[boots]

Yesterday, NPR had a really interesting clip about the intelligence surrounding Iraq's alleged purchase of uranium from Niger.

It was a very interesting take. The guest was Seymour Hersh, a writer for the New Yorker. The contention was that the forged document were planted by ex-intelligence ops in order to embarrass the administration...but not publicly...for the way information was being fed to the president. Anything negative about Iraq was given directly to the inner circle without substantiating the info - a process they call stovepiping. The Intelligence community was frustrated with the way the administration was filtering information, so this was supposed to get to the inner circle (VP, Pres, etc.) and then be exposed as faulty BEFORE it went public. But it backfired.Have a listen to the interview. It is titled "Tracking Intelligence Flaws on Iraq Nuclear Story" and is 2/3 of the way down the page.


Here's the synopsis from NPR:

An article in The New Yorker magazine provides a new look at the White House’s use of information on Iraq, uranium and Niger. According to the article, the filtering system used for the last 50 years to screen out bad intelligence was subverted by "stovepipes" that channel information directly to top leadership. NPR's Robert Siegel talks with writer Seymour Hersh.

The full article is at The New Yorker.

An interesting read.

[Mithras]

i was falling asleep reading that piece (in the magazine) yesterday. thanks for the prod to read the whole piece. Very interesting.

Since it's too long for the average Lounger to wade through, here are some choice bits:

Selective analysis by the Pentagon

The people in the policy offices didn’t seem to care. When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study’s exploration of options amounted to planning for failure.

Cheney's push to get a Nuclear story favorable to war

The Vice-President was further told that it was known that Iraq had acquired uranium ore from Niger in the early nineteen-eighties but that that material had been placed in secure storage by the I.A.E.A., which was monitoring it. “End of story,” Martin added. “That’s all we know.” According to a former high-level C.I.A. official, however, Cheney was dissatisfied with the initial response, and asked the agency to review the matter once again. It was the beginning of what turned out to be a year-long tug-of-war between the C.I.A. and the Vice-President’s office...

[Ambassador Wilson was then sent to Niger on his notorious trip, after which he reported back that there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium in Niger]
Wilson returned to Washington and made his report. It was circulated, he said, but “I heard nothing about what the Vice-President’s office thought about it.” (In response, Cathie Martin said, “The Vice-President doesn’t know Joe Wilson and did not know about his trip until he read about it in the press.” The first press accounts appeared fifteen months after Wilson’s trip.)

Iraq war weakening the war on terror

By early March, 2002, a former White Hous official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President ha decided, in his own mind, to go to war. Th undeclared decision had a devastating impac on the continuing struggle against terrorism The Bush Administration took man intelligence operations that had been aimed a Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around th world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf Linguists and special operatives were abruptl reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terroris intelligence programs were curtailed.

Chalabi’s defector reports were now flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President’s office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When INR analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found.

The Niger story is sniffed out as false by an Italian journalist, but bought wholesale by the Pentagon

[ This journalist is the woman to whom the forged Niger documents were originally given. She passed them on to the American Embassy, then went to Niger to investigate the story herself]
She visited mines and the ports that any exports would pass through, spoke to European businessmen and officials informed about Niger’s uranium industry, and found no trace of a sale. She also learned that the transport company and the bank mentioned in the papers were too small and too ill-equipped to handle such a transaction. As Ambassador Wilson had done eight months earlier, she concluded that there was no evidence of a recent sale of yellowcake to Iraq. The Panorama story was dead, and Burba and her editors said that no money was paid. The documents, however, were now in American hands.

Two former C.I.A. officials provided slightly different accounts of what happened next. “The Embassy was alerted that the papers were coming,” the first former official told me, “and it passed them directly to Washington without even vetting them inside the Embassy.” Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. “Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false—until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed.”

[boots]

Somehow, I thought there would be more comment on this.

Lerk, in particular, has been voicing this "stovepiping" concern from 9/11 on.

[Lerkfish]

Originally posted by boots:
Somehow, I thought there would be more comment on this.

Lerk, in particular, has been voicing this "stovepiping" concern from 9/11 on.

*having been summoned*

Yes, I'd read this thread, and thought I'd responded, but I see I didn't. (sorry) That comes from cmd-clicking threads in safari and losing track of the tabbed threads.

In fact, this lays it out so well, I am not sure what additional to contribute...except, as you say, I saw this a long time ago.

I think certainly everything has fit in well with a rift between the intelligence community and this administration...which is odd considering Bush sr.'s role with the intel community.
But when rumsfeld created his own inner circle that superseded and buffered the president from the intel community, there should have been red flags popping up for everyone.
Indeed, since 9/11, the neocons have taken advantage of the hysteria and insulated the president further and further behind veils of controlled information.

One wonders about the ultimate outcome of such things...when you control information you control the situation. I'm not comfortable with neocon control of the president. Advisors are one thing, handlers are another.

This is further exemplified by the recent acknowledgement that a study was drawn up detailing the potential hurdles to Iraqi rebuilding that precisely and accurately predicted all the problems we are now encountering, which the Pentagon flat out silenced and ignored.

there is NOTHING good about an administration that seeks to limit its own knowledge.

[Spliffdaddy]

That's the 4th prong, right?

[Zimphire]

Originally posted by Spliffdaddy:
That's the 4th prong, right?

The lefties and their friends were and are hoping this whole expedition turns out for the worst so you can dance around the Maypole flag in your earth friendly hempware and proclaim yourselves "lovers of humanity."

The irony.

[Spliffdaddy]

No. Wait.

I think there are only 3 prongs.

[Lerkfish]

well, since you've entered the thread, you might as well comment intelligently:

Do you, as two rabid foaming at the mouth conservatives, feel comfortable with an administration that intentionally blinds itself to intelligence, that prefers to make decisions with only a partial picture, and that tables discussions that are contrary to its goals, in spite of how severe the danger being brought up in those discussions?

Do you prefer an administration that shuns complete knowledge of a situation?

I would like to hear your justification for why "stovepiping" is an advantageous strategy.

[Lerkfish]

bump.

well, I suppose this proves that zim and spacefreak never have anything of substance to contribute except abuse.


nice.

[Lerkfish]

bump

[gadster]

Yeah, but it is creative abuse.

Not.

[zigzag]

I missed this thread and had even thought of posting the Hersh piece myself.

I would note that Hersh is not just a regular New Yorker writer, but a very serious Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. However, this will not matter to those who have dismissed the piece without even reading it. They will miss, for instance, the comments of Kenneth Pollack, an avid hawk:

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”

The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”

Like Pollack, I didn't oppose the idea of forcibly overthrowing Saddam, so I can't be accused of being a knee-jerk lefty peacenik (neither, I suspect, can the CIA agents who are so bitter about all this). But I'm also not naive or blind enough to think that Bush et al. aren't politicians like any other.

When this all started I allowed for the fact that, politics being what it is, there would be a certain amount of exaggerated rhetoric on the part of the administration in order to garner public support. I said I could support the idea of an overthrow even if it was for different reasons than the administration was giving. Unfortunately, the political chicanery was even worse than I suspected. This administration may be setting some kind of record for deviousness (and for me that's saying a lot since I remember Gulf of Tonkin, Watergate, and Iran-Contra).

Still, I accept that there will be deviousness. What's even worse than deviousness is incompetence. I figured that, even if they were exaggerating the urgency of the WMD threat, and even if I questioned the timing and the diplomatic failures, I figured that they at least had sound overall intelligence and a sound and comprehensive plan for the operation and its aftermath. I figured that they at least knew what they were getting us into. Unfortunately, by its own admissions, the administration failed to adequately plan and even failed to give its own people sufficient time to plan. It's not that it was an imperfect plan - that would be normal. These have been major blunders.

And the buck continues to get passed. It's amusing to watch Bush loyalists say on the one hand how smart Bush and the rest of the administration is, and on the other hand say that it must have been the CIA's fault, that Bush was hoodwinked. But no one was fooled who didn't want to be fooled. The administration cherry-picked the intelligence that suited its agenda and ignored the rest. The buck should stop there.

I continue to hope for the best, whether it gets Bush re-elected or not. I haven't dismissed the validity of the original concept and I believe it can still bear fruit. However, I'm left with very little faith in this administration (I find it hard to believe that Condi Rice, who's at the center of all this, is being touted as a VP candidate). Here's hoping they get it right in the long run.

[BlackGriffen]

Right on, ZZ.

BG

[Lerkfish]

good post, Zigzag....
and goes along with the point I keep making...even IF you are a Bush apologist, the idea of stovepiping and insulating the president from useful information seems frivolous if not downright incompetent or even malicious. I cannot see a valid reason for limiting the completeness of the data used to make decisions.
If nothing else, it brings into question whether proper decisions CAN be made at all in such an environment.

As I"ve stated in the past...I'm completely against invading Iraq, but if they were going to do it anyways, I would have hoped SOMEONE in the administration would have soberly assessed all scenarios and prepared for all contingencies. Obviously, that did NOT happen. They had a plan A...and as far as I can tell, they're just winging and trying to make a plan B on the fly.

Even if I were a conservative republican, I'd have a problem with that. As leader of this country, Bush, and his advisors have an obligation and a responsibility to execute their positions with supreme competence and effort...or even failing that, to at least weigh all options equally.