Report: Iraq intelligence 'dead wrong' WMD panel to present findings to Bush

CNN Flim-Flams the public, Bush and Company off the Hook

Thursday, March 31, 2005

CNN - The U.S. intelligence community was "simply wrong" in its assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities before the U.S. invasion, according to a panel created to study those failures and recommend corrections to prevent them in the future.

"We conclude that the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," said a letter from the commission to President Bush. "This was a major intelligence failure."

The panel -- called the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction -- formally presents its report to President Bush Thursday morning.

A National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq put forth in October 2002 warned that Baghdad was still pursuing weapons of mass destruction, had reconstituted its nuclear weapon program and had biological and chemical weapons.

The Bush administration used those conclusions as part of its argument for the eventual invasion of Iraq in March, 2003.

But the Iraq Survey Group -- set up to look for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or evidence of them -- issued its final report saying it saw no weapons or no evidence that Iraq was trying to reconstitute them.

The commission's report says the principal cause of the intelligence failures was the intelligence community's "inability to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather, and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions, rather than good evidence."

"The single most prominent a recurring theme" of its recommendations is "stronger and more centralized management of the Intelligence Community, and, in general, the creation of a genuinely integrated Community, instead of a loose confederation of independent agencies."

President Bush appointed the nine-member commission led by by former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman, a conservative who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and former Sen. and Gov. Chuck Robb of Virginia, a Democrat.

Commentary by Lorelei Jackson

This is OLD NEWS folks.  Once again, media (CNN) plays its part with Bush and tries to flim-flam the public. The vice president and the neocons were in a fever to bypass the C.I.A. and conjure up a case to attack Saddam. When Mr. Tenet put out the new National Intelligence Estimate on Oct. 2, 2002, nine days before the Senate vote on the war resolution and after our troops and aircraft carriers were getting into position for battle, there was one key change: suddenly the agency agreed with Mr. Cheney that Iraq was pursuing the atomic bomb.

The Times reported yesterday that administration officials were relieved that the new report (Click for full report in pdf format, it is quite large (618 pages) and may take a while to appear)by a presidential commission had "found no evidence that political pressure from the White House or Pentagon contributed to the mistaken intelligence." Gee, how nice.

Me? I am wondering why no news outlets, no members of congress, no citizen, no one is calling for investigations and charges for the blatant misrepresentation of facts by the now dis-banded Pentagon office, the Office of Special Plans and George Tenant and Paul Wolfowitz.  The office is said to have played a role in the George W. Bush administration's presentation of evidence on Iraq. In what amounted to a direct assault on George Tenet, who was CIA director in the run-up to the Iraq war and gave the president his daily intelligence briefing, the commission found that "the daily reports sent to the president and senior policymakers discussing Iraq over many months proved to be disastrously one-sided."

Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, accused of hyping the intelligence on Iraq in order to pursue a costly war with a deadly aftermath, escaped direct blame.

"The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgements," the report said.

But then they turned right around and added: "It is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom." DUH!

Special Plans, headed by Douglas Feith,  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 the now debunked Ahmad Chalabi.

Created by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (who was wrong in many..err...most of his assumptions regarding Iraq)  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. You might wonder why.

Douglas J. Feith, under secretary of defense for policy,  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." Correct me if I am wrong....George Tenent of the CIA where Special Plans got the info in the first place. "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".

Here is where disbelief comes to the foreground, there was 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. They succeeded too.

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."

Where are the cries for justice? 

Feith 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.

Collusion!  It is the only word I can think of for this kind of  double talking crap.  Feith in his own words said "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."

As for the report's insistence that there was no politicization of intelligence the Times editorial said: "Somehow the panel must have missed the intelligence agents who told reporters for The Times on several prewar occasions that they thought their product was being politicized and that they were pushed to provide evidence to support the Bush administration's claims that Iraq was a threat."

People have died for this politicized intelligence!  Recommendations for a stronger intelligence force is great, but there is more here than meets the eye.  Wolfowitz, Tenant and Feith and most assuredly more...had a hand in this fiasco.  CNN did get one thing right in thier story... "dead-wrong" and Citizens of America must call for the people involved to face the "dead-wrongness" with charges. Our children were sent to war, and died for political gain.  Where will the accountability start, if ever?

The commission called for dramatic change to prevent future failures. It outlined more than 70 recommendations, saying that President Bush must give John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, broaders powers for overseeing the nation's 15 spy agencies.

It also called for sweeping changes at the FBI to combine the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence resources into a new office.

Seymour Hersh 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."

Perhaps, though, I'm being too unkind to the likes of Feith and similarly-minded liars. Sure, they've all prodded us into a criminal war that's knocked off 1500 American soldiers and 100,000 innocent Iraqis, physically and emotionally crippled countless others, poisoned an entire country with depleted uranium for generations to come, cost the U.S. untold billions of dollars, invited worldwide enmity, and provided genuine terrorists a country-sized training facility absolutely scot-free, not to mention their organizers a guaranteed pool of jihadist trainees for decades down the IED-laden road, but what the hell, right?

Mr. Hersh, "lying" was not a strong enough word.

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