U.S. Insiders Say Iraq Intel Deliberately Skewed

[Miss Modular]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...elligence_dc_2

U.S. Insiders Say Iraq Intel Deliberately Skewed
Fri May 30, 7:18 PM ET Add Top Stories - Reuters to My Yahoo!


By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A growing number of U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq (news - web sites).

A key target is a four-person Pentagon (news - web sites) team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) to banned weapons or terrorist 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 Defense Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence.

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 (news - web sites) 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 (news - web sites) 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."

The INC, which brought together groups opposed to Saddam, worked closely with the Pentagon to build a for the early use of force in Iraq.

"There are current intelligence officials who believe it is a scandal," he said in a telephone interview. 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.

"They established beyond any doubt that there were connections that had gone unnoticed in previous intelligence analysis," he said on the PBS NewsHour Thursday.

A Pentagon spokesman, Marine Lt. Col. David Lapan, said the team in question analyzed links among terrorist groups and alleged state sponsors and shared conclusions with the CIA.

"In one case, a briefing was presented to Director of Central Intelligence Tenet. It dealt with the links between Iraq and al Qaeda," the group blamed for the Sept. 2001 attacks on the United States, he said.

Tenet denied charges the intelligence community, on which the United States spends more than $30 billion a year, had skewed its analysis to fit a political agenda, a cardinal sin for professionals meant to tell the truth regardless of politics.

"I'm enormously proud of the work of our analysts," he said in a statement on Friday ahead of an internal review. "The integrity of our process has been maintained throughout and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong."

Tenet sat conspicuously behind Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) during a key Feb. 5 presentation to the U.N. Security Council arguing Iraq represented an ominous and urgent threat -- as if to lend the CIA's credibility to the presentation, replete with satellite photos.

Powell said Friday his presentation was "the best analytic product that we could have put up."

SHAPED 'FROM THE TOP DOWN'

Greg Thielmann, who retired in September after 25 years in the State Department, the last four in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research working on weapons, said it appeared to him that intelligence had been shaped "from the top down."

"The normal processing of establishing accurate intelligence was sidestepped" in the runup to invading Iraq, said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security and who deals with U.S. intelligence officers.

Anger among security professionals appears widespread. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group that says it is made up mostly of CIA intelligence analysts, wrote to U.S. President George Bush May 1 to hit what they called "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions."

"In intelligence there is one unpardonable sin -- cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy," it wrote. "There is ample indication this has been done with respect to Iraq."

____________

I'm surprised that this is coming to light at all, at least in terms of the mainstream press.

[GAsux]

This is just a thought but here is my opinion on why it's happening.

I would likely guess that this sort of selective hearing has been going on for quite some time. The President of the day formulates his policy, then sets out to "prove" it. I'm quite sure that JFK/LBJ/Nixon had plenty of information available to them with regards to the status of the war in Vietnam, but they choose to filter it to fit their stated policies. I'm sure there were plenty in the intelligence world (CIA, FBI, NSA, etc) that fully understood where we were headed, but were too afraid to state it publically.

I am guessing that the blame game following 9/11 has caused some of those intel types to be less afraid and more willing to stand up for themselves. The intel agencies essentially became the 9/11 scapegoats. Congressmen were lining up to bash the "intel failures" and were quick to point the finger at their inability to do their jobs.

Now the folks in those intel fields are sticking up for themselves. Their integrity is at stake here. I think a lot more of them are willing to state their case now. I can't say that I blame them. If I am Joe C.I.A. analyst and I bust my ass every day at work, only to hear the administration leadership and the public berrate me and my organization for our "failures" I'd want to clear the air too.

Anyway, it's just a thought.

And for the record, I don't doubt for one single second that the bulk of this article is true. They only heard, saw, disseminated the info that supported their position and disregarded or hid everything to the contrary.

[Sethomas]

I want Ronnie to reply to this. I think I remember him saying that after the war, WMDs would be found that were obviously made by France and Germany, or something.

[kellychaos]

Stay with me on this ... it'll make sense later. I watched one of those forensics show wherein the police recieived the help from a FBI profiler in re-creating how he thought the crime happened. As the cops had a thin case, they proceeded to go out and basically select both "witnesses" and "suspects" and pound the square pegs in a round hole to fit the profiler's renactment. That's what this whole mess sounds like. Bush, Rumsfeld et al had a script and all they had to do was go out and make the people, events, ect fit ... in addition, the climate following the 9/11 attacks (even though the Iraqis had nothing to do with it as far as they have established) made it a lot easier to push the propaganda through. I even rememeber watching the news prior to the war beginning and there were a few people when asked if we should go to war respond with "Heck yes! We need revenge for what they did on 9/11!" or words to that effect.