Yeah, I would think that Powell had any info the President had, and if not, he could ask to see any information that he thought the President was keeping from him. If it wasn’t forthcoming, and Powell was convinced it existed, then Powell needs to resign–it’s obvious his boss doesn’t trust him.
I think Powell had the intel the President had, plus is more able to draw conclusions for that intel.
God bless you people!!! … and I mean that in a most positive way. I have bolded what is what I consider to be a very critical fact/issue on this very appropriated topic.
This is great I believe, because this discussion is focused on the true revelation about the intelligence that Bush referred to during the run-up to invasion. There is pre-landmark intelligence (see above) on Iraq’s WMD and then there is intelligence gathered after the inspections began in December 2002.
We know that all pre-landmark intelligence was accepted by a decent sized majority of politicians and constituencies around the world. It is my view that there was sufficient cause after the 9/11/01 attacks on U.S. soil to take a new look at that fact that Saddam Hussein was not in compliance with his disarmament obligations with the world.
But when Saddam allowed the return of Dr. Blix and Dr El Baradai and cooperated on process which meant that he allowed unfettered access to all requested sites, including his palaces, that meant that the all pre-landmark intelligence was to be secondary to the inspection process. And further, Bush as a member state of the UN and permanent member of the UNSC agreed to provide all WMD intel to the inspectors so that it could be verified. The Bush Administration claimed that they did do that, although there is evidence that they did not do so immediately as they should have.
This is why, the Dr. Amir al Saadi offer in December 2002 is a huge landmark event, because to have offered to allow the CIA and other US Military and FBI come into Iraq, absolutely and without question puts to doubt any claims that Bush truly had any serious new and ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE with regard to what Iraq might be hiding from UN inspectors.
You will recall that Dr. Blix shot down Colin Powell’s shadowy evidence of mobile WMD trailers of Curveball fame, because after the speech at the UN the intelligence was provided to Dr. Blix’s team, and the claim about secret hidden trailer holding rooms that the CIA alleged to exist at a specific facility were found to be false.
And as part of this timeline of the run-up to invasion, the Bush Administration revealed that it did not have actionable intelligence or evidence that Iraq was hiding anything from inspectors at that point in time when Powell took a draft resolution to the UNSC on March 7, 2003 that was effectively an offer that would have allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in power.
This is very important:
If the UK and US had actionable intelligence that Iraq was ‘deceiving’ the UN inspectors - they could not have offered to allow Saddam Hussein to remain in power. Actionable intelligence that Iraq was still dicking around with the inspectors would have been the trigger for war, as far as the Brits and US were concerned. Both nations believed they had to right to enforce existing UN Resoloutions against Iraq without UN authorization on specific national security matters.
But the UK and US were in a bind here, because they did not have any new actionable solid intelligence from anyone that Iraq was CONCEALING THE MOST LETHAL WEAPONS EVER DIVISED FROM UN INSPECTORS.
Those caps are what Bush claimed in his speech to the nation announcing the start of war. He added that he had intelligence that LEAVES NO DOUBT to those words.
Now think about this:
Has anyone ever asked the question of Bush or the intelligence gathering community just exactly what that post-landmark intelligence was based upon or from whom did it come.
I don’t think there is any.
Our President made something up and gets away with it by conflating pre-landmark and post landmark intelligence.
And he shouldn’t.
Colin Powell does not want to get into any of this investigation and questioning about post-landmark ACTIONALBE intelligence either, for sure.
The absence of actional intelligence to justify war is where a real journalist and a real investigation would go.
All the pre-landmark intelligence really in my view should be put in proper perspective, if we are to arrive at true answers about the US invasion of Iraq and what went wrong.
Really? You don’t think there was any?
If you can find any reference in that Senate Report where they addressed any post-landmark actionable intelligence that ‘left no doubt’ that Iraq was concealing WMD from UN inspectors in March 2003, I would appreciate your pointing it out.
Post-landmark intel not shared with the UN is what I was referring to.
Please go back and read what I wrote.
I answered your exact question. If you don’t like the answer, that’s another issue. But the question is answered.
And just to be clear, I have no intention in engaging in en endless, niggling discussion with you where you continually move the goal posts and completely ignore any evidence that doesn’t fit your preconceived ideas.
It is unlikely, but there is for the POTUS to cut the SOS out of the information flow and decision making process of international affairs. Nixon cut SOS William Rogers and pretty much the whole State department out, instead conducting private diplomacy along with Henry Kissinger when Kissinger was the National Security Advisor.
There is also the matter of the “intelligence” group set up by Cheney in the White house, because they distrusted the output of the CIA (or maybe better said is that they needed some kind of group to cook the raw intelligence into a differSent result). As a general rule, it was rare for the White House to see all the raw intelligence, they got summaries of it and made decisions from there. But they insisted on raw intelligence about Iraq, which was then filtered through the group.
So it’s not totally clear which set of information Powell was looking at, and if both, which might have appeared more reasonable on the surface.
You did not answer my question, exact or otherwise.
You responded to my point that (go back and look) referred to post-landmark intelligence that Bush claimed to have on March 17 2003 with your link to a report about all the pre-landmark intelligence.
Obviously you cannot find anything in that report that applies to what I was discussing with several other posters and now you advise of your plans to depart the discussion.
Thanks for joining the discussion, but next time try to understand what we are talking about before you join in.
Powell has a really awful character. He is polite and civilized and really f’in smart, and that makes his criminal war mongering more palatable than the idiocy of Bush and Cheney, but he had a long military career as a criminal war-monger stretching back to Vietnam.
I’m not a Powell fan but I think you’d have a hard time claiming he had a long career as a “war-monger”.
He had extremely strong reservations regarding the First Gulf War and very aggressively opposed the Clinton administration’s military actions throughout the 1990s.
If you think he’s “a war-monger” I’d hate to hear what you think of either of the Clintons who were vastly more willing to use the US military as a club to impose their will on the war.
His reputation seems to be as the guy who says, “Uh, Mr. President, this war you’re thinking of is a really BAD idea, you need to commit more troops, and be prepared for a much longer siege, maybe decades-long, to win this thing, and an entire generation of dead and maimed young Americans, all to win a war I don’t really see the point of, and what the public is violently opposed to, so my sternest advice to you is to back off, sir, and …what’s that? You still want to go to war? Whatever it takes? Yessir, Mister President, I’m behind you 100%! Anything you want to say or do or sell, just say the word. Write my script for me, doesn’t matter how idiotic or unlikely, and I’ll say it public for you, any time, sir, any where…”
I would think that a logical inference would be that Bush handed Powell a pile of documents and said, “Colin, read all of that. Iraq has these WMDs. Even Clinton agrees.”
I mean, who wouldn’t believe the President? If Obama came on national TV tonight and said that Bermuda was preparing to launch a dirty bomb in Miami harbor, I would believe him. I disagree with him politically, but when it comes to matters of national import, I stand by whatever President we have. I’m still pissed that GW Bush lied/was mistaken.
When successive claims by the administration are shown to be false, (“yellow cake” anyone?), when the president is on record as claiming, prior to his election, that he wanted to attack Iraq, when all the “intelligence” condemning Iraq is coming from advertising flacks with no intelligence training set up in the Pentagon for the express purpose of cherry-picking data, and when the evidence I was given to present to the UN causes me to declare “this is bullshit,” then I would not believe the president and neither should anyone else in the administration who was not already a Neo-Con/PNAC toady.
Colin Powell is a “good soldier,” a “team player.” He has demonstrated this going all the way back to his investigation of the My Lai massacre in which he was unable to find any evidence to support the claims being made about it.
He is not stupid and I do not believe he is evil, but he certainly has an enormous blind spot when it comes to accepting orders.
(If one wishes to assert that Powell might not have known of Bush’s conversation with Herskowitz–a point I will reluctantly grant with the caveat that I had heard Bush make similar statements on the early campaign trail in 1999–there is still no way that Powell could have been unaware of Bush’s declarations in the White House, reported by Richard Clarke, demanding evidence of Hussein’s complicity in the WTC/Pentagon attacks two days earlier.)
Your efforts in these discussions are not so far above reproach that you have any business making personal comments about other posters.
Back off on the personal comments or you are going to start picking up unwanted Moderator attention.
[ /Moderating ]
I wasn’t aware he was involved in the My Lai investigation, and this settles things for me. There was overwhelming evidence it occurred, including photos and testimony of American soldiers. So Powell is indeed evil, or so utterly incompetent that he needed someone assigned to wipe his ass because he didn’t know how.
My Lai does not reflect well on Powell, but there is no evidence that he actively covered it up. My memory is that he was not even in country when it happened and his investigation took place before it blew up on TV and the news magazines. He was new to Nam and told to go out and discover whether reported “routine” killings of civilians was occurring. He went out and talked to a few troops, (or, more likely, talked to a few company commanders), and returned with the verdict that civilian deaths were exaggerated. I will fault him for being a “good soldier” and doing exactly what he was told to do, but I would have a different view of him if he had been told to go investigate My Lai or My Son, explicitly, and had come back with the same report.
I can’t buy the idea that Bush was mistaken. As I’ve mentioned, there were plenty of credible people in 2003 saying that Iraq did not have WMD’s - so the possibility was certainly out there. Bush was the President and he was deciding whether or not to go to war. It was his responsibility to find out if the evidence he was looking at was credible and sufficient and to look at the counter-evidence as well. And if he had done his job, he would have learned the truth that Iraq did not have WMD’s - other people knew this and they didn’t have the resources Bush did. So if Bush was “mistaken” it was by intent - he would have had to avoid being told things he didn’t want to hear so he could claim deniability.
Like who? People who are more “credible” than his own head of the CIA?
See the exchange. I asked John Mace very politiely to respond to what I wrote specifically about what I have explained as post-landmark intelligence.
John Mace got personal telling me that I moved the goal posts and that comment about niggling discussion, and that he answered my exact question, and that I ignore evidence.
I did not ignore what he presented as evidence. I asked him to be specific about what he thinks in that evidence answered my question.
He did not address my question at all.
The record is there.
Did the head of the CIA actually make that claim in 2003?
In September, 2002, pretty nearly everyone “knew” that Iraq had WMD. However, after UNMOVIC re-entered the country, in November, it became increasingly clear that there were no weapons to be found. The Office of Special Plans was used by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, (and Cheney?), to cherry-pick the most suspicious data to be sent to the White House. Their information was generally contradicted by information coming from NSA, Army Intelligence, and the CIA and others, but it was the information that Bush wanted to hear. (It was the OSP that assembled the information that Powell called “bullshit.”) Tenet was certainly the author of the “slam dunk” claim in December, 2002. However, (regardless whether it was actually “twisted” by the White House as he later claimed), it appears to have been made in reference to WMD claims making the propaganda war a certitude rather than a claim that the WMD actually existed. In fact, there are claims that as early as September, 2002, Tenet had tried to tell Bush that the WMD were gone, but Bush indicated that he did not want to hear that–at which point Tenet, too, took on his “good soldier” persona and simply dropped the topic.
Bush was good at believing what he wanted to believe and he had long demonstrated an attitude of intellectual laziness, (not stupidity), in avoiding research on topics about which he had already made up his mind.
I see no “mistake” in Bush’s actions.