Talk:Senate Report on Iraqi WMD Intelligence

NPOV issue

I think this article's NPOV would be improved if the report's official findings were summarized more aggressively (I mean, shortened), and if the comments in the appendix to the report by John Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat, were mentioned. Rockefeller wrote in that appendix:

Phase one of the Committee’s report on U.S. pre-war intelligence on Iraq details how the Central IntelligenceAgency (CIA) and the Intelligence Community as a whole ofien failed to produce accurate intelligence analysis on alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorist organizations.

Regrettably, the report paints an incomplete picture of what occurred during this period of time. The Committee set out to examine ten areas of investigation relating to pre-war intelligence on Iraq and we completed only five in this report. The scope of our investigation was divided in a way so as to prevent a complete examination of all the matters within the Committee’s jurisdiction at one time.

The central issue of how intelligence on Iraq was used or misused by Administration officials in public statements and reports was relegated to the second phase of the Committee’s investigation, along with other issues related to the intelligence activities of Pentagon policy officials, pre-war intelligence assessments about post-war Iraq, and the role played by the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, which claims to have passed “raw intelligence” and defector infomation directly to the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President.

As a result, the Committee’s phase one report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which Intelligence Community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq when policy officials had already forcefully stated their own conclusions in public.

My (admittedly partisan, and anti-Bush) impression of the events surrounding the report's release was that Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) was able to successfully truncate the report's scope so as to de-emphasize the evidence alluded to by Rockefeller on how the Bush administration pressured the intelligence agencies. The Democrats on the committee, faced with a choice of either 1) no report being released before the 2004 election, or 2) a truncated report being released, with the damning information available in the appendix, chose the second option, and signed off on the report in its truncated form.

Given this context, the existing entry's conclusion with Roberts' statement that "Finally, the committee found no evidence that the intelligence community’s mischaracterization or exaggeration of intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result of politics or pressure." seems misleading to me.

I'm new to wikipedia editing, and while I want to live up to the dictum to be bold and just edit to fix the problem, I'm not sure I want to jump right in and make a change of that magnitude without some input from the more-experienced hands, especially given the issue's potential divisiveness. John Callender 09:41, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Missing info

this article does not mention the fact that the "second half" of the investigation was actually never done and actually never will be done, because the republicans broke their promise to do it. one of them has been quoted in saying something like "i don't see why we need to go over it again."

Also it does nto report on the widespread view that the report is a cover-up, and that the preeminent reason that statements of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld were unreliable was that the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy, rather than the other way around. That is, that the second half of the investigation would be more interesting and important. And this is corroborated:

• [1]
• [2]
• [3]

Kevin Baas^{talk: new} 18:01, 2005 May 30 (UTC)

More sources

Some New York Times articles covering this follow. For those that have been rotated into their for-pay category, I give the NYT-supplied abstract. (Login required to follow the links):

• [Senate Rejects Panel on Prewar Iraq Data] - 17 July 2003 (Senate Republicans resist establishing a panel to investigate the use of intelligence):

ABSTRACT - Republican-led Senate defeats effort to establish bipartisan panel to examine use of intelligence in prelude to Iraq war; vote comes as Democrats press Bush administration on rationale for war as well as on long-term costs of military operation; CIA director George J Tenet is questioned for five hours behind closed doors by Senate Intelligence Committee about his agency's handling of intelligence as senior Democrats step up criticism of administration's Iraq policies; photo of Sen Jon Corzine, whose proposal for independent commission is defeated by vote of 51 to 45

• [Senate Iraq Report Said to Skirt White House Use of Intelligence - 8 July 2004 (Early news report on Democrat's dissatisfaction with the way the report turned out):

ABSTRACT - Bipartisan Senate report that is highly critical of prewar intelligence on Iraq is expected to sidestep question of how Bush administration used that information to make case for war; under deal reached between Republicans and Democrats, administration's role will not be addressed until Senate Intelligence Comm completes further stage of its inquiry, probably not until after Nov elections; as result, initial, unanimous report will focus solely on misjudgments by intelligence agencies, not White House, in assessments about Iraq, illicit weapons and Al Qaeda that administration used as rationale for war; this may provide opening for Pres Bush and his allies to deflect responsibility for what now appear to be exaggerated prewar assessments about threat posed by Iraq; Democrats will try to focus attention on issue by releasing 'additional views' to supplement bipartisan report

• [News Conference on Senate Intelligence Committee Report] - 9 July 2004 (Transcript of press conference by Roberts and Rockefeller announcing the report.)

QUESTION: And you are now saying it was political pressure. Then why did you vote for the report?

ROCKEFELLER: That's me. (LAUGHTER) Because there are 511 pages in the report. And the vast amount of that report, which covered basically only the prewar intelligence, basically on weapons of mass destruction, was superb. And we had major disagreements on pressure. And I felt that the definition of pressure was very narrowly drawn in the final report. And that is that, sort of, that if somebody came up to you and you were one of the analysts who had been working on WMD, and they said, Did anybody tell you that you had to change your point of view? and the answer was, No, well that was the description of pressure. That's not my description of pressure. That's a description of pressure. But another description of pressure is the total ambience of this cascade of ominous statements, which continued really up to the present, about what was going to happen or the relationship between Al Qaida and Iraq, Mohammed Atta and the rest of it.

So, to me, pressure also can be defined by what else is in our additional views. And that is that George Tenet indicated that he was approached by analysts from the CIA. Going to the director's office? If you've ever done that, it's, sort of, intimidating. And they came to him and he said, to relieve the pressure,

Simply don't answer the question if there is no new information. But the key phrase there is to relieve the pressure. He was agreeing, assenting to the fact that there was. The ombudsman of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose job it is for people to come to with their complaints, a veteran of many years there, said that the hammering on analysts was greater than he had seen in his 32 years of service to the Central Intelligence Agency, and he was referring to pressure. And the former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Robert Kerr (ph), had a group which did analysis of this within the CIA, and he also came up with the same conclusion, that the pressure was there, it's always internal to the analysts and it was external in the whole ambience, the whole sense of what the nation was moving toward, what the policy-makers were in fact moving toward, except that we couldn't discuss that in our report.

• [A Bipartisan Report Masks Deep Divisions] - 14 July 2004 (Followup article on Democrat dissatisfaction):

ABSTRACT - Senate Intelligence Committee issued blistering critique of prewar intelligence on Iraq unanimously, but election year partisanship has broken out, with Democrats demanding follow-up report before November on Bush administration's use of intelligence to justify invasion

I believe I saw somewhere that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence decided at some point after the 2004 election that they would not perform phase II of the investigation, in which they were going to look into how the intelligence was used by the Bush team. I've been unable to track down a source for that, however.

Again, I'm not saying the article needs to include all this detail, or give this point of view prominence. But in its current form, the article mostly just quotes Republican Senator Roberts at length, including statements that are directly contradicted by the ranking Democrat on the panel.

-- John Callender 18:15, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Sources on Sen. Roberts' recent statements on 'Phase 2'

I've dug up a few more sources, and think I'm just about ready to try editing the article to address the POV issue I raised earlier. Here are some sites with information on Chairman Roberts' recent statements about "Phase 2" of the investigation being put "on the back burner":

• Woodrow Wilson Center speech by Pat Roberts (10 March 2005).
• Roberts calls for constant change in intel (10 March 2005) UPI/Washington Times article by Shaun Waterman.
• Transcript of the appearance by Pat Roberts and John Rockefeller on NBC's Meet the Press (10 April 2005).

-- John Callender 08:42, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

Whew.

Remind me to think twice next time before choosing to try a major rewrite of an article based on a 500-page government report. :-) Anyway, I've finished reading the report (previously I'd only read the introduction and others' summaries of it), and hope to have a revised version of the article ready to go up around the middle of next week. I'll be retaining some of the material in the current article, but instead of quoting so extensively from Chairman Pat Roberts' press release, I'll be doing more of a standard Wikipedia-style article, with coverage of the historical background of the report, the chronology of the investigation, the report's conclusions, the controversies covered in the "additional views" of the various committee members, and events related to the report that have taken place since its release. John Callender 07:27, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

And now, having reached the middle of next week, I'm still working on it. I'm about halfway through my outline for the revised version of the article, and can see I'm going to need to do some aggressive editing when I'm done to get it reduced to a reasonable length. Anyway, it's coming. John Callender 16:40, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Expanded version

I've gone ahead and replaced the previous version of the article with the significantly expanded one I've been working on. It's still kind of rough, but I think it's a significant improvement over the previous version. Some things it still needs:

• It needs to be shorter. I've done my best to whittle it down, but it's still on the long side.
• It could use more internal linking to other wikipedia articles, and to outside resources.
• The external links section at the end needs to be cleaned up some.
• It could use a few photos.
• I'm sure it has a fair number of misspellings, grammar mistakes, awkward language, and wiki style problems.

Please feel free to have at it and give it whatever it needs. Thanks. John Callender 05:46, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

"reasonable" conclusions on ties to terror

I just reverted one of Kevin baas' edits, in which he changed the language about what the report said on the intelligence community's findings on Iraq's ties to terrorism. Kevin had changed it to read that the Committee found that the intelligence community's findings were "unreasonable"; I reverted the language to say it found that those findings were reasonable. See section 12 of the report. Quoting from it:

Conclusion 90. The Central Intelligence Agency’s assessment that Saddam Hussein was most likely to use his own intelligenceservice operatives to conduct attacks was reasonable, and turned out to be accurate.

Conclusion 91. The Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) assessment that Iraq had maintained ties to several secular Palestinian terrorist groups and with the Mujahidin e-Khalq was supported by the intelligence. The CIA was also reasonable in judging that Iraq appeared to have been reaching out to more effective terrorist groups, such as Hizballah and Hamas, and might have intended to employ such surrogates in the event of war.

Conclusion 92. The Central Intelligence Agency’s examination of contacts, training, safehaven and operational cooperation as indicators of a possible Iraq-al-Qaida relationship was a reasonable and objective approach to the question.

Conclusion 93. The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably assessed that ehre were likely several instances of contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida throughout the 1990s, but that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship.

Conclusion 94. The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably and objectlvely assessed in Iraqi Support for Terrorism that the most problematic area of contact between Iraq and al-Qaida were the reports of training in teh use of non-conventional weapons, specifically chemical and biological weapons.

Conclusion 95. The Central Intelligence Agency's assessment on safehaven - that al-Qaida or assocaited operatives were present in Baghdad and in northeastern iraq in an area under Kurdish control - was reasonable.

Conclusion 96. The Central Intelligence Agency's assessment that to date there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in an al-Qaida attack was reasonable and objective. No additional information has emerged to suggest otherwise.

Certainly there were many unreasonable uses made of the intelligence by the Bush administration. But that's a different matter. On the narrow question of what the Committee found regarding the CIA's intelligence on ties to terrorism, Kevin's edit was factually wrong. --John Callender 00:57, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Removal of quoted Italian news article on high-level Iraq/al-Qaeda meeting

I've removed the quotation from the Italian news article that described the alleged meeting between the head of the Iraqi secret service and Osama bin Laden in Sudan in 1994, as well as the contextualizing comment added after that quotation by a subsequent editor. I've replaced both with an expanded overview of that section of the report that mentions the Italian news article, but doesn't quote from it directly. My sense is that the direct quote from the Italian article lacked sufficient context, and that especially with the use of the word "Interestingly,..." to introduce it, it amounted to a POV problem. The in-article rebuttal that was subsequently added after it helped with that, though I was bothered by the sense that the article was arguing with itself. Overall, I think I prefer the current approach, in which the article is mentioned, but only in the larger context of what the report actually said about it (to the extent we can know that, given the extensive redactions in this section). -- John Callender 18:02, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

John, I appreciate your goal that the article not seem to be arguing with itself. I fully support that. Some articles appear downright schizophrenic. However, I do not understand why the quote should be removed. The article currently reads as though it was just a meeting and no one knows the topic of discussion. The report actually says that a "pact" was sealed. I think, at a minimum, that word should be used/quoted in the article. Several other newspapers printed similar stories in London, Paris and Moscow. See Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. The Senate Report did not discuss those reports. BTW, I am the one responsible for the word "Interestingly" to introduce the quote. I tried to find something non-offensive and that was the best I could do. I certainly would welcome a better word... or perhaps no introductory word is needed. I do think it is interesting that the Committee found no formal relationship without ever impeaching the story in the Italian newspaper (or the other newspapers). I also think it interesting the Committee recognized credible witnesses regarding Iraq's training of al Qaeda in CBRN but did not consider that an "established formal relationship." It makes one wonder what is required to meet such a definition. Can we make another attempt to include the word "pact" in the article? -RonCram 19:51, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

John, I just reread your entry and there is an error. If you reread page 328, you will see that 1994 was the first meeting of Hijazi and Osama. The newspaper article was published in 1998 - December, I believe. -RonCram 20:11, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Cut it out Ron. The term "pact" is ludicrous as I pointed out in our discussion on another page. This article from 1998 has been refuted by the updated conclusions of all intelligence agencies who looked into the issue. The fact is that noone does know the topic of discussion of the meeting, though there are reports -- the more recent ones suggest that Hijazi asked OBL if they could work together and OBL said "no." There is no evidence of any "pact" at all - where is the pact? Whose signatures are on it? Where is the evidence of money or weapons exchanges to accompany such a pact? You say "The Senate Report did not discuss those reports" -- so why should they be on a page about the Senate Report? You act as if it is the Senate's job to "impeach" a word quoted from an article in an Italian newspaper -- perhaps they just thought it wasn't relevant? All you can cite is the word "pact"; do we even know in what context that word was used? Was there any evidence of such a pact or are we going on the reporter's assertion? This meeting took place eleven years ago -- in all that time, has there been a single example of collaboration between Saddam and al-Qaeda as a result of that meeting? What we do know is that they never met again, and that both sides came away reporting that no relationship had been established between them. We also know that the CIA, FBI, NSC, DIA, and numerous overseas intel agencies investigated the "link" and found none.--csloat 20:55, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

I would disagree that the report says a "pact" was sealed. The report simply quotes the Italian article, which, in the CIA's translation, used that word. As far as I can see, the report doesn't take any explicit position on whether the article is credible in making that claim. It was simply one of the pieces of information that the CIA used in putting together the picture it presented of whether or not Saddam and al Qaeda were likely to work together. The Committee appears to have looked at it and said, yup, okay; we can see where you got the information that went into the reporting. But to quote from that one source, without including the context of what the CIA analysts concluded from that source, along with all the other sources, seems like a problem to me.

Why is it helpful to add the word "interestingly"? To me, that sounds like it's adding an editorial viewpoint. Hopefully everything included in the article is "interesting," at least on some level, else why include the material at all? Adding "interestingly" in introducing the quotation gives the quotation added weight; a heads-up to the reader: here's something important, it seems to say. In the context of the way the CIA treated that report, and the way the Committee treated it, I don't think it merits that extra emphasis.

I understand that you have questions and doubts about some of the Committee's judgements, and perhaps about the CIA analysts' judgements. I have my own (probably different) questions and doubts. Yes, the article should reflect the relevant information from the Committee's report that leads you to think that way. That's fair. But the information needs to be included in a way that doesn't slant it to favor a position that is contrary to what the report, on balance, actually says. That was my main concern about including the verbatim quotation from the Italian article.

On the 1994/1998 thing, my interpretation of the Report was that the article appeared in 1998, but the meeting it described took place in 1994. Is that not correct? -- John Callender 21:05, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

John, I am sorry for the confusion. The report in the Italian newspaper says the "pact was sealed," not the Senate Report. I am sorry for my sloppy writing. Although I do think the Italian newspaper article is interesting, I am quite willing to lose the word "Interestingly." We do not need to discuss that further. While reporters can make mistakes, a report in a daily newspaper like this is generally considered credible. Nothing in the Senate Report has impeached this story in any way. Even if the story is impeached in the future, that does not mean the Italian newspaper article is not historically interesting and possibly influential. I do not see the problem you see with quoting the newspaper. The quote is short, clear and appears in the Senate Report. I am not sure any context for the quote is needed. The quote seems to me to speak for itself. Regarding the dates, you are correct in your understanding but the page reads "The CIA provided the Committee with source materials that were used in preparing the Iraqi Support for Terrorism document, including an Italian news article that said a meeting had taken place between Osama bin Laden and Iraq's director of secret services, Faruk Hijazi, in Sudan in 1994." This will lead readers to think the story was published in 1994. In addition, readers will not know these men had meetings dating back over a four year period. John, I am certain you can fix the dates. I am also certain you can find a way to quote the Italian newspaper without unnecessary space spent on "context." Or, if you like, I can try it. -RonCram 22:27, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Ron do you have a copy of the Italian newspaper article in context? The context is not as clear to me as it is to you, and it would be odd if there were such a pact and no other journalist, no policymaker, no intel analyst has ever suggested that such a pact exists. Of course, you chose to ignore my other arguments above about this issue. These men did not "have meetings dating back over a four year period" - that is blatantly false. They had one meeting in 1994. There was a claim that Hijazi had a meeting with someone else in 1998, but that claim has not been supported with any evidence. Hijazi is in custody, and the information he has revealed under interrogation is considered reliable by investigators, who report that he denies the 1998 meeting took place. He admits the '94 meeting so it's not clear why he would lie about the second one. Every intel analysis and scholarly account of this issue that I have seen concludes that he probably did not meet in 1998. Even if they did, no information about any "pact" has emerged; the Guardian speculates that it was for Saddam to offer bin Laden asylum, which he rejected. Perhaps this Italian news report is "interesting", but it does not seem to belong here.--csloat 22:48, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

John, I apologize. I misread your statement above regarding your understanding of the Senate Report. I thought you and I agreed. The Senate Report makes clear that the Italian newspaper reported the meeting took place on December 21, 1998. (The newspaper was published on December 28, 1998.) The Senate report then references the CIA document Iraqi Support for Terrorism. The wording is somewhat odd here but is apparently saying the Italian newspaper article mentioned that the two men first met "as early as June 1994." This understanding of the Senate Report comports with the other published newspaper reports that the pact between Saddam and Osama was "sealed" in December 1998. See Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Let me take a stab at the changes and then you judge if I have accurately represented the Report. -RonCram 22:23, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Ron you are totally distorting the record and you know it. We are carrying on this same debate on three pages now. It should only take place on one. There was no 1998 meeting as most sources agree now, and there is absolutely no evidence that any "pact" was sealed. Of course I pointed this out just above and you ignored it, repeating the disinformation you insist on spreading.--csloat 22:59, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Edit Compromise

I have rewritten the section to comport more closely with reality. I do not think we should be having the same debate on three different pages. The only reason Ron came here to insert this information is that he was losing the debates on the page where these points really belong. I don't think this is reasonable, but I have made changes that preserve the suspicious claim of a "pact" from an Italian newspaper. It is clear to me that this word was nothing but a rhetorical flourish as no evidence of any "pact" has ever been claimed. So it is disconcerting to have to treat such a minor piece of info from an irrelevant source as if it were "evidence" of something. In any case, I'm hoping we can avoid an edit war this way and I invite input from other editors who are not so invested in arguing about this as myself and Ron. --csloat 23:13, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

I agree that the detailed back-and-forth that's in the article now about the significance of the various accounts of the meetings seems out of place. Without getting into trying to characterize peoples' motivations, or trying to debate the question of what the various accounts of the meetings actually mean, can I maybe get Ron's input on why he thinks that material is relevant to this article?

Let's say, just for the sake of discussion, that there really is more going on in terms of the news accounts, and the history of Saddam/al Qaeda interaction, than the CIA analysts, and the Committee members who wrote the report, realized. Even if that's the case, why should that information be included in this article? The way I see it, this article is meant to describe the report, its findings, the circumstances that led to its creation, and subsequent events relating to it. I think I'd like to just boil the current "Iraq's alleged links to terrorism" section down to a couple of short paragraphs focusing on the report's main conclusions in this area, and let users follow the link to the Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda page if they want to pursue that issue in more detail. Would you have a problem with that, Ron? And if so, can you explain why? -- John Callender 03:05, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

John, first let me say that your I appreciate your sense of what the article should be and I am not opposed to restructuring my contribution if you want the article to remain consistent. Second, I think the material is relevant because it is evidence that is actually found in the Senate Report and nothing in the Senate Report impeaches the evidence in any way. csloat has found an article stating that Vince Cannistraro does not believe the Italian news article but we do not have any idea what evidence convinced Vince. Intelligence information is often contradictory. Contrary to csloat's comment, there is plenty of evidence that the pact was sealed as Saddam and Osama grew closer together as time went on.

If you truly want the article to remain consistent, we have to look at how the evidence for the Senate conclusions is currently presented. In most sections, quotations marks are found around phrases and not sentences. Fine. I can rewrite my contribution to meet that standard. However, if you compare the treatment in the section on biological and chemical weapons, you will see a completely different standard. Full sentences are quoted from sources other than the Senate Report. Now I am not a fan of Curveball, who would apparently say anything to persuade the US to invade Iraq, but I am certain that this section does not meet the standard you have laid out. I am also certain the contributions by csloat regarding the Italian newspaper do not meet that standard. If you are willing to clear these two areas up, I will make sure my contribution meets your standard. -RonCram 14:04, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Ron, a poorly worded quote from an Italian newspaper article from 7 years ago is hardly "evidence" of anything and it certainly does not need to be "impeached" by a Senate Committee. You are also misrepresenting the Cannistraro quote, which does not say that he doesn't believe the article; it says the reason why: that bin Laden is known to have rejected Hijazi's overtures. There is no evidence that "the pact was sealed"; if there was, you would have mentioned it by now. So far all you have is a 7 year old article from a newspaper without any idea of even who the author is, much less what evidence convinced that author that such a "pact" existed. I pressed above for evidence of the pact -- a photocopy of it? signatures? money trails? exchanges of goods or weapons? even a phone call? -- and you have nothing. Your claim that Saddam and OBL "grew closer as time went on" is pure fantasy -- I mean, really. By 1999 Saddam cut off all communication with AQ. OBL talked about Saddam as an infidel and warned his people not to work with Saddam. OBL was still trashing Saddam in his speeches in 2003, when the war started. Please do not make things up. As for this article, I agree with John's goal of shortening this section - as I said above, I would prefer to have this ongoing debate on one page rather than having it spread all over wikipedia. It would also help in terms of assuming good faith, because right now it appears that you would rather make false claims on other pages than justify your claims on the pages where they are relevant. I am not sure what standard you are claiming that the Curveball information does not meet -- the point is that this section should either have all this info in it, duplicating the other page, or it should be a short summary that indicates the CIA's conclusions, the Senate Committee's conclusion, and then a link to the other page for more info. But I will not support a version of this page that distorts the information available in the ways you have suggested in your previous changes.--csloat 19:39, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

I've taken a stab at shortening the section. In doing so, I've tried to (mostly) retain the direct quotes that Commodore Sloat and RonCram have added, while reducing the amount of back-and-forth assertions and counter-assertions that the former version contained. In doing so, I'm proceeding from the position that while there certainly are controversies over many of the issues that the Committee looked into, and while there exists lots of evidence that could be used to undercut specific conclusions, it is problematic to try to use the article itself to argue those issues. If someone adds a piece of evidence undercutting one conclusion, someone else is going to feel it is necessary to balance that evidence with another piece of evidence, and it just escalates. And there really isn't a logical stopping point; the report itself was 500 pages long, and the Committee reviewed 30,000 pages of documentation in preparing it. For the most part, I think the article is best served by simply summarizing as accurately as possible what the report actually said, with references to other articles for more information on specific controversies. -- John Callender 13:02, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

There are minor problems with your edits that I will try to address later. The big one is that you took out the sentence that no evidence of any "pact" has appeared. Is there some evidence of a pact that I am not aware of, other than a CIA translation of an Italian newspaper 7 years ago using that dubious word? I feel it biases the whole section to make that quote so prominent, and as you can see above RonCram has never responded to my requests for evidence of such a pact. --csloat 22:32, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I assume Ron would argue that the Italian article itself constitutes evidence (not necessarly proof, but evidence) of a pact. I'm concerned by language stating that there was "no evidence" to confirm it, and by the apparent certainty behind replacing the phrase "the opinion of CIA analysts was that" with "the conclusion of CIA analysts was that". My recollection of that part of the report was that there was at least some degree of uncertainty expressed by the analysts. Again, going by my recollection, I thought the report indicated that the analysts' judgement was that, on balance, there probably was no operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda, but that they seemed unwilling to state that that was definitely the case.

On the other hand, I guess it could be argued that the word "confirm" means there is no evidence _in addition to_ the Italian article (i.e., additional evidence that would tend to confirm it), and that "conclusion" by analysts doesn't necessarily mean they are saying they are certain; merely that the preponderance of evidence, in their judgement, points that way.

Actually, I'm not sure I've got a good handle on the more-subtle points of all this. I think I'll re-read that section of the report and see what I think then. In the meantime, thank you very much for helping to improve the article. -- John Callender 03:10, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Of course you're probably right that Ron would say the article is "evidence," but that would be wrong. The article may report on evidence, but it is not evidence in itself. Your recollection is incorrect -- the CIA concluded in several reports (not just the one sent to the senate) that there was no evidence of a collaborative relationship. Meetings alone do not constitute such evidence, at least according to the CIA (as well as every other intelligence agency on earth that looked at this question). They did not express uncertainty about such a relationship, though there was uncertainty about whether certain meetings actually occurred. Check the timeline on the Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda page for many details on this, or just take a look at Levin's summary of the intelligence community's conclusions on this. I don't mind saying "believed" instead of "concluded", but I do mind saying that their conclusions were ambiguous. They stated that there was no evidence of such a relationship; you're right that is not the same as confirming that there is no relationship. The latter , of course, is an impossibly high burden of proof -- the burden should rest on those asserting a relationship, not those who question it, of course.--csloat 03:37, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

John, I appreciate your desire to both be even-handed and preserve a readable article. Of course newspaper articles are evidence. If they were not, the Italian article would not have been discussed in the Senate Report. News articles are known as "open source" evidence. Unfortunately, csloat has changed your edit again restoring his obviously false phrase "no evidence" of a pact. csloat also misrepresents the evidence (or has a false memory) when he says the CIA never concluded a relationship existed. The CIA has published on a "murky" relationship and they have have called reports of Iraq training al Qaeda as credible. But csloat is not able to acknowledge these well known facts. -RonCram 12:30, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Newspaper articles are not "evidence." They refer to evidence. Can you point to the evidence referred to in that article? Specific evidence that a pact was signed. You are going off of an unfortunate word choice by the journalist (or translator!) If there were evidence of such a "pact" we should be able to hear about it. When the meetings were looked at again several times by several different investigations in the years since that article was written, nobody was able to find evidence of a "pact" -- in fact, all they found was information that suggested the meeting or meetings led to disaster in terms of any working relationship, with OBL refusing to work with infidels. As for the CIA conclusions, I am perfectly capable of acknowledging the facts -- the CIA did conclude that there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda, but they also concluded that those contacts did not amount to a collaborative relationship. That is what I mean to assert here; my apologies if you heard something different.--csloat 20:29, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

csloat, news articles are not "evidence" in the judicial sense, they are hearsay. The number one definition on dictionary.com is "a thing or things helpful in forming a conclusion or judgment." News articles certainly fit that definition. If you are looking for corroborating evidence for the pact, I simply point you to additional news articles that detail al Qaeda being trained in Iraq, the pronouncement in Newsweek by the Saudi intelligence officer of major Iraqi terrorist attacks to be carried out by al Qaeda, the attack on the USS Cole and the Iraqi spies arrested in Germany in early 2001 for working with al Qaeda. csloat, the list goes on and on and is well attested by news organizations around the world. You may ask why the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Select Committee did not evaluate these reports before coming to their conclusion of no "collaborative relationship." I have to wonder the same thing. -RonCram 18:14, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

You are connecting things that nobody else in the news has connected. Please indicate where you learned that Iraq attacked the USS Cole -- you've mentioned that before but I have never heard such reports (and I have read a lot of books by counterterrorism experts on this topic). Also, none of this has to do with the issue at hand -- those items are (disputed) reports of contacts with AQ; they are not evidence of any "pact" being signed. The German news report you are referring to has not produced any evidence of a "pact." Nor has the "Saudi intelligence officer." You claim the Italian news article cites evidence of a pact and that is what has yet to be substantiated -- not this nonsense about disputed German arrest reports. Again, when every intel agency on earth -- not just the CIA -- looked at these various things they did not find evidence of cooperation between Iraq and AQ. I don't know how many times we have to keep saying this. As for what is relevant to this page - if you want to question the judgement of the SSCI on this issue that is fine but please find mainstream sources doing the questioning if you expect it to be in wikipedia -- your personal assessment that the SSCI is wrong may be interesting but it is not encyclopedic if you are the only one who thought to raise these questions in this context.--csloat 18:35, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

csloat, you are trying to change the meaning of "evidence." You have to learn to accept the fact that normal people consider news articles as something "helpful in forming a conclusion or judgment." What exactly is disputed about these newspaper accounts? Did any of the papers print a retraction? Has anyone shown cause why the paper should print a retraction? The answer to these questions is "No." The news accounts stand as published. You cannot say a news report is "disputed" if you are the only one disputing it. You might find me more susceptible to your logic if you provided some evidence. Also, I am not questioning the judgment of the SCCI in the article. But I do think it proper and important to point out the SCCI was missing information when they made their judgment. By the way, your assertion that every intelligence agency has found no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda is factually wrong. The intelligence services of both Israel and Egypt think Saddam was behind 9/11. I am not yet convinced of that, but find it interesting that they are. -RonCram 01:56, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

This is not about the meaning of the term "evidence"! My point is that the newspaper article is hopefully not just some guy's opinion; it is presumed to be based upon something that actually happened in the world. My pressing for "evidence" is simple -- I am asking what fact backs up this (relatively outrageous) statement that a "pact was sealed"? That's the issue and not the question of semantics -- if you want to call a random quotation "evidence" that is fine. The issue is not whether a retraction was issued or whether this article was even noticed by anyone in the real world. The "pact" is what is disputed, not the article.

Also how did you become aware of information that the SSCI was missing? Just because they did not mention something does not mean they were missing the information about it; this article, for example, was probably not considered notable enough to mention. As for Israel and Egypt - please provide links to where you heard that; I would be interested in researching it further. Every intel agency that I am aware of that has forwarded a conclusion has concluded that there is no evidence to support such a claim -- including every US agency and several European ones. If Egypt and Israel believe Saddam pulled off 9/11 it's kind of strange I haven't come across it yet in all my research but I am happy to be educated.--csloat 02:13, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Toning down some POV edits

The series of edits made by a non-logged-in user over the last few days went a little far, in my view, in advancing POV. In particular, they appear to be accepting at face-value some questionable assertions in Susan Schmidt's July 9, 2003, article in the Washington Post. The argument that Joe Wilson's trip to Niger actually tended to confirm, rather than disconfirm, the Iraq/Niger uranium-purchase attempt does not seem especially credible to me. I'm aware that the argument has been made, but I think the case is weak, and is more the stuff of pro-Bush spin than of objective analysis. In light of that, using the Schmidt article's interpretation as the basis for saying that "new evidence appeared supporting such an assessment [that Saddam was attempting to obtain uranium from Niger] in November 2002" seems like a stretch to me.

Also, I thought the revised caption for the first image (of Powell speaking to the UN) went a little far in attempting to explicitly blame Tenet for the problems in the speech. Rather than get into pushing that position, I think it's probably more appropriate just to leave that out of the caption.

I'm of two minds about leaving the reference to the Schmidt article in. She seems to go pretty far in her interpretation of what the report says. If we're going to leave the reference to her article in, I think it's important to also include the link I've added after it to Josh Micah Marshall's criticism of it, which appeared on his weblog the following day. I realize that weblog postings normally aren't viewed as appropriate sources on a par with a newspaper article in a mainstream publication, but in this case I think it's justified in order to give appropriate context for the Schmidt link. Marshall at least is a Washington journalist himself, with a doctorate in history and a long history of writing on these issues in mainstream publications, so it's not like he's just some random weblogger. Still, without the Schmidt link I wouldn't be arguing for inclusion of the Marshall link.

Anyway, I'm open to discussing all these changes, if anyone (like the person who made them) feels like discussing them. -- John Callender 06:10, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

More disinformation from RonCram

Ron how many times do we have to have this discussion? On three different pages now you insist on the discredited language of a "pact." That was from a 1998 article in an italian newspaper and no evidence has emerged to support it. I have thoroughly refuted this point several times on the talk pages of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda and 2003 Invasion of Iraq as well as here, and you continually concede the arguments, then you wait a couple weeks and make the changes anyway. It is frustrating. It is difficult enough trying to actually contribute to these pages without having to stand watch against blatant distortion. If you didn't agree with my arguments you should have refuted them rather than ignoring them and then making such changes. There was no evidence of a pact. If you have evidence of a pact, let's see it, and please offer a reason why Richard Clarke, Newsweek, and so many others who thought there might have been some kind of arrangement in 1998 have since changed their tune, concluding after further investigation that no evidence supported the existence of such an arrangement. It's weird, Ron. You seem so invested in spreading information that has been not only thoroughly refuted by the mainstream press; it has been backed off of by the Administration. The only people still making such claims either work at the Weekly Standard or for Iranian intelligence. I realize you keep twisting the words to highlight the poor word choice made by a translator of an italian newspaper in 1998, trying to back it up with the word "alliance" and "agreement", but none of these claims have panned out. It is 2005 now, Ron; we know a lot more about the evidence surrounding these claims than we did in 1998 and 1999; stop trying to turn back the clock.--csloat 23:12, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

More disinformation from csloat

csloat, you are factually wrong on almost every post. Your insistence there is no evidence of a pact is untrue. Richard Clarke wrote an email to Sandy Berger describing the al Shifa plant as " probably direct result of the Iraq-Al Qida agreement." Soon after the Clinton Administration bombed the plant. The Sudanese government has demanded an apology claiming it was just a pharmaceutical plant but both the Clinton Administration and Bush Administration have refused because they still believe the plant was a dual use facility and was involved in chemical weapons development. No one doubts that Iraq and al Qaeda were both connected to the plant. In addition, credible witnesses have reported that Iraq provided al Qaeda in chemical weapons training. Yes, we know a lot more about these claims now. And they all hold up. The Powell speech before the UN got good reviews from the Senate Report. All of the information in it was well vetted and correct. The problem, csloat, is that you have not come to terms with the facts. Unfortunately for you, facts are stubborn things. RonCram 23:56, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Ron you have not produced evidence of such a pact. A statement from Clarke (which, by the way, he has since backed away from) in 1999 is not evidence; it is supposedly based on evidence but we still don't have any evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda had any pact. I responded to this argument several times and you conceded these arguments. Where are the signatures? Where is the money trail? Where are the weapons transfers? Where are the credible witnesses you speak of? We know a lot more about this it is true -- most importantly, as I said over and over again in response to this hogwash, the CIA, DIA, NSC, FBI, State Department, and more have investigated claims of cooperation between Saddam and al-Qaeda and found that there was no evidence to support them. The Senate committee also reviewed the CIA conclusions on this and found them meritorious. So you are wrong, the claims do not hold up. The problem, RonCram, is that you keep asserting discredited statements from 7-8 years ago as if they were "facts," even though they have been thoroughly disputed in the intervening years. Unfortunately for you, it is no longer 1999. Reality is a stubborn thing.--csloat 00:09, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps Clarke backed away from his memo but neither the Clinton nor Bush Administrations have. You are fabricating when you say I have conceded your earlier arguments on this point. That never happened. The evidence for the pact has been told to you repeatedly. The evidence is in the collaboration. The Senate Report admits Iraq trained al Qaeda in chemical weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan. I do not understand how they can admit that and say there is no collaborative relationship, but that is what they did. Iraq also offered safehaven to al Qaeda and Zarqawi and many others accepted it. The credible witnesses, if you bothered to read the reports, are both Iraqi defectors and al Qaeda detainees. These facts have been reported in newspapers around the globe, a fact you are well aware of. csloat, you simply cannot say there is no evidence of a pact when it is all around you. RonCram 01:51, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Actually the Bush Administration has backed away from the claim that Saddam was behind 9-11, and has admitted that no evidence connecting them to AQ has been found (though some like Cheney seem to still believe the connection exists). Clinton of course is not relevant here. I am not fabricating; you have conceded these arguments or at least you stopped responding which seems to me to be a concession. Really, I assumed you had come to your senses by now about all of this but I guess I was wrong. You admit the Senate says there was no collaborative relationship (as has everyone else who looked at this issue) and yet you say the "evidence" of a "pact" is in the "collaboration." Look Ron - there were communications between Saddam and AQ that went nowhere. Collaboration did not occur. Even if the al-Shifa thing is true (and you've given no evidence of this either), that does not amount to "collaboration" and certainly not to a "pact." A "pact" is a formal agreement; the fact that you cannot provide any evidence (signatures? money or weapons changing hands? any indication of who signed it? etc etc etc.) suggests that you are simply hanging on to a poor word choice by an Italian journalist (or his translator). Most of the Iraqi defectors and some of the al-Qaeda detainees have been found to be not credible. Everyone associated with the INC, as well as al-Libi of al Qaeda, is suspected of fabricating this stuff about Saddam and al Qaeda. We can put all this information on this page as well though I don't know how many copies of the timeline from Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda we need all over wikipedia. It appears to me that you are simply bringing this stuff up here because you lost the arguments on that page but you nevertheless insist on this distorted view of reality. Look, if you have "evidence" let us see it. Stop telling me the evidence is all around me, or that it is in the collaboration, which is a circular argument. Either present it or stop this silliness.--csloat 04:52, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

csloat, your ability to distort the facts is amazing. The official Bush Administration position has never been that Saddam was behind 9/11. Some officials, such as Cheney, have voiced that opinion and continue to do so. The official Bush position has remainded the same - that Saddam and al Qaeda had a relationship that included chemical weapons training (in Iraq and Afghanistan), chemical weapons development in Sudan and safehaven for al Qaeda in Iraq. These facts are well-established in the Senate Report. You should not, now or in the future, believe that because I get busy with my business that I have somehow capitulated to your ideas. Facts are stubborn things. I have the facts on my side. RonCram 22:32, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Respectfully, Ron, you don't. As I said, if you have "evidence of a pact," bring it to the table. Your comments above are just not responsive to this issue. As far as whether Bush still believed Saddam had something to do with al-Qaeda, look at the statements made by him and Condi and even Powell prior to the invasion and now afterwards. They no longer imply he was behind 911; Powell openly says he has seen no evidence to suggest such a connection and none of them mention any "pacts" that were "sealed." You want to believe in the conspiracy that is fine but please stop insisting it must be entertained on every wikipedia page that is even only tangentially related.--csloat 00:12, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

The information from both sides seems off-topic to me

Maybe it would be helpful to take a step back from the edit war and consider that at least for the purposes of this article, there isn't much of a controversy. Just give a brief summary of what the Senate report said about the topic, and leave it at that. I don't think this article benefits from this amount of detail about specific evidence for/against an Iraq/al Qaeda connection. Can either of you (Ron or CSloat, I mean) explain to me why this information belongs here, rather than in the Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda page? -- John Callender 09:17, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Thank you, John. That is exactly the point I was trying to make above, if awkwardly. It seems to me that the only reason Ron insists on putting it here is because on the Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda page, the various points he keeps making are clearly refuted by the preponderence of evidence. It also seems to me he wants to refute the Senate report's conclusions on this page because he claims to understand the evidence better than they do (or better than the CIA does). That's just my perception; I've grown weary of arguing with him, so perhaps my interpretation is not so generous. But I agree, there is no reason for this page to go beyond summarizing the basic conclusions of the Senate report on this issue. The detail of evidence belongs on the Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda page, where it already is.--csloat 09:46, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and done some aggressive summarizing of that section (the section on ties to al-Qaeda). I think that on the whole, the section was fairly well balanced, with well-sourced information being presented on each side. But as stated above, I think it was too much detail for a side issue in an article that was already on the long side. In general, it seemed to me that the discussion was veering into arguing the underlying facts that the report was talking about, rather than talking about the report itself. Below are the biggest chunks of material I've removed, in case someone wants to evaluate the deletions or discuss how much was removed or whatever: -- John Callender 12:59, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

The CIA provided the Committee with source materials that were used in preparing the Iraqi Support for Terrorism document, including a CIA translation of a news article appearing in an Italian newspaper in 1998 that said, "Saddam Husayn and Usama bin Ladin have sealed a pact." The materials also included the results of FBI interrogations of captured al-Qaeda operatives, and intelligence reporting based on information provided to US intelligence by foreign intelligence services. The CIA concluded that some of the information describing high-level contacts between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government was credible, while some was less-so. The 9/11 Commission Report records a memo from Richard Clarke to Sandy Berger describing the al-Shifa plant as "probably a direct result of the Iraq-Al Qida agreement." The al Shifa plant was later bombed by the Clinton Administration. Witnesses reported Iraqi offers of safehaven to al Qaeda and Iraqi training programs for terrorists.

Throughout these sections, as through most of the report, the supporting discussion after each conclusion has been completely redacted. In the case of one conclusion, conclusion 101, which appears in the section on the intelligence community's "collection activities" regarding Iraq's links to terrorism, not only the supporting discussion, but the conclusion itself, has been redacted. This is the only case in the report where a conclusion itself was censored. According to Douglas Jehl in the New York Times (31 July 2004), the redacted parts of the Report questioned whether the CIA had raised sufficient questions about the reliability of captured al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, whose interrogation was the source of much of the information claiming links to Saddam. [4]

...while at least one news account from the pre-war period reported that analysts "are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books."[5]

The Committee reported on the accuracy of Colin Powell's statements to the U.N. regarding Saddam Hussein's support of terrorism. After examining the evidence, the Committee concluded that the information provided in Powell's speech "was vetted by both terrorist and regional analysts" and Powell's statements did not differ "in any significant way with earlier assessments published by the Central Intelligence Agency."

The problem, John, is that the report's conclusions do not adequately describe the credible evidence the committee studied and determined was credible. To leave out the section of the newspaper reporting the "pact was sealed" and the section that shows the Clinton Administration bombed al-Shifa because of the link between Saddam and al-Qaeda does an injustice to the report in its entirety. Readers will draw the conclusion there was no evidence for a relationship between AQ and Saddam and that is entirely the wrong conclusion to draw. Anyone who reads the report for themselves will know that credible evidence existed and that the Clinton Administration acted on it. I cannot state strongly enough that this needs to be restored. RonCram 19:54, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Ron you are being ridiculous; this point you keep making about a "pact" being "sealed" has been refuted again and again; see above; see the talk pages on Saddam and AQ, on 2003 Invasion of Iraq, etc. etc. More importantly however, this page is about the Senate Report -- not about a single obstinate individual's second-guessing of the conclusions of that report on Wikipedia talk pages. I think John is correct that the dispute about Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda belongs on the proper page and not here.--csloat 20:09, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

csloat, your comment that a published report has been refuted is pure bluster. No newspaper or magazine that reported the pact has issued a retraction. One (Newseek) has printed articles questioning the accuracy of that report but that is not the same as a refutation. Your personal opinion regarding the pact is not the issue. Several newspapers published the story about the pact, the Senate Report mentioned one of them. The Clinton Administration bombed a target in Sudan because they believed it was a joint venture between Iraq and al Qaeda. That fact was mentioned in the Senate Report and deserves to be mentioned here. Any less does a disservice to the readers of Wikipedia. RonCram 22:22, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Ron we have been through this -- your insistence that an obscure Italian newspaper's poor word choice (or the word choice of translators) must be specifically publicly refuted is just silliness. What was the basis of the word choice? The fact is that the notion that any "pact" between Saddam and al Qaeda existed has been thoroughly refuted -- that does not mean that those doing the refuting (including the CIA, DIA, NSC, FBI, State Dept, Senate Intel committee, 911 Commission, and every foreign intel agency I am aware of) have to specifically reply to every single newspaper article or opinion piece that got it wrong. Clinton bombed the target in Sudan because his admin believed it was used by al Qaeda. It seems to me that if he thought it was used by Saddam, there were plenty of targets in Iraq that he didn't bomb. I'd want to see evidence before accepting your assertion that the Clinton Admin bombed Sudan in order to respond to Saddam. But in any case this debate is getting tedious for myself as well as for any observers we have left. If you've been watching the news, you are aware that there will be much more public questioning of both the Administration's manipulation of intelligence and of the Senate Report specifically, so perhaps we should all just stay tuned and stop trying to influence the debate by second-guessing the Senate's evaluation of evidence on pages that should simply state their conclusions.

By the way - and this is responding to something you said in the previous section - if you don't want me to take your lack of response as agreement that is fine, but you do need to respond eventually if you expect me or anyone else to take your arguments seriously. What you seem to do is ignore my arguments, wait a week, and then repeat the argument you made a week ago on another section of the page (or on another talk page entirely) as if there were no responses to it. That's why I keep saying you have conceded these arguments. I don't think I have any chance of convincing you of anything but I think it is a severe problem in terms of communication ethics for you to carry on the discussion in this manner. --csloat 00:33, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Ron, you confuse me when you argue that "The problem ... is that the report's conclusions do not adequately describe the credible evidence the committee studied and determined was credible." What evidence do we have, beyond the Committee's actual conclusions, of what evidence they found credible? If their conclusion was that there was evidence of several exploratory meetings, but no compelling evidence of an operational relationship, how can you justify picking out those parts of the evidence they mentioned that most-strongly imply al-Qaeda/Saddam cooperation, and emphasizing it in this article out of proportion to how the Committee emphasized it themselves?

I don't doubt that you are sincere in your beliefs, Ron. And while I have strong doubts, personally, about the view you're arguing for, I'm really not trying to argue you out of it. I'm just saying, again, that this article seems like the wrong place to present it. -- John Callender 09:50, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

John, your confusion arises from the fact the Senate Report cites this evidence (the pact, the al-Shifa dual use plant, the bombing of the plant) as credible evidence and then concludes there was no formal collaborative relationship. I admit that is confusing, but that is what the committee did. The evidence for what the committee found credible are the statements in the report itself. When evidence is not credible, the report says so. If the report had called into question the authenticity of Clarke's memo to Berger that al-Shifa was evidence of the al Qaeda/Iraq "alliance," then I would be willing to say there was an issue of credibility. That has never been raised. No one doubts that Clarke viewed it that way and no one doubts the Clinton Administration was persuaded since they bombed the plant. The information about Colin Powell's statement before the UN as being "well vetted" is also important, especially since his speech on WMDs was criticized in the report. It seems to me to be quite POV to mention when Powell was criticize but not to mention when he was confirmed. The portions of the report I want included in the article are not "off topic" as all of it is present in the Senate Report. Deleting this important information is clearly POV. I will restore the portion I consider crucial. If the info is deleted again, the article will be labelled as "Disputed." RonCram 15:22, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Ron I am reverting your changes to John's version. If you want to keep this info in there, I will revert to the version before John changed it. What you have done is the worst of both worlds -- added the irrelevant information, but only added those comments that support your POV. This is an abuse of wikipedia. Either let's return to the long unwieldy section that repeats the information from Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda on both sides of your silly conspiracy theory, or let's keep this tangential stuff out of this article. I realize you are heavily invested in promoting your conspiracy theory using this Italian newspaper article from almost a decade ago that used the word "pact", but you have not responded to the arguments against it, and more importantly it does not belong here. If you want to revert back, then let's go back to the version that is at least balanced. For now I am guessing that everyone prefers the version that leaves this stuff out of this page and leaving it where it belongs. Finally, please stop repeating arguments that have been refuted. Clinton bombed the plant because of al-Qaeda and not because of Saddam. The "pact" is garbage and does not belong here; if it does, we must include the fact that no evidence of any pact ever materialized.csloat 16:40, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

csloat, your distortion of the facts is unending. The section I added, explained below, appears in the Senate Report and is fully relevant. Including information from the Senate Report is not POV, excluding it is POV ...as would be including information NOT in the Senate Report. Your claim this material does not belong here is plainly POV. Your repeated claim of refutation is wearing thin. Saying you have refuted something is not the same as refuting it. Your claim that Clinton bombed the plant because of al-Qaeda and not because of Saddam is just wrong and goes against the statements Clinton made at the time and the intelligence of Iraqi involvement quoted by William Cohen. I know you have strong feelings about this, csloat, but you have to stick to the facts and let the facts speak for themselves. Your effort to suppress evidence is not in the best interest of Wikipedia. RonCram 17:00, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Ron first I must ask you again to please cut out the personal attacks. You claim you want to let the facts speak for themselves and then you accuse me of censorship. There is no reason for the detail that you have added since this stuff is already covered on the page where it is relevant. If we are going to add it, we need to add the caveats. That is all. As far as Clinton, please cite Clinton making this claim specifically in reference to that bombing. --csloat 17:06, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

I have not made any personal attacks. I am simply pointing out the truth. The information is relevant on this page because without it readers will get a lopsided view of the issue. Clinton's quote is available on the Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda page under the "Statements" section. Clinton made the statement regarding Iraq and al-Qaeda in Feb 1998 and bombed the plant in August 1998. At the time of the bombing, Clinton had been reading intelligence reports on al-Shifa for more than a year. US satellites had been watching the plant get built and recorded that the building process was protected with anti-aircraft weaponry. If you doubt that, I refer you to the testimony of William Cohen. RonCram 17:47, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

LOL... sorry, but I am cracking up at your tortured logic. The quote you are talking about is the vaguest thing I have ever seen. You're saying he bombed Sudan 6 months later as a result of this quote about Iraq? And somehow never connected these things publicly after Feb 1998, and also when he bombed Iraq (which the US did many times that year) never bothered to mention a link to al-Qaeda? This is the quote from the page:

While speaking at the Pentagon on 17 February 1998, President Bill Clinton warned of the "reckless acts of outlaw nations and an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals." These "predators of the twenty-first century," he said "will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein's Iraq." [137]

LOL... it doesn't connect Saddam and AQ at all. It warns of an "unholy axis" (Bush had to get his language from somewhere I suppose) that includes drug traffickers and criminals as well as terrorists. Nowhere is AQ mentioned; nowhere is any real connection mentioned; just a vague implication that Saddam is a "clear example" of the threat of WMD arsenals -- not as a clear example of AQ connections or anything of the sort. Are you really staking your claims on this quote? That's just nuts, sorry. And again, it's odd that Clinton would not have even mentioned this months later after the actual bombing, especially when those on your side of the Congressional aisle were accusing him of "wagging the dog." Anyway, we've gotten far offtopic here - you will believe whatever tortured logic you want to; my only request is that you stop demanding that your conspiracy theories be enshrined in an encyclopedia, especially not under a subject heading where it is barely tangentially relevant. This stuff can be discussed on Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda but it really is not necessary here.-csloat 20:42, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Introducing the Discussion of Pressure on Analysts

The Senate Report has an interesting discussion on pressure on analysts. Phase 2 of the review will be coming out shortly. In the meantime, I have added a short section that is a nice seque into the discussion of pressure on analysts. I believe what I have written is relevant, interesting and readable. RonCram 16:51, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

I am fine with including this but I think it is important to also balance it with the available information, as the previous version of the page did. Ron wants to add only one side of the story. I am saying, both sides of the story are already available on the appropriate page, so they shouldn't be here at all, but if you want to add it here, the information should not be one-sided, especially when the Senate concluded the opposite of that side.--csloat 17:08, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

The Senate concluded no untoward pressure on analysts existed. I fail to see how what I wrote or what I quoted disagrees with the Senate conclusion. RonCram 17:18, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Sorry - that point was actually meant to respond to the overall POV that you have been pushing here. It applies above, but not to this argument.--csloat 17:23, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Answering John's Question on Level of Detail

This level of detail is necessary to preclude the disinformation being put out by csloat. If he did not constantly try to "discredit, dismiss or downgrade" information with nonsense, this level of detail would not be needed. BTW, you never responded to my earlier post in Talk. I will reproduce it here so you can comment.

John, your confusion arises from the fact the Senate Report cites this evidence (the pact, the al-Shifa dual use plant, the bombing of the plant) as credible evidence and then concludes there was no formal collaborative relationship. I admit that is confusing, but that is what the committee did. The evidence for what the committee found credible are the statements in the report itself. When evidence is not credible, the report says so. If the report had called into question the authenticity of Clarke's memo to Berger that al-Shifa was evidence of the al Qaeda/Iraq "alliance," then I would be willing to say there was an issue of credibility. That has never been raised. No one doubts that Clarke viewed it that way and no one doubts the Clinton Administration was persuaded since they bombed the plant. The information about Colin Powell's statement before the UN as being "well vetted" is also important, especially since his speech on WMDs was criticized in the report. It seems to me to be quite POV to mention when Powell was criticize but not to mention when he was confirmed. The portions of the report I want included in the article are not "off topic" as all of it is present in the Senate Report. Deleting this important information is clearly POV. I will restore the portion I consider crucial. If the info is deleted again, the article will be labelled as "Disputed." RonCram 15:22, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

I eagerly await your response. Until we talk it out, the fuller NPOV entry should remain. RonCram 15:26, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I disagree with your characterization, Ron, and with including this material in the article. The report is more than 500 pages long. The mere fact that something appeared in the report does not, in and of itself, qualify it for inclusion in this article. The article has to strike a balance, fairly summarizing what the report actually said, overall, and doing so in a brief space. Focusing on the report's conclusions, rather than specfiic pieces of underlying evidence cited in the report, helps to do that. True, in some areas the report's conclusions have been disputed; in those cases, the dispute should be briefly characterized with reference to the best available sources.

As near as I can tell, you have decided that the committee's conclusion (that there was no credible evidence of an operational relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam) is incorrect, or at least is strongly suspect, and you've chosen to edit the article to bolster that interpretation. But doing so does not advance the cause of NPOV. I think you need to think harder about the nature of NPOV, and the difference between advocating for one particular interpretation, and making the article the best it can be.

This article is already too long. To include the level of detail you wish to include on this subject makes it even longer. If we're going to include this material you've retrieved from the previous shortening of the section that I did, then in fairness I think we'd have to also retrieve the balancing information that points out the problems with your interpretation (that I also deleted), and the article gets longer still. If we're going to include all that information arguing back and forth over the Saddam/al Qaeda connection, then we're going to need to remove material elsewhere in the article. Where should that material be removed?

This problem isn't unique to this article. It comes up all the time on Wikipedia, and the answer is straightforward: When a section of an article gets too long, move that material into a more-specific article, summarize aggressively (but fairly, with an eye to NPOV) on the original page, and leave a link at the top of that section pointing to the more-specialized article. Such an article already exists in this case: Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. In looking at that article, it looks like the perfect home for this material. Why don't you work on integrating it with that page?

I've reverted your edits to this article once already today, and as a sign of good faith I won't do so again today. But I encourage you to address these issues in the meantime, either by editing this article to shorten that section in a way that honors NPOV, or by responding here to the specific question of why, in your view, this material deserves this much space in an article on the Senate report, rather than belonging in the Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda article. Thanks. -- John Callender 16:33, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Ron please stop the BS. If something I said was "disinformation," please call me on it specifically and we can discuss that. If you want to put in this level of detail we need to go back to the more balanced version. Actually we need to incorporate recent news, which you obviously haven't been paying attention to, which further bolsters the point that the reports your version relies on were false, and that the Senate committee was aware of this (I'm referring to the 2002 DIA and CIA reports that were recently discussed in the media, including today on CNN). I don't have time to deal with this now; you could show some good faith yourself by either reverting all of this to the version that makes sense here, as John outlines above, or by reverting to the longer version that we had created earlier, that balances the evidence more fairly. And of course the recent CIA/DIA reports would need to be included too. Of course your insistence on the importance of the Italian newspaper article and the beliefs of Clarke about al-Shifa have been specifically refuted in arguments that we have had over and over, and you continually conceded those points, or at least gave up trying to think of a response to them. Overall though, whether you were right or wrong about those minor points, this simply does not belong here.--csloat 20:11, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

csloat, I call you on your disinformation all the time. You rarely get the facts right. For example, the section heading "Iraq's alleged links to al-Qaeda" is bogus. The Senate Report discusses the links to al-Qaeda. The word alleged is never used. You constantly assert that you have refuted events or facts without ever showing any refutation. You have never refuted Clarke's memo that he believed al-Shifa was a joint venture between Iraq and al-Qaeda. For you to say you have is completely bogus. Clinton bombed al-Shifa in August 1998 and he bombed Iraq a few months later. Clinton was attacking the Iraq-al Qaeda link. He was concerned about Saddam giving al Qaeda WMDs. I put a 1998 quote from Clinton on the Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda page. It is complete revisionism to ignore this fact. I dont have much time now. I will have to respond more later. RonCram 15:53, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Ron it's like you're on another planet. I am meticulous about the facts and I admit when I am wrong. You filter everything through your ideological screen. The word alleged is accurate in the heading but it was not an issue I have made a big deal about so I don't know why you are even bringing it up as an example. I don't have to refute Clarke's memo; it's obvious Clarke has come to a different conclusion after looking at the evidence. It's amazing -- all you can do is cling to al-shifa because everything else has been refuted. Yet even there you ignore my arguments. Clinton never suggested the bombing had anything to do with Saddam. You are making connections that were never suggested by the President or the media. There is no evidence that Clinton was attacking the Saddam al-Q connection with bombings months apart. And you can't even tell us who from Iraq was involved in al-shifa or how. At least you have the good sense to back off your defense of the info from al-Libi, with all the new info coming out. But you're incorrigible - you just act like you never said any of that and now you cling to a vague quote from 1998 (from months before the bombing of al-shifa) that doesn't even mention al-qeada, and then you act like I'm the one being unreasonable! And I didn't even delete your quote!--csloat 17:44, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Where to put the 9/21 PDB info?

I'm not familiar enough with this article to add this myself, but the 9/21/01 PDB was one of the documents that Bush refused to show to this Senate Committee, and it pretty clearly shows the intel community's view of the supposed link to al-Qaeda was expressed early on to the Admin, and that the SSCI did not get an opportunity to look at this info: [6]-csloat 01:24, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

I added a brief mention of the Waas article on the 9/21 PDB to the part of the article that discussed the chronology of the investigation, where it previously mentioned that the Committee had requested, and been denied, access to the PDBs. Given all the back-and-forth lately in the "ties to terroism" section, I guess I'm leery of trying to incorporate it there. At the risk of inciting further mayhem, I guess I'd take the position that it's at least conceptually similar to the infamous Italian magazine article on the "pact"--only peripherally significant to an article on the Committee's report, and probably more directly applicable to the Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda article. I also didn't want to get too far out in terms of highlighting the implications of the 9/21 PDB, since at this point it's only unnamed sources in the Waas article, as far as I can tell, that have characterized its contents. --John Callender 06:45, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

I didn't mean to bring it up in the "ties to terrorism" part either -- independent of what it says, what is relevant here, methinks, is that the committee asked for this document and the Bush administration denied the request.--csloat 10:40, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Susan Jones article in CNSNews.com

Twice, now, I've reverted an edit that consisted only of deleting one reference from the end of the article: Prewar Intelligence Flawed; Senators Disagree on 'Political Pressure'. It's an article by Susan Jones, who is credited as "morning editor" of CNSNews.com.

The first time it was deleted, the editor (from a non-logged-in IP address, but one with a fairly lengthy edit history apparently consistent with use by a single user) provided no edit summary. This time he or she did provide an edit summary, saying, "cns=yellow journalism".

I don't think the article itself is especially biased. Having read up on CNSNews.com, I understand that it has a conservative political agenda, but I don't think that justifies removing the link to this article. It provides important detail about public statements that were being made by committee members at the time of the report's release. Anyway, I've added a mention of the conservative nature of the publication to the link, and added a link to the Cybercast News Service Wikipedia page; I think that provides sufficient context to help readers evaluate the information for themselves.

If the user who's been deleting the link wants to discuss reasons for removing it here, that might help me understand where he/she is coming from. Thanks. --John Callender 04:33, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

senators want more info declassified

This information should find its way into the article at some point.-csloat 06:33, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Phase II Section Edits

User JMD keep deleting the text of the Phase II conclusions insisting that they are strictly POV and editorial. However nothing in the Conclusions section of Phase II is editorial. It is verbatum from the report itself.

Anyone trying to assert that the Conclusions Section is editorial is either afraid of what it says, or partisan and trying to manipulate the findings of the report to highlight a one sided view on the wiki-page.

If anything is missing from the Conclusions section, then add text from the report as I have, if not, then stop deleting it. (Wingnutrules (talk) 18:14, 22 June 2008 (UTC))

Wingnut, you're adding a lot of editorial comments to your edits, and even the way you are posting the verbatim stuff suggests POV-pushing. I think for both phase 1 and 2 we should stick to the main details that have demonstrated notability -- i.e. they have been discussed in the NYTimes or other mainstream well-known sources. We don't need every conclusion here, and we certainly don't need to cherry-pick and highlight information that makes it look like the report concluded the opposite way than it did. Hopefully you can help by paring down your additions and taking the editorializing out. csloat (talk) 19:14, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Sloat, there are a lot of editorial comments already in the section on Phase II. And none of the conclusions I've listed today are cherry-picked. It's all of the conclusions from all 16. The phase II section overwhelmingly ignored the body of the report and stuck to the partisan statements of the Majority Chair. Yet the comments by the Minority of the Committee are not allowed?

The new edits have included more of the information in the conclusions to show from the actual body of the report that it was much more even-handed and non-partisan than the Chairman's comments. No where in the body of the Phase II Section before my additions mentioned the report's noting that a great deal of the intelligence was substantiated in the investigation. How is that not editorializing?

The pre-existing section was overwhelmingly slanted in one partisan direction, ignoring the body of the report itself and cherry-picking from the Chairman's comments and articles. Using the report itself, and not just NYTimes or other mainstream well-known sources ensures that the findings themselves and not the left-leaning spin are included. What are you people afraid of?(Wingnutrules (talk) 22:03, 22 June 2008 (UTC))

The fact that there is other pov-pushing on the page should not be a license to add more. The cherry picking is in the conclusions you highlight for special commentary in the first section. The comments of the minority were already there but they should not dominate here, especially if they were not commented on in the mainstream media. Whining that the media has a "left leaning spin" is not relevant to Wikipedia -- it is not Wikipedia's job to tell us that parts of the report that were ignored by professional reporters should be considered important. If the media haven't seen fit to comment on it, we should not either. We certainly should not use Wikipedia as a way of arguing with what we see as the media's "left-leaning" conclusions. csloat (talk) 23:06, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Cherry picking is in the special commentary even before I posted. Overwhelmingly steering clear of the text of the report and utilizing the Chairman's comments and not the report. I don't really care if you think it should be "adding more". You either remove the blatantly biased spin at all levels, or you allow all the matter to be presented. And no, the minority opinion was not even remotely adequately reflected against the crushing mountain of political bias before the additions. If this stuff goes, then the rest of the biased material goes as well. God, I can't believe the article was allowed to stand as it is. I add material that is IN THE REPORT and all of the sudden it's "nor reliable or somehow seems uneven". That's ludicrous. It's simply the pother half of the argument. And anyone who fails to see it is not looking through a non-partisan POV. (Wingnutrules (talk) 00:27, 23 June 2008 (UTC))

I agree with "removing the blatantly biased spin at all levels"; the problem is you are adding more instead. That's not helpful. There is no "other half of the argument" -- it's not an argument; it's a report. The minority opinion is a minority for a reason -- few on the committee thought it had any merit. So it should occupy a subordinate place; it should be mentioned only inasmuch as it has gotten some verifiable notability. csloat (talk) 01:12, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

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