The 90-page, top-secret report - National Intelligence Council

From: "APFN" The 90-page, top-secret report - National Intelligence Council

a.. Prosecute Leakgate Accuser for CIA Secrecy Violation - Rep. King, Tue Oct
7 00:59
a.. The 90-page, top-secret report -ational Intelligence Counc - Paul
Sperry, Tue Oct 7 16:51
b.. The lies about the reason for invading Iraq. - Pepe Escobar, Tue Oct 7
02:00
c.. Leaking With a Vengeance - Michael Duffy, Tue Oct 7 01:09
LEAK - GATE:
This White House Scandal Finally Tips the Scale!

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The 90-page, top-secret report - National Intelligence Council
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?disc=149495;article=45117;title=APFN
Paul Sperry
The 90-page, top-secret report - National Intelligence Council
Tue Oct 7 16:51:14 2003
64.140.158.241
Yes, Bush lied
Posted: October 6, 2003- 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34930
WASHINGTON - A year ago, on Oct. 1, one of the most important documents in
U.S. history was published and couriered over to the White House.
The 90-page, top-secret report, drafted by the National Intelligence Council
at Langley, included an executive summary for President Bush known as the "key
judgments." It summed up the findings of the U.S. intelligence community
regarding the threat posed by Iraq, findings the president says formed the
foundation for his decision to preemptively invade Iraq without provocation. The
report "was good, sound intelligence," Bush has remarked.
Most of it deals with alleged weapons of mass destruction.
But page 4 of the report, called the National Intelligence Estimate, deals
with terrorism, and draws conclusions that would come as a shock to most
Americans, judging from recent polls on Iraq. The CIA, Defense Intelligence
Agency and the other U.S. spy agencies unanimously agreed that Baghdad:
* had not sponsored past terrorist attacks against America,
* was not operating in concert with al-Qaida,
* and was not a terrorist threat to America.
"We have no specific intelligence information that Saddam's regime has
directed attacks against U.S. territory," the report stated.
However, it added, "Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that
only an organization such as al-Qaida could perpetrate the type of terrorist
attack that he would hope to conduct."
Sufficiently desperate? If he "feared an attack that threatened the survival
of the regime," the report explained.
"In such circumstances," it added, "he might decide that the extreme step of
assisting the Islamist terrorists in conducting a CBW [chemical and biological
weapons] attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact
vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."
In other words, only if Saddam were provoked by U.S. attack would he even
consider taking the "extreme step" of reaching out to al-Qaida, an organization
with which he had no natural or preexisting relationship. He wasn't about to
strike the U.S. or share his alleged weapons with al-Qaida - unless the U.S.
struck him first and threatened the collapse of his regime.
Now turn to the next page of the same NIE report, which is considered the
gold standard of intelligence reports. Page 5 ranks the key judgments by
confidence level - high, moderate or low.
According to the consensus of Bush's intelligence services, there was "low
confidence" before the war in the views that "Saddam would engage in clandestine
attacks against the U.S. Homeland" or "share chemical or biological weapons with
al-Qaida."
Their message to the president was clear: Saddam wouldn't help al-Qaida
unless we put his back against the wall, and even then it was a big maybe. If
anything, the report was a flashing yellow light against attacking Iraq.
Bush saw the warning, yet completely ignored it and barreled ahead with the
war plans he'd approved a month earlier (Aug. 29), telling a completely
different version of the intelligence consensus to the American people. Less
than a week after the NIE was published, he warned that "on any given day" -
provoked by attack or not, sufficiently desperate or not - Saddam could team up
with Osama and conduct a joint terrorist operation against America using weapons
of mass destruction.
"Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical
weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," Bush said Oct. 7 in his
nationally televised Cincinnati speech. "Alliance with terrorists could allow
the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving fingerprints." The terrorists
he was referring to were "al-Qaida members."
By telling Americans that Saddam could "on any given day" slip
unconventional weapons to al-Qaida if America didn't disarm him, the president
misrepresented the conclusions of his own secret intelligence report, which
warned that Saddam wouldn't even try to reach out to al-Qaida unless he were
attacked and had nothing to lose - and might even find that hard to do since he
had no history of conducting joint terrorist operations with al-Qaida, and
certainly none against the U.S.
If that's not lying, I don't know what is.
What's worse, the inconvenient conclusions about Iraq and al-Qaida were
withheld from the unclassified version of the secret NIE report that Bush
authorized for public release the day before his Cincinnati speech, as part of
the launch of the White House's campaign to sell the war. The 25-page white
paper, posted on the CIA website, focused on alleged weapons of mass
destruction, and conveniently left out the entire part about Saddam's reluctance
to reach out to al-Qaida. Americans also didn't see the finding that Saddam had
no hand in 9-11 or any other al-Qaida attack against American territory. That,
too, was sanitized.
Over the following months, in speech after speech, Bush went right on lying
with impunity about the Iraq-al-Qaida threat, all the while flouting the
judgments of his own intelligence agencies.
Even after the war, Bush continued the lie. "We have removed an ally of
al-Qaida," he said May 1 from the deck of the USS Lincoln. "No terrorist network
will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime."
In the glaring absence of any hard proof of either those alleged weapons or
al-Qaida links, the White House press corps has finally put down their
stenographer's pads and started asking tough questions, forcing the president to
at least level with the American people about Saddam's assumed role in 9-11.
"We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the Sept. 11"
attacks, Bush confessed last month, finally repeating for the public what his
own intelligence services had told him a year earlier.
The president's spokespeople say they're shocked, shocked, to learn that
seven in 10 Americans tell pollsters they blame Saddam Hussein for the 9-11
attacks. Gee, they pondered, wherever did they get such an idea?
Oh, maybe from all the president's speeches and remarks suggesting Saddam
was to blame for 9-11, starting with this one:
"Prior to Sept. 11, we thought two oceans would protect us," President Bush
said about Iraq in an Oct. 14 speech in Michigan. "After Sept. 11, we've entered
into a new era in a new war.
"This is a man that we know has had connections with al-Qaida," he
continued, referring to Saddam. "This is a man who, in my judgment, would like
to use al-Qaida as a forward army. And this is a man that we must deal with for
the sake of peace."
Or this one:
"Saddam Hussein and his weapons are a direct threat to this country," Bush
said March 6 in a White House news conference. "The attacks of Sept. 11 showed
what the enemies of America did with four airplanes. We will not wait to see
what terrorists or terrorist states could do with weapons of mass destruction."
Or this:
"Used to be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam
Hussein, that oceans would protect us from his type of terror," he said at the
same press conference. "Sept. 11 should say to the American people that we're
now a battlefield, that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist
organization could be deployed here at home."
In that press conference, Bush mentioned the Sept. 11 attacks nine times,
Saddam 40 times, and Osama zero, effectively morphing Osama into Saddam, as I
pointed out in a column just before the war.
During the war, Bush said he couldn't leave "enemies free to plot another
Sept. 11 - this time, perhaps, with chemical, biological or nuclear terror."
In that April 5 radio address, he added: "We'll remove weapons of mass
destruction from the hands of mass murderers."
Even when we found no weapons to remove, he continued to distort the truth
about Iraq and 9-11.
"We will not wait for known enemies to strike us again," he said Aug. 26 in
an American Legion speech, rationalizing his Iraq attack. "We will strike them
before they hit more of our cities and kill more of our citizens."
The juxtaposition was no accident. Just as it was no accident that the White
House timed the media rollout of its war campaign for the first 9-11
anniversary.
No wonder 71 percent of Americans told University of Maryland pollsters
after the war that they believe the "Bush administration implied that Iraq under
Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks." A more recent Washington
Post poll, as well as other polls, came up with roughly the same number.
Sadly, it's the small minority of respondents who said they saw no
connection at all who most accurately reflect the views of the U.S. intelligence
community, proving again the power of unfiltered propaganda.
A smoking gun found now wouldn't even undo the lies. It wouldn't negate the
fact that the president had no such evidence before the war when he claimed
Saddam and Osama were thick as thieves, contradicting the intelligence
community's threat assessment. He simply turned around and told the public a
whopper.
Forget that Bush lied about the reasons for putting our sons and daughters
in harm's way in Iraq; and forget that he sent 140,000 troops there with
bull's-eyes on their backs, then dared their attackers to "bring it on."
It was the height of irresponsibility to have done so in the middle of a war
on al-Qaida, the real and proven threat to America. Bush diverted those troops
and other resources - including intelligence assets, Arabic translators and
hundreds of billions of tax dollars - from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and
other al-Qaida leaders along the Afghan-Pakistani border. And now they've
regrouped and are as threatening as ever.
That's inexcusable, and Bush supporters with any intellectual honesty and
concern for their own families' safety should be mad as hell about it - and
that's coming from someone who voted for Bush.
Related columns:
Saddam bin Laden
Anatomy of a radioactive lie
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34930
Paul Sperry is Washington bureau chief for WorldNetDaily.com. He is author
of "Crude Politics: How Bush's Oil Cronies Hijacked the War on Terrorism" (WND
Books, an imprint of Thomas Nelson Publishers).