More on the failure of intelligence
I'm not sure I can add much here. There was a period when Saddam actually had WMDs--especially the 80s. No one really doubts that he had them at that time. And, it seems, he only used them as part of the war with Iran (there were probably chemical attacks on both sides, following the example of the savages in the trenches in World War I). The example we've been told of a million times--when he supposedly gassed the Kurds in 1988--was probably the work of the Iranians--and Rumsfeld, in particular, probably knows that very well. There is no indication that Saddam offered weapons or sold them to any terrorist group, used them or threatened to use them on any Americans, or anyone in the West, or any innocent civilians outside the war zone.
So Bush's defenders are now forced to argue that at a later time when Saddam had no WMDs at all--or almost none--he was desperately trying to strike some deal to use ... some weapons, from somewhere, against the U.S., or cooperate with terrorists in doing so, or something. (Thanks to Matthew Yglesias). He apparently had no nuclear weapons, nor any facilities to make them, nor any contracts to acquire them; yet he supposedly opened some negotiation in Niger to acquire uranium for military purposes.
Douglas Feith saw CIA briefings on a possible Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, and decided they were too skeptical--they tended too much away from a recommendation to go to war. So he changed them. He changed a professional, competent briefing, which turns out to have been correct, into an amateur, incompetent one, which turns out to have been incorrect. Then his briefing became part of the mix which Rumsfeld wanted to put together until a "new consensus" emerged to be considered at the highest levels.
How stupid would CIA people have to be not to give up on messages that were met with scorn and anger, and switch to messages that made them one of the gang with the higher-ups?
Laura Rozen lays it out very carefully. Many intelligence professionals have been quoted off the record as saying they were subject to what can only be called pressure to toe the line. This doesn't mean to lie, and one strategy of Bush defenders is to say that as long as Bush and others were consistent with the "new consensus" produced by Rumsfeld, Feith, and others, they not only weren't lying--they were agreeing with the (final, revised) documents by intelligence professionals.
Nevertheless, clear off-the-record descriptions of pressure seem to contradict Senator Roberts' statements that many officers were asked if they were subject to pressure, and they said no. As Rozen says, they may have had very reasonable fears for their careers.
Instapundit links to Dan Darling, who apparently did some research on the Senate report for Michael Ledeen:
"Everything Powell said at the UN regarding Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda (which is pretty much the same as what President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and others said going into the war) appears to have reflected the consensus of the broader intelligence community."
Laura Rozen: "In early February 2003 Colin Powell was putting the finishing touches on his speech to the United Nations spelling out the case for war in Iraq. Across the Potomac River, a Pentagon intelligence analyst going over the facts in the speech was alarmed at how shaky that case was. Powell's presentation relied heavily on the claims of one especially dubious Iraqi defector, dubbed 'Curve Ball' inside the intel community. A self-proclaimed chemical engineer who was the brother of a top aide to Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmad Chalabi, Curve Ball had told the German intelligence service that Iraq had a fleet of seven mobile labs used to manufacture deadly biological weapons. But nobody inside the U.S. government had ever actually spoken to the informant---except the Pentagon analyst, who concluded the man was an alcoholic and utterly useless as a source."
The mobile labs apparently never existed.
Darling points out that a state such as Saddam's Iraq may have close ties to organizations such as Al Qaeda without the organizations having actual storefront operations on busy streets. True. Darling claims to have brought out of the Senate report a few meetings--no matter how brief or inconclusive--that have not been reported on before. At least he's given up on the Prague meeting, which was very important to Feith's "improvements" on CIA briefings. On the other hand, he thinks Laurie Mylroie may get some partial vindication, somehow.
It seems hard to believe that anything like a full appreciation of the facts would have justified invading Iraq in March 2003. Maybe we need to hear from Bill Buckley again. He founded National Review, and in some ways launched the conservative movement that led to the election of Ronald Reagan, because Eishenhower refused to help the Hungarian rebels fight the Soviets in 1956. Now that would have been liberation.
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