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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (39389)	8/22/2002 10:52:14 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Safire feeds us, from his sources, what the CIA thinks is going on with Saddam. NYT today. I found Safire's column today very interesting, Bill. I'm curious what your take might be. Mine is that something is going on here. At the first level, we are dealing with Safire's sources within the CIA. They've always been very good sources, though perhaps they are from folk who are on the outs with Tenet. Hard to know. One can gather from this either one of two things. First, that there is something of a battle within the CIA as to what to do with both this information and the Czech-Atta information--what it is, how to process it, and how to picture it to the media. That looks to me to be a certainty. That means this is a leak from one faction and may not mean more than that. Second, that this is a leak which is meant to prepare the ground for further leaks in which the CIA shifts from not having evidence of a link between Al Q and Saddam, to progressive leaks each of which offers some evidence but not convincing evidence, and the whole pile is meant to be more than the sum of the parts. And they do this either because they've genuinely settled the internal argument in favor of the links indicating that. Or they've read the political tea leaves and are going with that public interpretation. Given that Tenet has a reputation as knowing how to play the political game, I think it means at least that latter. Which doesn't exclude the former. As for a further in depth, what it means about actual ties between Saddam and Al Q, that's much harder to say. Something is going on. These stories about an Al Q group in Kurdish territory, with some sort of low level wmd capabilities have been around for some time. Now they've been joined by stories that the Bush administration refused to do something about the wmd factory. For whatever reasons, which we are most likely never to know. So, them's my thoughts of the moment. Would be interested to hear yours.