FirmhandKY
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Politesub53
quote:
ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy
The links made to Al Qaeda were limited, and factual. He met with al-Zawahiri, he funded terrorists, he offered rewards to the families of suicide bombers, he harbored terrorists and Salman Pak trained terrorists.
More nonsense, dont you ever bother with facts ? It isnt hard to find any of this stuff. Do you really think that the fact one guy met another back in 1992 was a legitimate cause for war in 2003 ? Thats about as much as a link there was between Saddam and Bin Laden or AQ prior to the invasion, let alone prior to 9/11.
Still you Lucky and Firm all say I am biased so I have copied some stuff from some intelligence report or other. This looks like an unbiased source but what would I know huh.
"The Senate Report on Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq concluded in 2006, "Postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture al-Zarqawi and that the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi."
"Much of the Committee's investigation in this area concerned the CIA's preparation and distribution of a document titled Iraqi Support for Terrorism. An initial version of this document was distributed to senior Bush administration officials in September, 2002; an updated version of the document was provided to Congress in January, 2003. The conclusion of CIA analysts was that although Saddam Hussein's government had likely had several contacts with al Qaeda during the 1990s, "those contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship."
Interesting article, that I think covers the issues fairly. It lays the foundation for the very argument for war that you and others seem to wish to deny.
It also gives sufficient information about the partisan stances under which many of the conclusions and decisions were made, if you pay attention to the dates, the parties of involved and the political agendas of the individuals cited
Some interesting information that address a key point: whether the Bush Administration put pressure on the intelligence community to "fudge the facts". From the first, Phase I bi-partisan report:
The ISG also stated that Iraq had intended to restart all banned weapons programs as soon as multilateral sanctions against it had been dropped.
The report's first conclusion points to widespread flaws in the October 2002 NIE, and attributes those flaws to failure by analysts in the intelligence community:
Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community’s October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting. A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence.
Subsequent conclusions fault the intelligence community for failing to adequately explain to policymakers the uncertainties that underlay the NIE's conclusions, and for succumbing to "group think," in which the intelligence community adopted untested (and, in hindsight, unwarranted) assumptions about the extent of Iraq's WMD stockpiles and programs. The committee identified a failure to adequately supervise analysts and collectors, and a failure to develop human sources of intelligence (HUMINT) inside Iraq after the departure of international weapons inspectors in 1998. It also cited the post-9/11 environment as having led to an increase in the intensity with which policymakers review and question threat information.
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The report concludes that prior to October, 2002, it was reasonable for the intelligence community to assess Iraq may have been attempting to obtain uranium from Africa.
...
The committee reached several conclusions critical of poor communications between the CIA and other parts of the intelligence community
Pressure on analysts
The report partially looks at the question of whether pressure was brought to bear on intelligence analysts to get them to shape their assessments to support particular policy objectives. It recounts how Sen. Roberts made repeated public calls for any analysts who believed they had been pressured to alter their assessments to speak with the Committee about their experiences. The Committee also attempted to identify and interview several individuals who had described such pressure in media reports and government documents. The report says that the Committee did not find any evidence that administration officials tried to pressure analysts to change their judgments; however, an evaluation of the Bush Administration's use of intelligence was put off until "phase two" of the investigation.
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In terms of pressure on analysts, the Committee said that after 9/11, "analysts were under tremendous pressure to make correct assessments, to avoid missing a credible threat, and to avoid an intelligence failure on the scale of 9/11." The Committee concluded that this resulted in assessments that were "bold and assertive in pointing out potential terrorist links," and that this pressure was more the result of analysts' own desire to be as thorough as possible, than of any undue influence by the administration, for which the Committee said they found no evidence. Several Democratic members of the Committee said in the report's "additional views" that the question had not been adequately explored.
These were the agreed upon conclusions, and then there were the "additional views" that pretty clearly followed partisan lines.
The Phase II report, after the Democrats were in charge of Congress and stacked the committee still does not lead to any other conclusion
"repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent"
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While the report highlights many of the problems with the intelligence and criticizes the Bush Administration for its handling of the lead up to the war and its reasons for doing so, the report also supports in many cases that claims made by the Bush Administration about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction programs were "generally substantiated by the intelligence".
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The Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen.Jay Rockefeller twice alleged that the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, or its former head Douglas Feith may have engaged in unlawful activities, Phase II of the report "found nothing to substantiate that claim; nothing unlawful about the "alleged" rogue intelligence operation in the PCTEG , nothing unlawful about the Office of Special Plans, and nothing unlawful about the so-called failure to inform Congress of alleged intelligence activities.
I think that any reasonable individual can see that all the claims of "Bush lied" or "Bush forced the intelligence to fit his preconceptions" are without much basis, and also see why George Tenent - who was in charge of the CIA during this time - would be interested in deflecting blame from himself and his organization. This is one of the reasons that I take anything said by him with a large grain of salt.
Quite a few people had personal or partisan reasons to shift blame, or create blame, on both sides of the partisan divide, and you can trace that by their words and actions. But the cold hard facts tell their own story.
To address the one sentence above that specifically seems most damning (from a Democrat), you need to read it with an understanding that it both served partisan purposes and hides what it is actually saying within the larger context, and in the emotional impact of how it is phrased. This sentence is:
"repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent"
The main problem with this sentence is that "intelligence" is almost always "not fact". It is a proposed picture of reality based on assumptions and analysis and designed to allow policy makers to make decisions based on the "best available" possibility of reality. In this case, the sentence is laying the blame on the policy-makers, when the report has already roundly condemned the intelligence community and concluded that the actions of the policy-makers did not have a negative influence on the intelligence process.
I'll turn to the terrorist connection in another post, if I have time, but I think your own source, politesub, put to rest the entire "Bush Lied" meme. Thanks.
Firm
< Message edited by FirmhandKY -- 12/18/2010 6:12:18 AM >
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