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Banned
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Here's a different take on the report as found on Alternet. I'm only posting a portion as the original is very long:
Quote:
The CIA did it ... or was it Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the rope? On Friday the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee issued its 511 page report – an estimated 20% already censored out by the CIA (so assume this was the best news available) – and as all press reports in this country indicate, it savaged the Agency. Its essential implied conclusion was that the CIA more or less single-handedly led a misinformed Congress and a misadvised administration into war. ("The committee did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure [CIA] analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.") The committee Democrats signed off on this and then held edgy press conferences or like House minority leader Nancy Pelosi released statements indicating that it probably wasn't this way at all.
So, gee, like they used to say when I was a kid about those drawings that had five-legged cows floating through the clouds, what's wrong with this picture? To make sense of all this, it helps to compare the shameful CIA intelligence record on Saddam's Iraq to the various pretzled legal memos the Defense Department, the CIA, and others solicited from working groups of administration legal brains on the issue of torture and the president's power to create an offshore torture system. Like the CIA's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, with its even more doctored, unclassified public version (a White House construct which took much heat in the Committee report), these were essentially after-the-fact efforts to bolster decisions already taken or in the process of being taken by top administration officials who had, until then, largely consulted each other.
Remember, long before that NIE was produced, top administration figures were already out on the national and international hustings selling their wares and their prospective war with their own "intelligence" right at the tips of their tongues. As Dick Cheney, for instance, said in August 2002 speech to the VFW, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction"; while the President addressed the UN General Assembly thusly in September of that year, "Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons," and so on, ad nauseam. And keep in mind, they already had their own outfit, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans (OSP), set up in the Pentagon in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to create a perfect storm of intelligence exactly to the administration's liking.
In the case of our offshore mini-gulag of injustice, we know that essential decisions were taken quickly in late 2001 and early 2002 – including the creation of a new category of prisoners, "unlawful" or "illegal combatants" – by top Bush administration officials, including the President, without resort to any corps of lawyers. In the case of intelligence on Saddam's Iraq, we know from various kiss-and-tell memoirs that, within nanoseconds of the 9/11 attacks, the administration was readying itself for a long-desired invasion of Iraq. Though its urge to go to war had nothing to do with Saddam's actual danger to us, excuses were needed – wmd threatening the world, ties to al-Qaeda, and so on – and when that's what they wanted, as the legal memos on torture indicate, that's what they got. In fact, what they got was the Agency's already infamous "unfounded 'group think' assumptions." Whether the CIA's top officials leapt on board or were shoved on board by the neocons and the vice president, whether those vice presidential visits to Langley, Virginia did or did not push CIA analysts over the brink ("The committee found no evidence that the vice president's visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to pressure analysts...") – these aren't small points, but they're not the largest points either.
Really, if you think about it, our President made this clear in his response to the Senate report: He indicated that, report or not, he had no regrets about his war with Iraq: "Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons, I believe we were right to go into Iraq. America is safer today because we did. We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass destruction, and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take." With or without weapons. With or without those ties.
It was a point made no less strongly just after the war by Paul Wolfowitz in a Vanity Fair magazine interview, "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction [as justification for invading Iraq] because it was the one reason everyone could agree on." He meant, of course, the main reason everyone in the administration could agree on that would sell the war to Congress and the American public.
If you take a longer view, it's clear that the most essential aspects of the CIA's terrible intelligence, which supposedly bedazzled this administration and misled us into war, had long been in the hands of the Bush warriors. A quick peek, for instance, at the website of the neocon Project for a New American Century (PNAC) makes clear that Wolfowitz's "bureaucratic reason" was already well established when, in their out-of-power years, seventeen of them, most with remarkably familiar names (Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, R. James Woolsey), wrote Republican congressional leaders Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott an open letter in May 1998 forcefully suggesting what would come to be called "regime change" in Iraq: "We recommended," they said, referring to an earlier letter the group had sent President Clinton, "a substantial change in the direction of U.S. policy: Instead of further, futile efforts to 'contain' Saddam, we argued that the only way to protect the United States and its allies from the threat of weapons of mass destruction was to put in place policies that would lead to the removal of Saddam and his regime from power..." And they warned that, failing to do so, "The administration will have unnecessarily put at risk U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf, who will be vulnerable to attack by biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons under Saddam Hussein's control."
See rest of article
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I don't normally quote straight from the blogosphere, but wonderwench started it  |