With the "everyone thought they had WMD," and the "intelligence failures" memes still alive and making their way into generalized un-nuanced historical memory and mythology, I thought I would revisit this article from
February 2004. I and most everyone here didn't need Blumenthal to tell us this, we remembered the CIA, Scott Ritter, IAEA and intelligence-community members & diplomat resignation stories quite well, despite their constant interment on pages B-9 in publications everywhere. But I thought some of the newer DUers might want to see this (power search LynnTheDem's threads on the issue if you want more), and it is good for all of us to remember, as well. - H'spit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1141401,00.htmlThere was no failure of intelligence
US spies were ignored, or worse, if they failed to make the case for warSidney Blumenthal
Thursday February 5, 2004
The Guardian
- snip -
Kay's testimony was the catalyst for this u-turn, but only one of his claims is correct: that he was wrong.
The truth is that much of the intelligence community did not fail, but presented correct assessments and warnings, that were overridden and suppressed. On virtually every single important claim made by the Bush administration in its case for war, there was serious dissension. Discordant views - not from individual analysts but from several intelligence agencies as a whole - were kept from the public as momentum was built for a congressional vote on the war resolution.
- snip -
Bruce Hardcastle was a senior officer for the Middle East for the Defence Intelligence Agency. When Bush insisted that Saddam was actively and urgently engaged in a nuclear weapons programme and had renewed production of chemical weapons, the DIA reported otherwise. According to Patrick Lang, the former head of human intelligence at the CIA, Hardcastle "told
that the way they were handling evidence was wrong." The response was not simply to remove Hardcastle from his post: "They did away with his job," Lang says. "They wanted only liaison officers ... not a senior intelligence person who argued with them."
When the state department's bureau of intelligence and research (INR) submitted reports which did not support the administration's case - saying, for example, that the aluminum tubes Saddam possessed were for conventional rocketry, not nuclear weapons (a report corroborated by department of energy analysts), or that mobile laboratories were not for WMDs, or that the story about Saddam seeking uranium in Niger was bogus, or that there was no link between Saddam and al-Qaida (a report backed by the CIA) - its analyses were shunted aside. Greg Thielman, chief of the INR at the time, told me: "Everyone in the intelligence community knew that the White House couldn't care less about any information suggesting that there were no WMDs or that the UN inspectors were very effective."
When the CIA debunked the tales about Niger uranium and the Saddam/al-Qaida connection, its reports were ignored and direct pressure applied. In October 2002, the White House inserted mention of the uranium into a speech Bush was to deliver, but the CIA objected and it was excised. Three months later, it reappeared in his state of the union address. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed never to have seen the original CIA memo and deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley said he had forgotten about it.
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