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Did the Bush administration deliberately mislead the public of Saddams WMD'S? (pg. 3)
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| occrider |
| quote: | Originally posted by Spacey Orange
Deliberate? Probably, but intent is hard to discover.
Mislead? Yes, because he garnered public support using false evidence, made allegations not supported by the facts, and exaggerated. |
At this point I would say that the question of intent is a slam dunk:
| quote: |
Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel
By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005
Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.
The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.
One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.
The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Much of the contents of the September 21 PDB were later incorporated, albeit in a slightly different form, into a lengthier CIA analysis examining not only Al Qaeda's contacts with Iraq, but also Iraq's support for international terrorism. Although the CIA found scant evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the agency reported that it had long since established that Iraq had previously supported the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization, and had provided tens of millions of dollars and logistical support to Palestinian groups, including payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.
Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.
On November 18, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said he planned to attach an amendment to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill that would require the Bush administration to give the Senate and House intelligence committees copies of PDBs for a three-year period. After Democrats and Republicans were unable to agree on language for the amendment, Kennedy said he would delay final action on the matter until Congress returns in December.
The conclusions drawn in the lengthier CIA assessment-which has also been denied to the committee-were strikingly similar to those provided to President Bush in the September 21 PDB, according to records and sources. In the four years since Bush received the briefing, according to highly placed government officials, little evidence has come to light to contradict the CIA's original conclusion that no collaborative relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
"What the President was told on September 21," said one former high-level official, "was consistent with everything he has been told since-that the evidence was just not there."
In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties, and they cited the possibility that Iraq might share chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack against the United States.
Democrats in Congress, as well as other critics of the Bush administration, charge that Bush and Cheney misrepresented and distorted intelligence information to bolster their case for war with Iraq. The president and vice president have insisted that they unknowingly relied on faulty and erroneous intelligence, provided mostly by the CIA.
The new information on the September 21 PDB and the subsequent CIA analysis bears on the question of what the CIA told the president and how the administration used that information as it made its case for war with Iraq.
The central rationale for going to war against Iraq, of course, was that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons, and that he was pursuing an aggressive program to build nuclear weapons. Despite those claims, no weapons were ever discovered after the war, either by United Nations inspectors or by U.S. military authorities.
Much of the blame for the incorrect information in statements made by the president and other senior administration officials regarding the weapons-of-mass-destruction issue has fallen on the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.
In April 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a bipartisan report that the CIA's prewar assertion that Saddam's regime was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons program" and "has chemical and biological weapons" were "overstated, or were not supported by the underlying intelligence provided to the Committee."
The Bush administration has cited that report and similar findings by a presidential commission as evidence of massive CIA intelligence failures in assessing Iraq's unconventional-weapons capability.
Bush and Cheney have also recently answered their critics by ascribing partisan motivations to them and saying their criticism has the effect of undermining the war effort. In a speech on November 11, the president made his strongest comments to date on the subject: "Baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will." Since then, he has adopted a different tone, and he said on his way home from Asia on November 21, "This is not an issue of who is a patriot or not."
In his own speech to the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, Cheney also changed tone, saying that "disagreement, argument, and debate are the essence of democracy" and the "sign of a healthy political system." He then added: "Any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false."
Although the Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 commission, pointed to incorrect CIA assessments on the WMD issue, they both also said that, for the most part, the CIA and other agencies did indeed provide policy makers with accurate information regarding the lack of evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.
But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.
"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002.
The next day, Rumsfeld said, "We have what we consider to be credible evidence that Al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts with Iraq who could help them acquire … weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities."
The most explosive of allegations came from Cheney, who said that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, had met in Prague, in the Czech Republic, with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, five months before the attacks. On December 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press: "[I]t's pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in [the Czech Republic] last April, several months before the attack."
Cheney continued to make the charge, even after he was briefed, according to government records and officials, that both the CIA and the FBI discounted the possibility of such a meeting.
Credit card and phone records appear to demonstrate that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va., at the time of the alleged meeting, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials. Al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence official with whom Atta was said to have met in Prague, was later taken into custody by U.S. authorities. He not only denied the report of the meeting with Atta, but said that he was not in Prague at the time of the supposed meeting, according to published reports.
In June 2004, the 9/11 commission concluded: "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."
Regarding the alleged meeting in Prague, the commission concluded: "We do not believe that such a meeting occurred."
Still, Cheney did not concede the point. "We have never been able to prove that there was a connection to 9/11," Cheney said after the commission announced it could not find significant links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. But the vice president again pointed out the existence of a Czech intelligence service report that Atta and the Iraqi agent had met in Prague. "That's never been proved. But it's never been disproved," Cheney said.
The following month, July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in its review of the CIA's prewar intelligence: "Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al-Qaeda."
One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made statements that contradicted what they were told in CIA briefings might have been that they were receiving information from another source that purported to have evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from a covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the September 11 attacks by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.
Feith was a protégé of, and intensely loyal to, Cheney, Rumsfeld, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and Cheney's then-chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. The secretive unit was set up because Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Libby did not believe the CIA would be able to get to the bottom of the matter of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties. The four men shared a long-standing distrust of the CIA from their earlier positions in government, and felt that the agency had failed massively by not predicting the September 11 attacks.
At first, the Feith-directed unit primarily consisted of two men, former journalist Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, a veteran of neoconservative think tanks. They liked to refer to themselves as the "Iraqi intelligence cell" of the Pentagon. And they took pride in the fact that their office was in an out-of-the-way cipher-locked room, with "charts that rung the room from one end to the other" showing the "interconnections of various terrorist groups" with one another and, most important, with Iraq, Maloof recalled in an interview.
They also had the heady experience of briefing Rumsfeld twice, and Feith more frequently, Maloof said. The vice president's office also showed great interest in their work. On at least three occasions, Maloof said, Samantha Ravich, then-national security adviser for terrorism to Cheney, visited their windowless offices for a briefing.
But neither Maloof nor Wurmser had any experience or formal training in intelligence analysis. Maloof later lost his security clearance, for allegedly failing to disclose a relationship with a woman who is a foreigner, and after allegations that he leaked classified information to the press. Maloof said in the interview that he has done nothing wrong and was simply being punished for his controversial theories. Wurmser has since been named as Cheney's Middle East adviser.
In January 2002, Maloof and Wurmser were succeeded at the intelligence unit by two Naval Reserve officers. Intelligence analysis from the covert unit later served as the basis for many of the erroneous public statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others regarding the alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, according to former and current government officials. Intense debates still rage among longtime intelligence and foreign policy professionals as to whether those who cited the information believed it, or used it as propaganda. The unit has since been disbanded.
Earlier this month, on November 14, the Pentagon's inspector general announced an investigation into whether Feith and others associated with the covert intelligence unit engaged in "unauthorized, unlawful, or inappropriate intelligence activities." In a statement, Feith said he is "confident" that investigators will conclude that his "office worked properly and in fact improved the intelligence product by asking good questions."
The Senate Intelligence Committee has also been conducting its own probe of the Pentagon unit. But as was first disclosed by The American Prospect in an article by reporter Laura Rozen, that probe had been hampered by a lack of cooperation from Feith and the Pentagon.
Internal Pentagon records show not only that the small Pentagon unit had the ear of the highest officials in the government, but also that Rumsfeld and others considered the unit as a virtual alternative to intelligence analyses provided by the CIA.
On July 22, 2002, as the run-up to war with Iraq was underway, one of the Naval Reserve officers detailed to the unit sent Feith an e-mail saying that he had just heard that then-Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz wanted "the Iraqi intelligence cell … to prepare an intel briefing on Iraq and links to al-Qaida for the SecDef" and that he was not to tell anyone about it.
After that briefing was delivered, Wolfowitz sent Feith and other officials a note saying: "This was an excellent briefing. The Secretary was very impressed. He asked us to think about possible next steps to see if we can illuminate the differences between us and CIA. The goal was not to produce a consensus product, but rather to scrub one another's arguments."
On September 16, 2002, two days before the CIA produced a major assessment of Iraq's ties to terrorism, the Naval Reserve officers conducted a briefing for Libby and Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser to President Bush.
In a memorandum to Wolfowitz, Feith wrote: "The briefing went very well and generated further interest from Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby." Both men, the memo went on, requested follow-up material, most notably a "chronology of Atta's travels," a reference to the discredited allegation of an Atta-Iraqi meeting in Prague.
In their presentation, the naval reserve briefers excluded the fact that the FBI and CIA had developed evidence that the alleged meeting had never taken place, and that even the Czechs had disavowed it.
The Pentagon unit also routinely second-guessed the CIA's highly classified assessments. Regarding one report titled "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship," one of the Naval Reserve officers wrote: "The report provides evidence from numerous intelligence sources over the course of a decade on interactions between Iraq and al-Qaida. In this regard, the report is excellent. Then in its interpretation of this information, CIA attempts to discredit, dismiss, or downgrade much of this reporting, resulting in inconsistent conclusions in many instances. Therefore, the CIA report should be read for content only-and CIA's interpretation ought to be ignored."
This same antipathy toward the CIA led to the events that are the basis of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity, according to several former and current senior officials.
Ironically, the Plame affair's origins had its roots in Cheney and Libby's interest in reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to build a nuclear weapon. After reading a Pentagon report on the matter in early February 2002, Cheney asked the CIA officer who provided him with a national security briefing each morning if he could find out about it.
Without Cheney's knowledge, his query led to the CIA-sanctioned trip to Niger by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, to investigate the allegations. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were most likely not true.
Despite that conclusion, President Bush, in his State of the Union address in 2003, included the Niger allegation in making the case to go to war with Iraq. In July 2003, after the war had begun, Wilson publicly charged that the Bush administration had "twisted" the intelligence information to make the case to go to war.
Libby and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove told reporters that Wilson's had been sent to Niger on the recommendation of his wife, Plame. In the process, the leaks led to the unmasking of Plame, the appointment of Fitzgerald, the jailing of a New York Times reporter for 85 days, and a federal grand jury indictment of Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly attempting to conceal his role in leaking Plame's name to the press.
The Plame affair was not so much a reflection of any personal animus toward Wilson or Plame, says one former senior administration official who knows most of the principals involved, but rather the direct result of long-standing antipathy toward the CIA by Cheney, Libby, and others involved. They viewed Wilson's outspoken criticism of the Bush administration as an indirect attack by the spy agency.
Those grievances were also perhaps illustrated by comments that Vice President Cheney himself wrote on one of Feith's reports detailing purported evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In barely legible handwriting, Cheney wrote in the margin of the report:
"This is very good indeed … Encouraging … Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."
-- Murray Waas is a Washington-based writer and frequent contributor to National Journal. Several of his previous stories are also available online
http://nationaljournal.com/about/nj...005/1122nj1.htm
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| Jackson |
Yes.
I just think that if Saddam had the weapons the US claimed he had, Sattelite images would easily prove that.
*Puts on tin hat and waits for the flaming to begin* |
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| DaveSZ |
I was not one who subscribed to the view that the administration “lied,” though certainly I believed they had exaggerated the threat Saddam posed. I believed from the start the Iraq war was a mistake and unnecessary.
Even that sense of guarded skepticism has been shattered.
Yes I do now believe the administration intentionally misled (read: “lied to”) Congress (by withholding key intelligence) and the public (through shills in the media like Judeth Miller) to build support for war.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10164478
| quote: |
Report: 9/11-Iraq link refuted days after attack
Magazine says administration refused to give key docs to Senate committee
Updated: 7:09 p.m. ET Nov. 22, 2005
Ten days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President Bush was advised that U.S. intelligence found no credible connection linking the attacks to the regime of Saddam Hussein, or evidence suggesting linkage between Saddam and the al-Qaida terrorist network, according to a published report.
The report, published Tuesday in The National Journal, cites government records, as well as present and former officials with knowledge of the issue. The information in the story, written by National Journal contributor Murray Waas, points to an abiding administration concern for secrecy that extended to keeping information from the Senate committee charged with investigating the matter.
In one of the Journal report's more compelling disclosures, Saddam is said to have viewed al-Qaida as a threat, rather than a potential ally.
-more
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This unquestionably warrants impeachment. |
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| ogvh5150 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jackson
Yes.
I just think that if Saddam had the weapons the US claimed he had, Sattelite images would easily prove that.
*Puts on tin hat and waits for the flaming to begin* |
If there are satellites that can find natural resources buried underground for a few miles they would have found those darn WMD's they keep lusting for and found none.
Shoot, they prolly could have that Tim Osman err I means that Osama fellow. |
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| wOOt0832 |
| Deliberatly mislead is a euphamism for one word: "lie." The question is: Did President Bush lie to send our troops off to war? The press has tried to skew this as following poor intelligence to place the blame on the CIA and NSA, and has tried to blame the sources like "curveball" but the fact is they lied. The Niger documents were forged. Powell's presentation to the UN on Saddam's weapons capabilities was a plagarized report from a graduate student's project. Curveball was a known drunk and liar by the CIA and Ahmed Chalabi was shown to be passing state secrets to Iran. The OSP (run by Feith and Wurmser) was recieving intel from the Mossad and was going over old intel on Iraq to find stuff that fit their agenda. The OSP was set up inside the Pentagon and none of the intel they recieved or created was screened by the CIA or NSA. CIA agents have testified that, in the time leading up to the war, Cheney frequently visited the CIA and pressured them to find Intel linking Iraq to 911 and to find WMD. Blix testified he found no indications of WMD. Moreover, the PNAC group authored and signed a document sent to Bill Clinton near the end of his 2nd term that layed out a case to attack Iraq (despite the fact that UN reports showed the sanctions were having devistating effects, albet mostly on the poor civilians) that begged Clinton to launch a preemptive strike on Iraq. These are some of the facts, but one should, of course, judge for themselves. |
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| Trancer-X |
| quote: | Iraqi defector duped CIA, report says
| quote: |
The CIA never had access to Curveball. Instead, he was controlled by the German intelligence service, which passed along the information it collected to the United States through the Defense Intelligence Agency, a Pentagon spy agency that handled information from Iraqi defectors.
Between January 2000 and September 2001, the report said, the DIA disseminated "almost 100 reports" from Curveball, who was seen as a valuable new source. Among his most alarming claims was that Iraq had assembled a fleet of mobile labs to manufacture biological weapons and evade detection.
The reports triggered a flurry of escalating U.S. intelligence assessments on Iraq, even though the DIA "did not even attempt to determine Curveball's veracity," according to the report.
Curveball's claims were critical to the case for war. An October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iraq had biological weapons was "based almost exclusively on information obtained" from Curveball, according to the report.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic...MNGCLC1Q5U1.DTL |
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| ogvh5150 |
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| DaveSZ |
| Bush and his advisors talked of invading Iraq since 1999 when he was a candidate for president. They needed a pretext and 9/11 and WMDs, with the help of a compliant media invested heavily in the war effort, provided the means to rally popular support. |
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| ogvh5150 |
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14479271/
Do you think the Bush administration misled Americans on the Iraq war? * 80980 responses
Yes - As Sen. John McCain said, statements like "mission accomplished" underestimated the task ahead.
85%
No - The administration has always made clear the challenges facing the military in Iraq.
14%
I don't know or don't care.
1.2%
OK before those with short memory reply:
The ORIGINAL REASON for the Iraq invasion was that the Saddam Regime had Weapons of Mass Destruction (TM) and he was gonna use them according to both democrats and republicans.
So far the new missions' objectives have been changed more than a baby and his diaper. |
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| ogvh5150 |
| quote: | Originally posted by DevilDogUSMC
You're still dodging the question ^. |
What question is that?
| quote: | At the time everyone
in the world believed he had WMDs, and Bush didn't know
for a fact and purposely lied. Not saying 'there being
any wmd's in Iraq'. Thou you already dismissed the Sarin
they found... |
Sarin doesn't count because Bush and Co. aren't shouting from the rooftops that these are counted as WMD's. But keep ignoring that the hunt for WMDs are over. If you're going to hang onto antiquated sarin from the first gulf war as a means to invade then your diluted. I bet you don't even know what those investigators were looking for. You just stomped on down the recruiters office so you can play real life playstation socom.
| quote: | So your arguement fails. You keep going 'NO WMDs OMG,
and he knew it yadayadayad!'. Well every intelligence
agency in the world thought he did. You must think the
CIA is uber that it knows all and Bush knew for a fact
all WMD programs were verifiably dismantled according
to UN resolutions huh? Shish lol. You give the CIA too
much credit. |
Your argument fails when you keep saying that there are WMDs. The hunt for them is officially over if you actually read a paper or looked online for news articles to find this out.
The CIA is not in the business of finding facts. You are the one that gives them credit. If they and other intelligence agencies say that they thought that Saddam had some NBC stockpiles and were found out to be wrong then it makes them out to look as if they can't do their job. On the other side of that coin you have to believe that their possible mandate was not to look for any WMDs but just say anything to lie to get this war started. After all while you schlepped across the desert in Iraq there was a document titled "Rebuilding Americas Defenses by the Project for a New American Century which states things like "while adversaries like Iran, Iraq and North Korea are rushing to develop ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons as a deterrent to American intervention in regions they seek to dominate." or "U.S. nuclear force planning and related arms control policies must take account of a larger set of variables than in the past, including the growing number of small nuclear arsenals – from North Korea to Pakistan to, perhaps soon, Iran and Iraq – and a modernized and expanded Chinese nuclear force." or "Though the immediate mission of those forces is to enforce the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, they represent the long-term commitment of the United States and its major allies to a region of vital importance. Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
| quote: | | Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. |
This document was written in September 2000.
It doesn't take a caveman to figure out just what interests there are in the Gulf region.
| quote: | Israeli Subcommittee Faults Intelligence on Iraq
An investigation into Israel’s failure to provide accurate intelligence on Iraq’s weapons capabilities found that Israeli intelligence agencies suffered from a closed “information loop,” as well as other failures.
The conclusions are the result of an eight-month investigation by the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Subcommittee for Intelligence and Secret Services that questioned intelligence officials, military officers, and Cabinet members. On March 28, the subcommittee released an 81-page declassified report pending the completion of a longer, classified version.
The report criticized Israeli intelligence agencies for a number of failures, concluding that the agencies overestimated Iraq’s ability to strike at Israel directly. Likud Knesset member Yuval Steinitz, who headed the investigation, cited an “escalation” between 1998 and the beginning of the war in the number of missiles believed to be possessed by Iraq for which there was “no explanation.”
The subcommittee found that Israeli intelligence agencies used information from foreign intelligence services without recognizing that the other states obtained the data from Israel in the first place. The result, according to Steinitz, was that speculation was passed in circles “without any substantiation from the field.” However, Steinitz rejected suggestions that the Israeli agencies intentionally misled the United States and others in hopes of encouraging them to go to war against Iraq, a longtime enemy of Israel.
Steinitz criticized Israeli agencies for their failure to develop sources of hard data within Iraq, noting that the United States and the United Kingdom were able to obtain superior intelligence because of their direct access to Iraqi airspace. |
Don't forget the Downing Street Memo. |
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