Re: Phase II Report on the use of intelligence leading up to the Iraq War to be released.

On Mar 10, 3:32 pm, Jack Linthicum <jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
There is a choice, either the statements about Iraq's weapons,
capabilities and allies were the result of faulty use of intelligence
or they weren't.

"The left is not going to be happy. The right is not going to be
happy. Nobody is going to be happy."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-intel10mar10,1,1...
From the Los Angeles Times
Senate panel critiques prewar claims by White House
'Nobody is going to be happy' with the long-delayed report's mixed
verdict on whether the Bush administration misused intelligence to
argue for war with Iraq, an official says.
By Greg Miller
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

10:59 PM PDT, March 9, 2008

WASHINGTON -- After an acrimonious investigation that spanned four
years, the Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to release a
detailed critique of the Bush administration's claims in the buildup
to war with Iraq, congressional officials said.

The long-delayed document catalogs dozens of prewar assertions by
President Bush and other administration officials that proved to be
wildly inaccurate about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of banned weapons
and pursuit of nuclear arms.

But officials say the report reaches a mixed verdict on the key
question of whether the White House misused intelligence to make the
case for war.

The document criticizes White House officials for making assertions
that failed to reflect disagreements or uncertainties in the
underlying intelligence on Iraq, officials said. But the report
acknowledges that many claims were consistent with intelligence
assessments in circulation at the time.

Because of the nuanced nature of the conclusions, one congressional
official familiar with the document said: "The left is not going to be
happy. The right is not going to be happy. Nobody is going to be
happy."

The report helps culminate a series of investigations that the
committee has carried out in connection with the war in Iraq. The
"statements report" was stalled repeatedly, in part because of the
complexity of the task but also because of partisan disagreements
among senators.

The findings are likely to be a source of political discomfort for the
White House by reviving the controversy over the Bush administration's
case for war. That issue has largely faded from view on Capitol Hill
at a time when the White House is sparring with Congress over other
intelligence-related issues: CIA interrogation tactics and the scope
of the government's wiretapping authority.

The report could also become political fodder for the presidential
race, which has focused on the differing positions of the remaining
candidates on the decision to invade Iraq.

Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee had initially pushed
for the report to focus not only on the prewar claims of the Bush
administration but also on statements made by members of Congress,
including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who is vying for her
party's presidential nomination.

"The statements report is clearly the most political of all the
reports the committee has done," said a senior committee aide. "It's
inherently problematic to try to climb inside the heads [of
policymakers] and know what they knew at the time."

Officials said the report is divided into categories that focus on
prewar claims about Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear
weapons programs, as well as its supposed ties to Al Qaeda and other
terrorist groups.

Each section includes a catalog of as many as 20 prewar claims, as
well as a summary conclusion on whether the assertions were generally
warranted.

"The whole purpose of this exercise is to answer questions about
whether the administration was honest in its use of intelligence when
it made the case for war," said a senior aide to Sen. John D.
Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee.

In many cases, statements that were later proven wrong -- such as
President Bush's assertion in September 2002 that Iraq "possesses
biological and chemical weapons" -- were largely in line with U.S.
intelligence assessments at the time.

Prewar assertions about Iraq's nuclear program were more problematic
because they were supported by some intelligence assessments but not
others.

"They were substantiated," a congressional official said, "but didn't
convey the disagreements within the intelligence community."

In August 2002, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a
speech that "Saddam [Hussein] has resumed his efforts to acquire
nuclear weapons." But by that time, the State Department's
intelligence bureau was challenging the assumption that Iraq's nuclear
program had been reactivated.

White House suggestions that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda were at odds
with intelligence assessments that voiced skepticism about such a
relationship.

The report marks the culmination of a multipart investigation that the
committee launched in February 2004. The only remaining task is an
investigation into the activities of a Pentagon office led by Douglas
J. Feith, then undersecretary of Defense for policy and one of the
architects of the Iraq war.

Congressional officials said the panel is nearing completion of a
report on that subject that will focus largely on a secret post-Sept.
11 meeting between two Defense Department officials who worked for
Feith and an Iranian exile, Manucher Ghorbanifar, who had been a
middleman in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and was regarded by
the CIA as unreliable.

The report focusing on the Bush administration's prewar statements is
set to be delivered to members of the committee this week, officials
said. But it could be weeks away from public release because members
may push for changes, and much of the material cited in the report has
yet to be approved for declassification by U.S. intelligence
officials.

Dissatisfied with the scope of the report, Republicans on the panel
are expected to attach a section outlining their objections and
calling attention to prewar claims by prominent Democrats, including
Clinton.

In an October 2002 speech on the Senate floor, Clinton said that if
left unchecked, Hussein "will continue to increase his capacity to
wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop
nuclear weapons."

if you don't want to wait for the report to be released

False Pretenses
Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his
administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of
misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top
officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made
at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11,
2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's
Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive
examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an
orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and,
in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings,
interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key
officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari
Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them),
links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning
of the Bush administration's case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass
destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the
conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including
those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006),
the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose
"Duelfer Report" established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq's
nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis
of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that
culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not
surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make
speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public
debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-
ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.

President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about
Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-
highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq's links to Al
Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed
by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and
McClellan (with 14).

The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what
President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public
consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a
day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public
statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official
transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations)
over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces
relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books,
articles, speeches, and interviews.

Consider, for example, these false public statements made in the run-
up to war:

* On August 26, 2002, in an address to the national convention of
the Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney flatly declared: "Simply stated,
there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has ...

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Hi,

Regarding this. I think this might help to evaluate our decision
making.

.

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