Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lurqer who wrote (37557)	2/9/2004 11:08:44 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

The White House: A New Fight Over Secret 9/11 Docs Evan Vucci / AP Squaring off: Bush may be coming to blows with the 9-11 commission over access to his top secret intelligence briefings By Michael Isikoff NewsweekFeb. 16 issue - The White House is facing a new battle with the federal panel investigating 9/11. To mollify the panel chair, former governor Thomas Kean, President George W. Bush last week reversed course and agreed to a two-month extension that is supposed to ensure a final 9/11 report by July. But that might not be enough. Commission sources tell NEWSWEEK that panel members are fed up with what one calls "maddening" restrictions by White House lawyers on their access to key documents. Unless the panel gets to see the docs, the report "will not withstand the laugh test," a commission official says. The panel is threatening to force a showdown soon—by voting to subpoena the White House. advertisement The documents at the heart of the dispute are the so-called presidential daily briefs, or PDBs—the daily intelligence brief given to Bush by a senior intelligence official, usually the CIA director or his deputy. White House lawyers have guarded the documents as the "crown jewels" of executive privilege. But last year Kean and other commissioners complained they couldn't write their report without seeing exactly what Bush, and Bill Clinton before him, had been told about the threat of Al Qaeda. The White House then agreed to a complex deal that would allow four panel officials to review the PDBs and then brief the full 10-member panel. But the arrangement hasn't stopped the wrangling. The four-member team asked to look at 360 PDBs dating back to 1998; White House counsel Alberto Gonzales permitted them to see just 24, arguing that only those that specifically mentioned possible domestic attacks or airplane hijackings were relevant. (One panel member was allowed to read all 360—but couldn't share the contents with colleagues.) The team was permitted to write brief summaries of the PDBs they did read. But White House lawyers objected to some of the wording. The bickering has meant the full panel has yet to be told anything about the PDBs—even while it was conducting interviews with top officials, like last Saturday's with national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. The restrictions are especially infuriating, one source notes, because at least some of the PDBs appear to have been selectively shared by the White House two years ago with author Bob Woodward for his book "Bush at War." White House officials insist they are protecting the principle of confidential advice for the president and have given the panel "unprecedented" access to sensitive material. "We are doing everything we can to cooperate with the commission," a White House spokeswoman says. Still, some commission officials see an element of politics. While the commission's work has uncovered no smoking gun, sources say, the cumulative impact of the intelligence documents and other material is damning—showing far more screw-ups by both Clinton and Bush officials than the public has yet to learn. msnbc.msn.com

To: lurqer who wrote (37557)	2/9/2004 11:14:36 PM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Bush's Iraq War Gamble Was Costly Indeed The emerging line on Iraqi weapons is that if Saddam Hussein didn't have the goods at the moment the Iraq War was launched, his hunger to get them, his failure to come clean and his past deceptions still justified the war. Yet the United States would not have attacked Iraq without two massive rolls of the dice, both related to expectations about weapons of mass destruction. Both gambles went badly wrong in ways that may yet lose the war for us. One was Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld's controversial decision to jettison traditional military strategy and race fast and lean for Baghdad. Saddam was toppled with little ado. Yet without sizable U.S. forces to establish order right away, Baath regime loy alists got the opening they needed to organize resis tance. The other, related, gamble was that U.S. forces would quickly find all those weapons of mass destruction President George W. Bush, and his advisers kept assuring us were there. This would immediately vindicate the White House in having ordered the war without U.N. sanction or international backing. Outside support would pour in, helping us bring order and stability to the country. Just the reverse happened. U.S. troops found no weapons in the places U.S. spies thought they would be. That meant the effort to find weapons expanded. A purely military team was replaced by an inter-agency effort involving more than 1,000 people. Resources needed for the military effort, including scarce intelligence specialists and translators, were instead dedicated to the hunt for weapons. That waste of resources continues to this day. In other words, U.S. officials were suckered by the self-same game of three-card monte they thought Saddam Hussein was playing with them on the weapons. The almost evangelical certainty that Saddam had the nasties despite intelligence caveats and the negative findings from U.N. inspectors on the ground soars forth from this period like a choir of absolute truth. In September 2002, Rumsfeld listed "facts" about Saddam in Senate testimony that he said should guide U.S. policy toward Iraq. Among them, the fact that "he's amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, Sarin and mustard gas." Yet that same month, a classified Defense Intelligence Agency document in support of war planning said there was "no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons," and no direct evidence, only probabilities. Asked about this discrepancy, Rumsfeld said last week that he never saw the document. But what about the caveats ever-present in official intelligence reports? CIA chief George Tenet was almost plaintive last week when he said intelligence on Iraq weapons was never offered up as a dossier of certainty, but rather remained replete with recorded dissents right up until the moment of war. Last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell essentially had to eat crow after saying, "I don't know," Monday when a member of the Washington Post editorial board asked if he would have supported the war had he been told there were no weapons stockpiles in Iraq. Powell backtracked hastily the next day, telling reporters that, of course, "the president made the right decision." What's most galling is how the certainties continued even as evidence poured in that the idea of huge weapons caches was a phantom. Once weapons inspectors got back into Iraq, U.S. intelligence had a fresh source of information that some of the assumptions about production and stockpiling were faulty when inspectors went to sites highlighted by the CIA, and came up empty. Yet Rumsfeld was still suggesting last week that "enough biological weapons to kill thousands of human beings" may still turn up in spider holes like the one in which Saddam was hiding. That's totally illogical, accord ing to David Kay, who until recently led the Iraq Survey Group weapons hunt. "Look, if there were large stockpiles, they had to be produced by people, they had to be produced in facilities and they would have left some indelible signs," Kay told a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace audience last week. "Where are those people? Where are those facilities? Where are the documents, the importation and the other records of such large production? Those have not been found." That alone, said Kay, was "pretty compelling proof" that they don't exist. Like any gambler, the Bush administration is unwilling to admit that it guessed wrong. Some people would have called it a good gamble. Saddam's drive for battlefield biological weapons goes back decades. He used chemical weapons in war. U.S. spies were caught off guard by how close he got in the early 1990s to a nuclear bomb. The big surprise, Kay says now, is how deeply his regime had sunk into corruption and disrepair by 2003, making even Saddam one of the victims of his own deceptions. But that does not excuse a decision to go to war based on a gamble by those who had the access and the wherewithal to know better. Sign them all up for Gamblers Anonymous, and then start repairing the damage. commondreams.org lurqer