posted 07-13-2003 10:16 PM            

'Mr Blair, I hold you personally responsible for my son's death. You should stand down'
By Terri Judd

14 July 2003

Paratrooper Andrew Kelly's letter to his father was written in high spirits, relaying exuberant details of a "mega war" of "storming bridges", of taking "AK fire". His excitement was also in his signoff: "When I get back, let's have a pint, maybe 10".

His father Rob Kelly, who served with the Navy for 24 years, recalled yesterday: "I read it and went out to get some blueys - airmail letters - to send from the family, and then I got a call from my ex-wife. My feelings at that point are indescribable, your worst nightmare. While I was reading his letter, my son was already dead." This morning, Mr Kelly will send his own, carefully constructed letter to Tony Blair. In it, he blames the Prime Minister for his son's death in an "unjustified" war, and will call on Mr Blair to resign.

Mr Kelly's disdain for Mr Blair is clear from the outset. He writes: "I cannot begin to explain to you how I feel about losing my son nor do I believe that you care or would understand."

But the crux of his complaint is Mr Blair's attempts to justify the war, that has ,so far, seen 42 British servicemen lose their lives. Andrew, at 18, is the youngest to die.

Mr Kelly, 54, now a restaurateur, tells Mr Blair: "I hold you personally responsible for my son's death as well as those of the other servicemen killed as a result of your decision to go to war with Iraq. Unless you can justify the war with Iraq, I say you should take responsibility for your decision and stand down from your position as Prime Minister of our great country to enable a person with integrity, who has the interests of our country at heart, to lead with sincerity and dignity."

A veteran of the Falklands conflict who considers himself anything but a pacifist, Mr Kelly supported his son's lifelong ambition to join the Parachute Regiment, and backed him when he went out to Iraq. But he believes Mr Blair was guilty of an inexplicable decision when he sent British troops to war against Iraq.

Mr Kelly cares little for the nuance of the 45-minute claim or the "sexing-up" of documents to support the case for military action against Saddam Hussein. He considers, though, that all diplomatic avenues were not exhausted before troops - including his boy - were sent into combat.

Mr Kelly explained yesterday: "Even if there were weapons of mass destruction, it was still no reason to go to war. We should have sent people in to find them. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, we didn't declare war we just took them back.

"I don't disagree with war, and I agree that Saddam Hussein was a dictator. He should never have been in power but you have to do things properly.

"I would have always feared this could happen if my son went to war. But I would understand if someone was threatening our country. This was not the case - there was no reason to go to war."

Five days after his 18th birthday, Andrew Kelly, a "sincere, funny" young man with a "sense of right and wrong" who joined the army at 16 - headed off to the Gulf. As psyched up as one might expect of a teenager who always carried a copy of Maroon Machine - a poem that extols the fearlessness of paratroopers - he still turned to his father for advice on occasions.

Mr Kelly said: "The night before he went, we were talking about it and I said if he did go into conflict he would come back a changed person. When you are 18 years old, you have no concerns whatsoever. I said to him be prepared to be scared. Do as you are told and don't be a hero.

"There is absolutely no point when your son is going out there in saying I don't agree with it. There is no way I would do that to my son. He had to have the confidence that his family was behind him."

Ten weeks later, Mr Kelly watched as Private Kelly's coffin, draped with the Union flag, was borne into St Mary and St Julian Church at Maker in East Cornwall.

Serving with the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment, part of the 16 Air Assault Brigade, the teenager from Tavistock, Devon, helped to secure Basra and the surrounding oil fields during the early weeks. "When war ended, I thought 'Thank God my son is safe'," said Mr Kelly.

But shortly after 6am on 6 May he died at the unit's Basra base after an "accidental discharge" of a weapon - a matter which is still being investigated by the army authorities. His last letter home to his family ended with the bullish postscript: "Paras don't die, they go to heaven and regroup."

His father concluded yesterday: "This is not a vindictive letter [to Tony Blair]. It is not a letter of hate or anger - it is just a letter of feelings, very strong feelings. My son would be here now if war hadn't been declared."

posted 07-13-2003 11:51 PM            

PRO-AMERICA, PRO U.S. CONSTITUTION, PRO-DEFENSE

Get it straight.

posted 07-15-2003 09:05 AM            

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4108.htm

Rumsfeld on ABC Sunday July 13th

STEPHANOPOULOS: Our first guest, the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld -- welcome.

RUMSFELD: Thank you.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Overnight, the 4th Infantry Division in Iraq has launched a new operation -- Operation Ivy Serpent, I think it's called. What can you tell us about the mission?

RUMSFELD: Well, it is part of a continuing effort in the country to try to find and stamp out and capture or kill the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime. These are Baathists and Fedayeen Saddam and special Republican Guard types that didn't -- were never engaged in war. They were up North, probably, and they just drifted into the countryside. So while major combat activities ended, the war continues.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you think these groups, these remnants, you call them, are following some kind of organized plan?

RUMSFELD: I don't know. It appears -- there's discussion about that taking place inside the government. It's pretty clear that in a city or an area, there is coordination. We don't have any good evidence that it's nationwide or even a large region, but it's possible. But I just don't know the answer --

STEPHANOPOULOS: The commanding general on the ground has said he sees some sort of commanders intent there, and that these people are fighting like soldiers.

RUMSFELD: And it may very well be that they're doing it just through intent without coordination.

STEPHANOPOULOS: What does that mean?

RUMSFELD: It means that instead of getting specific instructions on a given day, someone said, "Look, go out and do this -- attack successful targets. They're targeting success, if you think about it. They killed someone near the university -- which -- the university is open; it's functioning; it's teaching; students are there. So they went in and killed someone near there. They did the same thing near the police school, where we're recruiting police and putting them -- Iraqi police -- putting then out on the street, and they literally are trying to target success. They don't --

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- isn't that -- excuse me -- isn't that guerrilla war?

RUMSFELD: I don't know. Call it what you want, what we've got, really, on the ground in Iraq is a mixture of things. We have the remnants of the regime that had a wonderful deal when Saddam Hussein was there. They could go around killing people and creating mass graves and arresting people and doing all those things that we don't believe in and that the repressive regime did believe in and have all the financial advantages -- cars and nice houses and so forth -- and they're unhappy. They would rather have Saddam Hussein back. It's not going to happen, but it's not surprising they're still continuing the war.

Then there are a group of people who came in from the outside, and they came probably in through Syria, for the most part, and these are typical people who are anti-coalition -- anti-U.S., anti-UK, and then there's maybe 50 to 100,000 people that were in prisons. These are just bad people -- criminals -- and they are there. They have -- prisons were empty during the war. And so it's a mixture of things taking place in there. Terrorism -- these are terrorist type attacks. They are not armies against armies or navies against navies. They -- but it's tough, and people are being killed and more people are going to be killed. We expect that the summer is not going to be a peaceful summer. There are a number of anniversaries coming up for the Baathists and so forth, so I think it's going to be some more attacks.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And if someone were to call it guerrilla war, they wouldn't necessarily be wrong?

RUMSFELD: I guess it's up to them. People can call it what they want. I characterize it the way I just did, which is what's actually going on. I don't know that that's necessarily the correct definition of organized resistance or guerrilla war, but it doesn't make a lot of difference to me. People are being killed, and we've got to go find them and stop them.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let's turn now --

RUMSFELD: -- it's clearly not conventional, classic war.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Okay, let's turn now to the controversy over the State of the Union, and this bad intelligence, which made it into the State of the Union. George Tenet, the CIA director, has taken responsibility, but what more do you know about how this intelligence made it into the State of the Union, even though there had been doubts about it in the administration for many months?

RUMSFELD: I don't know much more than has been said. George Tenet's statement says it all -- that there were 12 or 16 words that were in there. They were technically correct -- that the -- reporting that the British had said that. The British today still believe they are accurate.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But the CIA had great doubts about the British intelligence.

RUMSFELD: Some people did in the CIA and some people in the INR did at the Department of State and obviously if there's that kind of a debate, you wouldn't want it in there, and it didn't rise to the standard of a presidential speech, but it's not known, for example, that it was inaccurate. In fact, people think it was technically accurate.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Have you seen the British intelligence?

RUMSFELD: No, not that I recall.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you believe that George Tenet had seen it?

RUMSFELD: Oh, I let George speak for himself. The idea that there was some major problem here is just not so. George Tenet is an enormously talented public servant, and the intelligence community does a darn good job, and as the president said, those words should probably not have been in his speech, and that's fine. There it is, end of story.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Help us understand how this happens, because for a lot of people it's not going to be the end of the story. There is still going to be an investigation in the Senate. Back in October, George Tenet goes to the deputy national security advisor and says don't put this information in a major presidential address --

RUMSFELD: Look, you're going to have to ask George Tenet or the people involved in that. I was not involved. I do not know. All I know is what the president said and what George Tenet said, and it seems to me that George Tenet's statement explains the whole thing.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But it seems like, from his statement, there was some intent by people in the White House -- they wanted this to be in the speech, and it kept coming back, even though the CIA kept raising doubts.

RUMSFELD: That I don't know. I have no knowledge of that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you know if anyone in the Pentagon was pressing for this kind of information to go in presidential public statements?

RUMSFELD: Not to my knowledge.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Not at all?

RUMSFELD: No.

STEPHANOPOULOS: When you were before the Senate the other day, you said that you learned that this information -- and I think the question was bogus -- only days ago. And how could that be?

RUMSFELD: I think I said in recent days when it all became public. I should have said, probably, in recent weeks, because I went back and checked with the intelligence person who briefs me and, apparently, it went like this. The president's speech was in January. The next day I said the president had said this, and then in March, ElBaradei, the U.N. IAEA person, said he thought that statement was based on a forged document.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, and actually prior to that --

RUMSFELD: -- this is in March 12th or 8th or something --

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- March 8th, I think it was --

RUMSFELD: -- yeah, and my intelligence briefer tells me that when that hit the newspapers, I asked them -- what are the facts? And they came back and said that the agency thinks that ElBaradei may very well be right, and so it was then that I became aware of it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So it wasn't only in recent days. You've actually known that for several months --

RUMSFELD: -- no, it was in recent weeks or --

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- well, a few months, March 8th.

RUMSFELD: March, April, May, June -- right -- July -- so it's been four months, right.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And you haven't repeated the charge, the allegation, since then -- the evidence?

RUMSFELD: No.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And as far as you're concerned, the president said the case is closed. You seem to be saying the same thing.

RUMSFELD: I mean -- I don't know what else one can say. The president said that, in retrospect, those words wouldn't -- should not have been in the speech -- not that they're known to be inaccurate, the British still think they are accurate. The way he phrased it was accurate.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you don't vouch for the British intelligence here?

RUMSFELD: No, we can't, and we shouldn't. I mean -- we think they do a wonderful job. We have a very close relationship with the UK. Of all the intelligence services in the world, I think that one has to say they've done -- over the years, they do a very, very good job.

STEPHANOPOULOS: On the broader subject of weapons of mass destruction, the last time you appeared on the show -- I think it was March 30th -- we talked about why no weapons had been found. It was about three weeks into the war, and here is what you said. I want you to take a look at it.

(previously taped segment)

RUMSFELD: The area in the South and the West and the North that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and East, West, South, and North somewhat.

(end of taped segment)

STEPHANOPOULOS: You said, "We know where they are." Have those sites where you thought the weapons of mass destruction were -- have those been inspected now?

RUMSFELD: I probably should have said we know where they were instead of we know where they are. At that moment, the intelligence community said these are "x" number of suspect sites, meaning we have reason to believe that they might be in these various locations -- numbers of hundreds --

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- but at that time, on March 30th, you believed the weapons were there?

RUMSFELD: Exactly. We did believe that, and they may have been there. We've been out looking at those sites, and -- some of those sites -- and have gone through some fraction of them. It takes a long time. It's an enormously big country and, as you'll recall, the one individual came in and took the investigators into his backyard near a rosebush, dug down, and found things that had been buried there for years with respect to the Iraqi nuclear program, and you can imagine -- how would anyone have known that except for the person who buried them coming in and saying, "Here they are." So what the Iraqi survey group is now doing is they are, instead of running around to all these suspect sites that we had, where we believed they were, they are instead going through the interrogation process with these people and trying to find people who can tell us where they are.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So just on that they haven't looked at every one of those sites yet?

RUMSFELD: No, they have not.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But, so far, they have found no weapons?

RUMSFELD: I wouldn't say that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You wouldn't say that?

RUMSFELD: No.

STEPHANOPOULOS: They've found weapons?

RUMSFELD: They have found things -- they have not found things that when one aggregates them and looks at them that they would say, "Aha, there it is," but they are finding things, and then what they do is, they take the materials, and they send them to several different laboratories to be tested. Then it comes back, and it's not what you thought it might be. They send some more out, and it comes back, and it's a dual use. It could be this or it could be that -- something civilian or something military, and that process just -- we just have to be patient. It's been 10 weeks now. We've got a wonderful team of people working on the problems. They are intelligent, they are serious, they are purposeful, and they are going to keep looking, and there isn't anyone who has looked at all the intelligence, that I know of, who doesn't believe that the intelligence community was correct.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you say that they may have been there on March 30th.

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: They can be moved.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You think they could have been moved?

RUMSFELD: Of course, they can be moved.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, if that's true --

RUMSFELD: -- we know they had mobile capabilities, and think of the lethality of biological or chemical weapons and what a relatively small amount can be easily moved and buried -- or transported somewhere.

STEPHANOPOULOS: If that's true, couldn't the war then, the military operation, have invoked your worst fear -- that these weapons would be moved and get in the hands of terrorists?

RUMSFELD: They could have, and they still could, which is the reason you need to find them.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you believe that weapons could have been, say, taken out of the country and sold to Al Qaeda?

RUMSFELD: I'm not going to say that. I think they could have been moved. They could have been moved within the country or somewhere else but, basically, we don't know, and we intend to find out, and I believe we will find out.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Does that show a failure, then, of the Defense Department, and it was your responsibility to secure the sites or failure to secure those sites?

RUMSFELD: No, I mean, how can you secure a site that's -- sites in a country the size of California that has open borders, porous borders, people moving in and out? Even today, people move in and out. It's not possible to secure every single site, and what one has to do is go in and win the war, throw out the regime, and then as rapidly as possible, shift that fighting force into a presence force and try to provide security in the country. Think of all the things that -- the bad things that didn't happen. There was not a big humanitarian crisis; there was not enormous -- tens of thousands -- of refugees fleeing the country; there was not enormous destruction to the infrastructure; the dams were not broken and flooding the people; the weapons of mass destruction were not used, even though they had chemical weapons suits we found in Southern Iraq ready to be used.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But can you be certain that they had these weapons ready to be used. You're not certain of that.

RUMSFELD: I didn't say that. I said we found the suits that an Iraqi would wear, were they going to use those weapons or deal in that kind of a conflict. We had ours, as well. Our people were all equipped with those kinds of protected devices. They had to be, because we were convinced and remain convinced, that they had that capability. We know this from 12 years -- the U.N. has said so; the defectors have said so; all the intelligence community; the debate in the U.N. wasn't whether they had chemical/biological or a nuclear -- we never said they had a nuclear weapon -- we said they had a nuclear program. That was never any debate. The debate was -- how long should you wait after they violate 17 U.N. resolutions before you enforce those resolutions?

STEPHANOPOULOS: You mention now that the teams are talking to scientists. Journalists have talked to some of these scientists as well, and I want to show you something from the "New Republic." A journalist named Bob Drogin has interviewed a number of the Iraqi scientists, and here is what he wrote. He said, "The Iraqi scientists I met insist that the combination of U.S. bombing, U.N. inspections, disarmament efforts, unilateral destruction by Iraqi officials, and stiff U.N. sanctions had, indeed, eliminated Saddam's illicit weapons in the mid-90s. Ultimately, the scientists and others say Saddam may have feared that admitting his WMD were gone would have shown a weakness that could have threatened his hold on power." Is that what the scientists are telling the U.S. teams?

RUMSFELD: I don't know. I'm sure there are a lot of scientists, a lot of interrogations. I don't doubt for a minute that some people are saying that. Others have done what I said -- taken you to a backyard under a rosebush and said, "I was told not to destroy it, I was told to bury it and keep it and not let anyone know about it." Now, where is the truth? Maybe they're both true.

STEPHANOPOULOS: How would that be?

RUMSFELD: Well, there would be some people who believe that they were told that they were going to destroy them and others that were told -- bury this, hide it, spread it around, take it into private residences, get the documentation dispersed so they can't know where it is. You could have one person told one thing and another --

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- but the theory he is talking about there -- is it plausible that perhaps Saddam Hussein, by the time the war began, really didn't have an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction?

RUMSFELD: I think it's unlikely, and I'll tell you why. It seems to me that he could have had billions and billions of dollars, of revenues from his oil lifting. If he had wanted to do what other countries did, what Kazakhstan did, and say, "Come in here, inspect." Instead, what he did was they hid, they deceived, they lied, they filed a fraudulent report that everyone knew was not true. There wasn't any debate up in the U.N. about whether his report was fraudulent. Why would he do that? Why would he give away billions and billions and billions of dollars instead of doing what other countries have done and say, "Come on in."

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, it could be for the reason those scientists said -- because he didn't want to show weakness. But you say, in the end, it's unlikely that he didn't have an arsenal but not impossible?

RUMSFELD: You know, until we have done this job -- we've been there 10 weeks, less than 10 weeks, I guess -- until we've done this job and talked to enough people and been through it, we won't know precisely what we'll find. I believe that the intelligence community was correct; that he had these capabilities, and that -- we know he's used them in the past. It's not like this is some innocent. He is a person who has used chemical weapons on his own people as well as his neighbors.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me ask you about links to Al Qaeda. Do you still believe the intelligence that showed Iraq's links to Al Qaeda is bulletproof?

RUMSFELD: I think that the information we had, over a period of time, that I cited, that the intelligence community gave to me, and I read as opposed to ad-libbing, was correct. It was carefully stated. One argument was that Iraq was secular and Al Qaeda was religiously motivated and therefore they wouldn't link. I mean, the facts are we've seen accommodations take place in the world where people who don't agree end up cooperating because they have a common enemy.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But several Al Qaeda operatives who were in custody have said that Osama bin Laden rejected any alliance with Saddam Hussein.

RUMSFELD: And there is intelligence information that suggested there were interactions between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and those are the ones that I cited that the intelligence community provided to me to be cited publicly.

STEPHANOPOULOS: There are two former intelligence officials quoted in the Associated Press today saying there was no significant pattern of cooperation that were working in the intelligence community at the time of this administration, and a U.N. committee has also said they have found no evidence. Do you dismiss their doubts?

RUMSFELD: I don't dismiss them. How did you phrase that they said there was no what? No significant --

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- there was no significant pattern of cooperation.

RUMSFELD: Well, that may be, but there were pieces of indications of cooperation. I don't know what significant pattern -- I'm not going to say that they are incorrect nor can anyone say what I said is incorrect, which was provided by the Central Intelligence Agency.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let's turn now -- in March, before U.S. forces were committed, you put out some guidelines that you look to when you're considering sending U.S. forces into combat. I want to put up one on the screen and let our viewers take a look. It's called "Honesty -- U.S. leadership must be brutally honest with itself, the Congress, the public and coalition partners. Do not make the effort to sound even marginally easier or less costly than it could become."

RUMSFELD: I believe that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you think, though, the administration has been scrupulous about adhering to it?

RUMSFELD: Oh, I do, absolutely. We have said we don't know what it will cost. We have said it's not knowable how long it will last -- the war. We never said it would be fast or slow. We didn't know. We also indicated that we could not know about whether a lot of very harmful things could happen; that some of the neighboring countries could be destabilized if there were a long war; that the dams could be broken and people flooded out; that the oil fields could be set aflame; that there could be a humanitarian crisis. Now, none of those bad things happened. We warned about them, we were concerned about them, we planned for them, we were ready to deal with them in the event they occurred. As to cost, we never said that we knew what it would cost, and we said that because it's the truth, it wasn't knowable.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Except there were early estimates that it would cost about $2 billion a month, and this week you came out and doubled --

RUMSFELD: -- wrong, wrong, wrong. Let me tell you what the estimates were. If I'm not mistaken, the estimates were that it would cost $1.9 billion to $2 billion as a burn rate right then -- not that that burn rate would be projected over the next one, two, three, four years. I was asked before the Senate what it is costing. I said it's currently about $3.9 billion to $4 billion, I believe. That's the current burn rate. Now, if someone wants to take that and multiple it by one, two, three, four years, you can come up with a number that's 100 billion as the "Washington Post" did, or 200 billion or 300 billion --

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- but you don't believe this?

RUMSFELD: I don't know. I have said I don't know. The burn rate is what it is today. It's a snapshot -- at that moment -- what's it costing? Answer -- 3.9 billion a month average.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But we know that it's going to take 150,000 or so troops. General Frank said this week for the foreseeable future. How long does that mean?

RUMSFELD: Well, if we knew, we would say. We have avoided saying "x" number of years or "x" billions of dollars, because it would be deceptive. I went back and checked and said, "What did people say in the administration on Kosovo? What did they say on Bosnia? What did they say about Panama?" And they were all wrong -- they were all wrong -- they were wrong by a factor of one, two, three times, and I looked at that, and I said if it's not knowable, isn't it a bigger disservice to the American people to guess than it is to say the truth -- you don't know?

STEPHANOPOULOS: But it does seem like you're starting trouble with the American people and the Congress on this question. We did a new ABC poll just this week that showed that half of the public believes that the administration intentionally exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq. Secondly --

RUMSFELD: -- this is factually not true.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Okay, it may not be true, but then how do you convince the 50 percent of the American people who believe it's true?

RUMSFELD: Well, if the press keeps saying that it was exaggerated, and if people want to argue that, then a long enough debate over that issue will persuade a number of people that maybe it was.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, wait -- it was the director of the CIA who said it was a mistake to put the intelligence you put into the State of the Union in there.

RUMSFELD: And he was correct, and he is a fine public servant. Are you going to suggest that that is an intention exaggeration? It's not. It's a mistake.

STEPHANOPOULOS: What I'm saying is this is not something that's created by the press. The American believe --

RUMSFELD: -- it's a mistake --

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- for them to believe this?

RUMSFELD: No, it was a mistake to have those words in there -- not that they were inaccurate and not that they even may not be true, but they didn't rise to the level of a presidential speech, given -- in retrospect, given what was known.

STEPHANOPOULOS: There are also questions being raised in Congress. I want to show you something from Ken Conrad, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, and he was talking about these cost estimates, and he said, "It's been 'hide the ball' every step of the way. They consistently understated the cost by a factor of severalfold, and they've done everything they can, not to share information." He doesn't think you've been brutally honest.

RUMSFELD: Well, fair enough. Let me say what the facts are -- "They consistently understate it" -- not true. We have not stated, we have not said, "This is what it is going to cost." When we have been asked, "What's it going to cost?" If we knew, we would dearly love to tell people. In fact, I would overstate, not understate, because I would much rather deliver more than is promised than deliver less than is promised. So instead of stating anything, we have said, "We don't know." And then when we have said something, they said, "Well, what's it costing now?" And we said, "1.9 million [billion]." Then somebody says, "Well, that turns out not to be what it's going to cost a year from now or six months from now," and that's true, but we didn't say that's what it would cost every month. We said that's what the burn rate was for that month and in the Senate hearing recently, I said 3.9 [billion].

STEPHANOPOULOS: But before the end of the war --

RUMSFELD: -- so it's just not correct to say that we've done that. What I will say is the people who have tried to estimate have been wrong severalfold.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, except they've --

RUMSFELD: -- on Bosnia and on Kosovo.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But some have been closer. Before the war, General Shinseki, the outgoing army chief of staff said that he thought it would take several hundred thousands troops in Iraq for a long time. Both you and your deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were very dismissive of this and said it would take only 50 or 60,000.

RUMSFELD: Never said 50 or 60 -- neither Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld ever said 50 or 60.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I believe Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz did say 50 to 60.

RUMSFELD: Well, I can say never Rumsfeld. I can assure you of that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But he did --

RUMSFELD: -- I don't think he did.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And General Shinseki was closer.

RUMSFELD: I think not. Shinseki is a fine officer and had a distinguished career, and a very able man. He was pressed in a hearing, and he said -- over and over, they pressed him, questioned this, questioned that. Finally, he said maybe several hundred thousand U.S. troops. Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld said we think that's wide of the mark. What have we got in there -- 148,000. Is that several hundred thousand?

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's three times 50 to 60.

RUMSFELD: We didn't say 50 t0 60.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That was not the plan going in?

RUMSFELD: Absolutely not, the plan going in. I never, ever made a conclusion as to how many forces it would take, because I didn't know what Iraq was going to look like at the end of the war. Why would I think I was wise enough to look into the future and know an answer like that?

STEPHANOPOULOS: So looking at it now --

RUMSFELD: --I never did.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Looking at it now, 80 percent of the American people fear, in this ABC poll, that we're getting bogged down in a long and costly war. What can you say --

RUMSFELD: -- you keep saying that -- "bogged down in a long and costly war."

STEPHANOPOULOS: That's what the poll says.

RUMSFELD: Yeah, but, you know, leaders don't run around chasing polls. Leaders lead, and the president looked at that part of the world, and he said this is a regime that has violated 17 U.N. resolutions; this is a regime that is developing and has weapons of mass destruction. That is a danger, and the world will be a vastly better place and the region will be a vastly better place if that regime is gone, and he led a coalition and did that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Leaders also persuade. What do you say to those people who are worried about this? What can you say --

RUMSFELD: -- the truth.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And what is it?

RUMSFELD: You tell them the truth. Well, you say "bogged down," and I would say "bogged down?" We've been there less than 10 weeks. Is that bogged down? How long were we in Germany? How long were we in Japan?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you expect American troops will have to stay that long in Iraq?

RUMSFELD: I have no idea. You don't listen. I said I don't know the answers to those questions. The president has said we're going to use as many forces as are necessary for as long as it takes because it is an important thing for this country and the coalition. We've got 19 countries working with us. People are running around and saying, "Why don't you ask this country?" or "Why don't you ask that country?" They've asked 70 or 80 or 90 countries. They've asked the -- the NATO countries were asked last year to participate and assist. There is some large faction of them currently assisting in the country. Is it an important thing to be doing? Yes. Is it tough? You bet. Are more people going to be killed? You bet. Does it cost some money? You bet. Can we tell the world or anybody else precisely what it's going to cost or how long it's going to last? No. Would we love to be able to do so? You bet.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Secretary Rumsfeld, thank you very much.

RUMSFELD: Thank you.

posted 07-15-2003 09:52 AM            

DUMBYA'S LOGIC........

posted 07-15-2003 05:31 PM            

By Nicholas D. Kristof
Op-ed Columnist, New York Times
Tuesday, July 15, 2003 Posted: 6:52 AM EDT (1052 GMT)

After I wrote a month ago about the Niger uranium hoax in the State of the Union address, a senior White House official chided me gently and explained that there was more to the story that I didn't know.

Yup. And now it's coming out.

Based on conversations with people in the intelligence community, this picture is emerging: the White House, eager to spice up the State of the Union address, recklessly resurrected the discredited Niger tidbit. The Central Intelligence Agency objected, and then it and the National Security Council negotiated a new wording, attributing it all to the Brits. It felt less dishonest pinning the falsehood on the cousins.

What troubles me is not that single episode, but the broader pattern of dishonesty and delusion that helped get us into the Iraq mess -- and that created the false expectations undermining our occupation today. Some in the administration are trying to make George Tenet the scapegoat for the affair. But Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, issued an open letter to President Bush yesterday reflecting the view of many in the intel community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The open letter called for Mr. Cheney's resignation.

Condi Rice says she first learned of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's fact-finding trip to Niger during a TV interview, presumably when George Stephanopoulos asked her on "This Week" on June 8 about a column by me describing the trip. (Condi, you're breaking my heart -- you didn't read that column itself? How about if I fax you copies of everything I write, so you don't miss any, and you fax me everything you write?)

Actually, I have to agree with Ms. Rice that the focus on that single sentence in the State of the Union address is a bit obsessive. It was only 16 words, attributed in a weaselly way that made it almost accurate, and as any journalist knows well, mistakes do get into print.

So the problem is not those 16 words, by themselves, but the larger pattern of abuse of intelligence. The silver lining is that the spooks are so upset that they're speaking out.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has had town hall meetings in which everyone was told not to talk to journalists (thanks, guys, for naming me in particular). One insider complains: "In the most recent meeting, we also were told that, as much as possible, we should avoid `caveat-ing' our intelligence assessments. . . . Forget nuance, forget fine distinctions; they only confuse these guys. If that isn't a downright scary dumbing-down of our intelligence product, I don't know what is."

Intelligence isn't just being dumbed down, but is also being manipulated -- and it's continuing. Experts say the recent firefight on the Syrian-Iraq border involved not Saddam Hussein or a family member, as we were led to believe, but just some Iraqi petroleum smugglers. Moreover, Patrick Lang, a former senior D.I.A. official, says that many in the government believe that incursion was an effort by ideologues to disrupt cooperation between the U.S. and Syria.

While the scandal has so far focused on Iraq, the manipulations appear to be global. For example, one person from the intelligence community recalls an administration hard-liner's urging the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research to state that Cuba has a biological weapons program. The spooks refused, and Colin Powell backed them.

Then there's North Korea. The C.I.A.'s assessments on North Korea's nuclear weaponry were suddenly juiced up beginning in December 2001. The alarmist assessments (based on no new evidence) continued until January of this year, when the White House wanted to play down the Korean crisis. Then assessments abruptly restored the less ominous language of the 1990's.

The latest issue of the Naval War College Review describes the ambiguities of the North Korean uranium program and argues that U.S. officials "opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes."

"Is there a parallel with what is now going on, after the fact, in estimates about Iraq?" asked the article's author, Jonathan Pollack, chairman of the Strategic Research Department of the Naval War College, in an interview. "I think there may be."

So that chiding White House official was right: there was more to the picture. But I'm afraid the bigger the picture gets, the more it looks like a pattern of dishonesty.

posted 07-15-2003 10:20 PM            

So the problem is not those 16 words, by themselves, but the larger pattern of abuse of intelligence. The silver lining is that the spooks are so upset that they're speaking out.

posted 07-16-2003 06:54 AM            

Bu$h is a sham...and our kids are dying over there everyday as a result.

posted 07-16-2003 03:25 PM            

As Eggs said... "It will be a long, dark night of your soul."

posted 07-16-2003 03:34 PM            

quote:

---

No they did for sick, rich illuminati masters...and history will show this...as well as all those who believed in them.

---

This is exactly what I mean. You dishonor their memories. They did it for America, and the survival of humanity in the fight to rid the world of the terrorist WMD threat...the greatest threat the world has yet known. These men did not die in vain, as you imply. You spit on their graves.

posted 07-17-2003 07:37 PM            

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington and Marie Woolf www.independent.co.uk

16 July 2003

Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President and the administration's most outspoken hawk over Iraq, faced demands for his resignation last night as he was accused of using false evidence to build the case for war.

He was accused of using his office to insist that a false claim about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium from Africa to restart its nuclear programme be included in George Bush's State of the Union address - overriding the concerns of the CIA director, George Tenet.

Mr Cheney was also accused of knowingly misleading Congress when the administration sought its authorisation for the use of force to oust Saddam Hussein.

The allegations against Mr Cheney have come most vocally from a group of senior former intelligence officials who believe that information from the intelligence community was selectively used to support a war fought for political reasons. In an open letter to President George Bush, the group have asked that he demand Mr Cheney's resignation.

In a further development, it was reported in an Italian newspaper today that an African diplomat offered Italian intelligence services documents relating to Saddam's alleged attempts to buy uranium in Africa.

The report in La Repubblica, largely based on unidentified Italian secret services sources, also linked a theft at the Niger embassy in Rome during the 2001 New Year's holiday to the affair.

La Repubblica, quoting a source from Sismi, the Italian military intelligence service, said that in late 2001 or early 2002, M16 obtained the documents. The source implied that Italian colleagues provided the information to British intelligence officials.

"There were several meetings, at a higher level, almost always in London," the source was quoted as saying. "Despite this positive climate, we don't know if it was the English who passed on that stuff to the CIA. It's rather probable."

The source, La Repubblica reported, said the Italian Foreign Ministry had raised "strong objections" and "protests" about the information provided by Italian intelligence.

The paper published what it said were copies of four documents used to bolster the claim that Saddam was trying to buy uranium.

In January 2001, the Niger embassy reported a theft occurred while the mission was closed during the New Year's holiday, the paper said. Little was missing – a watch and three small bottles of perfume. Drawers were overturned, closets were opened and paper was all over the place.

As the clamour for a full inquest into the African uranium claims grew on both sides of the Atlantic, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, was accused by MPs of lacking "credibility" after he admitted knowing a month before the war that documents making the assertion were forgeries. Mr Straw said in a statement he had known that letters given to the UN nuclear agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, about the Niger claim were fake as early as February.

Mr Straw also claimed that the Government's case for military action was not based on "intelligence reports".

Labour MPs, including Tam Dalyell, the father of the House, asked why Mr Straw had not told MPs that the documents were fake in advance of the vote to approve military action on 18 March. "He now says the Government knew it was a forgery in February. Why didn't he tell us before Parliament voted for war?" he said. "Also if the case for war is not based on intelligence, what is it based on?"

Last night the Labour-dominated Foreign Affairs Committee asked Mr Straw to reveal what he knew about the Niger claim.

Donald Anderson, the committee's chairman, wrote to Mr Straw asking him when the CIA first questioned the Niger connection, and why ministers had not admitted earlier that there were doubts about the claims. The committee also asked whether the CIA had questioned any other claims in the September dossier on Iraq's weapons.

The letter, signed by 11 MPs of all parties, called on Mr Straw to confirm The Independent's report that technical documents and centrifuge parts found at the home of an Iraqi nuclear scientist in Baghdad had lain buried for 12 years. The letter also asked Mr Straw to reveal when he knew that the former US ambassador Joseph Wilson had found claims about Niger-Iraq links to be false.

Last week the White House admitted that the claim that Iraq was seeking "significant quantities of uranium from Africa" - based on faked documents provided by the Italian intelligence services - should not have been included in President Bush's speech of 28 January.

In Washington there is no conclusive proof that Mr Cheney was responsible for insisting that the claim be made in the speech. But there is clear evidence of Mr Cheney's interest in the alleged Niger deal. Joseph Wilson, a former US ambassador, said he was asked by the CIA to go to Niger and investigate the claim in a request from the Vice-President's office. Mr Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, has admitted that during a briefing from the CIA "the Vice-President asked a question about the implication of the report".

There have been reports from CIA officials that in the months before the war Mr Cheney made a "multiple number" of personal visits to its headquarters in Virginia to meet officials analysing intelligence relating to Iraq. "[He] sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here," one senior CIA official told reporters.

The CIA director, Mr Tenet, said he accepted responsibility for approving the speech but said his officers had only "concurred" with White House officials that by naming the British Government as the source of the Niger claim it was "factually correct". Britain has stood by the claim, saying it has evidence in addition to the Italian documents.

posted 07-17-2003 07:48 PM            

www.guardian.co.uk

Domestic criticism mounts over intelligence used to justify war

Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian

Washington Post Editorial, July 16

"So far there is no hard evidence that President George Bush or his top aides knowingly falsified the case for war. In the absence of evidence, there has been an extraordinary amount of attention paid to marginal issues - most recently, those 16 words in Mr Bush's state of the union speech that said, accurately, that British intelligence believed Iraq had been seeking to obtain uranium in Africa ...

"The excessive heat generated by this secondary issue reflects the troubling but, for the moment, unresolvable uncertainty about why Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have not been found ... If intelligence assessments were wrong, Congress must probe why they were, and whether political pressures had any influence. But first it is necessary to determine the facts. Despite what some of the rhetoric from both sides might suggest, that job has not yet been done."

Paul Krugman New York Times, July 15

"The case of the bogus uranium purchases wasn't an isolated instance. It was part of a broad pattern of politicised, corrupted intelligence ...

"An honest intelligence assessment would have raised questions about why we were going after a country that hadn't attacked us. It would also have suggested the strong possibility that an invasion of Iraq would hurt, not help, US security. So the Iraq hawks set out to corrupt the process of intelligence assessment. On one side, nobody was held accountable for the failure to predict or prevent 9/11; on the other side, top intelligence officials were expected to support the case for an Iraq war."

Newsday Editorial, New York, July 15

"The point is whether Mr Bush was telling the truth - the whole truth - when he painted a picture of Iraq as an imminent threat, based on the intelligence he related to the American people. It goes to the heart of not only this administration's credibility, but this nation's ... If there were officials in the administration who deliberately exaggerated or misused intelligence information, the American people need to know it. Indeed, Mr Bush needs to know it. That is, if he doesn't already know."

Arianna Huffington Los Angeles Times, July 16

"Quick, somebody get the Bush White House a copy of All the President's Men. A slow drip, drip, drip of incremental revelations and long-overdue admissions is not the way to stem a brewing scandal. But that's exactly the approach the administration is taking with the firestorm arising from the president's misstatement of the union fiasco, aka yellowcake-gate [yellowcake is lightly processed uranium] ...

"I'm not saying that yellowcake-gate is the equivalent of Watergate. I'm saying it's potentially much, much worse ... It's about the Bush administration's pattern of deception as it shoved this country into a pre-emptive war - from the much-advertised but nonexistent links between Iraq and al-Qaida to the hyping of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. No one died as a result of Watergate, but more than 200 US soldiers have been killed and thousands more wounded to rid the world of an imminent threat that wasn't. To say nothing of the countless Iraqis who have lost their lives."

William Murchison Dallas Morning News, July 16

"Senator John Edwards says, 'When the president's own statements are called into question, it's a very serious matter.' Who is calling the president's own statements into question? Well, as a matter of fact, Mr Edwards is, with the able assistance of his competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination and also - of course! - the media. There is nothing like a self-fulfilling accusation ...

"It is hard to get sillier than the African uranium flap ... Since the war ended in April our feet have become tangled in, shall we say, non-essentialities, not the least of which is, where are all those weapons of mass destruction? The obvious answer - not found yet, but the hunt goes on - never appeases the questioners ... [Their] game, it would seem, is to shake confidence in the worth and prospects of our Iraqi endeavours ... The yellowcake flap is a silly flap that has to do chiefly with Mr Edwards and the brethren pulling long, scandalised faces and pointing lugubriously in the president's direction."

Ralph Peters New York Post, July 16

"The current attacks on Mr Bush ... are based in politics, not in a sincere concern for our national interests ... Perhaps the greatest failing of the intellectual elite and those elements of the media that pander to it is that they consistently underestimate the American people ... The elite regard the masses as politically incompetent, yet the people consistently have been right when the intellectuals were wrong.

posted 07-17-2003 07:49 PM            

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/2003/07/001106.html

posted 07-17-2003 07:51 PM            

Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force

Julian Borger

Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian
www.guardian.co.uk

As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war.

It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses.

This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of intelligence.

According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.

The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.

The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war.

Mr Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's unsubstantiated claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been trying to buy uranium in Africa, but he also said his agency was under pressure to justify a war that the administration had already decided on.

How much Mr Tenet reveals of where that pressure was coming from could have lasting political fallout for Mr Bush and his re-election prospects, which only a few weeks ago seemed impregnable. As more Americans die in Iraq and the reasons for the war are revealed, his victory in 2004 no longer looks like a foregone conclusion.

The White House counter-attacked yesterday when new chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, accused critics of "politicising the war" and trying to "rewrite history". But the Democratic leadership kept up its questions over the White House role.

The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. Such hands-on involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the appropriate results.

Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican party leader who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his official title.

An intelligence official confirmed Mr Gingrich made "a couple of visits" but said there was nothing unusual about that.

Rick Tyler, Mr Gingrich's spokesman, said: "If he was at the CIA he was there to listen and learn, not to persuade or influence."

Mr Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace.

Mr Gingrich gained access to the CIA headquarters and was listened to because he was seen as a personal emissary of the Pentagon and, in particular, of the OSP.

In the days after September 11, Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, mounted an attempt to include Iraq in the war against terror. When the established agencies came up with nothing concrete to link Iraq and al-Qaida, the OSP was given the task of looking more carefully.

William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Mr Cheney, runs the day-to-day operations, answering to Douglas Feith, a defence undersecretary and a former Reagan official.

The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in part from "report officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job is to sift through reports from agents around the world, filtering out the unsubstantiated and the incredible. Under pressure from the hawks such as Mr Cheney and Mr Gingrich, those officers became reluctant to discard anything, no matter how far-fetched. The OSP also sucked in countless tips from the Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups, which were viewed with far more scepticism by the CIA and the state department.

There was a mountain of documentation to look through and not much time. The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in Afghanistan to deal with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of temporary "consultants". They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in Washington. Few had experience in intelligence.

"Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire individuals, without specifying a job description.

As John Pike, a defence analyst at the thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, put it, the contracts "are basically a way they could pack the room with their little friends".

"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it."

In fact, the OSP's activities were a com plete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon.

"The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."

The civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. "They were a pretty shadowy presence," Mr Thielmann said. "Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."

Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, said: "That office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees."

The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.

"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.

The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.

In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.

The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.

The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.

In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads.

The big question looming over Congress as Mr Tenet walked into his closed-door session yesterday was whether this shadow intelligence operation would survive national scrutiny and who would pay the price for allowing it to help steer the country into war.

A former senior CIA official insisted yesterday that Mr Feith, at least, was "finished" - but that may be wishful thinking by a rival organisation.

As he prepares for re-election, Mr Bush may opt to tough it out, rather than acknowledge the severity of the problem by firing loyalists. But in that case, it will inevitably be harder to re-establish confidence in the intelligence on which the White House is basing its decisions, and the world's sole superpower risks stumbling onwards half-blind, unable to distinguish real threats from phantoms.

posted 07-17-2003 07:57 PM            

Thu Jul 17,10:32 AM ET

By KEN GUGGENHEIM, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - CIA Director George Tenet told members of Congress a White House official insisted that President Bush State of the Union address include an assertion about Saddam Hussein nuclear intentions that had not been verified, a Senate Intelligence Committee member said Thursday.

Sen. Dick Durbin, who was present for a 4 1/2-hour appearance by Tenet behind closed doors with Intelligence Committee members Wednesday, said Tenet named the official. But the Illinois Democrat said that person's identity could not be revealed because of the confidentiality of the proceedings.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan was quick to dispute Durbin's account. "That characterization is nonsense. It's not surprising, coming from someone who was in a rather small minority in Congress who did not support the action we took," McClellan told reporters.

Durbin, appearing on ABC's "Good Morning America," said that Tenet "certainly told us who the person was who was insistent on putting this language in which the CIA knew to be incredible, this language about the uranium shipment from Africa."

"And there was this negotiation between the White House and the CIA about just how far you could go and be close to the truth and unfortunately those sixteen words were included in the most important speech the president delivers in any given year," Durbin added.

Countered McClellan: "The whole idea that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was not real was something that was never under debate previously. This is an attempt to continue to rewrite history."

Tenet — described as "very contrite" — told the Senate panel he was responsible for bad intelligence finding its way into Bush's Jan. 28 speech to Congress and the nation. In that address, the president cited the accusation about an African connection as part of his justification for going to war to oust Saddam.

"The more important question is who is it in the White House who was hellbent on misleading the American people and why are they still there?," Durbin said Thursday.

"Being a member of the Intelligence Committee I can't disclose that but I trust that it will come out," he said. "But it should come out from the president. The president should be outraged that he was misled and that he then misled the American people."

Durbin and other Democrats in the Senate had said earlier the question is not why Tenet failed to remove the Africa information from the speech, but who insisted on leaving it in. "All roads still lead back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," Durbin said.

He promised to offer an amendment later Thursday to a pending defense spending bill "calling on the president to report to Congress as to exactly how intelligence was used by his White House. Was he given good information, or people in his White House given good information, which was then hyped or spun or exaggerated to try to create this sentiment in favor of war. That's a very important question."

The claim that Saddam sought uranium from Africa was supported by British intelligence but rejected by U.S. officials. It was based, at least in part, on a series of forged documents.

Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, blamed Tenet for failing to seek the removal of the statement from the January speech. Tenet issued a statement Friday accepting responsibility.

After Wednesday's hearing, Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., described Tenet as "very contrite. He was very candid, very forthcoming. He accepted full responsibility."

Roberts said it was clear "there were mistakes made up and down the chain." He said the hearing reaffirmed his belief that "the handling of this was sloppy."

Roberts also said he expected to hold open hearings on the Iraq intelligence, probably in September.

But Democratic committee members said too much blame was being placed on Tenet.

"In a sense, I feel a little badly for George Tenet," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

Wyden said the CIA was not pushing to have the uranium matter included in Bush's speech, but that the White House was trying to justify its drive to oust Saddam.

"I believe that there was if not a battle royal between the CIA staff and the White House staff, certainly some back and forth," he said. "I believe that in this case, the White House political staff was looking at every rock, every nook and cranny to make their case and I believe the political staff prevailed."

Responding to a question, Roberts said White House officials may be called before the panel to discuss the handling of the intelligence.

Both the Senate and House intelligence committees are holding inquiries on whether prewar intelligence was inaccurate or mishandled to help Bush make the case for war. Democrats have stepped up demands for a formal investigation after the White House acknowledged that the uranium claim should not have been in the State of the Union speech.

A proposal by Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., for an independent investigation of the prewar intelligence was defeated Wednesday in the Senate on a 51-45 vote. Corzine sought to include the amendment as part of a $386.6 billion defense spending bill.

Senate Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, described the proposal as "an attempt to smear the president of the United States."

posted 07-17-2003 08:00 PM            

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/101379p-91769c.html

Late last month, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that President Bush had told the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, that he had gone to war in Afghanistan and Iraq on instructions from God.

The White House promptly and vociferously denied the account, but I'd like to believe it anyway. I have to.

The purported instructions from God remain about the only explanation for some of what Bush has done - not only overseas, but at home as well.

At the moment, the brouhaha is over Bush's assertion that Iraq was trying to get weapons-grade uranium from Africa. That turns out not be true - or at least not provable. In fact, it may well be that Iraq had no active nuclear weapons program. At least, none has been found.

That's not the mystery. By the advent of the war, it was clear that Iraq was not a nuclear power. It was also clear that it had no verifiable links to Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda or 9/11. In the intelligence community, there was no question, however, that deposed dictator Saddam Hussein had both chemical and biological weapons. The rest - a nuclear program, links to terrorism - was a different matter. No one much believed it.

But Bush, it is now clear, did. He believed - virtually without evidence - that Saddam and Bin Laden were in cahoots. Why? It's hard to say, but probably be