Thursday, July 15, 2004
WEAK
Days before Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was to present the case for war with Iraq to the United Nations, State Department analysts found dozens of factual problems in drafts of his speech, according to new documents contained in the Senate report on intelligence failures released last week.
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Offering the first detailed look at claims that were stripped from the case for war advanced by Powell, a Jan. 31, 2003, memo cataloged 38 claims to which State Department analysts objected. In response, 28 were either removed from the draft or altered, according to the Senate report, which was released Friday and included scathing criticism of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence services.
The analysts, describing many of the claims as "weak" and assigning grades to arguments on a 5-star scale, warned Powell against making an array of allegations they deemed implausible. They also warned against including Iraqi communications intercepts they deemed ambiguous and against speculating that terrorists might "come through Baghdad and pick-up biological weapons" as if they were stocked on store shelves.
The documents underscore the extent to which administration and intelligence officials were culling a vast collection of thinly sourced claims as they sought to assemble the case for war. But the origin and full scope of some errors remain unclear because Senate investigators were denied access to a number of relevant documents, according to aides involved in the probe.
Even Colin Powell knew their rationale was shaky, as he famously threw the document in the air and said, "This is bullshit!" It was then and it is now. Despite the Bush administration's repeated efforts to change their rationale for war, they took us into Iraq on nothing more than blatant lies and intelligence twisted to their war-hungry design.
posted by chris at 12:15 PM
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