Another bogus, zionist-sponsored Commission Report

[Moses]

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2005/03/24/national/w153210S70.DTL


Judge Laurence H. Silberman, foreground, and Charles Robb, who together led the commission.

Oliver North and John Poindexter both had their convictions overturned on appeal by the Reagan appointees, Judge Lawrence H. Silberman who served as a foreign policy advisor to Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign and Judge David Sentelle, who named his daughter Reagan, after the president.

In 1999, Judge Silberman upheld Washington D.C.'s youth curfew law (a city that has a majority black population) which had been held unconstitutional by two lower courts. June 18, 1999
Washington, D.C. Youth are "less able to make mature decisions in the face of peer pressure and are more in need of parental supervision during curfew hours," wrote Judge Lawrence H. Silberman.

[Moses]

April 1, 2005
NEWS ANALYSIS

A Final Verdict on Prewar Intelligence Is Still Elusive

By TODD S. PURDUM

WASHINGTON, March 31 - It found no evidence that intelligence had been politically twisted to suit preconceptions about Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, and made no formal judgments about how top policy makers had used that intelligence to justify war. Yet in its own way, the presidential commission on intelligence left little doubt that President Bush and his top aides had gotten what they wanted, not what they needed, when they were told that Saddam Hussein had a threatening arsenal of illicit weapons.

"It is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom," the commission said. But that understated indictment is about the extent of the commission's effort to explain the responsibilities of the nation's highest officials for one of the worst intelligence failures of modern times.

So the latest and presumably the last official review of such questions leaves unresolved what may be the biggest question of all: Who was accountable, and will they ever be held to account for letting what amounted to mere assumptions "harden into presumptions," as Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of the commission, put it.

A full accounting awaits the work of historians. But already some people have been judged, albeit it indirect ways, while others have been rewarded, even promoted. Some who foresaw potential disaster were punished or pushed aside, while the president and vice president were given new terms.

President Bush's election-year order creating the commission (and a schedule that assured it would report well after the election) did not authorize it to investigate how policy makers had used the intelligence they received. In the end, the commission reserved by far its sharpest criticism for the agencies that provided the intelligence, blaming them over and over again in its 601-page unclassified report for "poor tradecraft and poor management."

By comparison, the commission made a tantalizing but oblique reference to the president. It came in a passage criticizing the vaunted President's Daily Brief, the super-secret intelligence document that Mr. Bush and his predecessors have received each morning, complaining that its "attention-grabbing headlines and drumbeat of repetition" left misleading impressions, and no room for shadings. "In ways both subtle and not so subtle, the daily reports seemed to be 'selling' intelligence," the commission found, "in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested."

The clearest casualties of the Iraq intelligence failures - and the most direct targets of the commission - were the top leaders of the C.I.A., beginning with George J. Tenet, who resigned as director of central intelligence last summer in the face of rising criticism. President Bush later awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

After he left, Mr. Tenet's top leadership team was effectively replaced by his designated successor, Porter J. Goss. Among those to go were Mr. Tenet's deputy, John McLaughlin; James L. Pavitt and Stephen R. Kappes, top officials in the agency's clandestine service; and Jami Miscik, the deputy director for intelligence.

The old C.I.A. leadership is portrayed by the commission as either troublingly unaware or disturbingly dismissive of deep concerns within the agency that the principal source of prewar intelligence about Mr. Hussein's chemical and biological weapons programs was reported to have problems with drinking, reliability and truthfulness. At the same time, warnings unnamed analysts within the agency who questioned this information before the war were disregarded. Others who sought after the invasion to correct the informant's lies were branded as troublemakers and pushed out of their jobs, the commission found.

President Bush himself has never publicly blamed anyone in his administration, and some officials intimately involved in the review and public discussion of prewar intelligence including Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, and Stephen J. Hadley, now national security adviser, have since been promoted. Others, like Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and now president of the World Bank, have been publicly praised and rewarded.

Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican majority leader, called the report "a forceful reminder of the need to transform America's intelligence community to improve intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination, including its communication to policy makers."

Former Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who was one of the few leaders in either party before the war to vigorously and publicly question the administration's assertions about Iraq's capacities, was considerably more critical.

"Thus far, this administration has been characterized by a stunning amount of indifference to what has occurred," he said, adding: "This administration has held nobody accountable for anything, unless you count Tenet's resignation. Of course, he then turned around and received the nation's highest civilian award. They have been less than fully cooperative with the nonexecutive agencies which have attempted to find out what happened. It's inexplicable to me, at a pure level of management, why the administration has not held people accountable."

That is arguably so. But there may be another measure. With the exception of Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, there has now been considerable turnover in many of the administration officials most involved with prewar intelligence. At the Pentagon, Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary for policy who was deeply involved in intelligence matters, is leaving to return to private life soon.

While acknowledging the intelligence agencies' past success maintaining the status quo, the commission's co-chairman, former Senator Charles Robb, Democrat of Virginia, said the shifts in leadership that had already occurred, including Mr. Bush's nomination of John D. Negroponte to be the first director of national intelligence, meant it would be "a whole lot easier to instigate change."

Mr. Robb said that the commission had kept an open hot line for complaints, and "ran to ground" every report or rumor that came its way about potential political interference with intelligence-gathering and analysis, including reports that some C.I.A. analysts felt pressured by Mr. Cheney's repeated personal visits to the agency. But he said it had found "absolutely no instance" of anyone reporting pressure to change a position.

For his part, Judge Silberman noted that the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies had vigorously disputed any suggestion of a link between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda, but had not resisted the consensus opinion that Iraq had unconventional weapons. "They pushed that position," he said of the intelligence agencies, but were "absolutely uniform and uniformly wrong."

[Moses]

See:

October 24, 2004

After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law

Of the lawyers who devised the detention and torture policies: "A striking number had clerked for a prominent Reagan appointee, Lawrence H. Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

One young lawyer recalled looking around the room during a meeting with Attorney General John Ashcroft. "Of 10 people, 7 of us were former Silberman clerks," he said."

[Moses]

April 3, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Curveball the Goofball
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

I had an editor once whose wife was in the Audubon Society. There were a lot of articles about birds in that newspaper.

I had an editor once who loved fishing. There were a lot of articles about fish in that newspaper.

Organizations organically respond to please the boss. Bosses naturally surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear.

When King Lear's favorite daughter spoke frankly to him, and refused to fawn like her sisters, she was instantly banished. Insincerity pays.

It is absurd to have yet another investigation into the chuckleheaded assessments on Saddam's phantom W.M.D. that intentionally skirts how the $40 billion-a-year intelligence was molded and manufactured to fit the ideological schemes of those running the White House and Pentagon.

As the commission's co-chairman, Laurence Silberman, put it: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policy makers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."

Huh? That's like an investigation into steroids in baseball that looks only at the drug companies, not the players who muscled up.

We don't need a 14-month inquiry producing 601 pages at a cost of $10 million to tell us the data on arms in Iraq was flawed. We know that. When we got over there, we didn't find any.

This is the fourth exhaustive investigation that has not answered the basic question: How did the White House and Pentagon spin the information and why has no one gotten in trouble for it? If your kid lied and hid stuff from you to do something he thought would be great, then wouldn't admit it and blamed someone else, he'd be punished - even if his adventure worked out all right for him.

When the "values" president and his aides do it, they're rewarded. Condoleezza Rice was promoted to secretary of state. Stephen Hadley, Condi's old deputy, was promoted to national security adviser. Bob Joseph, a national security aide who helped shovel the uranium hooey into the State of the Union address, is becoming an under secretary of state. Paul Wolfowitz, who painted the takeover of Iraq as such a cakewalk that our troops went in without the proper armor or backup, will run the World Bank. George Tenet, who ran the C.I.A. when Al Qaeda attacked and when Saddam's mushroom cloud gained credibility, got the Medal of Freedom.

Then the president appoints a compliant Democrat and a complicit conservative judge to head an inquiry set up to let the president off the hook.

Please, no more pantomime investigations. We all know what happened. Dick Cheney and the neocons had a fever to sack Saddam. Mr. Cheney and Rummy persuaded W., "the Man," that it was the manly thing to do. Everybody feigned a 9/11 connection. Ahmad Chalabi conned his neocon pals, thinking he could run Iraq if he gave the Bush administration the smoking gun it needed to sell the war.

Suddenly Curveball appeared, the relative of an aide to Mr. Chalabi, to become the lone C.I.A. source with the news that Iraq was cooking up biological agents in mobile facilities hidden from arms inspectors and Western spies. Curveball's obviously sketchy assertions ended up in Mr. Tenet's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and Colin Powell's U.N. speech in February 2003, laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq.

Curveball's information was used to justify the war even though it was clear Curveball was a goofball. As the commission report notes, a Defense Department employee at the C.I.A. met with him and "was concerned by Curveball's apparent 'hangover' during their meeting" and suspicious that Curveball spoke excellent English, even though the Foreign Service had told U.S. intelligence officials that Curveball did not speak English.

By early 2001, the C.I.A. was receiving messages from our Foreign Service, reporting that Curveball was "out of control" and off the radar. A foreign intelligence service also warned the C.I.A. in April 2002 that it had "doubts about Curveball's reliability" and that elements of the tippling tipster's behavior "strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators."

But Curveball's crazy assertions had traction because they were what the White House wanted to hear.

The report warns the president to watch out for the "headstrong" intelligence agencies. If only the commission had concerned itself with headstrong officials at a higher level. Then its 601 pages would be worth reading.

---

E-mail: [e-mail]

[Moses]

April 1, 2005
EDITORIAL

A Profile in Timidity

The president's commission on intelligence gathering could have saved the country a lot of time, and considerable paper, by not publishing its report yesterday and just e-mailing everyone the Web addresses for the searching studies already done by the 9/11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee. After more than a year's dithering, the panel produced some 600 pages of conventional wisdom about the intelligence failures before the war with Iraq, along with a big dose of political spin that pleased the White House but provided little enlightenment for the public.

We were not optimistic when President Bush was pressured into creating this panel in February 2004. Though bipartisan, its membership lacked stature or independence, and Mr. Bush failed to give the commission a sweeping mandate that would go beyond rehashing the distressing but well-known shortcomings of the intelligence agencies. Still, it seemed worth waiting until after the election for the results because it was hard to imagine that the panel would not ask the vital questions.

Sadly, there is nothing about the central issue - how the Bush administration handled the intelligence reports on Iraq's weapons programs and presented them to the public to win support for the invasion of Iraq. All we get is an excuse: the panel was "not authorized" to look at this question, so it didn't bother. The report says the panel "interviewed a host of current and former policy makers" about the intelligence on Iraq, but did not "review how policy makers subsequently used that information." (We can just see it - an investigator holding up his hand and declaiming: "Stop right there, Mr. Secretary! We're not authorized to know what you did.")

Just compare this job with the work of the 9/11 commission, whose chairman, Thomas Kean, battled the White House over access to documents, fearlessly expanded the inquiry and insisted that policy makers testify in public - and not just about the shortcomings of their subordinates.

The report is right in saying that American claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs were "dead wrong" because the intelligence was old or from highly dubious sources, and because the analysis was driven by a predetermined conclusion that Mr. Hussein was a threat. But we knew that.

The panel said timidly that "it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom." But it utterly ignored the way President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team, and Condoleezza Rice, as national security adviser, created that environment by deciding what the facts were and saying so, repeatedly.

It does not say that these powerful people knew or should have known that there was no new intelligence on Iraq, and that as the intelligence reports were sanitized for the public, the caveats were stripped out. Instead, it loyally maintains the fiction that Mr. Bush was just given bum information by incompetent intelligence agents.

The way the administration hyped the intelligence on Iraq is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity. It is vital that the public know the answers because Americans are now being asked to accept a new set of claims about nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. A full airing of this issue could help John Negroponte, after his expected confirmation as national intelligence director, ensure that the missteps and misrepresentations are not repeated as the nation grapples with real threats from those and other countries, not imagined threats from Iraq.

As it stands, the report has mainly negative value. It reminds us that the Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to complete and publish its investigation of the handling of the Iraq intelligence. And it shows us what the 9/11 panel's report might have looked like if Mr. Bush had succeeded in making Henry Kissinger chairman.

[Moses]

Panel: US Ignored Work of UN Arms Inspectors
    By Dafna Linzer
    The Washington Post

    Sunday 03 April 2005

    Of all the claims U.S. intelligence made about Iraq's arsenal in the fall and winter of 2002, it was a handful of new charges that seemed the most significant: secret purchases of uranium from Africa, biological weapons being made in mobile laboratories, and pilotless planes that could disperse anthrax or sarin gas into the air above U.S. cities.

    By the time President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein of the deadly weapons he was allegedly trying to build, every piece of fresh evidence had been tested - and disproved - by U.N. inspectors, according to a report commissioned by the president and released Thursday.

    The work of the inspectors - who had extraordinary access during their three months in Iraq between November 2002 and March 2003 - was routinely dismissed by the Bush administration and the intelligence community in the run-up to the war, according to the commission led by former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.) and retired appellate court judge Laurence H. Silberman.

    But the commission's findings, including a key judgment that U.S. intelligence knows "disturbingly little" about nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, are leading to calls for greater reliance on U.N. inspectors to test intelligence where the United States has little or no access.

    "U.N. inspectors are boots on the ground," said David Albright, a nuclear specialist who accompanied the International Atomic Energy Agency to Iraq in the mid-1990s. Albright and others think the IAEA should be given greater access in Iran, and returned to North Korea. It would be up to the agency's board, which includes the United States, to authorize increased powers.

    The Bush administration tussled with inspectors before the Iraq war and maintains a hostile relationship with the IAEA, whose director, Mohamed ElBaradei, the United States is trying to replace this year. The administration also wants to shut down a U.N. inspection regime led by Hans Blix that was set up to investigate biological, chemical and missile programs in Iraq.

    During more than two years of investigations in Iran, the IAEA has "been critical in uncovering their secret activities so we know the scope and the status of the nuclear programs and the problems," said Albright, who has exposed unknown nuclear sites in Iran and has followed the IAEA's work there. "There is a tremendous amount of detail that the intelligence community didn't have prior to the IAEA going in and intensifying the investigation."

    The White House has not publicly presented intelligence to support its assertion that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, as it did with Iraq. Instead, it routinely points to the IAEA investigation, Iran's large oil reserves and the secrecy that surrounded Iran's nuclear program for nearly two decades.

    The IAEA has not found evidence that Iran is using its nuclear energy program as a cover for bomb building, as the administration claims. But those findings have been dismissed by some members of the administration.

    John R. Bolton, nominated to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has called the findings "simply impossible to believe."

    Jonathan Tucker, who was a bioweapons inspector for the United Nations in Iraq during the 1990s, said inspectors have limited access and rely heavily on intelligence that can be provided by powerful countries such as the United States.

    "What they can provide is ground truth and legitimacy. If you hope to persuade countries to impose sanctions or other measures on proliferators, the word of inspectors is valuable."

    North Korea kicked out IAEA inspectors in December 2002, a move that deprived the intelligence community of a key avenue of information about the closed country. The lack of access to North Korea, which has been judged to have the capacity to build six to eight nuclear weapons, has been a source of frustration for the international agency.

    But at the time of the IAEA's departure from Pyongyang, attention in Washington and in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, was largely focused on Iraq.

    Months before U.S. troops attacked Iraq in March 2003, the IAEA challenged every piece of evidence the Bush administration offered to support claims of a nuclear program there, according to the commission.

    In January, IAEA inspectors discovered that documents showing Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger were forged. But the CIA chose to stick to the claim for another six months.

    Two years earlier, the IAEA disputed CIA claims that Iraq was trying to buy black-market aluminum tubes for a nuclear program. The IAEA assessment, which turned out to be accurate, was first shared with U.S. intelligence in July 2001, according to the authors of the presidential commission report.

    Blix's U.N. group tested evidence supplied by an Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball," whose tales of mobile bioweapons laboratories turned out to be fabrications, according to the report. Among Curveball's claims was that an Iraqi facility had been redesigned, with a temporary wall, to allow mobile laboratories to slip in and out undetected.

    "When United Nations Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) inspectors visited the site on Feb. 9, 2003, they found that the wall was a permanent structure and could find nothing to corroborate Curveball's reporting," the commissioners wrote.

    "We offered eyes and ears," Blix said in a telephone interview yesterday. "We knew a lot about the country, we examined places, got intelligence tips about where to go and conducted 700 inspections at 500 sites in three months."

    UNMOVIC also determined before the war that CIA claims about a fleet of pilotless Iraqi planes were incorrect. The unmanned aerial vehicles did not have the capability to deliver chemical or biological weapons and were probably designed for reconnaissance missions.

    The Bush administration has prevented the IAEA from returning to Iraq since the invasion. UNMOVIC will likely be dismantled unless the United States agrees to turn it into an international inspection force for biological weapons and missile programs.