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| Seymour Hersh |
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Last modified: Fri Oct 24 00:29:58 EDT 2003
The October 27, 2003 issue of The New Yorker magazine contains an article by Seymour M. Hersh entitled, "The Stovepipe". The immediate focus of the article is the story of how President Bush's State of the Union Address in January 2003 came to contain the now-infamous phrase:
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."This is a fascinating tale in and of itself, but the broader message of the article is that the Bush Administration has systematically altered the process of intelligence analysis as practiced by the C.I.A. for the past 50 years. In particular, the Administration has arranged for politically useful intelligence reports to be "stovepiped" directly from the C.I.A. to high officials, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In the past, raw information was rarely, if ever, forwarded past the C.I.A. without first being "vetted" for reliability. In effect, the Administration has established its own intelligence operations, without guidance or support from the established intelligence community.
Among the results of this "stovepiping" is that the Administration can selectively leak information to support its positions to the press. As Hersh puts it, regarding information from Iraqi defectors:
A routine settled in: the Pentagon's defector reports, classified "secret," would be funnelled to newspapers, but subsequent C.I.A. and INR [the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research] analyses of the reports - invariably scathing but also classified - would remain secret.
Hersh paints a picture of an administration obsessed with finding what it wanted to find in intelligence reports, determined to justify the policy decisions already made, rather than using intelligence to guide policy.
A further bombshell is Hersh's claim that the documents used by the Administration to support the notion that Saddam was trying to buy uranium were actually forged by former C.I.A. operatives:
... a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves...This is, to me, downright stunning. The war against Iraq was sold to the American public in large part by the spectre of nuclear weapons in the hands of Saddam Hussein. President Bush said in a speech on October 7th, 2002:
"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."
Hersh's claims seem incredible, but he has excellent credentials as an investigative reporter. If he's right, the Bush Administration is guilty of a monstrous abuse of power.