Because while you are apparently inclined to judge Clinton favorably while condemning Bush for saying the same things, it is now thought that the claims were as untrue in Clinton’s time as they were in Bush’s time. (Considering that 1998 was when the Iraq inspection program stopped, you would have to think if anything there was a higher likelihood of WMD in 2002 than in 1998.)
Perhaps you can point to those reports. But in any event, they did not represent anything close to a consensus of the intelligence community. It appears that the prevailing opinion of intelligence community at the time was that Iraq had an active WMD program.
My understanding is that congressional leaders of both parties have independent access to intelligence reports and senior personel.
No, that’s not what the quotes say. Here’s the quotes from the actual members of the Clinton administration:
Like I wrote before, these are all talking about things Iraq did in the past and preventing him from doing those things in the future. Nowhere are they claiming Iraq has a WMD program now.
Now look at all the later quotes on this list. Notice the dates. Quick historical quiz: what major political event occurred in 2000?
After the year 2000, somebody began telling people that Iraq had current WMD programs. And people believed this because that someone was supposed to have access to secret intelligence.
People like Kerry and Byrd and Kennedy and Gore are only guilty of believing George Bush when he told them lies. I was guilty of the same thing in 2003. But there’s a major difference between being a liar and being lied to.
Could be. What do comments in 1998 have to do with the situation in 2003 again? Is this an Us vs. Them thing? If Clinton said it I have to believe it or something? Maybe they were true in 1998, maybe they were not. They have no bearing on what was so in 2003; I can’t imagine why you brought them up.
I would? No, I would not. Because I know what inspectors in 2003 were finding, which is nothing.
What reports? What are you talking about? I said nothing about consensus, I said, or am about to say, that it’s disingenuous to point to out-of-date intelligence to justify Bush’s actions. Why? Because what was said in 1998 has no bearing on what was so in 2003.
Canada’s official position was along the lines of “maybe a few rotten shells are sitting abandoned somewhere”. I have an out-of-date link to that report, but the Harper government redesigned the government websites so they look written on Conservative letterhead and it has vanished. It has already been shown that France, Germany, and the UN inspectors did not agree with your man Bush either. So don’t try to tell me that the US’s opinion was prevalent.
Personnel like Rumsfeld? Or people who took orders from Rumsfeld?
That ignores the plain meaning of the words, as well as the context, which was warning about an imminent threat that required action at that time (i.e. Operation Desert Fox). And even then, Madeline Albright said that they didn’t think they eliminated all of Iraq’s WMD.
FWIW, here’s the full Pelosi statement which is also clear. I didn’t look up the rest of the full quotes, but they’re undoubtedly the same.
One more time.
The fact that Clinton and his people, faced with largely the same situation and relying on much of the same intelligence operation, arrived at the same conclusion as the Bush people, casts considerable doubt as to the likelihood that Bush and/or his political people manipulated the evidence in order to further their agenda.
Occam’s Razor, I believe would apply. Either one phenomenon (intelligence consensus) explains both Bush & Clinton, or Bush lied/manipulated and Clinton had some mysterious other reason for saying the same thing (or better yet, let’s ignore him altogether). Simplest and most logical explanation is the former.
Why is this hard to understand? I quoted your post. You talked about “reports”. I asked about them. What’s missing?
But I did. See my first post to this thread.
I’m not claiming anything about foreign intelligence. It would be lunacy for a president to rely on foreign intelligence over US intelligence and I don’t believe any presidents do so. Re the UN inspectors, my understanding is that their position was that they had no hard evidence but had suspicions, although they thought inspections should be given more time to work.
No, actually people like (Clinton appointee) George Tenet, and people who took orders from him.
Seems neither Clinton nor Bush nor the intelligence community were in much of a fuss about this until it became crucial to Bush.
Consensus? We are going to war over intelligence from a divided intelligence community? When did Bush & Co. let any of us (or Congress) know that there was serious dispute within the intelligence community?
(bolding/underlining mine again)
Lots and lots and lots more to be had at that very thoroughly done web site. Go check for yourself.
I recently read Drumhellers book. He makes it clear that Cheney and Bush were forcing the intelligence to go where they wanted it. Standing up to them would have cost your career. If they suspected you were not on board enough you were transferred out. Gross came in afterwards and cleaned out any resistance. They politicized an agency that was created to be exempt from it. Others have tried ,but nothing on this scale this was ever tried before. The neocons were in charge and knew where they wanted it to go. They should be exposed and on trial.
The difference being, the consequences of error are much smaller when you’re just talking, or maybe hitting a few military targets from the air, than when the words are to win support for, and justify, launching a full-scale invasion and occupation.
If Clinton was wrong, what were the consequences?
If Bush was wrong, what were the consequences?
Which one had, or should have had, a much greater burden of having done due diligence?
And I repeat, when/where/how did Bush & Co. make its citizens and/or Congress aware of disputed intelligence? I posted earlier where Bush and others spoke of the imminent threat posed by Iraq. How did Bush & Co. come to this conclusion when such a conclusion was clearly in doubt?
Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that the intelligence provided was honestly given and Bush acted in good faith on intelligence that Saddam was an imminent threat to the US with WMDs why wasn’t the CIA gutted when it was shown the intelligence was faulty? Mind you we are not talking about a goof here or there. We are talking (again assuming the CIA was providing its best analysis that Saddam was building nukes and WMD) massive intelligence failures. Colossal. Epic.
I am not one for scapegoating but then I would expect our intelligence services (and military and so on) to be provably effective. If they fell down so utterly, so completely, were so invariably wrong I would start firing a lot of people and rebuild the agency. Certainly I would not want such incompetence to be left to continue.
Apparently though Bush felt they did such a bang up job he awarded former CIA Director George Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom (our highest civilian award). :rolleyes:
Al Qaeda stuff is misleading? How do you mean? I am misleading you or Bush & Co. was misleading us?
It does no such thing. One more time: it has no bearing on the matter. Unless you’re arguing that Bush’s claims were based on statements Clinton had made five years earlier, of course. That is not an argument I’d make if I wanted to defend the Bush Admin’s claims.
No. The argument “if Bush lied then Clinton must have also lied five years previously” makes no sense whatsoever. Maybe Clinton was lying. Maybe Clinton was honest, but wrong. Maybe he was right. This has nothing AT ALL to do with whether Bush’s claims five years later reflected reality and to what degree.
Ah, sorry. I have to devote some brain cells to my job, so I was skimming. I referred to UN inspection reports, yes. I could provide them tonight when I have time to dig them up six years after the fact, I suppose. Would it make a difference? You yourself admit that they do not support Bush’s claims, and that is what I would be trying to show by posting them.
The consensus - such as it was - was forced. Intelligence was provided by Rumsfeld’s Office of Special Plans, which existed to make the case for invading Iraq. Any intelligence that didn’t support Bush’s policy of invasion and conquest was dismissed.
But I do, and reports from non-US sources made it clear that Bush’s claims about Iraq were false. Bush used British intelligence regarding Uranium purchases in Niger despite the CIA’s determination no such purchases were made, so I submit the US does rely on foreign intelligence over American. If such intelligence tells the US what it wants to hear, anyway. And since the US was warned by Germany that Curveball was a bullshit artist, I suggest doing so is not lunacy.
But Bush and his Administration didn’t say they had suspicions. They said Iraq posed a threat. They said they knew where the weapons were, sort of. Although “north, south, east, or west of Tikrit” describes pretty much every place on earth.
Head of the CIA? Where Cheney made regular pilgrimages to before the invasion and occupation of Iraq? The same CIA whose agents had their cover blown out of pique because one of their operatives didn’t support the Bush administration’s lies?
I’m sorry, but the Bush Administration wanted to invade Iraq. Judging from the occupying of the Oil Ministry Building, Wolfowitz’s (or was it Bremer’s) claims that the debacle would be paid for with Iraqi oil money, Bush’s plea to Iraqis not to destroy their oilfields, PNAC’s plea, written by future Bush Administration executives and apologists, to Clinton years earlier to invade Iraq for its resources, and the attempts to pass the Iraqi Petroleum Law, I’ll go out on a limb and say it was about oil. I could be wrong. But regardless of the motive, weapons were the excuse. When it failed, terr’ was the excuse. I think Freedom was probably mentioned sometime too, as if Bush was doing Iraqis a favour by ruining their country and their lives. But the plethora of weaker and weaker excuses (it’s okay to invade because of X, in fact even though X is not so it’s still okay) coupled with the total lack of both hindsight and foresight tells me that weapons were just an excuse, and it was chosen because weapons are scary and Americans were all set to be protected from what scares them.
Again, that’s not what we are discussing (see the title of this thread).
I am not going to keep on responding to this.
I don’t think the conclusion was clearly in doubt (although in retrospect it was clearly wrong). As I’ve said repeatedly, intelligence by nature tends to lend itself to different interpretations. If you act the way you suggest, you could never act on anything. The way these things work is that more senior people have the job of sifting through the competing viewpoints and making a decision. Once that decision is made, that becomes the assumption, and you don’t necessarily keep acting like there’s some doubt (unless the decision is in fact that there is some doubt).
What’s your point with this? That Bush realizes that he lied and it wasn’t the fault of the CIA?
I think if Bush went and purged the CIA in response to the intelligence failures people would be screaming like mad that Bush is scapegoating others for his own failures. I imagine individual careers might have been helped or harmed by being right or wrong on WMD, and it’s possible that there was some sort of review to see where things went wrong (there was certainly an internal review of the curveball breakdown that you cited), but I don’t know that you can make a case that Bush lied based on lack of a CIA purge.
Your cite is misleading. It presents “there is some sort of relationship” as if it were a contradiction to “we don’t know the exact nature or extent of the relationship”.
Yes, absolute lunacy. Other countries have their own interests in mind. No US president in his right mind would ever do such a thing, and I submit that you, Whack-a-Mole - a man who I disagree with about much but does not appear to be a lunatic - would not, were you president, rely on other countries’ intelligence operations over your own.
But important - this does not mean that countries don’t rely on intelligence gathered by other countries’ spy operations. To the contrary, intelligence sharing goes on all the time. This is well known. But in terms of drawing ultimate conclusions, every country draws its own, using or rejecting the intelligence and conclusions of other agencies based on their own judgment.
So again, if you were the president and the CIA chief said “we believe X, based on intelligence gathered by Israeli intelligence” sure you would act on it. But if the CIA chief said “We believe X but Israeli intelligence disagrees with us” you’d be a lunatic if you acted on the conclusions of Israeli intelligence over the US.
OK, I disagree as above, and have nothing further to add.
I claim they provide partial support for the Bush claims. The UN was not in the intelligence gathering business. They were in the inspection business. They said there was a lot of unaccounted for material.
Your claim was that these reports described US claims as “garbage”. That’s a pretty strong statement and seems to contradict the CNN report that I cited earlier.
I’m aware that this is the claim being made. Continued assertions don’t add anything.
I discussed this earlier. Bush thought it had been cleared with the CIA, per Tenet (see link above).
How he got to the belief was not a lie. That he actually did believe it may also be true. That he presented it to the American people as established fact and not a hotly contested opinion made it a lie.
Not being able to find the weapons the US claimed were there does not support the US’s claims. Whether the UN is in the intelligence gathering or not (they were in the business of acting on it) their continued inability to verify Bush’s claims is something I consider evidence that Bush was lying. One could argue he was mistaken, but just being mistaken doesn’t explain the skullduggery with the NYT, the continued excuses for invasion once the WMD’s didn’t show up, the failure to secure suspected weapons sites while making sure the Oil Ministry was safe and sound, and so on. The magic 16 words were pulled out of the speech in which they were uttered several times on the grounds they were false, but someone insisted they be put back in. This is not honest. As for the Office of Special Plans and their mission to make the invasion of Iraq look just, it’s not just jawing, a Lt. Colonel working in intelligence at the time says she watched it happen. The things she says explains the facts, why should I doubt her? Her name is Kwiatkowski if you’re interested in looking this up.
I could say more, as I’ve said before I followed the Bush trainwreck with some interest, but there’s no point and nothing to be gained from it. And I certainly wouldn’t deny the possibility that gross incompetence rather than dishonesty is to blame, but this does not seem to be the case.
I understand and agree that rarely, if ever, does a government get 100% flawless intel from which to make a decision. Clearly they have to go on the incomplete info they have and make decisions.
What you seem to keep missing though is that the intel we had that Iraq had WMDs and/or was trying to build them was not remotely good intel. Indeed a great deal of the intel, cited profusely earlier in this thread, directly contradicted Iraq had/was getting WMDs. The evidence for it was remarkably thin.
Going to war is a Big Deal[sup]thm[/sup]. Extraordinary measures should require extraordinary proof. We had nothing remotely approaching that level of proof…not within light years. There was a lot of evidence to the contrary.
I am saying IF (note big “if”) the CIA was presenting its best evidence analysis and that led to war and later that evidence was shown to be profoundly wrong (all of it) how do you not hold them accountable? That is a good job in your view? Maybe you do not fire people but you certainly endeavor to see what went wrong and fix it. How could you rely on an agency that is so important that screwed up so completely (again we are assuming Bush just didn’t demand the evidence he wanted but rather the CIA did its best and Bush made a decision innocently believing the intel)? How…in…the…hell do you give the Medal of Freedom to the Director that oversaw such a colossal failure? A “whoops”, here’s a medal is cool with you on this level of screwup?
Point is I think it is evidence Bush & Co. were demanding evidence that supported their preconceived desire. I have given evidence above that people who were trying to say, “Hey, wait a sec, this is not right” were pushed out. The yes men got to stay. You give men who fucked up the Medal of Honor to keep them quiet. Put them on the chopping block and they will spill the beans. Bush could not have that so the CIA gets a pat on the back.
Go to the link I provided. There is LOTS of evidence showing Bush & Co. trying to link Al Qaeda to Saddam/Iraq. Hell, it started two days after 9/11 when Bush told Richard Clarke to find such a link. Clarke told him he’d of course look again but the fact was they already had and there was none. They looked again and, guess what, there was none. Despite no link at all over half the US in 2005 (or 2006?) believed bin Laden was in cahoots with Hussein. Wonder how they formed that opinion? In a vacuum where no one was mentioning it?
Of course countries (friendly ones) share intelligence. Makes sense and is smart. No problems with that at all.
Interesting that you find it ok to believe evidence based on a foreign intelligence service but find it not ok to believe evidence that contradicts what you believe from a foreign intelligence service. Two sides of the same coin in my view. You take their assessment under advisement either way.
However, in the case of Curveball:
He was a linchpin in Bush and Powell’s assertion for bio weapon production. Not some sideline…the main basis for the info.
The CIA never spoke to the guy (at least not till well after the war had started).
The intelligence was provided by the Germans (fine).
The Germans told the CIA the intelligence was not good.
The Germans told the CIA the guy was not exactly sane.
How would you assess that info? If you were a president and contemplating war wouldn’t you want something a bit better than the word of a nutjob who even your own intelligence service never interviewed? That is enough for you?
After the big game it seems obvious that Team A was going to win and Team B had weaknesses that the other guys exploited. But it’s a lot easier to look smart writing about it after the fact than to be successful putting money on the line in advance.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
Possibly Bush thought it was the fault of people further down the chain of command.
Trying to find a link is not the same as publically lying about it which is what we are discussing.
Firstly, I doubt if Bush ever heard of Curveball. I don’t know that the president gets into that level of detail in intelligence. Tenet and McLaughlin dispute that they ever heard the German doubts about Curveball, let alone passed it along to Bush.
Secondly, from what I understand about intel gathering, a lot of information that you get is highly imperfect, in much the same way as this guy or other ways. The job of the intel people is to put together the various pieces of info and figure which make more sense in the context of each other and the overall picture. The fact that any one piece is highly suspect is significant if the entire picture is based on that one guy. But if what the guy says is consistent with info that you’ve derived from multiple other sources - each one of which may be similarly imperfect on its own - and consistent with what you believe based on other types of info (e.g. political assessments) than the imperfections of any one guy is not necessarily a fatal flaw. (That said, it appears to be agreed that the CIA blew in on the Curveball guy - I’m only saying it’s not as egregious as it might appear).
Look, I completely agree that the CIA & the Bush people certainly weighed the various evidence based on their overall assessments. Everyone does this and it’s both logical and unavoidable. People here who think based on other incidents that Bush is a liar are more likely to interpret the evidence in the WMD intel fiasco as showing Bush to have lied, more than people who otherwise believe Bush to be an honest man. So yeah, if you believed based on a bunch of other facts or reports that SH had a WMD program going, you were more likely to believe that this or that defector with mental problems was saying the truth about the WMD than you would be if you didn’t think the other evidence showed it either.
But that’s not the question. The question here is if Bush lied about or cherry picked the evidence based on another agenda, unrelated to his assessment of which evidence was true or false?
Did Bush/CIA highlight evidence that they thought was more likely true and consistent with other evidence and downplay evidence that they thought was less reliable? I can’t imagine they didn’t.
Well, you can interpret things any way you’d like, that doesn’t make them true. First, your post moves the goalposts. We were talking about Bush, while it talks about “the administration”. You do realize they are two different things, right? And given the exhaustive search on whoever put together that list, doesn’t it give you pause that they could not find one in which Bush himself says the threat is “imminent”? And doesn’t give you pause that that list omits the quote that I supplied, which is the ONLY one that offers insight as to Bush and whether the concept of “imminent”?
The eternal quest for wriggle room. The act of aggressive war is illegal unless a threat is “imminent”. Whether or not Bush ever used that specific word is not important. One can only legitimately go to war in defense against an imminent threat. Not a theory about a threat that may, someday, come about.
By the very act of war, Bush stated that there was an imminent threat. The only other alternative is that he knew there wasn’t, and did it anyway.
By the laws and standards that we, ourselves, insisted upon, Bush might well have been hanged. Does that give you pause? It should.