You have to keep in mind that, by definition, anyone who was saying there weren’t WMD’s in 2003 has been proven to be more credible than those saying there were. So if George Tenet honestly thought that Iraq had WMD’s we’re forced to the conclusion that Noam Chomsky was better informed than George Tenet.
Unless he went to Bush in Feb 2003 and said “I take it all back”, I stand by my question if there was anyone more credible than Tenent stepping forward in that timeframe.
Sure, Bush picked an chose what he wanted out of the intelligence, but I’m not seeing the CIA saying they think Iraq did not have WMDs.
No, I don’t need to keep that in mind because we’re not engaging in 20/20 hindsight here. The head of the CIA is, by definition, the most credible source of intelligence to the president at any given time.
But “credibility” shouldn’t have really been an issue. If the CIA says one thing and Joe Wilson says another, you and I are in a poor position to judge whose right, since they’re relying on classified information. In that case, we’re stuck trying to judge whose more “credible”.
Bush wasn’t in that situation. He can actually see what the basis for both men’s claims are and judge himself. The CIA’s claims seem to have been based on people like Curveball, who even a little investigation into would’ve revealed wasn’t a valid source of information.
The Iraqi Aluminium tubes were claimed to be for Uranium enrichment by the CIA. This was questioned in the press. Since you and I probably don’t know about the details of Uranium enrichment, we’re stuck trying to guess whose more creditable. But Bush can actually ask the DoE, and find out that they descented from the CIA report.
If the CIA says there’s an “Al-Queda training camp” in Northern Iraq, but the press says they visited the supposed location and said there wasn’t, there’s no easy way for you and I to know who to trust. But Bush has the resources to actually send someone to the camp and verify the press report.
He was a willfully blind idiot who took pride in his own blindness, like deliberately not watching the news. I think it’s perfectly possible he was “mistaken”, because he lived in a self created bubble of ignorance and delusion. However that doesn’t let him off the hook, because he went out of his way to ensure that he would be “mistaken” about pretty much everything.
Not if the reason the CIA has the job is because its leadership has been stuffed with people who make a point of telling the White House what it wants to hear. Then the CIA is by definition one of the least credible sources of intelligence, because the White house doesn’t want credible intelligence.
OK, so who was this person, more credible than Tenent, who was saying Iraq had no WMDs. Nemo says there were “plenty” of such people. Can you name one?
I can rename the ones that I already mentioned in the post you quoted. The Department of Energy, the journalists who visited the “Al-Queda camp”, Joe Wilson and the German intelligence agents who said Curveball was unreliable.
Can we have the quotes where they said Saddam had no WMDs? That is the claim. Not that SH didn’t have “x” type of WMD, but had “no WMDs”.
The problem here is in framing it as a yes or no question. The reports would all be couched in percentages and probabilities. One president might consider a 90% probability as being a threat while another might consider a 40% probability to be a threat. Anyone claiming they knew that SH didn’t have any WMDs would be lying. It was impossible to know that.
Now, if you want to claim that Bush didn’t make an effort to seek out opposing views, then well, yeah!. But there weren’t lots of credible sources out there saying SH had no WMDs. Hell, the consensus seems to be that even SH didn’t know that he didn’t have WMDs.
I spent four paragraphs in the post you quoted explaining in what sense I thought the people I named were more credible then the CIA. They were more credible because they were right, and 20/20 hindsight wasn’t needed to see that they were right, the information was available to Bush and Powell at the time.
Again, my point is that I think its a mistake to take an aggregate assessment of whether or not Iraq had WMD’s as a single piece of evidence. The probabilities aren’t based on magic, they come from specific intelligence. Had Bush or Powell examined this intelligence (and Powell anyways, made a big deal about how he had done so prior to his UN speech), it was clear that the CIA NIE was based largely on faulty sources.
Saying that the evidence that SH has WMD’s is false isn’t exactly the same thing as saying there’s a zero percent chance that SH has WMD, but it’s close. Certainly if we use “100% certainty that country X has no WMD’s” as our standard for deciding whether or not to invade someone, we’ll have to invade everyone.
I challenged the claim that there were plenty of credible sources stating that SH had no WMDs. You spend 4 paragraphs noting that some people challenged some of the claims, but it’s unclear that those people were A) more credible than Tenent or Blix or B) made a comprehensive claim about all WMDs.
The point is that there were no current WMD programs in Iraq in 2003. That’s the reality.
There were people who said they had evidence that there were no WMD programs was right. And as history demonstrated, they were right. So anyone who thought the issue was important could have looked at the same evidence and arrived at the same conclusion. Like I said, Noam Chomsky (to use him as a random example) didn’t have access to any information that wasn’t available to George Tenet and George Bush. All the CIA had to do was the amount of investigation that Chomsky did and they would have known there were no WMD’s. If the CIA had done more investigation than Chomsky did (and really they should as a general rule) then they would have found additional evidence to corroborate the fact that there were no WMD’s.
I was questioning A), not B). That is, that some sort of pre-existing “credibility” was meaningful in this context (hence the second sentence of my response). Bush didn’t need to rely on a priori claims claims of who was more credible, unlike us he had the ability to actually see what the evidence for the claims was, and in some respects, the resources to test them.
Doing so would’ve revealed that the CIA was wrong on multiple, major points, while their critics were right. And not just wrong, but wrong in ways that made it pretty clear they were consciously ignoring evidence that went against what Cheney/Rumsfeld/Feith wanted to hear. An unbiased observer in 2002, with access to the information Bush had (or at least, had easy access to), would’ve found the CIA NIE not credible.
But B) is the key point. And I notice that Nemo has made no attempt to defend his claim. I wait his further edification. I mean, if it were so, why would anyone have needed to continue inspection?
My Lai doesn’t reflect well on Powell? Wow. That is exonerating with faint damnation. Powell also stated that he carefully reviewed the evidence and it was certain that Iraq had ongoing chemical, biological and nuclear programs. Of course it had none, and there was no such evidence.
Powell’s a fucking war criminal with respect to 2003 Iraq and an accomplice after the fact with respect to My Lai. Albert Speer was efficient and well spoken and competent too, which is what saved him from the death penalty for all the slave labor abuses during WWII. Powell will never be charged because he is on the winning side. But the man is a huge war criminal. And a liar about the most serious matters possible. How do we know this? Because there were no ongoing chemical, biological or nuclear programs, much less all three. He lied to be a successful member of team warmonger. People spend decades in prison for holding a few ounces of marijuana in this country. Liberty and justice for all, indeed. There really is no such thing as liberty or justice if you aren’t in with the in crowd.
Well, my key point is what I said it was. Bush wasn’t just one of the hoi polloi in 2002, reduced to guessing whether the NIE was believable based on some vague general notion of how credible an organization the CIA is. He had access to the actual intelligence that went into the report, and knew (or should’ve known) that much of it was flawed. Many people without access to Bush’s information and resources were able to do so.
Little Nemo is overstating his case in so much as there wasn’t any way of absolutely ruling out that SH has WMDs. But I’m pretty sure his key point was the one he started out with, that Bush wasn’t merely mistaken in thinking the WMD’s existed. Bush didn’t say we needed to go to war based on some epistemological point about how we can never know for absolute certain that Iraq doesn’t have weapons, he said “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” and “it has aided, trained and harboured terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda.”
Those reasons for going to war were false, and Bush and Powell should’ve known that the reasons for thinking they were true didn’t hold up. That they still presented to the public that there was “no doubt” that they were true wasn’t a mistake, it was a lie.
And here is more of the hard confirmed public record of rejections of the pre-landmark intelligence offered up by the White House in Tomndebb’s veiw:
I agree with jtgain keeping in mind that this pile of documemts was all pre-landmark intelligence gathering, not up to the minute UN inspection quality intelligence, which Bush did not allow the CIA to go directly into Iraq as offered.
Perhaps Powell did not not know about Iraq’s offer to let the CIA…I do know that Rumsfeld was asked about it by reporters… and he shrugged it off of course.
That is my sentinment exactly.
By intent is obvious because of the fact that Bush did not pursue the peace initiative by Iraq to allow the CIA enter Iraq. … The CIA had it been true to its mission would have chomped at the bit to get into Iraq along with all those UN Inspectors and ground penetrating radar and syp planes to watch truck movements and to interview scientists.
I agree with everyone here. And specifically with TomnDeb, I could not have said the following better myself.
That is corrrect and on the money.
All should weigh all this conversation in the back drop of the fact that Iraq offered to allow the CIA come into Iraq in the middled of December of 2002 and the Bush White House rejected the offer… And now one has ever asked the White House WHY? Why did they not want to CIA shoes on the ground inside Iraq instead of getting 4485 US Soldiers in boots killed?
I just want the questions asked of forme Bush officials.
I find a lot of this discussion amounts to angels dancing on the head of a pin.
People on this message board were unconvinced by the WMD claims just based on the fact that they were unsupported by any sort of convincing evidence. Such evidence as was presented to the public was either quickly revealed to be a sham, or was vague, second-hand stuff. I personally found Powell’s speech to the UN amazingly, transparently unconvincing. His “evidence” was shockingly weak.
If I and a million other ordinary Joes could tell the case was weak-ass, anyone could. Yeah, I have some military intel background, but I was years removed from any first-hand association with it by 2003 and this sort of thing wasn’t my specialty. But I know a shit intel presentation when I see one. Anyone who could read, for that matter, could see the lies falling apart.
Now, the issue of whether Bush, Cheney and friends knew it was all nonsense, or to what extent groupthink took over and they were convincing themselves, and forcing the CIA, NSA et al. to mold their reports to fit what was expected of them, might be an interesting thing to look at if the principals would ever fess up to the inside conversations, which they won’t. But that it was a deception is beyond any sort of rational argument. And that it was a deception a reasonably intelligent person should have been able to at least strongly suspect is equally beyond rational argument.
I don’t know. It wasn’t just Bush, remember. It was Bush plus Blaire plus dozens of members of Congress, including prominent Democrats in the senate like Kerry and Clinton. They’d have to all be in on the “lie” for it to work. Rather, I think “hubris” is a better word. I think they were so confident in their own assessment, so sure of what they knew based on either past experience with SH or whatever, that they ignored all the warning signs and just plowed ahead.
If “everyone” was so certain, even those opposed to the war, why was there such a strong push to continue weapons inspections. Why did Russ Feingold, a prominent anti-war Democrat say: