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


To: FaultLine who wrote (117273)10/20/2003 11:30:51 PM
From: stockman_scott  Respond to of 281500
 
THE STOVEPIPE
_____________________________

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2003-10-27
The New Yorker

How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.

newyorker.com

<<...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.

“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”...>>