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Banned
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Originally Posted by stevo
Host, I still see nothing in these articles showing how the president LIED. What I see is george tenet saying Thats what you offer as evidence of the president's lies? you've got to try harder than that.
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stevo, the evidence is overwhelming that POTUS Bush, and VP Cheney misled the American people about the justification to invade and occupy Iraq.
To this day, we cannot know all of the facts surrounding this criminal deception and illegal policy of war of aggression, because the President, and Senate Intel Committee chairman, Pat Roberts, have delayed disclosure of how the Bush administration analyzed pre-invasion intelligence and whether they improperly pressured intelligence analysts to skew the data to justify the urgency and the necessity for invading Iraq.
The last quote boxes that I include in this post make it quite clear that the Robb Silberman WMD report did not examine or reach conclusions about the intelligence handling questions, and it persuades that Pat Roberts tried to bury the determination, and has finally been pressured by his own republican colleagues in the senate to provide a report to the American people, but only after yet another election has taken place.
The reason that Bush and Roberts have been able to get away with obstructing an open investigation, and why the 9/11 Commission and the Robb Silberman WMD investigation <i>"were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community"</i>, is because the pre-invasion deception, playing on the emotions triggered by the experience of the 9/11 attacks, delayed the inevitable outrage that is pnly coming to fore now.....<b>but is still blunted from the full bloom of the outrage that will ulimately occur against Bush.....by the folks who will never allow themselves to even suspect that Bush blatantly lied to them</b> in order to justify an illegal war and the tragic and costly aftermath that the Iraqis and the US are still mired in, because of the Bush adminstration's Pre-emption.
stevo, if the news about what these scumbags actually knew.....pre-invasion, about the degree of WMD threat that Iraq posed, vs. what they terrorized us with, instead, was supportive to their reputations or in anyway vindicated them, can you post here that they would attempt to keep that knowledge from us....for this fucking long?
I don't expect to persuade you or Ustwo of anything, stevo. It's laid out here for all to see.....pulled up right alongside the opinions that the two of you post. <b>Consider that Tenet's July 11, 2003 admission and Hadley's July 22, 2003 "briefing", came as a direct response to Joe Wilson's July 6, 2003 "What I didn't see in Niger", op-ed piece in the NY Times. The Bush admin. public reaction, speaks volumes in support of Patrick Fitzgerald's contention that the executive branch launched an assault on Joe Wilson, as payback, that included the outing of his wife's classified status as a CIA employee. It's a small thing.....compared to launching an illegal war of aggression, after a terror propaganda campaign against the Amercian people, but....IMO...it's still treason....authorized at the highest levels of the Bush administration....and no counter spin offensive broadcast this month from the right, makes the facts that Irwin Libby lied to FBI investigators and to a grand jury, during multiple appearances.....giving false and misleading testimony to attempt to cover up the official Wilson "payback Op", in response to Wilson legitimately questioning a small segment of an entire propaganda campaign of lies that is the record of the official justification for invadin Iraq!</b>
Quote:
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/o.../0912iraq.html
or http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache...s&ct=clnk&cd=1
Published on: 09/12/06
History will show that <b>the U.S. government terrified its own citizens into supporting</b> the invasion of Iraq......
......However, questions about the honesty, wisdom, judgment and competence of our current leadership are far from meaningless. We are not debating the relative merits of Thomas Jefferson vs. John Adams; we are attempting to decide whether our current leaders can be trusted to handle the challenges we face.
It matters, for instance, that Vice President Dick Cheney now says that the Bush administration would have invaded Iraq even if it had known that Saddam had no WMD and no ties to al-Qaida. Intrigued by the admission on "Meet the Press" Sunday, host Tim Russert pressed the point with Cheney:
"So if the CIA said to you [in 2003] 'Saddam does not have weapons of mass destruction, his chemical and biological have been degraded, he has no nuclear program under way,' you'd still have invaded Iraq?"
Yes, Cheney said.
In other words, Iraqi WMD weren't the reason we went to war, they were merely the excuse that Cheney and his colleagues needed to scare up public support. That's a relevant piece of information as Americans try to decide how much faith they can put in this administration.
-— Jay Bookman, for the editorial board (jbookman@ajc.com)
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Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20060910.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
September 10, 2006
Interview of the Vice President by Tim Russert, NBC News, Meet the Press
NBC Studios
Washington, D.C.
....Q But, Mr. Vice President, the primary rationale given for the war in Iraq was Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. In August of 2002, this is what you told the VFW. Let's just watch it.
(Video clip is played.)
Q In fact, there is grave doubt because they did not exist along the lines that you described, the President described and others described. Based on what you know now, that Saddam did not have the weapons of mass destruction described, would you still have gone into Iraq?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, Tim, because what the reports also showed -- while he did not have stock piles, and clearly the intelligence that said he did was wrong. That was the intelligence all of us saw. That was the intelligence all of us believed. It was when George Tenet sat in the Oval Office and the President of the United States asked him directly, he said, George, how good is the case against Saddam and weapons of mass destruction, the Director of the CIA said, it's a slam dunk, Mr. President. It's a slam dunk.
That was the intelligence that was provided to us at the time, and based upon which we made --
Quote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12601112/
Drumheller: 'Caught up in the march to war'
Two CIA operatives raise questions about use of pre-war intelligence
Hardball
MSNBC
Updated: 12:12 p.m. ET May 3, 2006
.....TYLER DRUMHELLER, FMR. CIA EUROPEAN OPS. CHIEF: That’s the way it appears. You’re certainly right on the fact that the information that was in the State of the Union Address was inaccurate, and that the yellowcake reporting from Niger, the reports that had come in on the issue of yellowcake were well-known to have been discredited as far back as September and October.
MATTHEWS: When I asked the CIA director, the former director, George Tenet, this same question, I said, if the vice president raised the question about a possible deal in Africa by Saddam Hussein to buy nuclear materials, uranium yellowcake, as you put it, and the report turned out that there wasn’t such a deal and the report went back to the vice president, how could that have happened because the president subsequently gave a State of the Union Address?
And when I ask that, making that very point that there was a threat from a deal in Africa, you know what the former director said? He said ask Vice President Cheney. In other words, it’s like high school, this circle that goes around. Did we or did we not know at the highest levels of this government there was not a deal to buy uranium in Africa by Saddam Hussein?
<h3>DRUMHELLER: Oh absolutely. They knew that that was not the truth.
MATTHEWS: But why did the president say so in his State of the Union to make the case for war?
DRUMHELLER: They were making the case for war. There was a drive in the administration from the beginning to settle the issue of Iraq for a variety of reasons, which I think they were very sincere about.
MATTHEWS: So WMD was the case they made, but it wasn’t the reason?
DRUMHELLER: Right, no,</h3> because they knew by the fall of 2002, they had evidence from good reporting that both the yellowcake reporting was bad, that the reporting on the “Curveball” case, which was a big thing was bad, and that we had a good source that was telling us that they didn’t have this...........
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<b>"host sez": Back to Russert's 9/10/2006 questioning of Cheney and why Iraq was invaded:</b>
Q So if the CIA said to you at that time, Saddam does not have weapons of mass destruction, his chemical and biological have been degraded, he has no nuclear program under way, you'd still invade Iraq?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Because, again look at the Duelfer Report and what it said: No stock piles, but they also said he has the capability. He'd done it before. He had produced chemical weapons before and used them. He had produced biological weapons. He had a robust nuclear program in '91. All of this true, said by Duelfer, facts, also said that as soon as the sanctions are lifted they expect Saddam to be back in business.
Q But the rationale was he had it, a growing threat; all the while, North Korea, which had one or two potential bombs in 2000 when you came into office, now has double or triple that amount. So again you took your eye off of North Korea to focus on Iraq.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: But let's go back to the beginning here. Five years ago, Tim, you and I did this show, the Sunday after 9/11. And we learned a lot from 9/11. We saw in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars we'd spent on national security in the years up until 9/11, on that morning, 19 men with box cutters and airline tickets came in the country and killed 3,000 people. We had to take that and also the fact of their interest in weapons of mass destruction and recognize at that time -- it was the threat then and it's the threat today that drives much of our thinking -- that the real threat is the possibility of a cell of al Qaeda in the midst of one of our cities with a nuclear weapons, or a biological agent. In that case, you'd be dealing -- for example, if on 9/11 they had a nuke instead of airplanes, you'd have been looking at a casualty toll that would rival all the deaths in all the wars fought by America in 230 years. That's the threat we have to deal with, and that drove our thinking in the aftermath of 9/11, and does today.
Now, what Saddam represented was somebody who had for 12 years defied the International Community, violated 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions, started two wars, produced and used weapons of mass destruction, and was deemed by the intelligence community to have resumed his WMD programs when he kicked out the inspectors. Everybody believed it. Bill Clinton believed it. The CIA clearly believed it. And without question that was a major proposition.
But I also emphasize while they found no stock piles, there was no question in the minds of Mr. Duelfer and other in that survey group that Saddam did, in fact, have the capability, and that as soon as the sanctions were ended -- and they were badly eroded, he'd be back in business again.
Q But let's look at what you told me on that morning of September 16, 2001, when I asked you about Saddam Hussein. Let's watch.
(Video clip is played.)
THE VICE PRESIDENT: At this stage, the focus is over here on al Qaeda and the most recent events in New York. Saddam Hussein's bottled up at this point.
(Video clip concludes.)
Q Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to this operation?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No.
Q You said Saddam Hussein was bottled up, and he was not linked in any way to September 11th.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: To 9/11.
Q And now we have the select committee on intelligence coming out with a report on Friday that says here:
"A declassified report released Friday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence revealed that U.S. intelligence analysts were strongly disputing the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, while senior Bush administration officials were publicly asserting those links to justify invading Iraq."....
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Quote:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/14/sprj.irq.documents/
Fake Iraq documents 'embarrassing' for U.S.
From David Ensor
CNN Washington Bureau
Friday, March 14, 2003 Posted: 10:43 PM EST (0343 GMT)
The finding that documents on an Iraqi uranium deal were most likely faked is proving to be an embarrassment to the United States. CNN's David Ensor reports. (March 14)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Intelligence documents that U.S. and British governments said were strong evidence that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons have been dismissed as forgeries by U.N. weapons inspectors.
The documents, given to International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, indicated that Iraq might have tried to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger, but the agency said they were "obvious" fakes. ....
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer
Bush Faced Dwindling Data on Iraq Nuclear Bid
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 16, 2003; Page A01
In recent days, as the Bush administration has defended its assertion in the president's State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy African uranium, officials have said it was only one bit of intelligence that indicated former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.
<h3>But a review of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggests that between Oct. 7, when President Bush made a speech laying out the case for military action against Hussein, and Jan. 28, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq.</h3>
By Jan. 28, in fact, the intelligence report concerning Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa -- although now almost entirely disproved -- was the only publicly unchallenged element of the administration's case that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program. That may explain why the administration strived to keep the information in the speech and attribute it to the British, even though the CIA had challenged it earlier.
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Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...030722-12.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
July 22, 2003
Press Briefing on Iraq WMD and SOTU Speech
The Roosevelt Room
..... Q And are there choices, is this where the controversy gets into another government's intelligence? Or is this intelligence the British, themselves, have gotten?
MR. HADLEY: We don't know. They have not -- this is really for the CIA, my understanding is that they have not disclosed the sources.
Q Can I just see if I have this -- what you're saying here today. It seems to me you're acknowledging that the CIA warned the White House that the information about Africa and uranium was weak or disputed, but you're standing by your overall judgment there was plenty of other information that indicated that he was, in fact, trying to reconstitute a nuclear weapon and that this does not cause you to fall away at all from the overall point? ....
.... Q When you follow the NIE --
Q So the CIA tried to wave you off and the memos had slipped everyone's memory and, therefore, you put it in, even though had you seen those memos or remembered them, you would not have put it in?
MR. BARTLETT: Yes. That's it. They tried -- they did wave us off and it did come out of the Cincinnati speech. So it was in a different speech.
Q -- in the Cincinnati speech, though?
MR. HADLEY: So there's two points. There's the one you just made. Had we recalled those memos, had we seen them we would have raised the red flag or taken it out. That's obviously one failure. The other failure is, it's in the speech. The vetting of the State of the Union speech is a separate process, it goes out to all Agencies and at the end of the day, nobody raises their hands and says, take it out. That's the problem. There were, in fact, two failings here.
One other thing. And, obviously, we depend on that clearance process. You know, you cannot have a process that depends solely on recollections of three and a half months before. You have a process that both tries to draw from what people have learned in the past, but also sends it out again for another clearance because we want to make absolutely sure.
And one last point, if I could. The problem with this is that the -- and the real failing is that we've had a national discussion on 16 words, and it's taken away from the fact that the intelligence case supporting concerns about WMD in Iraq was overwhelming.....
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062401081.html
Warnings on WMD 'Fabricator' Were Ignored, Ex-CIA Aide Says
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 25, 2006; Page A01
In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.
Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.
A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails.".....
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..... Q I want to go back to the --
MR. BARTLETT: Orderly process here, I want to make sure everybody gets picked. Campbell.
Q Thank you. I want to ask you, U.S. News & World Report this week said there was a meeting in the Sit Room three days before the State of the Union by senior officials vetting the intelligence on WMD, that Scooter Libby led a presentation there that became the basis for Powell's presentation to the United Nations. Were you a part of that meeting? <h3>Because it was interesting, they're also reporting that Libby's paper he presented to Powell did not include any Niger reference, and that was put together three days before the State of the Union speech.
</h3>
MR. HADLEY: There were two processes going on at this time. It's interesting. There is a process associated with the State of the Union, which is given on the 28th. And there is a separate, but related, process associated with getting Powell ready for his U.N. speech. And there are, obviously, meetings and activities with respect to both of those processes.
Q But they weren't coordinated? Even though they're both, essentially, making the same --
MR. HADLEY: They're coordinated in the sense that the same people are involved in many of them. But, remember, they're also designed for different purposes.
MR. BARTLETT: I was in both -- I was in that meeting, as well. And there was not a handing out of any documents at that meeting.
Q No, he -- according to the report he did an oral presentation, then wrote up a document following that, presenting it to Powell as sort of a rough draft for his presentation to the U.N., and it did not include, that initial thing he gave to Powell, any reference to Niger.
MR. BARTLETT: Well, it was -- I remember it was not read in its entirety at that meeting. The information that was being provided was offered as types of information that could be used by the Secretary of State. It was not a "here's your draft, go deliver this" -- here is some information that has been compiled from here. I would have to go back, I don't know if that specific information --
Q I get all that. I was just wondering --
MR. BARTLETT: I don't know if that specific information -- I don't know, it's not -- I don't know why that specific information was not in there. .......
..... Q And I understand that. I just don't quite understand why Director Tenet takes responsibility for the Agency that he is in charge of, yet the President does not take ultimate responsibility for this failure, this mistake?
MR. HADLEY: In some sense, we all work for the President of the United States: Director Tenet, we here. So if you want to know who is the equivalent of Tenet, it's me. And I've taken responsibility for this with respect to the NSC staff in the same way Director Tenet has taken responsibility for his Agency. And the President is going to have to make decisions about, with respect to both organizations, how to make sure that this doesn't happen again.
<h3>Q You just said that the President takes responsibility for the case that he outlined. This was part of the case that he outlined.
MR. HADLEY: That's correct.
Q So, then, over a couple of steps, he does, in fact, take responsibility for these 16 words.
</h3>
MR. BARTLETT: He is responsible for the decisions he makes. He outlined a case to the American people that was clear and compelling. On the particular instance of this information, we've given our full estimation of how the process failed and the fact that it was put in the speech, and we also pointed out, as Steve walked through the history of why the statement is accurate, but it didn't rise to the presidential standards.
But the bottom line is, is that he takes responsibility for the decisions he makes. And he has in this case. ......
...... Q You feel comfortable just using British intelligence.
MR. HADLEY: No. Let's see what happened here. Remember, in connection with the Cincinnati speech, George Tenet does have concerns about the British report. And that's what we learned from the memorandum. It's partly on the basis of those he says to take it out. The problem is, within the clearance process three-and-a-half months later, with respect to the State of the Union, nobody raises a hand and says, remember, we had problems with British reporting, you need to take this out.
Q But I'm saying -- even if you don't remember that, why doesn't someone raise a hand and say, wait a second, we're just making a statement based on British intelligence, how do we know that; do we know that it's accurate? Wasn't anybody at the NSC concerned about that?
MR. BARTLETT: Well, the NSC, as we've explained, on more than one occasion, through the vetting process of the State of the Union address, raised that issue, got it fact-checked from the CIA, came back, and that's why it was in the speech.
Q -- problem with British intelligence, specifically, the use of British intelligence was raised?
MR. HADLEY: Say again?
Q Specifically, the accuracy of British intelligence was raised with the CIA?
Q You're saying, no, it was --
MR. HADLEY: No, I said --
MR. BARTLETT: The British -- we've mentioned the British concern raised in the Cincinnati speech. When the question is whether we could cite the British in the State of the Union process, that it was signed off on by the CIA. Now, what has been explained by the CIA is that George Tenet didn't look at those relevant sections of the speech, and they've made this explanation. But in that process, it did -- it was approved.
What Steve is saying, is that in light of the history on this, with the Cincinnati process, it probably shouldn't -- it should not have been approved.
Q Mr. Hadley, just a couple of details on it. Memo number one --
MR. HADLEY: Look, I think what happens is a question is, are you okay with this, somebody says, okay. And somebody should have said, no, we're not, we've got problems with British intelligence. That's something, if I had remembered, I should have said, something that should have been said in the clearance process. Again, there are a number of people who could have raised a hand, and a hand didn't get raised.
Q Memo number one, the concerns that were raised directly and with you and Mr. Gerson, were those concerns conveyed to the President at the time?
MR. HADLEY: No, they would not have been.
Q Would they have been conveyed to Dr. Rice?
MR. HADLEY: No, I would have run those -- we would have -- see, when you do these clearance processes, it's sort of a paper process. People call you with their comments. There's also a process here, as I said, the experts that work these issues are working on the phones trying to come up with the language that is mutually acceptable and people are comfortable with. And that's a process that goes on.
I think -- we looked at it, we can get you the number. In terms of the State of the Union, there's something close to 30 facts in the WMD field alone that are being cleared in this process. And what comes up is where the experts cannot reach agreement on what the language should say. And that comes up. And basically it comes to me, and I deal with John McLaughlin and George Tenet. If there were a major issue, I might come to Condi. In this case, I didn't. There was no need.
<h3>Q And the President was not told that that passage was taken out of the Cincinnati speech?
MR. BARTLETT: That's correct. He has no memory of that.</h3>
MR. HADLEY: His standard is, don't have anything in here that George Tenet can't stand by. And the clearance process is supposed to get all that stuff out.
Q So the first time Dr. Rice --
MR. HADLEY: His assumption is, when it comes to him, everybody signed off and it's good to go.
Q So within the White House, the first time that the CIA concerns about the quality of the British intelligence went up to the level above your level, up to Dr. Rice, would have been with memo number two?
MR. HADLEY: I'm hesitating because, again, given you don't know what you don't, given what we put together at this point in time, that's the evidence we had. That's old --
Q But as of memo number two, certainly Dr. Rice was aware of the concerns, the CIA --
MR. HADLEY: What we know is, again, a copy of the memo comes to the Situation Room, it's sent to Dr. Rice, it's sent -- and that's it. You know, I can't tell you she read it. I can't even tell you she received it. But in some sense, it doesn't matter. Memo sent, we're on notice.
Q Did you ever have a discussion with Dr. Rice about the quality of the British intelligence and the CIA concerns?
MR. HADLEY: Not that I can recall.
Q I'm just trying to square --
MR. HADLEY: I understand.
Q Do you consider the case of the aluminum tubes clear and compelling, given that even the key judgment qualified in the dissent on that. Were any red flags raised about that at all?
MR. BARTLETT: Well, there was a very open discussion about that, a discussion that Secretary Powell shared with the world and with his presentation for the United Nations Security Council. And it is an assessment in which the Director and the CIA stand by to this day. And, therefore, we have every reason to be confident.
Q That's the purpose --
Q Steve, you said that one of the major problems with it was that there were a number of people that could have raised their hands, and they didn't. A lot of those people were people in the CIA. At the time, after the President's U.N. speech, leading up all the way until the war, there was a lot of pressure on the CIA to come up with more evidence to support the administration's case for going to Iraq. There were many stories in the press that the CIA felt pressured beyond what they thought was appropriate. There was an office set up in the Pentagon to go over intelligence, to try to make sure that in other cases -- not this case, but in other cases -- the CIA hadn't missed something.
There are many people who say that by the time the State of the Union came along, the CIA was too cowed, effectively, to raise their hands. How would you respond to that?
MR. HADLEY: The Pentagon story, you know, Doug Fieth and others have testified on it and talked publicly about it. I don't have anything to add on that.
Q The major point is just the pressure that was put on the CIA.
MR. HADLEY: Well, the premise that you have is that there was pressure. And I don't accept that premise. I spent a lot of time on the phone talking to George Tenet and John McLaughlin, and I am very confident that if they felt that the White House was pressuring their Agency, they would have picked up the phone and they would have called me and they would have told me and we would have addressed it.
Q So you're saying that the CIA was not under any pressure from anywhere within the administration?
MR. HADLEY: I'm saying exactly what I said, that I believe that if it was pressure coming from the White House and it raised a concern with George Tenet and John McLaughlin, they would have raised it with me.
Q So do you deny, then, that a culture could have been created through statements by administration officials and the press, through various other appearances, not by direct pressure from the White House, but from the atmosphere at the time, that would have effectively put pressure on the CIA, that would have made them -- inappropriately -- but would have made them less willing to raise flags when they should have?
MR. HADLEY: I don't accept that that happened. And if it had happened, I believe I would have heard about it from George Tenet and John McLaughlin.
MR. BARTLETT: I think it's important to take a step back from that a little bit. There is clear recognition that the pressure under many people within the intelligence community, not just in the CIA, but the FBI and others, as we fight a war -- we're in the middle of a war -- and to protect the homeland and to pursue to make sure that we are doing everything we can to hunt down al Qaeda and to make sure that we have a knowledge of weapons of mass destruction, where they are, making sure we're confronting those threats. We are obligated to make sure that we aggressively pursue any lead that may be out there, to make sure we protect the American people.
Remember the conversation we were having two years ago, is that we were not connecting the dots -- the Asian -- (inaudible) -- memo, this memo, this, this -- we weren't engaging on that information pre-911. That's what some critics would say. And now it's supposed to be the flip side. And I don't think that's fair because I think these professionals are doing everything they can because they know that they help contribute to the safety of the American people. But then I just reiterate what Steve said -- I think there's a relationship and a confidence level between the White House and the Director of the CIA, and his deputy, that if he felt there was pressure coming from the White House on intelligence matters, that he would pick up the phone and call and say.
We got time for two more questions.
<h3>Q Did Steve offer to resign? You spoke to the President. Did you offer to him to resign?</h3> Or do you have any intention of doing so?
MR. HADLEY: My conversation with the President, I'm not going to talk about........
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<b>Is anyone who listened to the chorus of conservative pundits who claimed that the Bush white house handling of pre-invasion intelligence about Iraq, was somehow "vindicated" by the 2004 Senate Intel Committee, or by the Robb Silberman WMD reports, at all curious about how that claim could be true, since neither report released....even to this day.....contains determinations that could make that "vindication claim"....even remotely possible?</b>
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...090601920.html
Panel Set to Release Just Part of Report On Run-Up to War
Full Disclosure May Come Post-Election
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 7, 2006; Page A11
A long-awaited Senate analysis comparing the Bush administration's public statements about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein with the evidence senior officials reviewed in private remains mired in partisan recrimination and will not be released before the November elections, key senators said yesterday.
Instead, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will vote today to declassify two less controversial chapters of the panel's report, on the use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, for release as early as Friday. One chapter has concluded that Iraqi exiles in the Iraqi National Congress, who were subsidized by the U.S. government, tried to influence the views of intelligence officers analyzing Hussein's efforts to create weapons of mass destruction.......
.......Under pressure from Democrats, Republicans on the committee agreed in February 2004 to write a report on the use of prewar intelligence, but the effort has languished amid partisan feuding. Last year, angry Democrats briefly shut down the Senate to protest the pace of the investigation.
<h3>After nearly three years, the heart of the report remains incomplete.</h3> Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said Democrats produced 511 administration statements to be analyzed, a virtually impossible task. At this point, the section is 800 pages long, accompanied by 40,000 documents, and is nowhere near ready for release, he said.
But with midterm elections two months away, two of five chapters are about to be released. The first examines what, if any, information provided by Iraqi exiles was used in official intelligence estimates. The second compares prewar estimates of Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear programs with the findings of U.S. weapons hunters, who wrapped up their work empty-handed in December 2004.
Even that limited release may pack a wallop.
"This is a very critical part of our report," Feinstein said. "I am hopeful that it can be adequately declassified so that individuals can see that. If it is, the full import of the INC will be known."
<h3>Senate aides said it took two Republican committee members, Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Olympia J. Snowe (Maine), to force Roberts to act.</h3> Republicans on the committee readily conceded that Democrats would be able to pick through the chapters -- especially the INC portion -- to resurrect charges that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. And Democrats appeared ready to do just that......
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Quote:
http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/expo...506/news4.html
Sen. Roberts seeks delay of Intel probe
By Alexander Bolton
<h3>Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he wants to divide his panel’s inquiry into the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq-related intelligence into two parts, a move that would push off its most politically controversial elements to a later time.
The inquiry has dragged on for more than two years, a slow pace that prompted Democrats to force the Senate into an extraordinary closed-door session in November. Republicans then promised to speed up the probe.
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Roberts said in an interview shortly before the April recess that he could bring up the matter in a business meeting of the Intelligence Committee scheduled for tomorrow.
“We went over three reports that members are studying,” Roberts said, referring to three less controversial components of his committee’s inquiry. Roberts said his committee could approve the immediate publication of those components.
“We’ll have a business meeting first thing when we come back. I’d like to show some progress,” he said.
An aide to Sen. Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.), the panel’s ranking Democrat, said that Democrats are aware Roberts is mulling a decision on whether to divide the inquiry and that Rockefeller is unlikely to oppose such a move if Roberts goes through with it. But one Democrat who has followed the probe said separating the controversial elements would relieve pressure on Roberts to complete the entire inquiry soon.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” in February, host Tim Russert asked Roberts about the status of the inquiry.
Roberts and Rockefeller have already split their review of Iraq-related intelligence once before. In February 2004, they agreed to issue a report before the upcoming election on how well the nation’s intelligence agencies assessed the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Roberts and Rockefeller further agreed to publish a report on a second phase of the inquiry to after the election. Phase two was to focus on the politically sensitive issue of the Bush administration’s handling of intelligence findings.
At the time, some Democrats grumbled that Rockefeller had let slide an issue their party could have used against Bush’s reelection campaign.
Questions about the Bush administration’s handling of pre-war intelligence have new political relevance as the midterm elections draw nearer. Public concern about the war in Iraq is considered a major reason for Bush’s low job approval rating, which, in turn, is widely viewed as harmful to congressional Republicans’ political fortunes.
“It has resonance in the following way,” said Phil Singer, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “One of the major critiques against Republican incumbents in the Senate [is that] they take a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach to the administration on a number of issues, including on the Iraq issue. To the extent the Senate Republicans continue to refuse to ask tough questions and ask for accountability, it’s going to be a political liability for them.”
Roberts would like to wrap up work quickly on three relatively less controversial topics of the second phase of the inquiry:
• Pre-war intelligence assessments of what the political and security environment would be in Iraq after the American victory.
• Post-war findings about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and its links to terrorism and how they compare with prewar assessments.
• The U.S. intelligence community’s use of intelligence provided by the Iraqi National Congress.
A report on these three areas would be made separately from the most controversial aspects of the inquiry. Left unfinished would be a report on whether public statements and testimony about Iraq by senior U.S. government officials were substantiated by available intelligence information. Roberts also would leave unfinished another report on what Democrats have called possibly illegal activity in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, formerly headed by Douglas Feith, who is believed to have played an important role in persuading the president to invade Iraq.
The committee may review statements by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Democrats charged that the committee did almost nothing to evaluate the statements of public officials before November, when Democrats forced the Senate into closed session.......
....Roberts is less than completely pleased about his committee’s focus on wrapping up phase two.
He recently complained in a U.S. News & World Report article that his committee has not made progress on overseeing intelligence on Iran, a growing national security concern, because Democrats are “more focused on intelligence failures of the past.”
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Quote:
http://www.wmd.gov/report/report.html#overview
OVERVIEW OF THE REPORT
(Contained in the last paragraph of: )<b>INTRODUCTION</b>
......Finally, we emphasize two points about the scope of this Commission's charter, particularly with respect to the Iraq question. First, we were not asked to determine whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That was the mandate of the Iraq Survey Group; our mission is to investigate the reasons why the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments were so different from what the Iraq Survey Group found after the war. <h3>Second, we were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community.</h3> Accordingly, while we interviewed a host of current and former policymakers during the course of our investigation, the purpose of those interviews was to learn about how the Intelligence Community reached and communicated its judgments about Iraq's weapons programs--not to review how policymakers subsequently used that information..........
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Last edited by host; 09-23-2006 at 02:01 PM..
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