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B4 The Bell Tuezelday October 26


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Pre-War Intelligence Report

October 25, 2004

 

It helps to have intelligence to back you up when you're set to invade a country, and that's what the Bush administration needed. But the evidence they used, a new report finds, was not official intelligence community material. Democratic Sen. Carl Levin's office just released a report based on more than year of research finding that the information upon which the president relied when making his allegations that Iraq and Al Qaeda were allies came from a non-official intelligence source in Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith's office. The report argues that when the standard intelligence did not make a compelling enough case for an Iraq-Al Qaeda link, the Bush administration decided to use Feith's data to support the decision to invade Iraq. SEE THE REPORT

 

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/prewar_in...ence_report.php

Yep,Feith's "Orifice of Specious Lies" turns up yet again!

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Pre-War Intelligence Report

October 25, 2004

 

It helps to have intelligence to back you up when you're set to invade a country, and that's what the Bush administration needed. But the evidence they used, a new report finds, was not official intelligence community material. Democratic Sen. Carl Levin's office just released a report based on more than year of research finding that the information upon which the president relied when making his allegations that Iraq and Al Qaeda were allies came from a non-official intelligence source in Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith's office. The report argues that when the standard intelligence did not make a compelling enough case for an Iraq-Al Qaeda link, the Bush administration decided to use Feith's data to support the decision to invade Iraq. SEE THE REPORT

 

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/prewar_in...ence_report.php

Yep,Feith's "Orifice of Specious Lies" turns up yet again!

More outrageous by far than Watergate...smoking guns everywhere, and yet this is not on the cover of EVERY newspaper in the country.

 

No wonder the world is frightened of these guys:

 

 

The Deputy Director for Intelligence explained this ?purposefully aggressive? approach by saying that ?I was asking the people who were writing it to lean far forward and do a speculative piece. If you were going to stretch to the maximum the evidence you had, what could you come up with?? 23 This aggressive approach went beyond the traditional practice of basing judgments or findings on reliable reports that had been corroborated. The approach included all reliable reporting, corroborated or not. Put differently, the only reports excluded under this approach were uncorroborated reports whose reliability was in question. Yet Feith?s staff argued that even this ?purposefully aggressive? posture was too cautious, suggesting, in effect, that the IC should include information of questionable reliability, and go beyond stretching the evidence ?to the maximum.?

 

 

Underestimating the value of a hidden relationship. Under Secretary Feith?s second charge in the slide was that the IC undervalued the importance that both Iraq and al Qaeda would place on concealing a relationship, and therefore that the absence of evidence of such a relationship did not necessarily mean that such a relationship did not exist. Taken to its logical extreme, this argument implies that absence of evidence may in fact be evidence itself ? that the fact that no evidence can be found is an indication that evidence exists but is being hidden.

 

 

On all these charges in the Feith briefing slide, Under Secretary Feith?s characterization of IC views was highly inaccurate. It is not surprising, therefore, that DOD chose not to share this criticism with IC leadership when Under Secretary Feith briefed DCI Tenet and the IC. In addition, a number of slides which contained information that varied from the IC assessments were added to the version presented to the White House, which meant that unbeknownst to the IC, policymakers were getting information that was inconsistent with, and thus undermined, the professional judgments of the IC experts. The changes included information that was dubious, misrepresented, or of unknown import. These changes conveyed a perception that the U.S. had firm evidence of a relationship between the Hussein regime and al Qaeda when it did not.

 

 

UFB!

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