Tenet Tells Senators, Wolfowitz Committee Gave White House Dubious
Intelligence
By Jason Leopold
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4157.htm
05/13/03: (Information Clearing House) When George Tenet, the director
of the CIA, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last
week about dubious intelligence data on the Iraqi threat that made it
into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, he said
an ad-hoc committee called the Office of Special Plans, set up Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Policy Douglas Feith and other high-profile hawks rewrote the
intelligence information on Iraq that the CIA gathered and gave it to
White House officials to help Bush build a case for war, according to
three Senators on the intelligence committee.
Tenet told the Intelligence Committee that his own spies at the CIA
determined that much of the intelligence information they collected on
Iraq could not prove that the country was an imminent threat nor could
they find any concrete evidence that Iraq was stockpiling a cache of
chemical and biological weapons. But the Office of Special Plans,
using Iraqi defectors from the Iraqi National Congress as their main
source, rewrote some of the CIA's intelligence to say, undeniably,
that Iraq was hiding some of the world's most lethal weapons. Once the
intelligence was rewritten, it was delivered to the office of National
Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, where it found its way into various
public speeches given by Vice President ***** Cheney, Deputy Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush, the Senators said.
Moreover, these Senators allege that the office of the Vice President
and the National Security Council were fully aware that the
intelligence Wolfowitz's committee collected may not have been
reliable. The Senators said they are discussing privately whether to
ask Wolfowitz to testify before a Senate hearing in the near future to
determine how large of a role his Special Plans committee played in
providing the President with intelligence data on Iraq and whether
that information was reliable or beefed up to help build a case for
war.
A week ago, Tenet claimed responsibilty for allowing the White House
to use the now disputed claim that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium
from Niger to build an atomic bomb in Bush's State of the Union
address. Last week, these Senators and a CIA intelligence official
said the Office of Special Plans urged the White House to use the
uranium claim in Bush's speech.
But Democrats in the Senate are now asking what role the secret
committee set up by Wolfowitz played in hyping the intelligence on
Iraq's weapons programs.
Secretary of State Colin Powell appears to be the only White House
official who questioned the accuracy of the intelligence information
coming out of the Office of Special Plans. A day before he was set to
appear before the United Nations Feb. 5 to argue about the Iraqi
threat and to urge the Council to support military action against the
country, Powell omitted numerous claims provided to him by the Office
of Special Plans about Iraq's weapons program because the information
was unreliable, according to an early February report in U.S. News and
World Report.
Powell was so disturbed about the questionable intelligence on Iraq's
alleged weapons of mass destruction that he put together a team of
experts to review the information he was given before his speech to
the U.N.
Much of the information Powell's speech was provided by Wolfowitz's
Office of Special Plans, the magazine reported, to counter the
uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq.
Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's
banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, the
magazine said. At one point, he became so infuriated at the lack of
adequate sourcing by the Office of Special Plans to intelligence
claims he said, "I'm not reading this. This is *****," according to
the magazine.
Spokespeople for Wolfowitz, Rice and the Vice President all denied the
accusations, saying it was the CIA who provided the White House with
the bulk of intelligence on Iraq and that there is no reason to
believe the information isn't accurate. Tenet's spokespeople would not
return several calls for comment.
Separately, the CIA, earlier this year, brought back four retired
officials, led by former CIA deputy director Richard Kerr, to examine
the agency's pre-war intelligence and reporting on the Iraqi threat.
Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board is also probing the issue, but whether any of the
investigations include the Office of Special Plans is still undecided.
Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter for the New Yorker, wrote an
expose on the Office of Special Plans in May. In his story, he claims
a Pentagon adviser told him that the committee "was created in order
to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close
ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical,
biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the
region and, potentially, the United States."
Feith, in a rare Pentagon briefing in May, denied that the Office of
Special Plans was cherry-picking intelligence information to build a
case for war in Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans "was not involved in intelligence
collection," Feith said. "Rather, it relied on reporting from the CIA
and other parts of the intelligence community. Its job was to review
this intelligence to help digest it for me and other policymakers, to
help us develop Defense Department strategy for the war on terrorism…
in the course of its work, this team, in reviewing the intelligence
that was provided to us by the CIA and the intelligence community,
came up with some interesting observations about the linkages between
Iraq and al Qaeda."
To date, however, the Pentagon has failed to provide any proof of a
link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
Still, the OSP or "The Cabal," as the group calls itself, according to
the New Yorker story, played a significant role in convincing the
White House that Iraq was a threat to its neighbors in the Middle East
and to the United States. But the intelligence information and the
Iraqi defectors the group relied heavily upon to prove its case were
widely off the mark. For example, according to one CIA intelligence
official in charge of weapons of mass destruction for the agency, the
OSP is responsible for providing thee White House with the information
that thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were
intended for a secret nuclear weapons program.
Bush said last September in a speech that attempts by Iraq to acquire
the tubes point to a clandestine program to make enriched uranium for
nuclear bombs. But experts contradicted Bush, saying that the evidence
is ambiguous at best. It was later determined by the International
Atomic Energy Agency that the tubes were designed to was to build
rockets rather than for centrifuges to enrich uranium.
Furthermore, the Iraqi defectors feeding the OSP with information
about the locations of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction were
said to be unreliable and responsible for sending U.S. military forces
on a "wild goose chase," according to another CIA intelligence
official.
Case in point: In 2001, an Iraqi defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed
al-Haideri, told the OSP he had visited twenty secret facilities for
chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Saeed, a civil engineer,
supported his claims with stacks of Iraqi government contracts,
complete with technical specifications. Saeed said Iraq used companies
to purchase equipment with the blessing of the United Nations - and
then secretly used the equipment for their weapons programs. He
claimed that chemical and biological weapons labs could be found in
hospitals and presidential palaces, which turned out to be completely
untrue, when the locations were searched.
The OSP provided the National Security Council with Saeed's findings
last year and the information found its way into a White House report
in December called, "Iraq: A Decade of Deception and Defiance"
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/decade/sect3.html
But the information never held up and turned out to be another big
intelligence failure for the Bush administration. Judith Miller first
brought the existence of Saeed to light in a New York Times story in
December 2001 and again in January. The White House, in September
2002, cited the information provided by Saeed in a fact sheet.
Whether a bipartisan probe into the OSP is convened remain to be seen,
but one thing is certain, the committee of pseudo spies wields an
enormous amount of power.
Larry C. Johnson, a former counter-terrorism expert at the CIA and the
State Department, says he's spoken to his colleagues working for both
agencies and its clear that the OSP has politicized the intelligence
process.
"What they're experiencing now is the worst political pressure. Anyone
who attempted to challenge or rebut OSP was accused of rocking the
boat. OSP came in with an agenda that they were predisposed to
believe," he said.
Vinnie Cannistrano, who worked for the CIA for 27 years, told the
National Journal last month that the OSP "incorporated a lot of
debatable intelligence, and it was not coordinated with the
intelligence community."
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