Colin Powell: Doubts In Intelligence Community Never Made It To The White House
Put another dagger in the ‘Bush Lied’ scenario; Colin Powell, perhaps the strongest insider critic of the Bush Administration, has told the BBC that the intelligence community did not provide the Administration with accounts of their doubts:
The US administration was never told of doubts about the secret intelligence used to justify war with Iraq, former secretary of state Colin Powell told the BBC in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday night.
Mr Powell, who argued the case for military action against Saddam Hussein in the UN in 2003, told BBC News 24 television he was “deeply disappointed in what the intelligence community had presented to me and to the rest of us.
“What really upset me more than anything else was that there were people in the intelligence community that had doubts about some of this sourcing, but those doubts never surfaced to us,” he said.
Look for this to get about, oh, zero play stateside…
Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld were clear about what info they valued: proof of WMD’s in Iraq. Their underlings knew what information would make them happy, and they provided it.
I see this in the business world all the time. CEO wants to build new plant. Initial marketing study is not promising. CEO is clearly displeased. Further studies reveal (surprise!) that a new plant is a great idea.
Bush didn’t lie. He just manipulated the data to support his case. He never took counter-arguments seriously. Or rather, these were shielded from the president. Bush/Cheney wanted to invade Iraq practically from 9/12. Anyone who even dared to suggest Saddam had no WMD’s would have been out the door for incompetence.
By the way, in the same interview, Powell blames the chaos of occupation on Rumsfeld. He basically says, “I told you so.”
There’s a glaring contradiction. Did President Bush manipulate data himself (as you said in paragraph 3), or did the intelligence community manipulate it to “make him happy” (as you said in paragraph 1)?
Talk about grasping at straws.
Paragraph 1.
I think I understand now. In Joe’s world, any evidence that contradicts his flights of fancy now becomes – eureka! – just another person lying – even if it’s Colin Powell. Of course, you must also throw in some completely unrelated story about business leaders lying (there’s that word again) just to inflate your already sagging ideological underpinnings.
But wait – Powell was lying about the intel and Bush, but now he’s telling the truth about Rumsfeld? Cognitive dissonance must be a terrible thing to encounter for some people.
In Joe’s world, any evidence that contradicts his flights of fancy now becomes – eureka! – just another person lying – even if it’s Colin Powell.
I never said Powell lied. I never said Bush lied. I said Bush/Cheney et al made it clear what they were looking for, and their underlings went out and found it. Info that would make Bush/Cheney happy: in the report. Info that would not make them happy: out. Just like it works in the real world.
It never ceases to amaze me how little liberals seem to know about statistical analysis, a form of which, after all, is intelligence analysis.
It hypothesis testing, a sample of a larger population is taken, and a hypothesis about the population is made. The sample is used to determine whether the hypothesis should be accepted or rejected. Of course, there is the possibility of error in this procedure, namely that the hypothesis can be accepted when it is actually false, or vice versa. To minimize one form of error, the other must be maximized, so one must determine the greater threat.
Intelligence is usually a small portion of a much larger body of information, thus, a sample. The hypothesis, Saddam Hussein has, or will soon have WMDs, was tested using the intelligence gathered from Iraq. The greater danger would be to keep Saddam in power when he does have WMDs, so the possibility of this error would be minimized, thus maximizing the chance that he would be removed from power when he did not have WMDs.
This is not a matter of “making the boss happy,” but rather a matter of ensuring national security.
This would be true if and only if:
a) there were sufficient intelligence data to draw a valid conclusion (which there was not — as we now know, the “intelligence” came from patently untrustworthy sources, such as serial perjurers like Curveball and Chalabi, as well as the guy who was tortured to “reveal” the connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda)
b) there were a provable causal link between Iraqi possession of WMD and its use against the U.S. (plenty of other bad people had WMD — among them, Stalin, Mao, and North Korea — who did not use them — the administration never made the case why Saddam is different)
c) the unanticipated effects of an Iraqi invasion were of no consequence (e.g., there was no significant Al Qaeda presence in Iraq before the invasion — Iraq is now full of them — an unintended consequence of the invasion is that in the effort to defeat terrorism, the invasion created a Petri dish where terrorism can flourish)
Basically, Aaron’s argument is that the danger posed by WMD is so great that it outweighs shoody intelligence and poorly drawn conclusions, regardless of the consequences. As a former President once said, that dog don’t hunt.
OK, Joe – let’s take your assumptions to their logical conclusions. It’s now a given that Eisenhower and his allied generals only received favorable information about the weather conditions and enemy troop movements right before D – Day was launched.
Therefore, the fact that the invasion was a success was only happenstance, correct? Because hey, that’s “just what happens in the real world.” Regardless of the incredible harm that could come to our troops and citizens from such conduct, somehow your extrapolation from incidents in the “business world” correlate to the levels of the highest government.
Please contact Oliver Stone immediately, he sounds like the right guy to do a film based on your infantile conspiracy theories.
Peter-
Are you completely insane?
Can you think of no other evidence linking Saddam Hussein to chemical and biological weapons? (Hint: the fact that he had them and used them in the ’80s; rebuilt his stocks after GWI so that he had more for inspectors to find in the late ’90s; and in fact DID have some stocks that didn’t leave the country or get buried in the desert before we got there, if not as much as we suspect(ed) he had around.)
Are you suggesting that if we could have prevented Stalin, Mao or Kim from getting the bomb at a cost of $1 Trillion and 2,500 American lives that it wouldn’t have been the bargain of the millenium?
And in the midst of Iraq’s transformation from a brutal terror state to the Arab world’s first democracy, in the midst of Saddam Hussein’s trial, for dozens of crimes, any one of which is far worse than anything Al Qaeda has managed, how can you be so certain that the positive consequences don’t outweigh the negative ones?
Well, if he did have WMD at the time of the invasion, it’s news to me. As far as I know, nothing was ever found. All of the intelligence which purportedly led to the existence of WMD was, in fact, wrong. So whatever “evidence” existed — was wrong. I think that’s pretty dispositive.
I remember that when China got the bomb, there was a national debate regarding whether we should launch a pre-emptive strike. So my assumption is that we could have prevented Mao from getting the bomb (or, more precisely, eliminated his nuclear facilities once they had already produced weapons).
I’m by no means certain that the positive consequences will not outweigh the negative ones. I think it is far too soon to know. However, that is a different issue than I discussed in my post, the purpose of which was to debunk the argument that the putative existence of WMD excuses the misinterpretation of shoddy intelligence.
Peter-
Except that no one was saying that it did — they were saying that the intelligence, even if it turns out to have been wrong, wasn’t shoddy.
Re: actually existing “WMD” (a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad acronym) in the form of chemical weapons:
As late as a month or two before the war, there were artillery shells full of mustard gas. A year later, shells with sarin nerve gas and another with mustard gas began to turn up in “I.E.D.” attacks. By amazing luck, a team of Danish and Icelandic troops early in 2004 found a buried cache of mortar shells containing a “blistering agent” like mustard gas. (the kind of story that makes you think there could be thousands of such caches — and no one alive who knows where to look for them) Another small cache of chemical artillery shells from June, 2004…
The point is, none of these was remotely large enough to be a “smoking gun” or even a photo op. And though they were all chemical weapons, none was in quantities sufficient to make the ridiculous acronym “WMD” seem reasonable. Clearly the vast majority of the chemical weapons Saddam Hussein actually had in the ’90s remain unaccounted for. It is possible that he destroyed them, as you seem to suggest. But there’s no evidence of that, except that we haven’t been able to find most of them.
Well, saying that the intelligence was wrong but not shoddy seems (to me) to be a distinction without a difference –
Re the WMD: my guess is that it is a combination of a) Saddam’s generals vastly overstating the WMD program to him and b) there are probably a whole lot of WMD somewhere in Syria…
“my guess is that it is a combination of a) Saddam’s generals vastly overstating the WMD program to him and b) there are probably a whole lot of WMD somewhere in Syria…”
mine too.