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host · 11-17-2005, 11:30 PM

Patriots Graham and Levin tried to stop what was essentially a similar, Rovesque, propaganda "Op", to the one
that you appear to have succumbed to, now, politicophile...the "democrats are attempting to re-write history
BS, an "Op" which is a successor to the "Wilson's wife sent him to Niger", "Op", which is a successor of the "Iraqi WMDs/stop Saddam before he can produce a "mushroom cloud" in U.S. skies", "Op".

The difference today is that in October, 2002, Bush was not limited to speaking only to "prop" audiences of troops at secure locations, such as on military bases, where legitimate and vocal protests of outraged citizens can be kept out of the background of the view of TV cameras. Read about the pressure of polling data on democrats in the federal legislature who might have contemplated the mounting of a counter argument to the Bush-Cheney war "Op".
Read about the effort that Senators Graham and Levin expended in the attmept, blunted by the white house, to insure
that all in the house and the senate could read the classified NIE that they had read........

Quote:

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security...630selling.htm
The Selling of the Iraq War: The First Casualty
By John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman*
New Republic
June 30, 2003

........The Battle In Congress
Fall 2002

The administration used the anniversary of September 11, 2001, to launch its public campaign for a congressional resolution endorsing war, with or without U.N. support, against Saddam. The opening salvo came on the Sunday before the anniversary in the form of a leak to Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon of The New York Times regarding the aluminum tubes. Miller and Gordon reported that, according to administration officials, Iraq had been trying to buy tubes specifically designed as "components of centrifuges to enrich uranium" for nuclear weapons. That same day, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on the political talk shows to trumpet the discovery of the tubes and the Iraqi nuclear threat. Explained Rice, "There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Rumsfeld added, "Imagine a September eleventh with weapons of mass destruction. It's not three thousand--it's tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children."

Many of the intelligence analysts who had participated in the aluminum-tubes debate were appalled. One described the feeling to TNR: "You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie." Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security, recalled, "I became dismayed when a knowledgeable government scientist told me that the administration could say anything it wanted about the tubes while government scientists who disagreed were expected to remain quiet." As Thielmann puts it, "There was a lot of evidence about the Iraqi chemical and biological weapons programs to be concerned about. Why couldn't we just be honest about that without hyping the nuclear account? Making the case for active pursuit of nuclear weapons makes it look like the administration was trying to scare the American people about how dangerous Iraq was and how it posed an imminent security threat to the United States."

In speeches and interviews, administration officials also warned of the connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. On September 25, 2002, Rice insisted, "There clearly are contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq. ... There clearly is testimony that some of the contacts have been important contacts and that there's a relationship there." On the same day, President Bush warned of the danger that "Al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness." Rice, like Rumsfeld--who the next day would call evidence of a Saddam-bin Laden link "bulletproof"--said she could not share the administration's evidence with the public without endangering intelligence sources. But Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, disagreed. On September 27, Paul Anderson, a spokesman for Graham, told USA Today that the senator had seen nothing in the CIA's classified reports that established a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, in fact, was the greatest congressional obstacle to the administration's push for war. Under the lead of Graham and Illinois Senator Richard Durbin, the committee enjoyed respect and deference in the Senate and the House, and its members could speak authoritatively, based on their access to classified information, about whether Iraq was developing nuclear weapons or had ties to Al Qaeda. And, in this case, the classified information available to the committee did not support the public pronouncements being made by the CIA.

In the late summer of 2002, Graham had requested from Tenet an analysis of the Iraqi threat. According to knowledgeable sources, he received a 25-page classified response reflecting the balanced view that had prevailed earlier among the intelligence agencies--noting, for example, that evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program or a link to Al Qaeda was inconclusive. Early that September, the committee also received the DIA's classified analysis, which reflected the same cautious assessments. But committee members became worried when, midway through the month, they received a new CIA analysis of the threat that highlighted the Bush administration's claims and consigned skepticism to footnotes. According to one congressional staffer who read the document, it highlighted "extensive Iraqi chem-bio programs and nuclear programs and links to terrorism" but then included a footnote that read, "This information comes from a source known to fabricate in the past." The staffer concluded that "they didn't do analysis. What they did was they just amassed everything they could that said anything bad about Iraq and put it into a document."

Graham and Durbin had been demanding for more than a month that the CIA produce an NIE on the Iraqi threat--a summary of the available intelligence, reflecting the judgment of the entire intelligence community--and toward the end of September, it was delivered. Like Tenet's earlier letter, the classified NIE was balanced in its assessments. Graham called on Tenet to produce a declassified version of the report that could guide members in voting on the resolution. Graham and Durbin both hoped the declassified report would rebut the kinds of overheated claims they were hearing from administration spokespeople. As Durbin tells TNR, "The most frustrating thing I find is when you have credible evidence on the intelligence committee that is directly contradictory to statements made by the administration."

On October 1, 2002, Tenet produced a declassified NIE. But Graham and Durbin were outraged to find that it omitted the qualifications and countervailing evidence that had characterized the classified version and played up the claims that strengthened the administration's case for war. For instance, the intelligence report cited the much-disputed aluminum tubes as evidence that Saddam "remains intent on acquiring" nuclear weapons. And it claimed, "All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons and that these tubes could be used in a centrifuge enrichment program"--a blatant mischaracterization. Subsequently, the NIE allowed that "some" experts might disagree but insisted that "most" did not, never mentioning that the DOE's expert analysts had determined the tubes were not suitable for a nuclear weapons program. The NIE also said that Iraq had "begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents"--which the DIA report had left pointedly in doubt. Graham demanded that the CIA declassify dissenting portions.

In response, Tenet produced a single-page letter. It satisfied one of Graham's requests: It included a statement that there was a "low" likelihood of Iraq launching an unprovoked attack on the United States. But it also contained a sop to the administration, stating without qualification that the CIA had "solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." Graham demanded that Tenet declassify more of the report, and Tenet promised to fax over additional material. But, later that evening, Graham received a call from the CIA, informing him that the White House had ordered Tenet not to release anything more.

That same evening, October 7, 2002, Bush gave a major speech in Cincinnati defending the resolution now before Congress and laying out the case for war. Bush's speech brought together all the misinformation and exaggeration that the White House had been disseminating that fall. "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," the president declared. "Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." Bush also argued that, through its ties to Al Qaeda, Iraq would be able to use biological and chemical weapons against the United States. "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," he warned. If Iraq had to deliver these weapons on its own, Bush said, Iraq could use the new unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that it was developing. "We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas," he said. "We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States." This claim represented the height of absurdity. Iraq's UAVs had ranges of, at most, 300 miles. They could not make the flight from Baghdad to Tel Aviv, let alone to New York.

After the speech, when reporters pointed out that Bush's warning of an imminent threat was contradicted by Tenet's statement the same day that there was little likelihood of an Iraqi attack, Tenet dutifully offered a clarification, explaining that there was "no inconsistency" between the president's statement and his own and that he had personally fact-checked the president's speech. He also issued a public statement that read, "There is no question that the likelihood of Saddam using weapons of mass destruction against the United States or our allies ... grows as his arsenal continues to build."

Five of the nine Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, including Graham and Durbin, ultimately voted against the resolution, but they were unable to convince other committee members or a majority in the Senate itself. This was at least in part because they were not allowed to divulge what they knew: While Graham and Durbin could complain that the administration's and Tenet's own statements contradicted the classified reports they had read, they could not say what was actually in those reports.

Bush, meanwhile, had no compunction about claiming that the "evidence indicates Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program." In the words of one former Intelligence Committee staffer, "He is the president of the United States. And, when the president of the United States says, 'My advisers and I have sat down, and we've read the intelligence, and we believe there is a tie between Iraq and Al Qaeda,' ... you take it seriously. It carries a huge amount of weight." Public opinion bears the former staffer out. By November 2002, a Gallup poll showed 59 percent in favor of an invasion and only 35 percent against. In a December Los Angeles Times poll, Americans thought, by a 90 percent to 7 percent margin, that Saddam was "currently developing weapons of mass destruction." And, in an ABC/Washington Post poll, 81 percent thought Iraq posed a threat to the United States. The Bush administration had won the domestic debate over Iraq--and it had done so by withholding from the public details that would have undermined its case for war.

Quote:

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2002/10/dci100702.html
Source:
Congressional Record
October 9, 2002
Page S10154

Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, DC

October 7, 2002

The Honorable Bob Graham
Chairman
Select Committee on Intelligence
United States Senate
Washington, DC. 20510

Dear Mr. Chairman:

In response to your letter of 4 October 2002, we have made unclassified material available to further the Senate's forthcoming open debate on a Joint Resolution concerning Iraq.

As always, our declassification efforts seek a balance between your need for unfettered debate and our need to protect sources and methods. We have also been mindful of a shared interest in not providing to Saddam a blueprint of our intelligence capabilities and shortcoming, or with insight into our expectation of how he will and will not act. The salience of such concerns is only heightened by the possibility for hostilities between the U.S. and Iraq.

These are some of the reasons why we did not include our classified judgments on Saddam's decisionmaking regarding the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in our recent unclassified paper on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. Viewing your request with those concerns in mind, however, we can declassify the following from the paragraphs you requested:

Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States.

Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means, as with Iraq's unsuccessful attempt at a terrorist offensive in 1991, or CBW.

Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.

Regarding the 2 October closed hearing, we can declassify the following dialogue:

Senator Levin: . . . If (Saddam) didn't feel threatened, did not feel threatened, is it likely that he would initiate an attack using a weapon of mass destruction?

Senior Intelligence Witness: . . . My judgment would be that the probability of him initiating an attack--let me put a time frame on it--in the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now, the likelihood I think would be low.

Senator Levin: Now if he did initiate an attack you've . . . indicated he would probably attempt clandestine attacks against us . . . But what about his use of weapons of mass destruction? If we initiate an attack and he thought he was in extremis or otherwise, what's the likelihood in response to our attack that he would use chemical or biological weapons?

Senior Intelligence Witness: Pretty high, in my view.

In the above dialogue, the witness's qualifications--"in the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now"--were intended to underscore that the likelihood of Saddam using WMD for blackmail, deterrence, or otherwise grows as his arsenal builds. Moreover, if Saddam used WMD, it would disprove his repeated denials that he has such weapons.

Regarding Senator Bayh's question of Iraqi links to al- Qa'ida, Senators could draw from the following points for unclassified discussions:

* Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and al- Qa'ida is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability. Some of the information we have received comes from detainees, including some of high rank.

* We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'ida going back a decade.

* Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qa'ida have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression.

* Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qa'ida members, including some that have been in Baghdad.

* We have credible reporting that al-Qa'ida leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qa'ida members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.

* Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with growing indications of a relationship with al- Qa'ida, suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent US military action.

Sincerely,

[signed:] John McLaughlin (For)

George J. Tenet
Director of Central Intelligence

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...04Jul11_2.html
Report Says CIA Distorted Iraq Data
Senate Panel Cites Exaggerations in Paper Made Public in 2002

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 12, 2004; Page A0

....... When the public White Paper version was released in October, it sparked strong protests from Democrats on the Senate intelligence panel who had the classified version. They believed the public document slanted the case toward the administration's view of the Iraqi threat. In particular, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), the panel's chairman at the time, pushed the CIA to declassify more information.

Four days later, Tenet, in a letter to the committee, released more information. Among the new items: The CIA believed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would be unlikely to initiate a chemical or biological attack against the United States unless provoked by U.S. military actions.

"Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred," he might launch a chemical-biological counterattack, Tenet's letter said.

Hussein also might "decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD [weapons of mass destruction] attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."

The CIA also declassified other elements of analysis that seem to back up the president's assertion that Iraq has active ties to al Qaeda -- a growing feature of the administration's case for considering military action. Among the intelligence assessments linking Iraq to al Qaeda is "credible reporting" that the group's "leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities," according to the letter. The Senate's request and Tenet's letter came when an increasing number of intelligence officials, including former and current intelligence agency employees, were concerned the agency was tailoring its public stance to fit the administration's views.

Yesterday, speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," the Senate committee's chairman, Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), said that had Congress known before the vote to go to war what his committee has since discovered about the intelligence on Iraq, "I doubt if the votes would have been there."

Roberts characterized some of the redacted parts of the Senate report as "specific details that would make your eyebrows even raise higher."

You fell for the propaganda "Op" that snared votes for Bush_Cheney a year ago, politicophile, and you've fallen for this new one.....hook, line, and sinker, it seems from your creation, titling, and the content that you've posted on this thread. You've ignored the hard news reports that I've posted on this same matter, on other threads. (edited out comments related to the objectionable nature of the thread title) Be of your own mind and question everything that they tell you. Learn to think and to act in your own best interest.