1. Anonymous says:

    The intelligence indicates Sharone was put out of power by a ……….stroke just after he announced a third party to handle his enemies in the retired Isreali military and intelligence (see Plame and Bush) people who have arranged the invasion of Lebanon. It also indicates those in power have decided the US is out of time in Iraq and might as well be used by Mossad to attack Iran or Syria. This will be arranged an Bush will respond to the arrangement Mossad makes, pulling the US into a larger terretorial movement against Iran and Syria.

    Shays is not that smart. He was removed from the Intelligence Committee because he was playing super spy with terrorists and that is not his job; even if he gives us warnings that happen the next day. The real answer is the politicians are starting to call for an immediate(not full) withdraw from Iraq, understanding the above intelligence.

  2. Anonymous says:

    I think it’s important to realize that Bush Administration officials don’t believe that politicizing intelligence is wrong. I’m not saying you’re doing this, we, but a lot of blogosphere commentary on cooked intel carries a sense that if we can just expose it, they’ll be forced to change. I didn’t fully realize it myself until recently.

    Porter Goss openly declared that there wasn’t enough politicization of intelligence, and that he was going to make clear to the Agency that their job was to produce intelligence to support administration policy. Not to guide it, not to form it, but to support it.

    Their resistance to rational thought goes way beyond their attacks on science. They know what’s right, they’re just as smart as any â€expert,†and knowledge and experience means nothing. Experts are just another opinion, so anyone who presents information they don’t like can’t be reporting reality, they must have an agenda or secretly be a Democrat. The one constant is that they’re always right, and no matter how bad things are now, if we just keep going, everyone will see that they were right all along. Rational people can see the cliff up ahead, but their map doesn’t show a cliff, and we’re heading straight toward that green valley beyond, so it’s okay.

    A bit more directly on-topic, I hope top Democrats will reassure the intelligence community that they’re not going to blame them for not producing an NIE, that they understand that without an opposition forcing them, the administration would just leak the parts they like and ignore the parts they don’t.

  3. Anonymous says:

    Redshift

    You’re absolutely right. By writing this, I hope to get folks’ shock at the Silvestein piece directed more to the question of consequences–for those who do believe in â€intelligence†in all senses of the word. BushCo doesn’t care that it dawdled away all their chances to set this right. But some moderate Republicans do.

  4. Anonymous says:

    Negroponte is a known thug, but I’ve gotten the impression that he is not a neocon fool. My take on this is purely cynical – he isn’t going to waste time on intel assessments that wouldn’t be read anyway.

    And, as the peeling off of some Republicans shows, anyone capable of absorbing a realistic assessment doesn’t need it. Only the willfully delusional don’t understand by now that Iraq is a shambles, and steadily becoming more of one.

  5. Anonymous says:

    al-Fubar

    Well, Powell wasn’t a Neocon either. But he still did what he needed to do at the UN.

    You’re right, that if enough people figure this out independently, it won’t matter that there’s an NIE. Though, given that I’m in the middle of reviewing (again!!) some of the games with teh pre-war intell going into Iraq, there’s a lot of evidence that they don’t want an NIE or its equivalent because they don’t want a public record proving their incompetence.

  6. Anonymous says:

    I think that, given the growing intraparty dissent on the Iraq issue, an NIE that reflected the current state of Iraq would be a severe blow for the administration’s staunch supporters, especially if it came out this year. At the very least, expect such a document to be put off until early next year, so that it can blow over by the next election cycle.

    Or maybe they just want to get another new PM in place in Iraq first, since the present one is now supporting Hezbollah against Israel.

  7. Anonymous says:

    I’m one who has never believed that the Iraq intel was bad. Instead I believe it was no worse or better than it has historically proven itself to be. What was missing was a rich debate over its analysis. Obviously where I’m going is that what this admin chose to pull on an unsuspecting America/Congress was the misuse of that tool. Who wouldn’t believe the CIA & MI6 for God’s sake? This round they’ve lost the cover of that tool and now they’re using Israel in a Reagan like outlook â€Ya seen one terrorist (or Redwood) ya seen ’em all†This unitary/singular sourced and implemented policy, without benefit of multilateral wisdom has boxed itself into a corner, with no intel to blame anymore. They’re terrified, as Negroponte’s directive implies (trying to keep facts off the media radar), that Americans will finally turn around and lay the fault at their feet. And then there goes Rove’s Fall.

  8. Anonymous says:

    Maybe the Gosslings were writing a NIE and now it is back to square one.
    Maybe Negroponte best understands militia as a way of governance; city-state it used to be called. If the Republicans win the 2008 White House, he buys yet more time. If a Democratic executive branch ensues in 2008, the plan likely is to transfer power to the Dems but with a lot of remedial work, so that by 2012 the Dems will be emerging from the thicket of backlogged unaccomplished projects to exit a stable Iraq; but the problem handed to the Dems should be of such proportions that even with prodigous effort on the Dems’ part, the public still could be convinced in the 2012 campaign that the reconstruction and pacification were mismanaged by Dems. The two parties seem to do this all the time, in other spheres of activity; there is correlation between political cycle and business cycle. And, worse, the Democrats used to be the war party; glad that part of history passed.

  9. Anonymous says:

    â€Iraq is in a civil war. And the Bush Administration has dawdled through the time when we might have been able to prevent or at least minimize it.â€

    EW, Bush and the Chenyites don’t really care. They are way over their depth and now it’s all faith-based all the time. Death Squad is just playing what his bosses want to hear and getting ready to fall on his sword like good ol Tenet boy and get his medal and lucrative consulting gigs.

    As you said in a comment â€there’s a lot of evidence that they don’t want an NIE or its equivalent because they don’t want a public record proving their incompetence.†I think they don’t want any public record whatsoever on any topic as they can conveniently blame everyone else in true Rovian fashion.

    What they are doing however is ensuring the US will not be a â€superpower†much longer. None of our strategic competitors could have asked for more!

  10. Anonymous says:

    emptywheel,

    I disagree. We did not go to war because of the IC’s failures. We went to war because the Administration made explicit political decisions to ignore expertise. The facts were indeed fixed around the policy. The idea that if the IC had just stood up to the political pressure coming from the White House we could have avoided this debacle is naive. This administration, with specific intent, perverted the intelligence process to ensure a particular outcome. Even then, they needed the extra push of active Italian and Iranian disinformation campaigns waged against the Iraqi government to achieve their desired outcome. I’m not implying that there was any collusion between those three efforts, but they were all aimed at instigating an American attack against Iraq on false pretenses.

    I think this is worth mentioning in the current discussion because the absence of an NIE is a symptom, not a cause. Based on how the 2002 Iraq NIE was used, or I should say abused, by the administration, I think we can assume that having an NIE prepared now would have zero impact on our Iraq policy.

  11. Anonymous says:

    Death Squads Negroponte’s and Can’t Do Roberts’ primary job description seems to be obstruction, plus a sprinkling of the usual Bush Administration/Republican high style obfuscation.

  12. Anonymous says:

    William,

    THere was some of both that went on. The DOE case I mention is a clear instance of an agency caving. It’s clear that the aluminum myth largely came out of a careerist–if not neoconist–WINPAC analyst. If those two things hadn’t happened, the Administration would have remained where it was in the first week of September 2002, with even Republicans (like Trent Lott) unwilling to support war.

    But then there was the case of OSP which was absolutely a case of perverting the process.

    THe NIE wouldn’t have been usable in the way the Administration wanted to if it weren’t for some people caving.

  13. Anonymous says:

    emptywheel,

    In any sufficiently large bureaucracy, you will have incompetents, craven boot-lickers, and institutional weaknesses. Honest process will normally weed out the resulting crap. In the run-up to the Iraq war, the political leadership of our country reached down and dredged up the dregs of the intelligence stew to make their case for war.

    There are any number of things that we could do to improve the intelligence community in this country, but none of these much needed reforms would have prevented the Iraq war. We need to change the political leadership before we worry about the IC.

  14. Anonymous says:

    I agree with this diary 100%, because those responsible to prevent the â€cherry picking†of intelligence either caved in or drank the â€Kool-Aid.†The problem with Iraq although a wrong decision to begin with is compounded by the fact there is not enough â€reserve†ground troops. When American troops stormed Ramadi and fighting started in Mosul, the Army shifted troops from Ramadi to goto Mosul. While Israel is trying to disarm Hezbollah…no one is diarming Al-Sadr militia in Iraq. (why?). So the only logical decision is for American troops to withdraw from Iraq.

    As for Negroponte..you can only hide your head in the sand for so long.

  15. Anonymous says:

    I think the IC has morphed into its own estate, like Foggy Bottom. Its mission is larger than the political winds of a US administration. I wonder what Tenet will find worth inclusion in his book to appear after the election; probably the bluechip bunch of attorneys counseling Libby are hoping to sculpt Tenet’s memoir to lessen the perils implicit in Libby’s current indictment. I wonder what Hayden’s plan is; I still need to finish his hearing transcript; I got to the repetitious part about a rebirth of human intelligence. It seems I recall his view is coordinating a lot of the other conceptual work with the overall community, maybe what WO might call a load balancing server topology.

  16. Anonymous says:

    Just came across this quote regarding the October 2002 NIE:

    A senior intelligence official said the White House preferred to avoid a National Intelligence Estimate, a formal review of competing evidence and judgments, because it knew â€there were disagreements over details in almost every aspect of the administration’s case against Iraq.†The president’s advisers, the official said, did not want â€a lot of footnotes and disclaimers.â€

  17. Anonymous says:

    Great link EW, thanks. Bush and the WHIG, have a LOT to hide. The truth will come to light… we must keep the pressure on… thanks for all the great work you do here.

    I agree with mainsailset and americanforliberty. There wasn’t anything wrong with the intelligence. It was cherry picked to support the aims and goals of this cabal. The CIA bent to the demands for anything to support an untruth, or many untruths. In the real analysis of the material that is considered, even Powell knew the truth. But he was manipulated and decieved by his ’leader’. The CIA has been used by these evil buzzards, just as have our spineless congress…