http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/Bloggers are buzzing about "Dead Wrong: Inside An Intelligence Meltdown," tonight's CNN Presents special at 8 and 11pm. "This looks like a must-see program," The Grey Matter says. "I think it would be well worth every American watching this program on Sunday," Joe Trippi writes. Follow the rest of the chatter via Technorati.
Will the show live up to the hype? TVNewser asked CNN national security correspondent David Ensor what viewers should expect.
"We tried to make the program an accurate, nuanced presentation on this complex subject," he said on Friday. "We tried to be fair: to give credit, for example, to the intelligence community for its successes of recent years -- and to acknowledge how widespread, and in some ways justifiable was the view that Saddam Hussein's Iraq probably had WMD. At the same time, we did want to take a close look at how the intelligence community and the Bush Administration could reach such firm conclusions on Iraq's WMD, only to find them wrong."
The impetus for doing the program came from CNN Presents executive producer Sid Bedingfield. He was intrigued by some of the details revealed by the investigations into pre-war intelligence weaknesses, Ensor said: "As their reports make clear, there was significant disagreement among different agencies within the intelligence community about the WMD intelligence on Iraq, before it was released to the public. Piecing together the events that led up to the intelligence judgment that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction programs, though no weapons have been found -- and hearing from insiders -- seemed like a worthwhile project."
http://www.turnerinfo.com/newsitem.aspx?P=CNN&CID01=60d2ed9b-df5d-4983-97de-0616b2333afcThe following are quotes from the documentary. Please credit CNN Presents in all uses:
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff from 2002-2005 on Powell’s address to the United Nations on Iraq and WMD: “I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life. I wish I had not been involved.”
Wilkerson, recalling a conversation with Powell: “He walked into my office, musing, and he said words to the effect of, ‘I wonder how we’ll all feel if we put half a million troops into Iraq and march from one corner of the country to the other and find nothing?’”
Carl Ford, assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research: “Once an analyst starts believing their own work and quits doubting themselves and starts saying, ‘I’m going to prove to you that they’ve got nuclear weapons,’ watch out, be on the alert.”
Ford, on whether Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program: “I think that it would have been more accurate for the intelligence community to say, ‘Boss, we don’t know exactly what’s going on there. And there are some indications that they may be working on their nuclear program again, but don’t ask us to go up and prove that to anybody because it’s mostly guess work on our part.’”
David Kay, former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, on the future of U.S. intelligence gathering: “We can’t afford to be wrong a second time. How many people are going to believe us when we say, ‘It’s a slam dunk … Iran has nuclear weapons?’ The answer is going to be: ‘You said that before.’”
Michael Scheuer, CIA analyst from 1982-2004: “There was just a resignation within the agency that we were going to war against Iraq, and it didn’t make any difference what the analysis was, or what kind of objections or countervailing forces there were to an invasion. We were going to war.”
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