Who'se really in charge?

U.S. News has a good (and moderately long) story about how Powell's U.N. speech came to be. We excerpt four sections of interest:

Not all the secret intelligence about Saddam Hussein's misdeeds, they found, stood up to close scrutiny. At one point during the rehearsal, Powell tossed several pages in the air. "I'm not reading this," he declared. "This is bulls- - -."

and

Vice President Cheney's office played a major role in the secret debates and pressed for the toughest critique of Saddam's regime, administration officials say. The first draft of Powell's speech was written by Cheney's staff and the National Security Council. Days before the team first gathered at the CIA, a group of officials assembled in the White House Situation Room to hear Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, lay out an indictment of the Iraqi regime--"a Chinese menu" of charges, one participant recalls, that Powell might use in his U.N. speech. Not everyone in the administration was impressed, however. "It was over the top and ran the gamut from al Qaeda to human rights to weapons of mass destruction," says a senior official. "They were unsubstantiated assertions, in my view."

and get this

The team ... tried to follow a 45-page White House script, taken from Libby's earlier presentation. ...

One example, included in the script, focused on intelligence indicating that an Iraqi official had approved the acquisition of sensitive software from an Australian company. The concern was that the software would allow the regime to understand the topography of the United States. That knowledge, coupled with unmanned aerial vehicles, might one day enable Iraq to attack America with biological or chemical weapons. That was the allegation. Tenet had briefed Cheney and others. Cheney, says a senior official, embraced the intelligence.

The White House instructed Powell to include the charge in his presentation. When the Powell team at the CIA examined the matter, however, it became clear that the information was not ironclad. CIA analysts, it turns out, couldn't determine after further review whether the software had, in fact, been delivered to Iraq or whether the Iraqis intended to use it for nefarious purposes. One senior official, briefed on the allegation, says the software wasn't sophisticated enough to pose a threat to the United States. Powell omitted the allegation from his U.N. speech.

Yeah, like you need to know the topography to attack New York or Washington D.C. with a UAV launched from a ship in the Atlantic (which is about the only way their limited-range drones could be used: in tandem with the mighty Iraqi navy).

Finally, this pretty much sums it up:

Veteran intelligence officers were dismayed. "The policy decisions weren't matching the reports we were reading every day," says an intelligence official.

What else has Lewis "Scooter" Libby been involved with? Here is a reminder of how many PNAC-ites are in the White House (including "Scooter"):



This most recent news validates our ranking of the players. Cheney clearly is the Ace of Spades. (Bush gets ace ranking because he does hold the office of president, and you can't ignore that.)



posted by Quiddity at 6/01/2003 12:30:00 AM