CIA agent: Everything the US thought it knew about Saddam Hussein was wrong | Hacker News Reader

CIA agent: Everything the US thought it knew about Saddam Hussein was wrong

dailymail.co.uk

45 pointslisper34 comments

Open articleView on HN

this article... there's probably a reason it's published by the daily mail on sunday and self-authored.

This leaves more questions than answers and doesn't really make.a point.

... because he's hocking a book.

i kept looking for the amazon link but i didn't see it.

Seems to be promo for a book he's releasing later this month:

  Debriefing The President: The Interrogation Of Saddam Hussein, by John Nixon, is published on December 29 ...

Iraq having wmds will probably be looked back as the start of fake news peddled by the mainstream media outlets.

That wasn't fake news. Fake news is knowingly spreading news which is either a hoax or likely to be a hoax.

Reporting information from a credible government source based on facts in evidence, is simply reporting. The facts supplied to the reporter might be wrong, or their conclusion might be faulty, but as long as it's based on evidence and in good faith, it's not 'fake news'.

Journalists reiterating the government without critical reasoning isnt journalism.

Its propaganda.

I said, "based on facts in evidence." A good faith reading of what I wrote would assume I meant a "reasonable" reporter who has done the journalistic standard in the US of cross checking sources, critically examining the information.

Which Im saying didnt happen with Iraq.

So where the reasonable reporters then, and why should we believe anything has changed.

A reasonable reporter can follow journalistic procedure properly and still be misled, it's a probabilistic exercise.

Reducing news media into 'fake news' and 'always perfectly correct' is a 'false dilemma' fallacy.

Thats not what Im saying at all. Im not creating a false dilemma fallacy. Iraq didnt have wmds, journalists reiterated official talking points uncritically, even as intelligence officers came out to say otherwise.

What happened with Iraq was a great example of fake news propaganda and the failure of journalism lately, because it was soo wrong not even close to "perfectly correct" or correct anything.

I think the main stream media's report on it at the time was reasonable to the facts available (though a quo bono on it should, and did, make some outlets question the evidence).

You can't judge decisions in the past based on new evidence unless you can show those original decision makers had the evidence.

I think we have different core axioms and are at an impasse.

I think due to the extreme nature of war, journalists largely failed their responsibilty, and what we know today confirms it.

The large amount of human misery it created was too great a cost, and the refusal to learn lessons from it is a huge tragedy.

Thank you for the fairly civil discussion.

Thank you too, at least now we've worked down to what we really disagree about. GG

I think you should revisit this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller#The_Iraq_War

as long as it's based on evidence and in good faith, it's not 'fake news'.

Infowars passes that test.

It's the job of the press not to take things at face value. That's why the US has laws protecting the press, so it can go up against the government. If they are not doing that then they have stopped being journalists and started being paid propagandists.

sigh, if you consider "Soros-funded radicals want civil war" (infowars front page currently) a good faith statement, then we're working from different axioms and can't have a real conversation.

I believe that they believe it, which means they are acting in good faith.

I don't believe they believe it, and that means we're at an unarguable impasse without starting to bring evidence in.

You think they're purely in it for the clicks? If so, how is that distinct from a "real" newspaper (whatever that means these days)?

I do. I start from the assumption they're reasonable men like me, then compare their ledes to the evidence proffered in the story, and the strength of the conclusion.

Infowars fails that test for me, and as a crosscheck, people who have earned my trust. The New York Times passes that test for me, and people who have earned my trust.

I'd forgotten we're not supposed to do political arguments on HN (which I suppose really everything is), so I concede, you win the argument and the internet points.

I remember news articles about 'clear links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam' doing the rounds. There was no evidence whatsoever, not one single report. Yet it spread.

Heck there were even intelligence analysts going public saying 'hey guys there's absolutely no evidence of such links' (see Andrew Wilkie).

Remember the Maine.

I have to use my google-powers to understand your comment.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(ACR-1)

> The cause and responsibility for her sinking remained unclear after a board of inquiry investigated. Nevertheless, popular opinion in the U.S., fanned by inflammatory articles printed in the "Yellow Press" by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, blamed Spain. The phrase, "remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain", became a rallying cry for action, which came with the Spanish–American War later that year.

Try to avoid writing oneliners in HN.

Maybe some more clarity on the "Russian's hacking DNC" is warranted, in light of the CIA track record.

IMHO "Cyber Attribution" (cough) isn't really something you can do in a serious way. Let's be honest and admit that it's essentially "cui bono?" followed by looking at the locations of the first two C&C layers or something like that.

Not saying it's not possible, with low-grade attackers it could be quite easy in some instances. But to actually attribute some attack to some entity you need actionable intelligence, not looking at - very likely consciously spoofed - traces left behind.

I think we should also consider the standards for "cyber" (cough) evidence in the light of the recent "junk science in courts" articles showing how real-world evidence is often inconclusive or spoofable.

We can't possibly think that it's easier, or more clear, with computers, whose default modus operandi is "fail open".

CIA's intelligence assessment on Iraq WMD:

>The document determines that Saddam Hussein had an active chemical weapons program - although crucially, the CIA couldn't prove that his regime had actually resumed producing chemical and biological agents and cast doubt on the actual extent of Saddam's program.

http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-full-version-of-the...

The Bush administration misrepresented the intelligence.

Specifically, Bush created government agencies that say between himself and the int lligence agencies, these were tasked with 'correcting' the intelligence he was receiving.

Bush wanted to believe that Iraq had WMD's, so he designed his administration in such a way as to make that conclusion inevitable.

The headline doesn't really match the conclusion. While the interrogations added and corrected information, in the run up to the Iraq war of 2003 the CIA analysis was dismissed and a tiny subset cherry picked to create a pretense for war. It is the nature of intelligence that you will collect a large body of information, and some of it will be false.

This article, written prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is pretty damning of the Bush administration and to some extent separates then CIA Director George Tenet from the CIA in how intelligence was being handled.

edit. Here's the article: http://prospect.org/article/pentagon-muzzles-cia

Unless their claims are independently verifiable, is there anything they can say that won't be suspect?

That seems to me to be the problem we face now. We built systems on top of layers of corruption, that corruption has been laid bare, the Internet has made it so I can consume it using Wikipedia alone.

Now that our confidence is shaken, who do we trust? And, who with authority doesn't also have an agenda about which they might not tell us?

Perhaps most importantly, how do we reconcile believing in a corrupt systems that have the capacity to sacrifice us just as soon as they'd protect us, versus the threat that distrust thereof weakens our overall cohesion?

> Saddam had actually believed 9/11 would bring Iraq and America closer because Washington would need his secular government to help fight fundamentalism. How woefully wrong he had been

That was an interesting thought if you take the war on terror at face value. But as he said, he did not listen to what was actually going on and being said. The war was never about terror.

It was reasonably clear out here at the time that going into Afghanistan wouldn't deliver a clean, glorious war that would ensure Bush's reelection.

Hilarious, this is the worse piece of journalism I have seen in a while.

Saddam was a US backed 'bully', and as soon as it no longer suited them they took him down on false pretenses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r42oejmpkgw

http://www.globalresearch.ca/gulf-war-documents-meeting-betw...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com