Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: E. Kennedy distrugge Bush jr.

Un grandissimo discorso. Da standing ovation. Shalom.
Namib
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http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_5497.shtml
No President who misleads the country on the need for war deserves to be
reelected. SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY SPEECH TO THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN
RELATIONS
By Senator Edward Kennedy
Mar 6, 2004, 22:53
The nation is engaged in a major ongoing debate about why America went to
war in Iraq, when Iraq was not an imminent threat, had no nuclear weapons,
no persuasive links to Al Qaeda, no connection to the terrorist attacks of
September 11th, and no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
Over two centuries ago, John Adams spoke eloquently about the need to let
facts and evidence guide actions and policies. He said, "Facts are stubborn
things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of
our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." Listen to
those words again, and you can hear John Adams speaking to us now about
Iraq. "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our
inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state
of facts and evidence."
Tragically, in making the decision to go to war in Iraq, the Bush
Administration allowed its wishes, its inclinations and its passions to
alter the state of facts and the evidence of the threat we faced from Iraq.
A month ago, in an address at Georgetown University, CIA Director George
Tenet discussed the strengths and flaws in the intelligence on Iraq. Tenet
testified to several Senate and House committees on these issues, and next
Tuesday, he will come before our Senate Armed Services Committee. He will
have an opportunity to explain why he waited until last month to publicly
state the facts and evidence on these fundamental questions, and why he was
so silent when it mattered most - in the days and months leading up to the
war.
If he feels that the White House altered the facts, or misused the
intelligence, or ignored it and relied on dubious sources in the Iraqi exile
community, Tenet should say so, and say it plainly.
It is not sufficient for Tenet to say only, as he did last week to the
Senate Intelligence Committee, that we must be patient. When he was
appointed Director of Central Intelligence in 1997, Tenet said to President
Clinton. ". I have believed that you.and the Vice President must be provided
with . complete and objective intelligence...We must always be straight and
tell you the facts as we know them." The American people and our men and
women serving in Iraq deserve the facts and they deserve answers now.
The rushed decision to invade Iraq cannot all be blamed on flawed
intelligence. If we view these events simply as an intelligence failure -
rather than a larger failure of decision-making and leadership - we will
learn the wrong lessons.
The more we find out, the clearer it becomes that any failure in the
intelligence itself is dwarfed by the Administration's manipulation of the
intelligence in making the case for war. Specific warnings from the
intelligence community were consistently ignored as the Administration
rushed toward war.
We now know that from the moment President Bush took office, Iraq was given
high priority as unfinished business from the first Bush Administration.
According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's account in Ron
Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty, Iraq was on the agenda at the very
first meeting of the National Security Council, just ten days after
President Bush's inauguration in 2001. At that meeting, the President
quickly - and wrongly - concluded that the U.S. could not do much about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He said we should "pull out of that
situation," and then turned to a discussion of "how Iraq is destabilizing
the region."
Secretary O'Neill remembers: "Getting Hussein was now the Administration's
focus. From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking
at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And, if we
did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do
it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way
to do this.'"
By the end of February 2001, the talk on Iraq was mostly about how - and how
quickly - to get rid of Saddam Hussein. President Bush was clearly
frustrated with what the intelligence community was providing. According to
Secretary O'Neill, on May 16, 2001, he and the other principals of the
National Security Council met with the President to discuss the Middle East.
Tenet presented his intelligence report, and told the President that it was
still only speculation whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, or
was even starting a program to build such weapons.
Secretary O'Neill says: "Everything Tenet sent up to Bush and Cheney about
Iraq was very judicious and precisely qualified. The President was clearly
very interested in weapons or weapons programs - and frustrated about our
weak intelligence capability - but Tenet was clearly being careful to say,
here's the little that we know and the great deal that we don't. That
wouldn't change, and I read those CIA reports for two years," said O'Neill.
Then came 9/11. In the months that followed, the war in Afghanistan and the
hunt for Osama bin Laden had obvious priority. Al Qaeda was clearly the most
imminent threat to our national security. In fact, in his testimony to
Congress in February 2001, one month after President Bush's inauguration and
seven months before 9/11, Tenet had said: "Osama bin Laden and his global
network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious
threat." That testimony emphasized the clear danger of bin Laden in light of
the specific attacks in previous years on American citizens and American
institutions.
In February 2002, five months after 9/11, Tenet testified: "Last year, I
told you that Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network were the most
immediate and serious threat this country faced. This remains true despite
the progress we have made in Afghanistan and in disrupting the network
elsewhere."
Even during the buildup to the war in Iraq, in February 2003, Tenet again
testified, "the threat from Al Qaeda remains ... We place no limitations on
our expectations on what Al Qaeda might do to survive . Al Qaeda is living
in the expectation of resuming the offensive."
In his testimony last week to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tenet
repeated his earlier warnings. He said again that Al Qaeda is not defeated
and that "We are still at war.This is a learning organization that remains
committed to attacking the United States, its friends and allies."
Tenet never used that kind of strong language to describe the threat from
Iraq. Yet despite all the clear and consistent warnings about Al Qaeda, by
the summer of 2002, President Bush was ready for war with Iraq. The war in
Afghanistan was no longer in the headlines or at the center of attention.
Bin Laden was hard to find, the economy was in trouble, and so was the
President's approval rating in the polls.
Karl Rove had tipped his hand earlier by stating that the war on terrorism
could bring political benefits as well. The President's undeniable goal was
to convince the American people that war was necessary - and necessary soon,
because soon-to-be-acquired nuclear weapons in the hands of Saddam Hussein
could easily be handed off to terrorists.
This conclusion was not supported by the facts, but the intelligence could
be retrofitted to support it. Greg Thielmann, former Director of the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, put it bluntly last July.
He said, "Some of the fault lies with the performance of the intelligence
community, but most of it lies with the way senior officials misused the
information they were provided." He said, "They surveyed the data, and
picked out what they liked. The whole thing was bizarre. The Secretary of
Defense had this huge Defense Intelligence Agency, and he went around it."
Thielmann also said, "This administration has had a faith-based intelligence
attitude, its top-down use of intelligence: we know the answers; give us the
intelligence to support those answers.Going down the list of administration
deficiencies, or distortions, one has to talk about, first and foremost, the
nuclear threat being hyped," he said.
David Albright, the former weapons inspector with the International Atomic
Energy Agency, put it this way: "Leaders will use worst case assessments
that point to nuclear weapons to generate political support because they
know people fear nuclear weapons so much."
Even though they make semantic denials, there is no doubt that senior
Administration officials were suggesting the threat from Iraq was imminent.
At a roundtable discussion with European journalists last month, Secretary
Rumsfeld insisted: "I never said imminent threat."
In fact, Secretary Rumsfeld had told the House Armed Services Committee on
September 18, 2002, ".Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is
not imminent - that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear
weapons. I would not be so certain."
In February 2003, with war only weeks away, then Deputy Press Secretary
Scott McClellan was asked why NATO allies should support Turkey's request
for military assistance against Iraq. His clear response was, "This is about
an imminent threat." In May 2003, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was
asked whether we went to war "because we said WMD were a direct and imminent
threat to the United States." Fleischer responded, "Absolutely."
What else could National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice have been
suggesting, other than an imminent threat - an extremely imminent threat -
when she said on September 8, 2002, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a
mushroom cloud."
President Bush himself may not have used the word "imminent", but he
carefully chose strong and loaded words about the nature of the threat -
words that the intelligence community never used - to persuade and prepare
the nation to go to war against Iraq.
In the Rose Garden on October 2, 2002, as Congress was preparing to vote on
authorizing the war, the President said the Iraqi regime "is a threat of
unique urgency."
In a speech in Cincinnati on October 7, President Bush echoed Condoleezza
Rice's image of nuclear devastation: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we
cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the
form of a mushroom cloud."
At a political appearance in New Mexico on October 28, 2002, after Congress
had voted to authorize war, and a week before the election, President Bush
said Iraq is a "real and dangerous threat."
At a NATO summit on November 20, 2002, President Bush said Iraq posed a
"unique and urgent threat."
In Fort Hood, Texas on January 3, 2003, President Bush called the Iraqi
regime a "grave threat."
Nuclear weapons. Mushroom cloud. Unique and urgent threat. Real and
dangerous threat. Grave threat. This was the Administration's rallying cry
for war. But those were not the words of the intelligence community. The
community recognized that Saddam was a threat, but it never suggested the
threat was imminent, or immediate, or urgent.
In his speech last month at Georgetown, CIA Director Tenet stated that,
despite attempts to acquire a nuclear capability, Saddam was many years away
from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Tenet's precise words were: "We said Saddam
did not have a nuclear weapon, and probably would have been unable to make
one until 2007 to 2009."
The acquisition of enough nuclear material is an extremely difficult task
for a country seeking nuclear weapons. Tenet bluntly stated that the
intelligence community had "detected no such acquisition" by Saddam. The
October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate also outlined the disagreement
in the intelligence community over whether the notorious aluminum tubes were
intended for nuclear weapons or not. Tenet clearly distanced himself from
the Administration's statements about the urgency of the threat from Iraq in
his speech at Georgetown. But he stopped short of saying the Administration
distorted the intelligence or relied on other sources to make the case for
war. He said he only gave the President the CIA's daily assessment of the
intelligence, and the rest he did not know.
Tenet needs to explain to Congress and the country why he waited until last
month - nearly a year after the war started - to set the record straight.
Intelligence analysts had long been frustrated about the way intelligence
was being misused to justify war. In February 2003, an official described
the feelings of some analysts in the intelligence agencies to the New York
Times, saying "I think there is also a sense of disappointment with the
community's leadership that they are not standing up for them at a time when
the intelligence is obviously being politicized."
Why wasn't CIA Director Tenet correcting the President and the Vice
President and the Secretary of Defense a year ago, when it could have made a
difference, when it could have prevented a needless war, when it could have
saved so many lives?
It was Vice President Cheney who first laid out the trumped up argument for
war with Iraq to an unsuspecting public. In a speech on August 26, 2002, to
the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he asserted: ".We now know that Saddam has
resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.Many of us are convinced that
Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon." As we now know, the
intelligence community was far from certain. Yet the Vice President had been
convinced.
On September 8, 2002, Cheney was even more emphatic about Saddam. He said,
"[We] do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement
system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build
a nuclear weapon." The intelligence community was deeply divided about the
aluminum tubes, but Cheney was absolutely certain.
Where was the CIA Director when the Vice President was going nuclear about
Saddam going nuclear? Did Tenet fail to convince the policy makers to cool
their overheated rhetoric? Did he even try to convince them?
One month later, on the eve of the watershed vote by Congress to authorize
the war, President Bush said it even more vividly. He said, "Iraq has
attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes.which are used to enrich
uranium for nuclear weapons. If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or
steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single
softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we
allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed.Saddam Hussein would
be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists."
In fact, as we now know, the intelligence community was far from unified on
Iraq's nuclear threat. The Administration attempted to conceal that fact by
classifying the information and the dissents within the intelligence
community until after the war, even while making dramatic and excessive
public statements about the immediacy of the danger.
In a February 2004 article in the Atlantic Monthly, Ken Pollack, a former
CIA analyst who supported the war, said, ".Time after time senior
Administration officials discussed only the worst case and least likely
scenario, and failed to mention the intelligence community's most likely
scenario." In a January interview, Pollack added, "Only the Administration
has access to all the information available to various agencies of the U.S.
government - and withholding or downplaying some of that information for its
own purposes is a betrayal of that responsibility."
In October 2002, the intelligence agencies jointly issued a National
Intelligence Estimate stating that "most agencies" believed that Iraq had
restarted its nuclear program after inspectors left in 1998, and that, if
left unchecked, Iraq "probably will have a nuclear weapon during this
decade."
The State Department's intelligence bureau, however, said the "available
evidence" was inadequate to support that judgment. It refused to predict
when "Iraq could acquire a nuclear device or weapon."
The National Intelligence Estimate cited a foreign government report that,
as of early 2001, Niger planned to send several tons of nuclear material to
Iraq. The Estimate also said, "reports indicate that Iraq has sought uranium
ore from Somalia and possibly the Democratic Republic of the Congo." The
State Department's intelligence bureau, however, responded that claims of
Iraq seeking to purchase nuclear material from Africa were "highly dubious."
The CIA sent two memos to the White House stressing strong doubts about
those claims.
But the following January, the President included the claims about Africa in
his State of the Union Address, and conspicuously cited the British
government as the source of that intelligence.
Information about nuclear weapons was not the only intelligence distorted by
the Administration. On the question of whether Iraq was pursuing a chemical
weapons program, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded in September 2002
that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and
stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has - or will - establish its
chemical warfare agent production facilities."
That same month, however, Secretary Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services
Committee that Saddam has chemical-weapons stockpiles.
He said that "we do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological
weapons of mass destruction," that Saddam "has amassed large clandestine
stocks of chemical weapons," that "he has stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons," and that Iraq has "active chemical, biological and
nuclear programs." He was wrong on all counts.
Yet the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate actually quantified the
size of the stockpiles, finding that "although we have little specific
information on Iraq's CW stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked at least 100
metric tons and possibly as much as 500 metric tons of CW agents - much of
it added in the last year." In his speech at the United Nations on February
5, 2003, Secretary of State Powell went further, calling the 100-500 metric
ton stockpile a "conservative estimate."
Secretary Rumsfeld made an even more explicit assertion in his March 30,
2003, interview on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." When asked about
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he said, "We know where they are. They're
in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north
somewhat."
The second major claim in the Administration's case for war was the linkage
between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
Significantly here as well, the Intelligence Estimate did not find a
cooperative relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda. On the contrary, it
stated only that such a relationship might happen if Saddam were
"sufficiently desperate" - in other words, if America went to war. But the
estimate placed "low confidence" that, even in desperation, Saddam would
give weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda.
A year before the war began, senior Al Qaeda leaders themselves had rejected
a link with Saddam. The New York Times reported last June that a top Al
Qaeda planner and recruiter captured in March 2002 told his questioners last
year that "the idea of working with Mr. Hussein's government had been
discussed among Al Qaeda leaders, but Osama bin Laden had rejected such
proposals." According to the Times, an Al Qaeda chief of operations had also
told interrogators that the group did not work with Saddam.
Mel Goodman, a CIA analyst for 20 years, put it bluntly: "Saddam Hussein and
bin Laden were enemies. Bin Laden considered and said that Saddam was the
socialist infidel. These were very different kinds of individuals competing
for power in their own way and Saddam Hussein made very sure that Al Qaeda
couldn't function in Iraq."
In February 2003, investigators at the FBI told the New York Times they were
baffled by the Administration's insistence on a solid link between Al Qaeda
and Iraq. One investigator said: "We've been looking at this hard for more
than a year and you know what, we just don't think it's there."
But President Bush was not deterred. He was relentless in using America's
fears after the devastating 9/11 tragedy. He drew a clear link - and drew it
repeatedly - between Al Qaeda and Saddam.
In a September 25, 2002, statement at the White House, President Bush flatly
declared: "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk
about the war on terror."
In his State of the Union Address in January 2003, President Bush said,
"Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements
by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects
terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda," and that he could provide
"lethal viruses" to a "shadowy terrorist network."
Two weeks later, in his radio address to the nation, a month before the war
began, President Bush described the ties in detail, saying, "Saddam Hussein
has longstanding, direct and continuing ties to terrorist networks ."
He said: "Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and Al Qaeda have met at
least eight times since the early 1990s. Iraq has sent bomb-making and
document-forgery experts to work with Al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided Al
Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. An Al Qaeda operative
was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990s for help in acquiring
poisons and gases. We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network
headed by a senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner. This network runs a poison
and explosive training camp in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are
known to be in Baghdad."
In fact, there was no operational link and no clear and persuasive pattern
of ties between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda. That fact should have
been abundantly clear to the President. Iraq and Al Qaeda had diametrically
opposing views of the world.
In the march to war, the President exaggerated the threat anyway. It was not
subtle. It was not nuanced. It was pure, unadulterated fear-mongering, based
on a devious strategy to convince the American people that Saddam's ability
to provide nuclear weapons to Al Qaeda justified immediate war.
Why would the Administration go to such lengths to go to war? Was it trying
to change the subject from its failed economic policy, the corporate
scandals, and its failed effort to capture Osama bin Laden? The only
imminent threat was the November Congressional election. The politics of the
election trumped the stubborn facts.
Early in the Bush Administration, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill had raised
concerns about politics pervading the process in the White House.
Comparing the Bush Administration and previous Republican Administrations,
he said, referring to Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Karen Hughes: "The biggest
difference . is that our group was mostly about evidence and analysis - and
Karl, Dick, Karen and the gang seemed to be mostly about politics."
In the late winter and early spring of 2002, in the aftermath of the Enron
and other corporate scandals, as Ron Suskind, the author of the O'Neill book
wrote, ".Rove told numerous administration officials that the poll data was
definitive: the scandals were hurting the President, a cloud in an otherwise
blue sky for the soaring, post-Afghanistan Bush."
The evidence so far leads to only one conclusion. What happened was not
merely a failure of intelligence, but the result of manipulation and
distortion of the intelligence and selective use of unreliable intelligence
to justify a decision to go to war. The Administration had made up its mind,
and would not let stubborn facts stand in the way.
Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a recently retired Air Force intelligence
officer who served in the Pentagon during the buildup to the war, said: "It
wasn't intelligence -- it was propaganda.they'd take a little bit of
intelligence, cherry pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by
taking it out of context, usually by juxtaposition of two pieces of
information that don't belong together."
As it now appears, the Iraqi expatriates who had close ties to the Pentagon
and were so eager for the war may well have been the source of the hyped
intelligence. As Walter Pincus reported today in the Washington Post, "The
Bush Administration's prewar assertion that Saddam Hussein had a fleet of
mobile labs that could produce bioweapons rested largely on information from
an Iraqi defector working with another government who was never interviewed
by U.S. intelligence officers."
The Iraqi exiles have even begun to brag about it.
The Pentagon's favorite Iraqi dissident, Ahmed Chalabi, is actually proud of
what happened. "We are heroes in error," Chalabi recently said. "As far as
we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone
and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The
Bush Administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our
swords, if he wants."
Our men and women in uniform are still paying with their lives for this
misguided war in Iraq. CIA Director Tenet could perform no greater service
to the armed forces, to the American people, and to our country, than to set
the record straight, and state unequivocally what is so clearly the truth:
the Bush Administration misrepresented the facts to justify the war.
America went to war in Iraq because President Bush insisted that nuclear
weapons in the hands of Saddam Hussein and his ties to Al Qaeda were too
dangerous to ignore. Congress never would have voted to authorize the war if
we had known the facts.
The Bush Administration is obviously digging in its heels against any
further serious investigation of the reasons we went to war.
The Administration's highest priority is to prevent any more additional
stubborn facts about this fateful issue from coming to light before the
election in November.
This debate will go on anyway in Congress and in communities across the
country. The most important decision any President makes is the decision on
war or peace. No President who misleads the country on the need for war
deserves to be reelected. A President who does so must be held accountable.
The last thing our nation needs is a sign on the desk in the Oval Office in
the White House that says, "The buck doesn't stop here any more." Thank you
very much.

 
Se lo dici tu... :)
-Stefano

 -Stefano
Disse il bue all'asino