|
Senate
blasts Bush
What
others
say..........
President Bush has egg on his
face. The US Senate Intelligence Committee has damned the chief US
intelligence agency (CIA) for its sins of commission and omission.
The committee, presided over by a Republican, has castigated the
intelligence agency for "overstating the threat levels "from Iraq
and for drawing conclusions unsupported by reliable evidence. The
ranking Democrat on the committee has criticised the Bush
administration for using "bad information'' to mount an invasion of
Iraq.
Dependence on unproven evidence submitted by the intelligence
community has vitiated the entire process of decision-making on
starting a war against another country. The decision to go to war
against Saddam Hussein has been underpinned by unproven evidence
from and careless judgements by CIA. Which means that the Bush
administration's entire rationale for going to war against Iraq
falls flat, harming the reputation of the President in an election
year. The committee has concluded that the intelligence agency had
suffered from ``collective presumption'' which was not tested at any
stage. That the Bush administration has been too willing to swallow
the report hook, line and sinker speaks of pressure on the agency to
produce a report which was in line with a premeditated plan for
invading Iraq.
The intelligence agency has made four assumptions. Saddam Hussein
possessed a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Iraq was
in the process of starting a nuclear programme. The agency has
stated without any evidence that Iraq had mobile weapons labs and
unmanned aerial vehicles. All the four proved to be nothing more
than propaganda material to bolster the Bush administration's case
for war. The Senate committee has unanimously concluded that Iraq's
military capabilities "had steadily degraded'' following that
country's defeat in the first Gulf war. And those capabilities would
continue to erode as long as economic sanctions against that country
were in place. The CIA, observes the committee, had failed to
cooperate, collate and connect with other agencies, with the result
that its conclusions were unsupported by verifiable facts.
That the US has misled a whole host of countries and the United
Nations on the basis of a faulty intelligence report has made the
Democrats on the committee suspect that the Bush administration
might have pressurised the CIA to write a report in consonance with
the administration's thinking. The agency has emphasised that
Saddam's link with Al Qaeda was strong. Which the Senate committee
has disputed and termed the link ``tenuous''. Perhaps the intention
of the Bush administration and the CIA has been to find some link
between the Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Centre and Saddam
Hussein.
The Senate committee has come to the conclusion that a policy of
containment was preferable to invasion. President Bush's problems in
Iraq are of his own making. Now that he finds it difficult to
extricate the US from the rising flames of insurgency and guerrilla
war in Iraq, his withdrawal routes are becoming fewer by the day. No
self-respecting nation will send its troops to serve under a US
commander. Bush has to seek the help of UN. No other way.
l The Free Press Journal l
|
