Thursday, June 05, 2003
Oreilly's Talking Points and WMD
Last night Bill Oreilly talked about the contraversy surrounding WMD in Iraq. I agreed with almost everything he said, except for one thing I completely disagree with him on.
Oreilly says:
All Americans must have confidence that the CIA and other intelligence agencies are honest and effective. If the CIA told Mr. Bush there were weapons, did it make a mistake? If so, how did that mistake come about? These are logical questions that have to be answered in order for Americans to feel confident about their government.
In the end, if the intelligence was faulty, some people have to be fired. If, God forbid, the intelligence was contrived, and I don't believe that, but if it is proven, then Congressional action must be taken.
He wants to blame the CIA for this?!? Give me a break man, don't pin the blame on the intelligence agency for doing it's job by providing intelligence. If someone is to blame it's the Bush administration for selectively choosing what intelligence they wanted to use and exagerating the implications. The CIA knew what they had for real evidence of WMD and when you look at all the intelligence as a whole it did not amount to much. You can't cherry pick intelligence reports for info you want to hear and ignore everything else, especially when the intelligence you want to run with is disputed and contradicted by ten other intelligence reports.
I GIVE YOU ONE LAST WARNING DON'T PIN THE BLAME ON THE CIA WHEN THE ADMISTRATION NEEDS A FALL GUY OR YOU WILL REALLY PISS ME OFF.
The following are excerpts from News Week
The case that Saddam possessed WMD was based, in large part, on assumptions, not hard evidence.
In recent years, the CIA detected some signs of Saddam’s moving money around, building additions to suspected WMD sites, and buying chemicals and equipment abroad that could be used to make chem-bio weapons. But the spooks lacked any reliable spies, or HUMINT (human intelligence), inside Iraq.
The Cabal was eager to find a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda, especially proof that Saddam played a role in the 9-11 attacks. The hard-liners at Defense seized on a report that Muhammad Atta, the chief hijacker, met in Prague in early April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence official. Only one problem with that story, the FBI pointed out. Atta was traveling at the time between Florida and Virginia Beach, Va. (The bureau had his rental car and hotel receipts.)
The evidence sometimes cited to support Saddam’s nuclear program was shaky, however. On the morning after Bush’s State of the Union address in January, Greg Thielmann, who had recently resigned from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR)—whose duties included tracking Iraq’s WMD program—read the text in the newspaper. Bush had cited British intelligence reports that Saddam was trying to purchase “significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Thielmann was floored. “When I saw that, it really blew me away,” Thielmann told NEWSWEEK. Thielmann knew about the source of the allegation. The CIA had come up with some documents purporting to show Saddam had attempted to buy up to 500 tons of uranium oxide from the African country of Niger. INR had concluded that the purchases were implausible—and made that point clear to Powell’s office. As Thielmann read that the president had relied on these documents to report to the nation, he thought, “Not that stupid piece of garbage. My thought was, how did that get into the speech?” It later turned out that the documents were a forgery, and a crude one at that, peddled to the Italians by an entrepreneurial African diplomat. The Niger minister of Foreign Affairs whose name was on the letterhead had been out of office for more than 10 years. The most cursory checks would have exposed the fraud.
Before Powell's speech before the UN he was:
Presented with a “script” by the White House national-security staff, Powell suspected that the hawks had been “cherry-picking,” looking for any intel that supported their position and ignoring anything to the contrary.
The following is from TIME
CIA Director George Tenet took the unusual step of issuing a statement last Friday dismissing suggestions that the CIA politicized its intelligence. "Our role is to call it like we see it, to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think and what we base it on. That's the code we live by." Asked to translate, an intelligence official explained that if there was a breakdown on the Bush team, it wasn't at the agency. "There's one issue in terms of collecting and analyzing intelligence," he said. "Another issue is what policymakers do with that information. That's their prerogative."
"They were inclined to see and interpret evidence a particular way to support a very deeply held conviction," the officer says. "I just think they felt there needed to be some sort of rallying point for the American people. I think they said it sincerely, but I also think that at the end of the day, we'll find out their interpretations of the intelligence were wrong."
"Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence,"
Last night Bill Oreilly talked about the contraversy surrounding WMD in Iraq. I agreed with almost everything he said, except for one thing I completely disagree with him on.
Oreilly says:
All Americans must have confidence that the CIA and other intelligence agencies are honest and effective. If the CIA told Mr. Bush there were weapons, did it make a mistake? If so, how did that mistake come about? These are logical questions that have to be answered in order for Americans to feel confident about their government.
In the end, if the intelligence was faulty, some people have to be fired. If, God forbid, the intelligence was contrived, and I don't believe that, but if it is proven, then Congressional action must be taken.
He wants to blame the CIA for this?!? Give me a break man, don't pin the blame on the intelligence agency for doing it's job by providing intelligence. If someone is to blame it's the Bush administration for selectively choosing what intelligence they wanted to use and exagerating the implications. The CIA knew what they had for real evidence of WMD and when you look at all the intelligence as a whole it did not amount to much. You can't cherry pick intelligence reports for info you want to hear and ignore everything else, especially when the intelligence you want to run with is disputed and contradicted by ten other intelligence reports.
I GIVE YOU ONE LAST WARNING DON'T PIN THE BLAME ON THE CIA WHEN THE ADMISTRATION NEEDS A FALL GUY OR YOU WILL REALLY PISS ME OFF.
The following are excerpts from News Week
The case that Saddam possessed WMD was based, in large part, on assumptions, not hard evidence.
In recent years, the CIA detected some signs of Saddam’s moving money around, building additions to suspected WMD sites, and buying chemicals and equipment abroad that could be used to make chem-bio weapons. But the spooks lacked any reliable spies, or HUMINT (human intelligence), inside Iraq.
The Cabal was eager to find a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda, especially proof that Saddam played a role in the 9-11 attacks. The hard-liners at Defense seized on a report that Muhammad Atta, the chief hijacker, met in Prague in early April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence official. Only one problem with that story, the FBI pointed out. Atta was traveling at the time between Florida and Virginia Beach, Va. (The bureau had his rental car and hotel receipts.)
The evidence sometimes cited to support Saddam’s nuclear program was shaky, however. On the morning after Bush’s State of the Union address in January, Greg Thielmann, who had recently resigned from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR)—whose duties included tracking Iraq’s WMD program—read the text in the newspaper. Bush had cited British intelligence reports that Saddam was trying to purchase “significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Thielmann was floored. “When I saw that, it really blew me away,” Thielmann told NEWSWEEK. Thielmann knew about the source of the allegation. The CIA had come up with some documents purporting to show Saddam had attempted to buy up to 500 tons of uranium oxide from the African country of Niger. INR had concluded that the purchases were implausible—and made that point clear to Powell’s office. As Thielmann read that the president had relied on these documents to report to the nation, he thought, “Not that stupid piece of garbage. My thought was, how did that get into the speech?” It later turned out that the documents were a forgery, and a crude one at that, peddled to the Italians by an entrepreneurial African diplomat. The Niger minister of Foreign Affairs whose name was on the letterhead had been out of office for more than 10 years. The most cursory checks would have exposed the fraud.
Before Powell's speech before the UN he was:
Presented with a “script” by the White House national-security staff, Powell suspected that the hawks had been “cherry-picking,” looking for any intel that supported their position and ignoring anything to the contrary.
The following is from TIME
CIA Director George Tenet took the unusual step of issuing a statement last Friday dismissing suggestions that the CIA politicized its intelligence. "Our role is to call it like we see it, to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think and what we base it on. That's the code we live by." Asked to translate, an intelligence official explained that if there was a breakdown on the Bush team, it wasn't at the agency. "There's one issue in terms of collecting and analyzing intelligence," he said. "Another issue is what policymakers do with that information. That's their prerogative."
"They were inclined to see and interpret evidence a particular way to support a very deeply held conviction," the officer says. "I just think they felt there needed to be some sort of rallying point for the American people. I think they said it sincerely, but I also think that at the end of the day, we'll find out their interpretations of the intelligence were wrong."
"Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence,"
