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No political pressure on CIA analysts? This is pointed out by reader J, from the Washington Post Saturday:
A few days before Secretary of State Colin L. Powell gave his 2003 presentation to the U.N. Security Council on Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction -- with its startling allegation that four individuals had confirmed that Iraq had mobile biological weapons laboratories -- a government analyst who had read a draft of the speech sent an urgent e-mail to his boss.
All those sources are suspect or unreliable, especially the key one nicknamed "Curve Ball," warned the analyst, the only U.S. intelligence official who had met Curve Ball.The analyst received a dismissive reply. "This war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say, and . . . the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," replied the deputy chief of the CIA's Iraq task force. The warning was never passed on to Powell or his top aides.
You don't need a Congressional investigation to figure out that is political pressure.
MORE PRESSURE: Reader SM sends this article, by James Risen in the New York Times March 23, 2003. Headline:
C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure In Preparing Iraqi Reports
The recent disclosure that reports claiming Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger were based partly on forged documents has renewed complaints among analysts at the C.I.A. about the way intelligence related to Iraq has been handled, several intelligence officials said.
Analysts at the agency said they had felt pressured to make their intelligence reports on Iraq conform to Bush administration policies.
For months, a few C.I.A. analysts have privately expressed concerns to colleagues and Congressional officials that they have faced pressure in writing intelligence reports to emphasize links between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda.
As the White House contended that links between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda
justified military action against *Iraq,* these analysts complained that reports on *Iraq* have attracted unusually intense scrutiny from senior policy makers within the Bush administration."A lot of analysts have been upset about the way the Iraq-Al Qaeda case has been handled," said one intelligence official familiar with the debate.
That debate was renewed after the disclosure two weeks ago by Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, that the claim that *Iraq* sought to buy uranium from Niger was based partly on forged documents. The claim had been cited publicly by President Bush.