The continuing Debate over WMD's and the Denials from top Officials of Intelligence Manipulation
Confronting growing criticism that the Bush administration misled
Congress and the public over Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction,
a senior Pentagon official Wednesday denied that defense officials put a political
spin on intelligence to justify going to war.
CIA Director George Tenet is defending his agency's reputation.
"Our role is to call it like we see it, to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think and what we base it on," he said.
"The integrity of our process was maintained throughout and
any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong."
The now dis-banded Pentagon office, the Office of Special Plans, is said to have played a role in the George W. Bush administration's presentation of evidence on Iraq. Special Plans interpreted data gathered by other intelligence agencies but also concentrated on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi.
Created by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in the wake of the deadly September 11, 2001, terror attacks, the office succeeded in having its opinion prevail at the White House that the CIA and other agencies did not perceive the reality of the Iraqi threat.
Douglas J. Feith, under secretary of defense for policy who called a rare briefing today, on his own, to lay to rest some stories of a "so-called, or alleged intelligence cell and its relation to the Special Plans Office and the issue of intelligence judgments regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction".
Feith (transcripts found here) said they went to Tenet with NEW thoughts after reviewing CIA intelligence. So..if policymakers were given intelligence by the CIA then they reviewed it within this newly created Office of Special Plans, discovered, I guess something the CIA missed about Iraq, then said to themselves, "That's interesting. Let's share it with George Tenet." And so some members of the team and I (feith speaking) went over, I think it was in August of 2002, and shared some of these observations. And these were simply observations of this team based on the intelligence that the intelligence community had given to us, and it was just in the course of their reading it, this was incidental to the purpose of this group. But since they happened to come up with it and since it was an important subject, we went over, shared it with George and people at the CIA".
Susposedly this information was about Iraq and WMD's and terrorist connections according to todays briefing with Feith.
There is a general feeling among CIA analysts that intelligence was politicized and that the CIA and (Defense Intelligence Agency) was not given full consideration because the Pentagon, the policymakers, including the vice-president's office, did not want to hear that message. They wanted to hear a hardline message supporting a policy they already adopted.
After Mr. Feith's nearly hourlong briefing, some defense officials familiar with classified intelligence assessments on Iraq, its ties to terrorists and what the goverment charged were its weapons of mass destruction programs, said they were baffled or angered by his remarks.
One senior official, who said he was skeptical of Mr. Feith's account, was too angry to answer immediately. Another official said simply, "There was a lot of doublespeak out there."
Mr. Feith rarely gives on-the-record interviews or press briefings, but he said he acted on his own — not on orders from Mr. Rumsfeld or the White House — to rebut several published reports about the intelligence team he set up and its relation to the Office of Special Plans, an 18-member unit responsible for planning the Defense Department's Iraq policy. Mr. Feith says the team consisted of two people who drew on a pool of temporary help.
When asked about the special plans team Fieth said "..And this intelligence cell -- alleged -- which is this team that did this particular project, which was not an intelligence project -- it was a matter of digesting other people's intelligence products -- this team is not -- was not part of that office; wasn't related to it. In fact, the team stopped doing its work -- basically, once we had that meeting with the CIA and the team had given us a report on these terrorist network interconnections, there was no team anymore. And they stopped doing their work before the Special Plans Office, if I have it straight, was actually created within Dr. Luti's (William J. Luti, deputy under secretary of defense for special plans and Near East and South Asian affairs) organization".
"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".
Alledged?? You're holding a briefing to tell us about this team that you put together and it's alledged? Sorry folks, I just couldn't resist that one.
But other defense officials said the team's task quickly turned to gleaning details that may have collectively pointed to Iraq's wider connections to terrorism.
Finally the piece de resistance....
And that team stopped in August 2002?
Feith: Roughly. The -- (Chuckling.) -- and the Special Plans Office was called Special Plans, because at the time, calling it Iraq Planning Office might have undercut the -- our diplomatic efforts with regard to Iraq and the U.N. and elsewhere. We set up an office to address the whole range of issues regarding Iraq planning.
Seymour M. Hersh in an article in the New Yorker looks at a small circle of analysts and advisers at the Pentagon who came to rival the C.I.A. as the President's primary source of intelligence about Iraq; Hersh reports that questions have been raised about the integrity of the intelligence the group relied on. (that group being the Special Plans Office, my emphasis) He then said "If it is true that this Administration deliberately, from the very beginning, understood that the best way to mobilize the American people was to present Saddam as a direct national-security threat to us, without having the evidence beforehand that he was, that's, well, frankly, lying. That's the worst kind of deceit a President can practice. We don't elect our President to not tell us the real situation of the world, particularly when he sends kids to kill and be killed."
So...i ask you to read the transcript and decide for yourself, is the man lying? or not?