Annals of National Security -- The Stovepipe

[Gunit_Sangh]

This is a MOST excellant report .. I Found a link to it from Talking Points Memo ....


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

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.

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.”

There were, of course, good reasons to worry about Saddam Hussein’s possession of W.M.D.s. He had manufactured and used chemical weapons in the past, and had experimented with biological weapons; before the first Gulf War, he maintained a multibillion-dollar nuclear-weapons program. In addition, there were widespread doubts about the efficacy of the U.N. inspection teams, whose operations in Iraq were repeatedly challenged and disrupted by Saddam Hussein. Iraq was thought to have manufactured at least six thousand more chemical weapons than the U.N. could account for. And yet, as some former U.N. inspectors often predicted, the tons of chemical and biological weapons that the American public was led to expect have thus far proved illusory. As long as that remains the case, one question will be asked more and more insistently: How did the American intelligence community get it so wrong?


A heck of a lot more follows that is well worth the read ...

[fishnfla]

1. Garbage in, Garbage out

Chalabi and the INC had a hold of Cheney,Perle,Bolton,Luti and Feith. They cooked the intelligence, and set up this war. Its all there.

Treason, in a word.

Excellent article.

[DrBB]

2. One of the most interesting suggestions in the article

...comes from a CIA source who tells Hersh that the original Niger yellowcake forgeries were actually cooked up by disgruntled CIA personnel in an attempt to torpedo the neo-cons. They didn't think the thing would go as far as fast as it did, and so ended up stuck with it. He points out that whether it's true or not, the fact that a lot of CIA people believe it speaks volumes about how bad the relations are between CIA and the Pentagon.

[KC21304]

3. Great article.

Kick

[jbfam4]

4. Very depressing article to know that all along we were right

about the lies and lengths this administration would go to in order to go to war.

This is a must read. If this isn't impeachable........what is?

This group should be tried for war crimes.