Left Coaster Latest Bombshell:WMDgate: Fixing Intell Around Policy

Eriposte's latest bombshell -- WMDgate: Fixing Intelligence Around Policy, Part 3 -- The White House Iraq Protocol (WHIP) for Deceiving the United States
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/firedoglake/113396841294493844/

Wednesday :: Dec 7, 2005
WMDgate: Fixing Intelligence Around Policy, Part 3
SUMMARY

The source of this post is not new information. Rather, it is a brief, largely unnoticed paragraph buried in the 2004 Senate (SSCI) Report, the significance of which has clearly not permeated as deeply as it should have.

What I'm referring to here is a brief statement made to the SSCI by a top IC official to explain why the Bush Administration's unclassified White Paper of October 2002 dropped numerous critical caveats and direct challenges to the scary claims in the White Paper - caveats and challenges that existed in the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) (all emphasis mine):

The Vice Chairman of the NIC and the NIOs who drafted the classified NIE told Committee staff that the statement in the unclassified white paper - "most intelligence specialists assess" the tubes are intended for a nuclear program - was used because the NIC does not refer to disagreements between intelligence agencies in unclassified documents out of concern that the country being discussed would be tipped off to a potential cover story. For example, by publishing in an unclassified paper that a U.S. intelligence agency believed the tubes were intended for a rocket program, Iraq could learn that such a use was believable and could plausibly argue to the international community that the tubes were intended for rockets, even if they were really intended for a nuclear program.

After much consideration of the amazing responses in comments to an earlier post, I decided to use a term suggested by reader Jim to describe this: the White House Iraq Protocol (WHIP). As you can see, the stated goal of the WHIP was to hide or suppress accurate intelligence from public view if such information might possibly provide the enemy a "cover story".

To understand the gravity of the WHIP, simply extend the Vice-Chairman's statement (above) to public (unclassified) statements made by Bush, Cheney, and their cabinet in the run-up to the war. Since the Bush administration policy was to not publicly reveal any IC disagreements, or challenges to claims made by other members of the IC or the Bush administration, by definition fabrications and false or dubious claims were (allowed to be) freely made in public about Saddam Hussein's alleged capabilities, without presenting to the public the alternative IC views (which remained classified, unless they got leaked to the media). In other words, this protocol explains how Bush and his cabinet stage-managed the run-up to the Iraq war by deliberately cherry-picking the stove-piped, dubious or false reports that allowed them to falsely portray a worst case scenario, while hiding from the public (classifying) information they received from the IC that challenged those misleading or false claims. The dramatic differences between the classified NIE and the declassified White Paper based on the NIE were merely an example of the WHIP at work, considering that the public record is quite replete with other examples of the Bush administration's mendacity and misleading (my recent series' themselves have documented considerable evidence just on the aluminum tubes and uranium from Africa topics). (NOTE: I'm setting aside the issue of how dubious/false intel was created in the first place, at the Bush administration's behest; that's an equally important ingredient that is reserved for a future post but even without that, the WHIP explains the deliberate misleading and lying that occurred).

The rest of this post discusses important aspects of the WHIP.
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/006211.php

... and the derived conclusions, should not have been a function of whether the intelligence was classified or declassifed. Yet, by dropping the caveats and alternative views, the White Paper became a document that was deliberately misleading or false - a document that could be easily used to deceive the American public that was not allowed to see the classified version of the paper. A deceived public could then be pitted against honest members of Congress, to paint the latter as unpatriotic or unserious about national security."

Folk should read all of it ......


Peace.