CIA Watch - CIA concealed information that Iraq had no nuclear program

My Way News

I am sure that this article will bring joy to every Bush basher in the world. After all we all know that Bush and Cheney personally generated every piece of intelligence that was used to justify the war.

In reality what this article shows is the high state of dysfunction in the American Intelligence community. We really need to fire everyone at the CIA and make them interview again for their positions.

Highlights from the article:

Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of Cleveland made the dangerous trip to Iraq on the CIA's behalf. The book said her brother was stunned by her questions about the nuclear program because - he said - it had been dead for a decade.

New York Times reporter James Risen uses the anecdote to illustrate how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction. His book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration" describes secret operations of the Bush administration's war on terrorism.

The book said Dr. Alhaddad flew home in mid-September 2002 and had a series of meetings with CIA analysts. She relayed her brother's information that there was no nuclear program.

A CIA operative later told Dr. Alhaddad's husband that the agency believed her brother was lying. In all, the book says, some 30 family members of Iraqis made trips to their native country to contact Iraqi weapons scientists, and all of them reported that the programs had been abandoned.

In October 2002, a month after the doctor's trip to Baghdad, the U.S intelligence community issued a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program

So what this looks like to me is an agency so dysfunctional it has already reached it's conclusions and discards any evidence that disagrees with them.
And here is a little bit of context that might have been useful when the New York Times posted their story on the NSA "Domestic Spying" program

In the book, which quotes extensively from anonymous sources, Risen said the NSA spying program was launched in 2002 after the CIA began to capture high-ranking al-Qaida operatives overseas, and took their computers, cell phones and personal phone directories.

The CIA turned the telephone numbers and e-mail addresses from the material over to the NSA, which then began monitoring the phone numbers - in addition to anyone in contact with the telephone subscribers, the book said, saying this led to an expansion of the monitoring, both overseas and in the United States.

So intelligence was developed and followed up on at least the NSA was doing their job.
Finally I am not sure what this means, is it an admission that the NSA monitoring program was legal or an accusation that the NSA is a rogue agency:

The book said the NSA does not need approval from the White House, the Justice Department or anyone else in the Bush administration before it begins eavesdropping on a specific phone line in the United States.

I should note that all the above are based on the assumptions that James Risen's book is 100% accurate, which is the assumption the article makes. That isn't necessarily so.

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