The Stovepipe by Seymour M. Hersh (New Yorker, October, 2003)

[Widgetsfriend]

http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/031027fa_fact

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered.

The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went on, was that the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq’s nuclear-weapons programs, were far more accurate than the C.I.A. estimates. “Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,” the official said. “If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board.”

snip

By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing struggle against terrorism. The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed.

[Spazito]

1. Wow!

Thanks for this link! It is a MUST read!

[DUreader]

2. That irrelavent UN strikes again. Confirming what DUers were saying then

[Junkdrawer]

3. Iraq Rationalization #374: We didn't lie; we had 'procedural problems'....

So, if they weren't "lying", what about the forged Niger uranium papers? Well, let's blame disgruntled former agents...


Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.

Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.

“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go—to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels—a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”

[shockingelk]

10. I don't buy this

It would be so convenient if the forgery was created to trick the administration instead of trick congress and the public ...

[jbm]

4. Wow!!

This is a great article! Thanks for posting it.

[Skywalker]

5. I heard about this on NPR today!

I was all set to buy my first copy of The New Yorker magazine just for this article. It looks like the whole thing is on their webpage, so I guess I won't need to buy it now.

This was explosive! Thanx for posting the link.

I got so charged up I went on a 1/2 hour rant to my wife about it.

This is the stuff that your average sheeple (or is it sheeperson?) will never read or hear about and they will once again allow that chimp to reside in the White House for 4 more.

I'm so po'd right now. Someone please tell me there will be a Dem in 2004!

Mark

[grasswire]

6. hot stuff....

...especially the sting against Cheney!

I wonder why this thread isn't getting more hits?

[Skywalker]

7. I think it's because...

..they are responding on the thread in The General Discussions Forum:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=563348

Mark

[Nancy Waterman]

8. Another quote from the article

The notes said that Jafar was then asked, “But this doesn’t mean all W.M.D.? How can you be certain?” His answer was clear: “I know all the scientists involved, and they chat. There is no W.M.D.”

Jafar explained why Saddam had decided to give up his valued weapons:

Up until the 91 Gulf war, our adversaries were regional. . . . But after the war, when it was clear that we were up against the United States, Saddam understood that these weapons were redundant. “No way we could escape the United States.” Therefore, the W.M.D. warheads did Iraq little strategic good.

Jafar had his own explanation, according to the notes, for one of the enduring mysteries of the U.N. inspection process—the six-thousand-warhead discrepancy between the number of chemical weapons thought to have been manufactured by Iraq before 1991 and the number that were accounted for by the U.N. inspection teams. It was this discrepancy which led Western intelligence officials and military planners to make the worst-case assumptions. Jafar told his interrogators that the Iraqi government had simply lied to the United Nations about the number of chemical weapons used against Iran during the brutal Iran-Iraq war in the nineteen-eighties. Iraq, he said, dropped thousands more warheads on the Iranians than it acknowledged. For that reason, Saddam preferred not to account for the weapons at all.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

9. Hersh needs to back away from those people that are trying...

...to tell him that the CIA was not doing its primary mission, that of gathering information and reporting it accurately. In fact, the CIA and the UN inspectors were in COMPLETE AGREEMENT in regards to their independent assessmants of Iraq. Both organizations reported on a repeated basis that there were no WMDs in Iraq, and there had been none since the UN had reported the weapons destroyed in 1995.

What Hersh is being told is nothing more than an attempt to push attention away from the NeoCons who were fabricating anything and everything to push the U. S. into war with Iraq.

Hersh has to zero back in and find out who Herr Bunnypants trusted the most to provide him with the justification to go to war. The fact that intelligence assets were moved from Al Qaeda surveillance programs to Iraqi surveillance programs despite the strong protests of both the CIA and the FBI should give Hersh some major clues.

[The_Casual_Observer]

12. Isn't it becoming clear that the commander in thief

played a major role in this after initially being sold on the idea of removing Saddam? The intelligence was simply "reworked" in light of what chimp decided to do AT HIS DIRECTION. It wouldn't of mattered what the reports really said, we were going to war and that was that.

Chimp simply closed his eyes and dove in head first, arms at his sides, knowing full well that the pool was empty. Why this was done is a great riddle.

[Snazzy]

11. I'd like to see more Hersh (kick) n/t

[Merlin]

13. More proof that the New Yorker is one of the greatest mags ever.

And don't miss Hergzbergs assessment of Limbaugh in the current issue, too.

[ze_dscherman]

14. KICK!!!

Hersh might be pretty accurate about what led to the failure, he also plays very well the side of the CIA.

What is missing is the question why the heavy sanctions against Iraq were kept in place by U.S. and U.K. vetoes.

[marigold20]

15. kick

.

[GreenGreenLimaBean]

16. Stovepipe, more like SmokeStack

What struck me as particularily chilling was this,

“There was considerable skepticism
throughout the intelligence community
about the reliability of Chalabi’s sources,
but the defector reports were coming all
the time. Knock one down and another
comes along. Meanwhile, the garbage
was being shoved straight to the President.”

Garbage being fed to the guy with his finger on
the Nuclear (sic) Button.

I'll be sleeping well tonight.

[Flying_Pig]

17. It is so interesting watching the incestious workings of PNAC...

inside this administration, and to see it all documented so well. On the one hand, they had Cheney, vetting all the information, and then handing it off to Bush's office. But it was PNAC operatives Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton, Libby, et al, that were feeding Cheney.

Interesting to note, that every one of the PNAC operatives named in Sy's article, are radical pro-Israel people, most of whom have worked directly for the Israeli government, at one time or another. Add to these facts, that during this period Israel was lobbying Bush/Cheney furiously to invade Iraq (as they are now working to have the U.S. invade Syria and Iran).

What is clear to me, is there were two major factors at work here, and possibly a third. The first, was Cheney/Bush's desire to control Iraq's oil. Secondly, there was Israel's desire to have the U.S. in the M.E. in a big way, and to have the U.S. invade and neturalize Iraq. The third, is that the Saudi's, worried about possible Saddam hegemony, also encouraged invasion. All of these groups, using each other to further their causes, embraced the convicted felon Chabli as their primary information source.

It is also clear, that regardless of the information sources, they would have, and did, manufacture whatever they felt was needed to justify their actions. And, in a stunning admission of media manipulation and propaganda dissemination, the article contained the following little nugget, "A routine settled in: the Pentagon’s defector reports, classified “secret,” would be funnelled to newspapers, but subsequent C.I.A. and INR analyses of the reports—invariably scathing but also classified—would remain secret."

The media were/are willing supplicants and whores, and as guilty as any party for the Iraq debacle. It was the media that gave us Bush in the first place, and then further enabled his right-wing agenda and his Iraq escapade of lies. And now, as the 04' elections approach, I expect they will do all they can to keep him in office

Upon a Democratic victory in 04' (which, barring vote machine fraud, war, or suspended elections, we will win), we MUST extract retribution on this nation's media. They have committed treasonous crimes against this nation, by actively engaging with the Bush regime to disseminate lies and propaganda, and in the process, bringing grave harm and danger to this nation. They must be required to pay a severe price for this betrayal.

[ByeDick]

18. See this article discussed on a previous thread:

Here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=563348

[0007]

19. Excellent!

Very extentive and far-reaching.

Any administration in the history of this country should go down. This is an insult to each living and dead American.

[Gin]

20. excellent...thanks

.