Current and future potential fallout from the credibility gap WRT US intelligence, Iraq's WoMD, and the presentation of 'likelihoods and unresolved questions as facts:'
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3996047/ "The Bush administration's inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- after public statements declaring an imminent threat posed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein -- has begun to harm the credibility abroad of the United States and of American intelligence, according to foreign policy experts in both parties... "..."The foreign policy blow-back is pretty serious," said Kenneth Adelman, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Board and a supporter of the war. He said the gaps between the administration's rhetoric and the postwar findings threaten Bush's doctrine of "preemption," which envisions attacking a nation because it is an imminent threat. "The doctrine "rests not just on solid intelligence," Adelman said, but "also on the credibility that the intelligence is solid..." "...The inability to find suspected weapons "has to make it more difficult on some future occasion if the United States argues the intelligence warrants something controversial, like a preventive attack," said Haass, a Republican who was head of policy planning for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell when the war started. "The result is we've made the bar higher for ourselves and we have to expect greater skepticism in the future..." "...Bush, when asked by ABC's Diane Sawyer why he said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when intelligence pointed more to the possibility Hussein would obtain such weapons, dismissed the question: "So, what's the difference?" "The U.S. team searching for Iraq's weapons has not issued a report since October, but in recent weeks the gap between administration claims and Iraq's actual weapons holdings has become increasingly clear. The Washington Post reported earlier this month that U.S. investigators have found no evidence that Iraq had a hidden cache of old chemical or biological weapons, and that its nuclear program had been shattered after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. A lengthy study issued by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace also concluded the administration shifted the intelligence consensus on Iraq's weapons in 2002 as officials prepared for war, making it appear more imminent and threatening than was warranted by the evidence. The report further said that the administration "systematically misrepresented the threat" posed by Iraq, often on purpose, in four ways: one, treating nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as a single threat, although each posed different dangers and evidence was particularly thin on Iraq's nuclear and chemical programs; two, insisting without evidence that Hussein would give his weapons to terrorists; three, often dropping caveats and uncertainties contained in the intelligence assessments when making public statements; and four, misrepresenting inspectors' findings so that minor threats were depicted as emergencies. "Jessica T. Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment and co-author of the report, pointed to one example in a speech delivered by Bush in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002. U.N. inspectors had noted that Iraqi had failed to account for bacterial growth media that, if used, "could have produced about three times as much" anthrax as Iraq had admitted. But Bush, in his speech, turned a theoretical possibility into a fact. "The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount," Bush said. "This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for and is capable of killing millions." Mathews said her research showed the administration repeatedly and frequently took such liberties with the intelligence and inspectors' findings to bolster its cases for immediate action. In the Cincinnati example, "in 35 words, you go from probably to a likelihood to a fact," she said. "With a few little changes in wording, you turn an 'if' into a dire biological weapons stockpile. Anyone hearing that must be thinking, 'My God, this is an imminent threat.' " Here is the full report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with links to multiple articles commenting on the report (including international ones): http://www.ceip.org/files/projects/npp/resources/iraqintell/home.htm and the summary (pdf file): http://wmd.ceip.matrixgroup.net/Iraq3GuideFind_SummRec.pdf Debbi "Darlings are you ready for the long winter's fall? Said the lady in her parlor, Said the butler in the hall..." -- Jethro Tull, 'Dark Ages' (4th song in below link) http://remus.rutgers.edu/JethroTull/Albums/Stormwatch-lyrics.html#DarkAges __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
