Word: wmd
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...General Franks delivered an Orwellian tour de force. In a single short interview, he blamed the Iraqis for their country's electricity shortage, even though the U.S. created the situation; said he is "very thankful" that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction (WMD), even though this was one of the main justifications for the war; implied that the mere possibility that Saddam Hussein might have acquired WMD justified the war, even though such a broad premise would warrant attacking many other nations; and claimed without evidence that Saddam's regime was working with al-Qaeda, even though there...
...FEEL MISLED BY THE PREWAR INTELLIGENCE ASSERTING THAT SADDAM HUSSEIN HAD WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION (WMD) AND LINKS TO AL-QAEDA? I do not feel misled at all. Actually, I'm very thankful that he didn't have the WMD. What would you have had us do? Stand by and wait until he did have them? I do believe there were assets inside the Saddam regime who were working with international terrorists, and I believe that al-Qaeda were among them...
...second Iraq-war vote was in part a reaction to his vote against the first. "Bush was saying, 'I dare you to vote against this war,'" says a Kerry adviser. "Of course, John had his substantive reasons for voting for the war. He believed the intelligence about the WMD. He had called for regime change in 1998, after Saddam forced out the U.N. inspectors. But I'm pretty sure there was a political calculation too. John decided not to give Bush what he really wanted: a no vote...
...panel's call for a single NID say the move would reduce the bureaucratic logjams that have contributed to the intelligence community's string of failures, from its inability to track the hijackers before 9/11 to the fruitless hunt for bin Laden to the missing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. "You need someone who can give orders," says Lawrence Korb, a former Assistant Defense Secretary, "telling the NSA to focus its wiretap on a specific target, the CIA to focus its human intelligence there and the [National Reconnaissance Office] to focus [its] satellites there. That's not happening...
...while the advent of an NID would recast the intelligence community's pecking order, it could also make things worse. "There's too little competition for ideas already in this business," says John Hamre, Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration. "That's what happened with WMD. If you have one guy for whom everybody works, then you're going to start getting a homogeneous view." And despite its calls for sweeping organizational change, the 9/11 panel offers few specific suggestions for how the U.S. and its allies can improve in the most critical area of all: getting actionable...