Democrats leading the charge into the second phase of a
bipartisan investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence have said this week
that they will spend the next month or so working with Pentagon officials who
last week agreed to probe a top secret spy shop once headed by Undersecretary
of Defense Douglas Feith that many longtime CIA and FBI officials and other
intelligence analysts believe was responsible for providing the Bush
administration with bogus intelligence used to justify war with Iraq.
When the probe is complete, which aides to Senator John
McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) -- both of whom are
aggressively working to collect pre-war intelligence documents that undercut
administration's claims that Iraq posed a grave threat to national security --
said will likely be in early 2006, there could be some sort of "public
reprimand" brought against lower-level administration officials who work
or worked at the Defense Department, the National Security Council, and in the
office of Vice President Dick Cheney, for "cherry-picking"
questionable intelligence on Iraq and using it to win public support for the
war.
Based on the way the probe is starting to shape up, it's
clear the administration, particularly Feith, who resigned earlier this year,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and possibly Cheney will bear the brunt
of the blame, because the three of them sidestepped the usual intelligence
gathering process that historically was handled by the CIA and the Defense
Intelligence Agency in favor of their own clandestine intelligence gathering
operations in which questionable information on the so-called Iraqi threat was
collected and used by administration officials to build a case for war but
wasn't vetted by career intelligence analysts, said a senior aide to McCain who
requested anonymity for fear of angering members of the GOP.
Last month, under pressure from Democrats and some
Republicans, and with public support for war eroding, the Pentagon's Inspector
General agreed to probe Feith's secret spy group, the Office of Special Plans
(OSP), and whether the operation played a role in manipulating pre-war Iraq
intelligence in addition to knowingly passing dubious intelligence from
defectors, who were associated with Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, to
the White House to convince lawmakers and the American public into backing the
war.
The White House has been dogged by questions, since the
start of the Iraq war more than two years ago, regarding whether the
intelligence information it had relied upon was accurate and whether top White
House officials knowingly used unreliable intelligence in the buildup to war.
The furor started when President Bush said in his January
2003 State of the Union address that, according to British intelligence, Iraq
had tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from Africa. The intelligence was
based on forged documents.
In July 2003, CIA Director George Tenet took responsibility
for allowing Bush to cite the 16 words in his State of the Union address,
despite the fact that he had warned Rice's office that the claims were likely
wrong. Later that month, then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley
said he had received two memos from the CIA in 2002 alerting him to the fact
that the uranium information should not be included in the State of the Union
address. Hadley, who also took responsibility for failing to remove the uranium
reference from Bush's speech, said he forgot to advise the president about the
CIA's warnings.
The White House and the Pentagon seized upon the uranium
claims before and after Bush's State of the Union address, telling reporters,
lawmakers and leaders of other nations that the only thing that could be done
to disarm Saddam Hussein was a preemptive strike against his country.
The only White House official at the time who didn't cite
the uranium claim as proof Iraq intended to obtain a nuclear bomb was Secretary
of State Colin Powell. Greg Thielmann, who resigned in 2002 from the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research -- whose duties included
tracking Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs -- says he personally told
Powell that the allegations were "implausible" and the intelligence
it was based upon was a "stupid piece of garbage."
What's interesting about the Office of Special Plans is
that, two years ago, Levin had called on his Republican colleagues to
investigate the operation after a number of CIA agents came forward and
complained that the unit had been cherry-picking intelligence information that
was questionable at best. The probe never got off the ground.
But back in 2003, just a
few months after the start of the Iraq war, numerous Democratic lawmakers had
called on the Republican-controlled Senate and Congress to launch an immediate
investigation into the OSP's activities.
In a July 9, 2003, letter to Congressman Duncan Hunter
(R-Calif.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Congresswoman Ellen
Tauscher (D-Calif.) said Feith's OSP appeared to be competing with "other
United States intelligence agencies respecting the collection and use of
intelligence relating to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and war
planning."
"I also think it is important to understand how having
two intelligence agencies within the Pentagon impacted the Department of
Defense's ability to focus the necessary resources and manpower on pre-war
planning and post-war operations," Tauscher's letter said.
Congressman David Obey (D-Wis.) agreed. Back in 2003, he had
also called for a widespread investigation of Feith and the OSP to find out
whether there was any truth to the claims that the OSP willfully manipulated
intelligence on the Iraqi threat. During a July 8, 2003, congressional
briefing, Obey described what he knew about Special Plans and why an
investigation into the group was crucial.
"A group of civilian employees in the Office of the
Secretary of Defense, all of whom are political employees, have long been
dissatisfied with the information produced by the established intelligence
agencies both inside and outside the Department. That was particularly true,
apparently, with respect to the situation in Iraq," Obey said. "As a
result, it is reported that they established a special operation within the
Office of the Secretary of Defense, which was named the Office of Special
Plans. That office was charged with collecting, vetting, and disseminating
intelligence completely outside the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it
appears that the information collected by this office was in some instances not
even shared with the established intelligence agencies and in numerous
instances was passed on to the National Security Council and the president
without having been vetted with anyone other than [the Secretary of
Defense]."
"It is further alleged that the purpose of this
operation was not only to produce intelligence more in keeping with the
pre-held views of those individuals, but to intimidate analysts in the established
intelligence organizations to produce information that was more supportive of
policy decisions which they had already decided to propose."
Republicans successfully thwarted a probe back then, but now
some high-ranking Republican lawmakers are saying that their "hands are
tied" and that they must go along with the intelligence investigation, no
matter how bad it may turn out for the White House, because they risk losing
their seats in the Senate and House, come next November's mid-term elections,
if they are perceived as thwarting the probe -- this in addition to a number of
scandals that have plagued the White House, notably the leaking of Valerie
Plame Wilson's covert CIA status to reporters as retribution against her
husband for speaking out against the administration.
Moreover, with public support for the war waning and with
the US soldier body count surpassing 2,000, Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kan.),
chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has agreed to take a
look at Feith and the OSP. In September, Roberts informed the Pentagon's
inspector general that the OSP, an important part of the second phase of the
pre-war intelligence probe, must become part of the overall investigation.
By working with the inspector general, Democrats argue, Republicans
are hoping some information about the OSP's work won't become public knowledge
because Rumsfeld still presides over the Pentagon. However, Levin's office said
a preliminary probe launched two years ago into the OSP has already turned up
explosive details about the operation.
The OSP, which was also headed by Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz, described the worst-case scenarios on Iraq's alleged
stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and claimed the country was close
to acquiring an atomic bomb, according to four of the CIA agents, speaking on
the condition of anonymity because the information is still classified.
The agents said the OSP was responsible for providing
then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Cheney, and Rumsfeld with the
bulk of the intelligence information on Iraq's weapons program that turned out
to be wrong. But White House officials used the information it received from
the OSP anyway, despite warnings from intelligence officials at the CIA and
analysts at the State Department.
The agents said the OSP told the National Security Council
in 2002 that Iraq's attempt to purchase aluminum tubes were part of a
clandestine program to build a nuclear bomb. The OSP and the White House Iraq
Group (another top secret operation headed by Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card
and his deputy Karl Rove) leaked the aluminum tube story to Judith Miller, the
former reporter for the New York Times, who resigned this month after spending
85 days in jail for refusing to testify about her source in the Plame Wilson
case.
Miller wrote the aluminum tube story, which was published on
the front page of the Times in September 2002. Shortly after the story was
published, Bush and Rice both pointed to the piece as evidence that Iraq posed
a grave threat to the United States and to its neighbors in the Middle East,
even though experts in the field of nuclear science, the CIA, and the State
Department advised the White House that the aluminum tubes were not designed
for an atomic bomb program.
Furthermore, the CIA had been unable to develop any links
between Iraq and the al-Qaeda. But under Feith's direction, the Office of
Special Plans came up with information of an Iraq/al-Qaeda relationship by
looking at existing intelligence reports that they felt might have been
"overlooked or undervalued," according to a 2002 Defense Department
briefing headed by Rumsfeld, who added that he had "bulletproof"
evidence that Iraq was harboring al-Qaeda terrorists.
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 build a solid case for war in Iraq.
In an article in the New York Times in October 2002, the
paper reported that Rumsfeld had ordered the Office of Special Plans to
"to search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to
terrorists" that might have been overlooked by the CIA.
At a Defense Department briefing following the Times report,
Rumsfeld downplayed the allegation, saying that whenever Feith handed him
intelligence on Iraq's WMD, Rumsfeld would respond by saying, "Gee, why
don't you go over and brief George Tenet? So they did. They went over and briefed
the CIA. So there's no mystery about all this."
CIA analysts listened to the Pentagon team, nodded politely,
and said, "Thank you very much," said one government official,
according to a July 20 report in the New York Times. That official said the briefing
did not change the agency's reporting or analysis in any substantial way.
Several current and former intelligence officials told the
Times that they felt pressure to tailor reports to conform to the
administration's views, "particularly the theories Feith's group
developed."
Moreover, the agents said the OSP routinely rewrote the
CIA's intelligence estimates on Iraq's weapons programs, removing caveats such
as "likely," "probably" and "may" as a way of
depicting the country as an imminent threat. The agents would not identify the
names of the individuals at the OSP who were responsible for providing the
White House with the wrong intelligence. But, the agents said the intelligence
the committee gathered was personally delivered by Feith to the White House, to
Cheney's office, and to Rice without first being vetted by the CIA.
Feith, who has since returned to work in the private sector,
did not return calls made over the past week.
In cases where the CIA's intelligence wasn't rewritten, the
OSP provided the White House with uncorroborated intelligence it obtained from
Chalabi, who the CIA has publicly said is unreliable, the CIA agents said, and
Iraqi defectors employed by his agency.
Several other current and former CIA analysts working in the
counter proliferation division prior to the Iraq war said they were pressured
by the Pentagon and the OSP to hype and exaggerate intelligence to show Iraq as
being an imminent threat to national security.
Patrick Lang, the former head of worldwide human intelligence
gathering for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military
intelligence, said OSP "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a
bid to portray Iraq as a grave threat. Lang said that the CIA had "no guts
at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a
Pentagon that he said was now dominating US foreign policy.
Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of CIA counter-terrorist
operations, said he had spoken to a number of working intelligence officers who
blame the Pentagon for playing up "fraudulent" intelligence, "a
lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi."
In an October 11, 2002, report in the Los Angeles Times,
several CIA agents "who brief Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz on Iraq routinely
return to the agency with a long list of complaints and demands for new
analysis or shifts in emphasis."
"There is a lot of unhappiness with the analysis,"
usually because it is seen as not hardline enough, one intelligence official
said, according to the paper.
Another government official said CIA agents "are
constantly sent back by the senior people at Defense and other places to get
more, get more, get more to make their case," the paper reported.
By last fall, the White House had virtually dismissed all
the intelligence on Iraq provided by the CIA, which failed to find any evidence
of Iraq's weapons programs, in favor of the more critical information provided
to the Bush administration by the Office of Special Plans
In a rare Pentagon briefing recently, Office of Special
Plans co-director Douglas Feith said the committee was not an
"intelligence project," but rather a group of 18 people who looked at
intelligence information from a different point of view.
Feith said that when the group had new "thoughts"
on intelligence information it was given; they shared it with CIA Director
Tenet.
"It was a matter of digesting other people's
intelligence," Feith said of the main duties of his group. "Its job
was to review this intelligence to help digest it for me and other policy
makers, to help us develop Defense Department strategy for the war on
terrorism."
© 2005 Jason Leopold
Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive
memoir, "News Junkie," to be released in the spring of 2006 by
Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates.