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| Technosoul -- Republicans claim that GWB was acting on the best information he had from the CIA and made his choice based on the information. For a moment imagine that is true. |
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Dieval -- Why do we have to "imagine" that's true?
Do you have some kind of evidence suggesting it's not true?(something other than a conspiracy theory) |
As a matter of fact, yes.
In fact it's rather common knowledge that the Bush Whitehouse got a lot of it's intellegence from our favorite Iranian spy and his parade of defectors. Things like the infamous bio-weapons labs, the aluminum tubes, the phantom nuclear program and the 'vast' stockpiles came from these sources. The problem was, both the CIA and State Department Intellegence were, to say the least, highly suspicious of Chalabi's reliability. Donald Rumsfeld, already frustrated with the CIA's 'over cautious ways' in declaring fact vs. speculation or ambiguous data, began funneling intellegence he was interesting in through the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and from there straight to the Whitehouse.
The Stovepipe, Seymour Hersh, New Yorker Magazine, Oct. 27, 2003
--"Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence."--
--"Chalabi’s defector reports were now flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President’s office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When INR analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found. “They’d pick apart a report and find out that the source had been wrong before, or had no access to the information provided,” Greg Thielmann told me. “There was considerable skepticism throughout the intelligence community about the reliability of Chalabi’s sources, but the defector reports were coming all the time. Knock one down and another comes along. Meanwhile, the garbage was being shoved straight to the President.”"--
Weapons of Mass Disappearance, Michael Duffy, TIME Magazine, Jun. 01, 2003
--"Unlike his father, who ran the CIA briefly in the mid-'70s and prided himself on revitalizing an embattled spy corps, George W. Bush dotted his foreign-policy team with people who have waged a private war with the CIA for years, men who are disdainful of the way the agency gathers secrets — and what it makes of them. Working mainly out of the Pentagon, the hard-liners have long believed that America's spy agency was a complacent captive of the two parties' internationalist wings, too wary and risk averse, too reliant on gadgets and too slow to see enemies poised to strike."--
--"The hard-liners' staunch beliefs were powerfully bolstered after 9/11; they quickly concluded that the CIA failed to anticipate the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. And they were not reassured by the CIA's performance after 9/11 either. By last fall, Rumsfeld had grown so impatient with the CIA's equivocal explanations of the Iraq problem that he set up his own mini-CIA at the Pentagon called the Office of Special Plans. It was hatched and designed, as a former U.S. official puts it, to get "the intelligence he wanted."-- Where are Iraq's WMDs? Evan Thomas, Richard Wolffe and Michael Isikoff, NEWSWEEK June 9, 2003
--"Then came the defectors. Former Iraqi officials fleeing the regime told of underground bunkers and labs hiding vast stores of chemical and biological weapons and nuclear materials. The CIA, at first, was skeptical. Defectors in search of safe haven sometimes stretch or invent the facts. The true believers in the Bush administration, on the other hand, embraced the defectors and credited their stories. Many of the defectors were sent to the Americans by Ahmed Chalabi, the politically ambitious and controversial Iraqi exile. Chalabi’s chief patron is Richard Perle, the former Reagan Defense Department official and charter member of the so-called neocons, the hard-liners who occupy many top jobs in the Bush national-security establishment.
The CIA was especially wary of Chalabi, whom they regarded as a con man (Chalabi has been convicted of bank fraud in Jordan; he denies the charges). But rather than accept the CIA’s doubts, top officials in the Bush Defense Department set up their own team of intelligence analysts, a small but powerful shop now called the Office of Special Plans—and, half-jokingly, by its members, “the Cabal.”?--