CNN Re-running Dem Debate from Last Week...Hillary says I READ IT ALL and voted for War?

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Estimate

National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) express the coordinated judgments of the US Intelligence Community made up of 16 intelligence agencies, and thus represent the most authoritative assessment of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) with respect to a particular national security issue. NIEs are considered to be "estimative" intelligence products, in that they present what intelligence analysts estimate (not predict) may be the course of future events. Coordination of NIEs involves not only trying to resolve any interagency differences, but also assigning confidence levels to the key judgments and rigorously evaluating the sourcing for them. Each NIE is reviewed and approved for dissemination by the National Intelligence Board (NIB), which comprises the DNI and other senior Intelligence Community leaders within the Intelligence Community.

Two years ago, Graham was outflanked when he attempted to force the White House to make public the intelligence assessment on Saddam Hussein's WMD. Graham has described those events in a new book, "Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia and the Failure of America's War on Terror." The book describes a closed-door meeting on Sept. 5, 2002, with George Tenet, in which the Senate Intelligence Committee sought to clarify whether the increasingly dire threat painted by Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration officials was real, and whether it justified a preemptive invasion. Graham and senators Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., assumed an NIE on Iraq must already exist, given the gravity of an invasion. (Such assessments can be initiated either by the White House, Congress or the CIA). And the senators asked to see it. Tenet and other intelligence agency representatives replied with "blank stares," Graham wrote. The Democratic senators demanded that Tenet get to work immediately on the report.

Three weeks later, Tenet turned over to the congressional intelligence committees a 90-page classified NIE that minimized the view, held by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Department of Energy, that Saddam had probably not reconstituted a nuclear program. The NIE buried their many caveats in footnotes even as it also concluded that Saddam had shown little desire to attack the United States, and that Iraq had few contacts with al-Qaida. Graham pushed for its declassification. He got it on Oct. 4, 2002, only a week before the Congress voted on the Iraq war resolution.

The declassified report was 25 pages long and appeared to have been produced in advance, judging by the slick graphics and maps that accompanied it, Graham said. Gone were the caveats that the classified version had included, and gone were the assessments that Saddam didn't appear interested in attacking the United States. What was left was "a vivid and terrifying case for war," Graham wrote.

Salon 9/17/04
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/09/17/intelligence_estimate/index.html

“INR’s Alternative View: Iraq’s Attempts to Acquire Aluminum Tubes”

Some of the specialized but dual-use items being sought are, by all indications, bound for Iraq’s missile program. Other cases are ambiguous, such as that of a planned magneti-production line whose suitability for centrifuge operations remains unknown. Some efforts involve non-controlled industrial material and equipment—including a variety of machine tools—and are troubling because they would help establish the infrastructure for a renewed nuclear program. But such efforts (which began well before the inspectors departed) are not clearly linked to a nuclear end-use. Finally, the claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR’s assessment, highly dubious.”

http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/iraq-wmd-nie.pdf

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=3293749&mesg_id=3295077

The Bush Administration does not regard preemption as a substitute for traditional nonmilitary measures such as sanctions and coercive diplomacy or for proactive counterproliferation and strengthened nonproliferation efforts. Preemption is an “add-on” tailored to deal with the new, non-deterrable threat. But the question does arise as to whether “preemption” best characterizes the new policy. The Pentagon’s official definition of preemption is “an attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent.”20 In contrast, preventive war is “a war initiated in the belief that military conflict, while not imminent, is inevitable, and that to delay would involve great risk.”21 Harvard’s Graham Allison has captured the logic of preventive war: “I may some day have a war with you, and right now I’m strong and you’re not. So I’m going to have the war now.” Allison went on to point out that this logic was very much behind the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “and in candid moments some Japanese scholars say—off the record—that big mistake was waiting too long.”22

The difference between preemption and preventive war is important. As defined above, preemptive attack is justifiable if it meets Secretary of State Daniel Webster’s strict criteria, enunciated in 1837 and still the legal standard, that the threat be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation.”23 Preemptive war has legal sanction.24 Preventive war, on the other hand, has none, because the threat is neither certain nor imminent. This makes preventive war indistinguishable from outright aggression, which may explain why the Bush Administration insists that its strategy is preemptive, although some Cabinet officials have used the terms interchangeably.