Dems

“We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light through the prism of our experience on Sept. 11” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate in July.

More truthfully, this administration used our nation’s pain from Sept. 11 to unleash a war which senior Defense officials have advocated since 1992.

Bush’s latest call for an investigation into the pre-war intelligence is but a cover-story, a game of smoke and mirrors, a thin attempt to distract America from thinking seriously about the Bush Administration’s wreck of pre-war intelligence and post-war planning.

The failure of pre-war intelligence was directly orchestrated by Bush’s political appointees. The Pentagon created the “Office of Special Plans” specifically to channel favorable threat-assessments to top policy-makers, bringing dubious stories directly to the top.

Now, officials need the best information that the country can produce. This is why there is an extensive Intelligence Community — a collection of over a dozen agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (which recruits spies and also analyzes international affairs for the president), the Defense Intelligence Agency (which focuses more on the military capabilities of hostile countries, reporting to Rumsfeld), and the National Security Agency (which specializes in spying through technological means such as intercepting communications).

Yet in the run-up to Iraq II the Bush Administration decided to bypass the best intelligence apparatus in the world.

Why? Because the intelligence community was not depicting Saddam as enough of a threat. Many in the administration “believed that CIA analysts tended to be left-leaning cultural relativists who consistently downplayed threats to the United States. They believed that the agency, not the administration, was biased, and that they were acting simply to correct that bias,” Ken Pollack, a senior U.S. intelligence expert, wrote in this month’s Atlantic. In short, Team Bush shut it’s ears to voices of caution within the CIA because Bush and company thought that the CIA was too liberal!

Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq Bush and Cheney personally told Americans that Iraq was a direct threat to America because it had chemical and biological weapons, a nuclear weapons program and links to terrorists (much of which turned out to be false). As Secretary Rumsfeld told the Senate in July, there was no significant new evidence, just regurgitated evidence from 1996 and earlier (collected largely by the United Nations inspectors).

Gathering new intelligence from denied areas such as Iraq is a difficult task, and the United States needs better capabilities.

But this administration’s decision to forecast an immediate threat based solely upon the shreds of evidence it liked was the true failure of intelligence.

Yet the best information in the world will fail you unless you engage it critically. Creating intelligence is about seeking the truth, not producing spin.

And, for petty political reasons, senior Bush officials acted like a talkative Mafioso and revealed the identity of a senior CIA operative involved who was trying to protect our country from WMD.

Team Bush has recklessly undermined our nation’s security. This is what should really be investigated.

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GOP

OK listen. I’ve had more than enough of this conspiracy mumbo-jumbo about Iraq and our president. Fortunately, so has President Bush and he has decided to act on it.

Last week, David Kay, former director of the WMD search in Iraq, went on a speaking tour that included a number of newspapers and radio stations to voice his concern over the intelligence that led us to war. Immediately, the peacenik crowd jumped on his comments, spinning them into some revelation that Bush all along knew about the situation in Iraq and had misled the people of America.

Of course, upon closer inspection, the truth could be seen through the cloud of smoke actively being pumped about by liberals and Bush-haters. In fact, Kay’s comments, viewed in full, were quite pro-Bush in nature. Constantly, he sought to point out the fallacy that it was not Bush who misled, but that Bush was himself misled: “I actually think the intelligence community owes the president (an apology), rather than the president owing the American people,” said Kay.

Another unfounded claim laid against Bush was that he had ordered reports to be “dressed up” so that Saddam’s regime looked more like a threat than it really was. And yet Kay made it a key point to stress that he never came across a single intelligence officer that claimed to have been pressured into falsifying or exaggerating reports.

Kay’s central concern is that our intelligence agencies were not supplying accurate information to the people that needed it. He blames not the president, but the intelligence community for not doing their job effectively.

President Bush announced this week the formulation of a panel of independent analysts to look into the faults in our intelligence agencies. Not only will the panel be charged with uncovering where we went wrong with our Iraq information, but it will also question why we weren’t able to gauge the significant progress of Libya and Iran’s nuclear programs. Also, our general lack of ability to have successfully infiltrated the terror establishment before Sept. 11.

The panel will be selected by President Bush, an issue which has come under fire from Democrats in Congress. The critics seem to think that the panelists should be selected from the CIA, one of the agencies under fire for not doing their job, or perhaps Congress itself, which I’m sure would get straight to the bottom of the mess without any election-year partisanship.

This investigation is a necessary step to improving the security of our nation. After all, it wasn’t only Bush that was fooled.

In fact, if you look at quotes from Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, the German intelligence apparatus, the French, the United Nations, and even David Kay all the way up to his mid-way report on Oct. 2, you will see that everyone thought that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them. Everyone was mistaken.

There is much to be found in this investigation of the intelligence that Bush acted on, and there is much to be learned for the future. However, maybe people shouldn’t look past the still-ongoing search for WMDs in Iraq.

There is much to be found in this investigation of the intelligence that Bush acted on, and there is much to be learned for the future. However, maybe people shouldn’t look past the still-ongoing search for WMDs in Iraq. If I remember correctly, it took months and years to uncover the extent of Saddam’s weapons programs after the first Gulf War, and that was only after he admitted to them when we found a stockpile of WMD shells on a chicken farm. This time, he had months to hide them, as we yelled from the hill-tops, “Here we come!”