MUST READ Article by Thomas Powers: The Vanishing Case for War

[BurtWorm]

In a nutshell, Thomas Powers' argument: All of the claims the Bushists made before the war as fact have turned out to be, in fact, based on vapor. (But we all knew that.) The lead-up to the war, the war itself and its aftermath are a "disaster" that we'd better learn from or we'll be doomed to repeat it. Powers' thinks this is a systemic problem, rooted in the single-client relationship the CIA "enjoys," in every administration, with the WH. The CIA Director, in particular, represents to the "president" what he will understand to be the intelligence of the nation.

Powers doesn't say this explicitly--for some peculiar reason he globalizes the problem--but I don't think any other conclusion can be drawn: Bush (or Cheney, more likely) demanded a particular kind of intelligence, which Tenet felt obliged to provide in order to hold his job. This administration, in other words, put the intelligence cart before the horse. (But we all knew that.) Powers says, "The invasion and conquest of Iraq by the United States last spring was the result of what is probably the least ambiguous case of the misreading of secret intelligence information in American history. Whether it is even possible that a misreading so profound could yet be in some sense 'a mistake' is a question to which I shall return. Going to war was not something we were forced to do and it certainly was not something we were asked to do. It was something we elected to do for reasons that have still not been fully explained."

Following is a very interesting portion of the article that addresses the terrible failure of Congress to pull the reins on the war:


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16813


The Vanishing Case for War
By Thomas Powers

...


Why senators and congressmen accepted the CIA's findings is a question that demands explanation. They bought the story once, and might do it again. President Bush has warned both Syria and Iran to abandon their own programs to build weapons of mass destruction--warnings that closely follow in tone and wording those once directed at Iraq. Congress may soon find itself considering a new vote for war to meet threats and avoid dangers described by intelligence officials only in closed hearings. The key judgments, as before, will be laid out by the one-customer CIA; they will reflect the wishes and preconceptions of the White House; they will be based on evidence Congress will find it hard to judge; and there will be intense psychological pressure to accept what they are told, support the President, and stand fast against enemies.

The congressional vote for war last October was not unanimous--in the Senate the count was 77 to 23 in favor of war, in the House 296 to 133. Many senators and representatives argued that war was unnecessary or unwise or even wrong; some said the UN inspectors should be given more time, a few said they were not convinced the danger was imminent. But it seems that no one argued, or even suggested, what now appears to have been true--that Iraq was telling the truth in its 12,000-page report when it said it no longer had its banned weapons. Much more typical was the judgment of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who voted with multiple hesitations for the resolution but accepted the CIA's "Key Judgments." "This much is undisputed," she said about Iraq's ongoing programs for WMD, and she was right--it was undisputed. Senator John Kerry said much the same: "There is little question that Saddam Hussein wants... nuclear weapons." That was the problem--too little question.

In their defense the credulous senators and representatives might argue that the UN inspectors had not yet resumed their work and they had no independent check of the CIA's claims. But even after the inspections resumed last November, and the CIA conspicuously failed to provide the team with information that turned up actual weapons of any kind, the members of Congress who had voted the blank check held their peace. In the Senate a week after Powell's speech to the UN Robert Byrd lamented this timid march to war. "There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war," he said. "We stand passively mute...paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events."

...

[BurtWorm]

1. kick

[BurtWorm]

2. This article is not to missed!

[Romberry]

3. Kick for a must read!

nt*

[BurtWorm]

4. Kick again

[HFishbine]

5. About that 12,000 page Iraqi report

I seem to recall reports that the administration redacted portions before it went to the UN. Is that right? Anybody have a source for further substantiation?

[Media_Lies_Daily]

6. If I remember correctly, the U.S. snatched up the original...

...and actually REMOVED thousands of pages before sending copies of what remained to the other members of the UN Security Council. Only 4000 pages were left of the 12000 pages in the original report.

[pfitz59]

8. Deleting names of US corps.......

which sold the shit to Saddam in the first place! BFEE BS!

[Media_Lies_Daily]

7. Here's a link...

US Illegally Removes Pages from Iraq UN Report
<http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2004/3.html>

"Throughout the winter of 2002, the Bush administration publicly accused Iraqi weapons declarations of being incomplete. The almost unbelievable reality of this situation is that it was the United States itself that had removed over 8,000 pages of the 11,800 page original report.

This came as no surprise to Europeans however, as Iraq had made extra copies of the complete weapons declaration report and unofficially distributed them to journalists throughout Europe. The Berlin newspaper Die Tageszetung broke the story on December 19, 2002 in an article by Andreas Zumach."

[BurtWorm]

9. You mean there's a full report, with all 12,000 pages, available?

According to your link:

According to Niman, "The missing pages implicated twenty-four U.S.-based corporations and the successive Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. administration in connection with the illegal supplying of Saddam Hussein government with myriad weapons of mass destruction and the training to use them." Groups documented in the original report that were supporting Iraq's weapons programs prior to Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait included:

- Eastman Kodak, Dupont, Honeywell, Rockwell, Sperry, Hewlett-Packard, and Bechtel,
- U.S. government agencies such as the Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture and Department of Defense,
- Nuclear weapons labs such as Lawrence-Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia.
Beginning in 1983, the U.S. was involved in eighty shipments of biological and chemical components, including strains of botulism toxin, anthrax, gangrene bacteria, West Nile fever virus, and Dengue fever virus. These shipments continued even after Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran in 1984. Later, in 1988 Iraq used the chemical weapons against the Kurds.

But perhaps most importantly, the missing pages contain information that could potentially make a case for war crimes against officials within the Reagan and the Bush Sr. administrations. This includes the current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — for his collaboration with Saddam Hussein leading up to the massacres of Iraqi Kurds and acting as liaison for U.S. military aid during the war between Iraq and Iran.