It is not hatred that I react to Bush with. I react with outrage to the lies and deliberately misleading statements that Bush consistently makes about matters of national security and other important policy matters. I react negatively to his hubris, his conceit, his ignorance, incompetence, and to his inarticulate manner of speech, his uncurious nature, his pettiness, his insecure personality, and his squandering of his own presidency, the reputation of our nation, the budget surplus that he inherited, his tax policies that favor the rich, his indifference to and lack of compassion for ordinary Americans, and his hypocrisy.
We'll start with Bush's biggest lie:
Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0010916-2.html
...........Never did anybody's thought process about how to protect America did we ever think that the evil-doers would fly
not one, but four commercial aircraft into precious U.S. targets - never............. - GW Bush, speaking to reporters on Sept. 16, 2001
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Only later did we find this to call the president's remarks into question:
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...¬Found=true
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 14, 2004; Page A16
While planning a high-level training exercise months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. military officials considered a
scenario in which a hijacked foreign commercial airliner flew into the Pentagon, defense officials said yesterday.
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Quote:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...18-norad_x.htm
NORAD had drills of jets as weapons
By Steven Komarow and Tom Squitieri, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises
simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets
and cause mass casualties.
One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center...................
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Quote:
http://www.mdw.army.mil/news/Contingency_Planning.html
Contingency planning Pentagon MASCAL exercise simulates
scenarios in preparing for emergencies
Story and Photos by Dennis Ryan
MDW News Service
Exercise SimulationsWashington, D.C., Nov. 3, 2000 — The fire and smoke from the downed passenger aircraft billows from the Pentagon courtyard.
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Quote:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/...in509471.shtml
'99 Report Warned Of Suicide Hijacking
WASHINGTON, May 17, 2002
Former CIA Deputy Director John Gannon, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council when the report was written, said U.S. intelligence long has known a suicide hijacker was a possible threat.
(AP) Exactly two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal report warned the executive branch that Osama bin Laden's terrorists might hijack an airliner and dive bomb it into the Pentagon or other government building......
(Edited to add lil "dots" between the quoted article segments.)
......"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Thursday.
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<b>followed by his latest lies.....</b> (The lengthy documentation is necessary because of the massive propaganda effort that Rove of the white house and Mehlman of the RNC carry out in the media to disguise the lies...)
Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0051111-1.html
<b>President Commemorates Veterans Day, Discusses War on Terror
Tobyhanna Army Depot</b>
Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania
Fact sheetFact Sheet: Honoring America's Veterans
Fact sheetIn Focus: Honoring Our Veterans
11:45 A.M. EST
....While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. (Applause.) Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. <b>Misleading.... see quote box #1</b> These 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.<b>Misleading to the point of being untrue..see quote boxes #1, #4</b>
They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction. <b>Misleading....inaccurate....see quote box #2</b> And many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: "When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security." That's why more than <b>a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate -- who had access to the same intelligence</b> -- voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power. (Applause.)<b>Misleading....to the point that he is lying.....see quote boxes #1, #4</b>
The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges. (Applause.) These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. <b>Misleading.... see quote box #1</b>As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them. (Applause.) Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough. (Applause.) And our troops deserve to know that whatever our differences in Washington, our will is strong, our nation is united, and we will settle for nothing less than victory. (Applause.) .....
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<b>Bush disgusts me as he often uses our troops as "props" for his misleading and deliberately inaccurate speeches.</b>
Quote:
<b>box #1</b> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...111101832.html
Asterisks Dot White House's Iraq Argument
By Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 12, 2005; Page A01
President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.
Neither assertion is wholly accurate
The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.
But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.</b>
National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered "the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence." He said that "those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen."
But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."
Bush, in Pennsylvania yesterday, was more precise, but he still implied that it had been proved that the administration did not manipulate intelligence, saying that those who suggest the administration "manipulated the intelligence" are "fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments."
<b>In the same speech, Bush asserted that "more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence,</b> voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power." Giving a preview of Bush's speech, Hadley had said that "we all looked at the same intelligence."
<b>But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President's Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community's views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.
In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.</b>
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<b>Senator Pat Roberts' select intel committee, according to Roberts himself, has not even yet investigated the Bush administrations's pre-invasion role of "fixing the facts, as of July 2004, and as recently as Nov. 8, 2005
Here is what Roberts himself said when the "500 page report" was released in July, 2004:</b>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...004Jul9_4.html
QUESTION: Given the 800 American G.I.s who have lost their lives so far, thousands have had serious injuries, lost limbs, all on the basis of false claims, as much as the American taxpayers have had to kick in almost $200 billion, doesn’t the American public and the relatives of people who lost their lives have <b>a right to know before the next election whether this administration handled intelligence matters adequately and made statements that were justified -- before the election, not after the election?</b>
ROBERTS: Well, as Senator Rockefeller has alluded to, this is in phase two of our efforts. We simply couldn’t get that done with the work product that we put out. And he has pointed out that that has a top priority. It is one of my top priorities. It’s his top priority, along with the reform effort.
Now, we have 20 legislative days. We want to have hearings from wise men and women in regards to the reform effort, and we will proceed with staff on phase two of the report. It involves probably three things -- or at least three.
One is the prewar intelligence on Iraq, which is what you’re talking about.
Secondly is the situation with the assistant secretary of defense, Douglas Feith, and his activity in regards to material that he provided with a so-called intelligence planning cell to the Department of Defense and to the CIA.
And then the left one -- what is the last one? What’s the third one? Help me with it.
(CROSSTALK)
ROBERTS: Well, that’s prewar intelligence on Iraq.
There is a third one, and I don’t know why I can’t come up with it right now. But, anyway, it is a priority.
And, hey, I have told Jay, I have told everybody on the other side of the aisle, everybody on our side of the aisle, "We’ll proceed with phase two. It is a priority."
ROBERTS: I made my commitment, and it will be done.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?...rticleId=10472
<b>The Yes-Man</b>
President Bush sent Porter Goss to the CIA to keep the agency in line. What he’s really doing is wrecking it.
By Robert Dreyfuss
Issue Date: 11.23.05
.....From 9-11 through the start of the Iraq War in March 2003, the neoconservative nexus in the administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, leaned heavily on the CIA to come up with intelligence to support the White House’s preordained determination to go to war against Iraq. The pressure directed at Tenet, McLaughlin, and scores of other CIA managers, analysts, and field officers was intense. Subsequent official investigations, by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and by the commission co-chaired by Lawrence Silberman and Charles Robb, blithely passed over the question of whether intelligence analysts were pressured by the administration. Both studies determined that analysts were not pressured, a conclusion that CIA and other U.S. intelligence professionals find laughable -- especially the idea that analysts would answer in the affirmative when asked by commissioners or senators if they had been pressured. “The senior guys got together and said, ‘You guys weren’t pressured, right? Right?’” says W. Patrick Lang, a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Middle East section.
In fact, analysts were pressured, and heavily so, according to Richard Kerr. A 32-year CIA veteran, Kerr led an internal investigation of the agency’s failure to correctly analyze Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities, preparing a series of four reports that have not been released publicly. Kerr joined the CIA in 1960, serving in a series of senior analytic posts, including director of East Asian analysis, the unit that prepared the president’s daily intelligence brief, and finally as chief of the Directorate of Intelligence. For several months in 1991, Kerr was the acting CIA director; he retired in 1992. A highly respected analyst, Kerr received four Distinguished Intelligence Medals; in 1992, President George Bush Senior gave him the Citizen’s Medal for his work during Operation Desert Storm.
Two years ago, Kerr was summoned out of retirement to lead a four-member task force to conduct the investigation of the weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco. His team, which included a former Near East Division chief, a former CIA deputy inspector general, and a former CIA chief Soviet analyst, spent months sorting through everything that the CIA produced on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction prior to the invasion, as well as interviewing virtually everyone at the agency who had anything to do with producing the faulty intelligence estimates. The Kerr team’s first report was an overview of what the CIA said about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war compared with what Kerr calls the postwar “ground truth.” The second looked specifically at a classified version of the important October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which the administration used to build its case for war. The third looked at the overall intelligence process, and the fourth was a think piece that considered how to reorganize the management of intelligence analysis “if you could start all over again.”
Kerr’s four reports, with a fifth now under way, were viewed as the definitive works of self-criticism inside the agency and were shared with the oversight committees in Congress, outside commissions, and the office of the secretary of defense. Unlike the outside reports that looked at the same issues, however, Kerr’s concluded that CIA analysts felt squeezed -- and hard -- by the administration. “Everybody felt pressure,” Kerr told me. “A lot of analysts believed that they were being pressured to come to certain conclusions … . I talked to a lot of people who said, ‘There was a lot of repetitive questioning. We were being asked to justify what we were saying again and again.’ There were certainly people who felt they were being pushed beyond the evidence they had.”
In particular, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other administration officials hammered at the CIA to go back time and time again to look at intelligence that had already been sifted and resifted. “It was a continuing drumbeat: ‘How do you know this? How do you know that? What about this or that report in the newspaper?’” says Kerr. Many of those questions, which began to cascade onto the CIA in 2001, were generated by the Office of Special Plans and by discredited fabricators such as Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and a secret source code-named “Curveball.” As a result, says Kerr, the CIA reached back to old data, relied on several sources of questionable veracity, and made assumptions about current data that were unwarranted. In particular, intelligence on Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons program, much of which was based on data collected in the 1980s, early ’90s, and more spottily until the end of the United Nations inspection regime in 1998, was parsed -- and, some would argue, cherry-picked -- in order to reinforce the administration’s case.
On and off the record, other former CIA officials say that despite the pressure, dissent against the White House was rife within the agency. The strongest opposition centered in the CIA’s Near East Division, few of whose officials supported the idea of war with Iraq. They clashed often with WINPAC, the CIA division focused on weapons proliferation and the part of the agency most responsible for the heavily skewed conclusions about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. “The Near East Division people didn’t buy into what the Bush administration wanted to do in regard to Iraq, but much of WINPAC did,” says Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who left the agency in 1989 and then served four years as deputy director of the State Department’s office of counterterrorism. “Bush, and the White House, favored WINPAC over [the Near East Division]. There were people in the agency who tried to speak out or disagree … who got fired, got transferred, got outed, or criticized. Others decided to play ball.”
Michael Scheuer -- who gained fame in 2004 as Anonymous, the author of Imperial Hubris, and who exited the CIA as Goss came in -- headed the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit and saw the confrontation up close. “I know a lot of people in the Iraq shop who were dissenting,” he says. “There were people who were disciplined or taken off accounts.” Opposition flared, particularly when the controversial 2002 National Intelligence Estimate was being cooked. “There was a great deal of dissent about that [estimate],” says Scheuer. “No one thought it was conclusive. One gentleman that I talked to, a senior Iraq analyst, regrets to this day that he did not go public.”
According to another former CIA official, as the war loomed, the CIA’s Iraq task force ballooned in size, from fewer than 10 analysts to 500. But some of the CIA’s best and brightest on Iraq asked to be given other assignments rather than play ball with an administration already set on war. “A lot of people from the Iraq shop asked to be transferred away from Iraq,” the former officer said. “You had all these people being transferred in, and the people who didn’t like the direction it was going transferred out.”
* * *
Despite the vise-like squeeze on the CIA by Cheney and the Defense Department, the agency still got a lot on Iraq right. Not once in the period up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 did the U.S. intelligence community determine that Hussein posed a threat to the United States. The CIA concluded convincingly that there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and that Hussein had no connection to bin Laden’s attacks. “We, at CIA, were convinced within days -- within hours, by midday on September 11 -- that we had evidence that it was al-Qaeda and had no reason to suspect that Iraq was involved,” says a former high-level official. “That was our position, and we held to it firmly.” According to Scheuer, after the CIA received repeated inquiries about Iraq–al-Qaeda links from Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s office, the agency reviewed more than 70,000 documents and pieces of data, concluding that there was no tie between Hussein and al-Qaeda.
The CIA also correctly concluded that Iraq was not even close to developing nuclear weapons. And, long before the war, the CIA told the White House that if the United States invaded Iraq and carried out a prolonged occupation, it would spark an insurgency like the one now tearing Iraq apart. “We did predict this in papers that we wrote,” says a former CIA official.
Paul Pillar was one of many inside the CIA who accurately foresaw the insurgency, according to Scheuer. A longtime CIA officer who served in battle-scarred venues such as Sri Lanka, Algeria, and Kashmir until becoming the national intelligence officer for the Middle East, Pillar “knows insurgencies inside out,” says Scheuer admiringly. “It’s no surprise that Pillar would understand that there would be an insurgency in Iraq.”
By 2004, the CIA had issued a steady stream of finished intelligence products that, one after another, undermined the premises of the Bush administration’s basic assertions about the occupation. The team that put these together included McLaughlin, the bloodied Near East Division analysts, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Not only did the CIA’s work shoot holes in White House policy; several of its conclusions were leaked, finding their way on to the front pages of the major newspapers. More than anything else, it was these leaks that enraged Bush and Cheney and caused them to turn to Porter Goss as their enforcer.
The fact that the agency was leaking isn’t denied by some. “Of course they were leaking,” says Pat Lang. “They told me about it at the time. They thought it was funny. They’d say things like, ‘This last thing that came out, surely people will pay attention to that. They won’t re-elect this man.’”
The dissent within the agency, and the anger about being manipulated, were palpable by 2004. Equally palpable were the complaints about the agency emanating from the neoconservatives and other war supporters. In The New York Times, David Brooks was bloodthirsty. “If we lived in a primitive age,” he wrote, “the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes.” And Robert Novak, the principal conduit for the White House leak campaign against Plame and Wilson, concocted an indictment against Pillar for supposedly having leaked a CIA report that contradicted the most cherished assumptions of the administration about Iraq. The incident with Pillar, wrote Novak, “leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other.” It made for a situation that Bush, facing re-election, wanted desperately to change. Brooks was about to get his wish.
http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...235395,00.html
May 5, 2002
............Hawks like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Policy Board chief Richard Perle strongly believe that after years of American sanctions and periodic air assaults, the Iraqi leader is weaker than most people believe. <b>Rumsfeld has been so determined to find a rationale for an attack that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to the terror attacks of Sept. 11. The intelligence agency repeatedly came back empty-handed.</b> The best hope for Iraqi ties to the attack — a report that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in the Czech Republic — was discredited last week..............
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/...mep.saddam.tm/
First Stop, Iraq
By Michael Elliott and James Carney
Monday, March 24, 2003 Posted: 5:49 PM EST (2249 GMT)
How did the U.S. end up taking on Saddam? The inside story of how Iraq jumped to the top of Bush's agenda -- and why the outcome there may foreshadow a different world order
"F___ Saddam. we're taking him out." Those were the words of President George W. Bush, who had poked his head into the office of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with three U.S. Senators, discussing how to deal with Iraq through the United Nations, or perhaps in a coalition with America's Middle East allies. Bush wasn't interested. He waved his hand dismissively, recalls a participant, and neatly summed up his Iraq policy in that short phrase.
<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/14/60II/main577975.shtml">Feb. 4, 2004 The Man Who Knew</a>
Powell said that when he made the case for war before the United Nations one year ago, he used evidence that reflected the best judgments of the intelligence agencies.
But long before the war started, there was plenty of doubt among intelligence analysts about Saddam's weapons.
One analyst, Greg Thielmann, told Correspondent Scott Pelley last October that key evidence cited by the administration was misrepresented to the public.
Thielmann should know. He had been in charge of analyzing the Iraqi weapons threat for Powell's own intelligence bureau.......
"The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show."
Greg Thielmann
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NGNUFNCD61.DTL
Bush calls war critics 'irresponsible'
Richard W. Stevenson, New York Times
Saturday, November 12, 2005
......But the Senate review described repeated, unsuccessful efforts by the White House and its allies in the Pentagon to persuade the Central Intelligence Agency to embrace the view that Iraq had provided support to al Qaeda. In early 2003, according to former administration officials, then-CIA director George Tenet and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell also rejected as exaggerated and unsubstantiated by intelligence some elements of a speech drafted by aides to Vice President Dick Cheney that was intended to present the administration's case for........
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Quote:
<b>box #2</b>
By THOMAS WAGNER
Associated Press Writer
SEPTEMBER 25, 04:21 ET
http://wire.ap.org/?FRONTID=EUROPE&S...2dWORLD%2dREAX
LONDON (AP) - Prime Minister Tony Blair's warning about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction appeared to win little support outside Washington, with France and China expressing skepticism.
For weeks, talk about a possible U.S.-led war against Iraq had created widespread interest about Blair's long-promised dossier about Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological arsenal.
In it and his speech to a special session of the House of Commons on Tuesday, Blair said the stockpile is not only growing, but that Saddam is prepared to use such weapons of mass destruction quickly. The intelligence dossier also said Iraq has taken steps to develop nuclear weapons.
Blair, President Bush's top ally, said he wants U.N. weapons inspectors allowed back into Iraq with no limits on their movements.
But he also supported the U.S. goal of a ``regime change'' in Baghdad, given how often Saddam has defied the world body's requirements regarding his weapons since losing the Gulf War.
Britain and the United States are two of the five permanent, veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council, and they have been trying to win the support of the other three - China, France and Russia - for a new resolution threatening Iraq for its continued defiance.
But the French and Chinese leaders both sounded skeptical Tuesday about Blair's speech and the dossier in comments they made while attending a summit of European and Asian leaders in Denmark.
French President Jacques Chirac said a war with Iraq is still avoidable if the U.N. Security Council is given a primary role in the crisis. Chirac reiterated there was no need for a proposed Security Council resolution threatening war if Saddam keeps U.N. arms inspectors out.
``This is not the view of France,'' said Chirac, adding that only inspectors can provide the needed proof about Saddam's weapons. ``I do not think at all that war is unavoidable.''..............
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http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/me....powell.ricin/
Wednesday, February 12, 2003 Posted: 2:58 PM EST (1958 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- European intelligence officials questioned U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's contention Wednesday that the lethal poison involved in a terrorist plot broken up in Britain came from Iraq.
Powell cited the plot in testimony before the House International Relations Committee, arguing that part of the danger of not disarming Iraq lay in possible alliances with terrorists........
.......A French intelligence source said he was "stunned" by Powell's comment.
"There is no, repeat, no suggestion that the ricin was anything but locally produced," he said. "It was bad quality, not technically sophisticated."
Further, the source said, British authorities "are clear" that the poison was "home-made."
"Don't forget, intelligence is like a supermarket, and at that level in government, you see everything, and can pick anything," the source said.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...ixnewstop.html
German spies offered help to Saddam in run-up to war
By David Harrison in Baghdad
(Filed: 20/04/2003)
Germany's intelligence services attempted to build closer links to Saddam's secret service during the build-up to war last year, documents from the bombed Iraqi intelligence HQ in Baghdad obtained by The Telegraph reveal.
Documents recovered from Iraqi intelligence HQ in Baghdad
They show that an agent named as Johannes William Hoffner, described as a "new German representative in Iraq" who had entered the country under diplomatic cover, attended a meeting with Lt Gen Taher Jalil Haboosh, the director of Iraq's intelligence service.
During the meeting, on January 29, 2002, Lt Gen Haboosh says that the Iraqis are keen to have a relationship with Germany's intelligence agency "under diplomatic cover", adding that he hopes to develop that relationship through Mr Hoffner.
The German replies: "My organisation wants to develop its relationship with your organisation."
In return, the Iraqis offered to give lucrative contracts to German companies if the Berlin government helped prevent an American invasion of the country.
The revelations come a week after The Telegraph reported that Russia had spied for the Iraqis, passing them intelligence about a meeting between Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister. Both the British and Italian governments have launched investigations.
The meeting between the Iraqi and German agents took place some six months before Chancellor Schröder's Social Democrat-led government began its policy of direct opposition to the idea of an American/British-led war against Iraq. The policy was adopted in the heat of last year's German general election campaign, at a time when the Social Democrats were widely predicted to lose the contest. Mr Schröder was re-elected as Chancellor last September, largely because of the popularity of his government's outspoken opposition to the war against Iraq. The apparently verbatim account of the meeting between Lt Gen Haboosh and Mr Hoffner was among documents recovered by The Telegraph in the rubble of the Iraqi intelligence headquarters in Baghdad, which was heavily bombed.
During the meeting, Lt Gen Haboosh tells the German agent that Iraq has "big problems" with Britain and the United States. "We have problems with Britain because it occupied Iraq for 60 years and with America because of its aggression for 11 years," he says.
He adds, however, that Iraq has no problems with Germany and suggests that Germany will be rewarded with lucrative contracts if it offers international support to Iraq. "When the American conspiracy is finished, we will make a calculation for each state that helps Iraq in its crisis."
He also urges Mr Hoffner to lobby the German government to raise its diplomatic mission in Baghdad to full ambassadorial level. Mr Hoffner says that it would be a decision for the German foreign ministry, but Germany's diplomatic presence in the Iraqi capital made it easier for him to enter Iraq because he was able to use diplomatic cover.
Last night, a spokesman for the German government said it was "well known" that it had been offered lucrative contracts by Baghdad providing it maintained an anti-Iraq war stance. "Iraq made these kinds of promises before the war and praised Germany for its position," he said............
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http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...431645,00.html
<b>Why Bush Struggles to Win UN Backing</b>
Inspections have found Iraq in violation of disarmament requirements, but have not confirmed Anglo-American claims of an imminent danger. Can the President still convince the UN?
By TONY KARON
Posted Thursday, Mar. 13, 2003
The Bush administration has always insisted it doesn't need UN permission to invade Iraq. President Bush has never left any doubt that the outcome of Security Council deliberations won't stop him from acting to eliminate what he perceives as an imminent threat to U.S. and allied security. When Bush first raised the issue at the UN Security Council last Fall, he did so in the form of a challenge to the international body — follow us to war, or render yourselves irrelevant...............
....................This week's failure by the U.S. and Britain to win backing for a UN ultimatum to Iraq authorizing force if Baghdad fails to meet a 10-day disarmament deadline underscores the fact that the UN process has, if anything, weakened rather than strengthened international support for a war........
...................The reason for the administration's difficulties may be, in part, the nature of the evidence revealed by the UN process. The Bush case for war against Iraq is premised on the idea that not only has Saddam failed to complete the disarmament required of him by the Gulf War truce, but that he is actively pursuing new chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs; and that these, together with what Washington insists is an alliance between Iraq and al-Qaeda, represent a clear and present danger to U.S. security.
But the inspection process has tested some of these claims, and in the process undermined the Bush administration's case. The inspectors found that Iraq has failed to destroy or account for substantial the stocks of chemical and biological weapons left over from its war with Iran, but they have found nothing to back claims of current, active chemical, biological or nuclear programs. Inspectors have made clear to the Council that they have investigated a number of U.S. and British allegations and intelligence tips, which came to naught...........
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/mid...st/3661134.stm
Thursday, 16 September, 2004, 09:21 GMT 10:21 UK
Iraq war illegal, says Annan
The United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has told the BBC the US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN charter.
He said the decision to take action in Iraq should have been made by the Security Council, not unilaterally. .................
.........'Valid'
"I hope we do not see another Iraq-type operation for a long time - without UN approval and much broader support from the international community," he added.
He said he believed there should have been a second UN resolution following Iraq's failure to comply over weapons inspections.
And it should have been up to the Security Council to approve or determine the consequences, he added.
When pressed on whether he viewed the invasion of Iraq as illegal, he said: "Yes, if you wish. I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter from our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal.".............
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Quote:
<b>Box #4</b>
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/in...er=rssuserland
October 3, 2004
How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence
By DAVID BARSTOW, WILLIAM J. BROAD and JEFF GERTH
In 2002, at a crucial juncture on the path to war, senior members of the Bush administration gave a series of speeches and interviews in which they asserted that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. Speaking to a group of Wyoming Republicans in September, Vice President Dick Cheney said the United States now had "irrefutable evidence" - thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the United States.
Those tubes became a critical exhibit in the administration's brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of Mr. Hussein's revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers. The tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, explained on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
But almost a year before, Ms. Rice's staff had been told that the government's foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons, according to four officials at the Central Intelligence Agency and two senior administration officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. The experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were likely intended for small artillery rockets.
The White House, though, embraced the disputed theory that the tubes were for nuclear centrifuges, an idea first championed in April 2001 by a junior analyst at the C.I.A. Senior nuclear scientists considered that notion implausible, yet in the months after 9/11, as the administration built a case for confronting Iraq, the centrifuge theory gained currency as it rose to the top of the government.
Senior administration officials repeatedly failed to fully disclose the contrary views of America's leading nuclear scientists, an examination by The New York Times has found. They sometimes overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes, yet minimized or rejected the strong doubts of nuclear experts. They worried privately that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober certitude in public.
One result was a largely one-sided presentation to the public that did not convey the depth of evidence and argument against the administration's most tangible proof of a revived nuclear weapons program in Iraq.
Today, 18 months after the invasion of Iraq, investigators there have found no evidence of hidden centrifuges or a revived nuclear weapons program. The absence of unconventional weapons in Iraq is now widely seen as evidence of a profound intelligence failure, of an intelligence community blinded by "group think," false assumptions and unreliable human sources.
Yet the tale of the tubes, pieced together through records and interviews with senior intelligence officers, nuclear experts, administration officials and Congressional investigators, reveals a different failure.......
.........Mr. Tenet declined to be interviewed. But in a statement, he said he "made it clear" to the White House "that the case for a possible nuclear program in Iraq was weaker than that for chemical and biological weapons." Regarding the tubes, Mr. Tenet said "alternative views were shared" with the administration after the intelligence community drafted a new National Intelligence Estimate in late September 2002.
The tubes episode is a case study of the intersection between the politics of pre-emption and the inherent ambiguity of intelligence. The tubes represented a scientific puzzle and rival camps of experts clashed over the tiniest technical details in secure rooms in Washington, London and Vienna. The stakes were high, and they knew it.
So did a powerful vice president who saw in 9/11 horrifying confirmation of his long-held belief that the United States too often naïvely underestimates the cunning and ruthlessness of its foes.
"We have a tendency - I don't know if it's part of the American character - to say, 'Well, we'll sit down and we'll evaluate the evidence, we'll draw a conclusion,' " Mr. Cheney said as he discussed the tubes in September 2002 on the NBC News program "Meet the Press."
"But we always think in terms that we've got all the evidence,'' he said. "Here, we don't have all the evidence. We have 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent. We don't know how much. We know we have a part of the picture. And that part of the picture tells us that he is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."..............
...........One senior C.I.A. official recalled cautioning members of Congress in a closed session not to speak publicly about the possibility that the tubes were for rockets. ''If people start talking about that and the Iraqis see that people are saying rocket bodies, that will automatically become their explanation whenever anyone goes to Iraq,'' the official said in an interview.
So while administration officials spoke freely about the agency's theory, the evidence that best challenged this view remained almost entirely off limits for public debate.
In late September, the C.I.A. sent policymakers its most detailed classified report on the tubes. For the first time, an agency report acknowledged that ''some in the intelligence community'' believed rockets were ''more likely end uses'' for the tubes, according to officials who have seen the report.
Meanwhile, at the Energy Department, scientists were startled to find senior White House officials embracing a view of the tubes they considered thoroughly discredited. ''I was really shocked in 2002 when I saw it was still there,'' Dr. Wood, the Oak Ridge adviser, said of the centrifuge claim. ''I thought it had been put to bed.''
Members of the Energy Department team took a highly unusual step: They began working quietly with a Washington arms-control group, the Institute for Science and International Security, to help the group inform the public about the debate, said one team member and the group's president, David Albright.
On Sept. 23, the institute issued the first in series of lengthy reports that repeated some of the Energy Department's arguments against the C.I.A. analysis, though no classified ones. Still, after more than 16 months of secret debate, it was the first public airing of facts that undermined the most alarming suggestions about Iraq's nuclear threat.
The reports got little attention, partly because reporters did not realize they had been done with the cooperation of top Energy Department experts. The Washington Post ran a brief article about the findings on Page A18. Many major newspapers, including The Times, ran nothing at all. Scrambling for an 'Estimate'
Soon after Mr. Cheney's appearance on ''Meet the Press,'' Democratic senators began pressing for a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, terrorism and unconventional weapons. A National Intelligence Estimate is a classified document that is supposed to reflect the combined judgment of the entire intelligence community. The last such estimate had been done in 2000.
Most estimates take months to complete. But this one had to be done in days, in time for an October vote on a war resolution. There was little time for review or reflection, and no time for Jaeic, the joint committee, to reconcile deep analytical differences.
This was a potentially thorny obstacle for those writing the nuclear section: What do you do when the nation's nuclear experts strongly doubt the linchpin evidence behind the C.I.A.'s claims that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program?
The Energy Department helped solve the problem. In meetings on the estimate, senior department intelligence officials said that while they still did not believe the tubes were for centrifuges, they nonetheless could agree that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons capability.
Several senior scientists inside the department said they were stunned by that stance; they saw no compelling evidence of a revived nuclear program.
Some laboratory officials blamed time pressure and inexperience. Thomas S. Ryder, the department's representative at the meetings, had been acting director of the department's intelligence unit for only five months. ''A heck of a nice guy but not savvy on technical issues,'' is the way one senior nuclear official described Mr. Ryder, who declined comment.
Mr. Ryder's position was more alarming than prior assessments from the Energy Department. In an August 2001 intelligence paper, department analysts warned of suspicious activities in Iraq that ''could be preliminary steps'' toward reviving a centrifuge program. In July 2002 an Energy Department report, ''Nuclear Reconstitution Efforts Underway?'', noted that several developments, including Iraq's suspected bid to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, suggested Baghdad was ''seeking to reconstitute'' a nuclear weapons program.
According to intelligence officials who took part in the meetings, Mr. Ryder justified his department's now firm position on nuclear reconstitution in large part by citing the Niger reports. Many C.I.A. analysts considered that intelligence suspect, as did analysts at the State Department.
Nevertheless, the estimate's authors seized on the Energy Department's position to avoid the entire tubes debate, with written dissents relegated to a 10-page annex. The estimate would instead emphasize that the C.I.A. and the Energy Department both agreed that Mr. Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. Only the closest reader would see that each agency was basing its assessment in large measure on evidence the other considered suspect.
On Oct. 2, nine days before the Senate vote on the war resolution, the new National Intelligence Estimate was delivered to the Intelligence Committee. The most significant change from past estimates dealt with nuclear weapons; the new one agreed with Mr. Cheney that Iraq was in aggressive pursuit of the atomic bomb.
Asked when Mr. Cheney became aware of the disagreements over the tubes, Mr. Kellems, his spokesman, said, ''The vice president knew about the debate at about the time of the National Intelligence Estimate.''
Today, the Intelligence Committee's report makes clear, <b>that 93-page estimate stands as one of the most flawed documents in the history of American intelligence. The committee concluded unanimously that most of the major findings in the estimate were wrong, unfounded or overblown.
This was especially true of the nuclear section.</b>
Estimates express their most important findings with high, moderate or low confidence levels. This one claimed ''moderate confidence'' on how fast Iraq could have a bomb, but ''high confidence'' that Baghdad was rebuilding its nuclear program. And the tubes were the leading and most detailed evidence cited in the body of the report.
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