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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: John Carragher who wrote (99578)5/30/2003 4:14:55 PM
From: JohnM  Read Replies (2) of 281500
 
John are you assuming the adm found other intelligence that the cia did not collaborate.. I thought the cia was sitting behind Powell at the U.N. and stood by everything he said.

Well, that's certainly close to what I typed. I'm assuming something like the following. The CIA intelligence folk did their thing and the analysis was not perfectly consensual but the dominant theme was that the level of wmds in Iraq did not support an argument for a pre-emptive invasion. That's what I read in the two New Yorker pieces that are relevant, the one by Goldberg and the other by Seymour Hersh. In Goldberg's piece, Rumsfeld is quoted, perhaps Wolfowitz also to the effect that the CIA did not know how to do analysis and the DOD folk had to teach them. In other words, and both Goldberg and Hersh took this lesson from it, CIA intelligence did not fit the agenda of the administration so it had to either find its agenda in the intelligence from the CIA or get it from other sources, of which there are many both inside and outside the administration. I don't think there is any doubt they did the latter and little doubt now that trying to shape intelligence to fit an agenda is always a bad idea.

As for the CIA sitting behind Powell, it was definitely George Tenet. But if I understand Hersh's work and the latest panel I saw on PBS, the agency is less than enthralled with Tenet. They tend to see him as not of them and this will not help his position there at all.

As for not going after the admin until we get the facts, that sounds good in principle but I don't know how we apply it. I no longer will accept the notion of significant amounts of wmd in Iraq without some serious international confirmation. I would not believe either the Bush administration or the Blair administration. And, if you recall from my earlier posts, I believed Colin Powell about the presence of wmds when he made his UN presentation but did not believe his argument concerning the connections between Al Q and Saddam.
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