|
Pick up the latest Vanity Fair. It has a fantastic investigative piece. Best history of Iraq War/911 I have read so far.
Even Colin Powell didn't believe there was any connection between Iraq/9-11.
The following is a quote, I'm OCR'ing the full thing, since VF doesn't have a real website.
=================
From May 2004, Vanity Fair:
The centerpiece of the Bush administration's case for an invasion of Iraq, the presentation that laid out the key pieces of intelligence the U.S. government had gathered about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his purported links to al-Qaeda terrorists, was delivered by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations on February 5, 2003. It was a historic speech, and yet it was one that Powell, who had argued against the war for months, was probably far from comfortable delivering.
On Wednesday, January 29, a week earlier, Powell appeared in the doorway between his seventh-floor office at the State Department and that of his chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, and handed Wilkerson a 48-page dossier that had been sent over by the White House. The document, which the White House intended that Powell use as the basis of his speech, was a laundry list of intelligence gathered by the government about Iraq's weapons programs. It had been cobbled together in Vice President Richard Cheney's office by a team led by Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and John Hannah, the vice president's deputy assistant for national-security affairs—both well-known administration hawks. A few days earlier, Libby had presided over a meeting in the White House Situation Room in which he laid out the case against Iraq, producing what one administration official called a "Chinese menu" of material.
"Go out to C.I.A.," Powell instructed his staff chief, take whomever you need, and start work on the speech. By the next night Wilkerson, along with several staffers and a revolving group of C.I.A. analysts, was ensconced in a conference room down the hall from Director of Central Intelligence (D.C.I.) George Tenet's office at C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia. The White House supplied 45 more pages on Iraq's links to terrorism and its human-rights violations. By the end of the first day, though, Wilkerson and the others did something surprising: they threw out the White House dossier, now grown to more than 90 pages. They suspected much of it had originated with the Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.) and its chief, Ahmad Chalabi, a smooth-talking Iraqi former banker, whose family had fled Iraq in 1958, when Chalabi was 13. The I.N.C., an exile group based in London, had been supplying U.S. intelligence with Iraqi defectors whose information had often proved suspect or fabricated. The problem with the I.N.C. was that its information came with an overt agenda. As the I.N.C.'s Washington adviser, Francis Brooke, admits, he urged the exile group to do what it could to make the case for war: "I told them, as their campaign manager, 'Go get me a terrorist and some W.M.D., because that's what the Bush administration is interested in.'" As for Iraq's links to al-Qaeda, Powell's staff was convinced that much of that material had been tunneled directly to Cheney by a tiny, separate intelligence unit set up by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "We were so appalled at what had arrived from the White House," says one official. Instead, the group turned to the C.I.A. analysts and started from scratch. That night, and every night for the next several days, Powell went to Langley to oversee the process. In Tenet's conference room, joined by the D.C.I, and at times by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Scooter Libby, and C.I.A. deputy director John McLaughlin, the secretary of state demanded to know the sources and reliability of the information he had been given. For everyone involved, it was a tense and frustrating process. At one point, according to several witnesses, Powell tossed several documents in the air and snapped, "This is bullshit!"
The meetings stretched on for four more days and nights. Cheney's staff constantly pushed for certain intelligence on Iraq's alleged ties to terrorists to be included—information that Powell and his people angrily insisted was not reliable. Powell was keenly aware he was staking his credibility on the speech, and he wanted to include only solid information that could be verified. Cheney and his staff had insisted that their intelligence was, in fact, well documented. They told Powell not to worry. One morning a few days before the speech, Powell encountered Cheney in the hallway outside the Oval Office. "Your poll numbers are in the 70s," Cheney told him. "You can afford to lose a few points."
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
