This is a joke. Bush should have been impeached and removed from office long ago.
Ex-CIA official says war was goal from the start
By Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — The former CIA official charged with managing the U.S. government's secret intelligence assessments on Iraq says the Bush administration chose war first and then misleadingly used raw data to assemble a public case for its decision to invade.
Paul Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, said the Bush administration also played on the nation's fears after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, falsely linking al-Qaida to Saddam Hussein's government even though intelligence agencies had not produced a single analysis supporting "the notion of an alliance" between the two.
Instead, Pillar writes in the March-April issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, connections were drawn between the terrorists and Iraq because "the administration wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to the 'war on terror' and the threat the American public feared most, thereby capitalizing on the country's militant post-9/11 mood."
The criticisms in Pillar's 4,500-word essay, "Intelligence, Policy and the War in Iraq," are not new. But this apparently is the first time such attacks are being leveled publicly by such a high-ranking intelligence official directly involved behind the scenes before, during and after the Iraq invasion nearly three years ago.
Pillar also wrote that the administration went to war without considering strategic-level intelligence assessments "on any aspect of Iraq" and that the intelligence community foreshadowed many post-Saddam woes, though the findings largely were ignored before the March 2003 invasion.
Excerpts from Pillar's article were first reported by The Washington Post; Foreign Affairs posted it online Friday.
Pillar, retired after 28 years at the CIA, was an influential behind-the-scenes player and was considered the agency's leading counterterrorism analyst. By the end of his career, he was responsible for coordinating assessments on Iraq from all 15 agencies in the intelligence community. He is now a professor in security studies at Georgetown University.
The White House did not comment Friday, but Frederick Jones, a National Security Council spokesman, noted previous administration statements defending its use of intelligence.
He said the administration's prewar statements "about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein were based on the aggregation of intelligence from a number of sources and represented the collective view of the intelligence community."
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seattletimes.nwsource.com |
