Scottish newspaper Why the CIA thinks Bush is wrong

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger () ibd com>
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 23:00:27 -0700
To: Dave Farber IP <dave () farber net>, Dewayne Hendricks
<dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: Why the CIA thinks Bush is wrong

Why the CIA thinks Bush is wrong
http://www.sundayherald.com/print28384

The president says the US has to act now against Iraq. The trouble is, his
own security services don't agree. Neil Mackay reports

GEORGE Bush was about to be hoist by his own petard. It was Monday last
week, and the president was glad-handing with the great and the good at the
Cincinnati Museum Centre in Ohio as he waited to give one of his most
bellicose speeches yet.

In the audience were Ohio state governor Bob Taft and a host of business and
political luminaries. As the deadline approached for the Senate and House of
Representatives vote on whether or not to give Bush the backing he wanted to
attack Iraq, this speech was to be the president's final flourish in the
propaganda war to get the US marching in line behind him.

Calling Saddam Hussein a 'murderous tyrant', he made it clear why America
had to finish off the Iraqi dictator. 'Facing clear evidence of peril,' he
told the audience, 'we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun --
that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.' He went on: 'We have every
reason to assume the worst and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst
from happening.'

What Bush could not have guessed was that his claims that Iraq was intent on
attacking the USA had already began to unravel. The denouement started a few
days before, on Thursday, October 3, when Senator Bob Graham, chair of the
Senate intelligence committee, metaphorically donned his hob-nailed boots
and began delivering some well-aimed kicks to the head of George Tenet, the
director of the CIA. The CIA, Graham said, were monkeying with democracy.
The agency was not telling his committee what they needed to know about the
Iraqi regime. Tenet was damaging the ability of Congress to assess the need
for military action.

With one week until Congress voted on authorising Bush to use force, Graham
was impatient. These are serious times, he said , and he needed serious
answers. Graham and the committee had received an anodyne intelligence
report from the CIA on the threat posed by Iraq the day before -- Wednesday,
October 2. This, however, answered none of the questions the Senate
committee wanted answered: would Saddam use weapons of mass destruction
(WMD); how would his regime react if attacked; and what would be the
consequences of war?

On October 9, almost a week after Tenet received his whipping at the hands
of Graham, the senator's hardman approach paid off when the director of the
CIA admitted that the only reason Saddam would use WMDs against the United
States was if he was backed into a corner -- due to a strike by the American
military -- and realised he was about to fall. Saddam, Tenet was saying,
would only become the nightmare that Bush envisaged, if Bush attacked him
first. Within two days, then, of Bush's flag-waving call to arms, his most
senior intelligence officer had pulled the rug from under the biggest
project of his presidency.

Tenet's admission left Bush in disarray with revelations making it appear as
if the president was exaggerating the threat from Iraq, to say the least.
Tenet, a loyal subject of the Bush administration, had no option but to come
clean -- no matter how difficult a position it put the president in.

The CIA director's hands were tied on October 3 by Senator Graham, a
democrat who represents Florida, when he told the CIA it was acting
'unacceptably', and added: 'We're trying to carry out a very important
responsibility, and given the nature of this classified information, we are
the only means by which the intelligence community can communicate to the
legislative branch of government.'

There was no way that Tenet could play fast and loose with the Senate. Both
the FBI and CIA have been attacked repeatedly in Congressional hearings
since September 11 for a series of intelligence cock-ups.

Later on October 3, after Graham met with Tenet, his mood had changed --
Graham seemed to be cooler, calmer. He said the meeting had been frank and
candid. What Graham wanted was a flavour of the classified National
Intelligence Estimates, prepared by the National Intelligence Council, whose
analysts report directly to Tenet. On Monday, October 7, around the time
Bush was in Ohio cheerleading for war , Graham received just what he had
been looking for -- it came in the shape of a letter from the CIA director.
It made astonishing reading. Two days later, on Wednesday, October 9, the
Senate intelligence committee voted to make the full text of Tenet's letter
public.

Tenet's letter said he was declassifying selected material to help the
Senate's deliberations on whether or not to support the president over
attacking Iraq. 'Baghdad, for now, appears to be drawing a line short of
conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW (chemical and
biological weapons) against the United States,' the declassified material
read.

'Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he
probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions.
Such terrorism might involve conventional means ... or CBW.

'Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists
in conducting a WMD attack against the US would be his last chance to exact
vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.'

Tenet went on to declassify formerly secret evidence given at a closed
hearing of the Senate's intelligence committee in which democrat Carl Levin,
was told by a 'senior intelligence witness' that the 'probability ... would
be low' of Saddam initiating a WMD attack. The agent also said the chances
were 'pretty high' that Saddam would launch a WMD attack 'if we initiate an
attack and he thought he was in extremis'. Tenet's revelations left the
entire basis of Bush's call to arms in ruins, and the CIA director swiftly
became an embarrassment to the president as the propaganda war backfired .
Tenet was not deliberately trying to undermine Bush -- he was simply forced
into a corner by the Senate and compelled to reveal his true understanding
of the Iraqi crisis.

Kenneth M Pollack, who worked as a military analyst at the CIA before
serving as a top aide on Persian Gulf affairs on President Clinton's
National Security Council, said: 'The agency line is that it is basically
unlikely that Iraq would give WMDs to terrorists under most circumstances.
The Bush administration is trying to make the case that Iraq might try to
give WMDs to al-Qaeda under certain circumstances. But what the agency is
saying is that Saddam is likely to give such weapons to terrorists only
under extreme circumstances when he believes he is likely to be toppled.'

The White House tried to put a different spin on the Tenet letter. Sean
McCormack, the White House National Security Council spokesman, said the
portions of the letter released by Graham gave a misleading impression of
the CIA's overall conclusion. 'There were parts of the Tenet letter that
weren't read in,' he said. Other parts were 'taken out of context', he said.
However, Graham's spokesman, Paul Anderson, denied there had been any
misquoting, and the full document, which the Senate committee has released,
supports Anderson's line.

Lee Hamilton, the former chairman of the House of Representatives
Intelligence Committee, added pointedly: 'It's an overwhelming temptation to
manipulate intelligence to serve policy and, to some extent, I think that's
what's happening here with Iraq.'

<snip>
-- 
Robert J. Berger - Internet Bandwidth Development, LLC.
15550 Wildcat Ridge Saratoga, CA 95070
408-882-4755 Fax: 408-490-2868 rberger () ibd com http://www.ibd.com


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