| Author | Message | | Alpha | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 8:25 pm Post subject: Report says Pentagon manipulated intel |
| Report says Pentagon manipulated intel
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer1 hour, 31 minutes ago
Pentagon officials undercut the intelligence community in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq by insisting in briefings to the White House that there was a clear relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, the Defense Department's inspector general said Friday.
Acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the office headed by former Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith took "inappropriate" actions in advancing conclusions on al-Qaida connections not backed up by the nation's intelligence agencies.
Gimble said that while the actions of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy "were not illegal or unauthorized," they "did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to senior decision makers" at a time when the White House was moving toward war with Iraq.
"I can't think of a more devastating commentary," said Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich.
He cited Gimble's findings that Feith's office was, despite doubts expressed by the intelligence community, pushing conclusions that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague five months before the attack, and that there were "multiple areas of cooperation" between Iraq and al-Qaida, including shared pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
"That was the argument that was used to make the sale to the American people about the need to go to war," Levin said in an interview Thursday. He said the Pentagon's work, "which was wrong, which was distorted, which was inappropriate ... is something which is highly disturbing."
Rep. Ike Skelton (news, bio, voting record), D-Mo., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Friday the report "clearly shows that Doug Feith and others in that office exercised extremely poor judgment for which our nation, and our service members in particular, are paying a terrible price."
Republicans on the panel disagreed. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., said the "probing questions" raised by Feith's policy group improved the intelligence process.
"I'm trying to figure out why we are here," said Sen. Saxby Chambliss (news, bio, voting record), R-Ga., saying the office was doing its job of analyzing intelligence that had been gathered by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Gimble responded that at issue was that the information supplied by Feith's office in briefings to the National Security Council and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney was "provided without caveats" that there were varying opinions on its reliability.
Gimble's report said Feith's office had made assertions "that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community."
At the White House, spokesman Dana Perino said President Bush has revamped the U.S. spy community to try avoiding a repeat of flawed intelligence affecting policy decisions by creating a director of national intelligence and making other changes.
"I think what he has said is that he took responsibility, and that the intel was wrong, and that we had to take measures to revamp the intel community to make sure that it never happened again," Perino told reporters.
Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman denied that the office was producing its own intelligence products, saying they were challenging what was coming in from intelligence-gathering professionals, "looking at it with a critical eye."
Some Democrats also have contended that Feith misled Congress about the basis of the administration's assertions on the threat posed by Iraq, but the Pentagon investigation did not support that.
In a telephone interview Thursday, Levin said the IG report is "very damning" and shows a Pentagon policy shop trying to shape intelligence to prove a link between al-Qaida and Saddam.
Levin in September 2005 had asked the inspector general to determine whether Feith's office's activities were appropriate, and if not, what remedies should be pursued.
The 2004 report from the Sept. 11 commission found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Saddam and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror organization before the U.S. invasion.
Asked to comment on the IG's findings, Feith said in a telephone interview that he had not seen the report but was pleased to hear that it concluded his office's activities were neither illegal nor unauthorized. He took strong issue, however, with the finding that some activities had been "inappropriate."
"The policy office has been smeared for years by allegations that its pre-Iraq-war work was somehow 'unlawful' or 'unauthorized' and that some information it gave to congressional committees was deceptive or misleading," said Feith, who left his Pentagon post in August 2005.
Feith called "bizarre" the inspector general's conclusion that some intelligence activities by the Office of Special Plans, which was created while Feith served as the undersecretary of defense for policy — the top policy position under then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — were inappropriate but not unauthorized. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 8:32 pm Post subject: |
| Published on Tuesday, February 13, 2007 by The Nation
Feith-Libby Lies Exposed
by Robert Dreyfuss
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0213-20.htm
If fool-me-once was the Bush Administration's reams of faked intelligence about Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent ties to Al Qaeda, then fool-me-twice is the Administration's shameless effort to shift the blame for American casualties in Iraq from the Sunni-led resistance, where it belongs, to a make-believe threat from Iran and allied Shiite militias.
It's Iran in the headlines today, but happily on February 9 we got a timely reminder of how brazenly the Bush Administration--along with its neoconservative allies at The Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute--trumped up the case for war against Iraq five years ago.
In a stunning indictment of the Administration's chicanery, Pentagon Inspector General Thomas Gimble slammed the super-secret predecessor organizations to the Office of Special Plans for "disseminating alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and Al Qaeda relationship." Its actions, Gimble concluded, were "inappropriate," and its conclusions "were not supported by the available intelligence." Among the absurdly wrong conclusions reached by the OSP and its earlier incarnations--the equally Orwellian-sounding Policy Support Office and the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group--were that a "mature symbiotic relationship" existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda and that Baghdad and Osama bin Laden's terrorists displayed "cooperation in all categories." Vice President Cheney used this nonsense to bolster his dark muttering about "possible Iraq coordination" with Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks.
Make no mistake: The phrase "not supported by the available intelligence" is merely bureaucratese for a "lie-filled pile of crap," and that's the most straightforward way to describe the intelligence product produced by the OSP, which was run directly out of the office of then-Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Feith, who was called "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth" by Gen. Tommy Franks, is a hard-core neoconservative with intimate ties to the Israeli far right. The Inspector General's report chips away at merely the tip of a gigantic iceberg, a virtual empire of lies that was owned and operated by the Defense Department from 9/11 though the start of the Iraq War in March 2003. (For a complete account of the inner workings of the OSP, see "The Lie Factory," by me and Jason Vest, in the January 2004 edition of Mother Jones.)
At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Carl Levin invited Gimble in to air Feith's dirty laundry. "The Inspector General's report is a devastating condemnation," said Levin. "These issues are as critical as any I have ever seen." After drawing out Gimble on his careful inquiry into Feith's mischief, Levin noted that despite having interviewed some seventy-five people for the report, there were still many--including at the White House, the National Security Council and the Vice President's office--who had somehow avoided talking to Gimble. "We're gonna be interviewing a lot of folks, including people who have refused to talk to you...including the Chief of Staff of the Vice President."
That "Chief of Staff" would be none other than Feith comrade-in-arms I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the now-disgraced neocon who is standing trial for perjury for trying to cover up information about the Administration's lies and deception over Iraqi WMD four years ago. Thus, very neatly, the Inspector General's inquiry dovetails with US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's long-running effort to pull on yet another thread in the Feith-Libby spider web.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Feith was shockingly unrepentant, denying any and all evidence that he stacked the deck for war. It was too much even for Chris Wallace, the show's host, who seemed incredulous that Feith would deny the obvious. (You can read the whole transcript here.) An excerpt:
WALLACE: Okay. Let's talk about it, because the briefing was titled "Iraq and Al Qaeda Making the Case," and here are some of the highlights from your PowerPoint presentation. "Intelligence indicates cooperation in all categories, mature symbiotic relationship." "Some indications of possible Iraq coordination with Al Qaeda specifically related to 9/11." And you said an alleged meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague in April 2001 was a known contact. Mr. Feith, all of that--all of that was wrong, wasn't it?
FEITH: No, not at all. There was substantial intelligence. I mean, evidence is a legal term not really appropriate here. There was a lot of information out there. Intelligence is very sketchy, and it's always open to interpretation. On this issue, there were people who disagreed about the intelligence and the people in the Pentagon were giving a critical review. They were not presenting alternative conclusions. They were presenting a challenge to the way the CIA was looking at things and filtering its own information.
WALLACE: I have to tell you, I mean, when I--I mean, I read these as "mature symbiotic relationship," "known contact"--that sure sounds like conclusions.
FEITH: You're plucking language out of a briefing, the thrust of which was why is the CIA accounting for information that it had that suggested an Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship when the CIA was excluding that information from its own finished intelligence at the time. It was a criticism. It's healthy to criticize the CIA's intelligence. What the people in the Pentagon were doing was right. It was good government.
The New York Times, in a scathing editorial ridiculing Feith, also pointed the finger at Feith's boss, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: "Wolfowitz would feverishly sketch out charts showing how this Iraqi knew that Iraqi, who was connected through six more degrees of separation to terrorist attacks, all the way back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing."
After Feith's OSP concocted its cock-and-bull story about Iraq, they had the temerity to take it over to the CIA and present it to a team of professional analysts there. George Tenet, after listening politely to Feith's team on August 15, 2002, quietly asked his staff to stick around after the OSP briefers departed. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency reviewed Feith's conclusions (apparently there were some two dozen or more pieces of "evidence") and promptly disagreed with more than 50 percent of it, Gimble said. Five days later, they all met once again, and the CIA pointedly offered to footnote Feith's report with strident objections of its own. Feith's team said thanks--and then promptly set up an appointment to brief the White House, without so much as adding a single CIA footnote. Needless to say, that briefing was widely cited by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and others--and it was helpfully leaked to The Weekly Standard, which printed it nearly verbatim. Later, when asked why he kept insisting that Iraq and Al Qaeda were allies, Cheney pointed to the Weekly Standard article to support his charges!
Bizarre as all this is, it is important to remember that because of these lies, America went to war against a country that had never attacked the United States, that had no weapons of mass destruction and that had no ties to Al Qaeda or 9/11. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead, along with 3,109 Americans. Not only that, but there is every reason to believe that the Administration is once again involved in fabricating intelligence to justify its increasingly belligerent stance toward Iran. While Senator Levin keeps one eye on the Feith-Libby lies of 2003, let's hope he and the rest of Congress keep the other on what looks like additional baloney about Iran. As President Bush himself so eloquently put it: "Fool me once, shame on--shame on you. Fool me--you can't get fooled again."
Robert Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan).
The Lie Factory:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html
Last edited by Alpha on Sat Feb 17, 2007 8:45 am; edited 1 time in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 11:00 am Post subject: |
| Pentagon official's prewar intel faulted (Reuters)
By David Morgan and Jeremy Pelofsky Fri Feb 9, 8:46 PM ET
A leading figure in the Bush administration's march to war in Iraq helped justify the 2003 invasion by undercutting the CIA with questionable intelligence about Saddam Hussein's links to al Qaeda, a Pentagon watchdog agency said in a report on Friday.
Former U.S. defense policy chief Douglas Feith presented the White House with claims of a "mature symbiotic relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda as if they were facts, while ignoring contradictory views from the intelligence community, the report by the Pentagon inspector general said.
"They did not show the other, dissenting side," Defense Department acting inspector general Thomas Gimble told the Senate Armed Services Committee at a hearing.
A claim by Feith's office that September 11 hijacking ringleader Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi official months before the 2001 attacks could not be verified by intelligence, he said.
Gimble, who produced the classified report after a one-year review, concluded that Feith was authorized by former deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to pursue alternative intelligence conclusions and that the action was lawful.
But Feith's actions were sometimes "inappropriate" because they "did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the intelligence community," said an unclassified two-page executive summary of the report released by the inspector general's office.
As a result, Feith's office "did not provide 'the most accurate analysis of intelligence' to senior decision-makers," it said
"The inspector general's report is a devastating condemnation," said Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, the Senate panel's Democratic chairman.
'POOR JUDGMENT'
Rep. Ike Skelton (news, bio, voting record) of Missouri, Democratic chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, said the report showed that Feith's office exercised "extremely poor judgment for which our nation, and our service members in particular, are paying a terrible price."
Feith's audience at a White House presentation in September 2002 included then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who is now on federal trial over another matter related to prewar Iraq intelligence.
Top administration officials including Cheney used claims of an Iraq-Qaeda relationship to suggest Saddam could have had a role in the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Independent bodies, including the September 11 commission, found no collaborative links between Iraq and the militant network blamed for the attacks that killed 3,000 people and prompted the U.S. war on terrorism.
The report, requested by the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2005, recommended no action be taken because leadership changes in the Pentagon and intelligence community made a recurrence unlikely.
Feith, who left government in 2005, welcomed the finding that his activities were legal and authorized but said it was "absurd" to conclude that his work was inappropriate.
"It, of course, varied from (the) consensus. It was a criticism of that consensus. That is why it was written," he said in a statement.
Republicans loyal to President George W. Bush rebutted Levin and called Feith's work an intelligence critique that required no formal vetting process.
"I don't think in any way that his report can be interpreted as a devastating condemnation," said Sen. James Inhofe (news, bio, voting record), an Oklahoma Republican.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who replaced Donald Rumsfeld in December, did not comment on the substance of the report but said intelligence should to be handled through established channels.
"If intelligence is inadequate, then changes need to be made in those institutions to improve intelligence," Gates told reporters in Spain.
(Additional reporting by Andrew Gray and Joanne Allen, and by Kristin Roberts in Seville) | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 12:39 pm Post subject: |
| February 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com
Inquiry on Intelligence Gaps May Reach to White House
By DAVID S. CLOUD
WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Friday that he would ask current and former White House aides to testify about a report by the Pentagon’s inspector general that criticizes the Pentagon for compiling “alternative intelligence” that made the case for invading Iraq.
The chairman, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said that among those called to testify could be Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, a former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. Both received a briefing from the defense secretary’s policy office in 2002 on possible links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government.
In its report on Thursday, the acting inspector general, Thomas F. Gimble, found that the work done by the Pentagon team, which was assembled by Douglas J. Feith, a former under secretary of defense for policy, was “not fully supported by the available intelligence.”
It was not clear whether Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby would testify. The White House normally resists having top aides testify before Congress.
The Senate Intelligence Committee may also seek to question the men. Tara Andringa, a spokeswoman for Mr. Levin, said Mr. Levin planned to consult with Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of that committee. Mr. Levin is on both committees.
The inspector general’s report found that while the Feith team did not violate any laws or knowingly mislead Congress, it made dubious interpretations of intelligence reports and shared them with senior officials without making clear that its findings had already been discounted or discredited by the main intelligence agencies.
“The actions, in our opinion, were inappropriate, given that all the products did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the intel community, and in some cases were shown as intel products,” Mr. Gimble told the Armed Services Committee in a hearing on Friday.
That set off a two-hour partisan clash. Democrats argued that the report showed intelligence had been manipulated to justify an invasion of Iraq, and Republicans insisted that Mr. Feith’s office did nothing wrong by reaching conclusions that differed from those of the main intelligence agencies and presenting them to higher-ups, who had asked for the re-examination in the first place.
Senator Levin, who has long been a leading critic of Mr. Feith’s role, called the report “a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities” by Mr. Feith. But Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, responded, “I don’t think in any way that his report can be interpreted as a devastating condemnation.”
Mr. Gimble said formal intelligence findings did not corroborate some of the Pentagon’s assertions: that Mr. Hussein’s government and Al Qaeda had a “mature symbiotic relationship,” that it involved a “shared interest and pursuit of” unconventional weapons and that there were “some indications” of coordination between Iraq and Al Qaeda on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The briefers from Mr. Feith’s office should have noted their departures from the formal consensus findings of intelligence agencies, Mr. Gimble said.
Representative Ike Skelton, a Democrat from Missouri and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Mr. Feith’s office exercised “extremely poor judgment for which our nation, and our service members in particular, are paying a terrible price.”
Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, noted that Mr. Feith’s superiors at the Pentagon had asked him to re-examine intelligence on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Therefore, Mr. Sessions said, there was no need for the briefers to point out that their conclusions differed from those of the C.I.A., because the briefing was intended as a “critique” of the agencies’ conclusions.
A similar argument has been made in a formal rebuttal to the inspector general that was prepared by Mr. Feith’s successor at the Pentagon. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 12:40 pm Post subject: |
| http://www.nytimes.com
February 10, 2007
Editorial
The Build-a-War Workshop
It took far too long, but a report by the Pentagon inspector general has finally confirmed that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s do-it-yourself intelligence office cooked up a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda to help justify an unjustifiable war.
The report said the team headed by Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, developed “alternative” assessments of intelligence on Iraq that contradicted the intelligence community and drew conclusions “that were not supported by the available intelligence.” Mr. Feith certainly knew the Central Intelligence Agency would cry foul, so he hid his findings from the C.I.A. Then Vice President Dick Cheney used them as proof of cloak-and-dagger meetings that never happened, long-term conspiracies between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that didn’t exist, and — most unforgivable — “possible Iraqi coordination” on the 9/11 attacks, which no serious intelligence analyst believed.
The inspector general did not recommend criminal charges against Mr. Feith because Mr. Rumsfeld or his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, approved their subordinate’s “inappropriate” operations. The renegade intelligence buff said he was relieved.
We’re sure he was. But there is no comfort in knowing that his dirty work was approved by his bosses. All that does is add to evidence that the Bush administration knowingly and repeatedly misled Americans about the intelligence on Iraq.
To understand this twisted tale, it is important to recall how Mr. Feith got into the creative writing business. Top administration officials, especially Mr. Cheney, had long been furious at the C.I.A. for refusing to confirm the delusion about a grand Iraqi terrorist conspiracy, something the Republican right had nursed for years. Their frustration only grew after 9/11 and the C.I.A. still refused to buy these theories.
Mr. Wolfowitz would feverishly sketch out charts showing how this Iraqi knew that Iraqi, who was connected through six more degrees of separation to terrorist attacks, all the way back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
But the C.I.A. kept saying there was no reliable intelligence about an Iraq-Qaeda link. So Mr. Feith was sent to review the reports and come back with the answers Mr. Cheney wanted. The inspector general’s report said Mr. Feith’ s team gave a September 2002 briefing at the White House on the alleged Iraq-Qaeda connection that had not been vetted by the intelligence community (the director of central intelligence was pointedly not told it was happening) and “was not fully supported by the available intelligence.”
The false information included a meeting in Prague in April 2001 between an Iraqi official and Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 pilots. It never happened. But Mr. Feith’s report said it did, and Mr. Cheney will still not admit that the story is false.
In a statement released yesterday, Senator Carl Levin, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has been dogged in pursuit of the truth about the Iraqi intelligence, noted that the cooked-up Feith briefing had been leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine so Mr. Cheney could quote it as the “best source” of information about the supposed Iraq-Qaeda link.
The Pentagon report is one step in a long-delayed effort to figure out how the intelligence on Iraq was so badly twisted — and by whom. That work should have been finished before the 2004 elections, and it would have been if Pat Roberts, the obedient Republican who ran the Senate Intelligence Committee, had not helped the White House drag it out and load it in ways that would obscure the truth.
It is now up to Mr. Levin and Senator Jay Rockefeller, the current head of the intelligence panel, to give Americans the answers. Mr. Levin’s desire to have the entire inspector general’s report on the Feith scheme declassified is a good place to start. But it will be up to Mr. Rockefeller to finally determine how old, inconclusive, unsubstantiated and false intelligence was transformed into fresh, reliable and definitive reports — and then used by Mr. Bush and other top officials to drag the country into a disastrous and unnecessary war. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2007 11:45 am Post subject: |
| Forwarded:
Jeff wrote:
What Scheer writes here is not new. It has long ao become clear that the Zionist Lobby --of which Feith and the neocons are a critical part --was the main factor in getting the US to invade Iraq as it will be the key factor should the US attack Iran or come to Israel's "defense" should it attack Iran. The big question is how long will it be before the American people wake up and take the lobby and its major players out behind the political woodshed?-JB
http://www.informat ionclearinghouse .info/article170 65.htm
Before the invasion, there was Feith
By Robert Scheer
02/14/07 "San Francisco Chronicle" -- - SOMEDAY, you are going to read a whole lot about the shenanigans of one Douglas J. Feith and an elaborate scheme to get the United States to invade Iraq . That is because Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., has been determined to get to the bottom of this sordid tale and is now, fortunately, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee and thereby empowered to get at the truth.
Last week, his focus led to the partial declassification of a report produced by the Pentagon's inspector general. Although its shocking revelations did not get the coverage it deserved -- what with a jealous astronaut on the loose and the death of a certain voluptuous stripper/heiress -- efforts such as Levin's eventually will uncover the full picture of why President Bush committed to a war costing tens of thousands of lives and an expected $1 trillion that served no valid national security purpose.
The tale begins with Feith, who was appointed undersecretary of defense for policy in the Pentagon by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after Bush was installed in the White House in 2000 by the Supreme Court. In that capacity, Feith's office manufactured an "Alternative Analysis on the Iraq-al Qaeda Relationship, " which ignored the consensus of the intelligence community that the two natural enemies -- one a secular Arab government, the other a fundamentalist terror group bent on destruction of same -- were not, nor ever had been, working together, despite a shared enmity for the United States .
Most important, as the Pentagon's independent inspector general noted, the intelligence did not support any connection between Saddam Hussein's regime and the brutal Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Nevertheless, such an apocryphal connection was asserted repeatedly by the Bush administration based largely on cherry-picked information (compiled and presented by Feith's highly ideological group within the Pentagon).
"[I]ntelligence indicates cooperation in all categories" and a "mature symbiotic relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda, Feith conveniently reported to superiors who had already decided on the need to overthrow Hussein and were seeking a way to link it to Americans' rage at Osama bin Ladin. These alleged "multiple areas of cooperation" included "shared interest and pursuit of [Weapons of Mass Destruction] " and "some indications of possible Iraq coordination with al Qaeda related to 9/11." All of those claims were known by the intelligence community to be false or completely unproven, as documented by the nonpartisan 9/11 commission. Yet, they were presented by Feith's office "unbeknownst to the Director of Central Intelligence, " according to the report, were "not vetted by the Intelligence Community" and were "not supported by the available intelligence. "
The most glaring distortion was Feith's indefensible reliance on a shaky, discredited report from a Czech intelligence agent that said 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had a meeting with a top Iraqi diplomat in Prague five months before Sept. 11, 2001. As the 9/11 commission reported, there was never any good evidence of such a meeting, yet Vice President Dick Cheney continued to assert it as true, long after the facts were known. Cheney even called Feith's report the "best source of information" on the alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda after it was leaked to the neoconservative Weekly Standard
So was the White House in on this hustle? It is hard to imagine it wasn't, because Feith was selected by Cheney and Rumsfeld to run the "alternative" intelligence operation precisely because they knew he was an inveterate hawk, long committed publicly to a rollback strategy that would ensure Israel 's security through regime change in the Arab world, beginning with Iraq .
That radical and dangerous notion, based on a deep hostility to the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts pursued by all previous presidents, had been clearly outlined by Feith in a 1996 report he co-wrote with Richard Perle and other prominent neoconservatives called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," issued by an Israeli think-tank. The report spelled out a rosy scenario in which a new post-Hussein Iraq with a Shia majority would support a pro-Israel position.
The absurdity of that expectation has been well demonstrated by the close ties of the Iraqi Shia leadership with an Iranian government that is publicly committed to eliminating Israel . Of course, as a private citizen, Feith had the right to endorse such deeply erroneous views -- but why was a man given to such bizarre analysis placed in a position of critical importance in the federal government?
More important, why did the president raise Feith's analysis over that of the government's lavishly funded intelligence agencies? That is the basic question begged by the report, and one that truth-diggers such as Levin eventually may be able to answer.
E-mail Rscheer@truthdig. com | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 9:54 pm Post subject: |
| DoD Report Appears to Confirm Downing Street Memo
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report (http://www.truthout.org)
Friday 09 February 2007
A long-awaited report on the veracity of pre-war Iraq intelligence has found that a secretive policy shop exaggerated the Iraqi threat, providing the White House with cherry-picked information about links between Iraq and al Qaeda. The shop, operating out of the Pentagon, was set up by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Its goal was to lay the groundwork for a pre-emptive military strike against Iraq.
The report would appear to confirm British intelligence assertions that surfaced in a document widely referred to as the Downing Street Memo that the facts against the threat posed by Iraq were being fixed around the Bush administration's policy leading up to the invasion of Iraq.
Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said the report is a "a devastating condemnation of the activities of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Those activities supported the Bush administration's misleading case for war against Iraq."
The Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General produced the report, which focuses largely on the work of former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Feith's Office of Special Plans sent the Bush administration bogus intelligence on Iraq's weapons program and ties to terrorist organizations that supported the administration's policy.
An executive summary of the report was released late Thursday by Senator Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Levin has spent the past two years battling the former Senate Republican leadership to conclude its so-called Phase II investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence.
Last month, in an interview with McClatchy Newspapers, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he was told by Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kans.), who was formerly in charge of the second phase of the Senate's investigation, that Vice President Dick Cheney applied "constant" pressure on Roberts to drag out the probe on pre-war intelligence. A spokeswoman for Cheney denied the allegation.
Levin will chair an armed services committee hearing Friday, at which acting Pentagon Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble will discuss the findings of the report. On Thursday, Levin released an unclassified executive summary of the inspector general's findings: specifically, the role Feith's Office of Special Plans played in helping the White House to mislead the public about Iraq. Levin said he is trying to get the entire report declassified.
The inspector general's unclassified executive summary of the report, as characterized by Levin, states:
The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy developed, produced and disseminated to senior decision-makers alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaeda relationship. These assessments included some conclusions inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community,
The inspector general also stated that the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy "was inappropriately performing intelligence activities of developing, producing, and disseminating that should be performed by the intelligence community."
The inspector general concluded that these "inappropriate" activities were authorized by Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense, or Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of defense.
Senior administration officials, including Vice President Cheney, made numerous public statements that reflected the views of the Feith alternative analysis, which were inconsistent with the analysis and judgments of the intelligence community. Indeed, Vice President Cheney said the principal Feith office assessment was the "best source of information" on the alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.
Rockefeller said the conclusions of the report are damning. Moreover, he said, his committee was kept in the dark about the Office of Special Plans and the fact that it was engaged in intelligence-gathering activities.
"The IG has concluded that this office was engaged in intelligence activities," Rockefeller said. "The Senate intelligence committee was never informed of these activities. Whether these actions were authorized or not, it appears that they were not in compliance with the law. In the coming days, I will carefully review all aspects of the report and will consult with [Senate intelligence committee] Vice Chairman [Kit] Bond to determine whether any additional action by the Senate intelligence committee is warranted."
The White House and the Pentagon have been dogged by questions about Feith and OSP's activities dating back to the beginning of the Iraq War. It was during that time that a number of CIA analysts spoke privately with Democratic lawmakers and complained that Feith's unit had been cherry-picking intelligence information that provided worst-case scenarios about Iraq's weapons programs. Levin and Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), called for an immediate investigation.
Republicans successfully thwarted a probe into the policy shop back then, but the issue resurfaced in November 2005, when the Iraq War took a turn for the worse. Levin and other lawmakers began to demand documents and the authority to conduct interviews with Feith and his staff. But Senator Roberts, who headed the Senate intelligence committee, sidestepped the Democratic lawmakers' requests and instead asked the inspector general in the Department of Defense to look into OSP's activities. That all but guaranteed that it would become bogged down in bureaucratic red tape and that tough questions would take years to answer.
In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, Rumsfeld became increasingly frustrated that the CIA could not find any evidence of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program - evidence that would have helped the White House to build a solid case for war in Iraq. Rumsfeld helped set up the Office of Special Plans in 2001 and tapped Feith to head the office.
The OSP, according to published reports, was to gather intelligence information on the Iraqi threat that the CIA and FBI could not uncover, and present it to the White House to build a case for war in Iraq. The committee relied heavily on information provided by Iraqi defector Ahmed Chalabi, who has provided the White House with reams of disputed intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. Chalabi heads the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles who have pushed for regime change in Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans routinely provided President Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, who headed the National Security Council at the time, with questionable intelligence information on the Iraqi threat. Much of that information was included in various speeches by Bush and Cheney, and some was never vetted for accuracy by career CIA analysts.
In an article in the New York Times in October 2002, the paper reported that Rumsfeld had ordered the OSP to "to search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists" that might have been overlooked by the CIA.
Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in an interview with the New Yorker in May 2003 that the Office of Special Plans "started picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the president. It's not intelligence. It's political propaganda."
Lang said the CIA and the OSP often clashed on the accuracy of intelligence information provided to the White House by Paul Wolfowitz.
By the fall of 2002, the White House had virtually dismissed all of the intelligence on Iraq provided by the CIA, in favor of the more critical information provided to the Bush administration by the Office of Special Plans. The CIA had failed to find any evidence of Iraq's weapons programs.
In a rare Pentagon briefing four years ago, Douglas Feith said the Office of Special Plans was not an "intelligence project," but rather a group of eighteen people who looked at intelligence information from a different point of view. Feith now teaches a seminar on Iraq War planning at Georgetown University.
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Jason Leopold is a former Los Angeles bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswire. He has written over 2,000 stories on the California energy crisis and received the Dow Jones Journalist of the Year Award in 2001 for his coverage on the issue as well as a Project Censored award in 2004. Leopold also reported extensively on Enron's downfall and was the first journalist to land an interview with former Enron president Jeffrey Skilling following Enron's bankruptcy filing in December 2001. Leopold has appeared on CNBC and National Public Radio as an expert on energy policy and has also been the keynote speaker at more than two dozen energy industry conferences around the country. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Apr 07, 2007 12:49 am Post subject: |
| Friday, April 6th, 2007
Headlines for April 6, 2007
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