<h3>The Administration Hasn't Been Cleared on WMD</h3>
I think it's a joke to say that the Bush administration didn't manipulate the information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
You have Powell saying Saddam "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction" in a speech in February 2001. Two months later,
Condi Rice said of Saddam, "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt." But boy did they change their tune less than a year later. If you want more, check out the testimony of Scott Ridder, the former UN chief weapons inspector in Iraq, although the above two statements give lie to the notion that everyone, all along, thought that there were huge WMD stockpiles in Iraq.
Certain members of the CIA have taken the rap for the Bush Administration. In press statements, Kay sucked up to Bush while the search was in process, and he is transferring blame to the CIA now. Tenet took the blame for the "16 words" about Iraq's nuclear program in Bush's state of the union speech last year, but if you looked into it, it was clearly bullshit. The administration had been informed that the Niger story was bogus back in October of 2002. They had been told by the CIA -- by Tenet, even--to take it out of a different speech. When Condi was asked on TV why the claim was still in the state of the union, she said that everyone forgot. She said, "We are trying to put now in place methods so you don't have to be dependent on people's memories for something like that."
We forgot? You don't "forget" about things like that.
MORE...
I love
Tom Tomorrow's comeback on that one:
Gosh, I guess we all forget things from time to time. What we had for dinner last night, or whether a key piece of evidence supporting a planned unilateral invasion is credible or not. Things like that. At least they're working on methods to supplement fallible human memory. And Condi, if you're reading this, might I suggest Post-It notes? You can just scribble a quick note to yourself -- yellowcake uranium story utterly fictional, say -- and stick it on your computer monitor, so that when you get to work on that State of the Union address, you and everyone else who vets the SOTU speech in the entire goddamned White House don't "forget" anything.
Another thing... Don't forget that Cheney's office broke with earlier norms and demanded raw intelligence come to his office so that he and his staff could make sure that 'nothing was missed'. Normally, the CIA processes raw intelligence to corroborate it and make sure it isn't frivolous noise. But Cheney wanted to make sure they didn't miss any dirt to support their desired actions.
I'm not disagreeing with the statement that there are problems with the CIA's set-up... both with their setup (too much reliance on satellites and not enough people on the ground) and with constraints against voicing opposing viewpoints. But it that's not grounds for saying that the Bush administration isn't at fault. They spun the information so hard that it broke. As Kenneth Pollack, who made the case for invading Iraq in his book The Threatening Storm, now says
The intelligence community did overestimate the scope and progress of Iraq's WMD programs, although not to the extent that many people believe. The Administration stretched those estimates to make a case not only for going to war but for doing so at once, rather than taking the time to build regional and international support for military action.
On the other side of the Atlantic, you have the Hutton report exonerating the Blair administration from naughtiness in exaggerating the WMD threat and in leaking the identity of David Kelly, the source of the BBC story who later appeared dead in the woods near his house. I was seething when I heard Blair on the radio yesterday saying "we never leaked Kelly's identity." Yet when the controversy was in full steam, you had
a reporter saying that it was easy to figure out Kelly's identity with a little poking about on the Web. The government had leaked enough information so that he was clearly identifiable, and when the reporter narrowed it down to two names, they confirmed which one it was. To say that they didn't leak his identity is like quibbling over the definition of "leak".
Furthermore, in reading some of the testimony from the Hutton hearings, it's not justifiable to say that they didn't exaggerate the WMD threats. The whole 45 minute claim was basically out of nowhere and even that nowhere source was exaggerated. It was only Hutton who exonerated Blair. When Hutton was appointed (by Blair) he was identified as having a distinguished career, but was also called "a pair of safe hands", according to an interviewee on NPR yesterday.
Finally, there are still the other reported complaints from intelligence agents that they felt pressured to come up with specific findings. That is what this whole Wilson/Plame case was about. The media always says that it was to punish Wilson for going against the president. But I've only heard one person say what I also think is the real reason: it was to give a signal to other intelligence officers what the price could be for speaking out.
If you don't think this administration pressures people and manipulates information and intelligence for its own purpose, just look at what's happening in the EPA. When it came time to publish a State of the Environment report, they clashed with the administration over the environment. An internal memo was leaked from this period of negotiations in which it was stated that they could not comply with the White House and still publish a credible report on climate change. So they just purged that section from the report completely. At the same time that the Bushies claim there is no greenhouse effect, you have the Pentagon actively strategizing for the changes that may come. As far as the EPA goes, I've read headlines now saying that the administration is trying to change the scientific research process to make the results more controllable.