After it became clear that we invaded Iraq to rid it of stuff that didn't exist there (WMD, terrorists, African yellowcake uranium, imminent threats), the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI, or "sucky" to its friends) agreed to hold hearings on what went wrong. The report was divided, so that first SSCI would evaluate the failures of the intelligence committee, and then look at the way that intelligence was used and abused by public officials selling the war. Phase I was finished pretty fast under the chairmanship of Senator Pat "Memory Pills" Roberts, and while it softpedaled a lot, like political pressure to produce flawed intelligence, it was generally seen as tolerably accurate. Phase II was delayed and delayed. Two years ago, Senator Reid complained that "the Intelligence Committee is not being run by Senator Roberts. It’s being run by the vice president, and that makes it very difficult” to get answers on intelligence matters." Six months before that, he called the Senate into closed session, stopping the business of the Senate to demand action on that long-delayed report.
At long last, the Democratic Senate has completed Phase II. SSCI Chairman Rockefeller explains the major findings:
--Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
--Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
--Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
--Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
--The Secretary of Defense's statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
--The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.
In other words, the flawed intelligence that existed was not enough to sell the war, and the administration went well beyond what the intelligence supported.
Most troublingly, John McCain and Dick Cheney continued to peddle the absurd notion that Iraqis would "greet us as liberators" long after the publication of an Intelligence Community Assessment stating, according to the Phase II report that "Iraq was a deeply divided society that likely would engage in violent conflict unless an occupying power prevented it."
Yet, when General Shinseki and prescient bloggers (and, notably, then-state-senator Obama) suggested that we needed a bunch of troops to maintain peace in Iraq post-invasion, we were treated like dirty hippies by wise old men like McCain, who continues to claim that "I supported [the war] because I believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction as did every intelligence agency in the world and every assessment." Except the ones he chose to ignore.
On a happily now-irrelevant note, Senator Clinton ignored those assessments, too, or at least voted the wrong way given what she knew about them.
The next President has to push hard for revision of government classification systems, so that critical intelligence assessments like this can be made public before our Armed Forces get bogged down in an aimless occupation. And news outlets need to consider their own culpability in repeating White House propaganda. McClatchy (née Knight-Ridder) got it right. Any pundit who uncritically accepted White House spin should be editorially banned from TV or print until after the election, with a probationary fact-checking period to follow. Reporters who failed to get their facts right should have been canned years ago, and this report gives editors a guide for choosing which reporters bought a bill of goods. Hopefully they, and the American public, will use this time for some long-delayed housecleaning.
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Here is the evidence that shows Atta meeting with al Ani in Prague that the MSM and the left wing political actors don't want you to see.
http://www.thexreport.com/the_prague_connection1.htm
So, Cynthia.... how's that tinfoil hat workin' out for ya??
caerbannog
Obviously, you can't deal with the idea of real evidence, can ya?
Wow, I guess all them Ay-rabs look the same to Cynthia. The guy in the photo doesn't look like Atta, not even when you Photoshop a mustache onto his face. Plus, the 9/11 commission reviewed evidence that shows Atta in Florida at relevant times.
And there's this, from 2006:
Is Dick Cheney now a "left wing political actor"?
Josh Rosenau
Don't agree with you one bit.
Those photo's are real evidence.
Why doesn't the MSM inquire to the x report about the photo's and let the American people know about the evidence? Most Americans do not even know they exist. Americans do have a right to know, and then let the people judge for themselves. How about the support of the Czech President?
Because the photograph isn't of Atta!
And the statement by Czech President Havel's spokesman (not Havel himself, technically) continued to point out that "Mr. Havel was still certain there was no factual basis behind the report that Mr. Atta met an Iraqi diplomat." The "fabrication" the spokesman referred to was that "The president [Havel] did not call the White House about this. The president [Havel] never spoke with any American government official about Atta, not with Bush, not with anyone else."
If the X Report can't get basic facts right, why would their photographic analysis be right?
Wrong, the Photo is of Atta.
The spokesman spoke on behalf of Havel. "Where he totally discredited the New York Times Report" of Oct. 21, 2002.
So who was lying at the New York Times and why?
Here is the key statement from Havel in the report you cite: "The spokesman, Ladislav Spacek, said Mr. Havel was still certain there was no factual basis behind the report that Mr. Atta met an Iraqi diplomat, Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, here in April 2001"
Mr.Rosenau, if you would have read thexreport correctly, you would have seen the photo's are from the winter of 2000, not of the alleged (spring) April 2001 date.
And in the New York Times Oct. 21, 2002 report, it downplays what al Ani (Saddam's intel official) was doing in Prague with an American interest. He was running a surveillance operation against the headquarters of RFE/RL, which is funded indirectly by the U.S. congress. That is a far cry from being "scant".
Do we have a member of the Bush group here with us? If not Cyntina certainly qualifies as such. Or maybe more of a conspiracy theorist.
The main gist is that the President and Vice President both lied to get us into Iraq. That in my opinion is a treasonous act and they should be dealt with as such.
Tony P
What should concern you more is the fact there are cover-ups occurring relating to evidence.
Don't you really believe, with a Dem controlled House of Reps and Senate, if Bush was really that bad of a person, they would't have been able to impeach him by now?
Think about it.
Cynthia, the X-files, uh, I mean X-report guy can't even spell "Photoshop" and we're supposed to believe he's some kind of expert on digital photography? And he doesn't seem to have heard of .jpg compression artifacts.
(Imagines blissful silence on network and cable television news channels, smiles...)
Seriously, the fourth estate seems to be just mailing it in. "According to this press release, here's what happened"
decrepitoldfool
matching artifacts. now you see that is funny, I didn't know they traveled from one photo to another.
Seriously, you never seen those photo's before. No one ever mentioned those photo's in any report, whether from the 9-11 commission, or the very political senate intel committee.
I'll let you in on another tidbit of info. That is the same person whom the witness (in the 9-11 report) saw in Prague with al Ani.
Josh,
RE your last paragraph. All of those reports *were* made public before the war. What happened is anyone bringing these things up were accused of being anti-patriotic and shouted down, a la Cynthia here. I couldn't get through to anyone that we should have let Blix do his job while we cleaned up Afghanistan. They held back soldiers for the Iraq invasion so that there weren't enough people on the ground to catch OBL (or even the Taliban leaders) before he (they) escaped into Pakistan.
I still haven't figured out what the obsession with Iraq was...
P.S. Personally I'd like to see Fox News charged with treason for its part in promoting the neocon propaganda.