The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #71458 Message #1222751
Posted By: DMcG
10-Jul-04 - 03:38 AM
Thread Name: BS: Senate Report: Bush misled by CIA/FBI..
Subject: RE: BS: Senate Report: Bush misled by CIA/FBI..
Here's a Slate clipping from 2002:
======= How the hawks plan to find a Saddam/al-Qaida connection. By Fred Kaplan Slate, Posted Monday, October 28, 2002, at 2:42 PM PT You've got to hand it to Donald Rumsfeld and his E-Ring crew at the Pentagon. They know all the stratagems of bureaucratic politics, and they play the game well. In their latest maneuver, reported on the front page of last Thursday's New York Times, the secretary of defense has formed his own "four- to five-man intelligence team" to sift through raw data coming out of Iraq in search of evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida terrorists.
Rumsfeld has publicly continued to push this link as a prime—or at least the most easily sellable—rationale for going to war with Iraq, even after the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency have dismissed the connection as tenuous at best. But Rumsfeld contends that the spy bureaucracies may have missed something. As his top team member, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, put it to the Times, there is "a phenomenon in intelligence work that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won't, and not see other facts that others will." Since Wolfowitz is one of Washington's most forceful advocates of a second Gulf War, we can safely predict that he will find the facts he needs to make his case.
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Did this Senate Report look at Rumfeld's intelligence group as well as the CIA? If not, why not? If so, did it come in for any criticism?