With Iraq dead, the post-mortem autopsy/pissing match getting revved up

[boutons_]

Official's Key Report On Iraq Is Faulted

'Dubious' Intelligence Fueled Push for War

By Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 9, 2007; A01


Intelligence provided by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith :




... to buttress the White House case for invading Iraq included "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" that supported the political views of senior administration officials

( aka WHIG, neo- s, PNAC ) ... rather than the conclusions of the intelligence community, according to a report by the Pentagon's inspector general.

Feith's office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," according to portions of the report, released yesterday by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). The inspector general described Feith's activities as "an alternative intelligence assessment process."

( Rummy set up his own intelligence operation at the Pentagon, with neo- zealots like Feith, rather than use ALL the intel from the NatSec orgs. Not exactly true to "small government" principles. )

An unclassified summary of the full do ent is scheduled for release today in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which Levin chairs. In that summary, a copy of which was obtained from another source by The Washington Post, the inspector general concluded that Feith's assessment in 2002 that Iraq and al-Qaeda had a "mature symbiotic relationship" was not fully supported by available intelligence but was nonetheless used by policymakers.

At the time of Feith's reporting, the CIA had concluded only that there was an "evolving" association, "based on sources of varying reliability."

In a telephone interview yesterday, Feith emphasized the inspector general's conclusion that his actions, described in the report as "inappropriate," were not unlawful. "This was not 'alternative intelligence assessment,' " he said. "It was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance."

( Holy . but head went for 2 years repeating at every opportunity the Saddam-WTC-al-Quaida bull until even dubya said their was no link )

Feith, who was defense policy chief before leaving the government in 2005, was one of the key contributors (aka liars) to the administration's rationale for war.

His intelligence activities, authorized by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, and coordinated with Vice President Cheney's office, stemmed from an administration belief that the CIA was underplaying evidence of then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's ties with al-Qaeda.

( head/PNAC searching desparately for a justification to go after Iraq's oil )

In interviews with Pentagon investigators, the summary do ent said, Feith insisted that his activities did not cons ute intelligence and that "even if they were, [they] would be appropriate given that they were responding to direction from the Deputy Secretary of Defense."

( the Eichmann defense, "only doing my job" )

The report was requested in fall 2005 by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), then chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Although the committee and a number of official inquiries had criticized the administration's prewar intelligence, Democratic senators, led by Levin, demanded further investigation of Feith's operation.

"The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration's decision to invade Iraq," Levin said yesterday. "The inspector general's report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war."

The summary do ent confirmed a range of accusations that Levin had leveled against Feith's office, alleging inaccurate work.

Feith's office, it said, drew on "both reliable and unreliable" intelligence reports in 2002 to produce a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq "that was much stronger than that assessed by the IC [Intelligence Community] and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the Administration."

It stated that the office produced intelligence assessments "inconsistent" with the U.S. intelligence community consensus, calling those actions "inappropriate" because the assessments purported to be "intelligence products" but were far more conclusive than the consensus view.

In particular, the summary cited the defense policy office's preparation of slides describing as a "known contact" an alleged 2001 meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta, the leader of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and an Iraqi intelligence officer.

That claim figured heavily in statements by Cheney and other senior administration officials alleging a link between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime, but it has since been discredited.

Three versions of the briefing prepared by Feith's office were presented in August and September 2002 -- months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- to I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then Cheney's chief of staff; Rumsfeld; and then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, the summary states.

But only "some of the information" in those briefings was "supported by available intelligence," the summary said. The version of the briefing presented to senior Bush officials, it said, contained different information than a presentation to the CIA. Left out of the version for the CIA, the inspector general said, was "a slide that said there were 'fundamental problems' " with the way the intelligence community was presenting the evidence.

While Pentagon officials said in responses cited in the summary that no senior policymakers mistook these briefings as "intelligence assessments," the inspector general said that administration officials had indeed cited classified intelligence that allegedly do ented a close al-Qaeda-Iraq relationship.

( aka fabricating and cherry-picking intel to support the Iraq oil grab )

The policy office, the summary stated, "was inappropriately performing Intelligence Activities . . . that should be performed by the Intelligence Community."

The summary recommended no action within the Defense Department because, it said, the current collaboration under new leadership at the Pentagon and the intelligence community "will significantly reduce the opportunity for the inappropriate conduct of intelligence activities outside intelligence channels."

Staff writer Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.

=============
Keep going, Carl! Let's get the neo- /PNAC bull out in the open where everybody can smell it.

[George Gervin's Afro]

My last post ever on premise for Iraq war.

My only question for war supporters is: If the case for war was so strong and ,if it was inevitable, why did the Bush administration use knowingly faulty information as justification for war?

Point 1: Aluminum Tubes Bush told us that the aluminum tubes that were confiscated from a ship from Libya that was on it's way to Iraq. Bush told us that this was further proof that Saddam was trying to build more wmds.

On the face of it I would say that this was proof. However:

In 2002, at a crucial juncture on the path to war, senior members of the Bush administration gave a series of speeches and interviews in which they asserted that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. Speaking to a group of Wyoming Republicans in September, Vice President Cheney said the United States now had "irrefutable evidence" - thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the United States.

Those tubes became a critical exhibit in the administration's brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of Mr. Hussein's revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers. The tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, explained on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

But almost a year before, Ms. Rice's staff had been told that the government's foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons, according to four officials at the Central Intelligence Agency and two senior administration officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. The experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were likely intended for small artillery rockets. The White House, though, embraced the disputed theory that the tubes were for nuclear centrifuges, an idea first championed in April 2001 by a junior analyst at the C.I.A. Senior nuclear scientists considered that notion implausible, yet in the months after 9/11, as the administration built a case for confronting Iraq, the centrifuge theory gained currency as it rose to the top of the government.

Senior administration officials repeatedly failed to fully disclose the contrary views of America's leading nuclear scientists, an examination by The New York Times has found. They sometimes overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes, yet minimized or rejected the strong doubts of nuclear experts. They worried privately that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober cer ude in public.

So then I began to wonder if the case was so strong why use information that you know not to be true?

Why? Because the case wasn't as strong as it was reported..Bush lost my supportwhen I found out about this story. His own nuclear experts told him they could not be used for nuclear weapons but he told the public anyway.

Of course many Neocons will come back and say "well there are many other reasons why went to war as well". So then why use intel you know is bad if you have 'many other reasons'?.. I stopped believing the administration form that day forward.

[ChumpDumper]

Oh man, this guy was on NPR's Day to Day in full denial mode. It was pathetic. There will be an audio link later.

[Extra Stout]

Feith back in the day used to argue that war was good, if only to give the military a chance to get some practice. Because you don't want the military getting rusty.

He deserves to have his head crushed like an overripe melon.

[boutons_]

"If the case for war was so strong"

You can stop right there. It never was strong. That's why WHIG kept putting forth all knids of reasons (except the real one: Iraqi oil) from week to week in 2002 and early 2003, and exactly why the WHIG went nuts when Wilson contradicted them on yellowcake.

Even "bring democracy to M/E" bull wasn't trotted out as a primary reason until after the invasion found all the pre-invasion bull to really be bull .

When the WHIG kept changing their story, desparate to find some war rationale to sell the US/allies/UN, the odor of cheezy bull kept getting stronger and stronger.

The real reasons were the grab for Iraqi oil medium/long-term in sweeth-heart revenue-sharing oil deals for US/UK oilcos with a friendly puppet Iraqi government and short-term (remeber war was the ONLY option and was an IMMEDIATE option) to get dubya re-elected as a "war winning president"/Mission Accomplished. When the war wasn't won by Nov 03 and insurgent was hitting the fan, the fall back electioneering position worked, too, "dubya as mid-war president, not to be changed in mid-war."

dubya elected standing in a pool of blood of US military.

[Saddam's Ghost]

I thought this thread was about me, brah!

[clambake]

My greatest disappointment was Powell. Those stupid animations of mobile labs while dramatically holding a vial of white powder that represents the worlds doom.

[Oh, Gee!!]

Dubya already admitted that Iraq was not connected with the attacks on 9/11.

[ChumpDumper]

Hear Feith use the "louder is more convincing" tactic on NPR.

[BIG IRISH]

My greatest disappointment was Powell. Those stupid animations of mobile labs while dramatically holding a vial of white powder that represents the worlds doom.

Not the first time he either got taken or went along to get along.

Good little Major's grow up to be good little general's.

i.e. Mai Lai

As an Army officer, Powell's superiors considered him a consummate "team player." They could count on Powell to haul their water despite any contradictory feelings he may have had.

Powell's blind loyalty was demonstrated during a second tour in Vietnam (1968-1969), where as deputy assistant chief of staff for operations G-3 at Americal Division headquarters in Chu Lai, he was asked to handle a potentially embarrassing letter a young soldier had written to Gen. Creighton Abrams, commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam.

The soldier had written about rumors of a massacre that Americal Division soldiers had committed in the hamlet of My Lai 4 in South Vietnam. Although he did not mention My Lai in the letter, the soldier complained that Americal soldiers were indiscriminately killing Vietnamese civilians. Such acts, the young soldier warned, "are carried on at entire unit levels and thereby acquire the aspect of sanctioned policy."

Several days after he received a copy of the letter, Powell sent a memo to his superior, the adjutant general, making the outrageous claim that the young soldier had not given enough specifics upon which to base an inquiry. The purposely blind Powell said the soldier's charges were false except for "isolated instances." He wrote that "relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese are excellent."
Powell's refutation would be called an act of "white-washing" the news of My Lai, and questions would continue to remain undisclosed to the public



Powell's damage control efforts soon proved fruitless and the My Lai massacre burst onto the world stage like an atomic explosion, severely damaging the U.S. war effort in Vietnam.

However looking back 1968-69 was not a good time for a black Army Officer
to bring bad news to the attention of the big brass. and for sure not for one that was on the fast tract for promotion.

[PixelPusher]

I just started reading "State of Denial", one of the things that has stood out so far is what a low opinion everyone at the Pentagon (other than Rumsfeld) had of Feith.

Franks routinely denounced Doug Feith as the "dumbest bas , dumbest mother er on the face of the earth." - p. 117


Abizaid had four or five variations of the same question. "Who is going to be in charge of the country?" he asked another time.

Once Rumsfeld said, "Well Doug is working on that." That meant Feith, who Keane believed to be a very weak link in Rumsfeld's team and completely underqualified for his post. - p. 143

[boutons_]

Feith's defense on the NPR program was that he was not running his own intel operation but just offering constructive criticism, an alternative theory to counter CIA's theory that secular/irreligious Saddam would be not co-operate with ultra-religious jihadi al Qaida. Feith's theory aligned with head's long-repeated lies that led much of the US military and US public to believe a) Saddam was involved in WTC attack and b) Iraq was a legitimate target in the war on terrror, both resoundingly false, confirmed by the 3000+ wasted cadavers of US military.

But it turns out that the CIA theory was the right one, as infuriating as it was for head's fishing expedition for reasons to grab Iraq oil. head is as an effective fisherman as his is an effective quail hunter.

PNAC/neo- flaming assholes every last one of them, head, rummy, feith, scooter, etc, etc. They'll go completely unpunished, except for getting eternally tatooed as the group that started and lost a bogus war. Expect them all to be well compensated, directly or indirectly, by the oilcos for at least trying to get the oilco hands on Iraqi oil.

[boutons_]

February 10, 2007

Editorial (NYtimes)

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 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.

[boutons_]

Here's Feith's riposte:


Tough Questions We Were Right to Ask

By Douglas J. Feith
Wednesday, February 14, 2007; A19

Promoters of the "Bush Lied, People Died" line claim that the recent Pentagon inspector general's report concerning my former office's work on Iraq intelligence supports their cause. What the IG actually said is a different story.

The IG, Thomas Gimble, focused on a single Pentagon briefing from 2002 -- a critique of the CIA's work on the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship. His report concluded that the work my office generated was entirely lawful and authorized, and that Sen. Carl Levin was wrong to allege that we misled Congress.

Gimble made Levin happy, however, by calling the Pentagon briefing "inappropriate," a word the senator has whipped into a political lather. At issue is a simple but critical question: whether policy officials should be free to raise questions about CIA work. In Gimble's opinion, apparently, the answer is no. I disagree.

The CIA has a hard job. Some of its work has been good; some has been famously and disastrously bad, as everyone familiar with the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction fiasco knows. Intelligence is inherently sketchy and speculative -- and historically often wrong. It is improved when policy officials freely probe and challenge it.

In evaluating our policy toward Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001, my office realized that CIA analysts were suppressing some of their information. They excluded reports conflicting with their favored theory: that the secular Iraqi Baathist regime would not cooperate with al-Qaeda jihadists. (We now face a strategic alliance of jihadists and former Baathists in Iraq.)

( hey, Doug, that "alliance", of convenience against the much bigger Shiite majority, is between Iraqi Sunni Baathists, who under Saddam ran a secular, non-theocratic dictatorship, and foreign Sunni al-Quaida jihadists. An alliance encouraged and facilitated by your boy dubya's bull invasion and your boss rummy's total botching of the invasion (not enough troops) and post-invasion (only a rosy, do-nothing scenario "planned" for) This "alliance" is for facing the Shiites primarily, those US invaders secondarily, and didn't exist before the dubya quaqmire, and so wasn't a reason to invade Iraq ).

Pentagon officials did not buy that theory, and in 2002 they gave a briefing that reflected their skepticism. Their aim was not to enthrone a different theory, but to urge the CIA not to exclude any relevant information from what it provided to policymakers. Only four top-level government officials received the briefing: Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and (together) Stephen Hadley and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

( and YOUR goal WAS to urge the CIA "to exclude any relevant information from what it provided to policymakers", eg, info that weakend the WHIG/PNAC/AIE/neo- insane drive to and case for a bogus war? )

A 2004 Senate intelligence committee report praised the quality of the Pentagon's Iraq-al-Qaeda work -- the critical briefing and the related Pentagon-CIA dialogue. The policy officials "played by [intelligence community] rules" and asked questions that "actually improved the Central Intelligence Agency's products," it said. Levin and Sen. Jay Rockefeller both endorsed that judgment.

The recent inspector general's report argues that policy officials "undercut" the CIA by pointing out " 'fundamental problems' with the way the Intelligence Community was assessing information" on the issue of Iraq-al-Qaeda relations -- even though Gimble last week said at a Senate hearing: "Again, I need to just remind everyone, we didn't make an assessment on the validity of either side of this issue." He labeled the Pentagon briefing "inappropriate" not because of any errors in it but because he viewed it as an "intelligence activity" that "varied" from "the intelligence community consensus." The Pentagon officials told the IG, however, that the briefing was a policy activity -- a critique of an intelligence product.

If this report hadn't become part of a political battle, Gimble's position would be scoffed at across the political spectrum. Sensible people recognize the importance of vigorous questioning of intelligence by the CIA's "customers." In bipartisan, unanimous reports on Iraq intelligence, both the Senate intelligence committee and the Silberman-Robb WMD commission called for more such questioning.

( but "more such questioning" was AFTER the invasion, not before. IIRC, anybody, like Joe Wilson, questioning the intelligence on yellowcake sent the WHIG into violent rage to discredit Wilson's questioning )

Specifically on the Pentagon's criticism of Iraq-al-Qaeda intelligence, the 2004 Senate report noted that our challenges were helpful: Intelligence analysts "stated that the questions had forced them to go back and review the intelligence reporting, and that during this exercise they came across information they had overlooked in initial readings."

In his Senate testimony, Gimble said his report -- and therefore all related claims that my office "manipulated intelligence" -- concerned only this single briefing. His whole argument rests on the claim that the briefing was "disseminated" as "an intelligence product" rather than a policy product. But he acknowledged that neither Rumsfeld nor Tenet could have mistaken the briefers for intelligence community spokesmen. His objections applied solely to the briefing that Hadley and Libby received in September 2002.

Astonishingly, the IG acknowledged that his office had not interviewed either of these officials to ask whether they thought the briefing was an intelligence product. Knowing well that the briefers worked for me, neither could have believed that Pentagon policy officials were speaking for the intelligence community. One of the briefing slides was "Fundamental Problems With How the Intelligence Community Is Assessing Information." Gimble had no basis to say the briefing was seen as an intelligence activity.

In his report, Gimble wrote that the Pentagon briefing was not the "most accurate analysis of intelligence." This has been taken to suggest it was false or deceptive. But the IG said he meant only that the briefing was at "variance with the consensus of the Intelligence Community." Of course it was at variance! It was a critique. That's why it was prepared in the first place.

Gimble's characterization is absurdly circular. Cheered on by the chairmen of the Senate intelligence and armed services committees, he is giving bad advice based on incomplete fact-finding and poor logic. He is discouraging tough questioning of intelligence. Our government needs more such questioning, not less.

The author was undersecretary of defense for policy from July 2001 until August 2005.

=====================

So, let me get this right: it's alright, even dutifully patriotic for you, as point-man for WHIG/PNAC/AEI/neo- desk-jockey plutocratic warriors, to criticize CIA for not supporting your ideological drive for pre-emptive war, but if US citizens, or the Congress criticizes the Exec for their bogus war, those US citizens and Congress are bullied into silence, slimed as traitors, as stomach-less, as being pro-terrorist?

Doug, you and your buddies got your ing fiasco of a war. Now what? Blame it all on "bad intel"?