posted February 10, 2006 03:42 PM            

A former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East during the Iraq invasion accused the White House of misusing prewar intelligence to justify its case for war.

Paul Pillar, who was national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, also said the Senate intelligence committee and a presidential commission overlooked evidence that the Bush administration politicized the intelligence process to support White House policymakers.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar said in an article written for the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs and posted on the magazine's Web site on Friday.

"If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war -- or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath," he said.

Pillar was not immediately available for comment. A CIA spokesman said Pillar was expressing his own personal point of view and not the official views of the spy agency.

The CIA and other agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community have been widely criticized for prewar Iraq intelligence including the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which was a main justification for the war. No such weapons have been found.

'CHERRY-PICKING' INTELLIGENCE

But Pillar, a widely respected intelligence analyst who spent 28 years at the CIA, said it has become clear since the 2003 invasion that the White House did not use official intelligence analysis in making even the most significant national security decisions.

Policymakers instead employed a "cherry-picking" approach that selected pieces of raw intelligence that seemed most favorable to its WMD claims and the charge of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

The White House ignored intelligence reports that said Iraq was not fertile ground for democracy and warned of a long, difficult turbulent post-invasion period that would require a Marshall Plan-type effort to restore the country's economy despite its abundant oil reserves.

Reports also predicted an occupying force would be a target of resentment and attacks including guerrilla warfare.

Pillar said the Bush administration politicized Iraq intelligence by repeatedly calling for more material that would contribute to its case for war, a tactic that he said skewed intelligence resources toward topics favoring the White House.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the WMD commission have both concluded in official reports that there was no evidence of White House political pressure.

"But the method of investigation used by the panels -- essentially, asking analysts whether their arms had been twisted -- would have caught only the crudest attempts at politicization," Pillar wrote.

posted February 11, 2006 04:54 AM              

Just filling in for him

Maybe we should put out a Missing persons ad for him... something like "Missing! Lost Republican, probably to be observed shouting 'Death to Commies' and rooting through Ted Kennedy's dustbins. If found please assist with returning him to the present decade."

posted February 24, 2006 05:25 PM            

Along came Porter Goss, a real CIA agent from years past who swept them out of their cushy offices and into the street.

Rogue Bureaucrat
The problem with Paul Pillar's Foreign Affairs piece.
by Thomas Joscelyn
02/23/2006 8:20:00 AM

IT IS NO SECRET that the Bush administration and the old guard at the CIA have not, in many instances, seen eye to eye over the last several years. Leaks and anonymously-sourced complaints from agency officials have dominated above-the-fold news stories. The rancorous bureaucrats at the agency have been so hostile to the administration, in fact, that Senator John McCain warned, on ABC's This Week, in November 2004, that "This is a dysfunctional agency and in some ways a rogue agency."

Porter Goss, who became the director of Central Intelligence in April 2005, has confronted this highly-politicized bureaucracy. The result has been a staggering amount house cleaning. Various press accounts have discussed the ongoing purge of senior-level officials from Langley. But the bureaucrats who once ran the nation's supposedly super-secret spook organization aren't going down without a fight. Bureaucracies die hard.

Enter Paul Pillar.

Few, if any, old guard bureaucrats have been more vocal in their opposition to the Bush administration than the man who was the former National Intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the CIA from 2000 to 2005.

We still don't know who leaked Pillar's own National Intelligence Estimate, which painted "a dark assessment of Iraq," to the New York Times in September 2004. That leak, which was disclosed just several weeks prior to the presidential election, seemed perfectly timed to discredit the Bush administration and its policies. But it is clear that Pillar long ago discarded his "neutral role" as an intelligence analyst and "inject[ed]
himself in the political realm," as Guillermo Christensen, himself a 15-year veteran of the CIA, recently explained in the Wall Street Journal.

It is no surprise, then, that upon departing Langley we find Pillar continuing his career as a critic of the Bush administration in the pages of Foreign Affairs Magazine. With more than a dab of irony, Pillar claims to expose the ways in which the administration "disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case."

But while there are certainly legitimate, rational criticisms to be made of the Bush administration's prosecution of the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and the intelligence that informs its handling of both, you will not find any of them in Pillar's piece. Instead, Pillar demonstrates that he himself is a master of the art of politicizing intelligence. Far from being a dispassionate analyst, Pillar practices the very same "manipulations and misuse[s]" he claims to expose.

CONSIDER, for example, Pillar's discussion of the prewar investigation into Iraq's relationship with al Qaeda. The "greatest discrepancy," Pillar claims, "between the administration's public statements and the intelligence community's judgments concerned not WMD (there was indeed a broad consensus that such programs existed), but the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. The enormous attention devoted to this subject did not reflect any judgment by intelligence officials that there was or was likely to be anything like the 'alliance' the administration said existed." Moreover, "The intelligence community never offered any analysis that supported the notion of an alliance between Saddam and al Qaeda."

The only reason analysts investigated the relationship, according to Pillar, was because they were continually peppered with pointed questions by the administration, which was on a pre-determined path to war. And the administration's fixation on this non-existent relationship diverted the CIA's preciously scarce resources. So much so that "It is fair to ask how much other counterterrorism work was left undone as a result."

It would be difficult to construct a more skewed history of events.

TO UNDERSTAND how out-of-step with reality Pillar's narrative is, consider what the Senate's bipartisan investigation into the uses of prewar intelligence had to say about the CIA's investigation into Iraq's al Qaeda ties. Far from being an unjustified concern of the Bush administration alone, Pillar's own division at the CIA was independently investigating the issue as the war approached.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq, released July 7, 2004, discusses "five primary finished intelligence products on Iraq's links to terrorism" produced by the CIA. The last two of these, versions of a document called Iraqi Support for Terrorism, are of paramount importance since they were produced in the months leading up to the war.

On September 19, 2002, according to the Senate Intelligence Report, the CIA's first version of Iraqi Support for Terrorism was "disseminated to 12 senior officials by the CIA Directorate of Intelligence." Interestingly, "it was not drafted to respond to a specific request." Instead, "CIA officials decided that new intelligence warranted another look at
the issue." (Emphasis added)

That there was "new intelligence" that demanded attention should come as no surprise. On October 7, 2002 George Tenet, then the DCI, reported to Congress that there "growing indications of a relationship with al Qaeda," which " suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action." The paper was initially drafted by "a senior analyst from the Near East and South Asia Division," who "worked closely with the Iraq analysts in the Counter Terrorism Center's (CTC) Office of Terrorism Analysis." Was this analyst Pillar himself? We don't know. But at the very least it must have been one reporting to him.

The CTC later took over responsibility for editing and publishing updated versions of the analysis, which included additional "intelligence collected from detainees between September 2002 and January 2003." A second version of Iraqi Support for Terrorism was then disseminated to a wider audience in January 2003, on the eve of Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations in early February, with "references to highly sensitive sources and methods" edited out.

Thus, contrary to Pillar's claims, his own division at the CIA thought there were good reasons based on "new intelligence" to investigate the matter--without any "specific request" from the Bush administration--in the months leading up to the war.

Why did officials at the CIA think that the issue warranted an additional investigation? The reality of this matter is far more complicated than the quick and dirty narrative Pillar gives us.

ALTHOUGH the Senate Intelligence Report is heavily redacted, the excerpts of Iraqi Support for Terrorism that were made available for public consumption, as well as the Senate Intelligence Committee's own analysis, paint a very different picture than the one Pillar wants us to see. The CIA, we learn, had failed to collect first-hand human intelligence inside either the Iraqi regime or al Qaeda. Despite this poor collection effort, however, the CIA had acquired intelligence on a relationship between the two--primarily from foreign government services and open sources.

The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded, for example that "despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al-Qaida." In fact, the CIA "did not have a focused human intelligence (HUMINT) collection strategy targeting Iraq's links to terrorism until 2002." The CIA's intelligence collection was so bad that the agency did not have "any unilateral sources that could provide information on the Iraq/al-Qaida relationship" and was "entirely dependent on foreign government services for that information."

It is true that the CIA refrained from concluding that an "operational relationship" existed--a conclusion that was more forcefully echoed by the 9/11 Commission. But, this was because the CIA did not have "credible reporting on the leadership of either the Iraqi regime or al-Qaida, which would have enabled it to better define a cooperative relationship, if any did in fact exist."

PILLAR DOES NOT TELL US about the old guard at the CIA's poor track record in collecting intelligence. That is not surprising. Good bureaucrats, after all, defend the bureaucracy from outside criticism.

Instead, he pretends to dismiss the issue with absolute certainty--as if he had been reviewing concrete intelligence collected by his colleagues over all these years.

Nor does Pillar tell us that when the CIA revisited the issue they did compile evidence of a relationship. Any intelligence analysis, by its very nature, must deal with vagaries and uncertainties. But here we come to the most egregious aspect of Pillar's Foreign Affairs piece. He avoids substantive discussion of the actual intelligence the CIA had amassed from various other sources; evidence that, in many instances, cuts against his out-of-hand dismissal.

Again, we turn to what Pillar's own division at the CIA told the administration on the eve of war. "Our knowledge of Iraq's ties to terrorism is evolving," the CIA wrote in Iraqi Support for Terrorism. "Regarding the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," the CIA assessed, "reporting from sources of varying reliability points to a number of contacts, incidents of training, and discussions of Iraqi safehaven for Osama bin Laden and his organization dating from the early 1990s."

There was evidence that al Qaeda had metastasized inside regime-controlled Iraq. According to the Senate Intelligence Report, "Iraqi Support for Terrorism described a network of more than a dozen al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-associated operatives in Baghdad, and estimated that 100-200 al-Qaeda fighters were present in northeastern Iraq in territory under the control of Ansar al-Islam." Furthermore, "A variety of reporting indicates that senior al-Qaeda terrorist planner al-Zarqawi was in Baghdad between May-July 2002 under an assumed identity." Regarding those hundreds of al Qaeda operatives who set up shop in northeastern Iraq, "it would be difficult for al-Qaeda to maintain an active, long-term presence in Iraq without alerting the authorities or obtaining their acquiescence."

Alarmingly the CIA noted, "The most disturbing aspect of the relationship is the dozen or so reports of varying reliability mentioning the involvement of Iraq or Iraqi nationals in al Qaeda's efforts to obtain CBW training." Elsewhere, the CIA's analysts noted that they could not determine if some of these nationals were working for the Iraqi regime or not. But still, "The general pattern that emerges is of al Qaeda's enduring interest in acquiring, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) expertise from Iraq."

(It is worth remembering that one of Pillar's colleagues, Michael Scheuer, was once able to determine that Iraq was, in fact, aiding al Qaeda's pursuit of CBRN expertise.)

There is much more to this story, of course. There is a vast body of evidence that indicates there was an ongoing relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. Pillar, however, would prefer not to debate the meaning of this evidence. It may turn out that the bureaucracy he served missed quite a bit over the last decade. It may also turn out that Pillar's own understanding of the terror network was inadequate.

In either case, it is safer for Pillar to pretend that the relationship was a fantasy of the administration that decided it was time for his CIA to undergo a radical change.

Thomas Joscelyn is an economist and writer living in New York.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/011/901oltmc.asp?pg=1

posted February 25, 2006 12:22 AM            

"No information has emerged thus far to suggest that Saddam did try to employ Al Qaida in conducting terrorist attacks."

posted February 25, 2006 02:16 AM            

I'm much more impressed with the official findings of the Senate Select Committee Report and the 9/11 Commission Report on the matter at hand that there was no evidence of Administration pressure on intelligence agencies or analysts to produce a particular intelligence finding.

"The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the WMD commission have both concluded in official reports that there was no evidence of White House political pressure."

Reuters

Apparently Paul Pillar didn't see fit to share his concerns with the 9/11 Commission or the Senate Select Committee that political pressure was brought to bear on intelligence analysts to produce intelligence findings favorable to Administration positions on Iraq and al-Quida...whatever that position was at the time.

Paul Pillar and the band of Agency bureaucrats were the problem at the CIA. A problem being diligently corrected by Porter Goss.

posted February 25, 2006 02:24 AM            

Donald Rumsfeld didnt like that the CIA couldn't prove the link, so he hired two groups to look into it. These groups took the least reliable information the CIA had, and presented Rumsfeld with the argument he wanted to hear. Then to further politicize it, they presented it to Cheney's staff with the unjust criticism of the CIA.

It's all there in black and white.

posted February 25, 2006 12:18 PM            

Thanks for identifying the culprit who penned the notes in the margin. The culprit who came to exactly the opposite conclusion from that stated in the document he was trying to use to make his point.

quote:

---

I wrote in those margins, and it's 100% clear that the DOD forced politicization of the issue. If you read the document, it's impossible to come to any other conclusion....acoustic

---

Repeat 1000 time acoustic

It was not clear.
It was not clear
It was not clear
It was not clear........

Now acoustic, anytime you feel compelled to come to a different conclusion than the one being expressed in a document you are using to try to make a point....a point you so desperately want to make...whether it's true or not....then acoustic, repeat the qualifiers 1000 times until the urge to have a Michael Moore type moment passes out of your system.

One other thing acoustic. I've already warned you against ever attempting to become an analyst of information. You should have taken my advice.

Now acoustic repeat the conclusions of the Senate Select Committee and the 9/11 Commission...and keep repeating it until you get it right.

"there was no evidence of White House political pressure."
"there was no evidence of White House political pressure."
"there was no evidence of White House political pressure."
"there was no evidence of White House political pressure."
"there was no evidence of White House political pressure.".......

Paul Pillar was one of the rogue bureaucrats at the CIA John McCain was talking about. A rogue bureaucrat now attempting to make political capital out of CIA and other intelligence services findings...as well as Commission findings.

Make that ex rogue CIA bureaucrat.

posted February 25, 2006 12:32 PM            

Jwhop, I've already proven that your reading comprehension isn't the greatest. For people with half a brain it's clear that the reason they state, "It was not clear however, whether the formal tasking system had been used to funnel requests to the Intelligence Community for analysis that would suit OUSDP needs," is because Rumsfeld and the people who set up the OUSDP would never openly admit that they created the OUSDP as a means of trying to promote the argument that Iraq is tied to Al Qaida. Your quoted statement, in any rational person's mind, should indicate that there is still some question as to whether the OUSDP was created with the intention of creating that link between Iraq and Al Qaida.

It's not very difficult to understand Jwhop.

A person who spends over 20 years in the service of his country shouldn't be called a 'rogue' anything. That's pretty reprehensible and unpatriotic.

posted February 25, 2006 12:50 PM            

Page three says that the CIA Ombudsman for Politicization received a confidential complaint four days after the paper was published ...claiming the CTC paper was misleading, in that it did not make clear that it was an uncoordinated product that did not reflect the NESA's views and assessments. Why would it be reported there, Jwhop?

Page four states implicitly, "What happened with the "murky paper" was I was asking the people who were writing it to lean far forward and do a speculative piece." This is the same report that the OUSDP (Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy) cited as their definitive proof of Iraq/Al Qaida ties.

posted February 25, 2006 01:38 PM            

Made all the more prattling nonsense when the very report you cite stated,(quote)"it was unclear" and further, the 9/11 Commission Report, the Senate Select Committee Report and the WMD Report make it crystal clear, "there was no evidence of White House political pressure."

It's all there acoustic. All you have to do is get in touch with reality. That and read the 9/11 Commission finding which says there was a connection between Saddam and al-Quida...not an operational connection...meaning there was no evidence Saddam participated in the 9/11 attack on the WTC...which was the subject of and the reason for the 9/11 Commission being convened in the first place.

posted February 25, 2006 01:45 PM            

The report we're speaking of above states that there was a link, but that they hadn't joined forces (but might if Saddam was backed into a corner). Similar statements were in the 911 Commission report, but once again they came to the conclusion that al Qaida had nothing to do with 911, and that there was no (operational, as you say) link between them.

quote:

---

I only needed to come up with enough to blow your cockeyed prattlings out of the water...that (quote)it's 100% clear that the DOD forced politicization of the issue Thanks for providing the proof in the very document you cited to prove your cockeyed theory.

---

I did provide proof. It's really, truly sad that you refuse to read the document and look at the facts.

I'll be back tomorrow night at the earliest, and hopefully by then you'll have actually come up with something (rather than merely thinking you came up with something).

posted February 26, 2006 12:43 AM            

That's right acoustic, the report says, as I stated, there was no operational connection between al-Qaida and Saddam. And acoustic, the President never claimed Saddam had anything to do with 9/11. In fact, Bush stated over and over again there was no proof Saddam was connected to the 9/11 attacks.

posted February 27, 2006 12:57 AM            

When did ANYONE say that Al-Qaida had nothing to do with 911?

Of course there was no operational connection between al-Qaida and Saddam! That's what people like Paul Pillar have been saying all along:

quote:

---

But Pillar, a widely respected intelligence analyst who spent 28 years at the CIA, said it has become clear since the 2003 invasion that the White House did not use official intelligence analysis in making even the most significant national security decisions.

Policymakers instead employed a "cherry-picking" approach that selected pieces of raw intelligence that seemed most favorable to its WMD claims and the charge of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

---

posted February 27, 2006 10:08 AM            

quote:

---

When did ANYONE say that Al-Qaida had nothing to do with 911?.....acoustic

---

quote:

---

The report we're speaking of above states that there was a link, but that they hadn't joined forces (but might if Saddam was backed into a corner). Similar statements were in the 911 Commission report, but once again they came to the conclusion that al Qaida had nothing to do with 911, and that there was no (operational, as you say) link between them.....acoustic

---

"Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," Bush said Oct. 7 in his nationally televised Cincinnati speech. "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving fingerprints." The terrorists he was referring to were "al-Qaida members."

An absolutely true statement acoustic. Saddam could, on any given day decide to do a variety of things...one of which could be to hand off chemical and/or biological weapons to al-Qiada for use against the US...or our allies.

"The Sept. 11 commission reported yesterday that it has found no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda, challenging one of the Bush administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq."

Notice the attempted lie in this story you linked acoustic. Bush never claimed there were operational links between al-Qaida and Saddam only that there were links...and there WERE links between al-Qaida and Saddam. The 9/11 report DID NOT SAY THERE WERE NO LINKS.


'Vice President Cheney said in a speech on Monday that Saddam Hussein "had long-established ties with al Qaeda." The Sept. 11 panel said in a report that it has found no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda."

Notice the attempted lie in this story you linked acoustic. Cheney says there were long established ties between Saddam and al-Qaida and the paper decides to not publish what the 9/11 Commission said about the ties/links between Saddam and al-Qaida but rather to change the focus to "no collabortive relationship....which is an entirely different issue.

"President Bush yesterday defended his assertions that there was a relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, putting him at odds with this week's finding of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission."

This story you linked contains an outright lie acoustic...an outright lie the paper knows is an outright lie and you know it's a lie too. The Bush statement is absolutely true...there was a relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida and the 9/11 Commission findings were that there was a relationship/links/ties between the parties.....just not a collaborative relationship.

But that non collaborative relationship could have changed on any given day...couldn't it have...acoustic?

"Hey Osama, this is Saddam. I find myself with an embarrassment of riches...WMD wise. They're getting harder and harder to shift around from location to location. Those damned inspectors are everywhere and I'm wearing out my trucks moving them around. I've been thinking Osama, that it might be wise to disperse them around to both avoid detection and place them into hands which can effectively use them. They aren't doing me any good where they are and if those idiot inspectors from the UN happen to get lucky and stumble onto one of my hiding spots, they will confiscate them anyway.

So what do you think Osama, would you like some chemical and biological weapons to use in your jihad against the infidel Americans?

And Osama says.....

I don't need no stinkin WMD

Right acousic? Right

Paul Pillar and a lot of other entrenched bureaucrats don't work at the CIA any more acoustic. They don't work there anymore because they decided they were a power unto themselves and that their job was to oppose policy, policy of the Executive Branch of government whom they report to. The CIA is not a policy making organization acoustic. The job of the CIA is to provide intelligence and carry out the policy decisions of the Administration. That's the reason Porter Goss was sent to the CIA to clean it up...and to clean out the nest of vipers who worked there....one of whom was Paul Pillar.

posted February 27, 2006 12:26 PM            

quote:

---

Notice the attempted lie in this story you linked acoustic. Bush never claimed there were operational links between al-Qaida and Saddam only that there were links...and there WERE links between al-Qaida and Saddam. The 9/11 report DID NOT SAY THERE WERE NO LINKS.

---

There is no attempted lie. There is what Bush said, which alludes to a collaborative relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and there is the response: that there wasn't a collaborative relationship between the two. And it wasn't just Bush either. Cheney was often touting the Saddam Al-Qaeda relationship as well. That they didn't specify themselves that it wasn't a collaborative relationship from the start flatly implicates their desire to deceive. Show me ANY instance in which Bush or Cheney clarified the difference early on, or pre war. Why do you suppose the President and Vice President were out promoting the idea of this relationship?

Consider the words they use, "longstanding ties." Saddam himself said, "If we had a relationship with al-Qaeda and we believed in that relationship, we wouldn't be ashamed to admit it." Does that sound like a "tie" to you?

quote:

---

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney, anxious to defend the White House foreign policy amid ongoing violence in Iraq, stunned intelligence analysts and even members of his own administration this week by failing to dismiss a widely discredited claim: that Saddam Hussein might have played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism specialist, said that Cheney's "willingness to use speculation and conjecture as facts in public presentations is appalling. It's astounding."

Nonetheless, 69 percent of Americans believe that Hussein probably had a part in attacking the United States, according to a recent Washington Post poll. And Democratic senators have charged that the White House is fanning the misperception by mentioning Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks in ways that suggest a link.

"The general public just doesn't have any independent way of weighing what is said," Cannistraro, the former CIA counterterrorism specialist, said. "If you repeat it enough times . . . then people become convinced it's the truth."
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/09/16/cheney_link_of_iraq_911_challenged/

---

quote:

---

Bush stands by al Qaeda, Saddam link

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush repeated his administration's claim that Iraq was in league with al Qaeda under Saddam Hussein's rule, saying Tuesday that fugitive Islamic militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ties Saddam to the terrorist network.

"Zarqawi's the best evidence of a connection to al Qaeda affiliates and al Qaeda," Bush told reporters at the White House. "He's the person who's still killing."

U.S. intelligence officials have said al Qaeda had some links to Iraq dating back to the early 1990s, but the nature and extent of those contacts is a matter of dispute.

Critics have accused the president and other administration officials of falsely inflating the links between Iraq and al Qaeda in the months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech Monday in Florida, raised eyebrows by reasserting claims that Saddam "had long-established ties with al Qaeda."

Bush said Tuesday that Saddam also had ties to Palestinian militant groups and was making payments to the families of suicide bombers in Israel.

"We did the absolute right thing in removing him from power, and the world is better off with him not in power," he said.

Bush has tried to portray the war in Iraq as the "central front" in the war on terrorism that began with al Qaeda's September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

In September, after Cheney asserted that Iraq had been "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11," Bush acknowledged there was no evidence that Saddam's government was connected to those attacks.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/06/15/bush.alqaeda/

---

Cheney says ties, Bush says Saddam wasn't connected to the attacks. You like to talk about people speaking out of both sides of their mouths Jwhop. Well, which is it? Do we listen to Cheney or Bush? Do we listen to Bush when he's backing up Cheney, or do we listen to him when he's saying that Saddam isn't linked to Al Qaeda's 911 attacks?

quote:

---

But that non collaborative relationship could have changed on any given day...couldn't it have...acoustic?

---

Apparently the thought either didn't cross Saddam's mind, or he didn't act on it. We can see clearly that Saddam didn't get terrorist groups to do anything to slow or avert our invasion.

quote:

---

Paul Pillar and a lot of other entrenched bureaucrats don't work at the CIA any more acoustic. They don't work there anymore because they decided they were a power unto themselves and that their job was to oppose policy, policy of the Executive Branch of government whom they report to. The CIA is not a policy making organization acoustic. The job of the CIA is to provide intelligence and carry out the policy decisions of the Administration. That's the reason Porter Goss was sent to the CIA to clean it up...and to clean out the nest of vipers who worked there....one of whom was Paul Pillar.

---

That's an opinion, and one you have no factual basis for making. I don't think Paul Pillar was ever trying to make policy. He was merely stating that the policy decided upon by this administration was not based on solid intelligence. Apparently, this administration as well as yourself are trying to make people like him the scape goat. If the DOD wasn't looking for intelligence that wasn't supported, then maybe there wouldn't have been this embarrassment on behalf of the intelligence community.

quote:

---

"They are politicizing intelligence, no question about it," said Vincent M. Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief. "And they are undertaking a campaign to get George Tenet [the director of central intelligence] fired because they can't get him to say what they want on Iraq."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14056-2002Oct24.html

---

posted February 27, 2006 02:49 PM            

The facts remain:

Neither Bush or any White House official ever claimed there was an operational connection between Iraq and al-Qaida

There was clear and convincing evidence there were ties and connections between Iraq and al-Qaida.

The 9/11 Commission reported there were ties and connections between Iraq and al-Qaida.

The 9/11 Commission Report, The Senate Select Committee Report and the WMD Commission Report ALL concluded there was no political pressure brought to bear on intelligence agencies or analysts to reach predetermined conclusions.

Now acoustic, your argument is crap, Paul Pillar is full of crap and an ex renegade CIA bureaucrat to boot.

Your other point is also as flawed as your thought process.

Not just anyone could hand off chemical/biological weapons to al-Qaida but Saddam could have done so.

Not just anyone would have a reason/motive to do so but Saddam certainly had a motive to do so.

Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida have been and had been attempting to obtain or develop WMD for some time...AND acoustic, they most certainly would have taken WMD from Saddam.

I well understand the radical left mourning the loss of yet another socialist/communist dictator acoustic and their rage at Bush for bringing another of their heroes down.

But really acoustic, the radical left needs to grow up. They are further from the levers of power in America than at any time in the last 50 years and they aren't going to get any closer by throwing temper tantrums and wetting themselves.

Nevertheless acoustic, I'm pleased the radical left, radical leftist politicians and the radical leftist press constantly attack the President.

Radical leftist groups are seen by Americans to be the lunatic fringe of America.

Radical leftist politicians in Congress don't seem to understand their approval ratings are much lower than the Presidents.

The radical leftist press has even lower credibility ratings than Congress.

To most American adults, it looks like you all need a baby-sitter.

So, from my perspective, let the screeching, howling and pants wetting continue.