Moderators: Alyrium Denryle, Edi, K. A. Pital
Sorry chum, concession denied. I didn't respond seriously because his question was bullshit, a lead-in to the leap in logic "because he didn't tell us he didn't have them, he must have had them".Sorry, you gotta support your arguments. Show your reasoning there. Otherwise, concession accepted by Shep.
Trying to paint this as "so it was all false" is pretty pathetic.Hamel wrote:The items listed in the classified annex were either raw reports or products of the CIA, the NSA, or, in one case, the DIA. The provision of the classified annex to the Intelligence Committee was cleared by other agencies and done with the permission of the Intelligence Community. The selection of the documents was made by DOD to respond to the Committee’s question. The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no conclusions.
This stuff is old as hell among the intelligence community and people in the know, and the Bush admin had enough disconfidence in these reports to (eventually) admit that a Saddam/Sept11/AlQuaida relationship was bogus.Trying to paint this as "so it was all false" is pretty pathetic.
Bush did not disavow the possibility of an al-Qaeda/Iraq relationship in September, just the possibility that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. But if some of these Atta claims hold up, it is quite possible that he in fact, did.Hamel wrote:This stuff is old as hell among the intelligence community and people in the know, and the Bush admin had enough disconfidence in these reports to (eventually) admit that a Saddam/Sept11/AlQuaida relationship was bogus.Trying to paint this as "so it was all false" is pretty pathetic.
I may be mistaken on Bush's denial of Qaeda/Iraq relationship, ok.Bush did not disavow the possibility of an al-Qaeda/Iraq relationship in September, just the possibility that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. But if some of these Atta claims hold up, it is quite possible that he in fact, did.
hehehedsylexics_untie wrote:"raw reports"= my mother's friend's sister's milkman's cousin's neighbor said he saw Saddam's 4th removed nephew shoot a game of pool with a bearded Saudi.
Pick a point that you don't like and use that to discredit the whole thing. How utterly logical of you.Of course, the Atta claims are garbage and have been since forever, as anyone who has witnessed the Degan/Axis debates can attest to. It totally destroys Feith's and the memo's credibility.
That was a huge fucking deal according to the memo, Charlie. The rest of it is riddled with gems such as:Durran Korr wrote:Pick a point that you don't like and use that to discredit the whole thing. How utterly logical of you.Of course, the Atta claims are garbage and have been since forever, as anyone who has witnessed the Degan/Axis debates can attest to. It totally destroys Feith's and the memo's credibility.
talkingpointsmemo.com wrote:A quick note on Stephen Hayes new article Iraq-al Qaida link story, “Case Closed”, in the Weekly Standard.
(I was watching Fox News Sunday this morning and saw Fred Barnes --- Executive Editor of the Standard --- go almost apoplectic about how devastating and case-closing a piece it is.)
In any case, the quick note.
First, congratulations to Steve for a great scoop. He and I disagree about most things these days. But I'm certainly an admirer of his work.
But is it "case closed"? Not quite. More like, case restated.
What do we already know about the intelligence wars over the Iraq-al Qaida link?
We know that most of the Intelligence Community didn't think there was much there. Some contacts, but nothing substantial. We also know that Doug Feith -- along with other administration appointees -- didn't agree. And Feith set up his own intelligence shop at the Pentagon to review all the raw data and find what the CIA and others had missed, misinterpreted or buried.
They came up with a raft of purported connections between Saddam and al Qaida. But when they presented their findings to professional analysts in the rest of the Intelligence Community, most notably at the CIA, the consensus was that those findings didn't pass the laugh-test.
And who put together this new memo, the one the Standard article is based on? "The U.S. Government," as the headline of the article says?
Not exactly. As Steve's article makes clear, the authorship is a bit more specific. "The memo," writes Steve ...
dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources.
In other words, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee is doing their investigation into the pre-war intelligence. This memo is what Doug Feith sent them representing their side of the story. With the exception of some tidbits from interviews with Iraqis now in custody, this is, to all appearances, the same bill of particulars that Feith's shop put together in 2002 and which was panned by the analysts in the rest of the Intel community.
So, the first point to make is that there seems to be little if anything here that the folks in the rest of the Intel Community -- outside of Special Plans -- did not see before concluding that there were no significant links between Iraq and al Qaida.
Point two is that Feith's shop, the Office of Special Plans, the original source of this memo, gained an apparently richly-deserved reputation for what intel analysts call cherry-picking. That is, culling raw intel data to find all the information that supports the conclusion you want to find and then ignoring all the rest.
Now, of course, Feith's advocates say that everyone else was just doing their own sort of cherry-picking, picking the evidence that supported their preconceived notions, etc. But this is simply another example of a pattern which we see widely in this administration: the inability to recognize that there is such a thing as expertise which is anything more than a cover for ideological predilection (for more on this, see this article.)
More to the point, there's now a record. These are the folks, remember, who had the most outlandish reads on the extent of Iraq's WMD capacities and the most roseate predictions about the ease of the post-war reconstruction. So their record of interpreting raw intelligence is, shall we say, objectively poor.
Having said all this, I am, needless to say, not a trained analyst. I'll be commenting on various points in the piece that I know something about. But there's really little point in my speculating on the meaning of the various data points raised in this memo. Much of the value of this evidence rests on the reliability of the sources and methods used to find it. And we on the outside have little way of knowing who the sources were or how reliable they are. Also, you'd want people who could put the data points into their proper context.
So, let's read Hayes' article, but also be clear on the character and source of the memo he's discussing and wait till other knowledgeable folks weigh in with their opinion of what it means.
-- Josh Marshall
Oh, puh-lease. It's one thing to say that a single mistake disqualifies an entire document, but when someone releases something which relies heavily upon sources which were widely discredited long before it was written, it's pretty clear that whoever wrote it was a bullshit artist. Therefore, its implicit credibility as a well-researched source (note that you're trying to bludgeon other people with it) is shot to hell. It's not a logical argument, and should not be judged as one; it is a series of factual claims, many of which are clearly fraudulent.Durran Korr wrote:Pick a point that you don't like and use that to discredit the whole thing. How utterly logical of you.Of course, the Atta claims are garbage and have been since forever, as anyone who has witnessed the Degan/Axis debates can attest to. It totally destroys Feith's and the memo's credibility.
What points? It's inaccurate unconfirmed raw data leaked by a biased source, who was in charge of the Office of Special Plans, to a biased source. I need not attach any credence to it's 'points' until someone more credible provides more information.Durran Korr wrote:I'm still withholding judgment on this, although I'd like for it to be true. But can you actually deal with the points made in the article rather than whining about neocons, as usual?
So why are you using it as evidence? It's a restating of the poor case the OSP made in the first place, with no confirmations or conclusions drawn from it at all, like the DoD said. The whole reason they created the OSP in the first place was to bypass the tpyical intelligence vetting process (think 'peer review') and get cherry-picked intelligence that fitted their preconceived neocon conclusions straight to the higher-ups. I don't know how you can defend the hatfuckers personally, considering their responsibility for every piece of embarassment that has befallen the US administration since March.Durran Korr wrote:Did you even read the article? There are 50 points - one of them involves Mohammed Atta, and even that one acknowledges the controversy involving the intelligence with concern to the Spring 2001 visit. It does not present the visit to us as fact.
Fair enough. In any case I'll have egg all over my face if this turns out to be totally false (and honestly, I would say that it isn't at all unlikely that it will), so again, judgment withheld.What points? It's inaccurate unconfirmed raw data leaked by a biased source, who was in charge of the Office of Special Plans, to a biased source. I need not attach any credence to it's 'points' until someone more credible provides more information.
I wasn't aware that I was.So why are you using it as evidence?
The DoD denies any conclusions made on the basis of the report without actually commenting on the validity of the information beyond a vague "inaccurate."It's a restating of the poor case the OSP made in the first place, with no confirmations or conclusions drawn from it at all, like the DoD said.
All 50 points are of OSP origin?The whole reason they created the OSP in the first place was to bypass the tpyical intelligence vetting process (think 'peer review') and get cherry-picked intelligence that fitted their preconceived neocon conclusions straight to the higher-ups. I don't know how you can defend the hatfuckers personally, considering their responsibility for every piece of embarassment that has befallen the US administration since March.
Fair enough.Durran Korr wrote:
Fair enough. In any case I'll have egg all over my face if this turns out to be totally false (and honestly, I would say that it isn't at all unlikely that it will), so again, judgment withheld.
Ok, it seemed as you were.I wasn't aware that I was.
Exactly. Drawing conclusions from it is wrong was the point they were making.The DoD denies any conclusions made on the basis of the report without actually commenting on the validity of the information beyond a vague "inaccurate."
Not in all cases- what the OSP did was take Iraqi defectors (usually from Chalabi's INC) at their word when the other agencies had discarded them as not credible for a variety of reasons (e.g. what they said didnt' match with confirmed information, or there was no way they could know of what they were purporting to reveal, etc etc)- what the OSP did, according to reports, was not only take new intelligence, but also look at old intelligence that had already been done away with once and recylce it and give it new credibility. The word/suspicion is that the OSP was created to tell certain interested parties what they wanted to hear, and prevent it from being culled by the more experienced/reasoned minds at the more established intel agencies, who had already dismissed it once.All 50 points are of OSP origin?
