Bush officials withheld key information on Iraq, former senator says

[deminks]

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13295728.htm

WASHINGTON - In the months before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration resisted pleas from senators to assess the risks of a war, especially the prospect of Iraqi resistance, and failed to share with senators key information about weaknesses in the case for war, former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., charged Wednesday.

Graham, who was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the run-up to the Iraq war, said that in September 2002, six months before U.S. forces invaded, he asked then-CIA Director George Tenet to analyze the "readiness and willingness" of Iraqis to resist the American presence. He also asked Tenet to look beyond the removal of Saddam Hussein, he said.

"They ignored our requests. To the administration, it was always going to be Paris in 1944: We would be embraced, we'd go home and the Iraqi people would be happy," said Graham, who's teaching at Harvard University.

The National Journal reported last week that the CIA told Bush during his daily briefing 10 days after the 9-11 attacks that there was no link to Iraq, a finding that was repeated later in a longer CIA report.

Graham said that information was never passed to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

[mia]

1. flowers and candy

were supposed to fall at our feet.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

I had never heard of

RPG candy before. Must be a subsidiary of Halliburton.

[mia]

11. candy and flowers for Kellogg, Brown & Root (Halliburton)

Fruit for Stockpickers

http://www.smartmoney.com/barrons/index.cfm?story=20051129


Barron's: Halliburton is a bit controversial.

Lyon: That was the great opportunity last year. We bought that stock right before the election, and the timing was superb. It is a lot less controversial now than it was a year ago, because I think all the hubbub about Iraq and Halliburton has died down. And their Kellogg Brown & Root division is doing much better and likely to be spun off as a really attractive pure-play global-construction operator.

Halliburton is on its way to being a pure play on oil-field capital spending. It has a good balance sheet and is in leadership positions in several sectors, including pressure pumping, which is their big area. It still trades at a discount to Schlumberger (SLB: 95.73, +1.28, +1.4%) and Baker Hughes (BHI: 57.35, +0.62, +1.1%).

Barron's: You expect the energy story to continue to play out?

[PDJane]

2. Getting rid of Saddam

was always the beginning, the end, and the middle of the discussion. Period.

Anything else was incidental. Once you look at the entire umbroglio from that viewpoint, making sense of it becomes easier.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

6. Bullshit! (no offense intended)

This is all about money. Wars usually are, in one form or another, and a hand full of people are getting obscenely rich off this war while the majority of the rest of the populace of the planet will be paying for it for generations.

[eridani]

8. This is absolute nonsense

Saddam is just as gone if he goes into exile, correct? That's waht Iraq's neighbors were trying to arrange, when the Psychopath in Chief announced that even if Saddam, sons and cronies went into exile, the invasion was still on!

[PDJane]

9. Saddam

was a political liability to the administration, and the link between the Taliban and the administration was an embarassment. Money and oil were benefits, of course......and money is an object.

However, the best of all possible worlds, and the one the US was trying to bring about, was to keep the ba'athists in power and remove Saddam in Iraq. And, of course, in both places the war was meant to cover the administration when they started making new rules for the disposition of oil wealth and government largesse.

However, the administration did not want "regime change" in either place, not really, which was the point of the post.

[eridani]

14. Oh, OK

Sorry I misconstrued what you were saying.

[Yoda Yada]

3. The information was never passed on?

And yet, we still allow the Republicans to chastise the Democrats for voting for the war against Iraq?

[pinto]

4. Another reality check. The Senate didn't get all the info. The Admin

had a preordained course of action...and apparently saw no need to fully inform our representatives. Or, they saw the problems full disclosure would engender, and chose otherwise.

Spin is one thing - all governments have done it to some level - but the level of exclusion in the decision making process represented here is phenomenal.

[MadisonProgressive]

5. I guess they really DIDN'T get the same intelligence!

[texpatriot2004]

7. CIA told * 10 days after 9-11 there was NO link to Iraq

"...the CIA told Bush during his daily briefing 10 days after the 9-11 attacks that there was no link to Iraq..."

[robbedvoter]

10. Doesn't excuse Congress, but incriminates BFEE further

While I still think Senate, House had enough reasons not to allow Dim Sum to play with fire, let's not forget that this is a significant piece in the bunch of lies to war - as well as a clearly impeachable offense.

[KoKo]

12. And what former Senator Graham says is why No Democratic Senator

should have voted to Invade Iraq. And that's why some of us can never forgive Kerry and Edwards because they KNEW...and they voted to go for political reasons...not to seem "soft on war." Kerry knew better...I will never understand how he could have voted for it. Never.

[DeepModem Mom]

13. K&R -- And why did Graham leave the Senate??? nt

[deminks]

15. More Info: WP: What I Knew Before the Invasion

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/18/AR2005111802397_pf.html

By Bob Graham
Sunday, November 20, 2005; B07

In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats for being hypocrites on the Iraq war. "ore than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power," he said.

The president's attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.

At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.

The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs." It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as "If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year," underscored the White House's claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.

edited to simplify link

[emcguffie]

16. and everyone conveniently forgets that --

the inspectors were still busy there, that they kept saying there was no indication of WMD, that Saddam was cooperatng, letting them look anywhere they wanted, and they needed more time.

They had to get out in 24 off 48 hours not to be bombed, I think.

This is, to me, where the media has been complicit. They may have truthfully noted that somewhere, but for every truthful statement, they printed the lie about a hundred times, usually on page A1.

People also conveniently forget that Saddam's gvt was very secular. Lots of people I knew just assumed it was like Afghanistan. It wasn't, and the press didn't expend ANY energy to clear up those misconceptions. And even WITH those misconceptions, a majority of Americans were opposed to the war, without the UN, up to the moment it started. Then I guess they felt like they had to support our soldiers, so they switched over.

It was like living in a perpetual night/daymare where everybody with a voice was lying and everybody with ears was believing it, day after day after day.