Iraq Intel - Take it to the Committee Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Last Thursday night I took part in a discussion with Senator Jay Rockefeller, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.  Rockefeller offers a predictably blistering critique of the Administration's handling of intelligence to date, and makes clear that Congressional access to those on the frontlines of intelligence gathering is sorely limited.

But Rockefeller is surprisingly upbeat about prospects that incoming DNI Mike McConnell will start to change all that.  He respects McConnell's experience, and judges him a straightshooter who will not be beholden to a hobbled Administration.

Apropos of last week's post on how we will judge the success or (seemingly inevitable) failure of the surge/escalation, Rockefeller and his Committee may play a key role in this determination.   As illustrated by Dick Cheney's down-the-rabbithole argument that Britain's withdrawal from Iraq bodes well for the war effort, the Administration will try to spin anything into success.  Solid intelligence, assuming we have any, could be essential to baring the truth. 

If McConnell is committed to a serious effort to restore the legitimacy of the US intelligence establishment, there is no better place to start than Iraq.

Comments

[Don Bacon]

One of the problems with intelligence-gathering is that the CIA has lost credibility, perhaps due to the dilution of its efforts. I just finished reading a thirty-year-old book written by an ex-CIA agent which included the revelation that the CIA at that time was primarily devoted, its budget and its personnel, not to intelligence-gathering but to clandestine activities, or so-called black ops. Doing nasty stuff on presidential orders without oversight. Is this still the case? Probably.

Incidentally, one individual who was involved in getting this book published by testifying in court as to its relevance to a free society was an ex-contributor to DA. Mr. Morton Halperin. It would be nice to hear from him.

[AGB]

The secretive WMD operation that transferred 550 metric tons of Saddam-era yellowcake to the Cameco refinery facility in Canada, while reported in the press' back pages, continues to be under wraps. Intel officals know that it is -- in direct contrast to those who deny it -- the exact same yellowcake degraded uranium precursor the subject of Joe WIlson's The New York Times article retorting to GW Bush's 2002 State of the Union message. The material was guarded secretly -- no one talked about its existence -- and shipped secretly in a $70 million operation.

Some sources claim it is "old" yellowcake from 1991, however, it is old yellowcake Saddam did not list in his inventory required of him by the UN that led up to UNSC Resolution 1441 prior to the war. It is the Saddam-era yellowcake for which America fought the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Now it is in our possession and will be heating American homes this Global Warming winter.

To this date, Jan. 2, 2009 President Bush has not taken credit for the extrication of the WMD -- or of its existence after a persistent campaign by his opponents to show otherwise.

REF: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/07/the_550_tons_of_yellowcake.html

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/07/iraq.uranium/index.html

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