Ok DU, lets see if anyone can find THIS:

[populistdriven]

I have scoured the web looking for the MSM news reports that came out before the war, before Plame, before the state of the union speech, before the mushroom cloud statements, where CIA analysts were anonymously reporting that they were being pressured by Bush to make the intelligence on Saddam's WMD look more concrete.

I distinctly remember reading it.

It has been scoured from the web.

It think it was reported on CNN or MSNBC.

Does anyone have access to LN or some other resource that might have this?


It would be great to have several of these early reports or even a timeline.

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. The observer and the Guardian also publsihed this

look at them archives...

Interesting gem

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,876299,00.html

No, not dierctly on the CIA but it mentions PNAC by name

[wryter2000]

2. Kick

I'll give you a kick. I only remember the reports coming out after the war started and, maybe, after Joe Wilson went public. I could be wrong. I'd love to see what you come up with.

[johnaries]

3. I remember hearing it on NPR, but I can't remember which show. nt

[PDJane]

10. Karen Kwiatkowski wrote

about that before and after the war began.

There is an interview with her on Lew Rockwell in which she talks about this, at

http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski129.html

There is an archive of her colums at Military Week as well:

http://militaryweek.com/kwiatkowski.shtml

Ray McGovern was pretty outspoken too.....This details his organization and the reasons for it.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles8/Jentzsch_McGovern-Interview.htm

[havocmom]

4. Might check with Larry Johnson

Does he have a site?

Also, see about emailing the question to Randi Rhodes. She has has some ex- CIA people on often and may have the info or a source for you. She was one of the first to give these guys a platform from which to tell their stories.

[Tennessee Gal]

5. Here you go!

I did a search on the words "analysts pressured" and came up with this. Hope it helps.

http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=utf-8&fr=slv1-&p=analysts+pressured

[serryjw]

6. Try this..I know I have better ones

quote.....
Yet there was no consensus within the American intelligence community that Saddam represented such a grave and imminent threat. Rather, interviews with current and former intelligence officials and other experts reveal that the Bush administration culled from U.S. intelligence those assessments that supported its position and omitted those that did not. The administration ignored, and even suppressed, disagreement within the intelligence agencies and pressured the CIA to reaffirm its preferred version of the Iraqi threat. Similarly, it stonewalled, and sought to discredit, international weapons inspectors when their findings threatened to undermine the case for war.

end quote......
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=0cQNpJfYxhSff7JJVl4q9T%3D%3D

[johnaries]

7. Here's an interesting article.

A senior CIA operative who handled sensitive informants in Iraq asserts that CIA managers asked him to falsify his reporting on weapons of mass destruction and retaliated against him after he refused.

The operative, who remains under cover, asserts in a lawsuit made public yesterday that a co-worker warned him in 2001 "that CIA management planned to 'get him' for his role in reporting intelligence contrary to official CIA dogma."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49647-2004Dec8.html

Also, let's not forget the "purge" of the CIA to make sure it's agents were loyal, so, any agents that would admit to being pressured were already fired before the investigation:
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/bush/articles/2004/11/17/president_moves_to_rein_in_2_agencies/

[Ready4Change]

8. I recall reports of Cheney rejecting reports not saying what he wanted.

Reports of him reject reports, saying "try again," over and over, with it being very clear he wouldn't accept them unless they said what he wanted them to say.

Also of him making personal trips to the Pentagon and CIA HQ to apply a little personal incentive to achieve this effect.

I don't recall any such reports regarding Bush.

[pacalo]

9. Here you go...

Go here, & scroll down to page 16 where Sen. Rockefeller asks Vince Cannistraro about pressure being put on CIA analysts.

This is from the transcript of the Democratic Policy Committee hearing on October 24, 2003, about the Plame leak, in which Larry Johnson, Vince Cannistraro, & Jim Marcinkowski testified.

[PDJane]

11. And the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15019-2003Jun4?language=printer

[Ready4Change]

17. Very interesting transcript. Thank you!

I read page 16. But then I went back and read on from page 13. Still so engrossing I think I'll read the whole there.

There in that transcript is the whole deal, in black and white. Highly "enhanced" WMD rationale for the Iraq war. Reasons for outing Plame, and the damage that caused. It's clear the people on this panel know exactly who done what. The only question in my mind is: Why aren't heads rolling RIGHT NOW?

Recommended reading.

[pacalo]

18. It was a very interesting hearing -- I wish I could find the video

in the C-Span archive, but I doubt that it is still available.

There, but for the grace of protection by a Republican majority in Congress, goes this administration. That's the only reason heads aren't rolling.

[cal04]

12. here's some but I can't find the Newsweek article

Cheney's CIA visits pressured us: analysts
Multiple visits to the CIA by the United States Vice-President, Dick Cheney, created an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments on Iraq fit with Bush Administration policy objectives, intelligence officials said.
They said Mr Cheney and his chief of staff, "Scooter" Libby, questioned analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to al-Qaeda.
Mr Cheney took the lead in the Administration last August in advocating military action against Iraq by claiming it had weapons of mass destruction. The visits "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here", one agency official said.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/05/1054700335400.html?oneclick=true

http://www.iraqwar.org/adminlies.htm

* "Dick Cheney's repeated trips to CIA headquarters in the run-up to the war for unusual, face-to-face sessions with intelligence analysts poring over Iraqi data. The pressure on the intelligence community to document the administration's claims that the Iraqi regime had ties to al-Qaida and was pursuing a nuclear weapons capacity was ‘unremitting,’ said former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro, echoing several other intelligence veterans interviewed." Additionally, CIA officials "charged that the hard-liners in the Defense Department and vice president's office had 'pressured' agency analysts to paint a dire picture of Saddam's capabilities and intentions." --Dallas Morning News, 7/28/03; Newsweek, 7/28/03

[populistdriven]

13. Thank You! This will get me started and is exactly what I needed!

:)

[acmejack]

14. Here are a few :

Vice President Dick Cheney has taken an active role in the administration's Iraq policy. A key briefing on the president's intelligence order took place in Cheney's West Wing office. Cheney acted as a kind of quarterback

A similar theme was originally used to set up Saddam Hussein as an al- Qa'ida ally. Back in March, George Tenet, the CIA director, stated that Baghdad "has also had contacts with al-Qa'ida", although he somewhat diluted this bald statement by adding that "the two sides' mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible". Note the discrepancy here between "has also had contacts" and "is possible".

Cheney's assertion that Iraq is close to acquiring a nuclear weapon -- and Rumsfeld's suggestion that Bush can back it up with evidence -- contrasts sharply with the CIA's most recent public assessments of Baghdad's nuclear weapons development efforts.officials that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses -- including distorting his links to the al-Qaida terrorist network; have overstated the amount of international support for attacking Iraq; and have downplayed the potential repercussions of a new war in the Middle East.

They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Hussein poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary.

[populistdriven]

15. Thanks everybody - this was "Prostitution of Intelligence"

/rubs hands together and gets to work

This was the exact article I read in 2002! DU is awesome!
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4196/is_20021009/ai_n10822053

(This was a great interview)
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles8/Jentzsch_McGovern-Interview.htm

Jentzsch: How is the mood in the CIA today?



RMG: The folks who are working in the agency, in the analytic directorate, the directorate in which most of us from VIPS worked, are terribly demoralized. Think for example about the heroic efforts they made after 9-11

to track down each and every report having to do with ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Despite there assiduous efforts, they came up with zero. No conclusive evidence at all that bears the term evidence, that there were any ties at all - meaningful ties - between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Then think of them after a year and a half of this painstaking work, holding their integrity against the Pentagon which very much wanted to prove the existence of these ties, watching their director sitting right behind Colin Powell as the spun this yarn into the end of the speech, about all these associations, this sinister nexus between al-Qaeda and Iraq.



Now the other folks unfortunately are the folks that bubbled to the top of the managerial ranks during William Casey and his protégé who learned so well at his knee: a fellow named Bobby Gates. They were rewarded for being able to sniff which way the wind was blowing and to trim their sails accordingly, and so early on in the eighties you had some prostitution of intelligence. On Iran for example, on the Soviet Union for example. And the folks that bubbled to the top, many of them are still in place, and those are the folks that you can go to when they are doing a "National Intelligence Estimate" (NIE) on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.



And say: "As you know, the Vice President has said that 'Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program', I certainly hope that the NIE will bear that out", and they say, "Yes, Sir", they'll salute crisply and they mold the evidence to fit the policy. This is the cardinal sin, cooking evidence to the recipe of high policy and it was done in this estimate and it is an unforgivable sin in terms of intelligence.

[spanone]

16. I remember reading that it was unusual for the Veep to make so many

trips to the CIA. In fact, I remember they reported it had never happened before.

FOUND THIS!!!
~snip~ Cheney's CIA visits pressured us: analysts

June 6 2003


Multiple visits to the CIA by the United States Vice-President, Dick Cheney, created an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments on Iraq fit with Bush Administration policy objectives, intelligence officials said.

http://www.smh.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2003/06/05/1054700335400.html

oR THIS?

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cheney20oct20,0,5587019.story?coll=la-home-nation