Experts Accuse U.S. of Misrepresentation

[codeword]

WASHINGTON - As President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended their invasion of Iraq (news - web sites), a group of arms control experts accused the administration of misrepresenting intelligence information to justify the war.

When the war began in March, Iraq posed no threat to the United States or to its neighbors, a former senior State Department intelligence official said Wednesday.

Its missiles could not reach Israel, Saudi Arabia or Iran, said Greg Thielmann, who held a high post in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

But Thielmann, one of four critics at a session held by the private Arms Control Association, said the Bush administration had formed a "faith-based" policy on Iraq and took the approach that "we know the answers; give us the intelligence to support those answers."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030710/ap_on_re_mi_ea/us_iraq&cid=540&ncid=716

[lkinsale]

1. Wow. look at these quotes from same article

At the Arms Control Association session Wednesday, Gregory V. Treverton, a senior analyst at Rand, a government-financed research group, challenged what he said was the administration's persistent description of intelligence as evidence when it often is a qualified judgment.

But the administration extracted from the data the "best bumper stickers" it could fashion, said the former vice chair of the National Intelligence Council.

Joseph Cirincione, a proliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, credited U.N. inspectors with doing a good job of finding weapons in Iraq and having them dismantled.

But he said the administration in its statements made the inspectors "look like fools" and went far beyond U.S. intelligence findings on Iraq.

[proud patriot]

2. Be sure to rate the article

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