OT: Political: Wow! Our Security Agencies held back important information...

[Alan Baker]

...because Bush told them to hold it back:

'The next day, Sept. 18, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri. "Tenet told me he
briefed the president personally," said one of the former CIA officers.
According to Tenet, Bushšs response was to call the information "the
same old thing." Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to
think. "The president had no interest in the intelligence," said the CIA
officer. The other officer said, "Bush didnšt give a fuck about the
intelligence. He had his mind made up."

But the CIA officers working on the Sabri case kept collecting
information. "We checked on everything he told us." French intelligence
eavesdropped on his telephone conversations and shared them with the
CIA. These taps "validated" Sabrišs claims, according to one of the CIA
officers. The officers brought this material to the attention of the
newly formed Iraqi Operations Group within the CIA. But those in charge
of the IOG were on a mission to prove that Saddam did have WMD and would
not give credit to anything that came from the French. "They kept saying
the French were trying to undermine the war," said one of the CIA
officers.

The officers continued to insist on the significance of Sabrišs
information, but one of Tenetšs deputies told them, "You havenšt figured
this out yet. This isnšt about intelligence. Itšs about regime change."

The CIA officers on the case awaited the report they had submitted on
Sabri to be circulated back to them, but they never received it. They
learned later that a new report had been written. "It was written by
someone in the agency, but unclear who or where, it was so tightly
controlled. They knew what would please the White House. They knew what
the king wanted," one of the officers told me.

That report contained a false preamble stating that Saddam was
"aggressively and covertly developing" nuclear weapons and that he
already possessed chemical and biological weapons. "Totally out of
whack," said one of the CIA officers. "The first [para]graph of an
intelligence report is the most important and most read and colors the
rest of the report." He pointed out that the case officer who wrote the
initial report had not written the preamble and the new memo. "Thatšs
not what the original memo said."'



Someone should PAY for this! Holding that information is blatantly
political! How can we trust our security agencies if they put politics
first over national security? EVERY ONE of the top officials in those
agencies should be fired!

:-)

--
Alan Baker
Vancouver, British Columbia
"If you raise the ceiling four feet, move the fireplace from that wall
to that wall, you'll still only get the full stereophonic effect if you
sit in the bottom of that cupboard."