Faulty Intelligence on WMD

[Uncivil]

@SimonX

Pentagon Office of Special Plans (OSP): What’s the Deal?
More relevant now than ever. Take a peep here first…

Thanks for that, having a read through now.

[PatriotX]

Let’s not foget the OSP’s ugly sister **Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG).

[Squink]

@Uncivil

Which leads me to believe at some point the government was presented with an exaggerated threat assesement.

A more probable phrasing of this would be that at some point the administration gifted itself with an exaggerated threat assessement:

The entire team involved in the Office of Special Plans (OSP) championed by Vice-President Dick Cheney were political appointees and all are closely identified with Ariel Sharon’s right-wing Likud Party in Israel. Indeed, Feith’s law partner is a spokesman for the settler movement in Israel.
Whether there was intelligence linkage between the neocons in the Bush administration and the Sharon government or not remains to be conclusively determined. Still, domestic critics of Israel’s intelligence establishment contend that the data it provided the Americans to buttress their prewar assessment of Saddam’s WMD programs pointing to a threat that did not, in fact, exist damaged Israelis’ trust in their intelligence establishment and its credibility in the eyes of Israel’s allies and friends.

Lebanon Daily Star on Israeli intelligence probe re Saddam

[PatriotX]

from Mr. Blanche’s piece in the Daily Star posted by Squink
Whether there was intelligence linkage between the neocons in the Bush administration and the Sharon government or not remains to be conclusively determined.

There’s certainly some evidence that could lead one to conclude that an investigation into the matter may prove to be of value to the American electorate, (at the very least, it could help lay these sorts of silly rumors to rest).

**Do Israel’s Interests Have Undue Influence on US Foreign Policy? (esp re NeoCons)**

**More Missing Intelligence**
"According to the former official, also feeding…[info to the OSP] was a…unit…[of] the office of…Sharon… This unit…prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. …the Mossad…had views closer to the CIA’s, not the Pentagon’s, on Iraq."

[Uncivil]

@Squink

A more probable phrasing of this would be that at some point the administration gifted itself with an exaggerated threat assessement.

Yes, reading some of SimonX’s links that seems to be the case.

Haven’t had time to go through all of it yet, but by the sound of it, the Bush administration didn’t like the intelligence reports it was getting and setup the OSP to re-interpret them. Which explains why they really expected to find WMD - they chose experts who agreed with their basic premise that Iraq was a real threat, and ignored those who disagreed. So my “beaurocracy” theory was either just a side issue or completely irrelevant to what was really going on - politics.

[PatriotX]

@Beagle

Mr. 45 Minutes has not backed down. I could find more recent articles. His statement is completely consistent with nobody talking. All he said is that nobody would talk until Saddam was captured. That in no way implies that people would feel safe when Saddam was captured. That implies that it is a necessary precondition to anyone talking. I know some people will be unable to see the difference.

Here’s a more recent one, February 22, 2004:

**Is this the face of the man who gave Blair the cue for 45-minute WMD claim?**
Former Iraqi general thought to be source of controversial intelligence
By Raymond Whitaker and Kim Sengupta
22 February 2004
Nizar al-Khazraji…was considered by the CIA to be a potential replacement for Saddam if the army staged a coup.
…17 March last year he vanished, escaping a war crimes investigation, amid reports that he had been spirited away by the CIA.

It has since emerged that the information came from “an established and reliable source” who had been reporting to MI6 for some years, in the words of the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw - but he was acting as an intermediary for a serving officer in the Iraqi army, and had no means of checking it himself.
The Independent on Sunday has established at the highest level that the middleman, who had “military knowledge”, was an Iraqi exile with “Scandinavian connections” who made contact with British intelligence after he left Iraq. He maintained links with serving officers in Saddam’s military forces, but the fact that he was outside Iraq meant that the “45 minutes” information - said to have come from a full colonel or brigadier, but not the “Lieutenant-Colonel al-Dabbagh” named in some newspapers - failed to meet normal standards for assessing intelligence. It should not have been included in the dossier, especially since there was no supporting documentary evidence.

@Beagle

“Imminent” threats are interpreted differently from administration to adminstration.

Are you maintaining that Iraq was an imminent threat to the US?

@Beagle

The argument WAS “faulty intelligence.” I provide an actual source that still maintains the weapons are out there. This guy was a Lt-Col in the Iraqi military. Which part, exactly, of the US bureaucracy was he in?

The problem wasn’t so much the faulty intelligence, of which there’s much in the world, (hence the SDMB;)), as it was the use of and reliance on faulty intelligence, (especially intel that was known to be faulty).

That there’re people in the world who’ll lie isn’t the USG’s fault. The Bush Admin isn’t responsible for that. The Bush Admin is being taken to task for choosing to trust known embezzlers, liars and oath breakers, and knowingly presenting dubious info as iron-clad.

I hope you will be able “to see the difference.”

[elucidator]

As well, consider these comments from Ahmed Chalabi…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$5RM3YWKKUZDFXQFIQMGSFFOAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2004/02/19/wirq19.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/02/19/ixworld.html

(Gadzooks, what long URL? Let me know if it works…)

“An Iraqi leader accused of feeding faulty pre-war intelligence to Washington said yesterday his information about Saddam Hussein’s weapons, even if discredited, had achieved the aim of persuading America to topple the dictator…”

"…Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. “We are heroes in error,” he told the Telegraph in Baghdad.

“As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We’re ready to fall on our swords if he wants.”

I suppose, looking at it all from his perspective, it makes sense. They had a goal, a worthy goal in thier eyes. They used the Americans to obtain that goal, nothing more than realpolitik. Our dead are not thiers, so they used us. Not entirely sure I can blame them.

Oh. lest I forget, this entirely unintentional bit of irony.

“…Mr Chalabi is now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, but his star in Washington has waned…” Mmmm, yes. Those of you with memorys will recall that we were intent on installing this man as President.

Couple that with this, by way of the invaluable Josh M. of Talking Points Memo, without which no citizen can hope to be informed…

U.S. still paying source of tainted intelligence

" The Department of Defense is continuing to pay millions of dollars for information from the former Iraqi opposition group that produced some of the exaggerated and fabricated intelligence President Bush used to argue his case for war.

The Pentagon has set aside between $3 million and $4 million this year for the Information Collection Program of the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi, said two senior U.S. officials and a U.S. defense official…"

Stunning. Positively stunning.

(Upon preview, the link seems hopeless. From the UK Telegraph, 2/19/2004)

[Sofa_King]

Curious. I wonder what makes Mr. Chalabi so bold? Others–American citizens and foreigners alike–who have dared to fly the bird at the Bush administration have discovered that those people are more than willing to eschew the niceties of diplomacy (and in the case of Ambassador Wilson’s wife, perhaps the law) in order to extract retribution.

You know, at this point I’m beginning to wonder what the Bush people have up their sleeve for all of this. I think I have an answer.

I’ll bet that at some point in that brief war, some Iraqi communications guy got the bright idea so send a message in the clear saying, “okay boys, get the chemical weapons ready,” in an attempt to slow down the American advance. Bush’s people could declassify the recording at the opportune time, say the weekend before the Democratic National Convention. And the Department of Defense will be able to sit behind the curtain of operational security and not have to answer that they didn’t believe it then, and didn’t slow down because of it.

Just a thought I feel the need to put down. Pay it no mind.

[blowero]

@Uncivil

Otherwise, what a load of nonsense. I don’t leave myself “wiggle room” so I can backpedal later. I don’t know if my original premises are true or not.

Nonsense. You assumed your premise was true, and refused to consider a possible scenario that could render your premise untrue, claiming that it was an entirely different subject. I will keep saying this until you concede it: The possibility that your premise is wrong is not another subject; it is the same subject.

I have a lot of respect for uncertainty. Thats why I started the thread, I was hoping someone could give me more information or provide a line of argument that might give me a better idea.

No you didn’t. You made the assumption that the intelligence was flawed, and refused to entertain any viewpoints not in line with that assumption. Just admit that’s what you did. It’s painfully obvious.

Well, so far the closest anyone has come is Sofa Man’s article, which suggests that my original argument was not very important to the whole affair.

You mean it’s the only response you didn’t dismiss out of hand.

Strange, I thought we were having an interesting discussion for a while there.

I did too, 'til you got on this refusing to entertain certain arguments kick.

You were making some good points, even if I considered them slightly off-topic. If I caused any offence I apologise, that wasn’t my intention.

Of course it was your intention; you’re backpedaling again.

Why is it a stupid assumption exactly? Events strongly suggest that it was flawed.

No, events suggest that Bush presented the case he wanted to present all along. Anyone who’s been following the news has seen plenty of evidence that the Bush Administration tweaked the evidence to sell a war that he was already bent on making happen. We could have had an interesting discussion about that, but you refuse to play. You’d rather stick your fingers in your ears and insist that it had to be bad evidence and it couldn’t be Bush’s fault.

Nope, you just didn’t understand me. I think he did exaggerate, I just think they really expected to find some evidence of WMD in Iraq, and thats all that argument covers.

I understand you; you just keep changing your argument. I have no doubt that they hoped to find some WMDs; that’s not in dispute. But it’s very clear now that it was much more wishful thinking than hard evidence.

Which leads me to believe at some point the government was presented with an exaggerated threat assesement.

And that is a conclusion not supported by your premise. The argument you are making here is very clear:

1. You believe that the Bush Admin. expected to find WMD evidence in Iraq.

2. Therefore, you believe that the Bush Admin. must have been supplied with exaggerated intelligence.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily follow at all, because it completely ignores the possibility that the Bush Admin. simply thought they would find WMDs, based on what Iraq supposedly had decades ago, and tweaked the current intelligence to make a trumped-up case supporting this false belief. This is quite a plausible scenario, yet you refuse to consider the possibility at all.

Knowing your m.o. now, I’m sure you’re going to waffle and weasel your way out of the argument that you are clearly making, but it’s right there in your post, plain as day.

You are basically calling me a liar here, and saying you understand my arguments better than I do myself.

No, I’m saying you are making certain arguments and then backpedaling.

Either you can believe me and accept that you mis-understood, or I can dig up some threads on another forum from months ago where I said the US & UK administrations were exaggerating the WMD threat for political ends. I was saying this before the war even started.

I didn’t misunderstand you. In fact, you are still making the argument that Bush must have been supplied with exaggerate intelligence. You’re just talking out both sides of your mouth, as usual. It’s possible that both scenarios are true simultaneously, but being possible doesn’t make it a certainty, and especially not to the extent that you can just dismiss one scenario out of hand.

Sorry if you found this offensive. I was implying that you hadn’t thought this through fully, not saying you were naive. All of us are naive sometimes, possibly my original post was slightly naive (a gross simplification of the issue).

“Sorry if you found this offensive” - that’s a poor excuse for an apology. But it’s no skin off my nose, because you are completely wrong in your assessment of me. It’s far more naive to think that, out of fear of political backlash, a president couldn’t possibly do wrong.

If you think I get upset when challenged, I’d suggest a little more self-awareness is in order.

Ooh, the old “I’m rubber and you’re glue” argument. How witty.:rolleyes:

[Uncivil]

Blowero, you’ve been pitted. Clearly no point trying to continue this discussion with you.