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

To: Suma who wrote (208488)	11/15/2006 1:37:02 PM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 281500

Thank you. You're very gracious and broad-minded. (eom)

To: Suma who wrote (208488)	11/15/2006 2:05:42 PM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 281500

One thing to remember is that the intelligence on Iraq's didn't have to be cooked up by any neocon (Jewish) conspiracy as Kwiatkowski imagines. Almost all of it came from the same intelligence apparatus that served under Clinton. It was George Tenet, Clinton's CIA head retained by Bush, who assured Bush on the eve of the war that the intel on Iraq's WMD was "a slam dunk". Here is something from Tenet after the war: CNN) -- CIA Director George Tenet on Thursday defended the prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq, saying the United States needs more time to fully account for Iraq's suspected weapons programs and denying that political pressure bent analysts' conclusions. The following are some key points from Tenet's speech. Pre-war intelligence "The question being asked about Iraq in the starkest terms is, were we right or were we wrong? In the intelligence business, you are almost never completely wrong or completely right. That applies in full to the question of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. And like many of the toughest intelligence challenges, when the facts of Iraq are all in, we will neither be completely right nor completely wrong." Influence of politics on intelligence "I can tell you with certainty that the president of the United States gets his intelligence from one person and one community: me. And he has told me firmly and directly that he's wanted it straight and he's wanted it honest and he's never wanted the facts shaded." Unfinished search for WMD "As we meet here today, the Iraq Survey Group is continuing its important search for people and data. And despite some public statements, we are nowhere near 85 percent finished. The men and women who work in that dangerous environment are adamant about that fact. Any call that I make today is necessarily provisional. Why? Because we need more time and we need more data." Imminent threat "Let me be clear: Analysts differed on several important aspects of these programs and those debates were spelled out in the estimate. "They never said there was an imminent threat. Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policy-makers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests. No one told us what to say or how to say it." premium.asia.cnn.com And then there's this from Bill Clinton himself: Let me tell you what I know. When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn't know. So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the U.N. to say you got to let these inspectors in, and this time if you don't cooperate the penalty could be regime change, not just continued sanctions. ..... think the main thing I want to say to you is, people can quarrel with whether we should have more troops in Afghanistan or internationalize Iraq or whatever, but it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks... DOLE: That's right. CLINTON: ... of biological and chemical weapons. We might have destroyed them in '98. We tried to, but we sure as heck didn't know it because we never got to go back in there. KING: Yes. CLINTON: And what I think -- again, I would say the most important thing is we should focus on what's the best way to build Iraq as a democracy? How is the president going to do that and deal with continuing problems in Afghanistan and North Korea? We should be pulling for America on this. We should be pulling for the people of Iraq. freerepublic.com