Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: La balla "WMD" è orfana

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/helenthomas/4353874/detail.html
Bush 'Pleased' That Intelligence Failures Not His
Analysts Must Have Known Conventional Wisdom
Helen Thomas, Hearst White House columnist
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan says President George W.
Bush was "pleased" with the latest investigation that blames CIA
analysts for the false information that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction.
That's the reason Bush invaded Iraq, remember?
Once again it's those low-level bureaucrats who took us into war.
And once again a panel of "don't rock the boat" establishment figures
has let the commander-in-chief off the hook.
I asked McClellan if the president was upset to be so misguided and at
such a human cost.
Well, you had to be there.
He danced around on the subject, talked about "a culture in the
intelligence community that had not adapted to meet the threats that
we face today."
But he could not be pinned down on how the president personally felt
about making war on the basis of bum information.
Any other president would have blown his stack.
Instead, Bush honored former CIA Director George Tenet with the
Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The commission assigned to inquire into the intelligence failures was
headed by Laurence Silberman, a conservative Republican and retired
member of the D.C. U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, with former
Democratic Sen. Charles Robb as co-chairman.
Their report did not deal with how the policy makers used the
intelligence or what questions they were asking the intelligence
agencies to answer.
Bush had carefully limited the commission's mandate to steer clear of
such potential embarrassments.
The report said, "The analysts who worked on the Iraqi weapons issues
universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause
them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."
Gee, those analysts must have been living on Mars.
Reporters covering the daily White House news briefings at the end of
2001 and during 2002 knew that war was on the agenda.
They heard over and over again that there had to be a regime change in
Iraq and that Saddam Hussein possessed vast arsenals of lethal weapons
and posed a threat to the United States.
The reporters wrote and broadcast the White House line.
It became the conventional wisdom.
Perhaps it was that incessant drumbeat from the White House that led
the panel to note, It is hard to deny that intelligence analysts
worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the
conventional wisdom."
While Bush apparently has no personal reaction about being
misinformed, former Secretary of State Colin Powell wasn't so shy.
Powell got caught out on the limb with his thumping presentation to
the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003 -- one month before the invasion of
Iraq -- when he described in gripping detail Saddam's supposed
chemical and biological weapons.
More recently, Powell told the German magazine Stern that he was
"furious and angry" that he had been misinformed about Iraq's weapons
stockpile.
He said he had based his U.N. presentation on information "from our
security services and from some Europeans, including Germans."
"Some of this information was wrong," Powell said.
"I did not know this at the time."
The panel called the whole escapade "one of the most public and
damaging intelligence failures on record in American history."
U.S. intelligence agencies were "dead wrong" in their pre-war
assessment of Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons."
And the information on Iraq was "either worthless or misleading" and
its analysis riddled with errors.
Nor was the White House about to listen to Hans Blix, who formerly
headed the U.N. inspection teams that went into Iraq between November
2002 and March 2003.
The commission said the Bush administration and the intelligence
community routinely dismissed the U.N. reports -- based on 700
inspections -- that the Iraqi stockpiles apparently had been destroyed
before the U.S. attack.
So who is accountable?
Bush and his top aides see the 2004 election as vindication for the
president.
End of story.
Harry Truman got it wrong -- the buck never stops at this White House.
Instead, it's those nameless, faceless bureaucrats who led us down the
garden path.

 
Solito titolo del ca**o del solito Namib :)
-Stefano

 End of story.
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secondo me e' stata Castagno ad inventarla <g>
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