SundayHerald: Why the CIA thinks Bush is wrong

[protect freedom impeach bush now]

from last Feb email
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13 October 2002

SundayHerald: Why the CIA thinks Bush is wrong

http://www.sundayherald.com/28384


Why the CIA thinks Bush is wrong


The president says the US has to act now against Iraq. The trouble is, his own security services don't agree. Neil Mackay reports



GEORGE Bush was about to be hoist by his own petard. It was Monday last week, and the president was glad-handing with the great and the good at the Cincinnati Museum Centre in Ohio as he waited to give one of his most bellicose speeches yet.
In the audience were Ohio state governor Bob Taft and a host of business and political luminaries. As the deadline approached for the Senate and House of Representatives vote on whether or not to give Bush the backing he wanted to attack Iraq, this speech was to be the president's final flourish in the propaganda war to get the US marching in line behind him.

Calling Saddam Hussein a 'murderous tyrant', he made it clear why America had to finish off the Iraqi dictator. 'Facing clear evidence of peril,' he told the audience, 'we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.' He went on: 'We have every reason to assume the worst and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from happening.'

What Bush could not have guessed was that his claims that Iraq was intent on attacking the USA had already began to unravel. The denouement started a few days before, on Thursday, October 3, when Senator Bob Graham, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, metaphorically donned his hob-nailed boots and began delivering some well-aimed kicks to the head of George Tenet, the director of the CIA. The CIA, Graham said, were monkeying with democracy. The agency was not telling his committee what they needed to know about the Iraqi regime. Tenet was damaging the ability of Congress to assess the need for military action.

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(snip)

It seems that most of the Senate listened to the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's reply to claims that the White House was exaggerating the Iraqi threat.
'Each of us has a solemn responsibility,' he said, 'to do everything in our power to ensure that, when the history of this period is written, the books won't ask why we slept.'

The doubts of the intelligence community were washed away against such patriotic phrase-making. It should be noted, however, that a few senators listened to Tenet's admissions and voted 'no'. Among them was Senator Bob Graham.

http://www.sundayherald.com/28384