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.
A key target is a four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi President Saddam Hussein 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 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 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 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."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the many similar reports from the majour news services (including the news wire services, CBC, CNN, BBC - to name a few). And British (un)intelligence has been shown in a similar light. The CIA is even investigating how its intel was utilized and possibly abused by the Pentagon and the Executive Branch. Is British intelligence still using (outdated, and edited) student papers as part of its intel research? And, what happened to those two or three Iraqi ships that fled Iraq, and that the US and the British had intelligence were carrying WMD's? Or the intel preceding the Iraqi invasion / occupation, that was later shown to be either forged or wrong. Presumably, the same intelligence was used in finalizing of the regime change / invasion of Iran by the US (and possibly and most probably, with the UK in tow) and US-sponsored, counter-Irani terrorists (I guess the US believes it takes terrorists to fight so-called terrorists). At any rate, dozens of US and UK companies are raking in hundreds of millions to billions of dollars from the sale of Iraqi oil as they rebuild Iraq (followed soon enough by Iran) and the Middle East in their image. "God Bless Iraq", but we'll decide 'which of your Gods.' Democracy, but we'll decide who may run for office. Trade, but we'll decide with whom and when. By some estimates, it may be two to even three years before Iraqi will seem fit to be a sovereign nation and run its own affairs. Afghanistan is no closer to sovereignty after nearly two years, and Afghanis continue to be killed on a daily basis - along with the odd allied soldier. Nation building is not as easy at is looks on paper (the US Republicans know this all to well as they, time after time, berated the Clinton administration for so-called nation building in the Balkans), especially when the people do not welcome the conquerors. And over time, the resentment will turn to violent rage. In the Middle East, time runs fast as patience is quickly exhausted. A lesson well learned from previous occupations (Turks and the British to name a few). And if you think the Arab World will tolerate the future US/UK-sponsored regime changes in Iran, Syria, etc., then you have a big and unpleasant surprise at the end of the tunnel. They 'tolerated' the conquest of Iran, but it would not serve their 'interests' to allow the conquest of the Middle East. And one conservative think tank that I know enough, has the same reservations and concerns. Bush's holy crusade against evil does not end here, and it will not end in accordance to his twisted game plan. Terrorists are not born, they are made. Often made by occupations. And even some Bush administration insiders are concerned that the Iraqi situation has hurt the war on terrorism. So no WMD's discovered in Iraq, destablized Middle East (Israel and Palestine are far from peace, and a few more terrorist attacks will settle that), mounting historical / monsterous deficits/ debt for the US (on the brink of bankruptcy), and a faltering war on terrorism. Are we sure Bush has given up his drinking and other nasty habits?
----
Cheers,
Dan
Founder and CEO
LionsGate Creative GoodPassRobot Magelln