US Intelligence on Iraq WMD -- counter to NYT's Judith Miller -- Sleeping for Eternity

The press like the NYT reporter Judith Miller reporting on the Iraq War in 2003 was complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of both US and Iraqis human beings  (The estimate of Iraqi deaths is hard to address.  It is no doubt in the hundreds of thousands), the wounding of many more and the displacing of millions.  ISIS, ISIL, Al Qaeda and other radical groups exist now all over the Middle East where they never existed before destabilizing it by creating a region dissolved in utter dehumanizing chaos. 

This mayhem can and should be laid at George W. Bush's, Cheney's and their NeoCon henchmen's feet.  It was through their lies, cheer-leading for and cherry-picking of evidence for the Iraq War that this is so.  The Middle East is in deep trouble and our nation may be as well.  The disintegrating of former Middle East states such as Yemen, Syria, and Libya through US policy made the reality of the Arab Spring we see before our very eyes. 

Do the former policy makers sleep well at night?  I bet they do but those who have volunteered and have been called upon to fight the phony trumped up wars pay for them dearly and do not sleep well if they sleep at all unless they sleep for eternity very well indeed.

Those who perpetrated the egregious Iraq War policy need to be held accountable.  They should not be allowed to get away with literally murder and those journalists like Judith Miller who failed to ask the proper questions should pay with their jobs -- they shouldn't have them.

I post the following Factcheck.org that addresses the issues that Judith Miller did not address very well.  She and all those who supported the Iraq war must live with the consequential deaths they have delivered and decide, if they care at all, how to live with the catastrophes they have wrought. 

Factcheck.org

"One senator, Bob Graham of Florida, then chairman of the intelligence committee, has said that reading the full, classified 2002 NIE led him to vote against the war resolution. He had urged his colleagues to read the entire 92-page classified report prior to the vote. Graham said in a National Public Radio interview in June 2007 that he found the report to be "pocked with dissent, conditions, [and] minority opinions on a variety of critical issues."

Graham was one of the few who disbelieved the report’s conclusions, however. And it’s not at all clear that more lawmakers would have doubted it had they read the full report. The unclassified portions do make clear that not all intelligence agencies agreed on all points. The Department of Energy’s technical experts didn’t agree that some aluminum tubes bought by Iraq were for use in uranium-enriching centrifuges, saying they were more likely for use as rocket launchers. And the State Department’s intelligence experts said they saw no "compelling case" that Iraq had an "integrated and comprehensive" program to get nuclear weapons.

"Washington Post: No more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page National Intelligence Estimate executive summary, according to several congressional aides responsible for safeguarding the classified material."

In 2007 the Washington, D.C., newspaper The Hill surveyed current and former senators and reported that 22 of those who were serving in 2002 sent word they had read the full report. Since it would be embarrassing now to admit not reading it before voting on such an important matter, we suspect that number is inflated. But whether the true number is six or 22, it’s clear that only a small minority of the 100-member Senate read this important intelligence summary in full.

–Brooks Jackson

Sources

Director of National Intelligence. "Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction," National Intelligence Estimate October 2002. portions declassified, 18 July 2003.

Priest,  Dana. "Congressional Oversight of Intelligence Criticized; Committee Members, Others Cite Lack of Attention to Reports on Iraqi Arms, Al Qaeda Threat." Washington Post, 27 April 2004.