| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"G-Ride" |
| Date: |
17 Nov 2005 08:49:33 PM |
| Object: |
OT: Fact checking the Cheney Administration |
Someone in the media finally does their job:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13185357.htm
Posted on Wed, Nov. 16, 2005
In challenging war's critics, administration tinkers with truth
By James Kuhnhenn and Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - WASHINGTON _ President Bush called Democratic critics of how he
sold the Iraq war to the world "irresponsible" five times Thursday during a
brief news conference in South Korea.
Bush said he agreed with Vice President ***** Cheney, who on Wednesday had
accused some unnamed senators who oppose the administration's Iraq war
policy of lacking "backbone" and making "reprehensible charges" that Bush
and his aides "purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence."
Cheney's rough-edged remarks, and the president's unequivocal endorsement of
them, were the latest in the Bush administration's new campaign to challenge
critics of how it sold the war, accusing them of twisting the historical
record about how and why the war was launched. Yet in accusing Iraq-war
critics of "rewriting history," Bush, Cheney and other senior administration
officials are tinkering with the truth themselves.
The administration's overarching premise is beyond dispute: Administration
officials, Democratic and Republican lawmakers and even leaders of foreign
governments believed intelligence assessments that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction. That intelligence turned out to be wrong.
But Bush, Cheney, and other senior officials have added several other
arguments in recent days that distort the factual record. Below, Knight
Ridder addresses the administration's main assertions:
ASSERTION: In a Veterans Day speech last Friday, Bush said that Iraq war
"critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no
evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's
judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs."
CONTEXT: Bush is correct in saying that a commission he appointed, chaired
by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Sen. Charles Robb, D-Va., found no
evidence of "politicization" of the intelligence community's assessments
concerning Iraq's reported weapons of mass destruction programs.
But neither that report nor others looked at how the White House
characterized the intelligence it had when selling its plan for war to the
world and whether administration officials exaggerated the threat. That's
supposed to be the topic of a second phase of study by the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence.
"Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence
by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that was not part of our
inquiry," Silberman said when he released the panel's findings in March.
The Senate committee concluded that none of the intelligence analysts it
interviewed said they were pressured to change their conclusions on weapons
of mass destruction or on Iraq's links to terrorism.
But the committee's findings were hardly bipartisan. Committee Democrats
said in additional comments to the panel's July 2004 report that U.S.
intelligence agencies produced analyses and the key prewar assessment of
Iraq's illicit weapons in "a highly pressurized climate."
And the committee found that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, analysts
were under pressure to avoid missing credible threats, and as a result they
were "bold and assertive" in making terrorist links.
In a July 2003 report, a CIA review panel found that agency analysts were
subjected to "steady and heavy" requests from administration officials for
evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaida, which created "significant
pressure on the Intelligence Community to find evidence that supported a
connection."
ASSERTION: In his speech, Bush noted that "more than a hundred Democrats in
the House and the Senate - who had access to the same intelligence - voted
to support removing Saddam Hussein from power."
CONTEXT: This isn't true.
The Congress didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief, a top-secret
compendium of intelligence on the most pressing national security issues
that was sent to the president every morning by former CIA Director George
Tenet.
As for prewar intelligence on Iraq, senior administration officials had
access to other information and sources that weren't available to lawmakers.
Cheney and his aides visited the CIA and other intelligence agencies to view
raw intelligence reports, received briefings and engaged in highly unusual
give-and-take sessions with analysts.
Moreover, officials in the White House and the Pentagon received information
directly from the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group,
circumventing U.S. intelligence agencies, which greatly distrusted the
organization.
The INC's information came from Iraqi defectors who claimed that Iraq was
hiding chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, had mobile
biological-warfare facilities and was training Islamic radicals in
assassinations, bombings and hijackings.
The White House emphasized these claims in making its case for war, even
though the defectors had shown fabrication or deception in lie-detector
tests or had been rejected as unreliable by U.S. intelligence professionals.
All of the exiles' claims turned out to be bogus or remain unproven.
War hawks at the Pentagon also created a special unit that produced a prewar
report - one not shared with Congress - that alleged that Iraq was in league
with al-Qaida. A version of the report, briefed to Secretary of Defense
Donald H. Rumsfeld and top White House officials, disparaged the CIA for
finding there was no cooperation between Iraq and the terrorist group, the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence disclosed.
After the report was leaked in November 2003 to a conservative magazine, the
Pentagon disowned it.
In fact, a series of secret U.S. intelligence assessments discounted the
administration's assertion that Saddam could give banned weapons to
al-Qaida.
In other cases, Bush and his top lieutenants relied on partial or
uncorroborated intelligence.
For example, Cheney contended in an August 2002 speech that Iraq would
develop a nuclear weapon "fairly soon," even though U.S. intelligence
agencies and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency had no evidence to
support such a claim.
The following month, Bush, Cheney and then-national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice asserted that Iraq had sought aluminum tubes for a
nuclear-weapons program. At the time, however, U.S. intelligence agencies
were deeply divided over the question. The IAEA later determined that the
tubes were for ground-to-ground rockets.
A recently declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report from February
2002 said that an al-Qaida detainee was probably lying to U.S. interrogators
when he claimed that Iraq had been teaching members of the terrorist network
to use chemical and biological weapons.
Yet eight months after the report was published, Bush told the nation that
"we've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and
poisons and gases."
Meanwhile, lawmakers didn't have access to intelligence products that may
have been more temperate than what they got, even after they investigated
the prewar intelligence assessment. For instance, the Director of Central
Intelligence refused to give the Senate committee a copy of a paper drafted
by the CIA's Near East and Southeast Asia Office examining Iraq's links to
terrorism.
Lawmakers didn't see the main document concerning Iraq and WMD - the October
2002 National Intelligence Estimate - until three days before their vote
authorizing war. The White House ordered the NIE compiled only after
lawmakers, including the then-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., demanded it.
The resolution that authorized use of force against Iraq didn't specifically
address removing Saddam. It gave Bush the power to "defend the national
security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq"
and to "enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions
regarding Iraq."
ASSERTION: In his Veterans Day address, Bush said that "intelligence
agencies around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein."
CONTEXT: Bush is correct in saying that many intelligence agencies,
particularly in Europe, believed that Saddam was hiding some weapons of mass
destruction capabilities - not necessarily weapons. But they didn't agree
with other U.S. assessments about Saddam. Few, with the exception of Great
Britain, argued that Iraq was an imminent threat, or that it had any link to
Islamic terrorism, much less the Sept. 11 attacks.
France, backed by several other nations, argued that much more time and
effort should have been given to weapons inspections in Iraq before war was
launched.
ASSERTION: Stephen Hadley, the president's national security adviser, told
reporters last Thursday that the Clinton administration and Congress
perceived Saddam as a threat based on some of the same intelligence used by
the Bush administration.
"Congress, in 1998 authorized, in fact, the use of force based on that
intelligence," Hadley said.
And Rumsfeld, in briefing reporters Tuesday, seemed to link President
Clinton's signing of the act to his decision to order four days of U.S.
bombing of suspected weapons sites and military facilities in Baghdad and
other parts of Iraq.
CONTEXT: Congress did pass the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which stated
U.S. support for regime change in Iraq and provided up to $97 million in
overt military and humanitarian aid to opposition groups in Iraq.
But it didn't authorize the use of U.S. force against Iraq.
Clinton said his bombing order was based on Iraq's refusal to comply with
weapons inspections, a violation of United Nations Security Council
resolutions that ended the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
***
--
Aloha, G-Ride
"Like a quarrelling group of monkeys on a leaky boat, armed with sticks of
dynamite, we are now embarked on an uncertain journey."
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