November 12, 2005 by s.z.

Life Styles of the Rich and Famous Media in Trouble gives us Judy Miller's claim that it's standard practice among her crowd to give a false attribution to a source (i.e., Scooter Libby) in order to HEAR his information, but it doesn't mean that Judy misled anybody or anything.  (And if NPR thinks otherwise, they can just go to hell!) Sisyphus Shrugged explains the importance of being Karen Santorum. Seeing the Forest shows why, per President George Bush, it's the Democrats' fault that we're in this mess. Fried Green al-Qaedas breaks the shocking story about how Pat Robertson was so right about the fate of Dover, PA.  Remember, they're rich and/or famous and you're probably not, so they must know more than you.  (The bloggers, I mean.) 6:30:31 AM

Manipulating, Misleading Yesterday the President "launched a barrage at war critics," using a Veteran's Day speech to lash out at Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, and the 55 percent of the American public who believe that the Bush administration "intentionally misled" the public in making its case for war.  The President said in part: Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs. As you know, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence didn't investigate whether White House officials had mischaracterized or manipulated the intelligence they had received.  As Dana Milbanks and Walter Pincus point out: National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered "the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence." He said that "those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen." But the only committee investigating the matter, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence. And Judge Laurence Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005, "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry." Bush, in Pennsylvania Friday, was more precise, but he still implied that it had been proved that the administration did not manipulate intelligence, saying those who suggest the administration "manipulated the intelligence" are "fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments." Hmm, did the President just manipulate the data in an effort to mislead us? In any case, Bush could have said just as truthfully, "Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming that we manipulated intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that the Warren Commission found no evidence of us doing any such thing.  Additionally, the 9/11 Commission could never prove that we killed any intelligence analysts.  So, we have been vindicated, you America-hating traitors! Nyah, nyah" While we wait for that the results of that investigation that Harry Reid tried to jump-start, I propose we conduct our own little investigation, using a January 2004 interview that Vice President Dick Cheney gave to the Rocky Mountain News.  Sure, this interview took place after we'd gone to war (and after we'd concluded that we'd been mislead about how we got there), but I think it gives some insight into how the top echelon of the Bush administration uses intelligence. So, let's see what it might tell us. First off, Cheney is asked for his reaction to the Carnegie Foundation Report, which questioned "some of the pre-war justifications that were used by the administration."  He gives basically the same response that Bush provided yesterday: the info we had seemed really scary; and besides, all the other kids said that Saddam had had WMDs at some point in time. CHENEY:  The reporting that we had prior to the war ... basically said that he had a chemical, biological and nuclear program, and estimated that if he could acquire fissile material, he could have a nuclear weapon within a year or two.  Based on that there wasn't any way the administration could ignore those findings of the intelligence community in terms of thinking about the threat that Saddam Hussein represented. But apparently Cheney is leaving out a few details.  Here's pro-war Kenneth Pollack: The major Western intelligence services essentially agreed that Iraq could acquire one or more nuclear bombs within about four to six years. However, all also indicated that it was possible Baghdad might be able to do so in as few as one or two years if, and only if, it were able to acquire fissile material on the black market. This latter prospect was not very likely. The Iraqis had been trying to buy fissile material since the 1970's and had never been able to do so. Nevertheless, some Bush administration officials chose to stress the one-to-two-year possibility rather than the more likely four-to-six year scenario. Needless to say, if the public felt Iraq was still several years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon rather than just a matter of months, there probably would have been much less support for war this spring. Did Cheney manipulate intelligence?  Did he attempt to deceive the American public?  I'd have to say yes, but that's just my opinion. Now, here's Cheney answering a question about whether Saddam had ties to 9/11. CHENEY:  Well, there are two issues here. ... One is, was there a relationship between al Qaida and Iraq. ... A separate question is, whether or not there was any relationship relative to 9/11. Those are two separate questions and people oftentimes confuse them. [...] On the 9/11 question, we've never had confirmation one way or another. We did have reporting that was public, that came out shortly after the 9/11 attack, provided by the Czech government, suggesting there had been a meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, and a man named al-Ani (Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani), who was an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, at the embassy there, in April of '01, prior to the 9/11 attacks. It has never been -- we've never been able to collect any more information on that. That was the one that possibly tied the two together to 9/11. Since the Vice President is saying that we have info from the Czechs "suggesting" that Iraq was implicated in 9/11, let's look briefly at the Atta/al-Ani story. Shortly after 9/11, one of the Czech counterintelligence service's Arabic informants came forward after seeing Atta's picture in the paper, and told his handlers that back in April 2001 he saw al-Ani meet with a guy who looked like Atta. That's it.  One guy (who wasn't an intelligence officer) said, months after the fact, that he saw a guy who looked like Atta meet with a low-level Iraqi intelligence officer. The Czechs later retracted the claim.  There were claims that the report was made up by the Iraqi ex-pat community to get al-Ani in trouble.  There was speculation that the informant mixed up Atta with somebody else, since al-Ani reportedly met frequently with one of his friends, an Arabic car dealer whom Atta resembled. And the FBI found records placing Atta in Florida a day or two before the purported meaning. Here's part of a September 2002 Slate analysis of the story: An April 28 Newsweek report sought to kill the story for good. According to the story, the Czechs had, months earlier, quietly acknowledged that they "may have been mistaken about the whole thing." After a lengthy search, the FBI had found no evidence that Atta was even in Prague in April 2001. Following the Newsweek report, the Times reversed itself a second time, citing a senior administration official who said the FBI and CIA had both firmly concluded that no such meeting had occurred. [...] Though the latest wave of news stories says the meeting never happened, the Bush administration reportedly isn't ready to abandon the story. [...]  According to Newsweek, when an FBI agent recently told Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz that the meeting was "unlikely," Wolfowitz grilled him until he agreed it was technically possible, since the FBI can't cite Atta's whereabouts on April 9.  So, yeah, there was a report from Czech intelligence which could possibly indicate that there could be a tie between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorists -- except that the CIA, FBI, and the Czechs say that the claim is erroneous.  So, why would the Vice President cite this story?  Could it be in an effort to deceive the American public?  And wouldn't you consider it "manipulating intelligence" to present info from an unvetted source without also pointing out all the conflicting information, and without mentioning the assessments of those who said the source was wrong in his claims?  Well, you're not the VP, are you? But back to the 2004 interview; here's Dick Cheney answering the second part of the question (the part that hadn't been asked by the reporter): With respect to the other question, the general relationship, I would refer you...There are several places you can go. One place you ought to go look is an article that Stephen Hayes did in the Weekly Standard here a few weeks ago, that goes through and lays out in some detail, based on an assessment that was done by the Department of Defense and forwarded to the Senate Intelligence Committee some weeks ago. That's your best source of information.  Let's consider that Stephen Hayes article.  It was based on a leaked document composed of cherry picked raw intelligence "data points," and was designed to bolster Doug Feith's claim that there was an ongoing relationship between Iraq and al Qaida.  The Department of Defense decried the leak, and said that leaked document was "not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no conclusions."  (Oh, and if the GOP Senate members are so eager to investigate leaks these days, they try to discover who gave this classified document to Stephen Hayes -- after all, it's been two years, and it looks like the FBI never discovered the culprit.) Oh, and here's part of what David Ignatius said about the memo back in November 2003: Bush administration hard-liners have a dangerous habit of selectively using intelligence to support the policy conclusions they favor. The latest example of that tendentious approach comes in the leaked Pentagon memo on alleged operational links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda that was summarized last week by the Weekly Standard. [...] Analysts working for Feith gathered [reports of meetings dating back to the 1990s] and some new ones and argued that they showed significant links between the Iraqis and al Qaeda -- rejecting the CIA's skepticism on one of the most sensitive issues in the Iraq debate. [...] There's a reason why the CIA and British intelligence remained dubious about any serious Iraq-al Qaeda operational link, even though they knew about covert contacts between the two. That's because they had an unusually well-placed source in Iraq who told them before the war that in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had indeed considered such an operational relationship with bin Laden -- and then decided against it.  [...] Now the interesting part: Confirmation of this version of events can be found in, of all places, the Weekly Standard article. [...] Don't get me wrong. I respect the Weekly Standard's reporter, Stephen Hayes, and I think he had a good scoop (although I think he may have buried the lead). No, my complaint is with Feith, who produced an intelligence memo that to me had a clear political agenda, despite his claims to the contrary.  ... Advocates for U.S. policy in Iraq should understand that it weakens their credibility, rather than strengthening it, when they seem to be cooking intelligence to serve President Bush's political interests. But still, Vice President Cheney recommended that article as "your best source of information" proving a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. So, obviously cherry-picking info, disregarding caveats from intelligence professionals, and discounting info that doesn't accord with his beliefs is how Cheney uses intelligence. I would call that "manipulating intelligence." And the fact that he would do this even after the info he cited had been discredited demonstrates something scary about how his mind works. So, in conclusion, I personally think that this little exercise proves that Cheney (and by extension, all of the senior White House architects of the Iraq War) have an alarming tendency to manipulate intelligence, and to mislead the American public. But hey, I'm a fair person, so if a bipartisan panel were to investigate how intelligence was used in the lead-up to the war, I would certainly take notice of their findings. 4:19:10 AM