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Wow, so much irrelevance in one post.... but you offered no rebuttal to this: The intelligence Bush and Congress used to make the decision to go to war did not come from cheney and rumsfeld, but from an NIE compiled by clinton DCI george tenet, comprised of intel collected when clinton was president.
The rebuttle is: No, it didn't. Nobody goes to war on an NIE. That's not even what it's for. The purpose of the NIE is to aid Congress in voting for an intelligence budget.
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You go on to make a lot of bizarre references that add up to suggesting we had technology that could have detected WMD in Iraq underground. Nope thats utter BS.
If you do enough Googling, you can find some information about it.
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The whole narrative that Bush somehow manipulated intelligence is silly. John Kerry, who was the chair of the Senate Intelligence committee, voted for the war. Hillary Clinton voted for the war. 3/4 of Congress voted for the war.
They got what Rumsfeld and Cheney gave them. I don't blame Bush at all--he also only got what Rumsfeld and Chaney gave him.
Rumsfeld outright lied. I know he outright lied because I personally know the man who briefed him otherwise. While Rumsfeld was twisting the DIA, Cheney was twisting the CIA--actually going to Langley and breathing down the necks of the analysts.
Even then, the CIA report was heavily caveated. CIA's favorite caveat: "However, the possibility of the converse cannot be discounted." Unfortunately, as Rice later admitted, "We never read the caveats."
One of Powell's deputies later wrote that because State Department intelligence disagreed with CIA's WMD assertion, Powell went back to Tenet three separate times asking for confirmation that CIA was right. Powell's big mistake was not relying on his own people. He should have told Tenet, "If your people can convince my people, I'll go along with it."
But from the analysts: "That's not what we briefed."
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As for "he was watched and inspected"... yeah so? Do you think sanctions and inspections were a permanent solution? Do you know why we were attacked on 9/11?
Osama bin Laden told us exactly why he ordered the 9/11 attack: Because US military forces were based in the Muslim Holy Land. Saddam Hussein has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Paul Pillar, who was CIA Near East national intelligence officer from 2000-2005, explained it a little differently. His take was that there was no Dick Cheney conspiracy regarding WMD intelligence. Instead he said that there is always an inherent bias for intel analysts to tell a Dick Cheney what they want to hear. If you tell them what they want to hear, suddenly you're important, you're in the loop. If you tell them something that they don't want to hear, you are liable to be ignored, to become persona non grata.
Most people at the time believed that Saddam had WMD, so that was an easy leap. Even some of Saddam's own senior officers believed it, as has been well documented.
The Cheney conspiracy theories to this day tickle partisan fancy, but are bogus.
I still don't get what the Iraq war was really about. People say they U.S. invaded because of oil, but they never brought back an oil on tankers that I could find, so what was the point, unless I missed something?
The rebuttle is: No, it didn't. Nobody goes to war on an NIE. That's not even what it's for. The purpose of the NIE is to aid Congress in voting for an intelligence budget.
If you do enough Googling, you can find some information about it.
They got what Rumsfeld and Cheney gave them. I don't blame Bush at all--he also only got what Rumsfeld and Chaney gave him.
Rumsfeld outright lied. I know he outright lied because I personally know the man who briefed him otherwise. While Rumsfeld was twisting the DIA, Cheney was twisting the CIA--actually going to Langley and breathing down the necks of the analysts.
Even then, the CIA report was heavily caveated. CIA's favorite caveat: "However, the possibility of the converse cannot be discounted." Unfortunately, as Rice later admitted, "We never read the caveats."
One of Powell's deputies later wrote that because State Department intelligence disagreed with CIA's WMD assertion, Powell went back to Tenet three separate times asking for confirmation that CIA was right. Powell's big mistake was not relying on his own people. He should have told Tenet, "If your people can convince my people, I'll go along with it."
But from the analysts: "That's not what we briefed."
Osama bin Laden told us exactly why he ordered the 9/11 attack: Because US military forces were based in the Muslim Holy Land. Saddam Hussein has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Youve got so many grievous errors here I almost didnt dignify it with a response. Since you seem sincere let me educate you.(this doesnt mean I expect you to change your position on the war)
First, the NIE absolutely is what Congress and the President based their decisions on the war upon. Innan unusual move this NIE was furnished both by requests from Bush as well as congressional democrats who cited the anticipated vote on the JRAUMF.
What you claim is simply not true, if it were then NIEs would be annual and automatic and not limited to a specific issue. This was the NIE on Iraq WMD.
By mid-September 2002, Tenet and others in the intelligence community were scrambling. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Senator Bob Graham, unwilling to rely on the administration's white paper, had insisted that a formal National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's WMD be prepared for Congress prior to any vote authorizing Bush to take military action against Saddam. The deadline for the finished NIE product was October 1, 2002. The Senate vote was scheduled for October 10, a few weeks before the mid-term elections.
Second, no Im not going to google to find your argument for you supporting fantastic weapons detectors from space.
Third, no, as outlined in the intelligence oversight act of 1980, congress has a seperate conduit of intel from the president. By law since they requested the NIE the executive branch could not have controlled it.
Fourth, this stuff about Cheney breathing down the necks at Langley. Where did you get that, Mother Jones? Neither the President nor Congress can access raw intelligence and in no case can Cheney manufacture raw intelligence himself.
Your narrative is simply BS because if it were true there would be SOME reports from US intel agencies at some time before the war concluding Saddam had disarmed. Can you produce one? No because it didnt exist. Other countries intel agencies came to the same conclusions. Did Cheney control that too? Did he control the UN and hans blix who said saddam had not accounted for gulf war stockpiles?
Finally the most absurd of all. You furnish part of the truth. Here is al qaedas 1998 fatwa.
It cites troops in saudi arabia- who were they protecting the saudis from? DUH. They wouldnt be there except for desert storm and what do you know after the 2003 war we removed them.
It goes into detail about sanctions on iraq killing a million muslims. That had nothing to do with saddam? Huh?
the policies we used to contain saddam. were what angered al qaeda so after 9/11 we had to quietly stop them. This cuts to the heart of the matter with you war critics who never could offer a better alternative than we should have done nothing and stayed on the course we were on. Thats crazy, killing hundreds of thousands of iraqi children every year!
Since I'm not one of those who believe it was right, I can't say what they are thinking.
Who were we to.protect our allies? Who were we to stop saddams suicide bombers? Who were we to uphold UN resolutions that saddam bribed france and russia to obstruct? Who were we to stop saddam from helping to topple the dollar as the world currency? Who were we to stop a dictator from starving his people to death while he built palaces with solid gold toilets, skimming 13 BILLION dollars off oil for food, meant to feed his people?
Who were we to see the butcher of baghdad swing from a rope?
Paul Pillar, who was CIA Near East national intelligence officer from 2000-2005, explained it a little differently. His take was that there was no Dick Cheney conspiracy regarding WMD intelligence. Instead he said that there is always an inherent bias for intel analysts to tell a Dick Cheney what they want to hear.
The "bias" is called fear of losing one's career.
When the freaking Vice President of the United States made multiple trips to Langley and made clear what he wanted the reports to say, then, yes, that's what the analysts (who had expensive northern VA mortgages to pay) wrote.
CIA promotions depended on their analyses being read as high up the chain as possible. Getting a report into the Situation Room got an analyst promoted, and it had been made clear to the Iraq analysts that no report got into the Situation Room unless it said something about WMD.
So those reports got written by people trying to keep their jobs--albeit heavily caveated: "However, the possibility of the converse cannot be discounted."
Nothing surprising about that.
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If you tell them what they want to hear, suddenly you're important, you're in the loop. If you tell them something that they don't want to hear, you are liable to be ignored, to become persona non grata.
Back in the late 80s, I knew an analyst at DIA who, when I first arrived, was well-known in the office scuttlebutt as being an addle-pated airhead. He had this wild-assed theory that a certain ICBM facility in the Soviet Union was actually out of service and, in fact, had never been operational since its construction.
Nobody wanted to hear that because at the time the US considered the facility a violation of SALT and it was being used to hammer the Soviets. The guy stuck to his guns and actually lost promotions.
Personally, I thought his theory was reasonable--and he had plenty of good observations to prove it. But it didn't fit the political agenda.
After the Soviet Union fell, a group of US congresscritters were given a tour of the facility...and it turned out that analyst had been absolutely right. The facility had never been operational for the very reasons he had determined.
I wonder if the pollsters were specific in defining which Iraq war, 1991 (Desert Storm) or 2003 Iraq war. I think 1991 was justified - 2003 not.
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