Look what I found under the carpet!

[Hoax]

There was a tiny article written in the Washington Post then used in the SF Chronicle on Friday that spoke of a report that basically said the inteligence community had done a great job in Pakistan and other nations but in Iraq had somehow failed to get anything right:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15184-2005Mar31.html  *

*you will need to sign up to view it but that just requires 5min + a gmail account.


I wanted to see if somebody else had caught this somewhere between all the wailing about an old guy who has been sick for a long time dying and a chick who was already dead who is...  still dead.

So, I'm just going to link the report itself in all its edited out all the good classified bits glory.  If you turn to page 4 of 208 (according to things I had read the unclassified one is ~700pgs) you'll see a blue box which reads:

"The Intelligence Community's performance in assesing Iraq's pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure.  The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community's assessments were wrong.  There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers."

http://www.wmd.gov/report

So yeh, in case anyone cares and missed this here ya go.  If this was already mentioned somewhere I'm sorry, I usually stay out of general but I did take a look and missed it.

[Murgos]

I'm guessing this will get pushed to politics by the time I get back from working out.

But in the spirit of the thing..., and?

This is what we WANT our government to do, right?  Determine somethings wrong, study it to find the cause and correct it?  Sounds reasonable to me.

Or are you suprised that there was an intelligence failure in Iraq?

[Hoax]

I just find two things funny:

1) This has gotten ZERO press.  While tube lady's boring story about being dead and now being even more dead snatches all the headlines (where is the liberal media?  They should be all over this right?).

2) The committee was NOT authorized to look into how policy makers used this bullshit info to start a war.  If you read the overview of the actual document you get the feeling that the commitee would have really liked to analyze what happened there.
 
For example:
Colin Powell went before the UN and all his info was comming from one source that the commitee states "was lying".  Period that was the only source his info was comming from..  What the fuck?

[ahoythematey]

Early 2004 called and said it wants it's bullshit back, Hoax.

[sinij]

Early 2004 called and said it wants it's bullshit back, Hoax.

[Murgos]

I just find two things funny:

1) This has gotten ZERO press..

Yes, Actually it has gotten quite a bit of press.  1800+ results as of 30 seconds ago on google news.

2) The committee was NOT authorized to look into how policy makers used this bullshit info to start a war.

Probably because they are policy makers and that kind of investigation requires a senate hearing.  You see, the thing about policy makers is they make policy so its kind of hard to hold them to task for acting on the reports of agencies that they are, you know, required to listen too.

It's not exactly illegal for the president to order an invasion of another country because they served cold grits at the state breakfast that morning so it's going to be REALLY REALLY hard to say anyone at the upper levels did anything knowingly wrong.

As far as I'm concerned this is EXACTLY the correct path for our government to take in addressing the issue.  Who knows, in a few years it might even lead to trials.  Maybe you should take the tinfoil off and go take some courses at the local U on civics.

[Toast]

It doesn't take a Civics class to know that the White House twisted the intelligence that was available to drive toward a predetermined course of action. The performance of the intelligence community was irrelevant. No matter what was discovered about Iraq's "weapons", Iraq was going to be invaded.

This was only an intelligence failure in the sense that the analysts allowed their work to be modified to draw a conclusion that the actual data did not support.

[Biobanger]

No, I'm leaning toward the belief that the executive branch didn't convince the "Intelligence" community to make shit up, or that they changed the reports, but rather I believe that the exec branch did what they could to stifle the intelligence operations in Iraq. It would be simple enough to block certain types of phone calls, emails, etc coming from Iraq to the US for whatever reason they choose, which would seperate the agents from the administrators. That with embargos, restricted travel, and withheld military intelligence can make any info coming from Iraq pretty "up for interpretation".

[Margalis]

Even at the time it was clear that the White House was very selective in the info it was interested in. The WMD reports from the CIA were never presented as a sure thing, and the dubiousness of sources like Chalabi was well known. The intelligence community is just a scapegoat here.

[Sky]

Ever hear of research that leads to the desired results?

Yeah, that. The PNAC needed that intelligence, and they got it for long enough to begin their mission.

What's funny to me is that these folks have been gunning to attack Iraq for around eight years now, proclaiming it in public forums on the 'net, and they even signed a Statement of Principles, with many of the signees being major players in the Bush administration (and others that had "external" influence on the Administration, like....his brother). And people have some sort of confusion as to what went on? Seems pretty clear to me.

If we spent the money we pour into anti-terrorism into building schools and hospitals we might not need to fight terrorism....ahh, sorry. Being idealistic again.

[Hoax]

No, I'm leaning toward the belief that the executive branch didn't convince the "Intelligence" community to make shit up, or that they changed the reports, but rather I believe that the exec branch did what they could to stifle the intelligence operations in Iraq. It would be simple enough to block certain types of phone calls, emails, etc coming from Iraq to the US for whatever reason they choose, which would seperate the agents from the administrators. That with embargos, restricted travel, and withheld military intelligence can make any info coming from Iraq pretty "up for interpretation".

You should read the actual report overview, they noticed that the NSA was blocked out of analyzing telecommunications in Iraq for example, this is all blamed on some kind of "turf war" between various agencies. 

Look, I just posted it because I feel like its an interesting read, I've only skimmed bits at work but I intend to print it out and sit down with it once I finish up my apartment search.  I did take a shot at the tube lady and the pope but only because I think religion is retarded. 

@Ahoy:  Wow what a clever one-liner.  The key part of the report is they PRAISE the majority of work done in other countries and I've yet to see a satisfactory explination to why Iraq was so bungled.  In no way was I trying to make another "HAHA Bush is st00pid" post.  Just pointing out an interesting document I think is getting no press because the mass media sucks dick in this country...

[HaemishM]

This is what we WANT our government to do, right?  Determine somethings wrong, study it to find the cause and correct it? 

Actually, I want some of that correction to be some real accountability. Of which, there has been zero, none, nil for anyone in the administration. No one has been fired. Hell, Rice, the president's advisor on National Security affairs got a goddamn promotion. No heads rolled at the top, and all the reports pretty much just said the peons and the nameless fucked up.

Accountability has been zilch in this administration.

[Pococurante]

It's strange to see the administration embrace a report it did not want that condemns (among others) the man the President honored with a medal just a scant month and a skip before.

Well perhaps "strange" is the wrong word.  "Amazingly contemptuous of the citizenry" might be more apropos.

[Hoax]

I'm glad some people find this interesting, I was worried I was going to be batting 0.00% on starting threads here, perhaps I am 1/3 now!   

Anyways, I truly intend to read the whole thing finally by this weekend, I'll post anything that really jumps out at me as "what the fuck" on Monday.