Pentagon Office Produced 'Alternative' Intelligence on Iraq

[forrestkc]

Pentagon Office Produced 'Alternative' Intelligence on Iraq

by Jonathan S. Landay

A special unit run by former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's top policy aide inappropriately produced "alternative" intelligence reports that wrongly concluded that Saddam Hussein's regime had cooperated with al-Qaida, a Pentagon investigation has determined.

The Department of Defense Inspector General's Office found that former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and his staff had done nothing illegal or unauthorized.

But Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who requested the investigation, called the findings "devastating" because senior administration officials, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, used Feith's work to help make their case for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

"We went to war based on the argument of the administration . . . that there was a link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein and that Saddam Hussein could give al-Qaida and other terrorist groups weapons," Levin said Thursday in an interview with McClatchy Newspapers.

The findings "are about as damning a statement as one can hear, and I think the American people will be absolutely furious," Levin continued. The lawmaker is a longtime critic of the administration's use of exaggerated and erroneous intelligence to justify the invasion and a leading voice for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

Feith, who resigned from the Pentagon in 2005 and now teaches at Georgetown University, said that he'd been exonerated.

"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," he said in a statement. "The inspector general's report has now thoroughly repudiated the smears."

But Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that he'd review whether Feith may have violated the 1947 National Security Act.

The act "requires the heads of all departments and agencies of the U.S. government involved in intelligence activities `to keep the congressional oversight committees informed,' " Rockefeller said. "The IG has concluded that (Feith's) office was engaged in intelligence activities. 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."

The Pentagon investigation focused on the Policy Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group, which Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz created shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to look for state sponsors of terrorism, according to a Pentagon response to the inspector general's report. The unit then began probing for possible links between Saddam's regime and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.

The Pentagon response from Eric Edelman, Feith's successor and a former aide to Cheney, said Wolfowitz asked Feith's analysts to ignore the intelligence community's belief that the militant Islamist al-Qaida and Saddam's secular dictatorship were unlikely allies.

Feith's unit gave three different briefings on its findings, according to Edelman's response. The one for Rumsfeld, in August 2002, cited "one indication of Iraqi coordination with al-Qaida specifically related to 9/11." One the same month for senior CIA officials cited "one possible indication of Iraqi coordination with al-Qaida specifically related to 9/11." The third version, given to the White House in September 2002, cited "some indications of possible Iraqi coordination with al-Qaida specifically related to 9/11."

None of the versions, however, was an "assessment of any sort," as the inspector general concluded, the DOD rebuttal says.

According to the rebuttal, the counterterrorism unit was one of three offices that received intelligence on Iraq as the Bush administration made its case for ousting Saddam.

An Iraqi exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, fed one unit, the Office of Special Plans, exaggerated and bogus claims that Saddam was hiding illegal nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and was training Islamic terrorists, several investigations have found. The INC funneled the same claims to Cheney's office and to selected members of the press.

Feith's Policy Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group examined raw U.S. intelligence reports and post-Sept. 11 CIA assessments. Although there were intermittent contacts for about a decade, there was no operational cooperation between Iraq and bin Laden, the CIA assessments stated.

The CIA's findings have been substantiated by a number of investigations, including that of the independent Sept. 11 commission.

Feith's unit, however, found that there were "multiple areas of cooperation" between Iraq and al-Qaida, "more than a decade of numerous contacts" and "shared interest and pursuit of WMD (weapons of mass destruction)," the Pentagon response said.

The unit cited as its strongest evidence a purported April 2001 meeting in the Czech capital of Prague between a senior Iraqi intelligence officer and Mohamed Atta, who led the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon several months later.

At the time, the CIA had doubts about reports of the meeting, and the agency and the FBI subsequently concluded that it never took place.

As late as January 2004, Cheney called Feith's findings, which also were leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, "the best source of information" on links between Saddam and al-Qaida, even though the Pentagon and the CIA had disavowed the conclusions of Feith's office.

McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Warren P. Strobel contributed to this report.

[Marnie]

I can tell you that is not an uncommon practice. Intelligence gathering is not an exact science and two analysts can look at the same data and give you four different opinions. The rule of thumb is to always go with the piece of intelligence that seems: most likely and when acting on that intelligence, the results most likely to be in America's best interest.

It's pretty easy to be an armchair quarterback looking through the lens of history and make judgments based on known factors today that were unavailable before.

[forrestkc]

I can tell you that is not an uncommon practice. Intelligence gathering is not an exact science and two analysts can look at the same data and give you four different opinions. The rule of thumb is to always go with the piece of intelligence that seems: most likely and when acting on that intelligence, the results most likely to be in America's best interest.

It's pretty easy to be an armchair quarterback looking through the lens of history and make judgments based on known factors today that were unavailable before.

I understand that. However, what we see is a constant hyping of intelligence that favored going to war, and a disregard of intelligence that indicated Iraq was effectively disarmed and posed no credible threat. Basically, the Whitehouse started with a clear agenda, and then found intelligence to support that agenda, rather than letting the intelligence determine the agenda.

[Marnie]

I can tell you that is not an uncommon practice. Intelligence gathering is not an exact science and two analysts can look at the same data and give you four different opinions. The rule of thumb is to always go with the piece of intelligence that seems: most likely and when acting on that intelligence, the results most likely to be in America's best interest.

It's pretty easy to be an armchair quarterback looking through the lens of history and make judgments based on known factors today that were unavailable before.

I understand that. However, what we see is a constant hyping of intelligence that favored going to war, and a disregard of intelligence that indicated Iraq was effectively disarmed and posed no credible threat. Basically, the Whitehouse started with a clear agenda, and then found intelligence to support that agenda, rather than letting the intelligence determine the agenda.

forrset, I have never been anything but ambivalent about the war. Every administration has an agenda. Fact is, we are there and in my opinion, this sort of "news" should be saved until the war is over. I fear we do great harm airing dirty laundry in a time of war.

[forrestkc]

forrset, I have never been anything but ambivalent about the war. Every administration has an agenda. Fact is, we are there and in my opinion, this sort of "news" should be saved until the war is over. I fear we do great harm airing dirty laundry in a time of war.

Not very libertarian of you, you know.

At any rate, the whole world knows our dirty laundry already. The only thing that makes it worse for us is when we act as though we are ignoring it.

You are right about every administration having an agenda. However, generally that does not including ginning up elective wars for ideological reasons. Off the top of my head, that dubious honor lies solely with LBJ and now Bush administrations.

[Leonard]

C'mon! EVERY INTELLIGENCE SERVICE IN THE FREE WORLD CAME TO THE SAME CONCLUSIONS, FORREST! Stop your lying. (Guess what? He won't. It's what Lenin taught his disciples to do.....)

And Forrest STILL wants us to believe he's NOT carrying water for Comintern..........

[Marnie]

C'mon! EVERY INTELLIGENCE SERVICE IN THE FREE WORLD CAME TO THE SAME CONCLUSIONS, FORREST! Stop your lying. (Guess what? He won't. It's what Lenin taught his disciples to do.....)

And Forrest STILL wants us to believe he's NOT carrying water for Comintern..........

So, how do you really feel about it, Leonard?

[Oh Hamburgers!]

C'mon! EVERY INTELLIGENCE SERVICE IN THE FREE WORLD CAME TO THE SAME CONCLUSIONS, FORREST! Stop your lying. (Guess what? He won't. It's what Lenin taught his disciples to do.....)

And Forrest STILL wants us to believe he's NOT carrying water for Comintern..........

Just because you disagree with Forrest doesn't mean you need to smear his name on these boards.

In my opinion, the US did have an agenda when it came to invading Iraq. I think that there was some misleading information out there, but at the same time I think that the ones in power believed themselves to be doing something that was in the best interest for our country. In the end though there is no point in arguing about what could have, or should have happened. They were misguided, and here we are today, stuck in Iraq with hundreds of thousands of deaths on our hands.

At this point we are stuck there; I don't advocate removing the troops in Iraq at this point in time because it would only make things worse. I support the troops, because they have nothing to do with the politics of our time, even if they are the pawns.

The issue I have is that we need to learn from the things we have done in the past. Now I am hearing that tensions are rising in Iran? That frightens me. I don't want the same situation in Iraq to happen in Iran, because that implies to me that we haven't learned from our recent history and our recent mistakes. I know that the poltical situation in Iran is different than that of Iraq, but the fact is the more we war, the more we will be hated by the international community.

[ted]

People keep sniffing up the wrong tree when looking for things concerning the Iraq war. The Al-Qaeda stuff is secondary, at best. From the beginning, I never felt that we should have even brought them into the equation when listing reasons for going into Iraq. They simply didn't have much of a relationship at all with Saddam, if any. Playing that card was the wrong thing to do, and was not the reason why we went in.

The reasons are many, but have little to do with any supposed connections between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. To use them as a reason for going in is the mistake, not the fact that we went in.

Personally, I don't think we should have used any other excuse except for the fact that Saddam kept stalling the inspection process set up at the end of the Gulf War. His repeated abuse of the process agreed upon by him set the stage for doubt and easily created a hostile enviroment which led to us thinking he may be developing WMD's.

All this extra fluff about Al-Qaeda was the wrong way to sell it, and it really didn't need to be used. We had enough to go by without it in the first place.

t.

[forrestkc]

People keep sniffing up the wrong tree when looking for things concerning the Iraq war. The Al-Qaeda stuff is secondary, at best. From the beginning, I never felt that we should have even brought them into the equation when listing reasons for going into Iraq. They simply didn't have much of a relationship at all with Saddam, if any. Playing that card was the wrong thing to do, and was not the reason why we went in.

The reasons are many, but have little to do with any supposed connections between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. To use them as a reason for going in is the mistake, not the fact that we went in.

Personally, I don't think we should have used any other excuse except for the fact that Saddam kept stalling the inspection process set up at the end of the Gulf War. His repeated abuse of the process agreed upon by him set the stage for doubt and easily created a hostile enviroment which led to us thinking he may be developing WMD's.

All this extra fluff about Al-Qaeda was the wrong way to sell it, and it really didn't need to be used. We had enough to go by without it in the first place.

t.

The problem is there is no valid excuse for the invasion. We went off and invaded a country that had the highest likelihood of any nation in the Middle East of devolving into a Civil War. Iraq posed no threat to the United States. It was effectively disarmed and contained. Saddam, being a secular dictator was mortal enemies with Al Qaeda. There was just no reason for the war.

Even before we went in, I was not convinced that he still had any usable WMD, especially considering that the weapons inspectors all thought that Iraq was pretty much disarmed. Moreover, even if he did have them, which he did not, there was never any indication that he would provide them to any terrorist groups as he never did in all the time we know he had them. Anyway you slice it, the war was a strategic mistake and a diversion in the war on terrorism.