Holden of Atrios finds the Los Angeles Times taking a look at what our Secretary of State knew and when he knew it:
Eschaton: Posted by Holden:
Secretary Colin L. Powell, UN Security Council, February 5, 2003
My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples...
The LA Times delves into the SSCI report and finds that the State Department's very own analysts tried to delete a number of lies from Powell's speech:On the Mobile Weapons Labs:The analysts, describing many of the claims as "weak" and assigning grades to arguments on a 5-star scale, warned Powell against making an array of allegations they deemed implausible. They also warned against including Iraqi communications intercepts they deemed ambiguous and against speculating that terrorists might "come through Baghdad and pick-up biological weapons" as if they were stocked on store shelves.
Posted by DeLong at July 15, 2004 04:54 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postIn one section that remained in the speech, Powell showed aerial images of a supposed decontamination vehicle circling a suspected chemical weapons site.
"We caution," State Department analysts wrote, "that Iraq has given … what may be a plausible account for this activity — that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives."
The presence of a water truck "is common in such an event," they concluded.
On Aluminum Tubes:State Department analysts also made it clear that they disagreed with CIA and other analysts on the allegation that aluminum tubes imported by Iraq were for use in a nuclear weapons program. "We will work with our [intelligence community] colleagues to fix some of the more egregious errors in the tubes discussion," the memo said.
In the speech, Powell acknowledged disagreement among analysts on the tubes, but included the claim. The Senate report concluded last week that the tubes were for conventional rockets.
[snip]In one case, Powell was to say that the aluminum tubes were so unsuitable for use in conventional rockets that if he were to roll one on a table, "the mere pressure of my hand would deform it."
Department of engineers said that statement was incorrect.
On Nuclear Weapons:
In a section on nuclear weapons, the analysts argued against using a communications intercept they described as "taken out of context" and "highly misleading." There is no more information on what was in the intercept, but Powell in his speech referred to intercepted communications that he said showed that "Iraq front companies sought to buy machines that can be used to balance gas centrifuge rotors."
"Holden of Atrios"?
I thought Atrios was the pseudonym and Eschaton the name of web site.
Posted by: marcel on July 15, 2004 05:08 PMHolden is one of Atrios's guest bloggers.
History will record that there are two people that could have stopped the war - Powell and Tony Blair.
When history called, they cowered.
Blair may be worse than Powell. UK daily Independent said today that Blair signed on for the war at his meeting with Bush in
April 2001 - a full five months before 9/11.
Fool us once, shame on them. Fool us twice, shame on us.
Deborah Branscum back in Nov. 2002 ( http://buzz.buzzword.com/discuss/msgReader$142?mode=topic ) -
"...good marketing, effective marketing, can conjure up desires for the oddest things.
War's a good example. Often, there's remarkably little enthusiasm for bloodshed of various sorts. That's when savvy marketers can really show off their chops...royal family of Kuwati hired Hill & Knowlton...the message most likely to motivate public support for war on Iraq was the perception of Saddam Hussein as an evil madman who even committed atrocities against his own people and had to be stopped...
...The story that may have started the Gulf war [I]...Kuwaiti girl known only as Nayirah...told how, as a volunteer at the Al-Addam hospital in Kuwait, she had seen Iraqi soldiers taking babies from incubators and leaving them to die on the floor.
...Only much later...did it emerge that Nayirah was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the USA, that she had been coached in giving the testimony by...H&K’s vice-president, and that the story was entirely untrue. "
It's about time you saw the light. Weren't you trying to recruit him as one of the "grown-up republicans" just last month or so...
Posted by: Spasm on July 15, 2004 09:51 PMTo be fair, Powell did try to do due diligence on the intelligence (hence existence of the State/INR evaluation system, which would not have arisen had Powell not wanted a thorough look). Powell was simply misserved.
BTW, the State/INR evaluation system for the most part endorsed the view that Saddam had WMD systems and programs. It's simply not accurate to suggest that they were pouring cold water on all the intelligence.
Posted by: Jim Harris on July 16, 2004 05:07 AMWhat is astounding to me is: why Powell did not acknowledge or take into account of the work done by the UN inspectors at the time. I mean, if you were going to be so methodical about it, wouldn't you correlate the old, unreliable, defector-fed, single-sourced, unverifiable data (from all the intelligence agencies) with the clean, transparent,
uo-to-the-date information that is available for free for asking? And if you are not going to use such clean data because of your own biases, does that not make your argument useless instantly?
Has any part of the press correlated Powell's presentation with the available reports from Blix's team at the time?
"To be fair, Powell did try to do due diligence on the intelligence (hence existence of the State/INR evaluation system, which would not have arisen had Powell not wanted a thorough look). Powell was simply misserved."
Posted by: Jim Harris on July 16, 2004 05:07 AM
Right. It's not like he's been around DC for, oh, 30-odd years. It's not like he's seen intelligence estimates before, or was around long enough to see the realities emerge, to compare with the prior estimates. It's not like he rose to the top of a competitive hierarchy, where being misserved could end one's career. It's not like he had a large number of contacts throughout the military-industrial-intelligence community to draw upon.
I guess that Kerry should call upon the legacy of Gen. Marshall, and install a retired general as his Secretary of State. That way, he won't be fooled, like the newbie Powell was fooled.
Posted by: Barry on July 16, 2004 06:54 AMThis is nothing new for Powell. He was involved in the attempted cover-up of the My Lai 4 massacre in Vietnam.
The only reason anyone here gives Powell the benefit of the doubt is that he is a lot slicker than other neocons - some of whom are easy to see thru like, say, Wolfie or Bush himself.
.....and probably because he's black.
But make no mistake, they are all snots from the same nose.
Posted by: avedis on July 16, 2004 07:20 AMOne technical note regarding State/INR's analysis:
"In one section that remained in the speech, Powell showed aerial images of a supposed decontamination vehicle circling a suspected chemical weapons site.
'We caution,' State Department analysts wrote, 'that Iraq has given … what may be a plausible account for this activity — that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives.'
The presence of a water truck 'is common in such an event,' they concluded."
The problem is that a water truck does not present the same imagery signature as a decontamination vehicle...and while it is not impossible to use a decontamination vehicle to carry water, a fire truck (which the Iraqis certainly had) would be much more effective for the purpose INR cites. Plus, flooding the decontamination vehicle's tanks with water would reduce its effectiveness in its intended role, due to dilution of the decontaminating solution.
It is quite possible that an analyst without training in imagery exploitation wouldn't be able to tell the difference and assume that what they saw in the image was what they expected to see. In my career, it was not all that uncommon for a relatively untrained "all source" analyst to disregard the opinion of a highly experienced imagery analyst and substitute their opinion for the imagery specialist's in the product sent forward to the seniors. I've chopped a few people off at the knees (metaphorically speaking) during briefings for doing so, and thereby (unintentionally) providing erroneous information to senior decisionmakers.
Posted by: Jem on July 16, 2004 08:29 AM"IRREFUTABLE" -- actual headline in local (major) paper day after Powell's presentation to U.N.
POWELL LIES TO U.N. -- factual headline (based on info known at the time) that a real newspaper would have printed on the same day.
Posted by: Dem on July 16, 2004 09:08 AMDuring his UN presentation, when Powell used the term 'teaspoonful' in describing the amount of some catastrophic liquid, to the UN, to the metric-system world, I wondered "why would he use teaspoon units? who is his audience?"
Maybe he didn't care about world opinion nor about being precise, caring more for painting a dramatic picture.
Posted by: Laura on July 16, 2004 11:36 PM