Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel / The Problem with Bush Defe

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Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel

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Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World

Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly

classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no

evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and

that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant

collaborative ties with Al Qaeda. Congress has been denied access to

the document. Cheney knew too. They flat out lied. We knew that too.

 

 

 

 

http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/1122nj1.htm

 

 

Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel

 

By Murray Waas, special to National Journal

© National Journal Group Inc.

Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005

 

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World

Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly

classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no

evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and

that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant

collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and

current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

 

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the

" President's Daily Brief, " a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national

security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived

from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign

intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news

reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

 

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the

briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq

and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the

terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic

radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular

regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered

infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi

intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings,

according to records and sources.

 

The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the

president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks

to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq

and Al Qaeda.

 

Much of the contents of the September 21 PDB were later incorporated,

albeit in a slightly different form, into a lengthier CIA analysis

examining not only Al Qaeda's contacts with Iraq, but also Iraq's

support for international terrorism. Although the CIA found scant

evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the agency

reported that it had long since established that Iraq had previously

supported the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization, and had

provided tens of millions of dollars and logistical support to

Palestinian groups, including payments to the families of Palestinian

suicide bombers.

 

The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President

Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser

and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and

undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush

administration policy makers, according to government records.

 

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the

CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other

PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the

Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the

run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn

over these documents.

 

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the

Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to

congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then

that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it,

even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other

than to acknowledge that it exists.

 

On November 18, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said he planned to

attach an amendment to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill

that would require the Bush administration to give the Senate and

House intelligence committees copies of PDBs for a three-year period.

After Democrats and Republicans were unable to agree on language for

the amendment, Kennedy said he would delay final action on the matter

until Congress returns in December.

 

The conclusions drawn in the lengthier CIA assessment-which has also

been denied to the committee-were strikingly similar to those provided

to President Bush in the September 21 PDB, according to records and

sources. In the four years since Bush received the briefing, according

to highly placed government officials, little evidence has come to

light to contradict the CIA's original conclusion that no

collaborative relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

 

" What the President was told on September 21, " said one former

high-level official, " was consistent with everything he has been told

since-that the evidence was just not there. "

 

In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice

president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq

had significant ties, and they cited the possibility that Iraq might

share chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a

terrorist attack against the United States.

 

Democrats in Congress, as well as other critics of the Bush

administration, charge that Bush and Cheney misrepresented and

distorted intelligence information to bolster their case for war with

Iraq. The president and vice president have insisted that they

unknowingly relied on faulty and erroneous intelligence, provided

mostly by the CIA.

 

The new information on the September 21 PDB and the subsequent CIA

analysis bears on the question of what the CIA told the president and

how the administration used that information as it made its case for

war with Iraq.

 

The central rationale for going to war against Iraq, of course, was

that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons, and that he

was pursuing an aggressive program to build nuclear weapons. Despite

those claims, no weapons were ever discovered after the war, either by

United Nations inspectors or by U.S. military authorities.

 

Much of the blame for the incorrect information in statements made by

the president and other senior administration officials regarding the

weapons-of-mass-destruction issue has fallen on the CIA and other U.S.

intelligence agencies.

 

In April 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a

bipartisan report that the CIA's prewar assertion that Saddam's regime

was " reconstituting its nuclear weapons program " and " has chemical and

biological weapons " were " overstated, or were not supported by the

underlying intelligence provided to the Committee. "

 

The Bush administration has cited that report and similar findings by

a presidential commission as evidence of massive CIA intelligence

failures in assessing Iraq's unconventional-weapons capability.

 

Bush and Cheney have also recently answered their critics by ascribing

partisan motivations to them and saying their criticism has the effect

of undermining the war effort. In a speech on November 11, the

president made his strongest comments to date on the subject:

" Baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy

that is questioning America's will. " Since then, he has adopted a

different tone, and he said on his way home from Asia on November 21,

" This is not an issue of who is a patriot or not. "

 

In his own speech to the American Enterprise Institute yesterday,

Cheney also changed tone, saying that " disagreement, argument, and

debate are the essence of democracy " and the " sign of a healthy

political system. " He then added: " Any suggestion that prewar

information was distorted, hyped, or fabricated by the leader of the

nation is utterly false. "

 

Although the Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Commission

on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the

9/11 commission, pointed to incorrect CIA assessments on the WMD

issue, they both also said that, for the most part, the CIA and other

agencies did indeed provide policy makers with accurate information

regarding the lack of evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

 

But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice

president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the

days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed

to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments

showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

 

" You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about

the war on terror, " President Bush said on September 25, 2002.

 

The next day, Rumsfeld said, " We have what we consider to be credible

evidence that Al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts with Iraq who

could help them acquire … weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities. "

 

The most explosive of allegations came from Cheney, who said that

September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to

crash into the World Trade Center, had met in Prague, in the Czech

Republic, with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim

Samir al-Ani, five months before the attacks. On December 9, 2001,

Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press: " t's pretty well confirmed

that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of

the Iraqi intelligence service in [the Czech Republic] last April,

several months before the attack. "

Cheney continued to make the charge, even after he was briefed,

according to government records and officials, that both the CIA and

the FBI discounted the possibility of such a meeting.

Credit card and phone records appear to demonstrate that Atta was in

Virginia Beach, Va., at the time of the alleged meeting, according to

law enforcement and intelligence officials. Al-Ani, the Iraqi

intelligence official with whom Atta was said to have met in Prague,

was later taken into custody by U.S. authorities. He not only denied

the report of the meeting with Atta, but said that he was not in

Prague at the time of the supposed meeting, according to published

reports.

In June 2004, the 9/11 commission concluded: " There have been reports

that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden

had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted

in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have

adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq. We

have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks

against the United States. "

Regarding the alleged meeting in Prague, the commission concluded: " We

do not believe that such a meeting occurred. "

Still, Cheney did not concede the point. " We have never been able to

prove that there was a connection to 9/11, " Cheney said after the

commission announced it could not find significant links between Al

Qaeda and Iraq. But the vice president again pointed out the existence

of a Czech intelligence service report that Atta and the Iraqi agent

had met in Prague. " That's never been proved. But it's never been

disproved, " Cheney said.

The following month, July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee

concluded in its review of the CIA's prewar intelligence: " Despite

four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little

useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi

regime's possible links to al-Qaeda. "

One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made statements that

contradicted what they were told in CIA briefings might have been that

they were receiving information from another source that purported to

have evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from a

covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the September 11 attacks

by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.

Feith was a protégé of, and intensely loyal to, Cheney, Rumsfeld,

then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and Cheney's

then-chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis (Scooter)

Libby. The secretive unit was set up because Cheney, Rumsfeld,

Wolfowitz, and Libby did not believe the CIA would be able to get to

the bottom of the matter of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties. The four men shared a

long-standing distrust of the CIA from their earlier positions in

government, and felt that the agency had failed massively by not

predicting the September 11 attacks.

At first, the Feith-directed unit primarily consisted of two men,

former journalist Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, a veteran of

neoconservative think tanks. They liked to refer to themselves as the

" Iraqi intelligence cell " of the Pentagon. And they took pride in the

fact that their office was in an out-of-the-way cipher-locked room,

with " charts that rung the room from one end to the other " showing the

" interconnections of various terrorist groups " with one another and,

most important, with Iraq, Maloof recalled in an interview.

They also had the heady experience of briefing Rumsfeld twice, and

Feith more frequently, Maloof said. The vice president's office also

showed great interest in their work. On at least three occasions,

Maloof said, Samantha Ravich, then-national security adviser for

terrorism to Cheney, visited their windowless offices for a briefing.

But neither Maloof nor Wurmser had any experience or formal training

in intelligence analysis. Maloof later lost his security clearance,

for allegedly failing to disclose a relationship with a woman who is a

foreigner, and after allegations that he leaked classified information

to the press. Maloof said in the interview that he has done nothing

wrong and was simply being punished for his controversial theories.

Wurmser has since been named as Cheney's Middle East adviser.

In January 2002, Maloof and Wurmser were succeeded at the intelligence

unit by two Naval Reserve officers. Intelligence analysis from the

covert unit later served as the basis for many of the erroneous public

statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others regarding the

alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, according to former and

current government officials. Intense debates still rage among

longtime intelligence and foreign policy professionals as to whether

those who cited the information believed it, or used it as propaganda.

The unit has since been disbanded.

Earlier this month, on November 14, the Pentagon's inspector general

announced an investigation into whether Feith and others associated

with the covert intelligence unit engaged in " unauthorized, unlawful,

or inappropriate intelligence activities. " In a statement, Feith said

he is " confident " that investigators will conclude that his " office

worked properly and in fact improved the intelligence product by

asking good questions. "

The Senate Intelligence Committee has also been conducting its own

probe of the Pentagon unit. But as was first disclosed by The American

Prospect in an article by reporter Laura Rozen, that probe had been

hampered by a lack of cooperation from Feith and the Pentagon.

Internal Pentagon records show not only that the small Pentagon unit

had the ear of the highest officials in the government, but also that

Rumsfeld and others considered the unit as a virtual alternative to

intelligence analyses provided by the CIA.

On July 22, 2002, as the run-up to war with Iraq was underway, one of

the Naval Reserve officers detailed to the unit sent Feith an e-mail

saying that he had just heard that then-Deputy Defense Secretary

Wolfowitz wanted " the Iraqi intelligence cell … to prepare an intel

briefing on Iraq and links to al-Qaida for the SecDef " and that he was

not to tell anyone about it.

After that briefing was delivered, Wolfowitz sent Feith and other

officials a note saying: " This was an excellent briefing. The

Secretary was very impressed. He asked us to think about possible next

steps to see if we can illuminate the differences between us and CIA.

The goal was not to produce a consensus product, but rather to scrub

one another's arguments. "

On September 16, 2002, two days before the CIA produced a major

assessment of Iraq's ties to terrorism, the Naval Reserve officers

conducted a briefing for Libby and Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy

national security adviser to President Bush.

In a memorandum to Wolfowitz, Feith wrote: " The briefing went very

well and generated further interest from Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby. "

Both men, the memo went on, requested follow-up material, most notably

a " chronology of Atta's travels, " a reference to the discredited

allegation of an Atta-Iraqi meeting in Prague.

In their presentation, the naval reserve briefers excluded the fact

that the FBI and CIA had developed evidence that the alleged meeting

had never taken place, and that even the Czechs had disavowed it.

The Pentagon unit also routinely second-guessed the CIA's highly

classified assessments. Regarding one report titled " Iraq and

al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship, " one of the Naval Reserve

officers wrote: " The report provides evidence from numerous

intelligence sources over the course of a decade on interactions

between Iraq and al-Qaida. In this regard, the report is excellent.

Then in its interpretation of this information, CIA attempts to

discredit, dismiss, or downgrade much of this reporting, resulting in

inconsistent conclusions in many instances. Therefore, the CIA report

should be read for content only-and CIA's interpretation ought to be

ignored. "

This same antipathy toward the CIA led to the events that are the

basis of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the

leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity, according to several

former and current senior officials.

Ironically, the Plame affair's origins had its roots in Cheney and

Libby's interest in reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase

uranium yellowcake from Niger to build a nuclear weapon. After reading

a Pentagon report on the matter in early February 2002, Cheney asked

the CIA officer who provided him with a national security briefing

each morning if he could find out about it.

Without Cheney's knowledge, his query led to the CIA-sanctioned trip

to Niger by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, to

investigate the allegations. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the

allegations were most likely not true.

Despite that conclusion, President Bush, in his State of the Union

address in 2003, included the Niger allegation in making the case to

go to war with Iraq. In July 2003, after the war had begun, Wilson

publicly charged that the Bush administration had " twisted " the

intelligence information to make the case to go to war.

Libby and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove told reporters

that Wilson's had been sent to Niger on the recommendation of his

wife, Plame. In the process, the leaks led to the unmasking of Plame,

the appointment of Fitzgerald, the jailing of a New York Times

reporter for 85 days, and a federal grand jury indictment of Libby for

perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly attempting to conceal

his role in leaking Plame's name to the press.

The Plame affair was not so much a reflection of any personal animus

toward Wilson or Plame, says one former senior administration official

who knows most of the principals involved, but rather the direct

result of long-standing antipathy toward the CIA by Cheney, Libby, and

others involved. They viewed Wilson's outspoken criticism of the Bush

administration as an indirect attack by the spy agency.

Those grievances were also perhaps illustrated by comments that Vice

President Cheney himself wrote on one of Feith's reports detailing

purported evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In

barely legible handwriting, Cheney wrote in the margin of the report:

" This is very good indeed … Encouraging … Not like the crap we are all

so used to getting out of CIA. "

-- Murray Waas is a Washington-based writer and frequent contributor

to National Journal. Several of his previous stories are also

available online.

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/05/11/con05445.html

November 22, 2005

The Problem with Bush and Cheney's " Faulty Intelligence " Defense

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

by Kristina Borjesson

Weighed down by the detritus of their war-selling campaign, including

the Plame affair, President Bush and Vice President Cheney came out

swinging against charges that they misused pre-war intelligence. The

intelligence was faulty, not manipulated, they say. " While it is

perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the

war, " the president declared, " it is irresponsible to re-write the

history of how the war began. "

Re-writing history may be wrong, but reviewing it is instructive. The

record shows that Bush and Cheney's claims that they were duped by bad

intelligence are disingenuous.

Upon arriving at the White House, they began an extensive campaign to

get to Iraq. They assembled an ad hoc bureaucracy for gathering and

diffusing intelligence--true or faulty, it didn't matter--to sell the

war. They paid Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (a group

that the CIA had previously dismissed as an unreliable intelligence

source) for faulty intelligence that served their agenda. Another

aspect of their campaign was pressuring and punishing those who

disputed or refuted the intelligence. The Plame affair resulted from that.

Ron Suskind reported in his book, The Price of Loyalty, that ten days

into the Bush administration's tenure, former treasury secretary Paul

O'Neill attended a meeting where the president turned to Condi Rice

and in what several observers understood was a scripted exchange said,

" What's on the agenda? " " How Iraq is destabilizing the region, Mr.

President, " she replied, after which then-CIA director George Tenet

gave a presentation that raised the possibility of Hussein having

weapons of mass destruction. At the end of the meeting, the president

assigned Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and General Henry H. Shelton to

look at " military options. " A little less than year later, Rumsfeld

expressed his desire to find evidence in the ruins of 9/11 that was

" good enough to hit SH [saddam Hussein]. "

From there, members of the administration associated with Bush and

Cheney's offices, oversaw an ad hoc bureaucracy comprised of several

groups designed to gather, package and sell intelligence promoting the

war.

There was the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, run by

Cheney's Middle East Advisor, David Wurmser. According to

intelligence expert and author James Bamford, this group was assigned

to produce evidence for pretexts for attacking Iraq. Knight Ridder's

Jonathan Landay said that the group was tasked to look for links

between Saddam and al Qaeda. This linking exercise resulted in a

post-war memo that was released by the conservative Weekly Standard

under the headline: " Case Closed: The U.S. Government's Secret Memo

Detailing Cooperation Between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. "

The Defense Department and the CIA disowned the memo as a legitimate

analysis. Nonetheless, Cheney called it the " best source of

information " on the Saddam/bin Laden connection.

Then there was the Office of Special Plans [OSP] for advance war

planning and media strategy. Created by Undersecretary of Defense

Douglas Feith, it was hidden away on the Pentagon's fifth floor. The

OSP operated in secret. Retired Air Force Lieutenant Karen

Kwiatkowski, who was on staff there, says, " We were instructed at a

staff meeting that this office was not to be discussed or explained

and if people in the Joint Staff, among others, asked, we were to

offer no comment. " One of the OSP's tasks, according to Bamford, was

to " target doubters and non-believers in the government, from the CIA

to the Secretary of State. Those who wouldn't go along with the OSP's

false information [courtesy of Ahmed Chalabi] or agenda, like CIA

intelligence experts and General Anthony Zinni, former commander of

Middle East Forces, were attacked and put on enemies lists. "

The president, vice-president and Ahmed Chalabi weren't necessarily

looking for good intelligence, just pro-war intelligence. Chalabi was

the administration's pick to head up Iraq after the invasion.

Currently wanted in Jordan for embezzling millions of dollars from a

bank, he has been serving as Iraq's oil minister. Chalabi is probably

still the administration's top pick for running that country, because

he has promised to protect U.S. interests and to make a peace deal

with Israel.

In 2002, when the Senate Appropriations Committee demanded to know why

the State Department was paying Chalabi's INC for intelligence, the

INC sent a letter saying that their information was going directly to

William Luti in Rumsfeld's office and John Hannah in Cheney's office.

The Pentagon's Kwiatkowski confirmed that the OSP had a " very close

relationship with Cheney's office " and told Knight Ridder's Jonathan

Landay that staff members in Douglas Feith's office were giving

talking points and position papers based on the INC's bogus

information to conservative columnists and influential journalists.

Then there was the White House Iraq Group, headed up by Bush's chief

of staff, Andrew Card, and charged with selling the war to the public.

Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice and Scooter Libby were members of this

group. A computer disk leaked in 2002 showed that they were planning

a fall media blitz featuring frightening images of mushroom clouds as

well as biological and chemical weapons. The blitz began in August.

Cheney talked to veterans groups about Iraq's imminent and actual

possession of nuclear arms. He always made the nuclear weapons pitch

towards the end of his speeches, to leave a lasting impression. When

Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay heard about Cheney's August 26, 2002

speech at a VFW national convention, he called a government source he

knew to be well-versed on the issue of Iraq's nuclear capabilities,

and the source told Landay flat out: " The vice-president is lying. "

Three days later, Cheney sold the same bogus message to veterans of

the Korean War. Days after that, Cheney and Rice went on television

to talk about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds, pointing to Judith

Miller's Chalabi-sourced article entitled, " U.S. Says Hussein

Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts. "

While Bush and Condi were hitting the airwaves with their " mushroom

cloud " speeches, Israeli prime minister Sharon and his top aide,

Ra'anan Gissin, were issuing similar dire warnings about Iraq's

nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities. The Associated Press

reported on a briefing Gissin gave during which he said that Saddam

gave Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission orders to speed up their work to

make their weapons operational. The AP's headline was: " Israel to

U.S., Don't Delay Iraq Attack. " This was no coincidence. According

to the UK Guardian's Julian Borger, the Office of Special Plans had a

mirror office in Israel. Douglas Feith was the liaison between OSP

U.S. and OSP Israel.

And then, there's the Niger story. According to Bamford, Bush had

intended to mention the story of Hussein seeking yellowcake uranium

from Niger in a speech he gave on October 7, 2002 at the Cincinnati

Museum. The president didn't, though, because CIA director George

Tenet, knowing it lacked credibility, forced the National Security

Council to drop it from the president's speech. Up until mid to late

October 2002, Tenet's CIA was bucking the administration on at least

some of the intelligence they wanted to use to sell the war. But then,

Bamford observes, it seems the pressure on Tenet to get with the

invasion program became too intense. He stopped fighting and got on

board to the point where he actually allowed himself to be quoted

telling the president that there was a " slam dunk " case for WMDs.

Although the president knew the Niger story wasn't nailed down, he

included it in his subsequent state of the union speech. Tenet never

said a word. The Plame affair is a result of Ambassador Joseph Wilson

doing what Tenet would not do.

Colin Powell didn't hold up under pressure either. In February 2001,

he publicly stated: " Saddam has not developed any significant

capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. " Karen

Kwiatkowski confirmed that during the war-selling phase, this view

posed a problem: " There was a lot of frustration with Powell, they

said a lot of bad things about him at the office … "

Sources close to Powell told Bamford that Cheney's chief-of-staff,

Scooter Libby, drafted Powell's now-infamous UN speech. While writing

it, Libby was in constant communication with David Wurmser of the

Policy Counterterrorism Group. Powell's people also told Bamford that

the secretary of state knew that much of what was in the script was

false. In the end, Powell's people were furious at Libby, but the

secretary of state didn't have the courage to not deliver the speech.

AP special correspondent Charles J. Hanley did a thorough job of

identifying the false and misleading statements in Powell's speech.

Finally, there are all kinds of post-mortem reports examining the

government's intelligence failures, but pre-war, the report that

really mattered was the National Intelligence Estimate [NIE]. This

report is produced by senior intelligence analysts and outside experts

known as the National Intelligence Council. The president did not want

an NIE done to assess Saddam's WMD capabilities, even though the

standard protocol is to put one together before making a big policy

decision like going to war. Knight Ridder's Warren Strobel reports

that the administration only agreed to order one under duress.

Instead of taking the usual several months to craft this key report,

it was completed in a record, eyebrow-raising three weeks. Two

versions were released: a classified version for policymakers and a

public version.

Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay contrasted the public and classified

versions in his February 9, 2004 article, " Doubts, Dissent Stripped

from Public Iraq Assessments "

... For example, the public version declared that " most analysts

assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program " and says,

" if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon this decade. "

But it fails to mention the dissenting view offered in the

top-secret version by the State Department's intelligence arm, the

Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as the INR.

That view said, in part, " The activities we have detected do not,

however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing

what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach

to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq may be doing so, but INR considers

the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment. "

... What the comparison showed is that while the top-secret

version delivered to Bush, his top lieutenants and Congress were

heavily qualified with caveats about some of its most important

conclusions about Iraq's illicit weapons programs, the caveats were

omitted from the public version.

The caveats included the phrases, " we judge that, " " we assess

that " and " we lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's

WMD programs. "

These phrases, according to current and former intelligence

officials, long have been used in intelligence reports to stress an

absence of hard information and underscore that judgments are

extrapolations or estimates.

Among the most striking differences between the versions were

those over Iraq's development of small, unmanned aircraft, also known

as unmanned aerial vehicles [uAV].

The public version said that Iraq's UAVs " especially if used for

delivery of chemical and biological warfare [CBW] agents--could

threaten Iraq's neighbors, U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, and the

United States if brought close to, or into, the U.S. Homeland. "

The classified version showed there was major disagreement on the

issue from the agency with the greatest expertise on such aircraft,

the Air Force. The Air Force, " does not agree that Iraq is developing

UAVs primarily intended to be delivery platforms for chemical and

biological warfare CBW agents, " it said. " The small size of Iraq's

new UAV strongly suggests a primary role of reconnaissance, although

CBW delivery is an inherent capability. "

... The public version contained the alarming warning that Iraq

was capable of quickly developing biological warfare agents that could

be delivered by " bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert

operatives, including potentially against the U.S. Homeland. " No such

warning that Iraq's biological weapons would be delivered to the

United States appeared in the classified version.

... Deleted from the public version was a line in the classified

report that cast doubt on whether Saddam was prepared to support

terrorist attacks on the United States, a danger that Bush and his top

aides raised repeatedly in making their case for war.

" Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting

terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW [Chemical Biological

Weapons] against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi

involvement would provide Washington with a stronger case for making

war, " the top-secret report said.

Also missing from the public report were judgments that Iraq would

attempt " clandestine attacks " on the United States only if an American

invasion threatened the survival of Saddam's regime or " possibly for

revenge. "

Landay concluded that: " As a result, the public was given a far more

definitive assessment of Iraq's plans and capabilities than President

Bush and other U.S. decision-makers received from their intelligence

agencies. "

" There are laws that make it a crime for a public official to

willfully or knowingly mislead or lie to Congress, " observed Landay.

" It's a high crime under the Constitution's impeachment clause to

manipulate or deliberately misuse national security intelligence data.

And under federal criminal law, it's a felony to 'defraud the United

States or any agency thereof, in any manner or for any purpose.' "

Knight Ridder's Warren Strobel mentioned that he and Landay had

" looked at one other law that might have been broken, which is a law

that says if Congress gives you money, you cannot turn around and use

that money to lobby the U.S. government. We found evidence that Ahmed

Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress [iNC], which had provided false and

exaggerated intelligence to the administration for making the case for

war, may have broken that law. But the INC was not charged with

anything. "

The entire history of the administration's pre-war activities can't be

written here. But clearly the president and vice-president's " faulty

intelligence " defense ignores the fact that they set up a bureaucratic

machine that circumvented the federal government's intelligence

agencies, bought and used bad and inconclusive intelligence to sell

the war, and engaged in other highly questionable activities, some of

which may one day rise to the level of serious crimes.

©Kristina Borjesson

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Kristina Borjesson is the author of the newly released FEET TO THE

FIRE: The Media After 9/11, Top Journalists Speak Out, a BuzzFlash

Premium. This editorial is largely based on her interviews with

national security and intelligence journalists in her book, including

James Bamford and Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel.

Among the other journalists interviewed for the book were Ron

Suskind, Walter Pincus, Barton Gellman, Paul Krugman, Peter Arnett,

Helen Thomas, Tom Curley and Ted Koppel.