The "Times" does it again. Senate Intel report comes out, and six paragraphs in, the paper says,
<font color=blue><font size=4>
The report concluded, "The committee was not presented with any evidence that intelligence analysts changed their judgments as result of political pressure, altered or produced intelligence products to conform with administration policy, or that anyone even attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to do so."
<font color=black><font size=4>
But what is the headline and the first paragraph lead?
You will notice they did it as a <font color=blue>"News analysis"<font color=black> to get away with opening with their opinion rather than the quotable facts. They don't like the facts, so they frame the story against the facts. Why do they do this? So that they can run an editorial that says:
<font color=blue><font size=3>
But what comes through is thoroughly damning. Put simply, the Bush administration's intelligence analysts cooked the books to give Congress and the public the impression that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear arms, that he was plotting to give such weapons to terrorists, and that he was an imminent threat.
<font color=black>
nytimes.com
<font size=4>
The report does not say this, and they know it. But they are going to slant it that way. Disgusting.
<font size=3>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
July 10, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS
Senate Report Does Little to Still Debate on C.I.A.'s Prewar Data
By DAVID JOHNSTON
ASHINGTON, July 9 — Although the Senate Intelligence Committee found no evidence that the Bush administration had tried to coerce the C.I.A. to produce exaggerated prewar warnings about Iraq's weapons programs, its findings did little to still the furious debate about whether the White House and the Pentagon tried to influence the agency's conclusions.
The White House took comfort in the committee's report on Friday, but it was clear from the arguments still raging across Washington that the administration's dealings with the Central Intelligence Agency will remain a politically volatile issue through the election campaign.
At a news conference on Friday, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the committee, said the report "failed to explain the environment of intense pressure in which intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq, when policy officials had already forcefully stated their own conclusions in public."
Mr. Rockefeller, recalling that President Bush described Saddam Hussein in March 2002 as "a dangerous man who possesses the world's most dangerous weapons," said such comments put pressure on intelligence agencies to conform with the president's views.
Democrats also noted that the formation of a special intelligence unit at the Pentagon by the Bush administration to review ties between Iraq and terror groups served notice on the C.I.A. that powerful corners of the administration were ready to challenge agency assessments. Frequent visits to the agency by Vice President Dick Cheney, they said, also were a form of pressure, a view the Senate committee rejected.
But Pat Roberts, a Republican from Kansas and chairman of the panel, said there was no evidence that the agency altered any findings under political pressure. "In the end," he said at a news conference, "what the president and the Congress used to send the country to war was information that was provided by the intelligence community, and that information was flawed."
The issue is not whether the White House or the Pentagon ordered the agency to produce intelligence assessments that conformed with White House policy on Iraq. The report concluded, "The committee was not presented with any evidence that intelligence analysts changed their judgments as result of political pressure, altered or produced intelligence products to conform with administration policy, or that anyone even attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to do so."
The lingering question, not directly addressed by the committee, is whether the White House and Pentagon generated a climate that induced the agency and its director, George J. Tenet, to emphasize the Iraqi threat even though the intelligence data was ambiguous.
That question, in part, revolves around the relationship between the White House and Mr. Tenet, who leaves the agency on Sunday after seven years as director. Some intelligence officials said Mr. Tenet, a holdover from Bill Clinton's presidency, seemed to be eager to establish himself in Mr. Bush's inner circle.
Mr. Tenet has said that he never shaded intelligence to please a president.
As the White House turned its attention toward Iraq in 2002, intelligence officials, including Mr. Tenet, were still on the defensive about the agency's failure to detect possible warning signs of the September 2001 attacks. The Senate report found that the agency was reluctant to underestimate Mr. Hussein or his ties to terrorists.
The pressure at the agency was especially intense on issues related to whether Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda. The report concluded that the agency reported accurately about such ties, based on its limited information.
In one committee interview, the agency's ombudsman, who was not identified by name, described what he called a "hammering" in the form of repeated questions by administration officials on Iraq intelligence related to Mr. Hussein's possible links to Al Qaeda. The intensity of the questioning was "harder than he had previously witnessed in his 32-year career with the agency," the report quoted the official as saying.
The ombudsman, the report said, had interviewed about two dozen employees who had worked on a June 2002 report entitled "Iraq and Al Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship," a document that was accompanied by a note that said it was prepared using a "purposefully aggressive" approach in assessing possible ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.
Some frequent visits to the agency were from the White House, including Mr. Cheney, who visited for briefings between five and eight times between September 2001 and February 2003. Jami Miscik, the deputy director for intelligence was quoted in the report saying, "He was usually in receive mode during the presentation and then asked questions afterwards."
The report concluded that these visits were not perceived by analysts as efforts to pressure them, but other intelligence officials said such high-level visits often forced analysts to simplify complicated subjects and gloss over internal doubts.
Richard Kerr, a former deputy director at the agency who was interviewed by the committee after reviewing intelligence on Iraq, said administration officials asked repetitive questions. The committee report said some analysts said that the repeated queries were a form of pressure, but could not say whether anyone complained about it.
The committee's report was approved unanimously by senators from both political parties, though some Democrats issued additional statements that seemed to contradict key findings in the report.
Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, said on Friday that the administration could be faulted for the C.I.A.'s mistakes on Iraq. "The committee's report does not acknowledge that the intelligence estimate were shaped by the administration," she said. "In my view, this remains an open question that needs more careful scrutiny."
By agreement between Republicans and Democrats on the committee, the issue of how the administration used the C.I.A.'s information has been deferred to a second phase of the inquiry, which is not expected to be completed until after the presidential election in November.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
<font size=4>
The Washington Post played the same story straight. It
really shows you how much the Times slanted it. I will be
reading outrage about this Times treatment all over the
net. - From: LindyBill
Panel Condemns Iraq Prewar Intelligence
Senate Report Faults 2002 Estimate Sent To Hill, Accuses the CIA of 'Group-Think'
<font size=3>
By Dana Priest and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 10, 2004; Page A01
The U.S. intelligence community gave lawmakers debating whether to wage war on Iraq a deeply flawed and exaggerated assessment of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, according to the results of a year-long, bipartisan Senate investigation released yesterday.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said either the intelligence community "overstated" the evidence that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was actively reconstituting its nuclear program, or that the claims were "not supported by the underlying intelligence."
The report refutes every major weapons assessment laid out in a key 2002 intelligence estimate provided to lawmakers before the war and cited by Bush administration officials to justify publicly the case for an invasion. The findings also offer a broad indictment of the way the CIA carried out its core mission, accusing the agency's leadership of succumbing to "group- think," of being too cautious to slip spies into Iraq and of failing to tell policymakers how weak their information really was.
Asked yesterday if he believes Congress would have supported the use of force if it had been aware of this information before lawmakers voted, committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said, "I don't know." He said he would have voted for war on humanitarian grounds and would have considered it more "like Bosnia and Kosovo." U.S. ground troops did not fight in those conflicts.
Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va), the committee's ranking Democrat, was more emphatic. "We in Congress would not have authorized that war, in 75 votes, if we knew what we know now," he said. U.S. standing in the world "has never been lower, and as a direct consequence our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before."
<font size=4>
In a 440-page report that came to 117 conclusions, the committee said the intelligence community correctly determined that "there were likely several instances of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda throughout the 1990s, but that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship." The panel also concurred with the CIA's conclusion that "there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an al Qaeda attack," including the Sept. 11, 2001, strikes at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The committee also concluded that the CIA overstated what it knew about Iraq's attempts to procure uranium in the African nation of Niger, and that it delayed for months examining documents that would prove to be forgeries, resulting in reports to policymakers that were "inconsistent and at times contradictory." No one at the CIA told the National Security Council of concerns about the credibility of the Niger intelligence as President Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech was drafted, contrary to officials' previous assertions, the report said.
In evaluating the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the committee blamed intelligence leaders who "did not encourage analysts to challenge their assumptions, fully consider alternative arguments, accurately characterize the intelligence reporting, or counsel analysts who lost their objectivity."
Senate aides, who conducted hundreds of interviews with intelligence officials throughout the government as well as with United Nations weapons inspectors and others, said they found no evidence that junior or senior officials knowingly distorted or withheld information to make a particular case. Nor did they find evidence of undue political pressure by policymakers. But they did conclude that contradictory information was often ignored or dismissed.
Acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin defended the agency in a rare news conference yesterday. "I don't think there is a broken corporate culture here at all," he said, adding that outgoing CIA director George J. Tenet had admitted "serious flaws" months ago and has remedied most of them.
"We get it," McLaughlin said, noting that caveats to key judgments were buried in the body of the October 2002 intelligence document, but from now on will be given equal weight. He added that, in the future, estimates and assumptions will be tested by "devil's advocates" from the agency as well as outside experts.
The Senate report is one of four major government inquiries into intelligence failures on Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks.
As part of an agreement reached six months ago between Republicans and Democrats, the Roberts committee will investigate the administration's use of intelligence on Iraq. Critics have accused Bush, Vice President Cheney and other senior officials of exaggerating Iraq's links to al Qaeda and repeatedly suggesting that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attacks.
A Shortage of Spies
The Senate panel found "significant shortcomings in almost every aspect" of human intelligence that it said could not be blamed on a lack of funding or lack of qualified clandestine operatives, as the agency frequently suggests. Rather, it blamed "a broken corporate culture and poor management."
From 1991 to 1998, a time when Iraq was considered a top national security threat, little effort was made to create a U.S.-only spy network there. Because the United States had no official presence in Iraq, there was not even a plausible cover story for Americans to be in the country.
"The intelligence community appears to have decided that the difficulty and risks inherent in developing sources or inserting operations officers into Iraq outweighed the potential benefits," the report said.
When the committee staff asked the CIA why it had not considered placing a CIA officer in Iraq during those years, an agency official responded: "Because it's very hard to sustain . . . it takes a rare officer who can go in . . . and survive scrutiny [deleted] for a long time."
The report also showed how dependent the CIA often was on single sources of information. For example, a significant shift in 2002 in the intelligence community's assessment of Iraq's biological weapons was based almost exclusively on information provided by one individual, who asserted Iraq had mobile bioweapons laboratories.
The individual, code-named "Curve Ball," was debriefed by a foreign intelligence service and the only American to meet Curve Ball thought he was an alcoholic. Others in the Pentagon raised concerns about Curve Ball's credibility, but his information still became the centerpiece of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations seven weeks before the war.
Despite a 2002 assessment that determined there was a 50 percent chance that Iraq possessed the smallpox virus, the only fresh information to that effect came from a single defector in 2000.
Mass Weapons
Among the most scathing chapters of the Senate report is its assessment of prewar reporting on Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program. The report portrays the 2002 estimate as a sharp break from previous U.S. assessments, which said Iraq retained ambitions and latent capabilities but "did not appear to have reconstituted its nuclear weapons program."
The report said the CIA made a "significant shift" in its position two months after Cheney began stating publicly that Iraq had actively reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. The intelligence estimate, which echoed the administration's public claims, "was not supported by the intelligence" and relied on misstatements, concealment of doubts and suppression of evidence.
CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency advocates for this position repeatedly made false statements of fact in their classified assessments, many of which are quoted publicly for the first time in the Senate report. The report endorses the consensus of U.S. and overseas centrifuge experts that aluminum tubes cited as evidence of nuclear efforts were meant for conventional rockets.
The report said the CIA's leading advocate of the Iraqi nuclear threat withheld evidence from analysts who disagreed with him, misstated the information and analysis produced by others and distributed information inside and outside the agency that was "at minimum, misleading." The CIA did not adjust its position, the Senate committee said, when U.N. inspections in late 2002 and early 2003 "refuted" some of its most important assertions.
A senior intelligence official said the Senate committee report is "simply wrong," adding that the CIA continues to regard the purpose of the aluminum tubes as an open question. He declined to elaborate.
On the topic of biological weapons, the report concluded that none of the claims about Iraq's bioweapons stockpiles or capabilities was supported by intelligence and that the 2002 intelligence assessment also misrepresented the U.N.'s 1999 report on Iraq's biological research capabilities.
There was virtually no information to support allegations that Iraq was conducting biological and chemical experiments on humans. One Defense Department analyst told the committee: "Perhaps we were stretching that just a little bit."
Intelligence analysts also told the committee that claims that Iraq had renewed production of chemical weapons such as mustard, sarin and VX nerve gas were the results of "analytical judgments" and were not based on hard intelligence. The same methods were used to reach conclusions that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling as much as 500 metric tons of chemical weapons agents. No such weapons have been found.
But the committee found the National Intelligence Estimate's assessment of missile delivery systems to be carefully worded and said it accurately reflected what was known at the time.
The committee also lent credibility to reports that Iraq had tried to buy missile technology from North Korea and added a previously undisclosed detail: That during a 2001 meeting in North Korea to discuss missile cooperation, three Iraqi military officers also met with a Syrian missile team that was in North Korea at the same time.
Intelligence agencies failed to support their prewar assertions that Iraq was building unmanned aerial vehicles or drones that could disperse biological weapons. The 2002 assessment even claimed there was evidence "strongly suggesting" Iraq may have planned to sneak such a drone into the United States. That assertion was based on a single, uninvestigated report that Iraq was trying to buy U.S. mapping software.
Iraq Links to Al Qaeda
The report noted that the CIA and the FBI do not believe that an alleged meeting in Prague between an Iraqi intelligence officer and Sept. 11 mastermind Mohamed Atta occurred. Several Bush administration officials, most notably Cheney, have repeatedly highlighted the meeting as evidence of a potential Iraq-al Qaeda link.
The report said the CIA's counterterrorism center was "purposely aggressive in seeking to draw connections" between Iraq and al Qaeda. The approach was opposed by the CIA's Near East and South Asia office, which was more conservative in its conclusions. That office's views were left out of a June 2002 report.<font size=3>
Staff writers Barton Gellman, R. Jeffrey Smith, Dan Eggen, Susan Schmidt and Walter Pincus, and research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report. |
