Misleading accomplished

Doug Feith just won't go away.

Promoters of the "Bush Lied, People Died" line claim that the recent Pentagon inspector general's report concerning my former office's work on Iraq intelligence supports their cause. What the IG actually said is a different story.

Man, he wastes no time in obfuscating and misdirecting. "Promoters of the 'Bush Lied, People Died'" line is the tip-off that we're dealing with imaginary faeries and strawmen.

The IG, Thomas Gimble, focused on a single Pentagon briefing from 2002 -- a critique of the CIA's work on the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship. His report concluded that the work my office generated was entirely lawful and authorized, and that Sen. Carl Levin was wrong to allege that we misled Congress.

Gimble made Levin happy, however, by calling the Pentagon briefing "inappropriate," a word the senator has whipped into a political lather. At issue is a simple but critical question: whether policy officials should be free to raise questions about CIA work. In Gimble's opinion, apparently, the answer is no. I disagree.

"Inappropriate." Indeed.

Back to "The stupidest fucking guy on the planet."

In evaluating our policy toward Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001, my office realized that CIA analysts were suppressing some of their information. They excluded reports conflicting with their favored theory: that the secular Iraqi Baathist regime would not cooperate with al-Qaeda jihadists. (We now face a strategic alliance of jihadists and former Baathists in Iraq.) Pentagon officials did not buy that theory, and in 2002 they gave a briefing that reflected their skepticism. Their aim was not to enthrone a different theory, but to urge the CIA not to exclude any relevant information from what it provided to policymakers. Only four top-level government officials received the briefing: Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and (together) Stephen Hadley and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Innocently, they "realized" that the CIA was suppressing information that "conflicted with their pet theory." Right. In my recollection, it was Feith's "Office of Special Plans" crew that were pushing a "pet theory:" namely, that Iraq and al Qaeda were linked. The CIA was "suppressing" that because it's the CIA's job to sort through real intelligence and the ravings of nut jobs. According to Sy Hersh:

Last October [2002], an article in the Times reported that Rumsfeld had ordered up an intelligence operation “to search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists” that might have been overlooked by the C.I.A. When Rumsfeld was asked about the story at a Pentagon briefing, he was initially vague. “I’m told that after September 11th a small group, I think two to start with, and maybe four now . . . were asked to begin poring over this mountain of information that we were receiving on intelligence-type things.” He went on to say, “You don’t know what you don’t know. So in comes the daily briefer”—from the C.I.A.—“and she walks through the daily brief. And I ask questions. ‘Gee, what about this?’ or ‘What about that? Has somebody thought of this?’ ” At the same briefing, Rumsfeld said that he had already been informed that there was “solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members.”

If Special Plans was going to search for new intelligence on Iraq, the most obvious source was defectors with firsthand knowledge. The office inevitably turned to Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. The I.N.C., an umbrella organization for diverse groups opposed to Saddam, is constantly seeking out Iraqi defectors. The Special Plans Office developed a close working relationship with the I.N.C., and this strengthened its position in disputes with the C.I.A. and gave the Pentagon’s pro-war leadership added leverage in its constant disputes with the State Department. Special Plans also became a conduit for intelligence reports from the I.N.C. to officials in the White House.

But back, one last time, to Feith:

A 2004 Senate intelligence committee report praised the quality of the Pentagon's Iraq-al-Qaeda work -- the critical briefing and the related Pentagon-CIA dialogue. The policy officials "played by [intelligence community] rules" and asked questions that "actually improved the Central Intelligence Agency's products," it said. Levin and Sen. Jay Rockefeller both endorsed that judgment.

Um, not exactly, as David Corn wwrote in The Nation:

In an addendum to the report, Rockefeller and two other Democratic members of the committee--Carl Levin and Richard Durbin--criticize Roberts' decision to put off this part of the investigation. They note:

In the months before the production of the Intelligence Community's October 2002 Estimate, Administration officials undertook a relentless public campaign which repeatedly characterized the Iraq weapons of mass destruction program in more ominous and threatening terms than the Intelligence Community analysis substantiated. Similarly, public statements of senior officials on Iraqi links to terrorism generally, and Al Qaeda specifically, were often based on a selective release of intelligence information that implied a cooperative, operational relationship that the Intelligence Community did not believe existed."

In addition to casting all the blame at the CIA, the Senate intelligence committee also helps the Administration by declaring that the intelligence community's mistakes were not made in response to pressure from the hawks of the Bush White House. "The Committee found no evidence," the report says, "that the [intelligence community's] mischaracterization of exaggeration of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities was the result of political pressure."

But Rockefeller, Levin and Durbin argue that Bush officials made "high-profile statements" about the threat from Iraq "in advance of any meaningful intelligence analysis and created pressure on the Intelligence Community to conform to the certainty contained in the pronouncements." More specifically, they point to a statement made by Richard Kerr, a former deputy CIA director who conducted an internal review of US intelligence on Iraq. He said, "There was a lot of pressure [on the analysts], no question. The White House, State, Defense, were raising questions, heavily on WMD and the issue of terrorism. Why did you select this information rather than that? Why have you downplayed this particular thing?.... Sure, I heard that some of the analysts felt pressure." The CIA ombudsman, according to this addendum, told the committee "that he felt the 'hammering' by the Bush Administration on Iraq intelligence was harder that he had previously witnessed in his thirty-two-year career with the agency. Several analysts he spoke with [who were involved in preparing a report on Iraq and Al Qaeda] mentioned pressure and gave the sense that they felt the constant questions and pressure to reexamine issues were unreasonable." Tenet, too, told the committee that some agency officials raised with him the issue of pressure.

I just don't understand why The Washington Post feels the need to provide a platform for former Bush administration officials to continue to peddle long-discredited claims that they were innocent victims of the CIA or didn't support the invasion in the first place, or whatever. It's old and it's tiresome. Perhaps, in the Post's defense, the paper's just trying to give its on-line readers' a chance to blow off a little uncivil steam.