- Jul 25, 2002
- 10,053
- 0
- 71
Editorial from Los Angles Times
Seems like some of the same players did the same with information before to 'SCARE-UP' the issues.
When Bush Daddy ran the CIA, Wolfie was around overstating the intelligence back then.
Rummy was able to beat the drums in the background too.
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Vice President Dick Cheney was in friendly territory when he spoke last week at the American Enterprise Institute, which has served as the administration's intellectual brain trust, to defend the decision to go to war against Iraq. As Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi looked on approvingly, Cheney declared that it would have been "irresponsible" for President Bush not to have acted.
Cheney's argument rested on a 2002 estimate of Iraq's threat level by the CIA. Considering the blame recently heaped on the CIA by the White House itself for faulty intelligence about Iraq, the speech's logic had an odd ring. The CIA estimate judged that Iraq could develop a nuclear bomb in a decade and that its biological and chemical weapons program was more active than before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Questions remain about the extent to which those warnings were affected by ferocious political pressures. Such pressures are hardly new.
For instance, then-CIA chief George H.W. Bush created a "Team B" in 1976 to analyze the CIA's estimates of the Soviet strategic threat, which said Soviet military expenditures were not radically expanding. The elder Bush's team of "Cold Warriors," which included current Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, came to a much different conclusion: that because of a looming missile gap, the Soviet Union was leaving the U.S. in the dust militarily. When the Soviet Union crumbled in 1989, the Soviet military machine was found to be a dinosaur. An article in the July/August issue of Arms Control Today by Greg Thielmann, until recently a senior official in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, outlines more recent pressures on the CIA to adopt worst-case analyses of foreign threats.
In 1998, Congress asked current Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to lead a high-level commission, which also included Wolfowitz, that concluded the CIA was grossly underestimating the ballistic missile threat posed by Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Five years later, Thielmann notes, none of these countries pose an imminent ballistic-missile threat to the U.S., though it is obviously important to monitor their development programs. Nor has Cheney himself dispelled suspicions about his visits this year to CIA headquarters. Analysts at the spy agency have complained that Cheney pushed them to supply worst-case estimates on Iraq.
With the release Thursday of the congressional joint intelligence report on the 9/11 attacks, the need for sound and reliable intelligence is underscored. The findings don't contain shocking new information, but they show definitively how the FBI and CIA ignored a steady stream of data about terrorist activity within and outside the U.S. The government, it concludes, "did not undertake a comprehensive effort to implement defensive measures in the United States." The effort to correct such catastrophic oversights is certainly impeded by political pressure to cook intelligence agencies' assessments of threat.
Seems like some of the same players did the same with information before to 'SCARE-UP' the issues.
When Bush Daddy ran the CIA, Wolfie was around overstating the intelligence back then.
Rummy was able to beat the drums in the background too.
===========================================================================
Vice President Dick Cheney was in friendly territory when he spoke last week at the American Enterprise Institute, which has served as the administration's intellectual brain trust, to defend the decision to go to war against Iraq. As Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi looked on approvingly, Cheney declared that it would have been "irresponsible" for President Bush not to have acted.
Cheney's argument rested on a 2002 estimate of Iraq's threat level by the CIA. Considering the blame recently heaped on the CIA by the White House itself for faulty intelligence about Iraq, the speech's logic had an odd ring. The CIA estimate judged that Iraq could develop a nuclear bomb in a decade and that its biological and chemical weapons program was more active than before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Questions remain about the extent to which those warnings were affected by ferocious political pressures. Such pressures are hardly new.
For instance, then-CIA chief George H.W. Bush created a "Team B" in 1976 to analyze the CIA's estimates of the Soviet strategic threat, which said Soviet military expenditures were not radically expanding. The elder Bush's team of "Cold Warriors," which included current Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, came to a much different conclusion: that because of a looming missile gap, the Soviet Union was leaving the U.S. in the dust militarily. When the Soviet Union crumbled in 1989, the Soviet military machine was found to be a dinosaur. An article in the July/August issue of Arms Control Today by Greg Thielmann, until recently a senior official in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, outlines more recent pressures on the CIA to adopt worst-case analyses of foreign threats.
In 1998, Congress asked current Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to lead a high-level commission, which also included Wolfowitz, that concluded the CIA was grossly underestimating the ballistic missile threat posed by Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Five years later, Thielmann notes, none of these countries pose an imminent ballistic-missile threat to the U.S., though it is obviously important to monitor their development programs. Nor has Cheney himself dispelled suspicions about his visits this year to CIA headquarters. Analysts at the spy agency have complained that Cheney pushed them to supply worst-case estimates on Iraq.
With the release Thursday of the congressional joint intelligence report on the 9/11 attacks, the need for sound and reliable intelligence is underscored. The findings don't contain shocking new information, but they show definitively how the FBI and CIA ignored a steady stream of data about terrorist activity within and outside the U.S. The government, it concludes, "did not undertake a comprehensive effort to implement defensive measures in the United States." The effort to correct such catastrophic oversights is certainly impeded by political pressure to cook intelligence agencies' assessments of threat.
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