Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[seabass]

>>>From intelligence agencies, seabass. They get briefed just like the president, not from the president.<<<


You missed the point........not surprisingly. Of course they get briefed by intelligence agencies but who do these intelligence agencies answer to ultimately? Lowly senators or the CIC, the VP and the secretary of defense?


"Multiple visits to the CIA by the United States Vice-President, Dick Cheney, created an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments on Iraq fit with Bush Administration policy objectives, intelligence officials said.

They said Mr Cheney and his chief of staff, "Scooter" Libby, questioned analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to al-Qaeda. Mr Cheney took the lead in the Administration last August in advocating military action against Iraq by claiming it had weapons of mass destruction.

The visits "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here", one agency official said."

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/05/1054700335400.html



"By April of last year," he said, "I was beginning to pick up grumblings from friends inside the intelligence community that there had been pressure applied to analysts to come up with certain conclusions. Specifically, I was told that analysts were pressured to find an operational link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. One analyst, in particular, told me they were repeatedly pressured by the most senior officials in the Department of Defense."

Johnson added, "In an e-mail exchange with another friend, I raised the possibility that `the Bush administration had bought into a lie.' My friend, who works within the intelligence community, challenged me on the use of the word, `bought,' and suggested instead that the Bush administration had created the lie."

http://www.fcnp.com/349/comm2.htm