CIA

The Central Intelligence Agency has no bigger critic that myself over the last 20 years... they missed a lot of opportunities, no question there.

This does raise a question in my eyes, however...

If Cheney and Rummy were justified in "doubting" the CIA's abilities as an agency tasked with gathering, analysing, and dissemination foreign intelligence and information in the world immediately after 9/11, then why would it be acceptable to think that they had completely gotten it RIGHT in the 30 months from Sept. 2001 to March of 2003?

If the CIA was so wrong after missing the fall of the USSR, the terror attacks of the mid-90s and the attacks of 9-11... why would the rushed and conflicting reports and estimates concerning Iraq's capabilities be acceptable to be presented to the UN Security Council, our strongest ally on earth (the UK), and the American people, as justification for the '03 invasion... recalling that the invasion was for the PRIMARY purpose of removing an arsenal of weapons from Saddam and his regime? What had changed SO much in those 30 months at Langley? They got so much wrong that the VP and SecDef COULDN"T justifiably trust the Agency to operate effectively in Afghanistan... but by Jan of 2003, they had it SO dead-on right that an NIE created by Tenant's office in less than 60 days (when it normally takes about 12 months) was the ONLY evidence presented to Congress prior to the vote to okay military action. How does that work?

I also want to stress that I disagree with the rapidly aging "chestnut" that all the world's intelligence agencies agreed with the CIA estimates on Iraq's threat-capacity prior to the '03 invasion. As evidence I offer the following:

There was no “yellowcake” deal… ever. The US was told this was a false statement by the Italians, the Germans, and the British as early as Jan, 2002. The CIA and the State Department BOTH wrote reports telling the White House that the “yellowcake” story was undoubtedly false, and called into question the Chalabi associate that brought the information forward in the first place. No other source for this story was ever found… yet Powell, Cheney and Bush all made reference to it as a matter of serious concern to national security and was one of the “foundation” reasons Bush gave for giving the 2003 State of the Union “ultimatum” to Iraq… the US could not allow Iraq to use the “yellowcake” to develop nukes. My sources are HERE, HERE, and HERE.

This is not an attempt to claim that there was a conspiracy on the Administration's part... just that they were NOT managing information and intelligence correctly (or at all) and were only viewing these items based on assumptions made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. My beef is the suggestion that ALL of Iraq's nuclear development capabilities were based on the results of inspections carried out immediately after the '91 defeat of Iraq in Kuwait... accurate information, but information that was 12 years old by Jan of 2003. That's 12 years of ZERO funding from a regime that spent all its resources rebuilding the Republican Guard... NO EVIDENCE of post-'91 nuclear development has come to light since... NONE. That's a rather damning piece of "missing" evidence, isn't it?

I'm not now, nor have I ever in the past, argued the point that Saddam had chemical weapons-capabilities at some point... to do so would be the height of idiocy. He used them on as many as 15000 Kurds, and we know this because the weapons were US-manufactured. In a post-'91 Iraq, however, Saddam's chemical arsenal seems to have been limited to simply chemical agents available to him through the refining and weaponization of simple industrial components like chlorine, amonia nitrate, solvents and phosphates... all available to him in excess via the oil refining industry. However simple these weapons were... they would still have been deadly and very, very dangerous. My problem is that this is something ANY Middle Eastern nation with the capacity to refine oil would have, including Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ceylon... in short, easily any Islamic state that might harbor terrorists or terrorist sympathisers has the same capacity. This does not make Iraq the greatest threat to US interests, in other words.

This isn't a situation of "Monday-night quaterback" syndrome, either... this should have been appearant to the entire intelligence world (in my opinion). This is called "analysis in intel" and the CIA was doing badly for the entire time, not just up to 2001.