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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PartyTime who wrote (40641)	4/4/2005 11:53:14 PM
From: Doug R	Respond to of 173976

PT...don't grab on to what may be a limited hang-out that curveball was the undoing of the CIA and the scapegoat for the disaster in Iraq. Newsweek April 11 issue - When a Senate panel released a report last year on the disastrously bad intelligence on Iraq, it included an intriguing e-mail that showed how intensely the administration was looking for damning evidence against Saddam. The e-mail, written by a senior CIA official, addressed a debate that the agency's analysts were having about Curveball, an erratic Iraqi emigre who claimed to have seen Saddam's supposed mobile biological-weapons labs. The CIA had evidence that Curveball was a shameless fabricator months before Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the Iraqi's reports before the United Nations. But in the Feb. 4, 2003, e-mail—written a day before Powell's U.N. appearance—the senior CIA official sharply rebuked one of those skeptical analysts. "Keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," the CIA official wrote. The commission places almost all the blame on the intelligence community alone and—though it does not name names—the then CIA chief George Tenet. Intelligence officials are blasted for their uncritical and unimaginative thinking. And the report leaves senior policymakers in the Bush administration all but unscathed. "No analytical judgments were changed in response to political pressure," the report concludes. Yet the new panel conspicuously omitted the "Powers That Be" e-mail that appeared in the Senate report. In fact, commission leaders seemed to not even know of its existence. "What e-mail are you talking about?" Judge Lawrence Silberman, the chairman, testily responded when asked by a NEWSWEEK reporter why it wasn't included in the report. "I'm mystified." Two hours later, after NEWSWEEK supplied the panel with a copy of the e-mail from the Senate report, a commission spokesman explained that the panel was aware of it but chose not to include it because its contents were already known. But its absence from the report raises questions of whether the Silberman panel may have "cherry-picked" evidence to exclude anything politically embarrassing to the "Powers That Be." msnbc.msn.com Office of Special Plans, Cheney and shrub is where intelligence failed.