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

To: jttmab who wrote (174148)	11/4/2005 11:58:58 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

So the Democrats trying to stir up controversy by claiming that Bush "lied" to them is not just a political game the they are playing to win points in the polls?? Are they not LYING right now when they try and claim they were "lied to" and didn't feel enough obligation as a national leader to properly consider the intelligence presented and made available to them? What about the former Democratic Sen Chuck Robb. Maybe you should read what he had to say about it. They seem to believe it was a major intelligence failure, not deliberate lying about the intelligence. stimson.org wmd.gov; The judgment on Iraq is stark and sobering: “We conclude that the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure.”[2] After this show-stopper, the report goes on to say with some insight and even empathy that the pre-war hypothesis that Saddam Hussein had such weapons was reasonable given his past behavior, but should not have been turned into a presumption. It says that it would not have expected the community to get it all right but, rather, less wrong. This is a subtle but important understanding of the limits of intelligence that many in the U.S. media and therefore the American public do not fully grasp. In a recent public presentation, Silberman said it was a “grave, grave mistake” to go from a judgment of past behavior to a “90 percent certainty that he had weapons of mass destruction.” The report faults the community for not remembering or implementing its own tradecraft on the question of weapons of mass destruction. It failed to be sufficiently aggressive in questioning the bona fides of human sources; it became lax in questioning assumptions, red-teaming (the use of a parallel, independent analytic group to use different assumptions and presumably come to different conclusions), and considering alternative hypotheses; and it conducted a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) process that appeared to treat some dissenting views as trivial and failed to vet some technical disputes thoroughly through available auxiliary analytic processes.