WP: Inquiry Faults Intelligence on Iraq

[kskiska]

Threat From Saddam Hussein Was Overstated, Senate Committee Report Finds

Friday, October 24, 2003; Page A01

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is preparing a blistering report on prewar intelligence on Iraq that is critical of CIA Director George J. Tenet and other intelligence officials for overstating the weapons and terrorism case against Saddam Hussein, according to congressional officials.

The committee staff was surprised by the amount of circumstantial evidence and single-source or disputed information used to write key intelligence documents -- in particular the Oct. 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- summarizing Iraq's capabilities and intentions, according to Republican and Democratic sources. Staff members interviewed more than 100 people who collected and analyzed the intelligence used to back up statements about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capabilities, and its possible links to terrorist groups.

Like a similar but less exhaustive inquiry being completed by the House intelligence committee, the Senate report shifts attention toward the intelligence community and away from White House officials, who have been criticized for exaggerating the Iraqi threat. At stake as the presidential political season approaches, said committee sources and intelligence figures, is who gets blamed for misleading the American public if weapons of mass destruction are never found in Iraq -- the president or his intelligence chief.

Asked about the upcoming report, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the committee, said "the executive was ill-served by the intelligence community." The intelligence was sometimes "sloppy" and inconclusive, he said. "That's a concern I have with the total report" on Iraq.

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9230-2003Oct23.html

[salin]

1. the dems are not content with letting this go just as a CIA problem:

also from the article: Sen. John "Jay" Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) said yesterday he had secured a promise from Roberts to ask one executive agency, the Defense Department and, in particular, its Office of Special Plans, for information about the intelligence it collected or analyzed on Iraq.

The office has been accused by some congressional Democrats and administration critics of gathering unreliable intelligence on Iraq that bolstered the administration's case for war. Those allegations have not been substantiated, and the director of the office, William Luti, has denied them.

Rockefeller is under considerable pressure from the Senate Democratic leadership not to allow Roberts to focus only on intelligence bureaucrats while avoiding questions about whether Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others exaggerated the threat from Iraq.

[huckleberry]

2. Jay Rockefeller rocks!

He and, I think, the intelligence community won't let the administration off the hook on this.


"We're going to get this one way or the other," Rockefeller said yesterday. "If the majority declines to put the executive branch at risk, then they are going to have a very difficult minority to deal with."

He said that if that turned out be the case , he has the five votes necessary, under Rule 6 of the committee's rules of procedure, to launch an inquiry into the administration's use of intelligence.

[TacticalPeek]

3. Rule 6 sounds cool.

Where's it been all this time?

[goforit]

4. Shame on the Senate!!!......Congress supported Bush and now

they want to cover up their own f*cking tracks!!!

Well.....Hell is gonna pay!!!

[sandnsea]

6. You just don't get it

Two things. One, if you want to expose the lies of this Administration, it's only going to happen through Congress. If you think they're going to jump off a cliff themselves in order to do it, you're sadly mistaken. Second, Dick Cheney was at the CIA pressuring them to hype the reports. Rumsfeld was adding pressure of his own as well as creating intelligence with his little DoD group. How was Congress supposed to know that?

[radfringe]

8. THE STOVEPIPE - conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intellig

http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/031027fa_fact

THE STOVEPIPE
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.”

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 “stovepiping”—without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

[kodi]

5. its standard, republican senators will protect a republican president

expect it, deal with it, counter it.

make as much of the report public, so whatever is stated can be checked, verified, and commented upon by outside sources.

[w4rma]

7. “a four-person Pentagon team...self-mockingly called the Cabal”

Bush 'skewed facts to justify attack on Iraq'

A growing number of US national security professionals are accusing the Bush Administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq.

A key target is a four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or terror groups.

This team, self-mockingly called the cabal, “cherry-picked the intelligence stream” in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defence Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence.
…
The INC, which brought together groups opposed to Saddam, worked closely with the Pentagon to build a case against Iraq. “There are current intelligence officials who believe it is a scandal,” Mr Cannistraro said.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/31/1054177765483.html

Cheney Investigated Forged Niger Uranuium Document

As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.

During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush, and other very senior policy makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.

The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy makers at the table.

Cheney got into the operational side of intelligence as well. Reports in late 2001 that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger stirred such intense interest that his office let it be known he wanted them checked out. So, with the CIA as facilitator, a retired U.S. ambassador was dispatched to Niger in February 2002 to investigate. He found nothing to substantiate the report and lots to call it into question. There the matter rested – until last summer, after the Bush administration made the decision for war in Iraq.
…
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=6e9d5502599dc6a2
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=5858&mesg_id=5858&page=

Plans For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11

(CBS) CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.

That's according to notes taken by aides who were with Rumsfeld in the National Military Command Center on Sept. 11 – notes that show exactly where the road toward war with Iraq began, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin.
…
Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld.

“Go massive,” the notes quote him as saying. “Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” (Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hours after 9/11 attack)
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/04/september11/main520830.shtml
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=53315&mesg_id=53315&page=

A call to maintain CIA independence.

As the White House searches for every possible excuse to go to war with Iraq, pressure has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates to fit a political agenda. In this case, the agencies are being pressed to find a casus belli for war, whether or not one exists.

“Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements, and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA,” Vince Cannistraro, the agency's former head of counterterrorism, told The Guardian, a London newspaper.

This confirms what Knight-Ridder reporters found: “A growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war,” the news service reported recently. “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 Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary.”
…
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2002-10-24-oped-bamford_x.htm

U.S. Insiders Say Iraq Intel Deliberately Skewed
…
The DIA was “exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD,” or weapons of mass destruction, he added in a phone interview. He said the CIA had “no guts at all” to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy.

Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of Central Intelligence Agency counterterrorist operations, said he knew of serving intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for playing up “fraudulent” intelligence, “a lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi.”
…
They believe the administration, before going to war, had a “moral obligation to use the best information available, not just information that fits your preconceived ideas.”

CHEMICAL WEAPONS REPORT 'SIMPLY WRONG'

The top Marine Corps officer in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway, said on Friday U.S. intelligence was “simply wrong” in leading military commanders to fear troops were likely to be attacked with chemical weapons in the March invasion of Iraq that ousted Saddam.

Richard Perle, a Chalabi backer and member of the Defense Policy Board that advises Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, defended the four-person unit in a television interview.
…
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&ncid=578&e=2&u=/nm/20030530/ts_nm/iraq_intelligence_dc

CIA had doubts on Iraq link to al-Qaida

The debunking of the Bush administration's pre-war certainties on Iraq gathered pace yesterday when it emerged that the CIA knew for months that a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida was highly unlikely.

As President George Bush was forced for the second time in days to defend the decision to go to war, a new set of leaks from CIA officials suggested a tendency in the White House to suppress or ignore intelligence findings which did not shore up the case for war.
…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,974182,00.html

Ex-CIA Officers Questioning Iraq Data

A small group composed mostly of retired CIA officers is appealing to colleagues still inside to go public with any evidence the Bush administration is slanting intelligence to support its case for war with Iraq.

Members of the group contend the Bush administration has released information on Iraq that meets only its ends -- while ignoring or withholding contrary reporting.

They also say the administration's public evidence about the immediacy of Iraq's threat to the United States and its alleged ties to al-Qaida is unconvincing, and accuse policy-makers of pushing out some information that does not meet an intelligence professional's standards of proof.

“It's been cooked to a recipe, and the recipe is high policy,” said Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran who briefed top Reagan administration security officials before retiring in 1990. “That's why a lot of my former colleagues are holding their noses these days.” ---
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030314/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_iraq_intelligence_4
http://www.democraticunderground.com/duforum/DCForumID61/18413.html

Public was misled, claim ex-CIA men

A GROUP of former US intelligence officials has written to President Bush claiming that the US Congress and the American public were misled about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war.

The group’s members, most of them former CIA analysts, say that they have close contacts withsenior officials working inside the US intelligence agencies, who have told them that intelligence was“cooked” to persuade Congress to authorise the war.

The manipulation of intelligence has, they say, produced “a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions”. They write in the letter to Mr Bush: “While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes, never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorise launching a war.

“You may not realise the extent of the current ferment within the intelligence community and particularly the CIA. In intelligence, there is one unpardonable sin — cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy. There is ample indication that this has been done in Iraq.”
…
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-698028,00.html

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0207-04.htm

U.S. diplomats also tried to stop this invasion:

U.S. Diplomat's Letter of Resignation
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/27/international/27WEB-TNAT.html

Letter of Resignation (Mary Wright)
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/marywright.asp

U.S. Mongolian Diplomat Resigns Over Iraq (Fourth U.S. Diplomat)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=542&e=84&u=/ap/20030327/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/war_diplomat_resigns_2

Third U.S. Diplomat Resigns Over Iraq Policy
http://truthout.org/docs_03/032303G.shtml

Second US Diplomat Resigns in Protest
http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/03.03/0314krieger_diplo_resign.htm
U.S. diplomat resigns over Iraq war plans
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N10105063.htm

Niger-Uranium Timeline
http://www.deanforamerica.com/site/PageServer?pagename=niger_timeline

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND WMDs: THEN AND NOW
http://www.deanforamerica.com/site/PageServer?pagename=bush_wmd_summary

[ze_dscherman]

9. Kick!

Important stuff. What will happen when they put all the blame on the CIA?

Responsibility, anyone?

[ProfessorGAC]

10. Who Was In Charge Again?

I forget, who is running the Executive Branch to whom the intelligence bodies report?

Pat Roberts is just carrying water for the Bushites.
The Professor