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| Wed, 03-10-2004 - 5:11pm |
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.
Issue of 2003-10-27
Posted 2003-10-20
Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered.
The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,†he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went on, was that the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq’s nuclear-weapons programs, were far more accurate than the C.I.A. estimates. “Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,†the official said. “If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board.â€
There were, of course, good reasons to worry about Saddam Hussein’s possession of W.M.D.s. He had manufactured and used chemical weapons in the past, and had experimented with biological weapons; before the first Gulf War, he maintained a multibillion-dollar nuclear-weapons program. In addition, there were widespread doubts about the efficacy of the U.N. inspection teams, whose operations in Iraq were repeatedly challenged and disrupted by Saddam Hussein. Iraq was thought to have manufactured at least six thousand more chemical weapons than the U.N. could account for. And yet, as some former U.N. inspectors often predicted, the tons of chemical and biological weapons that the American public was led to expect have thus far proved illusory. As long as that remains the case, one question will be asked more and more insistently: How did the American intelligence community get it so wrong?
Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.
A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: “Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings?†The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities—a process known as “stovepipingâ€â€”without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.
The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm†generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.
“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,†Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.â€
The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenetâ€â€”the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.â€
The remainder of article at:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact

Interview: John Kerry
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101040315/ninterview.html
"I'm all for strength, when appropriate"
TIME: What would you have done about Iraq had you been the President?
KERRY: If I had been the President, I might have gone to war but not the way the President did. It might have been only because we had exhausted the remedies of inspections, only because we had to—because it was the only way to enforce the disarmament.
TIME: But it turns out there was nothing to disarm.
KERRY: Well, if we had kept on inspecting properly and gone through the process appropriately, we might have avoided almost a $200 billion expenditure, the loss of lives and the scorn of the world and the breaking of so many relationships.
TIME: Would you say your position on Iraq is a) it was a mistaken war; b) it was a necessary war fought in a bad way; or c) fill in the blank?
KERRY: I think George Bush rushed to war without exhausting the remedies available to him, without exhausting the diplomacy necessary to put the U.S. in the strongest position possible, without pulling together the logistics and the plan to shore up Iraq immediately and effectively.
TIME: And you as Commander in Chief would not have made these mistakes but would have gone to war?
KERRY: I didn't say that.
TIME: I'm asking.
KERRY: I can't tell you.
TIME: Might the war have been avoided?
KERRY: Yes.
TIME: Through inspections?
KERRY: It's possible. It's not a certainty, but it's possible. I'm not going to tell you hypothetically when you've reached the point of exhaustion that you have to and your intelligence is good enough that it tells you you've reached that moment. But I can tell you this: I would have asked a lot of questions they didn't. I would have tried to do a lot of diplomacy they didn't.
TIME: You would have asked more questions about the quality of the intelligence?
KERRY: Yes. If I had known that Chalabi was somebody they were relying on, I would have had serious doubts. And the fact that we learn after the fact that that is one of their sources disturbs me enormously.
TIME: As a Senator, could you not have asked that question?
KERRY: We asked. They said, Well, we can't tell you who the sources are. They give you this gobbledygook. I went over to the Pentagon. I saw the photographs. They told us specifically what was happening in certain buildings. It wasn't.
TIME: You were misled?
KERRY: Certainly by somebody. The intelligence clearly was wrong, fundamentally flawed. Look, the British were able to do a two-month analysis of what happened to their intelligence. This Administration wants to put it off to 2005. It's a national-security issue to know what happened to our intelligence. We ought to know now.
TIME: Obviously it's good that Saddam is out of power. Was bringing him down worth the cost?
KERRY: If there are no weapons of mass destruction— and we may yet find some—then this is a war that was fought on false pretenses, because that was the justification to the American people, to the Congress, to the world, and that was clearly the frame of my vote of consent. I said it as clearly as you can in my speech. I suggested that all the evils of Saddam Hussein alone were not a cause to go to war.
TIME: So, if we don't find WMD, the war wasn't worth the costs? That's a yes?
KERRY: No, I think you can still—wait, no. You can't—that's not a fair question, and I'll tell you why. You can wind up successful in transforming Iraq and changing the dynamics, and that may make it worth it, but that doesn't mean was the cause legitimacy to go. You have to have that distinction.
TIME: You've said the foreign policy of triumphalism fuels the fire of jihadists. Is it possible the U.S. show of force in Iraq tempers the fire of jihadists?
KERRY: I'm all for strength when appropriate, and, you bet, there are a lot of countries in the Middle East that understand strength, and it's a very important message. But in my judgment, the way it was applied this time, it has encouraged street-level anger, and I have been told by people it encourages the recruitment of terrorists. I mean, look, even Rumsfeld's own memo underscores that they haven't discovered how to stem the tide of recruitment.
TIME: Why would internationalizing the occupation of Iraq be a more effective strategy for stabilizing the country?
KERRY: The legitimacy of the governing process that emerges from an essentially American process is always subject to greater questioning than one that is developed with broader, global consent.
TIME: How do you bring in others?
KERRY: I spent the time to go to the U.N. and sit with the Security Council before the vote, because I wanted to ascertain what their real state of mind was and whether or not they would be prepared to enforce the resolution, provide troops, whether or not they took it seriously, whether or not they would share costs and burden, and I came away convinced after a two-hour conversation, a lot of questions, that they would.
TIME: You've criticized the pre-emptive nature of the Bush doctrine.
KERRY: Let me emphasize: I'll pre-empt where necessary. We are always entitled to do that under the Charter of the U.N., which gives the right of self-defense of a nation. We've always had a doctrine of pre-emption contained in first strike throughout the cold war. So I understand that. It's the extension of it by the Bush Administration to remove a person they don't like that contravenes that.
TIME: So, if we don't find WMD, the war wasn't worth the costs? That's a yes?
KERRY: No, I think you can still—wait, no. You can't—that's not a fair question, and I'll tell you why. You can wind up successful in transforming Iraq and changing the dynamics, and that may make it worth it, but that doesn't mean was the cause legitimacy to go. You have to have that distinction.
If we are successful doesn't that make the war necessary? This type if thinking is that the goal justifies the means. I don't think so. I agree with Kerry. Bush mislead the American public, and being an artful dodger doesn't make this go away.
>"If the Bush camp only thinks in black/white, I can understand how the complexity of Kerry's answers confuses them."<
>"If we are successful doesn't that make the war necessary? This type if thinking is that the goal justifies the means. I don't think so. I agree with Kerry. Bush mislead the American public, and being an artful dodger doesn't make this go away."<
Agreed on all points.
Middle East 3/12/2004
CIA chief plays dumb on neo-con intelligence
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Was Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet really the last person in Washington to find out that both the president and vice president were being fed phony or "sexed up" intelligence about prewar Iraq by a Pentagon office staffed by ideologically driven neo-conservatives?
It's highly doubtful. But in a desperate attempt to walk a tightrope between his increasingly irreconcilable loyalties to the administration of President George W Bush and to his own intelligence professionals, Tenet is suggesting that he was really in the dark about what was going on just a few kilometers down the Potomac River from CIA headquarters in Washington.
Only one month ago, in a rousing defense of the intelligence community's professionalism, Tenet boasted to students at Georgetown University that he and only he was the purveyor of intelligence information to the president. Then this Tuesday he claimed to members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that he was unaware until just last week that officials based in the Pentagon's policy office had given intelligence briefings directly to the White House.
"Is that a normal thing to happen, that there a formal analysis relative to intelligence that would be presented to the NSC that way, without you even knowing about it?" an incredulous Democratic senator, Carl Levin, asked Tenet during contentious hearings.
"I don't know. I've never been in the situation," Tenet replied, insisting, "I have to tell you, Senator, I'm the president's chief intelligence officer; I have the definitive view about these subjects."
"I know you feel that way," Levin said, betraying a hint of sarcasm.
The exchange reflected the latest development in what is becoming one of the biggest intelligence crises in modern US history - one the administration is trying desperately, but with increasing difficulty, to quash.
The scandal, which is based on Washington's abject failure one year after invading Iraq to find any evidence to back up the administration's prewar claims that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein possessed massive stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons; reconstituted his nuclear-weapons program (to the extent that, according to Vice President Dick Cheney, he had obtained weapons); and had operational ties with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, has been building since last summer.
It gained momentum in January when the CIA's chief weapons inspector, David Kay, admitted that US intelligence personnel, including himself, had been "almost all wrong" on its prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities.
Both Kay and the administration, as well as members of Congress from Bush's Republican Party, immediately blamed the official intelligence community, headed by Tenet as CIA director, for the failure.
Opposition Democrats, however - backed by former intelligence officials and some media reports - charged that the administration had systematically exaggerated and manipulated the intelligence by both intimidating the professional analysts who disagreed with it and by producing its own intelligence, much of which now appears to have been fabricated, through unofficial channels.
As a result, the intelligence committees in both houses of Congress have expanded their investigations in recent weeks.
While it is now clear that professional intelligence analysts made some serious errors in assessing Iraq's WMD programs - largely through a combination of assuming "worst-case scenarios" in the absence of hard evidence and lacking reliable agents or assets in Iraq either as informants or investigators - the "Feith factor" has recently emerged as the key focus of the committees' work.
Shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up two groups, the Office of Special Plans (OSP) and the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group (CTEG). These groups were tasked to review raw intelligence to determine if official intelligence agencies had overlooked connections between Shi'ite and Sunni terrorist groups and between al-Qaeda and secular Arab governments, especially Saddam Hussein's.
The effort, which reportedly included interviewing "defectors", several of them supplied by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group close to neo-conservatives who support Israel's Likud Party, closely tracked the agenda of the Defense Policy Group (DPG), chaired by Feith's mentor, Richard Perle.
It's known that the DPG convened after September 11 with INC leader Ahmad Chalabi to discuss ways in which the terrorist attacks could be tied to Saddam. Yet neither the State Department nor the CIA was informed about the meeting.
The OSP, which was overseen by Abram Shulsky, then brought on Michael Malouf, who had worked for Perle in the Pentagon 20 years before and specialized in obtaining authorizations, thereby giving the office access to analyses produced by official intelligence agencies, according to knowledgeable sources.
Malouf's operation, called the "bat cave", permitted hawks in the Pentagon and in Cheney's office to anticipate the intelligence community's more skeptical arguments about the alleged threats posed by Saddam, and then to devise questions or develop their own evidence that would be used to challenge the more benign views of the professional analysts, according to these sources.
At the same time, the OSP, which consisted of only two permanent staff members but which employed dozens of like-minded consultants, developed its own "talking points" and briefing papers, one of which - on the subject of Saddam's alleged ties to al-Qaeda - was leaked last November to the neo-conservative publication the Weekly Standard.
It consisted of 50 excerpts taken from raw, mostly uncorroborated intelligence reports from sources of varying reliability from 1990 to 2002, which purported to show an operational relationship between captured leader Saddam and the terrorist group. But when it was published, former intelligence officials dismissed the work as amateurish, unsubstantiated and indicative (even if most of the allegations were true) of the absence of any operative relationship.
"This is meant to dazzle the eyes of the not terribly educated," former State Department intelligence officer Greg Thielmann told Inter Press Service at the time. But as recently as last month, Cheney referred to the paper as "the best source of information" for intelligence on Iraq.
It was this paper that reportedly formed the basis of a briefing by Feith given to the NSC and Cheney's office in August 2002. Tenet said on Tuesday that he "vaguely" remembered having received a similar briefing by Feith, but was never informed that it was also presented to the White House. Even then, the presentation to the CIA reportedly omitted certain remarks made to the White House to the effect that the CIA was deliberately ignoring evidence of Saddam-al-Qaeda links.
"Did you ever discuss with the secretary of defense or other administration officials whether the Department of Defense policy office run by Mr Feith might be bypassing normal intelligence channels?" Levin asked Tenet on Tuesday.
"I did not. I did not," he replied.
Why he did not remains a major question, particularly in light of the fact that several publications, including the New Yorker, Knight-Ridder news agency and IPS, were reporting already last July that Feith's office was constantly "stovepiping" intelligence directly to Cheney and the White House to circumvent official channels.
These accounts have now been accepted by Democrats and some Republicans on the intelligence committees. Last Friday, the ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives committee, Representative Jane Harmon, raised the issue directly in a speech at Perle's American Enterprise Institute.
"The president should direct a review of the activities of various offices, particularly an early analytic unit that reported to Under Secretary of Defense Doug Feith, as well as the Office of Special Plans," she said. "Disclaimers notwithstanding, many in Congress and intelligence operatives in the field now believe these entities fed unreliable and 'unvetted' intelligence to policymakers and the Office of the Vice President."
(Inter Press Service)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FC12Ak01.html
The pretext for going to war in Iraq was on assertions & innuendo, intelligence appears to have taken leave.
If so many people knew the situation why did they vote for war? Weren't they able to check the facts. Is Congress only informed through the White House?
James
janderson_ny@yahoo.com
CL Ask A Guy
>"Weren't they able to check the facts."<
I agree. I too find
This is what I object to. Congress should have access to the intelligence--how else can they make a careful and wise decision. Just as the administrationed stovepiped the intelligence because they didn't trust the intelligence services, the Congress should have been able to get reports direct from Tenent. The Congress should have learned from history that a Rep. administration can't be trusted. But of course, it was a Rep. congress.
You are correct; I too doubted that Saddam was a threat to the US, and thought a war was unwise because of the problems afterward. I did believe he had WMD, but never believed the link with al Qaeda or that he had nuclear weapons. So what was the matter with the Congress?