cheney, kay
NYT - oped
Mr. Cheney, Meet Mr. Kay
Published: January 27, 2004
Vice President Dick Cheney continued to insist last week that Iraq had been trying to make weapons of mass destruction, apparently oblivious to the findings of the administration's own chief weapons inspector that Iraq had possessed only rudimentary capabilities and unrealized intentions. The vice president's myopia suggests a breathtaking unwillingness to accept a reality that conflicts with the administration's preconceived notions. This kind of rigid thinking helped propel us into an invasion without broad international support and, if Mr. Cheney is as influential as many say, could propel us into further misadventures down the road.
Mr. Cheney has long been the administration's most alarmist proponent of the view that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons ready for use at any time and an active nuclear program. He gave little ground in an interview on National Public Radio on Thursday. He described two flatbed trailers found in Iraq months ago as mobile biological weapons labs and claimed they were "conclusive evidence" of Iraqi programs to make weapons of mass destruction. The very next day, David Kay, who had just stepped down as the top weapons inspector, told Reuters that he now thought the much-feared stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons had not existed on the eve of the war. They were eliminated in the mid-1990's by United Nations inspectors and by Iraq's own decisions, he said, and no significant efforts to make new ones followed.
As for those trailers cited by Mr. Cheney, the consensus view, Mr. Kay told The Times, is that they were intended to produce hydrogen or perhaps rocket fuel, not biological weapons. Mr. Kay had earlier called the trailer assertions an embarrassing fiasco. So, too, with Iraq's nuclear weapons program. Mr. Cheney once famously declared that it had been reconstituted, but Mr. Kay called it rudimentary — hardly capable of producing a bomb in a year or two, as the administration had implied.
Although administration officials cling to the hope of finding some evidence of terror weapons in a cubbyhole somewhere in Iraq, surely it is time to focus on how the intelligence could have been so wrong and perhaps avoid making the same mistakes with the next secretive dictator to come along. Mr. Kay largely exonerates President Bush and blames the global intelligence community. He believes the C.I.A. became so reliant on the much-maligned United Nations weapons inspectors that their withdrawal left it without spies of its own.
Mr. Kay also believes that intelligence analysts failed to realize that Mr. Hussein became increasingly isolated and fantasy-driven in the late 1990's, a condition that enabled scientists to hoodwink him into approving fanciful weapons plans that turned into corrupt moneymaking schemes. That seems hard to believe in a land where people supposedly lived in terror of a brutal dictator. But if it is true that Mr. Hussein wrote novels while the American-led force geared up for war, then perhaps both sides of this conflict were divorced from reality.
there is visable daylight between the Kay and Ritter accounts. Kay lets Bush off the hook blaming bad intelligence. Ritter doesnt. Ritter discussion on Brian Lehrer show archive 1/27/04
In the various interviews (Reuters, NYT, NPR) I've noticed Kay slamming the intelligence community. However, Kay fails to consider the role of the Office of Special Plans. Mother Jones covers this "B team" in a article I haven't finished yet, The Lie Factory.
From the NYT interview, I especially noted Kay's statement that the Iraqis feared UNSCOM. I would like to ask Kay if he believes that once the inspectors were back in, the Dubster could have declared victory.
Debate Over Iraqi Arms Poses Risk to President
By DAVID E. SANGER
NYT Published: January, 30 2004
WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — The intensifying debate over prewar American intelligence about Iraq presents President Bush with difficult and risky alternatives as he balances election year politics with calls to overhaul the intelligence apparatus and to restore the nation's credibility around the world.
He could order the start of an inquiry about the performance of intelligence agencies, as Democrats and the former chief weapons inspector, David A. Kay, have insisted, but his aides fear that that could prove politically damaging and would almost certainly reopen old wounds with the C.I.A.
He could keep arguing that military action was justified no matter how immediate a threat Saddam Hussein posed, and put off an examination and possible overhaul of America's intelligence operations for another year. But his political team worries that doing so could keep the issue alive through a long campaign.
Or the president and those on his national security team who once described how Mr. Hussein could use his stockpiles of weapons to strike at any time could conclude that something went badly wrong during their long march to war.
But the White House does not make a habit of admitting error. And even if Mr. Bush vowed to fix what many say is a broken system, his national security aides note, the fix would not be easy.
"They've made a pretty huge mess of it," said one senior Republican who has been talking to Mr. Bush's top advisers about what steps to take next. "They wove this giant story, based on intelligence assessments that in hindsight — and this is hindsight, remember — were wrong.
"It's exposed a huge problem in our intelligence gathering. But who wants to take that on in an election year? Or while you are fighting terrorists?"
White House officials will not talk at length about why they are so deeply hesitant to start an investigation. But they are facing a situation where Democrats are looking for evidence to blame Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and some Republicans are looking for evidence to blame George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence.
One White House official said Thursday that there was clearly a risk that an inquiry could spin out of control, exactly what many administration officials fear has happened to the inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks.
Yet some officials are beginning to argue, in background conversations, that such an investigation is inevitable now that Dr. Kay has declared to the Senate that "we were almost all wrong."
The politics of doing what Dr. Kay says needs to be done — conduct an inquiry and overhaul the intelligence community before a similar mistake is made over Iran, North Korea or other potential threats — has grown enormously complex.
Mr. Bush has publicly defended the "unbelievably hardworking, dedicated people" of the American intelligence agencies in part, some administration officials say, because he because he wants to avoid another bitter public dispute with Mr. Tenet and the intelligence apparatus.
Feelings are still raw over last summer's open arguments between the White House and Mr. Tenet over who was to blame for Mr. Bush's faulty claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was trying obtain uranium in Africa.
They were worsened by the accusations that a White House official blew the cover of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. officer who operated under cover and is the wife of Mr. Bush's greatest critic on the Africa claim, Joseph C. Wilson IV.
Repairing that damage has taken months, and a grand jury has recently begun to hear evidence about the leak. Many intelligence officials continue to argue that real problem was not the ambiguous intelligence about Iraq's weapons capacity, but how Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney chose to use it.
On Thursday, appearing on NBC, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, insisted that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were not ducking the issue.
"No one will want to know more than the president of the comparison between what we found when we got there and what we thought was there going in," Ms. Rice said. She sounded in no hurry, saying it was important to let the Iraq Survey Group complete its work, work that Dr. Kay believes is 85 percent done.
Many Republicans have a different instinct: to follow Dr. Kay's lead and put the blame on the agency's assessments rather than the White House. In their view, that is the best way to insulate Mr. Bush from the charge that he cherry-picked the most damaging information.
Conveniently, some of them have long been suspicious of Mr. Tenet, who was put in his post by President Bill Clinton, and see this as an opportunity to speed along a retirement that the central intelligence chief has been talking about for a year. But Mr. Tenet has many defenders, including the president's father.
It was a measure of Mr. Bush's problem, and Mr. Tenet's, that Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said this week that his committee's draft report of what went wrong, to be issued soon, would be very specific, and very critical.
"This is, indeed, a very egregious problem," he said. "If your intelligence is wrong you're in a world of trouble."
Mr. Bush's political advisers are highly aware that Dr. Kay's report has given Democratic contenders for the presidential nomination something they have long sought: a way to revive the issue of whether Mr. Bush was careless and trigger-happy, willing to twist intelligence findings to fit his own agenda, even at the cost of American credibility abroad.
What that leaves for now is a slow retreat by White House officials — a day-by-day, fact-by-fact backing away from assertions they made with such confidence nine months ago. Mr. Bush no longer declares, as he once did, that he is certain that sooner or later unconventional weapons will be found in Iraq. "He still thinks it," one of his aides said, "but I'm not sure you will hear him say it" until the Iraq Survey Group's investigation is complete.
Mr. Powell, last weekend, started backing away as well, saying more assertively than ever before that there might be no weapons stockpiles in Iraq and that if none are found, an effort had to begin to find out what went wrong. Nonetheless, he and Ms. Rice argue that Mr. Hussein brought his troubles on himself by refusing to account for stockpiles that the United Nations said existed in the mid-1990's.
Only Mr. Cheney, the man who made the most extensive claims about Iraq's readiness to strike out, has failed to back down publicly. Last Friday he was on the air again, talking about Mr. Hussein's mobile biological weapons units, which now appear, Dr. Kay says, to have had no such purpose.
"We'll have to get Cheney the new memo," one White House official said after Mr. Cheney's comments. "As soon as we write it."
|
- bill 1-27-2004 3:41 pm
NYT - oped
Mr. Cheney, Meet Mr. Kay
Published: January 27, 2004
Vice President Dick Cheney continued to insist last week that Iraq had been trying to make weapons of mass destruction, apparently oblivious to the findings of the administration's own chief weapons inspector that Iraq had possessed only rudimentary capabilities and unrealized intentions. The vice president's myopia suggests a breathtaking unwillingness to accept a reality that conflicts with the administration's preconceived notions. This kind of rigid thinking helped propel us into an invasion without broad international support and, if Mr. Cheney is as influential as many say, could propel us into further misadventures down the road.
Mr. Cheney has long been the administration's most alarmist proponent of the view that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons ready for use at any time and an active nuclear program. He gave little ground in an interview on National Public Radio on Thursday. He described two flatbed trailers found in Iraq months ago as mobile biological weapons labs and claimed they were "conclusive evidence" of Iraqi programs to make weapons of mass destruction. The very next day, David Kay, who had just stepped down as the top weapons inspector, told Reuters that he now thought the much-feared stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons had not existed on the eve of the war. They were eliminated in the mid-1990's by United Nations inspectors and by Iraq's own decisions, he said, and no significant efforts to make new ones followed.
As for those trailers cited by Mr. Cheney, the consensus view, Mr. Kay told The Times, is that they were intended to produce hydrogen or perhaps rocket fuel, not biological weapons. Mr. Kay had earlier called the trailer assertions an embarrassing fiasco. So, too, with Iraq's nuclear weapons program. Mr. Cheney once famously declared that it had been reconstituted, but Mr. Kay called it rudimentary — hardly capable of producing a bomb in a year or two, as the administration had implied.
Although administration officials cling to the hope of finding some evidence of terror weapons in a cubbyhole somewhere in Iraq, surely it is time to focus on how the intelligence could have been so wrong and perhaps avoid making the same mistakes with the next secretive dictator to come along. Mr. Kay largely exonerates President Bush and blames the global intelligence community. He believes the C.I.A. became so reliant on the much-maligned United Nations weapons inspectors that their withdrawal left it without spies of its own.
Mr. Kay also believes that intelligence analysts failed to realize that Mr. Hussein became increasingly isolated and fantasy-driven in the late 1990's, a condition that enabled scientists to hoodwink him into approving fanciful weapons plans that turned into corrupt moneymaking schemes. That seems hard to believe in a land where people supposedly lived in terror of a brutal dictator. But if it is true that Mr. Hussein wrote novels while the American-led force geared up for war, then perhaps both sides of this conflict were divorced from reality.
- bill 1-27-2004 3:43 pm [add a comment]
there is visable daylight between the Kay and Ritter accounts. Kay lets Bush off the hook blaming bad intelligence. Ritter doesnt. Ritter discussion on Brian Lehrer show archive 1/27/04
- bill 1-27-2004 7:31 pm [add a comment]
In the various interviews (Reuters, NYT, NPR) I've noticed Kay slamming the intelligence community. However, Kay fails to consider the role of the Office of Special Plans. Mother Jones covers this "B team" in a article I haven't finished yet, The Lie Factory.
From the NYT interview, I especially noted Kay's statement that the Iraqis feared UNSCOM. I would like to ask Kay if he believes that once the inspectors were back in, the Dubster could have declared victory.
- mark 1-27-2004 9:34 pm [add a comment]
Debate Over Iraqi Arms Poses Risk to President
By DAVID E. SANGER
NYT Published: January, 30 2004
WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — The intensifying debate over prewar American intelligence about Iraq presents President Bush with difficult and risky alternatives as he balances election year politics with calls to overhaul the intelligence apparatus and to restore the nation's credibility around the world.
He could order the start of an inquiry about the performance of intelligence agencies, as Democrats and the former chief weapons inspector, David A. Kay, have insisted, but his aides fear that that could prove politically damaging and would almost certainly reopen old wounds with the C.I.A.
He could keep arguing that military action was justified no matter how immediate a threat Saddam Hussein posed, and put off an examination and possible overhaul of America's intelligence operations for another year. But his political team worries that doing so could keep the issue alive through a long campaign.
Or the president and those on his national security team who once described how Mr. Hussein could use his stockpiles of weapons to strike at any time could conclude that something went badly wrong during their long march to war.
But the White House does not make a habit of admitting error. And even if Mr. Bush vowed to fix what many say is a broken system, his national security aides note, the fix would not be easy.
"They've made a pretty huge mess of it," said one senior Republican who has been talking to Mr. Bush's top advisers about what steps to take next. "They wove this giant story, based on intelligence assessments that in hindsight — and this is hindsight, remember — were wrong.
"It's exposed a huge problem in our intelligence gathering. But who wants to take that on in an election year? Or while you are fighting terrorists?"
White House officials will not talk at length about why they are so deeply hesitant to start an investigation. But they are facing a situation where Democrats are looking for evidence to blame Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and some Republicans are looking for evidence to blame George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence.
One White House official said Thursday that there was clearly a risk that an inquiry could spin out of control, exactly what many administration officials fear has happened to the inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks.
Yet some officials are beginning to argue, in background conversations, that such an investigation is inevitable now that Dr. Kay has declared to the Senate that "we were almost all wrong."
The politics of doing what Dr. Kay says needs to be done — conduct an inquiry and overhaul the intelligence community before a similar mistake is made over Iran, North Korea or other potential threats — has grown enormously complex.
Mr. Bush has publicly defended the "unbelievably hardworking, dedicated people" of the American intelligence agencies in part, some administration officials say, because he because he wants to avoid another bitter public dispute with Mr. Tenet and the intelligence apparatus.
Feelings are still raw over last summer's open arguments between the White House and Mr. Tenet over who was to blame for Mr. Bush's faulty claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was trying obtain uranium in Africa.
They were worsened by the accusations that a White House official blew the cover of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. officer who operated under cover and is the wife of Mr. Bush's greatest critic on the Africa claim, Joseph C. Wilson IV.
Repairing that damage has taken months, and a grand jury has recently begun to hear evidence about the leak. Many intelligence officials continue to argue that real problem was not the ambiguous intelligence about Iraq's weapons capacity, but how Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney chose to use it.
On Thursday, appearing on NBC, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, insisted that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were not ducking the issue.
"No one will want to know more than the president of the comparison between what we found when we got there and what we thought was there going in," Ms. Rice said. She sounded in no hurry, saying it was important to let the Iraq Survey Group complete its work, work that Dr. Kay believes is 85 percent done.
Many Republicans have a different instinct: to follow Dr. Kay's lead and put the blame on the agency's assessments rather than the White House. In their view, that is the best way to insulate Mr. Bush from the charge that he cherry-picked the most damaging information.
Conveniently, some of them have long been suspicious of Mr. Tenet, who was put in his post by President Bill Clinton, and see this as an opportunity to speed along a retirement that the central intelligence chief has been talking about for a year. But Mr. Tenet has many defenders, including the president's father.
It was a measure of Mr. Bush's problem, and Mr. Tenet's, that Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said this week that his committee's draft report of what went wrong, to be issued soon, would be very specific, and very critical.
"This is, indeed, a very egregious problem," he said. "If your intelligence is wrong you're in a world of trouble."
Mr. Bush's political advisers are highly aware that Dr. Kay's report has given Democratic contenders for the presidential nomination something they have long sought: a way to revive the issue of whether Mr. Bush was careless and trigger-happy, willing to twist intelligence findings to fit his own agenda, even at the cost of American credibility abroad.
What that leaves for now is a slow retreat by White House officials — a day-by-day, fact-by-fact backing away from assertions they made with such confidence nine months ago. Mr. Bush no longer declares, as he once did, that he is certain that sooner or later unconventional weapons will be found in Iraq. "He still thinks it," one of his aides said, "but I'm not sure you will hear him say it" until the Iraq Survey Group's investigation is complete.
Mr. Powell, last weekend, started backing away as well, saying more assertively than ever before that there might be no weapons stockpiles in Iraq and that if none are found, an effort had to begin to find out what went wrong. Nonetheless, he and Ms. Rice argue that Mr. Hussein brought his troubles on himself by refusing to account for stockpiles that the United Nations said existed in the mid-1990's.
Only Mr. Cheney, the man who made the most extensive claims about Iraq's readiness to strike out, has failed to back down publicly. Last Friday he was on the air again, talking about Mr. Hussein's mobile biological weapons units, which now appear, Dr. Kay says, to have had no such purpose.
"We'll have to get Cheney the new memo," one White House official said after Mr. Cheney's comments. "As soon as we write it."
- bill 1-30-2004 5:23 pm [add a comment]