reports, classified “secret,” would be funnelled to newspapers, but subsequent C.I.A. and INR analyses of the reports—invariably scathing but also classified—would remain secret.

“It became a personality issue,” a Pentagon consultant said of the Bush Administration’s handling of intelligence. “My fact is better than your fact. The whole thing is a failure of process. Nobody goes to primary sources.” The intelligence community was in full retreat.

In the spring of 2002, the former White House official told me, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz began urging the President to release more than ninety million dollars in federal funds to Chalabi. The 1998 Iraq Liberation Act had authorized ninety-seven million dollars for the Iraqi opposition, but most of the funds had not been expended. The State Department opposed releasing the rest of the money, arguing that Chalabi had failed to account properly for the funds he had already received. “The Vice-President came into a meeting furious that we hadn’t given the money to Chalabi,” the former official recalled. Cheney said, “Here we are, denying him money, when they”—the Iraqi National Congress—“are providing us with unique intelligence on Iraqi W.M.D.s.”

In late summer, the White House sharply escalated the nuclear rhetoric. There were at least two immediate targets: the midterm congressional elections and the pending vote on a congressional resolution authorizing the President to take any action he deemed necessary in Iraq, to protect America’s national security.

On August 7th, Vice-President Cheney, speaking in California, said of Saddam Hussein, “What we know now, from various sources, is that he . . . continues to pursue a nuclear weapon.” On August 26th, Cheney suggested that Saddam had a nuclear capability that could directly threaten “anyone he chooses, in his own region or beyond.” He added that the Iraqis were continuing “to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago.” On September 8th, he told a television interviewer, “We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.” The President himself, in his weekly radio address on September 14th, stated, “Saddam Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure for a nuclear-weapons program, and has illicitly sought to purchase the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.” There was no confirmed intelligence for the President’s assertion.

The government of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, President Bush’s closest ally, was also brought in. As Blair later told a British government inquiry, he and Bush had talked by telephone that summer about the need “to disclose what we knew or as much as we could of what we knew.” Blair loyally took the lead: on September 24th, the British government issued a dossier dramatizing the W.M.D. threat posed by Iraq. In a foreword, Blair proclaimed that “the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt that Saddam . . . continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons.” The dossier noted that intelligence—based, again, largely on the sismi report—showed that Iraq had “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” A subsequent parliamentary inquiry determined that the published statement had been significantly toned down after the C.I.A. warned its British counterpart not to include the claim in the dossier, and in the final version Niger was not named, nor was sismi.

The White House, meanwhile, had been escalating its rhetoric. In a television interview on September 8th, Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, addressing questions about the strength of the Administration’s case against Iraq, said, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”—a formulation that was taken up by hawks in the Administration. And, in a speech on October 7th, President Bush said, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

At that moment, in early October, 2002, a set of documents suddenly appeared that promised to provide solid evidence that Iraq was attempting to reconstitute its nuclear program. The first notice of the documents’ existence came when Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama, a glossy Italian weekly owned by the publishing empire of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, received a telephone call from an Italian businessman and security consultant whom she believed to have once been connected to Italian intelligence. He told her that he had information connecting Saddam Hussein to the purchase of uranium in Africa. She considered the informant credible. In 1995, when she worked for the magazine Epoca, he had provided her with detailed information, apparently from Western intelligence sources, for articles she published dealing with the peace process in Bosnia and with an Islamic charity that was linked to international terrorism. The information, some of it in English, proved to be accurate. Epoca had authorized her to pay around four thousand dollars for the documents—a common journalistic practice in Italy.

Now, years later, “he comes to me again,” Burba told me. “I knew he was an informed person, and that he had contacts all over the world, including in the Middle East. He deals with investment and security issues.” When Burba met with the man, he showed her the Niger documents and offered to sell them to her for about ten thousand dollars.

The documents he gave her were photocopies. There were twenty-two pages, mostly in French, some with the letterhead of the Niger government or Embassy, and two on the stationery of the Iraqi Embassy to the Holy See. There were also telexes. When Burba asked how the documents could be authenticated, the man produced what appeared to be a photocopy of the codebook from the Niger Embassy, along with other items. “What I was sure of was that he had access,” Burba said. “He didn’t receive the documents from the moon.”

The documents dealt primarily with the alleged sale of uranium, Burba said. She informed her editors, and shared the photocopies with them. She wanted to arrange a visit to Niger to verify what seemed to be an astonishing story. At that point, however, Panorama’s editor-in-chief, Carlo Rossella, who is known for his ties to the Berlusconi government, told Burba to turn the documents over to the American Embassy for authentication. Burba dutifully took a copy of the papers to the Embassy on October 9th.

A week later, Burba travelled to Niger. She visited mines and the ports that any exports would pass through, spoke to European businessmen and officials informed about Niger’s uranium industry, and found no trace of a sale. She also learned that the transport company and the bank mentioned in the papers were too small and too ill-equipped to handle such a transaction. As Ambassador Wilson had done eight months earlier, she concluded that there was no evidence of a recent sale of yellowcake to Iraq. The Panorama story was dead, and Burba and her editors said that no money was paid. The documents, however, were now in American hands.

Two former C.I.A. officials provided slightly different accounts of what happened next. “The Embassy was alerted that the papers were coming,” the first former official told me, “and it passed them directly to Washington without even vetting them inside the Embassy.” Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. “Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false—until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed.”

The documents were just what Administration hawks had been waiting for. The second former official, Vincent Cannistraro, who served as chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis, told me that copies of the Burba documents were given to the American Embassy, which passed them on to the C.I.A.’s chief of station in Rome, who forwarded them to Washington. Months later, he said, he telephoned a contact at C.I.A. headquarters and was told that “the jury was still out on this”—that is, on the authenticity of the documents.

George Tenet clearly was ambivalent about the information: in early October, he intervened to prevent the President from referring to Niger in a speech in Cincinnati. But Tenet then seemed to give up the fight, and Saddam’s desire for uranium from Niger soon became part of the Administration’s public case for going to war.

On December 7th, the Iraqi regime provided the U.N. Security Council with a twelve-thousand-page series of documents in which it denied having a W.M.D. arsenal. Very few in the press, the public, or the White House believed it, and a State Department rebuttal, on December 19th, asked, “Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their Niger procurement?” It was the first time that Niger had been publicly identified. In a January 23rd Op-Ed column in the Times, entitled “Why We Know Iraq Is Lying,” Condoleezza Rice wrote that the “false declaration . . . fails to account for or explain Iraq’s efforts to get uranium from abroad.” On January 26th, Secretary Powell, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, asked, “Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium?” Two days later, President Bush described the alleged sale in his State of the Union address, saying, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.

Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’ ” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’ ” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.

“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go—to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels—a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”

Like all large institutions, C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, is full of water-cooler gossip, and a retired clandestine officer told me this summer that the story about a former operations officer faking the documents is making the rounds. “What’s telling,” he added, “is that the story, whether it’s true or not, is believed”—an extraordinary commentary on the level of mistrust, bitterness, and demoralization within the C.I.A. under the Bush Administration. (William Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had no more evidence that former members of the C.I.A. had forged the documents “than we have that they were forged by Mr. Hersh.”)

The F.B.I. has been investigating the forgery at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A senior F.B.I. official told me that the possibility that the documents were falsified by someone inside the American intelligence community had not been ruled out. “This story could go several directions,” he said. “We haven’t gotten anything solid, and we’ve looked.” He said that the F.B.I. agents assigned to the case are putting a great deal of effort into the investigation. But “somebody’s hiding something, and they’re hiding it pretty well.”

President Bush’s State of the Union speech had startled Elisabetta Burba, the Italian reporter. She had been handed documents and had personally taken them to the American Embassy, and she now knew from her trip to Niger that they were false. Later, Burba revisited her source. “I wanted to know what happened,” she said. “He told me that he didn’t know the documents were false, and said he’d also been fooled. ”

Burba, convinced that she had the story of the year, wanted to publish her account immediately after the President’s speech, but Carlo Rossella, Panorama’s editor-in-chief, decided against it. Rossella explained to me, “When I heard the State of the Union statement, I thought to myself that perhaps the United States government has other information. I didn’t think the documents were that important—they weren’t trustable.” Eventually, in July, after her name appeared in the press, Burba published an account of her role. She told me that she was interviewed at the American consulate in Milan by three agents for the F.B.I. in early September.

The State of the Union speech was confounding to many members of the intelligence community, who could not understand how such intelligence could have got to the President without vetting. The former intelligence official who gave me the account of the forging of the documents told me that his colleagues were also startled by the speech. “They said, ‘Holy shit, all of a sudden the President is talking about it in the State of the Union address!’ They began to panic. Who the hell was going to expose it? They had to build a backfire. The solution was to leak the documents to the I.A.E.A.”

I subsequently met with a group of senior I.A.E.A. officials in Vienna, where the organization has its headquarters. In an interview over dinner, they told me that they did not even know the papers existed until early February of this year, a few days after the President’s speech. The I.A.E.A. had been asking Washington and London for their evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of African uranium, without receiving any response, ever since the previous September, when word of it turned up in the British dossier. After Niger was specified in the State Department’s fact sheet of December 19, 2002, the I.A.E.A. became more insistent. “I started to harass the United States,” recalled Jacques Baute, a Frenchman who, as director of the I.A.E.A.’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office, often harassed Washington. Mark Gwozdecky, the I.A.E.A.’s spokesman, added, “We were asking for actionable evidence, and Jacques was getting almost nothing. ”

On February 4, 2003, while Baute was on a plane bound for New York to attend a United Nations Security Council meeting on the Iraqi weapons dispute, the U.S. Mission in Vienna suddenly briefed members of Baute’s team on the Niger papers, but still declined to hand over the documents. “I insisted on seeing the documents myself,” Baute said, “and was provided with them upon my arrival in New York.” The next day, Secretary Powell made his case for going to war against Iraq before the U.N. Security Council. The presentation did not mention Niger—a fact that did not escape Baute. I.A.E.A. officials told me that they were puzzled by the timing of the American decision to provide the documents. Baute quickly concluded that they were fake.

Over the next few weeks, I.A.E.A. officials conducted further investigations, which confirmed the fraud. They also got in touch with American and British officials to inform them of the findings, and give them a chance to respond. Nothing was forthcoming, and so the I.A.E.A.’s director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, publicly described the fraud at his next scheduled briefing to the U.N. Security Council, in New York on March 7th. The story slowly began to unravel.

Vice-President Cheney responded to ElBaradei’s report mainly by attacking the messenger. On March 16th, Cheney, appearing on “Meet the Press,” stated emphatically that the United States had reason to believe that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear-weapons program. He went on, “I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong. And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency on this kind of issue, especially where Iraq’s concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don’t have any reason to believe they’re any more valid this time than they’ve been in the past.” Three days later, the war in Iraq got under way, and the tale of the African-uranium-connection forgery sank from view.

Joseph Wilson, the diplomat who had travelled to Africa to investigate the allegation more than a year earlier, revived the Niger story. He was angered by what he saw as the White House’s dishonesty about Niger, and in early May he casually mentioned his mission to Niger, and his findings, during a brief talk about Iraq at a political conference in suburban Washington sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee (Wilson is a Democrat). Another speaker at the conference was the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who got Wilson’s permission to mention the Niger trip in a column. A few months later, on July 6th, Wilson wrote about the trip himself on the Times Op-Ed page. “I gave them months to correct the record,” he told me, speaking of the White House, “but they kept on lying.”

The White House responded by blaming the intelligence community for the Niger reference in the State of the Union address. Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, told a television interviewer on July 13th, “Had there been even a peep that the agency did not want that sentence in or that George Tenet did not want that sentence . . . it would have been gone.” Five days later, a senior White House official went a step further, telling reporters at a background briefing that they had the wrong impression about Joseph Wilson’s trip to Niger and the information it had yielded. “You can’t draw a conclusion that we were warned by Ambassador Wilson that this was all dubious,” the unnamed official said, according to a White House transcript. “It’s just not accurate.”

But Wilson’s account of his trip forced a rattled White House to acknowledge, for the first time, that “this information should not have risen to the level of a Presidential speech.” It also triggered retaliatory leaks to the press by White House officials that exposed Wilson’s wife as a C.I.A. operative—and led to an F.B.I. investigation.

Among the best potential witnesses on the subject of Iraq’s actual nuclear capabilities are the men and women who worked in the Iraqi weapons industry and for the National Monitoring Directorate, the agency set up by Saddam to work with the United Nations and I.A.E.A. inspectors. Many of the most senior weapons-industry officials, even those who voluntarily surrendered to U.S. forces, are being held in captivity at the Baghdad airport and other places, away from reporters. Their families have been told little by American authorities. Desperate for information, they have been calling friends and other contacts in America for help.

One Iraqi émigré who has heard from the scientists’ families is Shakir al Kha Fagi, who left Iraq as a young man and runs a successful business in the Detroit area. “The people in intelligence and in the W.M.D. business are in jail,” he said. “The Americans are hunting them down one by one. Nobody speaks for them, and there’s no American lawyer who will take the case.”

Not all the senior scientists are in captivity, however. Jafar Dhia Jafar, a British-educated physicist who coördinated Iraq’s efforts to make the bomb in the nineteen-eighties, and who had direct access to Saddam Hussein, fled Iraq in early April, before Baghdad fell, and, with the help of his brother, Hamid, the managing director of a large energy company, made his way to the United Arab Emirates. Jafar has refused to return to Baghdad, but he agreed to be debriefed by C.I.A. and British intelligence agents. There were some twenty meetings, involving as many as fifteen American and British experts. The first meeting, on April 11th, began with an urgent question from a C.I.A. officer: “Does Iraq have a nuclear device? The military really want to know. They are extremely worried.” Jafar’s response, according to the notes of an eyewitness, was to laugh. The notes continued:

Jafar insisted that there was not only no bomb, but no W.M.D., period. “The answer was none.” . . . Jafar explained that the Iraqi leadership had set up a new committee after the 91 Gulf war, and after the unscom [United Nations] inspection process was set up. . . and the following instructions [were sent] from the Top Man [Saddam]—“give them everything.”

The notes said that Jafar was then asked, “But this doesn’t mean all W.M.D.? How can you be certain?” His answer was clear: “I know all the scientists involved, and they chat. There is no W.M.D.”

Jafar explained why Saddam had decided to give up his valued weapons:

Up until the 91 Gulf war, our adversaries were regional. . . . But after the war, when it was clear that we were up against the United States, Saddam understood that these weapons were redundant. “No way we could escape the United States.” Therefore, the W.M.D. warheads did Iraq little strategic good.

Jafar had his own explanation, according to the notes, for one of the enduring mysteries of the U.N. inspection process—the six-thousand-warhead discrepancy between the number of chemical weapons thought to have been manufactured by Iraq before 1991 and the number that were accounted for by the U.N. inspection teams. It was this discrepancy which led Western intelligence officials and military planners to make the worst-case assumptions. Jafar told his interrogators that the Iraqi government had simply lied to the United Nations about the number of chemical weapons used against Iran during the brutal Iran-Iraq war in the nineteen-eighties. Iraq, he said, dropped thousands more warheads on the Iranians than it acknowledged. For that reason, Saddam preferred not to account for the weapons at all.

There are always credibility problems with witnesses from a defeated regime, and anyone involved in the creation or concealment of W.M.D.s. would have a motive to deny it. But a strong endorsement of Jafar’s integrity came from an unusual source—Jacques Baute, of the I.A.E.A., who spent much of the past decade locked in a struggle with Jafar and the other W.M.D. scientists and technicians of Iraq. “I don’t believe anybody,” Baute told me, “but, by and large, what he told us after 1995 was pretty accurate.”

In early October, David Kay, the former U.N. inspector who is the head of the Administration’s Iraq Survey Group, made his interim report to Congress on the status of the search for Iraq’s W.M.D.s. “We have not yet found stocks of weapons,” Kay reported, “but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war.” In the area of nuclear weapons, Kay said, “Despite evidence of Saddam’s continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material.” Kay was widely seen as having made the best case possible for President Bush’s prewar claims of an imminent W.M.D. threat. But what he found fell far short of those claims, and the report was regarded as a blow to the Administration. President Bush, however, saw it differently. He told reporters that he felt vindicated by the report, in that it showed that “Saddam Hussein was a threat, a serious danger.”

The President’s response raises the question of what, if anything, the Administration learned from the failure, so far, to find significant quantities of W.M.D.s in Iraq. Any President depends heavily on his staff for the vetting of intelligence and a reasonable summary and analysis of the world’s day-to-day events. The ultimate authority in the White House for such issues lies with the President’s national-security adviser—in this case,Condoleezza Rice. The former White House official told me, “Maybe the Secretary of Defense and his people are short-circuiting the process, and creating a separate channel to the Vice-President. Still, at the end of the day all the policies have to be hashed out in the interagency process, led by the national-security adviser.” What happened instead, he said, “was a real abdication of responsibility by Condi.”

Vice-President Cheney remains unabashed about the Administration’s reliance on the Niger documents, despite the revelation of their forgery. In a September interview on “Meet the Press,” Cheney claimed that the British dossier’s charge that “Saddam was, in fact, trying to acquire uranium in Africa” had been “revalidated.” Cheney went on, “So there may be a difference of opinion there. I don’t know what the truth is on the ground. . . . I don’t know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn’t judge him.”

The Vice-President also defended the way in which he had involved himself in intelligence matters: “This is a very important area. It’s one that the President has asked me to work on. . . . In terms of asking questions, I plead guilty. I ask a hell of a lot of questions. That’s my job.” Link (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact)

The Selling of the Iraq War: The First Casualty
By John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman*
New Republic
June 30, 2003

Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."

If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.

From late August 2002 to mid-March of this year, the Bush administration made its case for war by focusing on the threat posed to the United States by Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and by his purported links to the Al Qaeda terrorist network. Officials conjured up images of Iraqi mushroom clouds over U.S. cities and of Saddam transferring to Osama bin Laden chemical and biological weapons that could be used to create new and more lethal September elevenths. In Nashville on August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney warned of a Saddam "armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror" who could "directly threaten America's friends throughout the region and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail." In Washington on September 26, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed he had "bulletproof" evidence of ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda. And, in Cincinnati on October 7, President George W. Bush warned, "The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons." Citing Saddam's association with Al Qaeda, the president added that this "alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

Yet there was no consensus within the American intelligence community that Saddam represented such a grave and imminent threat. Rather, interviews with current and former intelligence officials and other experts reveal that the Bush administration culled from U.S. intelligence those assessments that supported its position and omitted those that did not. The administration ignored, and even suppressed, disagreement within the intelligence agencies and pressured the CIA to reaffirm its preferred version of the Iraqi threat. Similarly, it stonewalled, and sought to discredit, international weapons inspectors when their findings threatened to undermine the case for war.

Three months after the invasion, the United States may yet discover the chemical and biological weapons that various governments and the United Nations have long believed Iraq possessed. But it is unlikely to find, as the Bush administration had repeatedly predicted, a reconstituted nuclear weapons program or evidence of joint exercises with Al Qaeda--the two most compelling security arguments for war. Whatever is found, what matters as far as American democracy is concerned is whether the administration gave Americans an honest and accurate account of what it knew. The evidence to date is that it did not, and the cost to U.S. democracy could be felt for years to come.

The Battle Over Intelligence
Fall 2001-Fall 2002

The Bush administration decided to go to war with Iraq in the late fall of 2001. At Camp David on the weekend after the September 11 attacks, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz floated the idea that Iraq, with more than 20 years of inclusion on the State Department's terror-sponsor list, be held immediately accountable. In his memoir, speechwriter David Frum recounts that, in December, after the Afghanistan campaign against bin Laden and his Taliban sponsors, he was told to come up with a justification for war with Iraq to include in Bush's State of the Union address in January 2002. But, in selling the war to the American public during the next year, the Bush administration faced significant obstacles.

In the wake of September 11, 2001, many Americans had automatically associated Saddam's regime with Al Qaeda and enthusiastically backed an invasion. But, as the immediate horror of September 11 faded and the war in Afghanistan concluded successfully (and the economy turned downward), American enthusiasm diminished. By mid-August 2002, a Gallup poll showed support for war with Saddam at a post-September 11 low, with 53 percent in favor and 41 percent opposed--down from 61 percent to 31 percent just two months before. Elite opinion was also turning against war, not only among liberal Democrats but among former Republican officials, such as Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger. In Congress, even conservative Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott and House Majority Leader Dick Armey began to express doubts that war was justified. Armey declared on August 8, 2002, "If we try to act against Saddam Hussein, as obnoxious as he is, without proper provocation, we will not have the support of other nation-states who might do so."

Unbeknownst to the public, the administration faced equally serious opposition within its own intelligence agencies. At the CIA, many analysts and officials were skeptical that Iraq posed an imminent threat. In particular, they rejected a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. According to a New York Times report in February 2002, the CIA found "no evidence that Iraq has engaged in terrorist operations against the United States in nearly a decade, and the agency is also convinced that President Saddam Hussein has not provided chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda or related terrorist groups."

CIA analysts also generally endorsed the findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which concluded that, while serious questions remained about Iraq's nuclear program--many having to do with discrepancies in documentation--its present capabilities were virtually nil. The IAEA possessed no evidence that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program and, it seems, neither did U.S. intelligence. In CIA Director George Tenet's January 2002 review of global weapons-technology proliferation, he did not even mention a nuclear threat from Iraq, though he did warn of one from North Korea. The review said only, "We believe that Iraq has probably continued at least low-level theoretical R&D [research and development] associated with its nuclear program." This vague determination didn't reflect any new evidence but merely the intelligence community's assumption that the Iraqi dictator remained interested in building nuclear weapons. Greg Thielmann, the former director for strategic proliferation and military affairs at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), tells The New Republic, "During the time that I was office director, 2000 to 2002, we never assessed that there was good evidence that Iraq was reconstituting or getting really serious about its nuclear weapons program."

The CIA and other intelligence agencies believed Iraq still possessed substantial stocks of chemical and biological weapons, but they were divided about whether Iraq was rebuilding its facilities and producing new weapons. The intelligence community's uncertainty was articulated in a classified report from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in September 2002. "A substantial amount of Iraq's chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998 as a result of Operation Desert Storm and UNSCOM [United Nations Special Commission] actions," the agency reported. "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has--or will--establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities."

Had the administration accurately depicted the consensus within the intelligence community in 2002--that Iraq's ties with Al Qaeda were inconsequential; that its nuclear weapons program was minimal at best; and that its chemical and biological weapons programs, which had yielded significant stocks of dangerous weapons in the past, may or may not have been ongoing--it would have had a very difficult time convincing Congress and the American public to support a war to disarm Saddam. But the Bush administration painted a very different, and far more frightening, picture. Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who ultimately voted against the war, says of his discussions with constituents, "When someone spoke of the need to invade, [they] invariably brought up the example of what would happen if one of our cities was struck. They clearly were convinced by the administration that Saddam Hussein--either directly or through terrorist connections--could unleash massive destruction on an American city. And I presume that most of my colleagues heard the same thing back in their districts." One way the administration convinced the public was by badgering CIA Director Tenet into endorsing key elements of its case for war even when it required ignoring the classified findings of his and other intelligence agencies.

As a result of its failure to anticipate the September 11 attacks, the CIA, and Tenet in particular, were under almost continual attack in the fall of 2001. Congressional leaders, including Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wanted Tenet to resign. But Bush kept Tenet in his job, and, within the administration, Tenet and the CIA came under an entirely different kind of pressure: Iraq hawks in the Pentagon and in the vice president's office, reinforced by members of the Pentagon's semi-official Defense Policy Board, mounted a year-long attempt to pressure the CIA to take a harder line against Iraq--whether on its ties with Al Qaeda or on the status of its nuclear program.

A particular bone of contention was the CIA's analysis of the ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, former CIA Director James Woolsey, a member of the Defense Policy Board who backed an invasion of Iraq, put forth the theory--in this magazine and elsewhere--that Saddam was connected to the World Trade Center attacks. In September 2001, the Bush administration flew Woolsey to London to gather evidence to back up his theory, which had the support of Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, then the Defense Policy Board chairman. While Wolfowitz and Perle had their own long-standing and complex reasons for wanting to go to war with Iraq, they and other administration officials believed that, if they could tie Saddam to Al Qaeda, they could justify the war to the American people. As a veteran aide to the Senate Intelligence Committee observes, "They knew that, if they could really show a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, then their objective, ... which was go in and get rid of Hussein, would have been a foregone conclusion."

But this theory immediately encountered resistance from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Woolsey's main piece of evidence for a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda was a meeting that was supposed to have taken place in Prague in April 2001 between lead September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official. But none of the intelligence agencies could place Atta in Prague on that date. (Indeed, receipts and other travel documents placed him in the United States.) An investigation by Czech officials dismissed the claim, which was based on a single unreliable witness. The CIA was also receiving other information that rebutted a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. After top Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah was captured in March 2002, he was debriefed by the CIA, and the results were widely circulated in the intelligence community. As The New York Times reported, Zubaydah told his captors that bin Laden himself rejected any alliance with Saddam. "I remember reading the Abu Zubaydah debriefing last year, while the administration was talking about all of these other reports [of a Saddam-Al Qaeda link], and thinking that they were only putting out what they wanted," a CIA official told the paper. Zubaydah's story, which intelligence analysts generally consider credible, has since been corroborated by additional high-ranking Al Qaeda terrorists now in U.S. custody, including Ramzi bin Al Shibh and September 11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Facing resistance from the CIA, administration officials began a campaign to pressure the agency to toe the line. Perle and other members of the Defense Policy Board, who acted as quasi-independent surrogates for Wolfowitz, Cheney, and other administration advocates for war in Iraq, harshly criticized the CIA in the press. The CIA's analysis of Iraq, Perle said, "isn't worth the paper it is written on." In the summer of 2002, Vice President Cheney made several visits to the CIA's Langley headquarters, which were understood within the agency as an attempt to pressure the low-level specialists interpreting the raw intelligence. "That would freak people out," says one former CIA official. "It is supposed to be an ivory tower. And that kind of pressure would be enormous on these young guys."

But the Pentagon found an even more effective way to pressure the agency. In October 2001, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up a special intelligence operation in the Pentagon to "think through how the various terrorist organizations relate to each other and ... state sponsors," in Feith's description. Their approach echoed the "Team B" strategy that conservatives had used in the past: establishing a separate entity to offer alternative intelligence analyses to the CIA. Conservatives had done this in 1976, criticizing and intimidating the agency over its estimates of Soviet military strength, and again in 1998, arguing for the necessity of missile defense. (Wolfowitz had participated in both projects; the latter was run by Rumsfeld.) This time, the new entity--headed by Perle protégé Abram Shulsky--reassessed intelligence already collected by the CIA along with information from Iraqi defectors and, as Feith remarked coyly at a press conference earlier this month, "came up with some interesting observations about the linkages between Iraq and Al Qaeda." In August 2002, Feith brought the unit to Langley to brief the CIA about its findings. If the separate intelligence unit wasn't enough to challenge the CIA, Rumsfeld also began publicly discussing the creation of a new Pentagon position, an undersecretary for intelligence, who would rival the CIA director and diminish the authority of the agency.

In its classified reports, the CIA didn't diverge from its initial skepticism about the ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam. But, under pressure from his critics, Tenet began to make subtle concessions. In March 2002, Tenet told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Iraqi regime "had contacts with Al Qaeda" but declined to elaborate. He would make similar ambiguous statements during the congressional debate over war with Iraq.

The intelligence community was also pressured to exaggerate Iraq's nuclear program. As Tenet's early 2002 threat assessments had indicated, U.S. intelligence showed precious little evidence to indicate a resumption of Iraq's nuclear program. And, while the absence of U.N. inspections had introduced greater uncertainty into intelligence collection on Iraq, according to one analyst, "We still knew enough, [and] we could watch pretty closely what was happening."

These judgments were tested in the spring of 2002, when intelligence reports began to indicate that Iraq was trying to procure a kind of high-strength aluminum tube. Some analysts from the CIA and DIA quickly came to the conclusion that the tubes were intended to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon through the kind of gas-centrifuge project Iraq had built before the first Gulf war. This interpretation seemed plausible enough at first, but over time analysts at the State Department's INR and the Department of Energy (DOE) grew troubled. The tubes' thick walls and particular diameter made them a poor fit for uranium enrichment, even after modification. That determination, according to the INR's Thielmann, came from weeks of interviews with "the nation's experts on the subject, ... they're the ones that have the labs, like Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where people really know the science and technology of enriching uranium." Such careful study led the INR and the DOE to an alternative analysis: that the specifications of the tubes made them far better suited for artillery rockets. British intelligence experts studying the issue concurred, as did some CIA analysts.

But top officials at the CIA and DIA did not. As the weeks dragged on, more and more high-level intelligence officials attended increasingly heated interagency bull sessions. And the CIA-DIA position became further and further entrenched. "They clung so tenaciously to this point of view about it being a nuclear weapons program when the evidence just became clearer and clearer over time that it wasn't the case," recalls a participant. David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security, who had been asked to provide the administration with information on past Iraqi procurements, noticed an anomaly in how the intelligence community was handling the issue. "I was told that this dispute had not been mediated by a competent, impartial technical committee, as it should have been according to accepted practice," he wrote on his organization's website this March. By September 2002, when the intelligence agencies were preparing a joint National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, top CIA officials insisted their opinion prevail. Says Thielmann, "Because the CIA is also the head of the entire U.S. intelligence community, it becomes very hard not to have the ultimate judgment being the CIA's judgment, rather than who in the intelligence community is most expert on the issue."

By the fall of 2002, when public debate over the war really began, the administration had created consternation in the intelligence agencies. The press was filled for the next two months with quotes from CIA officials and analysts complaining of pressure from the administration to toe the line on Iraq. Says one former staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, "People [kept] telling you first that things weren't right, weird things going on, different people saying, 'There's so much pressure, you know, they keep telling us, go back and find the right answer,' things like that." For the most part, this pressure was not reflected in the CIA's classified reports, but it would become increasingly evident in the agency's declassified statements and in public statements by Tenet. The administration hadn't won an outright endorsement of its analysis of the Iraqi threat, but it had undermined and intimidated its potential critics in the intelligence community.

The Battle In Congress
Fall 2002

The administration used the anniversary of September 11, 2001, to launch its public campaign for a congressional resolution endorsing war, with or without U.N. support, against Saddam. The opening salvo came on the Sunday before the anniversary in the form of a leak to Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon of The New York Times regarding the aluminum tubes. Miller and Gordon reported that, according to administration officials, Iraq had been trying to buy tubes specifically designed as "components of centrifuges to enrich uranium" for nuclear weapons. That same day, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on the political talk shows to trumpet the discovery of the tubes and the Iraqi nuclear threat. Explained Rice, "There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Rumsfeld added, "Imagine a September eleventh with weapons of mass destruction. It's not three thousand--it's tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children."

Many of the intelligence analysts who had participated in the aluminum-tubes debate were appalled. One described the feeling to TNR: "You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie." Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security, recalled, "I became dismayed when a knowledgeable government scientist told me that the administration could say anything it wanted about the tubes while government scientists who disagreed were expected to remain quiet." As Thielmann puts it, "There was a lot of evidence about the Iraqi chemical and biological weapons programs to be concerned about. Why couldn't we just be honest about that without hyping the nuclear account? Making the case for active pursuit of nuclear weapons makes it look like the administration was trying to scare the American people about how dangerous Iraq was and how it posed an imminent security threat to the United States."

In speeches and interviews, administration officials also warned of the connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. On September 25, 2002, Rice insisted, "There clearly are contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq. ... There clearly is testimony that some of the contacts have been important contacts and that there's a relationship there." On the same day, President Bush warned of the danger that "Al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness." Rice, like Rumsfeld--who the next day would call evidence of a Saddam-bin Laden link "bulletproof"--said she could not share the administration's evidence with the public without endangering intelligence sources. But Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, disagreed. On September 27, Paul Anderson, a spokesman for Graham, told USA Today that the senator had seen nothing in the CIA's classified reports that established a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, in fact, was the greatest congressional obstacle to the administration's push for war. Under the lead of Graham and Illinois Senator Richard Durbin, the committee enjoyed respect and deference in the Senate and the House, and its members could speak authoritatively, based on their access to classified information, about whether Iraq was developing nuclear weapons or had ties to Al Qaeda. And, in this case, the classified information available to the committee did not support the public pronouncements being made by the CIA.

In the late summer of 2002, Graham had requested from Tenet an analysis of the Iraqi threat. According to knowledgeable sources, he received a 25-page classified response reflecting the balanced view that had prevailed earlier among the intelligence agencies--noting, for example, that evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program or a link to Al Qaeda was inconclusive. Early that September, the committee also received the DIA's classified analysis, which reflected the same cautious assessments. But committee members became worried when, midway through the month, they received a new CIA analysis of the threat that highlighted the Bush administration's claims and consigned skepticism to footnotes. According to one congressional staffer who read the document, it highlighted "extensive Iraqi chem-bio programs and nuclear programs and links to terrorism" but then included a footnote that read, "This information comes from a source known to fabricate in the past." The staffer concluded that "they didn't do analysis. What they did was they just amassed everything they could that said anything bad about Iraq and put it into a document."

Graham and Durbin had been demanding for more than a month that the CIA produce an NIE on the Iraqi threat--a summary of the available intelligence, reflecting the judgment of the entire intelligence community--and toward the end of September, it was delivered. Like Tenet's earlier letter, the classified NIE was balanced in its assessments. Graham called on Tenet to produce a declassified version of the report that could guide members in voting on the resolution. Graham and Durbin both hoped the declassified report would rebut the kinds of overheated claims they were hearing from administration spokespeople. As Durbin tells TNR, "The most frustrating thing I find is when you have credible evidence on the intelligence committee that is directly contradictory to statements made by the administration."

On October 1, 2002, Tenet produced a declassified NIE. But Graham and Durbin were outraged to find that it omitted the qualifications and countervailing evidence that had characterized the classified version and played up the claims that strengthened the administration's case for war. For instance, the intelligence report cited the much-disputed aluminum tubes as evidence that Saddam "remains intent on acquiring" nuclear weapons. And it claimed, "All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons and that these tubes could be used in a centrifuge enrichment program"--a blatant mischaracterization. Subsequently, the NIE allowed that "some" experts might disagree but insisted that "most" did not, never mentioning that the DOE's expert analysts had determined the tubes were not suitable for a nuclear weapons program. The NIE also said that Iraq had "begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents"--which the DIA report had left pointedly in doubt. Graham demanded that the CIA declassify dissenting portions.

In response, Tenet produced a single-page letter. It satisfied one of Graham's requests: It included a statement that there was a "low" likelihood of Iraq launching an unprovoked attack on the United States. But it also contained a sop to the administration, stating without qualification that the CIA had "solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." Graham demanded that Tenet declassify more of the report, and Tenet promised to fax over additional material. But, later that evening, Graham received a call from the CIA, informing him that the White House had ordered Tenet not to release anything more.

That same evening, October 7, 2002, Bush gave a major speech in Cincinnati defending the resolution now before Congress and laying out the case for war. Bush's speech brought together all the misinformation and exaggeration that the White House had been disseminating that fall. "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," the president declared. "Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." Bush also argued that, through its ties to Al Qaeda, Iraq would be able to use biological and chemical weapons against the United States. "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," he warned. If Iraq had to deliver these weapons on its own, Bush said, Iraq could use the new unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that it was developing. "We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas," he said. "We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States." This claim represented the height of absurdity. Iraq's UAVs had ranges of, at most, 300 miles. They could not make the flight from Baghdad to Tel Aviv, let alone to New York.

After the speech, when reporters pointed out that Bush's warning of an imminent threat was contradicted by Tenet's statement the same day that there was little likelihood of an Iraqi attack, Tenet dutifully offered a clarification, explaining that there was "no inconsistency" between the president's statement and his own and that he had personally fact-checked the president's speech. He also issued a public statement that read, "There is no question that the likelihood of Saddam using weapons of mass destruction against the United States or our allies ... grows as his arsenal continues to build."

Five of the nine Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, including Graham and Durbin, ultimately voted against the resolution, but they were unable to convince other committee members or a majority in the Senate itself. This was at least in part because they were not allowed to divulge what they knew: While Graham and Durbin could complain that the administration's and Tenet's own statements contradicted the classified reports they had read, they could not say what was actually in those reports.

Bush, meanwhile, had no compunction about claiming that the "evidence indicates Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program." In the words of one former Intelligence Committee staffer, "He is the president of the United States. And, when the president of the United States says, 'My advisers and I have sat down, and we've read the intelligence, and we believe there is a tie between Iraq and Al Qaeda,' ... you take it seriously. It carries a huge amount of weight." Public opinion bears the former staffer out. By November 2002, a Gallup poll showed 59 percent in favor of an invasion and only 35 percent against. In a December Los Angeles Times poll, Americans thought, by a 90 percent to 7 percent margin, that Saddam was "currently developing weapons of mass destruction." And, in an ABC/Washington Post poll, 81 percent thought Iraq posed a threat to the United States. The Bush administration had won the domestic debate over Iraq--and it had done so by withholding from the public details that would have undermined its case for war.

The Battle With The Inspectors
Winter-Spring 2003

By January 2003, American troops were massing on Iraq's borders, and the U.N. Security Council had unanimously approved Resolution 1441, which afforded Saddam a "final opportunity" to disarm verifiably. The return of U.N. inspectors to Iraq after four years had raised hopes both in the United States and abroad that the conflict could be resolved peacefully. On January 20, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin launched a surprise attack on the administration's war plans, declaring bluntly, "Nothing today justifies envisaging military action." Nor was this sentiment exclusively French: By mid-January, Gallup showed that American support for the impending war had narrowed to 52 percent in favor of war and 43 percent opposed. Equally important, most of the nations that had backed Resolution 1441 were warning the United States not to rush into war, and Germany, which opposed military action, was to assume the chair of the Security Council in February, on the eve of the planned invasion.

In his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, Bush introduced a new piece of evidence to show that Iraq was developing a nuclear arms program: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. ... Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide."

One year earlier, Cheney's office had received from the British, via the Italians, documents purporting to show Iraq's purchase of uranium from Niger. Cheney had given the information to the CIA, which in turn asked a prominent diplomat, who had served as ambassador to three African countries, to investigate. He returned after a visit to Niger in February 2002 and reported to the State Department and the CIA that the documents were forgeries. The CIA circulated the ambassador's report to the vice president's office, the ambassador confirms to TNR. But, after a British dossier was released in September detailing the purported uranium purchase, administration officials began citing it anyway, culminating in its inclusion in the State of the Union. "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," the former ambassador tells TNR. "They were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more persuasive.":rolleyes:

On February 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell took the administration's case to the Security Council. Powell's presentation was by far the most impressive the administration would make--according to U.S. News and World Report, he junked much of what the CIA had given him to read, calling it "bullshit"--but it was still based on a hyped and incomplete view of U.S. intelligence on Iraq. Much of what was new in Powell's speech was raw data that had come into the CIA's possession but had not yet undergone serious analysis. In addition to rehashing the aluminum-tube claims, Powell charged, for instance, that Iraq was trying to obtain magnets for uranium enrichment. Powell also described a "potentially ... sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder." But Powell's evidence consisted of tenuous ties between Baghdad and an Al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, who had allegedly received medical treatment in Baghdad and who, according to Powell, operated a training camp in Iraq specializing in poisons. Unfortunately for Powell's thesis, the camp was located in northern Iraq, an area controlled by the Kurds rather than Saddam and policed by U.S. and British warplanes. One Hill staffer familiar with the classified documents on Al Qaeda tells TNR, "So why would that be proof of some Iraqi government connection to Al Qaeda? might as well be in Iran."

But, by the time Powell made his speech, the administration had stopped worrying about possible rebukes from U.S. intelligence agencies. On the contrary, Tenet sat directly behind Powell as he gave his presentation. And, with the GOP takeover of the Senate, the Intelligence Committee had passed into the hands of a docile Republican chairman, Pat Roberts of Kansas.

As Powell cited U.S. intelligence supporting his claim of a reconstituted nuclear weapons program in Iraq, Jacques Baute listened intently. Baute, the head of the IAEA's Iraq inspections unit, had been pestering the U.S. and British governments for months to share their intelligence with his office. Despite repeated assurances of cooperation, TNR has learned that Baute's office received nothing until the day before Powell's presentation, when the U.S. mission in Vienna provided the IAEA with an oral briefing while Baute was en route to New York, leaving no printed material with the nuclear inspectors. As IAEA officials recount, an astonished Baute told his aides, "That won't do. I want the actual documentary evidence." He had to register his complaints through a United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) channel before receiving the documents the day Powell spoke. It was an incident that would characterize America's intelligence-sharing with the IAEA.

After a few weeks of traveling back and forth between Baghdad and Vienna, Baute sat down with the dozen or so pages of U.S. intelligence on Saddam's supposed nuclear procurements--the aluminum tubes, the Niger uranium, and the magnets. In the course of a day, Baute determined, like the ambassador before him, that the Niger document was fraudulent. Though the "president" of Niger made reference to his powers under the constitution of 1965, Baute performed a quick Google search to learn that Niger's latest constitution was drafted in 1999. There were other obvious mistakes--improper letterhead, an obviously forged signature, a letter from a foreign minister who had not been in office for eleven years. Baute also made quick work of the aluminum tubes. He assembled a team of experts--two Americans, two Britons, and a German--with 120 years of collective experience with centrifuges. After reviewing tens of thousands of Iraqi transaction records and inspecting Iraqi front companies and military production facilities with the rest of the IAEA unit, they concluded, according to a senior IAEA official, that "all evidence points to that this is for the rockets"--the same conclusion reached by the State and Energy Departments. As for the magnets, the IAEA cross-referenced Iraq's declarations with intelligence from various member states and determined that nothing in Iraq's magnet procurements "pointed to centrifuge enrichment," in the words of an IAEA official with direct knowledge of the effort. Rather, the magnets were for projects as disparate as telephones and short-range missiles. Baute, who according to a senior IAEA official was in "almost daily" contact with the American diplomatic mission in Vienna, was surprised at the weakness of the U.S. evidence. In one instance, Baute contacted the mission after discovering the Niger document forgeries and asked, as this official described it, "Can your people help me understand if I'm wrong? I'm not ready to close the book on this file. If you've got any other evidence that might be authentic, I need to see it, and I'll follow up." Eventually, a response came: The Americans and the British were not disputing the IAEA's conclusions; no more evidence would be provided.

On March 7, IAEA Director-General Mohammed ElBaradei delivered Baute's conclusions to the Security Council. But, although the United States conceded most of the IAEA's inconvenient judgments behind closed doors, Vice President Cheney publicly assaulted the credibility of the organization and its director-general. "I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," Cheney told Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press" on March 16. "I think, if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past." Incredibly, Cheney added, "We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

Cheney was correct that the IAEA had failed to uncover Iraq's covert uranium-enrichment program prior to the Gulf war. But, before the war, the IAEA was not charged with playing the role of a nuclear Interpol. Rather, until the passage of Resolution 687 in 1991, the IAEA was merely supposed to review the disclosures of member states in the field of nuclear development to ensure compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. By contrast, in the '90s, the IAEA mounted more than 1,000 inspections in Iraq, mostly without advance warning; sealed, expropriated, or destroyed tons of nuclear material; and destroyed thousands of square feet of nuclear facilities. In fact, its activities formed the baseline for virtually every intelligence assessment regarding Iraq's nuclear weapons program.

UNMOVIC Chairman Hans Blix received similar treatment from American officials--even though he repeatedly told the Security Council that the Iraqis had yet to account for the chemical and biological weapons they had once possessed, a position that strengthened the U.S. case for war. According to The Washington Post, in early 2002 Wolfowitz ordered a CIA report on Blix. When the report didn't contain damning details, Wolfowitz reportedly "hit the ceiling." And, as the inspections were to begin, Perle said, "If it were up to me, on the strength of his previous record, I wouldn't have chosen Hans Blix." In his February presentation, Powell suggested that Blix had ignored evidence of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons production. After stalling for months, the United States finally shared some of its intelligence with UNMOVIC. But, according to UNMOVIC officials, none of the intelligence it received yielded any incriminating discoveries.

Aftermath

What we must not do in the face of a mortal threat," Cheney instructed a Nashville gathering of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002, "is give in to wishful thinking or willful blindness." Cheney's admonition is resonant, but not for the reasons he intended. The Bush administration displayed an acute case of willful blindness in making its case for war. Much of its evidence for a reconstituted nuclear program, a thriving chemical-biological development program, and an active Iraqi link with Al Qaeda was based on what intelligence analysts call "rumint." Says one former official with the National Security Council, "It was a classic case of rumint, rumor-intelligence plugged into various speeches and accepted as gospel."

In some cases, the administration may have deliberately lied. If Bush didn't know the purported uranium deal between Iraq and Niger was a hoax, plenty of people in his administration did--including, possibly, Vice President Cheney, who would have seen the president's State of the Union address before it was delivered. Rice and Rumsfeld also must have known that the aluminum tubes that they presented as proof of Iraq's nuclear ambitions were discounted by prominent intelligence experts. And, while a few administration officials may have genuinely believed that there was a strong connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, most probably knew they were constructing castles out of sand.

The Bush administration took office pledging to restore "honor and dignity" to the White House. And it's true: Bush has not gotten caught having sex with an intern or lying about it under oath. But he has engaged in a pattern of deception concerning the most fundamental decisions a government must make. The United States may have been justified in going to war in Iraq--there were, after all, other rationales for doing so--but it was not justified in doing so on the national security grounds that President Bush put forth throughout last fall and winter. He deceived Americans about what was known of the threat from Iraq and deprived Congress of its ability to make an informed decision about whether or not to take the country to war.

The most serious institutional casualty of the administration's campaign may have been the intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA. Some of the CIA's intelligence simply appears to have been defective, perhaps innocently so. Durbin says the CIA's classified reports contained extensive maps where chemical or biological weapons could be found. Since the war, these sites have not yielded evidence of any such weapons. But the administration also turned the agency--and Tenet in particular--into an advocate for the war with Iraq at a time when the CIA's own classified analyses contradicted the public statements of the agency and its director. Did Tenet really fact-check Bush's warning that Iraq could threaten the United States with UAVs? Did he really endorse Powell's musings on the links between Al Qaeda and Saddam? Or had Tenet and his agency by then lost any claim to the intellectual honesty upon which U.S. foreign policy critically depends--particularly in an era of preemptive war?

Democrats such as Durbin, Graham, and Senator Jay Rockefeller, who has become the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, are now pressing for a full investigation into intelligence estimates of the Iraqi threat. This would entail public hearings with full disclosure of documents and guarantees of protection for witnesses who come forward to testify. But it is not likely to happen. Senator John Warner, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, initially called for public hearings but recanted after Cheney visited a GOP senators' lunch on June 4. Cheney, according to Capitol Hill staffers, told his fellow Republicans to block any investigation, and it looks likely they will comply. Under pressure from Democrats, Roberts, the new Intelligence Committee chairman, has finally agreed to a closed-door hearing but not to a public or private investigation. According to Durbin, the Republican plan is to stall in the hope that the United States finds sufficient weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to quiet the controversy. The controversy might, indeed, go away. Democrats don't have the power to call hearings, and, apart from Graham and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, the leading Democratic presidential candidates are treating the issue delicately given the public's overwhelming support for the war. But there are worse things than losing an election by going too far out on a political limb--namely, failing to defend the integrity of the country's foreign policy and its democratic institutions. It may well be that, in the not-too-distant future, preemptive military action will become necessary--perhaps against a North Korea genuinely bent on incinerating Seoul or a nuclear Pakistan that has fallen into the hands of radical Islamists. In such a case, we the people will look to our leaders for an honest assessment of the threat. But, next time, thanks to George W. Bush, we may not believe them until it is too late.

----

Correction: This article originally referred to Trent Lott as Senate majority leader in August of 2002. At the time he was Senate minority leader. The article has been corrected to reflect that change. We regret the error.

About the Author: John B. Judis is a senior editor at TNR. Spencer Ackerman is an assistant editor at The New Republic. (http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/unmovic/2003/0630selling.htm)


So what happened to all these weapons LUCKY? Again, when did CLINTON call for an invasion? Nothing of subwstance was found, and all of the WMD claims proved hollow.

There were no weapons, and who cares what CLINTON said?: ("But CLINTON, oh but Clinton, and CLINTON said...dude, you're like a broken record...") This isn't about CLINTON, this is about the PRESIDENT that invaded IRAQ under faulty pretenses, and his name is BUSH...




according to your friend clinton they were there or was he just politicizing the info so he could attack iraq in 98

I don't know CLINTON, so he's hardly my friend, agian, answer this question LUCKY: When was his planned invasion?


and we're actually now working to reform those countries

And PAKISTAN is reforming by killing our troops. Nice job! We're not reforming anything...We're training terorists how to be better...



did you not read the richard clark thing!! he said they we're working on wmd with respect to the sudan plant! clinton said the same thing! is this not making sense to you!

Again, who cares! Dated, faulty information that no major land war was planned around. He didn't abide any invasion of IRAQ, he condemed it even as things were going well for the US in the opening days...

'They?' The SUDANESE gov't was...



under the uns own resolutions iraq was to be brought back into un complience and thats what we did.

This is not UN compliance, and the invasion was still illegal. You don't enforce the law by breaking it...That's called hypocrasy.



not enough eviedence?!?! read up on it maybe you'll come across the pics of the intials in the jail cell never mind:

http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/news-article.aspx?storyid=3339
Investigators in Iraq find clue about missing pilot Speicher

...


So 1,800 American kids have died for ONE MAN that the IRAQIS could have easily killed as we invaded their country anyways? What kind of rationale is that?


what about panama? grenada? kosovo? bosnia? haiti? somiliea? to a lesser extent the ousting charles taylor in liberia. all countries who have resources that are of little value to us.

That's not true, most of those countries were in our hemisphere, you know, like VENEZUELA. Our interests were served on some grounds whether or not I agreed with those invasions or not, but for the most part they turned out alright. A lot of people fear that IRAQ will not turn out okay...In fact, most think tanks say a civil war is likely if not already taking place in the early stages!



they would be doing well because of high oil prices and the construction on new oil rigs in the gulf of mexico

Probably not, we won't really generate much extra oil...


al queda didn't exist till the earlier 90's after the soviets war in afghanistan. the reasons listed were just one of many not to mention iraq used wmd when you add it all up it was time for hime to go.

Al Qaeda wasn't located in IRAQ, until after we invaded, and al Qaeda was never really an "organization" per se. it's an idea, that we fed into with the invasion of IRAQ (the new AFGHANISTAN with us playing the part of the SOVIETS)

No, it doesn't "add up..." It's a war that's rationale is ever changing by an ADMINISTRATION that has failed us repeatedly...

[Warham]

Jesus Christ....

[Jesus Christ]

Originally posted by Warham
Jesus Christ....

Yes, My son?

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Warham
Jesus Christ....

Yeah, that is a long ass post. sorry.

In the words of BUBBA:

"I feel your pain.":)

[Warham]

Can you tell these guys to keep their posts under 2 million words?

[Warham]

HA HA!

[Nickdfresh]

The Selling of the Iraq War: The First Casualty
By John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman*
New Republic
June 30, 2003

Yet there was no consensus within the American intelligence community that Saddam represented such a grave and imminent threat. Rather, interviews with current and former intelligence officials and other experts reveal that the Bush administration culled from U.S. intelligence those assessments that supported its position and omitted those that did not. The administration ignored, and even suppressed, disagreement within the intelligence agencies and pressured the CIA to reaffirm its preferred version of the Iraqi threat. Similarly, it stonewalled, and sought to discredit, international weapons inspectors when their findings threatened to undermine the case for war.


This is all you really need to know...

[Warham]

'I want proof, not leads.'

[Jesus Christ]

Originally posted by Warham
Can you tell these guys to keep their posts under 2 million words?

You called Me all the way down from Heaven for that? :confused:

[lucky wilbury]

clinton: iraq has wmd


:elvis:

[lucky wilbury]

hey ford edit out all of my last post #49. i don't want to leave this thread opened end since it turns out i'm off again just leave it blank or put edited at my request

[DrMaddVibe]

Sunday, Aug. 28, 2005 12:31 a.m. EDT

Senate Asks White House for Able Danger Chart

The Senate Intelligence Committee has contacted the White House asking whether it has a copy of a pre-9/11 chart put together by the Able Danger military intelligence team that identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a terrorist threat.

Time magazine reports that the Committee "last week drafted a letter asking the White House for a copy" of the politically explosive chart, which Congressman Curt Weldon said he gave to then-Deputy National Security Advisor Hadley two weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

Earlier this month, Able Danger whistleblower Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer explained how the Atta chart was handed off to Hadley.

"Within two weeks of the attack, this colleague of mine ... she took that very poster [with Mohamed Atta] to Congressman [Curt] Weldon," Shaffer said in a radio interview. "And I have to say he took it right to [Steven] Hadley, I believe, over at the NSC."

"It's my understanding that he gave him that chart and Hadley had a great deal of interest in it," Shaffer added.

The one-time top aide to then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has made no comment so far on the Able Danger controversy.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has also requested clearance from the Pentagon to interview all 11 members of the Able Danger team, including a so-far unidentified female data mining expert from California who first identified Atta as a terrorist threat.

[DrMaddVibe]

Monday, Aug. 29, 2005 1:22 a.m. EDT

Missing Able Danger 'Atta' Chart in 2002 Video

A copy of the Able Danger chart that identified lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta as a terrorist operating inside the U.S. a year before the 9/11 attacks is clearly visible in a video of a 2002 speech by delivered by Rep. Curt Weldon to the Heritage Foundation.

The Pentagon, the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee are currently seeking evidence that the bombshell chart, featuring a photo Atta, ever existed - as claimed by three members of the Able Danger team, along with Rep. Weldon. But so far, no physical evidence of the controversial document has surfaced.

Until now.

A third of the way through his May 23, 2002 address on data fusion techniques, the video shows Rep. Weldon unfurling a copy of the now missing document and displaying it to the Heritage audience.

"This is the unclassified chart that was done by the Special Forces Command briefing center one year before 9/11," he explains. "It is the complete architecture of al Qaeda and pan-Islamic extremism. It gives all the linkages. It gives all the capabilities. . . ."

Though Weldon never mentions Able Danger or Atta by name - and the video never zooms in on the chart to the point where Atta's photo is identifiable - it's clear from Weldon comments that the chart is the same one currently being sought.

Since the Able Danger story broke three weeks ago, the Pennsylvania Republican has repeatedly insisted that he gave a copy of the chart shortly after the 9/11 attacks to then-Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley.

In the 2002 speech, Weldon told the same story in greater detail, standing beside a copy of what he said he gave Hadley.

"I went to the White House. I don't mean to embarrass this guy cause he's a good friend of mine. But I took a mini version of this chart in Nov. [2001] and I turned it over to him - Steve Hadley, who works directly for [then-National Security Advisor] Condi Rice."

Weldon said Hadley was stunned after viewing the Al Qaeda-Atta document.

"This is unbelievable - where'd you get this?" he wanted to know.

After being told that the chart was prepared by military intelligence a year before the 9/11 attacks, Hadley said, according to Weldon, "I've got to show this to the man" - apparently referring to President Bush.

In the same speech, Rep. Weldon also revealed that then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Hugh Shelton received a briefing on the Able Danger chart in the closing weeks of the Clinton administration.

To view Rep. Weldon's entire 2002 speech to the Heritage Foundation, go to: http://www.heritage.org/Press/Events/2002archive.cfm He displays the al Qaeda-Atta chart approximately 34 minutes into the presentation.

[Nickdfresh]

9) Sean Hannity (http://www.rotharmy.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=26525)

Right-wing blowhard Sean Hannity has been leading the charge recently to spread propaganda about "Able Danger," a military intelligence unit that allegedly identified 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta as an Al Qaeda operative in early 2000. Hannity has, of course, been practically wetting his pants over the opportunity to blame Bill Clinton for 9/11.

There's just one problem. Well, a couple of problems actually. First, Hannity and friends have been accusing the Clinton administration of creating a "wall" between the intelligence agencies prior to 9/11, which prevented them from sharing data about Al Qaeda. Unfortunately that's not true - the "wall" was actually created by the justice departments under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Second, it turns out that one of the guys involved with Able Danger was a general by the name of Pete Schoomaker, who, according to research done at DailyKos, "repeatedly told [intelligence agents] Philpott and Shaffer that they could not inform the FBI as DoD lawyers had opined that Atta's Green Card made him a 'US Person,' that the so-called 'Gorelick Wall' prevented talking to the FBI - even though Atta was part of al-Qaeda. Shaffer and Philpott were actually ordered to put yellow sticky pads over the faces of the 4 terrorists on their Analyst Notebook chart and act as thought they don't exist."

Where is General Pete Schoomaker now? Well, he retired in December 2000, and then - would you believe it - he was hand-picked by Donald Rumsfeld to replace General Shinseki as Army Chief of Staff in 2003. How nice.

Finally, the Bush administration weren't exactly on top of the terrorist threat. Aside from ignoring Richard Clarke, the Hart-Rudman report, the infamous August 6 PDB, and other warnings about terrorism, they also dismantled Able Danger in February of 2001, just weeks after coming to power.

Gee, I hope this story doesn't come back to bite Sean Hannity in the ass. That would be unfortunate.

[Nickdfresh]

September 2, 2005

Inquiry Fails to Find Data on Hijackers
A Pentagon report contradicts statements by members of an intelligence unit that some attackers were known before Sept. 11.

By Josh Meyer, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — An internal Pentagon investigation has found no proof that a classified military intelligence program identified Mohamed Atta or any of the other Sept. 11 hijackers before the attacks or found that they were living in the United States, officials said Thursday.

Several senior Pentagon officials said their investigation found five members of the intelligence program codenamed Able Danger who recalled the existence of a large chart of suspected Al Qaeda operatives as far back as 2000 that they said included Atta's name or photograph. But the Pentagon found no evidence that such a chart existed.

ADVERTISEMENT
The findings of the investigation contradict allegations that the military intelligence program may have had information in 2000 that could have led to Atta's arrest and prevented the terrorist attacks.

In recent weeks, three members of the team, which was disbanded in the spring of 2001, have publicly stated that Able Danger identified Atta and as many as three other hijackers at least a year before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon. One of them, Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, said he tried to warn the FBI about the presence of Atta and the other terrorists in the United States.

But Shaffer said he was blocked by Pentagon lawyers concerned about the repercussions of admitting that the team was gathering intelligence on Atta because he was in the country on a U.S. visa.

Many current and former U.S. officials have expressed skepticism about whether the military intelligence operation actually identified Atta and the other conspirators as part of Al Qaeda before Sept. 11.

This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that it would hold a Sept. 14 hearing to sift through conflicting claims about Able Danger, which was set up in 1999 to gather information about Al Qaeda cells worldwide. Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said Shaffer and other team members "have made some pretty serious statements and that ought to be investigated."

At a news briefing Thursday, Pentagon officials conceded that their investigation had answered most, but not all, of those questions about the military intelligence unit, which analyzed vast amounts of computerized information to detect links and patterns in global terrorism.

Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Defense Department spokesman, said Pentagon investigators reviewed 9.5 million documents, e-mails and other military records, and interviewed more than 80 individuals, including Shaffer and Able Danger's team leader, Navy Capt. Scott Philpott.

Swiergosz said four team members told investigators that they recalled a chart with a pre-Sept. 11 photo of Atta, while the fifth member recalled only a reference to Atta's name.

Swiergosz and other Pentagon officials said they believed that all five of the team members were credible, but that investigators could not find a single piece of evidence proving that such a chart existed.

"The facts are very simple," Swiergosz said. "They specifically searched for the name Mohamed Atta and it never came up. We couldn't even find data that someone could use to create such a chart."

Pat Downs, a senior policy analyst in the office of the undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, said investigators did find evidence of a "similar" chart that found links to a "Brooklyn cell," but said it did not contain a reference to Atta or any of the other 18 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Shaffer could not be reached for comment Thursday, and Philpott has not spoken publicly about the controversy, except to issue a brief statement several weeks ago saying the group had produced a chart with Atta's name on it long before Sept. 11.

Downs told reporters that the Pentagon team investigating Shaffer's claims would continue to conduct interviews, but that it had completed its search of official documents. Another Pentagon official said that all leads have been pursued and that the Defense Department is confident that the allegations appear to be baseless.

"They are going to keep on looking, but the expenditure of time and effort will diminish significantly," said the Pentagon official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. "When you've uncovered the last rock, where else can you look?

"You can't disprove a negative," he added. "If someone says, 'I had a purple elephant in my backyard last night,' you can't prove that they didn't see it."

Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), who has been outspoken in support of Shaffer and his claims, denounced the Pentagon investigation Thursday, saying through a spokesman that it was inconclusive and that the military and Congress needed to continue pursuing leads in the case.

Weldon was the first to publicly mention Able Danger, saying in a brief passage in his recent book, "Countdown to Terror," that the chart was produced before the attacks and that the Pentagon failed to act on it. Weldon also said he gave the chart to Stephen J. Hadley, an advisor to President Bush, just after the attacks. Hadley was deputy White House national security advisor at the time and has since been promoted to national security advisor. The White House has refused to comment on whether Hadley received such a chart.

Current and former U.S. officials, even those critical of the U.S. counter-terrorism effort before Sept. 11, have been skeptical of claims that Able Danger was able to identify Atta before the attacks.

Richard A. Clarke, White House counter-terrorism czar under Presidents Clinton and Bush, told the Los Angeles Times that he had no knowledge of Able Danger's existence before Sept. 11. He also said that, to his knowledge, no one at the White House, CIA, FBI, Pentagon or any other U.S. agency had information linking Atta to Al Qaeda at the time.

"The obvious question is, what information did they have that led them to believe these people were Al Qaeda, and what led them to possess this information uniquely?" Clarke said. "Or if they did not possess it uniquely, who else possessed this information?"

When Shaffer went public last month and alleged that team members briefed the Sept. 11 commission about their identification of Atta, commission members denied that assertion.

The Pentagon officials discounted Shaffer's speculation that documents proving the existence of the chart with Atta's name on it could have been destroyed in an effort to spare the military from embarrassment due to potential privacy violations.

The existence of such a chart could also be embarrassing to the Pentagon since it would suggest that the military had information about Atta and others that could have been used to thwart the attacks.

Navy Cmdr. Christopher Chope, of the U.S. Special Operations Command, said any shredding of the Able Danger paper trail was done under regulations requiring the routine destruction of such documents.

Link (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-atta2sep02,0,549919.story?track=tottext)

[DrMaddVibe]

Thursday, September 01, 2005

WASHINGTON — Pentagon officials said Thursday they have found three more people who recall an intelligence chart that identified Sept. 11 mastermind Mohamed Atta (search) as a terrorist one year before the attacks on New York and Washington. But they have been unable to find the chart or other evidence that it existed.

Last month, two military officers, Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer (search) and Navy Capt. Scott Philpott (search), went public with claims that a secret unit code-named Able Danger used data mining — searching large amounts of data for patterns — to identify Atta in 2000. Shaffer has saidt days Pentagon officials have said they could not yet verify or disprove the assertions by Shaffer and Philpott. On Thursday, four intelligence officials provided the first extensive briefing for reporters on the outcome of their interviews with people associated with Able Danger (search) and their review of documents.

They said they interviewed at least 80 people over a three-week period and found three, besides Philpott and Shaffer, who said they remember seeing a chart that either mentioned Atta by name as an Al Qaeda operative or showed his photograph. Four of the five recalled a chart with a pre-Sept. 11 photo of Atta; the other person recalled only a reference to his name.

The intelligence officials said they consider the five people to be credible but their recollections are still unverified.

"To date, we have not identified the chart," said Pat Downs, a senior policy analyst in the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. "We have identified a similar chart but it does not contain the photo of Mohamed Atta or a reference to him or a reference to the other (Sept. 11) hijackers."

She said more interviews would be conducted, but the search of official documents is finished.

Downs and the other officials said they could not rule out that the chart recalled by Shaffer, Philpott and three others had been destroyed in compliance with regulations pertaining to intelligence information about people inside the United States. They also did not rule out that the five simply had faulty recollections.

Navy Cmdr. Christopher Chope, of the Center for Special Operations at U.S. Special Operations Command, said there were "negative indications" that anyone ever ordered the destruction of Able Danger documents, other than the materials that were routinely required to be destroyed under existing regulations.

Shaffer, who is now a civilian employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, also has publicly asserted that military lawyers stopped the Able Danger staff from sharing the information on Atta with the FBI out of concern about gathering and sharing information on people in the United States legally.

Chope said there is no evidence that military lawyers blocked the sharing of Able Danger information with the FBI.

Chope also said the nature of Able Danger has been misrepresented in some news stories. He said it was created as a result of a directive in early October 1999 by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to U.S. Special Operations Command to develop a campaign plan against transnational terrorism, "specifically Al Qaeda."

He called it an internal working group with a core of 10 staffers at Special Operations Command. Philpott was the "team leader," he said. "Able Danger was never a military unit," and it never targeted individual terrorists, he said. It went out of existence when the planning effort was finished in early 2001, he said.