Editorials Question Bush's Role in 'Cooking' Up a War

[zimv20]

link (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=2077477)


In the wake of the latest revelations from weapons inspector David Kay, many of the largest U.S. newspapers are belatedly pressing the Bush administration for an explanation of how it could have gotten the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so wrong in the march to war last year. A growing number are raising the possibility that Bush and his team may have "cooked" the intelligence to support their case for war.

An E&P survey of the top 20 newspapers by circulation found that as of Wednesday, 13 had run editorials on Kay's resignation as chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq last Friday, and his statement that no WMDs exist in Iraq, and likely did not exist in Iraq during the U.S. run-up to war.

Nearly all of those papers blamed intelligence failures for the miscalculation and called for a full probe. But eight of the 13 -- most of which supported the war -- also raised the issue of White House deceit and its possibly blind pursuit of intelligence that fit its plan for war.

Among them was The Dallas Morning News (Click for QuikCap), in Bush's home state, which had supported the war, but now declared: "We feel deceived -- by the CIA, which overestimated the threat, and by the White House, which probably stretched the bad estimates to build a case for war." If Bush had found other strategic or humanitarian reasons for the war, "he should have argued the case on that basis," the editorial said.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Click for QuikCap) also stated that while intelligence was faulty, "the evidence also seems overwhelming that the Bush administration pushed existing evidence well beyond its breaking point, exaggerating threats and claiming specific knowledge of Iraqi WMD where in reality no such knowledge existed." The paper also came down hard on the administration for linking Saddam Hussein directly to al Qaeda -- which was in opposition to intelligence reports.

The Los Angeles Times refused to place the blame mainly on the intelligence agencies, observing that "the administration was not a passive consumer of intelligence. The CIA's own Iraq analysts contended last June that the administration pressured them to create worst-case scenarios." While backing a full CIA probe, the L.A. Times added, "Any investigation ... will also have to take in to account the administration's agenda." Indeed, Vice President Dick Cheney continued to make "bogus claims" about WMDs in Iraq over the weekend despite Kay's findings, the editorial noted.

The Detroit Free Press asked, "Was the administration misled, or did it twist what it was told to justify taking down Hussein? A full accounting is due."

Newsday of Melville, N.Y., said the latest revelation "raises troubling questions about the Bush administration's use of ambiguous or flawed intelligence findings to buttress its case" for the war. The Oregonian of Portland stated that, "it's fair to wonder ... whether the White House processed the intelligence information professionally."

The Boston Globe editorial said, in part: "President Bush should acknowledge two harsh truths: that the intelligence was completely wrong and that administration hawks tried to politicize intelligence."

Oddly, while fully condemning the intelligence scandal, two of the most liberal papers -- The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle -- did not strongly raise the specter of White House deceit. The Times hinted at this, however, by suggesting that Cheney's continuing false arguments revealed the "rigid thinking" based on "preconceived notions" that "helped propel us into an invasion."

The Philadelphia Inquirer simply declared that Kay's conclusion "destroys the remaining credibility of this administration's argument for an immediate, pre-emptive war."

Only two the 13 papers that ran editorials expressed little concern that the Kay findings undercut their support for the war: The New York Post and New York Daily News. The Post warned readers not to "be taken in by all the hot air following David Kay's statements."

[Thanatoast]

a day late and a dollar short. where were these calls for double-checking intelligence before the war? the media dropped the ball on this, and continues to do so in other areas eg) outing of cia spy, cheney's energy task force.

[Dont Hurt Me]

Im glad Saddam has been caught, im not glad that we are loosing American and coalition lives everyday. The Bush administration wanted him gone before he was in office and this is becoming clear. we went to war for the wrong Reason. they didnt have these weapons of mass Destruction as George led us to think. How many lives? how much money?

[zimv20]

Originally posted by Dont Hurt Me
How many lives?


according to http://www.iraqbodycount.net/, between 8059 and 9896 iraqi civilian deaths reported.

add to that, according to Coalition Casualty Count (http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx), 615 coalition soldiers killed, 2946 wounded.

add to that how many iraqi soldiers and insurgents have been killed. i can't get a good figure on that.


how much money?

according to http://www.costofwar.com/, over $98 billion.

according to nancy pelosi, in the democrats' response to the SOTU, over $120 billion.

[Desertrat]

About mid-day, today, a radio newscast had some of Kay's testimony before Congress. He commented that he, too, had originally been wrong about WMDs in Iraq. He blamed faulty intelligence, and went further to state there had not been pressure from the Administration on the CIA to "paint a WMD picture".

Overall, this makes sense. We shifted away from HumInt in the Carter era, going more and more to Elint via overflights and satellites. Our primary HumInt source, then, pretty much was Israel--and I've no clue as to how well they had infiltrated Iraq with people on the ground.

'Rat

[pseudobrit]

The UN was right and the US was wrong.

Why is the WH still still so indignant towards our [former, I fear] allies?

[IJ Reilly]

I keep hearing about this lack of "human intelligence," but it seems to me that we've also been hearing about how much the CIA depended on the word of Iraqi defectors, who it turns out were telling the agency what they wanted to hear. I get the idea that human intelligence is a bit like having an eye witness to crime. It might turn out that the forensic evidence is more reliable.

Kay is apparently being very careful to say that he wasn't pressured to come to any particular conclusions. Fine -- but it isn't the post-invasion intelligence that we're particularly concerned with at this point, it was the intelligence used to justify the invasion. What we do know is that when the CIA provided the White House with ambiguous evidence (at best) of a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear program, the administration went opinion shopping. They liked what British intelligence was saying better, so that's the information they chose to believe, and to use to make their case to the public. Kay didn't have anything to do with that episode.

Kay was sent in to look for WMDs, and he didn't find them, and what's more, doesn't expect them to be found by his successor. What Kay might have believed before he started his search isn't very material to the question of whether the administration was in procession of the information it needed to justify the case they were making for an imminent Iraqi threat to the US.

[Sayhey]

Originally posted by Desertrat
About mid-day, today, a radio newscast had some of Kay's testimony before Congress. He commented that he, too, had originally been wrong about WMDs in Iraq. He blamed faulty intelligence, and went further to state there had not been pressure from the Administration on the CIA to "paint a WMD picture".

Overall, this makes sense. We shifted away from HumInt in the Carter era, going more and more to Elint via overflights and satellites. Our primary HumInt source, then, pretty much was Israel--and I've no clue as to how well they had infiltrated Iraq with people on the ground.

'Rat

'Rat,

there are numerous accounts that point that pressure to select intelligence that supported the move to war did indeed occur. I know you have posted in the past articles by the now retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, so I would refer you to her three part series in The American Conservative (http://www.amconmag.com/12_1_03/feature.html). In Part 3 of the series she states:

Soon after, I was out-processed for retirement and couldn’t have been more relieved to be away from daily exposure to practices I had come to believe were unconstitutional. War is generally crafted and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons given to Congress and the American people for this one were so inaccurate and misleading as to be false. Certainly, the neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country on the real reasons for occupation of Iraq—more bases from which to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and Iran, better positioning for the inevitable fall of the regional sheikdoms, maintaining OPEC on a dollar track, and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision. These more accurate reasons could have been argued on their merits, and the American people might indeed have supported the war. But we never got a chance to debate it.

My personal experience leaning precariously toward the neoconservative maw showed me that their philosophy remains remarkably untouched by respect for real liberty, justice, and American values. My years of military service taught me that values and ideas matter, but these most important aspects of our great nation cannot be defended adequately by those in uniform. This time, salvaging our honor will require a conscious, thoughtful, and stubborn commitment from each and every one of us, and though I no longer wear the uniform, I have not given up the fight.__

She worked along side of the operation throughout the run up to war from 2002 to 2003 so her insights are interesting. They hardly come from my political perspective, so I would present them as a conservative critique of neoconservative actions.

In addition, this jibes with the estimate of Greg Thielmann, a former State Dept. intelligence analyst who said in an interview (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/interviews/thielmann.html) for the Fontline documentary, Truth, War, and Consequences (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/view/) that:

In those seven years, did you see any other times when intelligence was being used so selectively?

The only other thing that seems comparable to me is discussions of the foreign ballistic missile threat in the 1990s. There was, in my opinion, an exaggeration of the speed with which other countries could develop ballistic missiles and an exaggeration of the significance of those developments for U.S. security.

But all things considered, it's very hard for me to think of any example of systematic, across-the-board exaggeration and misleading statements about an important war and peace subject. Nothing quite matches what I've seen in the Iraqi WMD area in the last couple of years.

Lastly, I would point you to the very informative article by Pulitzer Prize winning Journalist Seymour Hersh in his article for the New Yorker entitled The Stovepipe (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact) he confirms this analysis.

Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.

A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: “Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings?” The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities—a process known as “stovepiping”—without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

I don't think this was just a error of the intelligence community and the President made a "good faith" mistake in following that faulty intelligence. In that regard David Kay is dead wrong.

[diamond geezer]

Originally posted by Desertrat
He blamed faulty intelligence, and went further to state there had not been pressure from the Administration on the CIA to "paint a WMD picture".

Overall, this makes sense.'Rat


Didn't Bush make statements about iraq, in that state of the union speech, that his own intelligence community knew to be false or unreliable?

Either they were knowingly lying, or simply incredibly incompetent. And they all seem to highly educated and to adept at making money and gaining power, to be making those kind of mistakes.

I think they're just to used to getting their own way and have no real respect for the law, or your average citizen.

The law, and especially jail, is something that only happens to other people. While the public are just the people you lie to, to gain power.

The group who wrote that PNAC document, you know, the document that recommends invading Iraq regardless of whether Saddam is in power. Are now themselves, in power.

After 9/11 they immediately began connecting the event with Iraq, without ANY proof. They then make claims which are known to be false, in the state of the union speech. They start up their own intelligence unit (because they didn't like the info coming from CIA or whoever), allowing them to write their own intelligence, most of whose claims turned out to be false.

I don't have any doubt that they were all knowingly lying, or at least knew there was no proof and were just hoping that WOMD would turn up somewhere, to justify their actions.

There evidence against Bush and cohorts, lying to the public and planing invasion regardless, is far stronger than the evidence linking Saddam with Al Queda, or 9/11 or WOMD ever was. But the media seem disinterested in connecting all the dots.