[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Washington fibs (cont.)

[Patrick Bond]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-britbook11feb11,0,2940212.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Los Angeles Times

Book Casts Doubt on Case for War
Believing the evidence fell short, Bush discussed with Blair the 
possibility of inciting a conflict with Iraq, British author says.

By John Daniszewski

February 11, 2006

LONDON - It was the end of January 2003. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell 
was five days away from giving a critical speech at the U.N. Security 
Council, laying out the case that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass 
destruction and posed a danger to world peace.

But huddled with aides at the White House, President Bush and British Prime 
Minister Tony Blair were not sure there was enough evidence to convince the 
Security Council. Without the council's explicit authorization, their plans 
for an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein could be difficult to defend under 
international law.

Bush proposed an alternative: paint a U.S. spy plane in United Nations 
colors and see if that didn't tempt Hussein's forces to shoot at it. In any 
case, he said, the war was "penciled in" for March 10 and the United States 
would go ahead with or without a second U.N. resolution.

Blair replied that he was "solidly with" the president.

That is the gist of an account of the Jan. 31, 2003, meeting contained in 
the new edition of "Lawless World," a book by British author Philippe 
Sands. He has not identified the writer of the memorandum on which the 
account is based, but British media reports say it was one of the aides in 
attendance: Sir David Manning, then security advisor to Blair and now the 
British ambassador in Washington.

A spokesman for Blair on Friday refused to address the allegations but 
repeated Downing Street's insistence that there was no decision to commit 
British forces to war in Iraq until after it was authorized by Parliament 
on March 18, two days before the invasion was launched.

A spokesman for Manning said the ambassador would not comment.

Sands, 45, is a professor of international law and a founding member of the 
Matrix law office in London, where Cherie Blair, the prime minister's wife, 
also works. His book, initially published last year, is not primarily about 
the decision to go to war in Iraq. Rather, it examines a range of issues in 
which, he argues, the Bush administration, with Britain's complicity, has 
undermined the "rules-based" international system built largely by the 
United States and Britain after World War II.

Sands said there was no doubt about the authenticity of the documents he 
quotes.

"They have not been denied, and they cannot be denied," he told the Los 
Angeles Times this week. Britain's Channel 4 News said it had seen the 
document outside Britain. The channel's Jon Snow presented excerpts in a 
broadcast last weekend.

The text, in Sands' view, shows that U.S. and British leaders had 
determined six weeks before the invasion to launch a war to disarm Hussein, 
even without explicit U.N. approval.

(clip)

===

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/10/AR2006021000267.html
Brown Blames Superiors For Response to Katrina

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 11, 2006; A01

Michael D. Brown, the former Federal Emergency Management Agency director, 
accused the Bush administration yesterday of setting the nation's disaster 
preparedness on a "path to failure" before Hurricane Katrina by 
overemphasizing the threat of terrorism, and of discounting warnings on the 
day the storm hit that a worst-case flood was enveloping New Orleans.

Brown called "a little disingenuous" and "just baloney" assertions by 
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and other top Bush 
administration officials that they were unaware of the severity of the 
catastrophe for a day after Katrina struck on Aug. 29. Investigators say 
their inaction delayed the launch of federal emergency measures, rescue 
efforts and aid to tens of thousands of stranded New Orleans residents.

Brown's highly charged testimony before a Senate investigative panel was a 
striking about-face from his comments to its House counterpart in 
September, when he was still on the administration payroll. At that time, 
Brown leveled his harshest criticism for what President Bush has called an 
"inadequate" response at Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) and 
New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D), who Brown said failed to fully evacuate 
the city and to forge a unified command.

His sometimes combative exchanges with senators also offered a rare glimpse 
of a former Bush official publicly criticizing the administration. He 
sharpened his earlier criticism and named people whom he had previously 
described only in general terms.

After the White House declined to offer Brown a legal defense of executive 
privilege, which would have allowed him not to testify to lawmakers, Brown 
said yesterday that Chertoff and his predecessor, Tom Ridge, paved the way 
for FEMA's Katrina failures by fomenting a "cultural clash" between FEMA 
and the Department of Homeland Security. DHS absorbed FEMA in 2003, and the 
head of the emergency agency stopped reporting to the president.

(clip)

===

NY Times, February 11, 2006
Intelligence
Ex-C.I.A. Official Says Iraq Data Was Distorted
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 - A C.I.A. veteran who oversaw intelligence assessments 
about the Middle East from 2000 to 2005 on Friday accused the Bush 
administration of ignoring or distorting the prewar evidence on a broad 
range of issues related to Iraq in its effort to justify the American 
invasion of 2003.

The views of Paul R. Pillar, who retired in October as national 
intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, echoed previous 
criticism from Democrats and from some administration officials, including 
Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism adviser, and 
Paul H. O'Neill, the former treasury secretary.

But Mr. Pillar is the first high-level C.I.A. insider to speak out by name 
on the use of prewar intelligence. His article for the March-April issue of 
Foreign Affairs, which charges the administration with the selective use of 
intelligence about Iraq's unconventional weapons and the chances of postwar 
chaos in Iraq, was posted Friday on the journal's Web site after it was 
reported in The Washington Post.

"If the entire body of official intelligence on Iraq had a policy 
implication, it was to avoid war - or, if war was going to be launched, to 
prepare for a messy aftermath," Mr. Pillar wrote. "What is most remarkable 
about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and 
thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of 
the most important U.S. policy decisions in decades."

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Pillar said he recognized that his views 
would become part of the highly partisan, three-year-old battle over the 
administration's reasons for going to war. But he said his goal in speaking 
publicly was to help repair what he called a "broken" relationship between 
the intelligence produced by the nation's spies and the way it is used by 
its leaders.

"There is ground to be replowed on Iraq," said Mr. Pillar, now a professor 
at Georgetown University. "But what is more important is to look at the 
whole intelligence-policy relationship and get a discussion and debate 
going to make sure what happened on Iraq doesn't happen again."

President Bush and his aides have denied that the Iraq intelligence was 
politicized. Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said in 
November, "Our statements about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein were 
based on the aggregation of intelligence from a number of sources, and 
represented the collective view of the intelligence community. Those 
judgments were shared by Republicans and Democrats alike."

Reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the presidential 
commission on weapons intelligence headed by Laurence H. Silberman, a 
senior federal judge, and Charles S. Robb, the former Virginia governor and 
senator, found that C.I.A. analysts had not been pressed to change their 
views. A second phase of the Senate committee review, on how administration 
officials used intelligence, has not been completed.

Mr. Pillar alleged that the earlier studies had considered only "the 
crudest attempts at politicization" and that the real pressures were far 
more subtle. "Intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions that 
had already been made," chiefly to topple Mr. Hussein in order to "shake up 
the sclerotic power structures of the Middle East," he wrote.

According to Mr. Pillar's account, the administration shaped the answers it 
got in part by repeatedly asking the same questions, about the threat posed 
by Iraqi weapons and about ties between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda. When 
intelligence analysts resisted, he wrote, some of the administration's 
allies accused Mr. Pillar and others of "trying to sabotage the president's 
policies."

In light of such accusations, he wrote, analysts began to "sugarcoat" their 
conclusions.

Mr. Pillar called for a formal declaration by Congress and the White House 
that intelligence should be clearly separated from policy. He proposed the 
creation of an independent office, modeled on the Government Accountability 
Office and the Congressional Budget Office, to assess the use of 
intelligence at the request of members of Congress.

Mr. Pillar suggested that the root of the problem might be that top 
intelligence officials serve at the pleasure of the president.

A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, said the agency had no comment.

Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at 
the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that the C.I.A. had 
long resisted intervention in Iraq, and that internal pressure on analysts 
to resist war was greater than any external pressure.

"If the C.I.A. had spent less time leaking its opinions, throughout the 
1990's, opposed to any conflict with Iraq, and more time developing assets 
inside Iraq, the agency would have more credibility and better 
intelligence," said Ms. Pletka, who served for a decade, until 2002, as a 
Republican staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.