Did White House Intentionlly Use Flawed Info?

[jbfam4]

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vpduo073661457feb08,0,7643505.story?coll=ny-editorials-headlines

Did White House Intentionlly Use Flawed Info?

February 8, 2004


CIA Director George Tenet went to unusual lengths Thursday to defend his agency's suspect assessments of Iraq's vanished weapons of mass destruction. But his speech failed to answer some key questions about the CIA's admittedly flawed and hedged estimates. It certainly didn't quell serious doubts about the uses to which the White House put the findings.

Although Tenet took pains to say his agency was never pressured to come up with specific conclusions, he did not address the crucial question emerging as a potent campaign issue: Did the Bush administration honestly and accurately convey intelligence estimates on Iraq's threat capabilities in making a case for war, or did it select only data that would support a worst-case scenario?

Even President George W. Bush, in a remarkably pugnacious speech Friday, was forced to acknowledge that "We have not yet found the stockpiles of weapons that we thought were there." But he insisted he was right to go to war against Iraq because of Saddam Hussein's history of using such weapons and the threat he'd pose if he had been allowed to develop them again.

That is a long way from declaring that Iraq posed an imminent threat - the justification for the war. This newspaper reluctantly supported the war on the basis of the international consensus that Hussein, left undisturbed, would develop a nuclear weapon with which he could threaten the entire region and control its oil supply in a few years. As it turns out, Iraq was further away from that eventuality than anyone suspected.


The NIE's assessments - and the way the administration used them to make a case for war - should be a key subject of inquiry for congressional investigators and the commission Bush appointed Friday to look into the intelligence failures. Tenet, obviously, did not want the CIA - or himself - to be made the scapegoat in the Iraq intelligence debacle. He was candid about some of the flaws in the intelligence process - the failure to penetrate Hussein's inner circle and the tendency to overestimate Iraq's capabilities after the embarrassing underestimate of its nuclear development in 1991. But the real issue, beyond the CIA's faults, is whether flawed intelligence was intentionally used to justify war. For that, the buck stops in the Oval Office.

[joeybee12]

1. Ok, why did I know this was a crock of s**t when it was being presented...

...and newspapers that weren't necessarily right-wing bought it?

Was it cowardice? Is there such a built-in prejuidice with editors, journalists, et al to believe authority without questioning anything?

I've yet to see a newspaper come out and apologize.

[DrBB]

2. Disturbing inaccuracy here

The NIE's assessments - and the way the administration used them to make a case for war - should be a key subject of inquiry for congressional investigators and the commission Bush appointed Friday to look into the intelligence failures.

Sorry, but the NIE was NOT something "the administration used... to make a case for war." The NIE was hastily assembled, in record short time, at the demand of Congress, over against Bush resistance.. The Bushies didn't even want one, but now there are disturbing signs that they're happy to lay the blame for what they did on the NIE.

Any investigation, whether by the press or the farcical "commission," that assumes the NIE was what drove the case for war is already misconceived and meandering in the wrong direction. The NIE was just a sop to Congressional vanity, and is itself a symptom of what went wrong, not a basis for anything.

[boobooday]

3. Further away than anybody expected? NOT.

There were many people, including very credible people from within the intelligence establishment, who were debunking the Bush Administration claims throughout the run-up to war.

The media has no excuse, and the Bush Administration has no excuse. They should all be ashamed.

Jeanette
http://www.wgoeshome.com