Saw this on
Yahoo News:
WASHINGTON - A new book on the government's secret anti-terrorism operations describes how the CIA recruited an Iraqi-American anesthesiologist in 2002 to obtain information from her brother, who was a figure in Saddam Hussein's nuclear program.
Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of Cleveland made the dangerous trip to Iraq on the CIA's behalf. The book said her brother was stunned by her questions about the nuclear program because -- he said -- it had been dead for a decade.
New York Times reporter James Risen uses the anecdote to illustrate how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction. His book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration" describes secret operations of the Bush administration's war on terrorism.
The major revelation in the book has already been the subject of extensive reporting by Risen's newspaper: the National Security Agency's eavesdropping of Americans' conversations without obtaining warrants from a special court.
The book said Dr. Alhaddad flew home in mid-September 2002 and had a series of meetings with CIA analysts. She relayed her brother's information that there was no nuclear program.
A CIA operative later told Dr. Alhaddad's husband that the agency believed her brother was lying. In all, the book says, some 30 family members of Iraqis made trips to their native country to contact Iraqi weapons scientists, and all of them reported that the programs had been abandoned.
In October 2002, a month after the doctor's trip to Baghdad, the U.S intelligence community issued a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program.
I don't think that Bush lied so much as he encouraged his underlings to tell him what he wanted to hear. He wanted Iraq to have WMD, and so intelligence that supported that conclusion was emphasized, while programs such as the one described in this book were swept under the rug. In order to tell Bush what he wanted to hear, the CIA simply ignored intelligence that contradicted the official administration stance that Iraq was developing its nuclear program.
Bush had a conclusion, and he encouraged intelligence-gathering agencies to find information that supported that conclusion. As shown in the book, evidence that did not fit with Bush's conclusion was disregarded.
