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What’s remarkable about this piece is that it is being picked up by
more newspapers across the country, and the mainstream media, print and
broadcast, are asking critical questions, acting more as advocates of the
public, not agents of the government.
This article mentions a pattern of behavior that will be difficult for
many to accept, especially given their unquestioning support after 9/11. The free ride is over. CIA leak illustrates selective
use of intelligence on Iraq WASHINGTON - The grand jury probe into the leak of a covert
CIA officer's name has opened a new window into how the Bush administration
used intelligence from dubious sources to make a case for a pre-emptive war and
discarded information that undercut its rationale for attacking Iraq. CIA officer Valerie
Plame was outed in an apparent attempt to discredit her husband, former
Ambassador Joseph Wilson, after he challenged President Bush's allegation in
his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy uranium for
nuclear weapons from the African nation of Niger. A Knight Ridder review of the
administration's arguments, its own reporting at the time and the Senate
Intelligence Committee's 2004 report shows that the White House followed a pattern of using
questionable intelligence, even documents that turned out to be forgeries, to
support its case - often leaking classified information to receptive
journalists - and dismissing information that undermined the case for war. The State of the Union
speech was one of a number of instances in which Bush, Vice President Dick
Cheney and their aides ignored the qualms of intelligence professionals and
instead relied on the claims of Iraqi defectors and other suspect sources or,
in the case of Niger, the crudely forged documents. Like the Niger
allegation, almost all of the administration's claims that Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein had to be ousted before he could develop nuclear, biological or
chemical weapons, use them against America or give them to al-Qaida terrorists
have turned out to be false. No such weapons or programs have been found,
and several official inquiries have concluded that there was no cooperation
between Iraq and al-Qaida. The indictments that
may come in the CIA leak case this week aren't expected to delve into the
administration's use of intelligence. The Senate Intelligence Committee agreed
to examine the issue in 2004, when it reported on the spy agencies' errors, but
it hasn't done so. (this is the Sen.
Roberts committee that has been stalled in Congress…k) The
Early Case For War The White House launched its public
campaign to build support for a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in August 2002. Top aides led by White House Chief of
Staff Andrew Card and known as the White House Iraq Group directed the effort,
according to current and former U.S. officials who requested anonymity because
of the ongoing investigation. The group included I.
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, and Karl Rove, Bush's
chief political adviser, who are at the center of the Plame probe. Other members were then-National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy and now successor, Stephen J.
Hadley, White House communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and
James R. Wilkerson and legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio. The Iraqi National Congress,
an exile opposition group whose leader, Ahmad Chalabi, was close to Cheney and
others, had begun feeding Western reporters Iraqi defectors' tales that Saddam
was training Islamic extremists to hit U.S. targets and hiding banned weapons
shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The INC, which was
deeply distrusted by the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency and
the CIA, piped the same information into Cheney's office and the Pentagon,
according to a June 2002 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee from the
group's Washington spokesman. In an Aug. 26, 2002,
speech, Cheney highlighted the main themes of the administration's case for
war. Iraq, he charged, was
"amassing" chemical and biological weapons, and "many of us are
convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon"
and could give them to terrorists. There
was no solid U.S. intelligence to support his assertions, and no such finding
by the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, which oversaw the destruction of Saddam's
pre-1991 Gulf War nuclear weapons program. U.S. intelligence had no evidence of any
alliance between Iraq and al-Qaida, and many analysts doubted that Saddam would give such
weapons to Islamic extremists. Those views were set
out in intelligence analyses, according to a report on Iraq intelligence by the
Senate Intelligence Committee. The
White House, however, based its case on an analysis by a secretive Pentagon
unit formed by then Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, a proponent of
attacking Iraq. The Pentagon analysis concluded that Saddam and al-Qaida leader
Osama bin Laden were working together. The Pentagon and the CIA later disowned the findings. The
Aluminum Tubes On Sept. 8, 2002, The New York Times
quoted unnamed U.S. officials as saying that Iraq had tried "to buy
thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes" believed to be intended
for centrifuges, devices that enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. The story quoted an unnamed senior
administration official as saying that "nuclear weapons are his (Saddam's)
hole card" and that delaying his overthrow would make him "harder ...
to deal with." The story reinforced
the Bush administration's charge that the United States couldn't wait for
proof
that Iraq was
developing nuclear weapons. Its
appearance in the nation's most influential paper also gave Cheney and Rice an
opportunity to discuss the matter the same day on the Sunday television talk
shows. They could
discuss the article, but otherwise they wouldn't have been able to talk about
classified intelligence in public. "Iraq has made
several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for
a nuclear weapon," Bush said to the U.N. General Assembly five days later. But U.S. intelligence
experts disagreed over the tubes' purpose. A majority of U.S. agencies, including several with no
expertise on the subject, agreed that the tubes could be used for
centrifuges. But after consulting
U.S. nuclear laboratories, the Department of Energy and the State Department's
Bureau of Intelligence and Research concluded that the tubes were most likely
for ground-to-ground rockets, not for centrifuges. The International Atomic Energy Agency later reached the
same conclusion. The
Background Paper In conjunction with Bush's U.N. speech,
the White House released a report, "A Decade of Deception and
Defiance," which purported to lay out evidence that Iraq was violating a
U.N. ban on possessing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. There's no evidence
that the CIA or the DIA cleared the paper. A number of the
assertions it made were based on exaggerated and fabricated information from Iraqi defectors provided by the
INC. One of them, Adnan Ihsan al Haideri, whose statements were also the basis
of a Dec. 20, 2001, New York Times article, showed "deception" in a
CIA-administered polygraph three days before the article appeared. When U.S.
weapons inspectors took him back to Iraq, he couldn't identify a single illicit
weapons facility. http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/12995481.htm |
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