<p>Moreover, a close reading of the recent 600-page report by the president’s commission on intelligence, and the previous report by the Senate panel, shows that as war approached, many U.S. intelligence analysts were internally questioning almost every major piece of prewar intelligence about Hussein’s alleged weapons programs.</p>
<p>These included claims that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium in Africa for its nuclear program, had mobile labs for producing biological weapons, ran an active chemical weapons program and possessed unmanned aircraft that could deliver weapons of mass destruction. All these claims were made by Bush or then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in public addresses even though, the reports made clear, they had yet to be verified by U.S. intelligence agencies.</p>
<p>Why don’t you just admit it that the US intelligence agencies were in agreement that Iraq was trying to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program "</p>
<p>Fundingfather, I’m not surprised that you avoided responding to my question - which was directly at the heart of the discussion. I’m also not surprised that your response was the internet equivalent of shouting “IS TOO!”
No, you haven’t. And in fact the various American intelligence agencies were far from confident about the Iraq nuclear claim by January, 2003. Here’s another discussion of some of the issues: <a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61622-2003Jul15?language=printer[/url]”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61622-2003Jul15?language=printer</a>
I “resist admitting” that my statment was wrong because it wasn’t wrong, outside of the cloistered blog-world of the right wing. In fact, the paranoid delusion that Iraq was in the process of acquiring uranium and equipment to start up a nuclear weapons program in 2002 was not supported by the information available to US intelligence agencies by January, 2003 and they were not willing to sign off on the specific “evidence” which supposedly supported that claim.</p>
<p>That’s why Bush didn’t say “We have recently learned…” - because “we” hadn’t “learned” any such thing; in fact, by January, 2003 “we” had learned that the claim was highly dubious. Not “disproved”, not “impossible” - but dubious to the point that the CIA wouldn’t sign off and a statement laying that claim at their feet.</p>
<p>It seems to me that that’s why it was “The British have recently learned…” instead. But if you have a better explanation for that particular choice of wording for the State of the Union Address, I’m all ears.</p>
<p>Well, Rorosen, I’ll take a stab at it–
First, let me note that you probably shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of a response to your post, although perhaps not for the reason you think. You made a variety of observations which were at a pretty large tangent to the ongoing conversation, and made them in a manner that was not as clear as you might have thought in terms of what message you were trying to convey. I reread your post several times to try to figure out what you were getting at - but I’ll admit, I only did that after your post # 260. The first time through, I was just briefly puzzled and then moved on. I suspect most did the same.</p>
<p>But I think what you’re trying to say is that Bush supporters would have supported the war regardless of whether the various untruths were said or not, and the Bush opponents would have opposed the war even if those statements were true, so it doesn’t matter if they were “lies” or not (?) If that is what you’re saying, I disagree. There’s a very large middle in this country which will support a president from the other party if he makes a case for his position. The diehard loyalists on each side are a minority (although a growing one, I fear.) So I think it does make a difference if an Administration “oversells” its case, because if the sales pitch turns out to be untrue - as it did in major ways with regard to the war in Iraq - those people in the middle will feel betrayed. And that’s not a good thing, and may tend to make them averse to believing that president - and future presidents - who may want and need to rally the support of the American people for a task which is unpleasant but necessary. Whatever else you may say, I think that George Bush spent a lot of the capital of the Presidency over Iraq, and I’m still not sure why.</p>
<p>thanks, kluge, that is exactly what I was looking for. I wasn’t considering the middle position. I don’t seem to run into many of those. But I must say, my post was something like spraying a hose at fighting dogs. I’m glad one of them stopped snarling and gave a very thoughtful answer.</p>
<p>I’ll perform a visible edit and say ‘lions’ and ‘roaring’.</p>
<p>I think there WAS a large group in the middle after 9-11. Most people DID want to go after Osama bin Laden and supported the invasion of Afghanistan. They wanted to stop terrorists and were willing to listen to what the president had to say about that and consider a variety of options. Thus Bush had a lot of support for the invasion of Iraq because he presented it as a case of fighting terrorism and stopping what he made appear to be an imminent threat to America. When the facts turned out to be different from the picture he painted, support began to drop, leading to the case today, where only a minority still feel the war was the right thing to do.</p>
<p>I know a number of people who supported Bush and thought he was doing a wonderful job after 9-11; however, quite a number of them have changed their minds. Most people want to believe that the president is trustworthy and that he knows what he is doing and has our best interests at heart. It can be quite disillusioning when they start realizing that it is not always the case. (Of course, for some of us, that disillusionment happened a long time ago, and we now have trouble trusting ANY politician!)</p>
<p>what you say is true, susan, except I would substitute ‘potential’ for ‘imminent’ which is when you stock up on water. To me this makes a big difference.</p>
<p>I’m not sure if it really does make a big difference when you’re talking about nuclear weapons, Rorosen. As Condoleeza Rice said: “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” And that may be where the Bush Administration erred. You’re right about the distinction: Americans will support a war against an imminent threat, but we’re a little iffy about a potential threat. That’s why the sense of being bamboozled over the Iraq war has become pretty widespread. Whatever legitimate reasons might have actually supported going to war, the reasons that were actually sold to the American people turned out to be phony. (That doesn’t mean they were “lies”, of course, just to tie into my thread tangent with Driver and Fundingfather about whether there was a “shred” or “scintilla” of evidence that the Bush Administration 'lied".)</p>
<p>kluge, since you are fixated on the 16 words and why Bush attributed the intelligence to the British rather than our own intelligence, perhaps this will help clear up your confusion:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And then there is this:</p>
<p>
But note that subsequent investigations have concluded that the British intelligence had nothing to do with the forgeries and that the Butler report has reaffirmed that the 16 words were “well-founded”. (Hence, making the Pincus article which claims that the Niger issue “has now been almost entirely disproved” a complete journalistic fabrication.)</p>
<p>And this summary statement:
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So, despite your claims, the consensus of the intelligence community was in agreement on the Niger yellowcake issue and also in consensus on the Iraqi attempts to reconstitute their nuclear program. I know that when you hate Bush it is tempting to spin everything as a super conspiracy, but unfortunately, the facts do not warrant such a claim.</p>
<p>No they weren’t but whatever you need to believe</p>
<p>On 6 October 2002, the CIA elaborated on why the sentence should be removed:</p>
<p>The evidence is weak …The procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq’s nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory … and we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them the Africa story is overblown and telling them this one of the two issues where we differed with the British."</p>
<p>Guess the state department, the CIA, the INR, are not part of the American Intelligence Agencies, but an Allgerian Business man, and a Iraqi scientist, a known liar, are</p>
<p>CGM, once again you failed to read the conclusions reached in the Senate report: </p>
<p>“CIA Iraq nuclear analysts and the Director of WINPAC told Committee staff that at the time of the State of the Union, they still believed that Iraq was probably seeking uranium from Africa”</p>
<p>It doesn’t get too much more straight forward than that.</p>
<p>Fundingfather, your last two posts highlight why the “Bush lied” controversy probably won’t go away. While I don’t doubt the sincerity of your opinion, your defense of the Administration displays many of the same overreaching techniques used by the administration, and therefore undercuts your personal credibility and gives rise to the question of whether your are consciously misleading. Let’s take a look at the snippets you cut and pasted from the Senate report in post #272.</p>
<p>First, you have selectively quoted from parts of the report discussing the oral statements made long after the fact by the WINPAC Director and the NSC Special Assistant as proof of how the reference to the British was inserted into the yellowcake line of the SOTU. But here’s what you left out:
Apparently the White House speechwriters - who all agree actually inserted the reference to “the British” into the speech - were never interviewed, so all we have is the recollections of two men about past conversations which are in significant respects directly contradicted by contemporaneous documents, and in others contradict each other. That’s not to say it’s necessarily untrue, just that the evidence supporting the claim you make is seriously flawed - and you did not disclose that in your post, preferring instead to project an aura of truth and reliability to your statement that you have to know was not warranted. </p>
<p>Did you “lie” when you did that? I’m sure you do believe the gist of what you wrote, but you also deliberately misled us about the basis for whatever level of confidence you had in that statement by selectively quoting from your source so as to conceal the legitimate doubts as to its accuracy evident on the face of your source. </p>
<p>Moving to your next points, you quote “Conclusion 21”, but not
or
…or, for that matter, Conclusions 17 through 20. The end result is that you have selected statements which you feel support your position, and deleted those which don’t, in order to present a distorted view of what the Senate report states. You also ignore all of the discussion about why the Niger yellowcake claim was not included in Powell’s UN briefing a week later, the discussion of how an intelligence agency recommended that the claim not be included in the January 20, 2003 report to Congress, the June 17, 2003 CIA memo which states: since learning that the Iraq-Niger uranium deal was based on false documents earlier this spring we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad. etc., etc.</p>
<p>Again, I don’t think you’re “lying” in the sense that you’re making statements you believe to be untrue as to their gist, but you are unquestionably trying to mislead people as to the strength of the evidence you believe supports your position. Is that “lying?” Because I think Bush & Co. believed the gist of what they were saying - i.e., that Iraq had WMD’s - but I think that they, like you, weren’t too particular about the accuracy of the way they tried to convince others of that fact. Some people consider that “lying”, others don’t. But to bring this full circle - it’s a “shred” or “scintilla” of evidence that they did, in fact, “lie.”</p>
<p>1) different people involved with the recommendations, some more cautious/conservative than others</p>
<p>2) The rationale given for the removal in October 2002 was recognized as being weak - since when is “he already has stockpiles of yellowcake - so he must not be pursuing more” a reasonable presumption to make when you are charged with the safety of the country? It certainly is not a rationale that one can use to refute the broader conclusion that Saddam was trying to develop nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>3) They still stood by their overall conclusion that Saddam was trying to get yellowcake from Africa even though they had reservations about Niger.</p>
different people involved; who vets Bush’s speeches?
if you present as evidence for Saddam reconstituting his nuclear program the belief that he is trying to buy Uranium from Niger, and that is unsubstantiated, you cannot then conclude that he is trying to buy yellowcake, because you think he is reconstituting his nuclear program. Circular reasoning.
from where in Africa was Saddam trying to obtain Uranium. What was the evidence?</p>
<p>I’m very disappointed in you. In a post in which you question my credibility you, yourself take liberties with the source material in an effort to smear me. Go back and look at the “quote” that you included. You make it look like one contiguous section from the report, but low and behold it is not. Here is the way it should be (with your segments in bold):</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So, what can be gleaned from the FULL context rather than the artfully edited version that you provided:</p>
<p>1)In section A there was full agreement that there was no concern with the credibility of the data and that their only concern was revealing the data while protecting the sourcing and methods - hence both agreed that citing the British information which had already been made public was the best choice.</p>
<p>2)In B and C we see that the “disagreement” that you trump up, really was no disagreement at all. Here is what happened: when WINPAC director first testified he claimed that he had recommended changes to the SoU regarding “Niger” and “500 tons”. The NSC said that there were no discussions about that since those words were never in any draft of the SoU. NSC said that perhaps WINPAC was confused with respect to a Negroponte speech. Low and behold in Section C we see that sure enough, WINPAC checked his drafts of the SoU and saw that indeed those words were never there and that indeed he must have been confused with the Negroponte speech. So what you seemed to characterize as a disagreement is seen really as an agreement when the whole story is shown - which you conveniently left out.</p>
<p>3) In section E, there was a minor disagreement over whether WINPAC said something to NSC or not about recommendations that the CIA had made to the British about their disclosure of the information. This is nothing more than an issue of one party recollecting something of relative insignificance that another part doesn’t recollect. BIG DEAL - it hardly changes the conclusion that concerns about using the uranium information pertained only to revealing sources and methods and not to any concerns about the credibility of the uranium reporting.</p>
<p>Now on to your other scurrilous allegations. Perhaps in your zeal to smear, you forgot the original point of this discussion was whether the president “lied” about uranium from Africa in specific or Iraq’s intent to restart its nuclear weapons program in general. Therefore the conclusions which you mention about how the NIE “should” have been worded or what the DCI “should” have said are relevant only in that they reinforce what the level of intelligence reporting and oversight provided to the president and Congress by the intelligence community actually was. This is a post mortem view of what went wrong - it does not change the fact that the information that was available at the time supported what Bush said. In some perverse way you are trying to blame Bush for how the NIE “should” have been worded or what Tenet “should” have done. That’s balderdash and you know it. But, for someone to doctor the report for his own agenda of smear, what’s a little more balderdash other than a fine seasoning. Quite frankly, I expected better from you.</p>