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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Srexley who wrote (535071)	2/4/2004 12:20:33 AM
From: Krowbar	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Iraq intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified errors, officials say BY JONATHAN S. LANDAY, WARREN P. STROBEL AND JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON - (KRT) - What went wrong with intelligence on Iraq will never be known unless the inquiry proposed by President Bush examines secret intelligence efforts led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon hawks, current and former U.S officials said Monday. The officials said they feared that Bush, gearing up his fight for re-election, would try to limit the inquiry's scope to the CIA and other agencies, and ignore the key role the administration's own internal intelligence efforts played in making the case for war. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, didn't dispute that the CIA failed to accurately assess the state of Iraq's weapons programs. But they said that the intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified the errors through exaggeration, oversights and mistaken deductions. Those efforts bypassed normal channels, used Iraqi exiles and defectors of questionable reliability, and produced findings on former dictator Saddam Hussein's links to al-Qaida and his illicit arms programs that were disputed by analysts at the CIA, the State Department and other agencies, the officials said. "There were more agencies than CIA providing intelligence ... that are worth scrutiny, including the (Pentagon's now-disbanded) Office of Special Plans and the office of the vice president," said a former senior military official who was involved in planning the Iraq invasion. Some of the disputed findings were presented as facts to Americans as Bush drummed up his case for war..... sanluisobispo.com Del