Transcript of ElBaradei's U.N. presentation
Friday, March 7, 2003 Posted: 12:39 PM EST (1739 GMT)

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei presents his report Friday to the U.N. Security Council.


(CNN) -- Following is a transcript of International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei's March 7 presentation to the U.N. Security Council on the progress of the inspection effort in Iraq.

ElBaradei: Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, my report to the council today is an update on the status of the International Atomic Energy Agency's nuclear verification activities in Iraq pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1441 and other relevant resolutions.

When I reported last to the council on February 14, I explained that the agency's inspection activities has moved well beyond the reconnaissance phase -- that is, re-establishing our knowledge base regarding Iraq nuclear capabilities -- into the investigative phase, which focuses on the central question before the IAEA relevant to disarmament -- whether Iraq has revived or attempted to revive its defunct nuclear weapons program over the last four years.

At the outset, let me state on general observation, namely that during the past four years at the majority of Iraqi sites industrial capacity has deteriorated substantially due to the departure of the foreign support that was often present in the late '80s, the departure of large numbers of skilled Iraqi personnel in the past decade and the lack of consistent maintenance by Iraq of sophisticated equipment.

At only a few inspected sites involved in industrial research, development and manufacturing have the facilities been improved and new personnel been taken on.

This overall deterioration in industrial capacity is naturally of direct relevance to Iraq's capability for resuming a nuclear weapons program.

The IAEA has now conducted a total of 218 nuclear inspections at 141 sites, including 21 that have not been inspected before. In addition, the agency experts have taken part in many joint UNMOVIC [U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission]-IAEA inspections.

Technical support for nuclear inspections has continued to expand. The three operational air samplers have collected from key locations in Iraq weekly air particulate samples that are being sent to laboratories for analysis. Additional results of water, sediment, vegetation and material sample analysis have been received from the relevant laboratories.

Our vehicle-borne radiation survey team has covered some 2,000 kilometers over the past three weeks. Survey access has been gained to over 75 facilities, including military garrisons and camps, weapons factories, truck parks and manufacturing facilities and residential areas.

Interviews have continued with relevant Iraqi personnel, at times with individuals and groups in the workplace during the course of unannounced inspections, and on other occasions in pre-arranged meetings with key scientists and other specialists known to have been involved with Iraq's past nuclear program.

The IAEA has continued to conduct interviews, even when the conditions were not in accordance with the IAEA-preferred modalities, with a view to gaining as much information as possible -- information that could be cross-checked for validity with other sources and which could be helpful in our assessment of areas under investigation.

As you may recall, when we first began to request private, unescorted interviews, the Iraqi interviewees insisted on taping the interviews and keeping the recorded tapes. Recently, upon our insistence, individuals have been consenting to being interviewed without escort and without a taped record. The IAEA has conducted two such private interviews in the last 10 days, and hope that its ability to conduct private interviews will continue unhindered, including possibly interviews outside Iraq.

I should add that we are looking into further refining the modalities for conducting interviews to ensure that they are conducted freely and to alleviate concerns that interviews are being listened to by other Iraqi parties. In our view, interviews outside Iraq may be the best way to ensure that interviews are free, and we intend therefore to request such interviews shortly.

We are also asking other states to enable us to conduct interviews with former Iraqi scientists that now reside in those states.

Mr. President, in the last few weeks, Iraq has provided a considerable volume of documentation relevant to the issues I reported earlier as being of particular concern, including Iraq's efforts to procure aluminum tubes, its attempted procurement of magnets and magnets-production capabilities and its reported attempt to import uranium.

I will touch briefly on the progress made on each of these issues.

Since my last update to the council, the primary technical focus of IAEA field activities in Iraq has been on resolving several outstanding issues related to the possible resumption of efforts by Iraq to enrich uranium through the use of centrifuge. For that purpose, the IAEA assembled a specially qualified team of international centrifuge manufacturing experts.

With regard to the aluminum tubes, the IAEA has conducted a thorough investigation of Iraq's attempt to purchase large quantities of high-strength aluminum tubes. As previously reported, Iraq has maintained that these aluminum tubes were sold for rocket production.

Extensive field investigation and document analysis have failed to uncover any evidence that Iraq intended to use these 81-millimeter tubes for any project other than the reverse engineering of rockets.

The Iraqi decision-making process with regard to the design of these rockets was well-documented. Iraq has provided copies of design documents, procurement records, minutes of committee meetings and supporting data and samples.

A thorough analysis of this information, together with information gathered from interviews with Iraqi personnel, has allowed the IAEA to develop a coherent picture of attempted purchase and intended usage of the 81-millimeter aluminum tubes as well as the rationale behind the changes in the tolerance.

Drawing on this information, the IAEA has learned that the original tolerance for the 81-millimeter tubes were set prior to 1987 and were based on physical measurements taken from a small number of imported rockets in Iraq's possession.

Initial attempts to reverse-engineer the rockets met with little success. Tolerance were adjusted during the following years as part of ongoing efforts to revitalize a project and improve operational efficiency. The project language for a long period during this time became the subject of several committees, which resulted in the specification and tolerance changes on each occasion.

Based on available evidence, the IAEA team has concluded that Iraq efforts to import these aluminum tubes were not likely to have been related to the manufacture of centrifuge, and moreover that it was highly unlikely that Iraq could have achieved the considerable redesign needed to use them in a revived centrifuge program.

However, this issue will continue to be scrutinized and investigated.

With respect to reports about Iraq efforts to import high-strength permanent magnets or to achieve the capability for producing such magnets for use in a centrifuge enrichment program, I should note that since 1998 Iraq has purchased high-strength magnets for various uses.

Iraq has declared inventories of magnets of 12 different designs. The IAEA has verified that previously acquired magnets have been used for missile guidance systems, industrial machinery, electricity meters and field telephones.

Through visits to research and production sites, review of engineering drawings and analysis of sample magnets, the IAEA experts familiar with the use of such magnets in centrifuge enrichment have verified that none of the magnets that Iraq has declared could be used directly for centrifuge magnetic bearings.

In June 2001, Iraq signed a contract for a new magnet production line for delivery and installation in 2003. The delivery has not yet occurred, and Iraqi documentations and interviews of Iraqi personnel indicate that this contract will not be executed.

However, they have concluded that the replacement of foreign procurement with domestic magnet production seems reasonable from an economic point of view.

In addition, the training and experience acquired by Iraq in pre-1991 period make it likely that Iraq possesses the expertise to manufacture high-strength permanent magnets suitable for use in enrichment centrifuges. The IAEA will continue, therefore, to monitor and inspect equipment and materials that could be used to make magnets for enrichment centrifuges.

With regard to uranium acquisition, the IAEA has made progress in its investigation into reports that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger in recent years. The investigation was centered on documents provided by a number of states that pointed to an agreement between Niger and Iraq for the sale of uranium between 1999 and 2001.

The IAEA has discussed these reports with the governments of Iraq and Israel, both of which have denied that any such activity took place.

For its part, Iraq has provided the IAEA with a comprehensive explanation of its relations with Niger and has described a visit by an Iraqi official to a number of African countries, including Niger in February 1999, which Iraq thought might have given rise to the reports.

The IAEA was able to review correspondence coming from various bodies of the government of Niger and to compare the form, format, contents and signature of that correspondence with those of the alleged procurement-related documentation.

Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded with the concurrence of outside experts that these documents which formed the basis for the report of recent uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic. We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded. However, we will continue to follow up any additional evidence if it emerges relevant to efforts by Iraq to illicitly import nuclear materials.

Many concerns regarding Iraq's possible intention to resume its nuclear program have arisen from Iraq's procurement efforts reported by a number of states. In addition, many of Iraq's efforts to procure commodities and products, including magnets and aluminum tubes, have been conducted in contravention of the sanctions specified under Security Council Resolution 661 and other relevant resolutions.

The issue of procurement efforts remains under thorough investigation, and further verification will be forthcoming. In fact, an IAEA team of technical experts is currently in Iraq, composed of custom investigators and computer forensics specialists, to conduct a -- which is conducting a series of investigations [through] inspection of trading companies and commercial organizations aimed at understanding Iraq's pattern of procurement.

Mr. President, in conclusion, I am able to report today that in the area of nuclear weapons, the most lethal weapons of mass destruction, inspections in Iraq are moving forward.

Since the resumption of inspection a little over three months ago, and particularly during the three weeks since my last ordered report to the council, the IAEA has made important progress in identifying what nuclear-related capabilities remain in Iraq and in its assessment of whether Iraq has made any effort to revive its past nuclear program during the intervening four years since inspections were brought to a halt.

At this stage, the following can be stated:

One, there is no indication of resumed nuclear activities in those buildings that were identified through the use of satellite imagery as being reconstructed or newly erected since 1998, nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any inspected sites.

Second, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990.

Three, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminum tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment. Moreover, even had Iraq pursued such a plan, it would have encountered practical difficulties in manufacturing centrifuge out of the aluminum tubes in question.

Fourth, although we are still reviewing issues related to magnets and magnet-production, there is no indication to date that Iraq imported magnets for use in centrifuge enrichment program.

As I stated above, the IAEA will naturally continue further to scrutinize and investigate all of the above issues.

After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq.

We intend to continue our inspection activities, making use of all additional rights granted to us by Resolution 1441 and all additional tools that might be available to us, including reconnaissance platforms and all relevant technologies.

We also hope to continue to receive from states actionable information relevant to our mandate.

I should note that in the past three weeks, possibly as a result of ever-increasing pressure by the international community, Iraq has been forthcoming in its cooperation, particularly with regard to the conduct of private interviews and in making available evidence that could contribute to the resolution of matters of IAEA concern. I do hope that Iraq will continue to expand the scope and accelerate the pace of its cooperation.

The detailed knowledge of Iraq capabilities that IAEA experts have accumulated since 1991, combined with the extended rights provided by Resolution 1441, the active commitment by all states to help us fulfill our mandate and the recently increased level of Iraqi cooperation should enable us in the near future to provide the Security Council with an objective and thorough assessment of Iraq's nuclear-related capabilities.

However, credible this assessment may be, we will endeavor, in view of the inherent uncertainties associated with any verification process, and particularly in the light of Iraq past record of cooperation, to evaluate Iraq capabilities on a continuous basis as part of our long-term monitoring and verification program in order to provide the international community with ongoing and real-time assurances.

Thank you, Mr. President.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/07/sprj.irq....ript.elbaradei/

Kwame Holman provides background on the British government's intelligence dossier against Iraq and the debate in parliament over whether to take action.
Follow-up Discussion



KWAME HOLMAN: British Prime Minister Tony Blair has stood almost shoulder to shoulder with President Bush over recent months, as the President has tried to rally international support for tough action against Saddam Hussein. Blair's position has not been a politically popular one with the people of Great Britain, including many within his majority Labour Party, and some within his own cabinet as well. The resignation of one, possibly two, cabinet ministers has been rumored for days.
SPOKESMAN: Order, order.

KWAME HOLMAN: It's against that backdrop that Blair asked the House of Commons be recalled today, a month early from summer recess, so he could disclose the findings of a 50-page British intelligence dossier on Iraq's possession of, and ability to develop, weapons of mass destruction.

TONY BLAIR: It concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons; that Saddam has continued to produce them; that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population; and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability.

KWAME HOLMAN: Blair insisted Saddam Hussein has rebuilt his biological weapons facilities.

TONY BLAIR: The biological agents we eve Iraq can produce include anthrax, botulinum, toxin, aflatoxin, and ricin. All eventually result in excruciatingly painful death.

KWAME HOLMAN: And Blair outlined the steps Saddam Hussein allegedly has taken to develop nuclear weapons.

TONY BLAIR: Saddam has bought or attempted to buy specialized vacuum pumps of the design needed for the gas centrifuge cascade to enrich uranium; an entire magnet production line of the specification for use in the motors and top bearings of gas centrifuges; dual-use products such as anhydrous hydrogen fluoride and fluoride gas, which can be used both in petrochemicals, but also in gas centrifuge cascades; a filament winding machine, which can be used to manufacture carbon fiber gas centrifuge rotors; and has attempted, covertly, to acquire 60,000 or more specialized aluminum tubes, which are subject to strict controls due to their potential use in the construction of gas centrifuges. In addition, we know Saddam has been trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Africa, though we do not know whether he has been successful.

KWAME HOLMAN: Blair encouraged members of parliament to pay special attention to that part of the dossier dealing with Saddam Hussein's human rights record.

TONY BLAIR; I say, read also about the routine butchering of political opponents; the prison "cleansing" regimes in which thousands die; the torture chambers and hideous penalties supervised by him and his family and detailed by Amnesty International. Read it all, and again, I defy anyone to say that this cruel and sadistic dictator should be allowed any possibility of getting his hands on more chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

KWAME HOLMAN: The prime minister addressed the benefits of a regime change in Iraq, and conceded military action might be necessary.

TONY BLAIR: But our purpose is disarmament. No one wants military conflict. The whole purpose of putting this before the United Nations is to demonstrate the united determination of the international community to resolve this in the way it should have been resolved years ago: Through a proper process of disarmament under the UN. Disarmament of all weapons of mass destruction is the demand. One way or another, it must be acceded to.

KWAME HOLMAN: Support for the prime minister came from the Conservative Party, the official opposition, and its leader, Ian Duncan Smith.

IAN DUNCAN SMITH: Mr. Speaker, no one wants to see British troops or any other troops engaged in war. War should be the last resort when all other efforts have failed. But Britain should never shy away from its responsibilities in time of international crisis.

KWAME HOLMAN: But there were questions for the prime minister not addressed in the dossier.

IAN TAYLOR, Conservative Party: Can the Prime Minister reassure us that he has had big conversations with President Bush as to how we handle what will be a very uncertain situation in the Middle East even if Saddam Hussein is removed?

TONY BLAIR: There is a later time when some of these questions should Saddam not comply have to be answered, and these obviously very important questions to which we should give careful thought.

KWAME HOLMAN: Criticism was voiced by the Liberal Democrats. Its leader Charles Kennedy was concerned the prime minister already was favoring military action.

CHARLES KENNEDY, Leader, Liberal Democrats Party: For those of us who have never subscribed to British unilateralism, we are not about to sign up to American unilateralism now either.

KWAME HOLMAN: Kennedy proceeded with a litany of questions and comments that lasted more than eight minutes, testing the patience of Blair's supporters.

CHARLES KENNEDY: And that is why the political emphasis must be on getting the inspectors back in. The worry has to be, from this side of the Atlantic, that even if that had been conceded, that has not been the primary interest to the government of the United States. Finally, Mr. Speaker.. does the prime minister..

SPOKESMEN: Here, here!

CHARLES KENNEDY: ...I'm only asking questions unasked...

SPOKESMEN: Here, here!

TONY BLAIR: The one thing I am sure of is there is no topic of a proper weapons regime going back in there and doing its job unless Saddam knows that the alternative to that is he is forced to comply with the UN will.

KWAME HOLMAN: But throughout the day most of the concern came from Blair's side of the chamber from the Labour Party.

BARRY GARDINER, Labour Party: The prime minister knows that action against Iraq that is supported by the authority of United Nations would be acceptable to the vast majority of MP's across this House… Does he agree with me that those mps who oppose independent action must explain why some things they believe to be right and justified when undertaken by nations together becomes wrong and unjustified if we should act alone.

TONY BLAIR: What I would say to my old friend is this: That, well, what I would say is this: That is -- the point that he made is exactly why the United Nations has got to be the way of resolving this issue. That is why I think it was right that President Bush made it very clear to the UN General that the United Nations itself was faced with a challenge and that's why it's important that challenge is met and the UN resolutions are implemented.

KWAME HOLMAN: It appears Blair still has more convincing to do. Members of his own Labour Party are leading a petition drive in the House of Commons expressing their deep unease about military action against Iraq.


http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/europe/july...itain_9-24.html

Dowing Street Memo

As originally reported in the The Sunday Times, May 1, 2005
SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY

DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad US options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

( Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.

( The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

© CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.

(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)

MATTHEW RYCROFT

(Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide)

[end text - emphasis added]

http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/memos.html

Other Downing Street Memos.

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Foreign Secretary Jack Straw Memo
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Plain text transcription
March 25, 2002 memo from Jack Straw (UK Foreign Secretary) to Tony Blair in preparation for Blair’s visit to Bush’s Crawford ranch, covering Iraq-al Qaida linkage, legality of invasion, weapons inspectors and post-war considerations.
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British Foreign Office Political Director Peter Ricketts Letter
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March 22, 2002 memo from Peter Ricketts (Political Director, UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office) to Jack Straw (UK Foreign Secretary) providing Ricketts’ advice for the Prime Minister on issues of the threat posed by Iraq, connections to al Qaida, post-war considerations and working with the UN.
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British Ambassador Christopher Meyer Letter
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March 18, 2002 memo from Christopher Meyer (UK ambassador to the US) to David Manning (UK Foreign Policy Advisor) recounting Meyer’s meeting with Paul Wolfowitz (US Deputy Secretary of Defense).
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Chief Foreign Policy Advisor David Manning Memo
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Plain text transcription
March 14, 2002 memo from David Manning (UK Foreign Policy Advisor) to Tony Blair recounting Manning’s meetings with his US counterpart Condoleeza Rice (National Security Advisor), and advising Blair for his upcoming visit to Bush’s Crawford ranch.
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Iraq Options
PDF scanned document
Plain text transcription
March 8, 2002 memo from Overseas and Defence Secretariat Cabinet Office outlining military options for implementing regime change.
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Iraq: Legal Background
PDF scanned document
Plain text transcription
March 8, 2002 memo from UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (office of Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary) to Tony Blair advising him on the legality of the use of force against Iraq.




http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/memos.html

Excerpts from the State of the Union regarding Iraq


Excerpt from President's Remarks
Click here for full transcript

Our nation and the world must learn the lessons of the Korean Peninsula and not allow an even greater threat to rise up in Iraq. A brutal dictator, with a history of reckless aggression, with ties to terrorism, with great potential wealth, will not be permitted to dominate a vital region and threaten the United States. (Applause.)

Twelve years ago, Saddam Hussein faced the prospect of being the last casualty in a war he had started and lost. To spare himself, he agreed to disarm of all weapons of mass destruction. For the next 12 years, he systematically violated that agreement. He pursued chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, even while inspectors were in his country. Nothing to date has restrained him from his pursuit of these weapons -- not economic sanctions, not isolation from the civilized world, not even cruise missile strikes on his military facilities.

Almost three months ago, the United Nations Security Council gave Saddam Hussein his final chance to disarm. He has shown instead utter contempt for the United Nations, and for the opinion of the world. The 108 U.N. inspectors were sent to conduct -- were not sent to conduct a scavenger hunt for hidden materials across a country the size of California. The job of the inspectors is to verify that Iraq's regime is disarming. It is up to Iraq to show exactly where it is hiding its banned weapons, lay those weapons out for the world to see, and destroy them as directed. Nothing like this has happened.

The United Nations concluded in 1999 that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax -- enough doses to kill several million people. He hasn't accounted for that material. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed it.

The United Nations concluded that Saddam Hussein had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin -- enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure. He hadn't accounted for that material. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed it.

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands. He's not accounted for these materials. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them -- despite Iraq's recent declaration denying their existence. Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.

The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary; he is deceiving. From intelligence sources we know, for instance, that thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors, sanitizing inspection sites and monitoring the inspectors themselves. Iraqi officials accompany the inspectors in order to intimidate witnesses.

Iraq is blocking U-2 surveillance flights requested by the United Nations. Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as the scientists inspectors are supposed to interview. Real scientists have been coached by Iraqi officials on what to say. Intelligence sources indicate that Saddam Hussein has ordered that scientists who cooperate with U.N. inspectors in disarming Iraq will be killed, along with their families.

Year after year, Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction. But why? The only possible explanation, the only possible use he could have for those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate, or attack.

With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in that region. And this Congress and the America people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes. (Applause.)

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option. (Applause.)

The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages -- leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained -- by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning. (Applause.)

And tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country -- your enemy is ruling your country. (Applause.) And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation. (Applause.)

The world has waited 12 years for Iraq to disarm. America will not accept a serious and mounting threat to our country, and our friends and our allies. The United States will ask the U.N. Security Council to convene on February the 5th to consider the facts of Iraq's ongoing defiance of the world. Secretary of State Powell will present information and intelligence about Iraqi's legal -- Iraq's illegal weapons programs, its attempt to hide those weapons from inspectors, and its links to terrorist groups.

We will consult. But let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him. (Applause.)

Tonight I have a message for the men and women who will keep the peace, members of the American Armed Forces: Many of you are assembling in or near the Middle East, and some crucial hours may lay ahead. In those hours, the success of our cause will depend on you. Your training has prepared you. Your honor will guide you. You believe in America, and America believes in you. (Applause.)

Sending Americans into battle is the most profound decision a President can make. The technologies of war have changed; the risks and suffering of war have not. For the brave Americans who bear the risk, no victory is free from sorrow. This nation fights reluctantly, because we know the cost and we dread the days of mourning that always come.

We seek peace. We strive for peace. And sometimes peace must be defended. A future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all. If war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means -- sparing, in every way we can, the innocent. And if war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the United States military -- and we will prevail. (Applause.)

And as we and our coalition partners are doing in Afghanistan, we will bring to the Iraqi people food and medicines and supplies -- and freedom. (Applause.)

Many challenges, abroad and at home, have arrived in a single season. In two years, America has gone from a sense of invulnerability to an awareness of peril; from bitter division in small matters to calm unity in great causes. And we go forward with confidence, because this call of history has come to the right country.

Americans are a resolute people who have risen to every test of our time. Adversity has revealed the character of our country, to the world and to ourselves. America is a strong nation, and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers.

Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/20...0030128-23.html

Some of these documents are key documents while others are various speculations.

External links and references

Italy's intelligence chief met with Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley just a month before the Niger forgeries first surfaced in by By Laura Rozen October 25, 2005 American Prospect Online

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?sectio...articleId=10506

Italian Faces Pre-War Intelligence Probe October 25, 2005 By ARIEL DAVID in the Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/stor...5369408,00.html

Text of Libby Indictment

http://www.isittreason.com/


"Senate Report on PreWar Intelligence on Iraq" - US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

http://intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf

"Report on Intelligence of Weapons of Mass Destruction" - Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by Lord Butler of Brockwell

http://www.archive2.official-documents.co....c/hc898/898.pdf

"Transcript of UN speech by Colin Powell" - CNN, February 6, 2003

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/02/05/sprj.irq.powell.transcript/

Detailed timeline of Africa-uranium allegation - Center for Cooperative Research

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timelin...icaUraniumClaim

"Who Lied to Whom?" by Seymore M. Hersch, The New Yorker, March 31, 2003.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1

"Fake Iraq documents 'embarrassing' for U.S." CNN, March 14, 2003.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/14/sprj.irq....ents/index.html

"Who Forged the Niger Documents?" interview of Vincent Cannistraro by Ian Masters, Alternet, April 7, 2005.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/21704/

"Cheney's Plan to Nuke Iran" interview of Philip Giraldi by Scott Horton, weekendinterviewshow.com, July 26, 2005

http://weekendinterviewshow.com/InterviewDisplay.aspx?i=118

"Agent behind fake uranium documents worked for France" by Bruce Johnston, News.Telegraph, September 19, 2004

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtm...9/wniger19.xml/

"Italy blames France for Niger uranium claim" by Bruce Johnston, The Telegraph, 05/09/2004

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtm...05/wuran05.xml/

"Franklingate.com (? -Plamegate - yellowcake Niger forged docs,AIPAC-Franklin Rosen Weissman indictment)

http://www.franklingate.com/

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowcake_forgery"

Thank you for your hard work NRNS. This is historic stuff, we should keep it hot.

Thanks Lazyboy. I think these documents and the ones that Snuffy and others have been putting together about Able Danger and the Abramoff investigation will come in handy over the coming days.

Italian lawmaker: U.S. told of WMD forgeries
Senator says Bush administration was warned Iraq documents were fake
The Associated Press
Updated: 5:37 p.m. ET Nov. 3, 2005

ROME - Italian secret services warned the United States months before it invaded Iraq that a dossier about a purported Saddam Hussein effort to buy uranium in Africa was fake, a lawmaker said Thursday after a briefing by the nation’s intelligence chief.

“At about the same time as the State of the Union address, they (Italy’s SISMI secret services) said that the dossier doesn’t correspond to the truth,” Sen. Massimo Brutti told journalists after the parliamentary commission was briefed.

Brutti said the warning was given in January 2003, but he did not know whether it was made before or after President Bush’s speech. Brutti, a leading opposition senator, said SISMI analyzed the documents between October 2002 and January 2003.

The United States and Britain used the claim that Saddam was seeking to buy uranium in Niger to bolster their case for the invasion, which started in March 2003. The intelligence supporting the claim later was deemed unreliable.

Italian lawmakers questioned Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s top aide and SISMI director Nicolo Pollari about allegations that Italy knowingly gave forged documents to Washington and London detailing a purported Iraqi deal to buy 500 tons of uranium concentrate from Niger. The uranium ore, known as yellowcake, can be used to produce nuclear weapons.

Pollari requested the hearing after the allegations were reported last week by the daily newspaper La Repubblica. Pollari and Cabinet Undersecretary Gianni Letta were questioned by members of a parliamentary commission overseeing secret services.

The closed-door session lasted about four hours, and commission members spoke with reporters after it ended.

La Repubblica, a strong Berlusconi opponent, alleged that after the Sept. 11 attacks Pollari was being pressured by Berlusconi to make a strong contribution to the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The Italian leader is a staunch U.S. ally.

Berlusconi’s government has denied any wrongdoing, and the premier has personally defended Pollari amid calls for his resignation.

Berlusconi denies
Berlusconi, in an interview with the conservative daily newspaper Libero published Thursday, said Italy had not passed any documents on the Niger affair to the United States. He added that La Repubblica’s allegations were dangerous for Italy because “if they were believed, we would be considered the instigator” of the Iraq war.

Brutti said the commission was told that the documents were forged by Rocco Martino, whom he described as a former SISMI informant. Both Brutti and commission chairman Enzo Bianco quoted Pollari and Letta as saying no SISMI officials were involved in forging the dossier or in distributing it.

The Niger claim also is at the center of a CIA leak scandal that has shaken the Bush administration, leading to last week’s indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.

Libby was charged with lying to investigators about leaking the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson. Libby pleaded not guilty Thursday.

Wilson accused the administration of covering up his inquiry into whether Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Niger after he found the claim had no substance.
© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9912352/

November 4, 2005
Intelligence
Source of Forged Niger-Iraq Uranium Documents Identified
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
and ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

ROME, Nov. 3 - Italy's spymaster identified an Italian occasional spy named Rocco Martino on Thursday as the disseminator of forged documents that described efforts by Iraq to buy uranium ore from Niger for a nuclear weapons program, three lawmakers said Thursday.

The spymaster, Gen. Nicolò Pollari, director of the Italian military intelligence agency known as Sismi, disclosed that Mr. Martino was the source of the forged documents in closed-door testimony to a parliamentary committee that oversees secret services, the lawmakers said.

Senator Massimo Brutti, a member of the committee, told reporters that General Pollari had identified Mr. Martino as a former intelligence informer who had been "kicked out of the agency." He did not say Mr. Martino was the forger.

The revelation came on a day when the Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that it had shut down its two-year investigation into the origin of the forged documents.

The information about Iraq's desire to acquire the ore, known as yellowcake, was used by the Bush administration to help justify the invasion of Iraq, notably by President Bush in his State of the Union address in January 2003. But the information was later revealed to have been based on forgeries.

The documents were the basis for sending a former diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson IV, on a fact-finding mission to Niger that eventually exploded into an inquiry that led to the indictment and resignation last week of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.

Mr. Martino has long been suspected of being responsible for peddling the false documents. News reports have quoted him as saying he obtained them through a contact at the Niger Embassy here. But this was the first time his role was formally disclosed by the intelligence agency.

Neither Mr. Martino nor his lawyer, Giuseppe Placidi, were available for comment.

Senator Brutti also told reporters that Italian intelligence had warned Washington in early 2003 that the Niger-Iraq documents were false.

"At about the same time as the State of the Union address, they said that the dossier doesn't correspond to the truth," Senator Brutti said. He said he did not know whether the warning was given before or after President Bush's address.

He made the claim more than once, but gave no supporting evidence. Amid confusing statements by various lawmakers, he later appeared to backtrack in conversations with both The Associated Press and Reuters, saying that because Sismi never had the documents, it could not comment on their merit.

There had long been doubts within the United States intelligence community about the authenticity of the yellowcake documents, and references to it had been deleted from other presentations given at the time.

Senator Luigi Malabarba, who also attended Thursday's hearing, said in a telephone interview that General Pollari had told the committee that Mr. Martino was "offering the documents not on behalf of Sismi but on behalf of the French" and that Mr. Martino had told prosecutors in Rome that he was in the service of French intelligence.

A senior French intelligence official interviewed Wednesday in Paris declined to say whether Mr. Martino had been a paid agent of France, but he called General Pollari's assertions about France's responsibility "scandalous."

General Pollari also said that no Italian intelligence agency officials were involved in either forging or distributing the documents, according to both Senator Brutti and the committee chairman, Enzo Bianco.

Committee members said they were shown documents defending General Pollari, including a copy of a classified letter from Robert S. Muller III, the director of the F.B.I., dated July 20, which praised Italy's cooperation with the bureau.

In Washington, an official at the bureau confirmed the substance of the letter, whose contents were first reported Tuesday in the leftist newspaper L'Unità. The letter stated that Italy's cooperation proved the bureau's theory that the false documents were produced and disseminated by one or more people for personal profit, and ruled out the possibility that the Italian service had intended to influence American policy, the newspaper said.

As a result, the letter said, according to both the F.B.I. official and L'Unità, the bureau had closed its investigation into the origin of the documents.

The F.B.I. official declined to be identified by name.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Italy's military intelligence service sent reports to the United States and Britain claiming that Iraq was actively trying to acquire uranium, according to current and former intelligence officials.

Senator Brutti told reporters on Thursday that indeed Sismi had provided information about Iraq's desire to acquire uranium from Niger as early as the 1990's, but that it had never said the information was credible.

Thursday's hearing followed a three-part series in La Repubblica, which said General Pollari had knowingly provided the United States and Britain with forged documents. The newspaper, a staunch opponent of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, also reported that General Pollari had acted at the behest of Mr. Berlusconi, who was said to be eager to help President Bush in the search for weapons in Iraq.

Mr. Berlusconi has denied such accounts.

La Repubblica said General Pollari had held a meeting on Sept. 9, 2002, with Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser. Mr. Hadley, now the national security adviser, has said that he met General Pollari on that date, but that they did not discuss the Niger-Iraq issue.

"Nobody participating in that meeting or asked about that meeting has any recollection of a discussion of natural uranium, or any recollection of any documents being passed," Mr. Hadley told a briefing on Wednesday in Washington. "And that's also my recollection."

At the time, Mr. Hadley took responsibility for including the faulty information in Mr. Bush's State of the Union address.

David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington for this article.


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/04/internat...agewanted=print

Here is that unclassified version of the NIE, it is loaded with qualifiers, probablys and maybes..
http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd/Iraq_Oct_2002.htm

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...-home-headlines


THE CURVEBALL SAGA
How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball'
The Iraqi informant's German handlers say they had told U.S. officials that his information was 'not proven,' and were shocked when President Bush and Colin L. Powell used it in key prewar speeches.

By Bob Drogin and John Goetz, Special to The Times


BERLIN — The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

ADVERTISEMENT

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.

Curveball's German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm.

"This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."

The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst.

Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar U.S. accusations that Baghdad had biological weapons, a commission appointed by Bush reported this year. The commission did not interview Curveball, who still insists his story was true, or the German officials who handled his case.

The German account emerges as the White House is lashing out at domestic critics, particularly Senate Democrats, over allegations the administration manipulated intelligence to go to war. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney called such claims reprehensible and pernicious.

In Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is resuming its long-stalled investigation of the administration's use of prewar intelligence. Committee members said last week that the Curveball case would be a key part of their review. House Democrats are calling for a similar inquiry.

An investigation by The Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the U.S., Germany, England, Iraq and the United Nations, as well as other experts, shows that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case was worse than official reports have disclosed.

The White House, for example, ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball's account. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years.

At the Central Intelligence Agency, officials embraced Curveball's account even though they could not confirm it or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability before the war, punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after the invasion.

After the CIA vouched for Curveball's accounts, Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had "mobile biological weapons labs" designed to produce "germ warfare agents." Bush cited the mobile germ factories in at least four prewar speeches and statements, and other world leaders repeated the charge.

Powell also highlighted Curveball's "eyewitness" account when he warned the United Nations Security Council on the eve of war that Iraq's mobile labs could brew enough weapons-grade microbes "in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people."

The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast when he watched Powell misstate Curveball's claims as a justification for war.

"We were shocked," the official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven…. It was not hard intelligence."

In a telephone interview, Powell said that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, and his top deputies personally assured him before his U.N. speech that U.S. intelligence on the mobile labs was "solid." Since then, Powell said, the case "has totally blown up in our faces."

Many officials interviewed for this report, including the German intelligence officers, spoke on the condition they not be identified because they were bound by secrecy agreements, were not authorized to speak to the news media or because the case involved classified sources and methods.

Curveball lives under an assumed name in southern Germany. The BND has given him a furnished apartment, language lessons and a stipend generous enough that he does not need to work. His wife has emigrated from Iraq, and they have an infant daughter.

The BND has relocated him twice because of concerns that his life was in danger. They still watch him closely. "He is difficult to integrate" into local society, said a BND operations officer. "We are still busy with him."

Curveball could not be interviewed for this report. BND officials threatened last summer to strip him of his salary, housing and protection if he agreed to meet with The Times.

"We told him, 'If you talk to anyone on the outside… you are out and you get no more help from us,' " the BND supervisor said.

CIA officials now concede that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the Internet and what his former co-workers called "water cooler gossip" into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Curveball's motive, CIA officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was seeking a German visa.

German journey

The Curveball chronicle began in November 1999, when the dark-haired Iraqi in his late 20s flew into Munich's Franz Josef Strauss Airport with a tourist visa.

The Baghdad-born chemical engineer promptly applied for political asylum in Arabic and halting English. He told German immigration officials he had embezzled Iraqi government money and faced prison or worse if sent home.

The Germans sent him to Zirndorf, a refugee center near Nuremberg once used for Soviet defectors, where he joined a long line of Iraqi exiles seeking German visas.

Abruptly, his story changed.

He once led a team, he told BND officers, that equipped trucks to brew deadly bio-agents. He named six sites where Iraq might be hiding biological warfare vehicles. Three already were operating. A farm program to boost crop yields was cover for Iraq's new biological weapons production program, he said.

Germany provided Europe's most generous benefits to Iraqi refugees, and several hundred arrived each month. But few had useful credible intelligence on Baghdad's suspected weapons programs. Intelligence agents became accustomed to exaggerated claims.

"The Iraqis were adept at feeding us what we wanted to hear," said a former official of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency who helped debrief about 50 Iraqi emigres in Germany before the war. "Most of it was garbage.''

But for this defector, the Germans assigned two case officers as well as a team of chemists, biologists and other experts. They debriefed him from January 2000 to September 2001.

Since the Iraqi had arrived in Munich, U.S. liaison with German intelligence was assigned to the local DIA team. Their clandestine operating base was an elegant 19th century mansion known as Munich House. There he was assigned his codename: Curveball.

The base cryptonym "ball" was used to signify weapons, two former U.S. intelligence officials said. An earlier informant in Germany, for example, was called Matchball.

In DIA files, Iraqi sources were listed as "red" if U.S. intelligence could interview them. Curveball was a "blue" source, meaning the Germans would not permit U.S. access to him.

Curveball said he hated Americans, the Germans explained.

As a result, the DIA — like the BND — never tried to check Curveball's background or verify his accounts before sending reports to other U.S. intelligence agencies. Despite that failure, CIA analysts accepted the incoming reports as credible and quickly passed them to senior policymakers.

The reports had problems, however. The Germans usually interviewed Curveball in Arabic, using a translator, although the Iraqi sometimes spoke English.

"But a case officer wants to speak directly to his source," said the senior BND officer. "Curveball began to learn German, and thus there was a big mix [of languages] that went on. This explains some of the confusion."

It got worse, like a children's game of "telephone," in which information gets increasingly distorted. The BND sent German summaries of their English and Arabic interview reports to Munich House and to British intelligence. The DIA team translated the German back to English and prepared its own summaries. Those went to DIA's directorate for human intelligence, at a high-rise office in Clarendon, Va.

Clarendon passed 95 DIA reports to the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center, known as WINPAC, at CIA headquarters in nearby Langley. Experts there called other specialists, including an independent laboratory, to help evaluate the data. Spy satellites were directed to focus on Curveball's sites. CIA artists prepared detailed drawings from Curveball's crude sketches.

The system led to confusion, not clarity.

"Analysts were studying drawings made by artists working from descriptions by a guy we couldn't talk to," explained a former senior CIA official who helped supervise the case and the postwar investigation. "It was hard to figure out."

"Our fear is that as it was analyzed and translated and reanalyzed and retranslated, and comments got added, it could have gotten sexed up by accident," agreed a former CIA operations official.

The British Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, blamed the BND for omitting what a Parliamentary inquiry called "significant detail" in the reports they sent to London. At issue were Curveball's trucks.

In an e-mail to The Times, Robin Butler, head of the British inquiry into prewar intelligence, said "incomplete reporting" by the BND misled the British to assume the trucks could produce weapons-grade bio-agents such as anthrax spores. But Curveball only spoke of producing a liquid slurry unsuitable for bombs or warheads.

At the CIA, bio-warfare experts viewed the defector's reports as sophisticated and technically feasible. They also matched the analysts' expectations.

After the 1991 Gulf War, U.N. inspectors struggled to unravel Baghdad's secret biological weapons program. They speculated that the regime produced germs in mobile factories to evade detection.

American U-2 spy planes looked for suspicious vehicles, and U.N. teams raided parking lots.

In 1994, acting on tips from Israeli intelligence, U.N. inspectors even stopped red-and-white trucks in Baghdad marked: "Tip Top Ice Cream." Inside they found ice cream.

"We thought they could easily transport other materials around," said Rolf Ekeus, who headed the U.N. inspectors from 1991 to 1997.

Finally, in mid-1995, Iraq officials admitted that before the Gulf War they had secretly produced 30,000 liters of anthrax, botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and other lethal bio-agents. They had deployed hundreds of germ-filled munitions and researched other deadly diseases for military use. They denied they ever had mobile production facilities.

Curveball's story to the Germans in 2000 and 2001 neatly dovetailed with that history and continuing CIA suspicions.

The Iraqi defector said he was recruited out of engineering school at Baghdad University in 1994 by Iraq's Military Industrial Commission, headed by Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamil. He said he went to work the following year for "Dr. Germ," British-trained microbiologist Rihab Rashid Taha, to build bio-warfare vehicles. Kamil and Taha had headed the pre-1991 bio-weapons program.

Curveball said he was assigned to the Chemical Engineering and Design Center, behind the Rashid Hotel in central Baghdad.

That also fit a pattern, as the center provided a cover story for Iraq's first bio-warfare program .

Curveball said he had helped assemble one truck-mounted germ factory in 1997 at Djerf al Nadaf, a tumble-down cluster of warehouses in a gritty industrial area 10 miles southeast of Baghdad. He helped the Germans build a scale model of the facility, showing how vehicles were hidden in a two-story building — and how they entered and exited on either end.

He designed laboratory equipment for the trucks, he said, providing dimensions, temperature ranges and other details. He sketched diagrams of how the system operated, and identified more than a dozen co-workers.

But the story had holes .

"His information to us was very vague," said the senior German intelligence official. "He could not say if these things functioned, if they worked."

Curveball also said he could not identify what microbes the trucks were designed to produce.

"He didn't know … whether it was anthrax or not," said the BND supervisor. "He had nothing to do with actual production of [a biological] agent. He was in the equipment testing phase. And the equipment worked."

David Kay, who read the Curveball file when he headed the CIA's search for hidden weapons in 2003, said Curveball's accounts were maddeningly murky.

"He was not in charge of trucks or production," Kay said. "He had nothing to do with actual production of biological agent. He never saw them actually produce [an] agent."

But the CIA and the White House overlooked the holes in the story.

In a February 2003 radio address and statement, Bush warned that "first-hand witnesses have informed us that Iraq has at least seven mobile factories" for germ warfare. With these, Bush said, "Iraq could produce within just months hundreds of pounds of biological poisons."

Curveball had told the Germans that Taha's team planned to build mobile factories at six sites across Iraq, from Numaniyah in the south to Tikrit in the north. But he visited only Djerf al Nadaf, he said. His information about the other sites, he told the Germans, was second-hand.

Flawed witness

Curveball's reports were highly valued in Washington because the CIA had no Iraqi spies with access to weapons programs at the time.

One detail particularly impressed the CIA: Curveball's report of a 1998 germ weapons accident at Djerf al Nadaf. Powell cited the incident in his prewar U.N. speech. An "eyewitness" was "at the site" when an accident occurred, and 12 technicians "died from exposure to biological agents," Powell said.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, then Powell's chief of staff, said senior CIA officials told Powell the "principal source had not only worked in mobile labs but had seen an accident and had been injured in the accident…. This gave more credibility to it."

But German intelligence officials said the CIA was wrong. Curveball only "heard rumors of an accident," the BND supervisor said. "He gave a third-hand account."

The incident led to the first questions inside the CIA about Curveball's credibility. In May 2000, the Germans allowed a doctor from the CIA's counter-proliferation branch to meet Curveball and draw a blood sample. Antibodies in the blood could indicate if he had been exposed to anthrax or other unusual pathogens in the accident.

The medical tests were inconclusive, but the meeting was memorable.

The BND, insisting Curveball spoke no English and would not meet Americans, introduced the doctor as a German. The CIA physician remained silent, because he was not fluent in German. He was surprised, he later told others, that Curveball spoke "excellent English" to others in the room.

Moreover, Curveball was "very emotional, very excitable," the doctor told one colleague. And although it was early morning, Curveball smelled of liquor and looked "very sick" from a stiff hangover.

German intelligence officials said Curveball didn't have a drinking problem. But they had other concerns.

Like many defectors, Curveball at first seemed eager to please. He thanked his new friends and laughed at their jokes. He was charming and clearly intelligent, providing complex engineering details.

But as the questions intensified, Curveball grew moody and irritable. His memory began to fail. He confused places and dates. He fretted about his personal safety, about his parents and wife in Baghdad, and about his future in Germany.

"He was between two worlds, sometimes cooperative, sometimes aggressive," said the BND supervisor. "He was not an easy-going guy."

Curveball largely ceased cooperating in 2001 after he was granted asylum, officials said. He would refuse to meet for days, and then weeks, at a time. He also increasingly asked for money.

"He knew he was important," said the BND analyst. "He was not an idiot."

Defectors are often problem sources. Viewed as traitors back home, many embellish their stories to gain favor with spy services. In the shadow world of intelligence, Curveball's inability or reluctance to provide many details actually helped convince analysts he was telling the truth.

Had Curveball claimed expertise with biological weapons or direct access to other secret programs, said the BND analyst, "It would be easier to assume he was lying."

A former British official involved with the case said Curveball's behavior should be seen through another lens. He is convinced that Curveball was under intense stress, terrified both that his visa scam would be exposed, and that his lies would be used to start a war.

"He must have been scared out of his mind," he said.

But concerns about Curveball's reliability were growing. In early 2001, the CIA's Berlin station chief sent a message to headquarters noting that a BND official had complained that the Iraqi was "out of control," and couldn't be located, Senate investigators found.

MI6 cabled the CIA that British intelligence "is not convinced that Curveball is a wholly reliable source" and that "elements of [his] behavior strike us as typical of … fabricators,'' the presidential commission reported.

British intelligence also warned that spy satellite images taken in 1997 when Curveball claimed to be working at Djerf al Nadaf conflicted with his descriptions. The photos showed a wall around most of the main warehouse, clearly blocking trucks from getting in or out.

U.S. and German officials feared that Ahmad Chalabi had coached Curveball after the defector said his brother had worked as a bodyguard for the controversial Iraqi exile leader. But they found no evidence.

Curveball "had very little contact with his [bodyguard] brother," the BND supervisor said. "They are not close.''

More problematic were the three sources the CIA said had corroborated Curveball's story. Two had ties to Chalabi. All three turned out to be frauds.

The most important, a former major in the Iraqi intelligence service, was deemed a liar by the CIA and DIA. In May 2002, a fabricator warning was posted in U.S. intelligence databases.

Powell said he was never warned, during three days of intense briefings at CIA headquarters before his U.N. speech, that he was using material that both the DIA and CIA had determined was false. "As you can imagine, I was not pleased," Powell said. "What really made me not pleased was they had put out a burn notice on this guy, and people who were even present at my briefings knew it."

But BND officials said their U.S. colleagues repeatedly assured them Curveball's story had been corroborated.

"They kept on telling us there were three or four sources," said the senior German intelligence official. "They said it many times."

Behind the scenes, the CIA stepped up pressure to interview Curveball. The BND finally accepted a compromise in the fall of 2002. They let CIA analysts send questions, but they could not interview the Iraqi.

The frustration was intense at the CIA. But it wasn't surprising.

Relations long have been rocky between the CIA and BND, officials in both spy services acknowledged. The friction dates to the Cold War, when the BND complained it was treated as a second-class agency.

Spy services jealously guard their sources, and the BND was not obligated to share access to Curveball. "We would never let them see one of ours," said the former CIA operations officer.

Intelligence shift

Despite the lack of access or any new reports from Curveball, U.S. intelligence sharply upgraded its assessments of Iraq's biological weapons before the war. The shift is reflected in declassified portions of National Intelligence Estimates, which are produced as the authoritative judgment of the 15 U.S. intelligence agencies.

In May 1999, before Curveball defected, a national intelligence estimate on worldwide biological warfare programs said Iraq was "probably continuing work to develop and produce BW [bio-warfare] agents," and could restart production in six months.

In December 2000, after a year of Curveball's reports, another national intelligence estimate cautiously noted that "new intelligence" had caused U.S. intelligence "to adjust our assessment upward" and "suggests Baghdad has expanded'' its bio-weapons program.

But the caveats disappeared after the Sept. 11 attacks and the still-unsolved mailing of anthrax-laced letters to several U.S. states.

Iraq "continues to produce at least … three BW agents" and its mobile germ factories provide "capabilities surpassing the pre-Gulf War era," the CIA weapons center warned in October 2001. The CIA followed up with a public White Paper and briefings for the White House and three Senate committees.

The CIA hadn't seen new intelligence on Iraq's germ weapons. Instead, analysts had estimated what they believed would be the maximum output from seven mobile labs — only one of which Curveball said he had seen — operating nonstop or six months. But even Curveball's description of a single lab was a fiction.

Similar misjudgments filled the most important prewar intelligence document, the National Intelligence Estimate issued in October 2002. It was sent to Congress days before lawmakers voted to authorize use of military force if Hussein refused to give up his illicit arsenal.

For the first time, the new estimate warned with "high confidence" that Iraq "has now established large-scale, redundant and concealed BW agent production capabilities."

It said "all key aspects" of Iraq's offensive BW program "are active and that most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War."

The assessment was based "largely on information from a single source — Curveball," the presidential commission concluded. It was one of "the most important and alarming" judgments in the document, the panel added. And it was utterly wrong.

A handful of bio-analysts in the weapons center, part of the CIA's intelligence directorate, controlled the Curveball reports and remained confident in their veracity. But across the CIA bureaucracy, the clandestine service officers who usually handle defectors and other human sources were increasingly skeptical.

Tyler Drumheller, then the head of CIA spying in Europe, called the BND station chief at the German embassy in Washington in September 2002 seeking access to Curveball.

Drumheller and the station chief met for lunch at the German's favorite seafood restaurant in upscale Georgetown. The German officer warned that Curveball had suffered a mental breakdown and was "crazy," the now-retired CIA veteran recalled.

"He said, first off, 'They won't let you see him,' " Drumheller said. " 'Second, there are a lot of problems. Principally, we think he's probably a fabricator.' "

The BND station chief, contacted by The Times during the summer, said he could not "discuss any of this." He has since been reassigned back to Germany. His BND supervisors declined to discuss the lunch meeting.

Drumheller, a veteran of 26 years in the CIA clandestine service, said he and several aides repeatedly raised alarms after the lunch in tense exchanges with CIA analysts working on the Curveball case.

"The fact is, there was a lot of yelling and screaming about this guy," said James Pavitt, then chief of clandestine services, who retired from the CIA in August 2004. "My people were saying, 'We think he's a stinker.' "

The analysts refused to back down. In one meeting, the chief analyst fiercely defended Curveball's account, saying she had confirmed on the Internet many of the details he cited. "Exactly, it's on the Internet!" the operations group chief for Germany, now a CIA station chief in Europe, exploded in response. "That's where he got it too," according to a participant at the meeting.

Other warnings poured in. The CIA Berlin station chief wrote that the BND had "not been able to verify" Curveball's claims. The CIA doctor who met Curveball wrote to his supervisor shortly before Powell's speech questioning "the validity" of the Iraqi's information.

"Keep in mind that this war is going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," his supervisor wrote back, Senate investigators found. The supervisor later told them he was only voicing his opinion that war appeared inevitable.

Tenet has denied receiving warnings that Curveball might be a fabricator. He declined to be interviewed for this report.

Powell said that at the time he prepared for his U.N. speech in early 2003, no one warned him of the debate inside the CIA over Curveball's credibility. "I was being as careful as I possibly could," he said.

Working from a CIA conference room adjoining CIA Director Tenet's seventh-floor office suite, Powell and his aides repeatedly challenged the credibility of CIA evidence — including the mobile germ factories.

"We pressed as hard as we could, and the CIA stood by it adamantly," Powell recalled. "This is one we really pressed on, really spent a lot time on…. We knew how important it was."

No smoking gun

On Feb. 5, 2003, Powell told the packed U.N. chamber that his account was based on "solid sources" and "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." "We thought maybe they had the smoking gun," recalled the BND supervisor, who watched Powell on TV. "My gut feeling was the Americans must have so much from reconnaissance planes and satellites, from infiltrated spotter teams from Special Forces, and other systems. We thought they must have tons of stuff."

Instead, Powell emphasized Curveball's "eyewitness" account, calling it "one of the most worrisome things that emerge from the thick intelligence file."

A congressional staffer on intelligence said she realized the case was weak when she saw Powell display CIA drawings of trucks but not photos. "A drawing isn't evidence," she said. "It's hearsay."

Powell's speech failed to sway many diplomats, but it had an immediate impact in Baghdad.

"The Iraqis scoured the country for trailers," said a former CIA official who helped interrogate Iraqi officials and scientists in U.S. custody after the war. "They were in real panic mode. They were terrified that this was real, and they couldn't explain it."

An explanation was available within days, but U.S. officials ignored it.

On Feb. 8, three days after Powell's speech, the U.N.'s Team Bravo conducted the first search of Curveball's former work site. The raid by the American-led biological weapons experts lasted 3 1/2 hours. It was long enough to prove Curveball had lied.

Djerf al Nadaf was on a dusty road lined with auto repair shops and small factories, near the former Tuwaitha nuclear facility and a sewage-filled tributary of the Tigris River.

Behind a high wall, a two-story grain silo adjoined the warehouse that Curveball had identified as the truck assembly facility.

"That's the one where the mobile labs were supposed to be," said a former U.N. inspector who worked with the U.S. and other intelligence agencies. "That's the one we were interested in."

The doors were locked, so Boston microbiologist Rocco Casagrande climbed on a white U.N. vehicle, yanked open a metal flap in the wall, and crawled inside. After scrambling over a huge pile of corn, he scraped two samples of residue from cracks in the cement floor, two more from holes in the wall and one from a discarded shower basin outside.

Back at the Canal Hotel that afternoon, he tested the samples for bacterial or viral DNA. He was searching for any signs that germs were produced at the site or any traces of the 1998 bio-weapons accident. Test results were all negative.

"No threat agents detected," Casagrande wrote in his computer journal that night. "Got to climb on a jeep and crawl into buildings and play second-story man, but otherwise spent the day in the lab."

A British inspector, who had helped bring the intelligence file from New York, found another surprise.

Curveball had said the germ trucks could enter the warehouse from either end. But there were no garage doors and a solid, 6-foot-high wall surrounded most of the building. The wall British intelligence saw in 1997 satellite photos clearly made impossible the traffic patterns Curveball had described.

U.N. teams also raided the other sites Curveball had named. They interrogated managers, seized documents and used ground-penetrating radar, according to U.N. reports.

The U.N. inspectors "could find nothing to corroborate Curveball's reporting," the CIA's Iraq Survey Group reported last year.

On March 7, 2003, Hans Blix, the chief U.N. inspector, told the Security Council that a series of searches had found "no evidence" of mobile biological production facilities in Iraq. It drew little notice at the time.

The invasion of Iraq began two weeks later.

Phantom labs

Soon after U.S. troops entered Baghdad, the discovery of two trucks loaded with lab equipment in northern Iraq brought cheers to the CIA weapons center.

Curveball examined photos relayed to Germany and said that while he hadn't worked on the two trucks, equipment in the pictures looked like components he had installed at Djerf al Nadaf.

Days later, the CIA and DIA rushed to publish a White Paper declaring the trucks part of Hussein's biological warfare program. The report dismissed Iraq's explanation that the equipment generated hydrogen as a "cover story." A day later, Bush told a Polish TV reporter: "We found the weapons of mass destruction."

But bio-weapons experts in the intelligence community were sharply critical. A former senior official of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research called the unclassified report an unprecedented "rush to judgment."

The DIA then ordered a classified review of the evidence. One of 15 analysts held to the initial finding that the trucks were built for germ warfare. The sole believer was the CIA analyst who helped draft the original White Paper.

Hamish Killip, a former British army officer and biological weapons expert, flew to Baghdad in July 2003 as part of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-led Iraqi weapons hunt. He inspected the truck trailers and was immediately skeptical.

"The equipment was singularly inappropriate" for biological weapons, he said. "We were in hysterics over this. You'd have better luck putting a couple of dust bins on the back of the truck and brewing it in there."

The trucks were built to generate hydrogen, not germs, he said. But the CIA refused to back down. In March 2004, Killip quit, protesting that the CIA was covering up the truth.

Rod Barton, an Australian intelligence officer and another bio-weapons expert, also quit over what he said was the CIA's refusal to admit error. "Of course the trailers had nothing to do with Curveball," Barton wrote in a recent e-mail.

The Iraq Survey Group ultimately agreed. An "exhaustive investigation" showed the trailers could not "be part of any BW program," it reported in October 2004.

The now-discredited CIA White Paper remains on the agency's website. A CIA spokesman said the report was posted because it was part of the historical record.

After U.S troops failed to find illicit Iraqi weapons in the days and weeks after the invasion, the CIA created the Iraq Survey Group to conduct a methodical search in June 2003.

Tenet appointed Kay to head it. The pugnacious Texan was convinced that Baghdad had hidden mobile germ factories. Kay's teams returned to Djerf al Nadaf and other sites identified by Curveball.

One CIA-led unit investigated Curveball himself. The leader was "Jerry," a veteran CIA bio-weapons analyst who had championed Curveball's case at the CIA weapons center. They found Curveball's personnel file in an Iraqi government storeroom. It was devastating.

Curveball was last in his engineering class, not first, as he had claimed. He was a low-level trainee engineer, not a project chief or site manager, as the CIA had insisted.

Most important, records showed Curveball had been fired in 1995, at the very time he said he had begun working on bio-warfare trucks. A former CIA official said Curveball also apparently was jailed for a sex crime and then drove a Baghdad taxi.

Jerry and his team interviewed 60 of Curveball's family, friends and co-workers. They all denied working on germ weapons trucks. Curveball's former bosses at the engineering center said the CIA had fallen for "water cooler gossip" and "corridor conversations."

"The Iraqis were all laughing," recalled a former member of the survey group. "They were saying, 'This guy? You've got to be kidding.' "

Jerry tracked down Curveball's Sunni Muslim parents in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood.

"Our guy was very polite," Kay recalled. "He said, 'We understand your son doesn't like Americans.' His mother looked shocked. She said, 'No, no! He loves Americans.' And she took him into [her son's] bedroom and it was filled with posters of American rock stars. It was like any other teenage room. She said one of his goals was to go to America."

The deeper Jerry probed, the worse Curveball looked.

Childhood friends called him a "great liar" and a "con artist." Another called him "a real operator." The team reported that "people kept saying what a rat Curveball was."

Jerry and another CIA analyst abruptly broke off the investigation and took a military flight back to Washington. Kay said Jerry appeared to be nearing a nervous breakdown.

"They had been true believers in Curveball," Kay said. "They absolutely believed in him. They knew every detail in his file. But it was total hokum. There was no truth in it. They said they had to go home to explain how all this was all so wrong. They wanted to fight the battle at the CIA."

Back home, senior CIA officials resisted. Jerry was "read the riot act" and accused of "making waves" by his office director, according to the presidential commission. He and his colleague ultimately were transferred out of the weapons center.

The CIA was "very, very vindictive," Kay said.

Soon after, Jerry got in touch with Michael Scheuer, a CIA analyst who felt he had been sidelined for criticizing CIA counterterrorism tactics. Scheuer would quit within a year.

"Jerry had become kind of a nonperson," Scheuer recalled of their meeting. "There was a tremendous amount of pressure on him not to say anything. Just to sit there and shut up."

A CIA spokeswoman confirmed the account, but declined to comment further. Jerry still works at the CIA and could not be contacted for this report. His former supervisor, reached at home, said she could not speak to the media. "What was done to them was wrong," said a former Pentagon official who investigated the case for the presidential commission. "But we didn't see it so much as a cover-up as an expression of how profoundly resistant to recognizing mistakes the CIA culture was."

Kay's findings

In December 2003, Kay flew back to CIA headquarters. He said he told Tenet that Curveball was a liar and he was convinced Iraq had no mobile labs or other illicit weapons. CIA officials confirm their exchange.

Kay said he was assigned to a windowless office without a working telephone.

On Jan. 20, 2004, Bush lauded Kay and the Iraq Survey Group in his State of the Union Speech for finding "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities…. Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction program would continue to this day."

Kay quit three days later and went public with his concerns.

In Germany, the BND finally agreed to let the CIA interview Curveball. The CIA sent one of its best officers, fluent in German and gifted at working reluctant sources.

They met at BND headquarters in Pullach, a suburb of Munich, in mid-March 2004 — one year after the Iraq invasion.

Alone with Curveball at last, the CIA officer steadily reviewed details and picked at contradictions like a prosecutor working a hostile witness. He showed spy satellite images and other evidence from the sites Curveball had identified.

Each night, he would file an encrypted report to CIA headquarters on his computer, and then call Drumheller.

"After the first couple of days, he said, 'This doesn't sound good,' " Drumheller recalled. "After the first week, he said, 'This guy is lying. He's lying about a bunch of stuff.' "

But Curveball refused to admit deceit. When challenged, he would mumble, say he didn't know and suggest the questioner was wrong or the photo was doctored. As the evidence piled up, he simply stopped talking.

"He never said, 'You got me,' " Drumheller said. "He just shrugged, and didn't say anything. It was all over. We told our guy, 'You might as well wrap it up and come home.' "

It took more than a month to track and recall every U.S. intelligence report — at least 100 in all — based on Curveball's misinformation. In a blandly worded notice to its stations around the world, the CIA said in May 2004:

"Discrepancies surfaced regarding the information provided by … Curveball in this stream of reporting, which indicate that he lost his claimed access in 1995. Our assessment, therefore, is that Curveball appears to be fabricating in this stream of reporting."

The CIA had advised Bush in the fall of 2003 of "problems with the sourcing" on biological weapons, an official familiar with the briefing said. But the president has never withdrawn the statement in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq produced "germ warfare agents" or his postwar assertions that "we found the weapons of mass destruction."

U.S., British and German intelligence officials still debate what Curveball really saw, and what he really did. One possible answer was buried in records the Iraq Survey Group recovered at the engineering and design center in Baghdad.

They show that Iraqi officials considered installing seed handling gear on trucks in 1995, but instead put the machinery in warehouses, like those at Djerf al Nadaf. Perhaps Curveball heard about the modified trucks and spun them into a bio-weapons system for gullible intelligence agencies.

"You're left at the end with uncertainty," said the former CIA official who helped supervise the Curveball case and the postwar investigation. "We know what he said. We know we don't believe him. But was he making it all up? Was he coached? Did he hear something and then embellish it? These things are still unresolved."

Not for Curveball. "He is convinced his story is true," said the BND analyst. "He has no doubts to this day."

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Key developments

1991

Gulf War ends

Saddam Hussein loses the Gulf War and orders aides to destroy stocks of germ-filled bombs. Regime officials lie to U.N. inspectors about prewar program and hide evidence of biological warfare factories.

1992

U.N. acts

A U.N. weapons inspector speculates in a memo that Iraq may be using mobile germ production facilities to hide its bio-warfare program. U.N. launches unsuccessful raids to find the suspected germ trucks.

1994

Curveball gets job

Curveball is hired out of engineering school at Baghdad University to work at the Chemical Engineering and Design Center. He says he is first in his class, but records later show that he was last in his class.

May 1995

Enter 'Dr. Germ'

Curveball says he is assigned to help his boss, Dr. Rihab Taha, also known as "Dr. Germ," as she begins planning for secret assembly of vehicles that can brew deadly germs and avoid detection.

July 1995

An Iraqi admission

Regime officials admit to U.N. inspectors that Iraq produced and weaponized anthrax, botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and other biological poisons before the Gulf War. CIA analysts suspect Baghdad has secret mobile labs.

July 1997

Germ truck

Curveball says he helped assemble a germ-production unit on trucks at Djerf al Nadaf. But the Iraqi says he did not see the unit in use, and did not know what germs it was designed to produce.

Fall 1998

Accident rumors

Curveball says an accident at Djerf al Nadaf kills 12 bio-warfare technicians. The CIA later says Curveball witnessed the accident and was injured, but Germans say he only heard "rumors" of incident.

November 1999

Move to Germany

Curveball applies for political asylum in Germany. He tells German intelligence for first time that he built germ weapons trucks. U.S. investigators later conclude he conjured up story to obtain visa.

January 2000

Curveball talks

German intelligence officers first interrogate Curveball. They refuse to let U.S. operatives meet him. But summaries of his information are quickly provided to senior U.S. policymakers.

May 2000

Doubts raised

Doubts emerge about Curveball. A CIA doctor, posing as a German, meets the defector and reports he spoke "excellent English." German officials say Curveball has emotional problems.

September 2001

9/11 raises profile

The Germans complete interrogations of Curveball. 9/11 terror attacks raise U.S. concerns about Saddam Hussein. CIA reassesses Curveball reports and sharply increases warnings of Iraq's germ weapons.

Fall 2002

A CIA warning

A German intelligence official tells Tyler Drumheller that Curveball may be a fabricator. Drumheller tries to warn others at the CIA. But U.S. intelligence concludes that Iraq has greater bio-warfare capabilities.

February-March 2003

Powell speaks

ADVERTISEMENT

Colin Powell warns U.N. that the mobile labs Curveball described can kill thousands of people. U.N. inspectors visit Djerf al Nadaf and other sites in Iraq but find no evidence. U.S. invades Iraq.

May 2003

Bush affirms WMD

U.S. find two trucks with lab equipment. Curveball identifies some items. President Bush announces finding weapons of mass destruction. CIA determines the vehicles cannot be used for biological weapons.

Fall 2003

Story unravels

CIA-led investigators discover Curveball was fired in 1995, and could not have worked on bio-weapons. Friends call him a liar and a fraud. "Jerry," a CIA official, tries to convince senior officials of their mistake.

March-May 2004

CIA closes case

Germans allow the U.S. to interview Curveball. He refuses to admit deceit, but CIA case officer is convinced he is lying. CIA declares Curveball a fabricator and withdraws all reports based on his accounts.

http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/13207508.htm

Pentagon probing intel allegations

ROBERT BURNS

Associated Press


WASHINGTON - The Pentagon's inspector general said Friday it has begun an investigation into allegations that an office run by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's former policy chief, Douglas J. Feith, engaged in illegal or inappropriate intelligence activities before the Iraq war.

The probe, which two senators requested two months ago, comes at a contentious point in the political debate over President Bush's decision to invade Iraq and the intelligence upon which Bush based his decision.

It extends a controversy that has prominently featured Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., a vocal critic of Bush's Iraq policy, who has accused Feith of engaging in inappropriate intelligence activities at the Pentagon and of deceiving Congress about intelligence on Iraq's pre-war links to the al-Qaida terrorist network.

One of the questions to be probed by the Pentagon inspector general, Levin said, is whether Feith, in his position as under secretary of defense for policy, "provided a separate channel of intelligence, unbeknownst to the CIA, to the White House - which he did." Feith left his Pentagon post this summer.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0511/S00222.htm

'01 CIA Testimony Suggests Iraq Intel Manipulation
Tuesday, 15 November 2005, 2:38 pm
Article: Jason Leopold

Rediscovered Testimony Given By CIA Director In 2001 Suggest Manipulation Of Pre-War Intelligence

By Jason Leopold
President George W. Bush's attempt Friday to silence critics who say his administration manipulated prewar intelligence on Iraq is undercut by congressional testimony given in February 2001 by former CIA Director George Tenet, who said that Iraq posed no immediate threat to the United States or other countries in the Middle East.

Details of Tenet's testimony have not been reported before.

Since a criminal indictment was handed up last month against Vice President Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for his role in allegedly leaking the name of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson to reporters in an attempt to muzzle criticism of the administration's rationale for war, questions have resurfaced in the halls of Congress about whether the president and his close advisers manipulated intelligence in an effort to dupe lawmakers and the American public into believing Saddam Hussein was a grave threat.

The White House insists that such a suggestion is ludicrous and wholly political. It has launched a full-scale public relations effort to restate its case for war by saying Democrats saw the same intelligence as their Republican counterparts prior to the March 2003 invasion.

But as a bipartisan investigation into prewar intelligence heats up, some key Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), have unearthed unreported evidence that indicates Congress was misled. This evidence includes Tenet's testimony before Congress, dissenting views from the scientific community and statements made by members of the administration in early 2001.

Tenet told Congress in February 2001 [LINK] that Iraq was "probably" pursuing chemical and biological weapons programs but that the CIA had no direct evidence that Iraq had actually obtained such weapons. However, such caveats as "may" and "probably" were removed from intelligence reports by key members of the Bush administration immediately after 9/11 when discussing Iraq.

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"We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since (Operation) Desert Fox to reconstitute its WMD programs," Tenet said in an agency report to Congress Feb. 7, 2001 [LINK]. "Moreover, the automated video monitoring systems installed by the UN at known and suspect WMD facilities in Iraq are still not operating. Having lost this on-the-ground access, it is more difficult for the UN or the U.S. to accurately assess the current state of Iraq's WMD programs."

In fact, more than two dozen pieces of testimony and interviews of top officials in the Bush administration, including those given by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz prior to 9-11, show that the U.S. never believed Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to anyone other than his own people.

Powell said the U.S. had successfully "contained" Iraq in the years since the first Gulf War. Further, he said that because of economic sanctions, Iraq was unable to obtain WMD.

"We have been able to keep weapons from going into Iraq," Powell said during a Feb. 11, 2001 interview with "Face the Nation." "We have been able to keep the sanctions in place to the extent that items that might support weapons of mass destruction development have had some controls."

"It's been quite a success for ten years," he added.

During a meeting with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in February 2001, Powell said the UN, the U.S. and its allies "have succeeded in containing Saddam Hussein and his ambitions." [LINK]
Saddam's "forces are about one-third their original size. They don't really possess the capability to attack their neighbors the way they did ten years ago," Powell said.

Powell added that Iraq was "not threatening America."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld seemed to agree with Powell's assessment. In a Feb. 12, 2001 interview with the Fox News Channel [LINK], Rumsfeld said, "Iraq is probably not a nuclear threat at the present time."

Ironically, just five days before Rumsfeld's Fox News interview, Tenet told Congress [LINK] that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qa'ida terrorist network remained the single greatest threat to U.S. interests. Tenet eerily describes in the report a scenario that six months later would become a grim reality.

"Terrorists are also becoming more operationally adept and more technically sophisticated in order to defeat counter-terrorism measures," the former CIA director said. "For example, as we have increased security around government and military facilities, terrorists are seeking out "softer" targets that provide opportunities for mass casualties."

"Osama bin Laden and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat," he added.

Between 1998 and early 2002, the CIA's reports on the so-called terror threat offered no details on what types of chemical and biological weapons Iraq had obtained. After 9/11, however, these reports radically changed. In October 2002, the agency issued another report [LINK], this time alleging Iraq had vast supply of chemical and biological weapons. Much of that information turned out to be based on forged documents and unreliable Iraqi exiles.

The October 2002 CIA report stated that Iraq had been stockpiling sarin, mustard gas, VX and numerous other chemical weapons. This was in stark contrast to Tenet's earlier reports which said the agency had no evidence to support such claims. And unlike testimony Tenet gave a year earlier, in which he said the CIA had no direct evidence of Iraq's WMD programs, Tenet said the intelligence information in the 2002 report was rock solid.

"It comes to us from credible and reliable sources," Tenet said during a 2003 CIA briefing [LINK]. "Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."

The intelligence sources turned out to be Iraqi exiles supplied by then-head of the Iraqi National Congress Ahmed Chalabi, who was paid $330,000 a month by the Pentagon to provide intelligence on Iraq. The exiles' credibility and the veracity of their reports came under scrutiny by the CIA but these reports were championed as smoking gun proof by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other members of the Bush administration.

Unanswered questions remain. Democrats are increasingly suggesting that the Administration may have known their intelligence was bad.

Sen. Levin's office directed RAW STORY to a statement the senator released Friday, claiming that the administration's assertion that al-Qaeda was providing Iraq with chemical and biological weapons training was based on bogus evidence and a source who knowingly lied about al-Qaeda's ties to Iraq. The Michigan Democrat also released a newly declassified report from the Defense Intelligence Agency to back up his allegations that the Bush administration misled the public.

"The CIA's unclassified statement at the time was that the reporting was 'credible,' a statement the Administration used repeatedly," he said. "What the Administration omitted was the second half of the CIA statement: that the source was not in a position to know whether any training had taken place."

That issue, along with other reports, is now the cornerstone of the bipartisan investigation into prewar intelligence.

Levin's office said the senator is going to provide the committee investigating prewar intelligence with reports from experts who warned officials in the Bush administration before the Iraq war that intelligence reports showing Iraq was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons were unreliable.


*************
© 2005 Jason Leopold

Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in the spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates.

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2005, Issue No. 104
November 7, 2005


LEVIN: NEW INFO SHOWS WHITE HOUSE MISSTATED IRAQ INTEL

Even as the Bush Administration was claiming that Iraq aided al Qaeda's chemical and biological weapons efforts, the source for those claims was deemed unreliable by U.S. intelligence, according to a release from Senator Carl Levin.


"Newly declassified information from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from February 2002 shows that, at the same time the Administration was making its case for attacking Iraq, the DIA did not trust or believe the source of the Administration's repeated assertions that Iraq had provided al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training," the November 6 news release said.

"Additional newly declassified information from the DIA also undermines the Administration's broader claim that there were strong links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda."

A copy of Senator Levin's release and the supporting documents, which were reported in the New York Times and the Washington Post on November 6, may be found here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2005/11/levin110605.html
Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita, quoted on CNN, said that the DIA report Levin cited was taken "out of context, without the analysis or any other indication as to how it may have factored in."


Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee outlined their expectations for the conduct of an investigation into the Administration's handling of pre-war intelligence at a November 4 press briefing. See this release:

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2005/11/rock110405.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9991919/site/newsweek/

Al-Libi’s Tall Tales
A CIA document obtained by NEWSWEEK provides further evidence that the U.S. intelligence community had serious doubts about information from a high-level Qaeda detainee before the Iraq war.

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 1:31 p.m. ET Nov. 10, 2005
Nov. 10, 2005 - A CIA document shows the agency in January 2003 raised questions about an Al Qaeda detainee’s claims that Saddam Hussein’s government provided chemical and biological weapons training to terrorists—weeks before President George W. Bush and other top officials flatly used those same claims to make their case for war against Iraq.

The CIA document, recently provided to Congress and obtained by NEWSWEEK, fills in some of the blanks in the mysterious case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a captured Al Qaeda commander whose claims about poison-gas training for the Qaeda group by Saddam’s government formed the basis for some of the most dramatic arguments used by senior administration officials in the run up to the invasion of Iraq.

As NEWSWEEK first reported last July, al-Libi has since recanted those claims. The new CIA document states the agency “recalled and reissued” all its intelligence reporting about al-Libi’s “recanted” claims about chemical and biological warfare training by Saddam’s regime in February 2004—an important retreat on pre-Iraq war intelligence that has never been publicly acknowledged by the White House. The withdrawal also was not mentioned in last year’s public report by the presidential inquiry commission headed by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Sen. Charles Robb which reviewed alleged Iraq intelligence failures.

The declassified CIA document about al-Libi was recently provided to Sen. Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who has been pressing for a more aggressive investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee into the Bush Administration’s handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraq. It has not been officially released because of Senate Intelligence Committee rules restricting public disclosure of information it receives as part of its inquires—even if the data has been declassified.

Levin did, however, release other material last weekend that he received through his membership on the Senate Armed Services Committee. This included declassified portions of a four-page February 2002 DIA Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary (DITSUM) that strongly questioned al-Libi’s credibility. The report stated it was “likely” al-Libi was “intentionally misleading” his debriefers and might be describing scenarios “that he knows will retain their interest.” A DIA official confirmed to NEWSWEEK that the DITSUM report—which also questioned whether the “intensely secular” Iraqi regime would provide such assistance to an Islamic fundamentalist regime “it cannot control”—was circulated at the time throughout the U.S. intelligence community and that a copy would have been sent to the National Security Council.

In addition to the new issues the latest al-Libi disclosure raises about the handling of pre-war Iraq intelligence, it also raises questions about the reliability of information gleaned from high-value Al Qaeda detainees who have been incarcerated in secret CIA facilities or “rendered” to foreign countries where they are believed to have been subjected to harsh and even brutal interrogation techniques.

Al-Libi, who was the “emir” of Al Qaeda’s Khalden training camp in pre-9/11 Afghanistan, was originally captured by U.S. forces in the fall of 2001 and, for a while, was in FBI custody. But according to Jack Cloonan, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent who was involved in the handling of his case, al-Libi became the subject of a heated battle between the FBI and CIA over which agency should retain control of him.

In early 2002, Cloonan says, al-Libi was ordered turned over to the CIA and, with his mouth covered by duct tape, the shackled Al Qaeda operative was transferred in a box onto an airplane at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Cloonan says he was later told that al-Libi was flown to Egypt, which CIA officials believed was his country of origin. (In fact, the FBI believed that al-Libi, as his nom de guerre suggests, was actually from Libya.)

The CIA, as part of its standard policy relating to its handling of all Al Qaeda captives, has declined to comment on what interrogation methods were used, where al-Libi was taken or where he is now being held (although some reports suggest he has since been transferred to the U.S. military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.)

What is known is that starting in the fall of 2002, al-Libi’s statements to his interrogators became the principal basis for a series of alarming Bush administration assertions about training that Saddam’s regime purportedly provided to Al Qaeda terrorists in the use of chemical and biological weapons. President Bush first referred to the claims in his Oct. 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati where he strongly emphasized Saddam’s ties to international terror groups in general and Al Qaeda in particular. “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases,” Bush said. (Ironically, this is the same speech that the White House, at the CIA’s request, deleted references to Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium “yellowcake” from Africa because of questions about the reliability of the information.)

The claim about poison-gas training resurfaced four months later in greatly expanded form during a particularly dramatic portion of then Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the UN Security Council that refers exclusively to al-Libi—although he is not actually identified by name. Towards the end of his speech, just after a passage that talked about Al Qaeda’s interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction, Powell said he wanted to “trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story,” said Powell. “I will relate to you now, as he himself, described it.

“This senior Al Qaeda terrorist was responsible for one of Al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan,” he continued. “His information comes first hand from his personal involvement at senior levels of Al Qaeda.” Powell then said that Osama bin Laden and one of his deputies—the since deceased Mohammed Atef—did not believe Al Qaeda had the capability to make chemical or biological weapons in Afghanistan on their own. “They needed to go somewhere else. They had to look outside of Afghanistan for help. Where did they go? Where did they look? They went to Iraq.”

Powell then continued, citing the unidentified operative’s story (from al-Libi) that Iraq offered chemical or biological weapons training to two Al Qaeda associates starting in December 2000. A militant identified as Abu Adula al-Iraqi had also been sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gases and that the relationship forged with Iraq officials was characterized by al-Iraqi as “successful,” according to Powell’s remarks. (Although it is not entirely clear from Powell’s speech, two U.S. counter-terrorism officials told NEWSWEEK they believe the information about al-Iraqi came exclusively from al-Libi.)

Powell concluded this portion of the speech by saying that “the nexus of poisons and gases is new” and the combination of the two “is lethal.” In light of “this track record,” Powell said this about Iraqi denials of support for terrorism: “It is all a web of lies.”

The administration’s drumbeat citing the claims from al-Libi continued the next day when President Bush gave a brief talk at the Roosevelt Room in the White House with Powell by his side. “One of the greatest dangers we face is that weapons of mass destruction might be passed to terrorists who would not hesitate to use those weapons,” Bush said. “Iraq has bomb-making and document forgery experts to work with Al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.”

But according to the newly declassified DIA and CIA documents provided to Levin, the credibility of those statements by Bush and Powell were already in doubt within the U.S. intelligence community. While the DIA was the first to raise red flags in its February 2002 report, the CIA itself in January 2003 produced an updated version of a classified internal report called “Iraqi Support for Terrorism.” The previous version of this CIA report in September 2002 had simply included al-Libi’s claims, according to the newly declassified agency document provided to Levin in response to his inquiries about al-Libi. But the updated January 2003 version, while including al-Libi’s claims that Al Qaeda sent operatives to Iraq to acquire chemical and biological weapons and training, added an important new caveat: It “noted that the detainee was not in a position to know if any training had taken place,” according to the copy of the document obtained by NEWSWEEK. It was not until January 2004—nine months after the war was launched—that al-Libi recanted “a number of the claims he made while in detention for the previous two years, including the claim that Al Qaeda sent operatives to Iraq to obtain chemical and biological weapons and related training,” the CIA document says.

Michele Davis, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said that President Bush's remarks were "based on what was put forward to him as the views of the intelligence community" and that those views came from "an aggregation" of sources. She added, however, that it was impossible at this point to determine whether the dissent from the DIA and questions raised by the CIA were seen by officials at the White House prior to the president's remarks. A counter-terrorism official said that while CIA reports on al-Libi were distributed widely around U.S. intelligence agencies and policy-making offices, many such routine reports are not regularly read by senior policy-making officials.

For their part, Levin and Sen. Jay Rockefeller want the Senate Intelligence Committee, as part of its reinvigorated Phase II investigation into the handling of Iraq pre-war intelligence, to answer key questions about al-Libi: What happened to the February 2002 DIA report questioning al-Libi’s credibility? Were the CIA’s caveats circulated to the White House before President Bush made his assertions? And why did the intelligence community declassify the substance of al-Libi’s original claims so they could be used in Powell’s speech in February 2003—but fail to publicly acknowledge that he had recanted until NEWSWEEK reported on it more than a year later?

The new documents also raise the possibility that caveats raised by intelligence analysts about al-Libi’s claims were withheld from Powell when he was preparing his Security Council speech. Larry Wilkerson, who served as Powell’s chief of staff and oversaw the vetting of Powell’s speech, responded to an e-mail from NEWSWEEK Wednesday stating that he was unaware of the DIA doubts about al-Libi at the time the speech was being prepared. “We never got any dissent with respect to those lines you cite … indeed the entire section that now we know came from [al-Libi],” Wilkerson wrote.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...MNG20FRBQJ1.DTL

NEWS ANALYSIS
The claims and facts on Iraq weapons
Robert Collier, Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writers

Sunday, November 20, 2005
Rarely in recent memory has a political debate turned on such diametrically opposed claims about the factual record.

As the Bush administration and war critics, most of them Democrats, are engaged in a slashing battle of words over the conflict in Iraq, what the president and his advisers knew and when they knew it have become a domestic second front. In the past week, this verbal battlefield consumed the House of Representatives and stretched across the Pacific to Asia, where President Bush on Saturday delivered his third major defense of his Iraq policies in nine days.

Here is a review of the factual basis for some of the White House and Democratic claims:

Weapons intelligence
Claim: Democrats and war critics have long claimed that the administration manipulated intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. In his Veterans Day speech this month, Bush in rebuttal said Democratic leaders "are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs."

Facts: Many of the administration's prewar claims have proved to be false or misleading. Reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee, released in July 2004, and the Silberman-Robb Commission, released in March, came to no firm conclusions about who was at fault, generally blaming the fiasco on sloppy work by CIA analysts. However, neither report attempted to interpret how the administration had used the intelligence or whether it had ignored dissenting views.

This gap caused a major fight on the Senate floor earlier this month, when Democrats complained that the GOP leadership of the Intelligence Committee had quashed a section of the probe that was to cover the administration's prewar use of intelligence on Iraq. Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., finally relented and allowed this second phase to continue; results are not expected to be completed until late next year.

So far, there has been no official attempt to assess why Vice President Dick Cheney, during the run-up to the war, continually made dramatic assertions that -- it is now known -- had already been discredited by internal intelligence reports. For example, he repeatedly claimed that the Sept. 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had met with Iraqi government agents not long before the terrorist attacks, that Iraq had mobile biological weapons laboratories and that Iraq was harboring and training al Qaeda terrorists -- claims that had been questioned in numerous CIA memos and later turned out to be false.

The administration's inaccurate claim that Iraq was trying to import yellowcake uranium from Niger has blossomed into a legal nightmare for the administration, as Justice Department special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has indicted Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements. More indictments are possible.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who knew what?
Claim: The White House has accused Democratic leaders of hypocrisy, saying they had also believed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. On Wednesday, Cheney said, "There was broad-based bipartisan agreement that Saddam Hussein was a threat ... that he violated U.N. Security Council resolutions and that, in a post-9/11 world, we couldn't afford to take the word of a dictator who had a history of (weapons of mass destruction) programs, who had excluded weapons inspectors ... who had committed mass murder. Those are the facts."

Facts: The White House version is largely correct. Most Democratic leaders don't like to admit it now, but they roundly supported the prewar conventional wisdom that Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear program. From former President Bill Clinton to former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt to Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., to 2004 presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the consensus was overwhelming -- Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

The chorus about Iraq's weaponry was reinforced by the vast majority of think-tank analysts.

"The consensus of the intelligence community was probably the most important factor" in the unanimity about Iraq's possession of weapons, said Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution in Washington, who was an influential voice in the prewar debate. "I was listening to the intelligence analysts. More the fool me, but they were absolutely adamant."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What the vote meant

Claim: The White House says the October 2002 war-powers resolution passed by the House and Senate was essentially a vote on whether to invade Iraq. Democrats say it was merely a vote to give the president increased leverage over Hussein in jockeying over U.N. weapons inspections.

Facts: The White House version is correct. At the time of the vote, it was widely understood that the vote was about whether to invade Iraq.

But from the perspective of the tiny handful of experts who dissented from the conventional wisdom about Iraq's weapons, both Republicans and Democrats are to blame.

"The White House wasn't misleading Congress because Congress was playing the game," said Scott Ritter, the chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 through 1998. Ritter was derided by many commentators for his claims in the prewar debate that Iraq did not have any banned weapons.

"It was politically expedient for all," he said. "The problem is that no politician, Republican or Democrat, had the courage to stand up and speak the truth about Iraq, because that would ... not only fly in the face of the American policy of 'regime change,' but also damage them politically because people would say: 'You're supportive of Saddam.' Everybody fell right in line and said: 'Yes, Saddam is a threat,' when they knew there was no information out there to sustain this information."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The same intelligence?
Claim: Democrats had access to the same intelligence about Iraqi weapons that the White House saw.

Facts: The White House version is only partly true. The Democrats had access to final CIA reports assessing Iraqi weapons, but they did not have access to dissenting reports from mid-level intelligence officials that cast cold water on erroneous or exaggerated claims.

Democratic leaders "didn't have the same intelligence by any means, and a lot of these guys look at the press because they have no ability to get classified information," said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who now is president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.

"What the administration did was spin up the information," Albright said. "The White House made it look like (an Iraqi attack with weapons of mass destruction) could happen anytime. ... There was the CIA making mistakes, hyping stuff up, suppressing dissent, belittling dissent; you had the White House exaggerating what the CIA was saying; and you had Kay exaggerating even what the White House was saying," Albright said, referring to former U.N. inspector David Kay, who before the Iraq invasion was a strident pro-war commentator. After the war, Kay headed a CIA team in Iraq searching for the weapons and -- when he found none -- became an equally strident Bush critic.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Foreign intelligence

Claim: In his Nov. 11 speech, Bush said that the Democrats "also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction."

Facts: The only major Western intelligence agencies that agreed fully with the Bush administration's stance on Iraqi weapons were the British and the Germans. In France, President Jacques Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin publicly stated that although there was evidence suggesting the possibility of banned activity by Iraq, there was no solid proof that such weapons existed. U.N. weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei reported that Iraq had failed to cooperate fully with their inspections teams and that major questions remained about Iraqi weapons, but they also said clearly that there was no irrefutable evidence of active weapons programs.

The Iraq resolutions passed by the U.N. Security Council did not say that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Instead, the council members condemned Hussein's failure to abide by U.N. resolutions ordering Iraq to allow inspectors full access for their searches.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americ...ticle328244.ece

The Independent & The Independent on Sunday
20 November 2005 23:20 Home > News > World > Americas

White House used 'gossip' to build case for war
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 21 November 2005

The controversy in America over pre-war intelligence has intensified, with revelations that the Bush administration exaggerated the claims of a key source on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, despite repeated warnings before the invasion that his information was at best dubious, if not downright wrong.

The disclosure, in The Los Angeles Times, came after a week of vitriolic debate on Iraq, amid growing demands for a speedy withdrawal of US troops and tirades from Bush spokesmen who all but branded as a traitor anyone who suggested that intelligence was deliberately skewed to make the case for war.

Yesterday Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, joined the fray, saying that talk of manipulation of intelligence "does great disservice to the country".

In Beijing, President George Bush said that a speedy pullout was "a recipe for disaster" - but the proportion of Americans wanting precisely that (52 per cent according to a new poll) is now higher than wanted similar action in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam war.

In an extraordinary detailed account, the Times charted the history of the source, codenamed Curveball, an Iraqi chemical engineer who arrived in Germany in 1999 seeking political asylum, and told the German intelligence service, the BND, how Saddam Hussein had developed mobile laboratories to produce biological weapons.

But by summer 2002, his claims had been thrown into grave doubt. Five senior BND officials told the newspaper they warned the CIA that Curveball never claimed to have been involved in germ weapons production, and never saw anyone else do so. His information was mostly vague, secondhand and impossible to confirm, they told the Americans - "watercooler gossip" according to one source.

Nonetheless the CIA would hear none of the doubts. President Bush referred to Curveball's tale in his January 2003 State of the Union address, and the alleged mobile labs were a central claim in the now notorious presentation to the United Nations by Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, in February 2003, making the case for war.

The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast when he watched Mr Powell overstate Curveball's case. "We were shocked," he said. "We had always told them it was not proven ... It was not hard intelligence."

The Iraqi, it now is clear, told his story to bolster his quest for a German residence visa. According to BND officials, he was psychologically unstable.

The debacle became complete when American investigators, sent after the invasion to find evidence of the WMDs, instead discovered Curveball's personnel file in Baghdad. It showed he had been a low-level trainee engineer, not a project chief or site manager, as the CIA had insisted. Moreover he had been dismissed in 1995 - just when he claimed to have begun work on bio-warfare trucks.

Curveball was also apparently jailed for a sex crime and then drove a Baghdad taxi.

The latest disclosures come at an especially delicate moment, as the Senate Intelligence Committee is about to resume a long-stalled inquiry into the administration's use of pre-war intelligence. Committee members said last week that the Curveball case would be a key part of their review. House Democrats are calling for a similar inquiry.

Washington is also still reverberating from the outburst of John Murtha, the veteran Democratic Congressman and defence hawk with close ties to the Pentagon, who last week urged an immediate "redeployment" of the 160,000 US troops in Iraq. Administration attempts to label him a defeatist have abjectly backfired. "I've never seen such an outpouring" of support, the decorated Marine Corps veteran, now 73, declared on NBC's Meet the Press programme yesterday. "It's not me, it's the public that's thirsting for answers."

No longer could President Bush "hide behind empty rhetoric". Mr Murtha said that his vote for war in October 2002 "was obviously a mistake. We were misled, they exaggerated the intelligence". He forecast that whatever the Bush administration said, "We'll be out of there by election day 2006" - a reference to next November's mid-term elections, when many Republicans fear that the Iraq debacle could drag the party down to defeat.

Intelligence red herrings

* Curveball: The Iraqi chemical engineer in his late twenties who defected to Germany in 1995, with tales of mobile germ weapons laboratories that were dubious before the invasion, and later shown to be false. The CIA brushed aside all doubts.

* Ahmed Chalabi: The exiled Iraqi leader won his way into the favour of the Pentagon. Defectors he brought to US attention proved to be false, as was his claim that US invaders would be met with bouquets.

* Iraq's quest to buy uranium from Niger: This claim was based on forged documents originating in Italy, but President Bush repeated it in his 2003 State of the Union speech.

* The aluminium tubes affair: Saddam was said to be seeking parts for a centrifuge for use in making a nuclear weapon. Analysts' doubts were disregarded.

The controversy in America over pre-war intelligence has intensified, with revelations that the Bush administration exaggerated the claims of a key source on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, despite repeated warnings before the invasion that his information was at best dubious, if not downright wrong.

The disclosure, in The Los Angeles Times, came after a week of vitriolic debate on Iraq, amid growing demands for a speedy withdrawal of US troops and tirades from Bush spokesmen who all but branded as a traitor anyone who suggested that intelligence was deliberately skewed to make the case for war.

Yesterday Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, joined the fray, saying that talk of manipulation of intelligence "does great disservice to the country".

In Beijing, President George Bush said that a speedy pullout was "a recipe for disaster" - but the proportion of Americans wanting precisely that (52 per cent according to a new poll) is now higher than wanted similar action in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam war.

In an extraordinary detailed account, the Times charted the history of the source, codenamed Curveball, an Iraqi chemical engineer who arrived in Germany in 1999 seeking political asylum, and told the German intelligence service, the BND, how Saddam Hussein had developed mobile laboratories to produce biological weapons.

But by summer 2002, his claims had been thrown into grave doubt. Five senior BND officials told the newspaper they warned the CIA that Curveball never claimed to have been involved in germ weapons production, and never saw anyone else do so. His information was mostly vague, secondhand and impossible to confirm, they told the Americans - "watercooler gossip" according to one source.

Nonetheless the CIA would hear none of the doubts. President Bush referred to Curveball's tale in his January 2003 State of the Union address, and the alleged mobile labs were a central claim in the now notorious presentation to the United Nations by Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, in February 2003, making the case for war.

The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast when he watched Mr Powell overstate Curveball's case. "We were shocked," he said. "We had always told them it was not proven ... It was not hard intelligence."

The Iraqi, it now is clear, told his story to bolster his quest for a German residence visa. According to BND officials, he was psychologically unstable.

The debacle became complete when American investigators, sent after the invasion to find evidence of the WMDs, instead discovered Curveball's personnel file in Baghdad. It showed he had been a low-level trainee engineer, not a project chief or site manager, as the CIA had insisted. Moreover he had been dismissed in 1995 - just when he claimed to have begun work on bio-warfare trucks.
Curveball was also apparently jailed for a sex crime and then drove a Baghdad taxi.

The latest disclosures come at an especially delicate moment, as the Senate Intelligence Committee is about to resume a long-stalled inquiry into the administration's use of pre-war intelligence. Committee members said last week that the Curveball case would be a key part of their review. House Democrats are calling for a similar inquiry.

Washington is also still reverberating from the outburst of John Murtha, the veteran Democratic Congressman and defence hawk with close ties to the Pentagon, who last week urged an immediate "redeployment" of the 160,000 US troops in Iraq. Administration attempts to label him a defeatist have abjectly backfired. "I've never seen such an outpouring" of support, the decorated Marine Corps veteran, now 73, declared on NBC's Meet the Press programme yesterday. "It's not me, it's the public that's thirsting for answers."

No longer could President Bush "hide behind empty rhetoric". Mr Murtha said that his vote for war in October 2002 "was obviously a mistake. We were misled, they exaggerated the intelligence". He forecast that whatever the Bush administration said, "We'll be out of there by election day 2006" - a reference to next November's mid-term elections, when many Republicans fear that the Iraq debacle could drag the party down to defeat.

Intelligence red herrings

* Curveball: The Iraqi chemical engineer in his late twenties who defected to Germany in 1995, with tales of mobile germ weapons laboratories that were dubious before the invasion, and later shown to be false. The CIA brushed aside all doubts.

* Ahmed Chalabi: The exiled Iraqi leader won his way into the favour of the Pentagon. Defectors he brought to US attention proved to be false, as was his claim that US invaders would be met with bouquets.

* Iraq's quest to buy uranium from Niger: This claim was based on forged documents originating in Italy, but President Bush repeated it in his 2003 State of the Union speech.

* The aluminium tubes affair: Saddam was said to be seeking parts for a centrifuge for use in making a nuclear weapon. Analysts' doubts were disregarded.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story...as-player=false

The Man Who Sold the War
Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war
By JAMES BAMFORD


The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.
On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.

Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.

"They're very closemouthed about what they do," says Kevin McCauley, an editor of the industry trade publication O'Dwyer's PR Daily. "It's all cloak-and-dagger stuff."

Although Rendon denies any direct involvement with al-Haideri, the defector was the latest salvo in a secret media war set in motion by Rendon. In an operation directed by Ahmad Chalabi -- the man Rendon helped install as leader of the INC -- the defector had been brought to Thailand, where he huddled in a hotel room for days with the group's spokesman, Zaab Sethna. The INC routinely coached defectors on their stories, prepping them for polygraph exams, and Sethna was certainly up to the task -- he got his training in the art of propaganda on the payroll of the Rendon Group. According to Francis Brooke, the INC's man in Washington and himself a former Rendon employee, the goal of the al-Haideri operation was simple: pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

As the CIA official flew back to Washington with failed lie-detector charts in his briefcase, Chalabi and Sethna didn't hesitate. They picked up the phone, called two journalists who had a long history of helping the INC promote its cause and offered them an exclusive on Saddam's terrifying cache of WMDs.

For the worldwide broadcast rights, Sethna contacted Paul Moran, an Australian freelancer who frequently worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "I think I've got something that you would be interested in," he told Moran, who was living in Bahrain. Sethna knew he could count on the trim, thirty-eight-year-old journalist: A former INC employee in the Middle East, Moran had also been on Rendon's payroll for years in "information operations," working with Sethna at the company's London office on Catherine Place, near Buckingham Palace.

"We were trying to help the Kurds and the Iraqis opposed to Saddam set up a television station," Sethna recalled in a rare interview broadcast on Australian television. "The Rendon Group came to us and said, 'We have a contract to kind of do anti-Saddam propaganda on behalf of the Iraqi opposition.' What we didn't know -- what the Rendon Group didn't tell us -- was in fact it was the CIA that had hired them to do this work."

The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.

Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline. "An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer," Miller wrote, "said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." If verified, she noted, "his allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so."

For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller's story, they could point to "proof" of Saddam's "nuclear threat." The story, reinforced by Moran's on-camera interview with al-Haideri on the giant Australian Broadcasting Corp., was soon being trumpeted by the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq -- the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.

By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony pro-war story overseas -- knowing with certainty that it will reach American citizens almost instantly. A recent congressional report suggests that the Pentagon may be relying on "covert psychological operations affecting audiences within friendly nations." In a "secret amendment" to Pentagon policy, the report warns, "psyops funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration policies." The report also concludes that military planners are shifting away from the Cold War view that power comes from superior weapons systems. Instead, the Pentagon now believes that "combat power can be enhanced by communications networks and technologies that control access to, and directly manipulate, information. As a result, information itself is now both a tool and a target of warfare."

It is a belief John Rendon encapsulated in a speech to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996. "I am not a national-security strategist or a military tactician," he declared. "I am a politician, a person who uses communication to meet public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager." To explain his philosophy, Rendon paraphrased a journalist he knew from his days as a staffer on the presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter: "This is probably best described in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when he wrote, 'When things turn weird, the weird turn pro.'"

John Walter Rendon Jr. rises at 3 a.m. each morning after six hours of sleep, turns on his Apple computer and begins ingesting information -- overnight news reports, e-mail messages, foreign and domestic newspapers, and an assortment of government documents, many of them available only to those with the highest security clearance. According to Pentagon documents obtained by Rolling Stone, the Rendon Group is authorized "to research and analyze information classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS" -- an extraordinarily high level of clearance granted to only a handful of defense contractors. "SCI" stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information, data classified higher than Top Secret. "SI" is Special Intelligence, very secret communications intercepted by the National Security Agency. "TK" refers to Talent/Keyhole, code names for imagery from reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites. "G" stands for Gamma (communications intercepts from extremely sensitive sources) and "HCS" means Humint Control System (information from a very sensitive human source). Taken together, the acronyms indicate that Rendon enjoys access to the most secret information from all three forms of intelligence collection: eavesdropping, imaging satellites and human spies.

Rendon lives in a multimillion-dollar home in Washington's exclusive Kalorama neighborhood. A few doors down from Rendon is the home of former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara; just around the corner lives current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. At fifty-six, Rendon wears owlish glasses and combs his thick mane of silver-gray hair to the side, Kennedy-style. He heads to work each morning clad in a custom-made shirt with his monogram on the right cuff and a sharply tailored blue blazer that hangs loose around his bulky frame. By the time he pulls up to the Rendon Group's headquarters near Dupont Circle, he has already racked up a handsome fee for the morning's work: According to federal records, Rendon charges the CIA and the Pentagon $311.26 an hour for his services.

Rendon is one of the most influential of the private contractors in Washington who are increasingly taking over jobs long reserved for highly trained CIA employees. In recent years, spies-for-hire have begun to replace regional desk officers, who control clandestine operations around the world; watch officers at the agency's twenty-four-hour crisis center; analysts, who sift through reams of intelligence data; and even counterintelligence officers in the field, who oversee meetings between agents and their recruited spies. According to one senior administration official involved in intelligence-budget decisions, half of the CIA's work is now performed by private contractors -- people completely unaccountable to Congress. Another senior budget official acknowledges privately that lawmakers have no idea how many rent-a-spies the CIA currently employs -- or how much unchecked power they enjoy.

Unlike many newcomers to the field, however, Rendon is a battle-tested veteran who has been secretly involved in nearly every American shooting conflict in the past two decades. In the first interview he has granted in decades, Rendon offered a peek through the keyhole of this seldom-seen world of corporate spooks -- a rarefied but growing profession. Over a dinner of lamb chops and a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape at a private Washington club, Rendon was guarded about the details of his clandestine work -- but he boasted openly of the sweep and importance of his firm's efforts as a for-profit spy. "We've worked in ninety-one countries," he said. "Going all the way back to Panama, we've been involved in every war, with the exception of Somalia."

It is an unusual career twist for someone who entered politics as an opponent of the Vietnam War. The son of a stockbroker, Rendon grew up in New Jersey and stumped for McGovern before graduating from Northeastern University. "I was the youngest state coordinator," he recalls. "I had Maine. They told me that I understood politics -- which was a stretch, being so young." Rendon, who went on to serve as executive director of the Democratic National Committee, quickly mastered the combination of political skulduggery and media manipulation that would become his hallmark. In 1980, as the manager of Jimmy Carter's troops at the national convention in New York, he was sitting alone in the bleachers at Madison Square Garden when a reporter for ABC News approached him. "They actually did a little piece about the man behind the curtain," Rendon says. "A Wizard of Oz thing." It was a role he would end up playing for the rest of his life.

After Carter lost the election and the hard-right Reagan revolutionaries came to power in 1981, Rendon went into business with his younger brother Rick. "Everybody started consulting," he recalls. "We started consulting." They helped elect John Kerry to the Senate in 1984 and worked for the AFL-CIO to mobilize the union vote for Walter Mondale's presidential campaign. Among the items Rendon produced was a training manual for union organizers to operate as political activists on behalf of Mondale. To keep the operation quiet, Rendon stamped CONFIDENTIAL on the cover of each of the blue plastic notebooks. It was a penchant for secrecy that would soon pervade all of his consulting deals.

To a large degree, the Rendon Group is a family affair. Rendon's wife, Sandra Libby, handles the books as chief financial officer and "senior communications strategist." Rendon's brother Rick serves as senior partner and runs the company's Boston office, producing public-service announcements for the Whale Conservation Institute and coordinating Empower Peace, a campaign that brings young people in the Middle East in contact with American kids through video-conferencing technology. But the bulk of the company's business is decidedly less liberal and peace oriented. Rendon's first experience in the intelligence world, in fact, came courtesy of the Republicans. "Panama," he says, "brought us into the national-security environment."

In 1989, shortly after his election, President George H.W. Bush signed a highly secret "finding" authorizing the CIA to funnel $10 million to opposition forces in Panama to overthrow Gen. Manuel Noriega. Reluctant to involve agency personnel directly, the CIA turned to the Rendon Group. Rendon's job was to work behind the scenes, using a variety of campaign and psychological techniques to put the CIA's choice, Guillermo Endara, into the presidential palace. Cash from the agency, laundered through various bank accounts and front organizations, would end up in Endara's hands, who would then pay Rendon.

A heavyset, fifty-three-year-old corporate attorney with little political experience, Endara was running against Noriega's handpicked choice, Carlos Duque. With Rendon's help, Endara beat Duque decisively at the polls -- but Noriega simply named himself "Maximum Leader" and declared the election null and void. The Bush administration then decided to remove Noriega by force -- and Rendon's job shifted from generating local support for a national election to building international support for regime change. Within days he had found the ultimate propaganda tool.

At the end of a rally in support of Endara, a band of Noriega's Dignity Battalion -- nicknamed "Dig Bats" and called "Doberman thugs" by Bush -- attacked the crowd with wooden planks, metal pipes and guns. Gang members grabbed the bodyguard of Guillermo Ford, one of Endara's vice-presidential candidates, pushed him against a car, shoved a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. With cameras snapping, the Dig Bats turned on Ford, batting his head with a spike-tipped metal rod and pounding him with heavy clubs, turning his white guayabera bright red with blood -- his own, and that of his dead bodyguard.

Within hours, Rendon made sure the photos reached every newsroom in the world. The next week an image of the violence made the cover of Time magazine with the caption POLITICS PANAMA STYLE: NORIEGA BLUDGEONS HIS OPPOSITION, AND THE U.S. TURNS UP THE HEAT. To further boost international support for Endara, Rendon escorted Ford on a tour of Europe to meet British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Italian prime minister and even the pope. In December 1989, when Bush decided to invade Panama, Rendon and several of his employees were on one of the first military jets headed to Panama City.

"I arrived fifteen minutes before it started," Rendon recalls. "My first impression is having the pilot in the plane turn around and say, 'Excuse me, sir, but if you look off to the left you'll see the attack aircraft circling before they land.' Then I remember this major saying, 'Excuse me, sir, but do you know what the air-defense capability of Panama is at the moment?' I leaned into the cockpit and said, 'Look, major, I hope by now that's no longer an issue.'"

Moments later, Rendon's plane landed at Howard Air Force Base in Panama. "I needed to get to Fort Clayton, which was where the president was," he says. "I was choppered over -- and we took some rounds on the way." There, on a U.S. military base surrounded by 24,000 U.S. troops, heavy tanks and Combat Talon AC-130 gunships, Rendon's client, Endara, was at last sworn in as president of Panama.

Rendon's involvement in the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein began seven months later, in July 1990. Rendon had taken time out for a vacation -- a long train ride across Scotland -- when he received an urgent call. "Soldiers are massing at the border outside of Kuwait," he was told. At the airport, he watched the beginning of the Iraqi invasion on television. Winging toward Washington in the first-class cabin of a Pan Am 747, Rendon spent the entire flight scratching an outline of his ideas in longhand on a yellow legal pad.

"I wrote a memo about what the Kuwaitis were going to face, and I based it on our experience in Panama and the experience of the Free French operation in World War II," Rendon says. "This was something that they needed to see and hear, and that was my whole intent. Go over, tell the Kuwaitis, 'Here's what you've got -- here's some observations, here's some recommendations, live long and prosper.'"

Back in Washington, Rendon immediately called Hamilton Jordan, the former chief of staff to President Carter and an old friend from his Democratic Party days. "He put me in touch with the Saudis, the Saudis put me in touch with the Kuwaitis and then I went over and had a meeting with the Kuwaitis," Rendon recalls. "And by the time I landed back in the United States, I got a phone call saying, 'Can you come back? We want you to do what's in the memo.'"

What the Kuwaitis wanted was help in selling a war of liberation to the American government -- and the American public. Rendon proposed a massive "perception management" campaign designed to convince the world of the need to join forces to rescue Kuwait. Working through an organization called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government in exile agreed to pay Rendon $100,000 a month for his assistance.

To coordinate the operation, Rendon opened an office in London. Once the Gulf War began, he remained extremely busy trying to prevent the American press from reporting on the dark side of the Kuwaiti government, an autocratic oil-tocracy ruled by a family of wealthy sheiks. When newspapers began reporting that many Kuwaitis were actually living it up in nightclubs in Cairo as Americans were dying in the Kuwaiti sand, the Rendon Group quickly counterattacked. Almost instantly, a wave of articles began appearing telling the story of grateful Kuwaitis mailing 20,000 personally signed valentines to American troops on the front lines, all arranged by Rendon.

Rendon also set up an elaborate television and radio network, and developed programming that was beamed into Kuwait from Taif, Saudi Arabia. "It was important that the Kuwaitis in occupied Kuwait understood that the rest of the world was doing something," he says. Each night, Rendon's troops in London produced a script and sent it via microwave to Taif, ensuring that the "news" beamed into Kuwait reflected a sufficiently pro-American line.

When it comes to staging a war, few things are left to chance. After Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, it was Rendon's responsibility to make the victory march look like the flag-waving liberation of France after World War II. "Did you ever stop to wonder," he later remarked, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American -- and, for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?" After a pause, he added, "Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then."

Although his work is highly secret, Rendon insists he deals only in "timely, truthful and accurate information." His job, he says, is to counter false perceptions that the news media perpetuate because they consider it "more important to be first than to be right." In modern warfare, he believes, the outcome depends largely on the public's perception of the war -- whether it is winnable, whether it is worth the cost. "We are being haunted and stalked by the difference between perception and reality," he says. "Because the lines are divergent, this difference between perception and reality is one of the greatest strategic communications challenges of war."

By the time the Gulf War came to a close in 1991, the Rendon Group was firmly established as Washington's leading salesman for regime change. But Rendon's new assignment went beyond simply manipulating the media. After the war ended, the Top Secret order signed by President Bush to oust Hussein included a rare "lethal finding" -- meaning deadly action could be taken if necessary. Under contract to the CIA, Rendon was charged with helping to create a dissident force with the avowed purpose of violently overthrowing the entire Iraqi government. It is an undertaking that Rendon still considers too classified to discuss. "That's where we're wandering into places I'm not going to talk about," he says. "If you take an oath, it should mean something."

Thomas Twetten, the CIA's former deputy of operations, credits Rendon with virtually creating the INC. "The INC was clueless," he once observed. "They needed a lot of help and didn't know where to start. That is why Rendon was brought in." Acting as the group's senior adviser and aided by truckloads of CIA dollars, Rendon pulled together a wide spectrum of Iraqi dissidents and sponsored a conference in Vienna to organize them into an umbrella organization, which he dubbed the Iraqi National Congress. Then, as in Panama, his assignment was to help oust a brutal dictator and replace him with someone chosen by the CIA. "The reason they got the contract was because of what they had done in Panama -- so they were known," recalls Whitley Bruner, former chief of the CIA's station in Baghdad. This time the target was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the agency's successor of choice was Ahmad Chalabi, a crafty, avuncular Iraqi exile beloved by Washington's neoconservatives.

Chalabi was a curious choice to lead a rebellion. In 1992, he was convicted in Jordan of making false statements and embezzling $230 million from his own bank, for which he was sentenced in absentia to twenty-two years of hard labor. But the only credential that mattered was his politics. "From day one," Rendon says, "Chalabi was very clear that his biggest interest was to rid Iraq of Saddam." Bruner, who dealt with Chalabi and Rendon in London in 1991, puts it even more bluntly. "Chalabi's primary focus," he said later, "was to drag us into a war."

The key element of Rendon's INC operation was a worldwide media blitz designed to turn Hussein, a once dangerous but now contained regional leader, into the greatest threat to world peace. Each month, $326,000 was passed from the CIA to the Rendon Group and the INC via various front organizations. Rendon profited handsomely, receiving a "management fee" of ten percent above what it spent on the project. According to some reports, the company made nearly $100 million on the contract during the five years following the Gulf War.

Rendon made considerable headway with the INC, but following the group's failed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996, the CIA lost confidence in Chalabi and cut off his monthly paycheck. But Chalabi and Rendon simply switched sides, moving over to the Pentagon, and the money continued to flow. "The Rendon Group is not in great odor in Langley these days," notes Bruner. "Their contracts are much more with the Defense Department."

Rendon's influence rose considerably in Washington after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. In a single stroke, Osama bin Laden altered the world's perception of reality -- and in an age of nonstop information, whoever controls perception wins. What Bush needed to fight the War on Terror was a skilled information warrior -- and Rendon was widely acknowledged as the best. "The events of 11 September 2001 changed everything, not least of which was the administration's outlook concerning strategic influence," notes one Army report. "Faced with direct evidence that many people around the world actively hated the United States, Bush began taking action to more effectively explain U.S. policy overseas. Initially the White House and DoD turned to the Rendon Group."

Three weeks after the September 11th attacks, according to documents obtained from defense sources, the Pentagon awarded a large contract to the Rendon Group. Around the same time, Pentagon officials also set up a highly secret organization called the Office of Strategic Influence. Part of the OSI's mission was to conduct covert disinformation and deception operations -- planting false news items in the media and hiding their origins. "It's sometimes valuable from a military standpoint to be able to engage in deception with respect to future anticipated plans," Vice President Dick Cheney said in explaining the operation. Even the military's top brass found the clandestine unit unnerving. "When I get their briefings, it's scary," a senior official said at the time.

In February 2002, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had hired Rendon "to help the new office," a charge Rendon denies. "We had nothing to do with that," he says. "We were not in their reporting chain. We were reporting directly to the J-3" -- the head of operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Following the leak, Rumsfeld was forced to shut down the organization. But much of the office's operations were apparently shifted to another unit, deeper in the Pentagon's bureaucracy, called the Information Operations Task Force, and Rendon was closely connected to this group. "Greg Newbold was the J-3 at the time, and we reported to him through the IOTF," Rendon says.

According to the Pentagon documents, the Rendon Group played a major role in the IOTF. The company was charged with creating an "Information War Room" to monitor worldwide news reports at lightning speed and respond almost instantly with counterpropaganda. A key weapon, according to the documents, was Rendon's "proprietary state-of-the-art news-wire collection system called 'Livewire,' which takes real-time news-wire reports, as they are filed, before they are on the Internet, before CNN can read them on the air and twenty-four hours before they appear in the morning newspapers, and sorts them by keyword. The system provides the most current real-time access to news and information available to private or public organizations."

The top target that the pentagon assigned to Rendon was the Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon Group to undertake a massive "media mapping" campaign against the news organization, which the Pentagon considered "critical to U.S. objectives in the War on Terrorism." According to the contract, Rendon would provide a "detailed content analysis of the station's daily broadcast . . . [and] identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships."

The secret targeting of foreign journalists may have had a sinister purpose. Among the missions proposed for the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence was one to "coerce" foreign journalists and plant false information overseas. Secret briefing papers also said the office should find ways to "punish" those who convey the "wrong message." One senior officer told CNN that the plan would "formalize government deception, dishonesty and misinformation."

According to the Pentagon documents, Rendon would use his media analysis to conduct a worldwide propaganda campaign, deploying teams of information warriors to allied nations to assist them "in developing and delivering specific messages to the local population, combatants, front-line states, the media and the international community." Among the places Rendon's info-war teams would be sent were Jakarta, Indonesia; Islamabad, Pakistan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Cairo; Ankara, Turkey; and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The teams would produce and script television news segments "built around themes and story lines supportive of U.S. policy objectives."

Rendon was also charged with engaging in "military deception" online -- an activity once assigned to the OSI. The company was contracted to monitor Internet chat rooms in both English and Arabic -- and "participate in these chat rooms when/if tasked." Rendon would also create a Web site "with regular news summaries and feature articles. Targeted at the global public, in English and at least four (4) additional languages, this activity also will include an extensive e-mail push operation." These techniques are commonly used to plant a variety of propaganda, including false information.

Still another newly formed propaganda operation in which Rendon played a major part was the Office of Global Communications, which operated out of the White House and was charged with spreading the administration's message on the War in Iraq. Every morning at 9:30, Rendon took part in the White House OGC conference call, where officials would discuss the theme of the day and who would deliver it. The office also worked closely with the White House Iraq Group, whose high-level members, including recently indicted Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby, were responsible for selling the war to the American public.

Never before in history had such an extensive secret network been established to shape the entire world's perception of a war. "It was not just bad intelligence -- it was an orchestrated effort," says Sam Gardner, a retired Air Force colonel who has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College. "It began before the war, was a major effort during the war and continues as post-conflict distortions."

In the first weeks following the September 11th attacks, Rendon operated at a frantic pitch. "In the early stages it was fielding every ground ball that was coming, because nobody was sure if we were ever going to be attacked again," he says. "It was 'What do you know about this, what do you know about that, what else can you get, can you talk to somebody over here?' We functioned twenty-four hours a day. We maintained situational awareness, in military terms, on all things related to terrorism. We were doing 195 newspapers and 43 countries in fourteen or fifteen languages. If you do this correctly, I can tell you what's on the evening news tonight in a country before it happens. I can give you, as a policymaker, a six-hour break on how you can affect what's going to be on the news. They'll take that in a heartbeat."

The Bush administration took everything Rendon had to offer. Between 2000 and 2004, Pentagon documents show, the Rendon Group received at least thirty-five contracts with the Defense Department, worth a total of $50 million to $100 million.

The mourners genuflected, made the sign of the cross and took their seats along the hard, shiny pews of Our Lady of Victories Catholic Church. It was April 2nd, 2003 -- the start of fall in the small Australian town of Glenelg, an aging beach resort of white Victorian homes and soft, blond sand on Holdback Bay. Rendon had flown halfway around the world to join nearly 600 friends and family who were gathered to say farewell to a local son and amateur football champ, Paul Moran. Three days into the invasion of Iraq, the freelance journalist and Rendon employee had become the first member of the media to be killed in the war -- a war he had covertly helped to start.

Moran had lived a double life, filing reports for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and other news organizations, while at other times operating as a clandestine agent for Rendon, enjoying what his family calls his "James Bond lifestyle." Moran had trained Iraqi opposition forces in photographic espionage, showing them how to covertly document Iraqi military activities, and had produced pro-war announcements for the Pentagon. "He worked for the Rendon Group in London," says his mother, Kathleen. "They just send people all over the world -- where there are wars."

Moran was covering the Iraq invasion for ABC, filming at a Kurdish-controlled checkpoint in the city of Sulaymaniyah, when a car driven by a suicide bomber blew up next to him. "I saw the car in a kind of slow-motion disintegrate," recalls Eric Campbell, a correspondent who was filming with Moran. "A soldier handed me a passport, which was charred. That's when I knew Paul was dead."

As the Mass ended and Moran's Australian-flag-draped coffin passed by the mourners, Rendon lifted his right arm and saluted. He refused to discuss Moran's role in the company, saying only that "Paul worked for us on a number of projects." But on the long flight back to Washington, across more than a dozen time zones, Rendon outlined his feelings in an e-mail: "The day did begin with dark and ominous clouds much befitting the emotions we all felt -- sadness and anger at the senseless violence that claimed our comrade Paul Moran ten short days ago and many decades of emotion ago."

The Rendon Group also organized a memorial service in London, where Moran first went to work for the company in 1990. Held at Home House, a private club in Portman Square where Moran often stayed while visiting the city, the event was set among photographs of Moran in various locations around the Middle East. Zaab Sethna, who organized the al-Haideri media exclusive in Thailand for Moran and Judith Miller, gave a touching tribute to his former colleague. "I think that on both a personal and professional level Paul was deeply admired and loved by the people at the Rendon Group," Sethna later said.

Although Moran was gone, the falsified story about weapons of mass destruction that he and Sethna had broadcast around the world lived on. Seven months earlier, as President Bush was about to argue his case for war before the U.N., the White House had given prominent billing to al-Haideri's fabricated charges. In a report ironically titled "Iraq: Denial and Deception," the administration referred to al-Haideri by name and detailed his allegations -- even though the CIA had already determined them to be lies. The report was placed on the White House Web site on September 12th, 2002, and remains there today. One version of the report even credits Miller's article for the information.

Miller also continued to promote al-Haideri's tale of Saddam's villainy. In January 2003, more than a year after her first article appeared, Miller again reported that Pentagon "intelligence officials" were telling her that "some of the most valuable information has come from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri." His interviews with the Defense Intelligence Agency, Miller added, "ultimately resulted in dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases, officials said."

Finally, in early 2004, more than two years after he made the dramatic allegations to Miller and Moran about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, al-Haideri was taken back to Iraq by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group. On a wide-ranging trip through Baghdad and other key locations, al-Haideri was given the opportunity to point out exactly where Saddam's stockpiles were hidden, confirming the charges that had helped to start a war.

In the end, he could not identify a single site where illegal weapons were buried.

As the war in Iraq has spiraled out of control, the Bush administration's covert propaganda campaign has intensified. According to a secret Pentagon report personally approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003 and obtained by Rolling Stone, the Strategic Command is authorized to engage in "military deception" -- defined as "presenting false information, images or statements." The seventy-four-page document, titled "Information Operations Roadmap," also calls for psychological operations to be launched over radio, television, cell phones and "emerging technologies" such as the Internet. In addition to being classified secret, the road map is also stamped noforn, meaning it cannot be shared even with our allies.

As the acknowledged general of such propaganda warfare, Rendon insists that the work he does is for the good of all Americans. "For us, it's a question of patriotism," he says. "It's not a question of politics, and that's an important distinction. I feel very strongly about that personally. If brave men and women are going to be put in harm's way, they deserve support." But in Iraq, American troops and Iraqi civilians were put in harm's way, in large part, by the false information spread by Rendon and the men he trained in information warfare. And given the rapid growth of what is known as the "security-intelligence complex" in Washington, covert perception managers are likely to play an increasingly influential role in the wars of the future.

Indeed, Rendon is already thinking ahead. Last year, he attended a conference on information operations in London, where he offered an assessment on the Pentagon's efforts to manipulate the media. According to those present, Rendon applauded the practice of embedding journalists with American forces. "He said the embedded idea was great," says an Air Force colonel who attended the talk. "It worked as they had found in the test. It was the war version of reality television, and for the most part they did not lose control of the story." But Rendon also cautioned that individual news organizations were often able to "take control of the story," shaping the news before the Pentagon asserted its spin on the day's events.

"We lost control of the context," Rendon warned. "That has to be fixed for the next war."



James Bamford is the best-selling author of "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies" (2004) and "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" (2001). This is his first article for Rolling Stone.

(Posted Nov 17, 2005)

West Wing Pipe Dream
Beyond yellowcake: Dissecting the over-hyped threat of those aluminum tubes.

Tim Dickinson
July 28 , 2003

http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/200.../we_489_01.html

Lost in the now radioactive State of the Union scandal is the fact that the attempted procurement of African uranium wasn't the only false claim the president uttered that night about Saddam's nuclear aims. The 19 words that followed the now-infamous "16 enormously overblown" ones have proved to be every bit as untrue, and the intelligence underlying the claim nearly as shoddy.

"Our intelligence sources tell us," President Bush told to the nation on January 28, "that he [Saddam] has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." The claim, paired with the alleged uranium buy, painted a damning picture of Baghdad's atomic ambitions.

The truth is far less frightening. Saddam did indeed attempt to purchase some highly-refined aluminum tubes. But they were not, as alleged by the Bush administration, to be used in a uranium-enriching centrifuge; rather they were intended to be used in the production of conventional rockets -- at least according to the United Nation's International Atomic Energy Agency, the closest thing to an impartial authority in this case.

What's more, this was well known at the time Bush delivered his address. Indeed, two weeks before the State of the Union, the IAEA said that the tubes "were not directly suitable" for uranium enrichment. Months earlier, the Department of Energy had reached the same conclusion -- as had intelligence experts at the State Department.

So why did the President allege a nuclear use for the tubes? According to Greg Thielmann, who directed the office of Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Affairs in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research until September 2002, "This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude. It's top-down use of intelligence; 'We know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers.'"

Here, a timeline of how the aluminum tubing allegation became a lynchpin in the case against Saddam Hussein -- and how that claim ultimately unraveled.

September 8, 2002
The Bush administration leaks word to The New York Times' Judith Miller and Michael Gordon that Saddam Hussein has repeatedly tried to acquire aluminum tubing "specifically designed" for a nuclear weapons program. Officials told the Times reporters that they believed the tubes were to be used as components of a centrifuge needed to enrich uranium. Unnamed Bush officials cite the "diameter, thickness and other technical properties" of the tubes in their assessment.

-- From the Source: Read the Times article

Later the same day, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice appears on CNN's Late Edition, saying the aluminum tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs."

-- From the Source: Read the CNN transcript of Rice's appearance

September 8:
Tag-teaming for the administration on NBC's Meet the Press, Vice President Dick Cheney says that Saddam Hussein "is trying, through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium -- specifically aluminum tubes."

-- From the Source: Read the Meet the Press transcript of Cheney's appearance

September 9:
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher tells reporters: "They've tried to buy the specialized aluminum tubing that's needed for centrifuges. They're trying to separate out nuclear material. When are they going to succeed? And how long do you wait to find out if they have or have not?"

-- From the Source: Read the transcript of the White House briefing

September 12:
Making a case for pre-emptive war, President Bush tells the United Nation's general assembly, "Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon." The same statement appears, verbatim, in the White House's "Saddam Hussein Fact Sheet."

-- From the Source: Read the text of the president's speech

September 13:
In the first public indication of ambiguity about this intelligence, The New York Times reports "some experts in the State Department and the Energy Department" have raised questions as to whether the tubes were actually intended for conventional artillery. "Other, more senior, officials" the paper reports, "insisted that this was a minority view among intelligence experts.

"'This is a footnote, not a split,' a senior administration official said.'"

-- From the Source: Read the Times article
September 19:
Testifying before the House International Relations Committee, Powell says: "You have been reading stories about these aluminum tubes. There may be a debate; some say in the newspaper today, about whether they're for centrifuges or for something else. The fact of the matter is that he is going after this kind of technology, so his intention has not changed."

-- From the Source: Read the transcript of Powell's testimony

September 23:
The Institute for Science and International Security -- an independent organization whose nuclear research on Iraq has been quoted by the White House -- releases a report calling the aluminum tube intelligence ambiguous, citing dissenting views from senior scientists in the Department of Energy.


"The debate over the purpose of the tubing left some dissenters perplexed.
'Always the same answer, no matter what the objections were,' one said. Inevitably, this situation led to speculation. Did the CIA have information about the tubes it was not sharing to protect important secrets? Or was the CIA arguing a view not really based in the facts? The recent statements emanating from the CIA suggest that it is not as certain about the intended purpose of this shipment as first stated.

...

ISIS has learned that U.S. nuclear experts who dissent from the Administration's position are expected to remain silent. The President has said what he has said, end of story, one knowledgeable expert said."

-- From the Source: Read the ISIS report
September 24:
In a white paper from Downing Street, the British government says of the aluminum tubing: "There is no definitive intelligence that it is destined for a nuclear programme."

-- From the Source: Read the British intelligence dossier

October 2:
The National Intelligence Estimate (a highly classified synthesis of the work of six intelligence agencies) issues its key points on Iraq's possible nuclear program. A portion of the document, declassified in July 2003, says that "most agencies" believe the attempt to purchase the aluminum tubes "provides compelling evidence" that Hussein is attempting to enrich uranium.

By "most" the NIE specifically means four of the six agencies. Dissenting are the Department of Energy, and the State Department's INR, which makes this eye-popping assessment:

In INR's view Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes is central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, but INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors. INR accepts the judgment of technical experts at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) who have concluded that the tubes Iraq seeks to acquire are poorly suited for use in gas centrifuges to be used for uranium enrichment and finds unpersuasive the arguments advanced by others to make the case that they are intended for that purpose. INR considers it far more likely that the tubes are intended for another purpose, most likely the production of artillery rockets. The very large quantities being sought, the way the tubes were tested by the Iraqis, and the atypical lack of attention to operational security in the procurement efforts are among the factors, in addition to the DOE assessment, that lead INR to conclude that the tubes are not intended for use in Iraq's nuclear weapon program. [emphasis added]

-- From the Source: Read the declassified National Intelligence Estimate
October 5:
Knight Ridder Newspapers reports: "Several senior administration officials and intelligence officers who spoke under the condition of anonymity assert that the decision to publicize one analysis of the aluminum tubes and ignore the contrary one is typical of the way the administration has been handling intelligence about Iraq."

October 7:
Speaking in Cincinnati, Ohio, President Bush says:


"Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."
-- From the Source: Read the text of the president's speech
December 2:
Responding to a question about Iraq's claim that it attempted to procure the tubes for conventional weaponry, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer says:


"I will say this is something that the President has said publicly, that Iraq did, in fact, seek to buy these tubes for the purpose of producing, not as Iraq now claims conventional forces, but for the purpose of trying to produce nuclear weapons. And so it's, on the one hand, mildly encouraging that Iraq would now admit to what it's been doing. But on the other hand, a lie is still a lie, because these -- they sought to produce these for the purpose of production of nuclear weapons, not conventional."
-- From the Source: Read the transcript of the White House briefing
December 19:
Colin Powell holds a news conference, during which he repeats the claim:


"We also know that Iraq has tried to obtain high strength aluminum tubes, which can be used to enrich uranium in centrifuges for a nuclear weapons program. The Iraqi regime is required by Resolution 1441 to report those attempts. Iraq, however, has failed to provide adequate information about the procurement and use of these tubes.
Most brazenly of all, the Iraqi declaration denies the existence of any prohibited weapons programs at all."

-- From the Source: Read the transcript of Powell's news conference
January 9, 2003:
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, reports that the "aluminum tubes sought by Iraq in 2001 and 2002 appear to be consistent with reverse engineering of rockets: "While it would be possible to modify such tubes for the manufacture of centrifuges, they are not directly suitable for it."

-- From the Source: Read the text of El Baradei's report

In response, a senior Bush official tells The New York Times, "I think the Iraqis are spinning the IAEA."

-- From the Source: Read the Times article

January 23:
Answering a question from New York Times reporter Michael Gordon following a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz tries to downplay the IAEA report:


"Gordon: Given that we're talking about matters of war and peace, does the administration plan to make a further report and provide intelligence information to address these concerns stated by the IAEA in its public report, and to buttress its claims that Iraq has resumed the production of weapons of mass destruction? And if not, is this because of targeting concerns, sources and methods, or do you simply not have reliable information that would stand up in a public forum on this?
Wolfowitz: I think the short answer, Michael, really is there is a lot of evidence; as the evidence accumulates, our ability to talk about it undoubtedly will grow. But we don't have a lot of time; time is running out."

-- From the Source: Read the transcript of Wolfowitz's comments
January 24:
Updating the intelligence on the ground, the IAEA tells The Washington Post that "It may be technically possible that the tubes could be used to enrich uranium, but you'd have to believe that Iraq deliberately ordered the wrong stock and intended to spend a great deal of time and money reworking each piece."

The newest batch of tubes Iraq tried to purchase "actually bear an inscription that includes the word 'rocket,' according to one official who examined them," the Post elaborates.

-- From the Source: Read the Post article

January 28:
In the State of the Union, Bush follows the infamous uranium claim with the aluminum allegation:


"Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide."
-- From the Source: Read the text of the State of the Union address
January 29:
U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte replies to a reporter's question about the disputed use of the tubes:


"Are we convinced that those tubes were designed and were intended for enrichment of uranium? The answer is definitely, yes."
-- From the Source: Read the transcript of Negroponte's comments
January 30:
Defending the administration's claims about the aluminum tubes, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer says: "The president stands by every word he said."

-- From the Source: Read the transcript of the White House briefing

January 30:
In a statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, ambassador Negroponte says of the aluminum tubes: "We believe their characteristics are not consistent with a rocket program and are intended for nuclear centrifuges."

In the same committee hearing, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, responded to a questing by Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware):


"Armitage: On the question of why we spend so much time on things that are difficult to prove, I don't know, perhaps, particularly on the aluminum tubes we miscalculated. Clearly there's a difference of opinion in the intelligence community which we came up and briefed forthrightly and, indeed, deliberately.
Biden: I agree, you did.

Armitage: Well, the reason we did it deliberately was to show you we're not playing hide-the-bacon here, there is a difference of opinion. I believe ... that the view is shifting on this more to the side that this has a relationship to nuclear activities rather than rocket motors. But perhaps we miscalculated, and I take your comments as a sign to, as we used to say in the Navy, KISS, keep it simple, sailor, go with your strong points."

-- From the Source: Read the transcript of Armitage's testimony (Microsoft Word format)
February 5:
Secretary of State Colin Powell, laying out the Administration's intelligence about Iraqi WMD before the UN Security Council, gives a balanced assessment: "By now, just about everyone has heard of these tubes, and we all know that there are differences of opinion; there is controversy about what these tubes are for. Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Other experts and the Iraqis themselves argue that they are really to produce the rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket launcher."

-- From the Source: Read the text of Powell's presentation

A slide from Powell's accompanying presentation, however, gives a rather one-sided view:



-- From the Source: View all the slides
February 11:
Before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee CIA Director George Tenet testifies:


"Iraq has established a pattern of clandestine procurements destined to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program. These procurements include but go well beyond the aluminum tubes that you have heard so much about.
...

Now aluminum tubes are interesting. And I know there is controversy associated with it. Except that when you look at the clandestine nature of the procurement and how they have tried to deceive what's showing up, and then you look at the other dual-use items that they're trying to procure, we think we have stumbled onto one avenue of a nuclear weapons program. And there may be other avenues that we haven't seen, but that he is reconstituting his capability is something that we believe very strongly."

-- From the Source: Read the transcript of Tenet's testimony (PDF format)
March 7:
The IAEA says it finds the Iraqi claim that the tubes were intended for conventional rockets credible: "Based on available evidence, the IAEA team has concluded that Iraq's efforts to import these aluminium tubes were not likely to have been related to the manufacture of centrifuges and, moreover, that it was highly unlikely that Iraq could have achieved the considerable re-design needed to use them in a revived centrifuge programme."

El Baradei adds: "After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq."

-- From the Source: Read the text of El Baradei's report

March 9:
In an interview on CNN's Late Edition, Powell says: "The issue of the centrifuges -- and I know that Dr. ElBaradei has said he doesn't see any evidence that the centrifuges, the aluminum tubes, were being used for centrifuges -- but we still have an open question with respect to that and we see more information from a European country this week that suggests that that is exactly what those tubes were intended to be used for. Our CIA believes strongly, and I think it's an open question."

-- From the Source: Read the CNN transcript of Powell's appearance

March 10:
The Institute for Science and International Security issues a follow-up report:


"A critical question is whether the Bush Administration has deliberately misled the public and other governments in playing a 'nuclear card' that it knew would strengthen public support for war.
For over a year and a half, an analyst at the CIA has been pushing the aluminum tube story, despite consistent disagreement by a wide range of experts in the United States and abroad. His opinion, however, obtained traction in the summer of 2002 with senior members of the Bush Administration, including the President.

The administration was forced to admit publicly that dissenters exist, particularly at the Department of Energy (DOE) and its national laboratories. This dissent is significant because the DOE has virtually the only expertise on gas centrifuges and nuclear weapons programs in the United States government."

-- From the Source: Read the ISIS report
March 16:
Back on Meet the Press Cheney says: "I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong. And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past."

-- From the Source: Read the Meet the Press transcript of Cheney's appearance

March 19:
War begins.

June 9:
In a retrospective of the aluminum claims, Newsweek reports that the aluminum tube claims had been doubted early on within the intelligence community:


"The strongest evidence that Saddam was building a nuke was the fact that he was secretly importing aluminum tubes that could be used to help make enriched uranium.... At the CIA, Tenet seems to have latched on to the tubes as a kind of smoking gun. He brought one of the tubes to a closed Senate hearing [in September 2002]. But from the beginning, other intelligence experts in the government had their doubts. After canvassing experts at the nation's nuclear labs, the Department of Energy concluded that the tubes were the wrong specification to be used in a centrifuge, the equipment used to enrich uranium. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) concluded that the tubes were meant to be used for a multiple-rocket-launching system. (And Saddam was not secretly buying them; the purchase order was posted on the Internet.) In two reports to Powell, INR concluded there was no reliable evidence that Iraq had restarted a nuclear program at all. 'These were not weaselly worded,' said [Greg] Thielmann, [who recently resigned from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research]. 'They were as definitive as these things go.'"
-- From the Source: Read the Newsweek article
June 30:
The New Republic reports: "Many of the intelligence analysts who had participated in the aluminum-tubes debate were appalled. One described the feeling to TNR: 'You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie.'"

-- From the Source: Read The New Republic article (pay)

July 2:
Speaking at U.C. Berkeley, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D.-California) takes Bush and Cheney to task:


"This administration took part fact and part supposition -- subjective information delivered to them by the intelligence community -- and they shaped it to reach a preconceived conclusion for the use of force.
...

I am deeply disturbed that I didn't know at the time that the aluminum tubes ... could possibly be used in gas centrifuges, but also in vacuum cleaners. We were told definitively that they were for gas centrifuges. The administration cherry-picked information that bolstered the case"

-- From the Source: Read the Berkeley release on Tauscher's speech
July 11:
Condoleeza Rice, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, defends the aluminum claim, saying it was written into the National Intelligence Estimate:


"The NIE ...has the yellowcake story in it, had the aluminum tube story in it. Now, if there were doubts about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the president, to the vice president, or to me.
...

The president of the United States went up to give the State of the Union on the basis of information that was in his National Intelligence Estimate and that everybody thought to be true."

-- From the Source: Read the transcript of Rice's comments
July 18:
Asked about the dubious claims in the State of the Union speech, a senior administration official tells The Washington Post: "The president is not a fact-checker."

-- From the Source: Read the Post article

WHO LIED TO WHOM?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq’s nuclear program?
Issue of 2003-03-31
Posted 2003-03-24

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/030331fa_fact1

Last September 24th, as Congress prepared to vote on the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, a group of senior intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq’s weapons capability. It was an important presentation for the Bush Administration. Some Democrats were publicly questioning the President’s claim that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction which posed an immediate threat to the United States. Just the day before, former Vice-President Al Gore had sharply criticized the Administration’s advocacy of preëmptive war, calling it a doctrine that would replace “a world in which states consider themselves subject to law” with “the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States.” A few Democrats were also considering putting an alternative resolution before Congress.

According to two of those present at the briefing, which was highly classified and took place in the committee’s secure hearing room, Tenet declared, as he had done before, that a shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes that was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for the construction of centrifuges that could be used to produce enriched uranium. The suitability of the tubes for that purpose had been disputed, but this time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was buttressed by a new and striking fact: the C.I.A. had recently received intelligence showing that, between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy five hundred tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world’s largest producers. The uranium, known as “yellow cake,” can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors; if processed differently, it can also be enriched to make weapons. Five tons can produce enough weapon-grade uranium for a bomb. (When the C.I.A. spokesman William Harlow was asked for comment, he denied that Tenet had briefed the senators on Niger.)

On the same day, in London, Tony Blair’s government made public a dossier containing much of the information that the Senate committee was being given in secret—that Iraq had sought to buy “significant quantities of uranium” from an unnamed African country, “despite having no active civil nuclear power programme that could require it.” The allegation attracted immediate attention; a headline in the London Guardian declared, “african gangs offer route to uranium.”

Two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before a closed hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also cited Iraq’s attempt to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of its persistent nuclear ambitions. The testimony from Tenet and Powell helped to mollify the Democrats, and two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly, giving the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq.

On December 19th, Washington, for the first time, publicly identified Niger as the alleged seller of the nuclear materials, in a State Department position paper that rhetorically asked, “Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?” (The charge was denied by both Iraq and Niger.) A former high-level intelligence official told me that the information on Niger was judged serious enough to include in the President’s Daily Brief, known as the P.D.B., one of the most sensitive intelligence documents in the American system. Its information is supposed to be carefully analyzed, or “scrubbed.” Distribution of the two- or three-page early-morning report, which is prepared by the C.I.A., is limited to the President and a few other senior officials. The P.D.B. is not made available, for example, to any members of the Senate or House Intelligence Committees. “I don’t think anybody here sees that thing,” a State Department analyst told me. “You only know what’s in the P.D.B. because it echoes—people talk about it.”

President Bush cited the uranium deal, along with the aluminum tubes, in his State of the Union Message, on January 28th, while crediting Britain as the source of the information: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” He commented, “Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.”



Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. “The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic,” ElBaradei said.

One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, “These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.”

The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agency’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office.

It took Baute’s team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half-dozen letters and other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Coöperation, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that “they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.”

The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning sign. Niger’s “yellow cake” comes from two uranium mines controlled by a French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear power companies in France, Japan, and Spain. “Five hundred tons can’t be siphoned off without anyone noticing,” another I.A.E.A. official told me.

This official told me that the I.A.E.A. has not been able to determine who actually prepared the documents. “It could be someone who intercepted faxes in Israel, or someone at the headquarters of the Niger Foreign Ministry, in Niamey. We just don’t know,” the official said. “Somebody got old letterheads and signatures, and cut and pasted.” Some I.A.E.A. investigators suspected that the inspiration for the documents was a trip that the Iraqi Ambassador to Italy took to several African countries, including Niger, in February, 1999. They also speculated that MI6—the branch of British intelligence responsible for foreign operations—had become involved, perhaps through contacts in Italy, after the Ambassador’s return to Rome.

Baute, according to the I.A.E.A. official, “confronted the United States with the forgery: ‘What do you have to say?’ They had nothing to say.”

ElBaradei’s disclosure has not been disputed by any government or intelligence official in Washington or London. Colin Powell, asked about the forgery during a television interview two days after ElBaradei’s report, dismissed the subject by saying, “If that issue is resolved, that issue is resolved.” A few days later, at a House hearing, he denied that anyone in the United States government had anything to do with the forgery. “It came from other sources,” Powell testified. “It was provided in good faith to the inspectors.”

The forgery became the object of widespread, and bitter, questions in Europe about the credibility of the United States. But it initially provoked only a few news stories in America, and little sustained questioning about how the White House could endorse such an obvious fake. On March 8th, an American official who had reviewed the documents was quoted in the Washington Post as explaining, simply, “We fell for it.”



The Bush Administration’s reliance on the Niger documents may, however, have stemmed from more than bureaucratic carelessness or political overreaching. Forged documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and British policy toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997, after an impasse over U.N. inspections. Then as now, the Security Council was divided, with the French, the Russians, and the Chinese telling the United States and the United Kingdom that they were being too tough on the Iraqis. President Bill Clinton, weakened by the impeachment proceedings, hinted of renewed bombing, but, then as now, the British and the Americans were losing the battle for international public opinion. A former Clinton Administration official told me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading false information about Iraq. The British propaganda program—part of its Information Operations, or I/Ops—was known to a few senior officials in Washington. “I knew that was going on,” the former Clinton Administration official said of the British efforts. “We were getting ready for action in Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare.”

Over the next year, a former American intelligence officer told me, at least one member of the U.N. inspection team who supported the American and British position arranged for dozens of unverified and unverifiable intelligence reports and tips—data known as inactionable intelligence—to be funnelled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed along to newspapers in London and elsewhere. “It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn’t move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world,” the former officer said. There was a series of clandestine meetings with MI6, at which documents were provided, as well as quiet meetings, usually at safe houses in the Washington area. The British propaganda scheme eventually became known to some members of the U.N. inspection team. “I knew a bit,” one official still on duty at U.N. headquarters acknowledged last week, “but I was never officially told about it.”

None of the past and present officials I spoke with were able to categorically state that the fake Niger documents were created or instigated by the same propaganda office in MI6 that had been part of the anti-Iraq propaganda wars in the late nineteen-nineties. (An MI6 intelligence source declined to comment.) Press reports in the United States and elsewhere have suggested other possible sources: the Iraqi exile community, the Italians, the French. What is generally agreed upon, a congressional intelligence-committee staff member told me, is that the Niger documents were initially circulated by the British—President Bush said as much in his State of the Union speech—and that “the Brits placed more stock in them than we did.” It is also clear, as the former high-level intelligence official told me, that “something as bizarre as Niger raises suspicions everywhere.”



What went wrong? Did a poorly conceived propaganda effort by British intelligence, whose practices had been known for years to senior American officials, manage to move, without significant challenge, through the top layers of the American intelligence community and into the most sacrosanct of Presidential briefings? Who permitted it to go into the President’s State of the Union speech? Was the message—the threat posed by Iraq—more important than the integrity of the intelligence-vetting process? Was the Administration lying to itself? Or did it deliberately give Congress and the public what it knew to be bad information?

Asked to respond, Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had not obtained the actual documents until early this year, after the President’s State of the Union speech and after the congressional briefings, and therefore had been unable to evaluate them in a timely manner. Harlow refused to respond to questions about the role of Britain’s MI6. Harlow’s statement does not, of course, explain why the agency left the job of exposing the embarrassing forgery to the I.A.E.A. It puts the C.I.A. in an unfortunate position: it is, essentially, copping a plea of incompetence.

The chance for American intelligence to challenge the documents came as the Administration debated whether to pass them on to ElBaradei. The former high-level intelligence official told me that some senior C.I.A. officials were aware that the documents weren’t trustworthy. “It’s not a question as to whether they were marginal. They can’t be ‘sort of’ bad, or ‘sort of’ ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud—it was useless. Everybody bit their tongue and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the Secretary of State said this?’ The Secretary of State never saw the documents.” He added, “He’s absolutely apoplectic about it.” (A State Department spokesman was unable to comment.) A former intelligence officer told me that some questions about the authenticity of the Niger documents were raised inside the government by analysts at the Department of Energy and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. However, these warnings were not heeded.

“Somebody deliberately let something false get in there,” the former high-level intelligence official added. “It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up.” (The White House declined to comment.)

Washington’s case that the Iraqi regime had failed to meet its obligation to give up weapons of mass destruction was, of course, based on much more than a few documents of questionable provenance from a small African nation. But George W. Bush’s war against Iraq has created enormous anxiety throughout the world—in part because one side is a superpower and the other is not. It can’t help the President’s case, or his international standing, when his advisers brief him with falsehoods, whether by design or by mistake.

On March 14th, Senator Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally asked Robert Mueller, the F.B.I. director, to investigate the forged documents. Rockefeller had voted for the resolution authorizing force last fall. Now he wrote to Mueller, “There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.” He urged the F.B.I. to ascertain the source of the documents, the skill-level of the forgery, the motives of those responsible, and “why the intelligence community did not recognize the documents were fabricated.” A Rockefeller aide told me that the F.B.I. had promised to look into it.

Bush's Claims About Iraq's Nuclear Program
Paul Kerr

http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2003_09/Nuc...laims.asp?print
September 2003

Vice President Dick Cheney stated three days before U.S.-led coalition forces invaded Iraq this past March that Iraq “has reconstituted nuclear weapons.” At the time, however, intelligence and other U.S. officials already disagreed about the evidence behind his statement, and events over the last few months have deepened doubts among the general public and members of Congress.

The international community discovered after Iraq’s defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War that Iraq had a much more advanced nuclear weapons program than either the United States or the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had suspected. The IAEA was charged with undertaking inspections to ensure that Iraq complied with disarmament requirements mandated by UN Security Council Resolution 687, but the United Nations withdrew the inspectors in December 1998 after Iraq stopped cooperating with them. The agency, however, reported in 1999 that, based on the inspectors’ work until that time, there was “no indication that Iraq possesses nuclear weapons or any meaningful amounts of weapon-usable nuclear material, or that Iraq has retained any practical capability (facilities or hardware) for the production of such material.”

The IAEA also cautioned that this statement was “not the same as a statement of [the weapons] ‘non-existence.’” A 2001 Department of Defense report added that Iraq “still retains sufficient skilled and experienced scientists and engineers as well as weapons design information that could allow it to restart a weapons program.”

The absence of inspectors, combined with the remaining uncertainty regarding Iraq’s nuclear program, created concern that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. The Security Council adopted Resolution 1441 in November 2002, requiring Iraq to comply fully with its disarmament requirements under relevant Security Council resolutions. Inspections resumed later that month. IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei reported to the Security Council March 7 that the inspectors had “found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq.”

The administration’s contention that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program has several components. President George W. Bush cited three pieces of evidence in an October 7, 2002, speech that “Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program”: meetings between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Iraqi nuclear weapons scientists, Iraq’s reconstruction of buildings at sites where its nuclear weapons facilities had previously been located, and Iraq’s attempts to obtain components for gas centrifuges that can be used to enrich uranium for use as fissile material in nuclear weapons.

The State Department issued a fact sheet December 19 asserting that Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium from Niger. Bush and other administration officials repeated the claim several times after that.

On February 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a presentation about U.S. intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to the Security Council. His presentation only mentioned efforts to acquire centrifuge components and Hussein’s meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists.

An October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) cites all of these factors in its judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. The NIE states that “most agencies” agreed but includes an alternative view from the State Department’s Bureau for Intelligence and Research (INR) stating that “available evidence indicates that Baghdad is pursuing at least a limited effort to maintain and acquire nuclear weapon-related capabilities” but that the evidence is “inadequate” to support the claim that “Iraq is currently pursuing…an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons.”

The following chart looks at the administration’s public claims about Iraq’s suspected nuclear weapons program.

NUCLEAR CLAIMS

Uranium Imports

Bush Administration Claim The Bush administration claimed that Iraq was attempting to acquire uranium from Niger.

Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium were considered an important step in its suspected nuclear weapons program because Baghdad’s lack of fissile material was one of the most serious constraints on its ability to produce nuclear weapons. Even if Iraq had acquired lightly processed uranium ore from Africa, however, it would still have needed to enrich it to obtain weapons-grade uranium.

Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet said in an August 11 statement that claims regarding uranium importation were not central to the National Intelligence Estimate’s judgments about Iraq’s nuclear program because “Iraq already had significant quantities of uranium.” Iraq had more than two tons of low-enriched uranium under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.

The Controversy Intelligence officials expressed reservations about this claim several times. Tenet told National Security Council staff and White House speechwriters not to include a line about Iraq’s attempts to import uranium from Africa in a speech Bush gave October 7, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said July 22. Additionally, Tenet said July 11 that the CIA expressed “reservations” about the claim to British intelligence in September 2002, and INR characterized claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa as “highly dubious,” according to the October NIE.

The CIA sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger in February 2002 to investigate reports about Iraq’s attempts to acquire uranium. Wilson wrote in The New York Times July 6 that “it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had taken place” because Niger’s uranium industry is closely regulated by its government and is controlled by a consortium of foreign companies monitored by the IAEA.

Tenet said July 11 that Wilson also reported to the CIA that a former Nigerien official described a businessman’s attempt to arrange a meeting between the former official and an Iraqi delegation as “an attempt to discuss uranium sales,” but Wilson told Arms Control Today August 18 that the official mentioned uranium as an afterthought.

ElBaradei told the UN Security Council in March that U.S.-supplied documents ostensibly supporting this claim were forged.

Nigerien Prime Minister Hama Amadou denied in an interview with the London Sunday Telegraph that Niger ever discussed uranium with Iraq, according to a July 27 article.

Centrifuges

Bush Administration Claim The October NIE claimed that Iraq was attempting to obtain aluminum tubes and magnets for use in a gas centrifuge-based uranium-enrichment program.

The Controversy Aluminum Tubes

An IAEA investigation concluded that “[t]here is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminum tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment. Moreover, even had Iraq pursued such a plan, it would have encountered practical difficulties in manufacturing centrifuges out of the aluminum tubes in question,” ElBaradei told the Security Council March 7. He added that “field investigation and document analysis have failed to uncover any evidence that Iraq intended to use these…tubes for any project other than the reverse engineering of rockets.” According to the October NIE, both INR and Department of Energy (DOE) centrifuge experts concluded that the tubes were most likely for rockets, although three other intelligence agencies concluded they were for use in centrifuges.

Tenet said August 11 that U.S. military intelligence experts concluded that the tubes were “poor choices for rocket motor bodies,” but Greg Thielmann, former director of INR’s Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Affairs Office, argued in a July 9 press conference that the DOE experts were the most knowledgeable about the subject.

Magnets

ElBaradei told the Security Council March 7 that there was “no indication to date that Iraq imported magnets for use in a centrifuge enrichment programme.”

Administration officials have also cited an Iraqi scientist’s June 2003 handover of blueprints and components for gas centrifuges that he had hidden on his property as evidence that Iraq had a centrifuge program. The scientist, however, had hidden those components since 1991 and IAEA Iraq Action Team Leader Jacques Baute said the component set is incomplete and the documents appear to contain errors, according to a July 15 Associated Press article.

Scientists/Personnel
Bush Administration Claim The administration claimed that Hussein was meeting with top nuclear weapons experts and that Iraq maintained the scientific know-how to produce nuclear weapons.

The Controversy Thielmann said that “there was no solid evidence that indicated Iraq’s top nuclear scientists were rejuvenating Iraq’s nuclear weapons program,” according to a June 20 Associated Press article. IAEA spokesperson Melissa Fleming added that Iraqi nuclear personnel were “aging…[and] weren’t working collectively.”

Infrastructure
Bush Administration Claim Bush said October 7 that Iraq was reconstructing buildings at sites where its nuclear weapons facilities had previously been located.
The Controversy ElBaradei reported March 7 that “[t]here is no indication of resumed nuclear activities in those buildings that were identified through the use of satellite imagery as being reconstructed or newly erected since 1998, nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any inspected sites.”

U.S. Claim on Iraqi Nuclear Program Is Called Into Question

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 24, 2003; Page A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer

When President Bush traveled to the United Nations in September to make his case against Iraq, he brought along a rare piece of evidence for what he called Iraq's "continued appetite" for nuclear bombs. The finding: Iraq had tried to buy thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes, which Bush said were "used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon."

Bush cited the aluminum tubes in his speech before the U.N. General Assembly and in documents presented to U.N. leaders. Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice both repeated the claim, with Rice describing the tubes as "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs."

It was by far the most prominent, detailed assertion by the White House of recent Iraqi efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. But according to government officials and weapons experts, the claim now appears to be seriously in doubt.

After weeks of investigation, U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq are increasingly confident that the aluminum tubes were never meant for enriching uranium, according to officials familiar with the inspection process. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N.-chartered nuclear watchdog, reported in a Jan. 8 preliminary assessment that the tubes were "not directly suitable" for uranium enrichment but were "consistent" with making ordinary artillery rockets -- a finding that meshed with Iraq's official explanation for the tubes. New evidence supporting that conclusion has been gathered in recent weeks and will be presented to the U.N. Security Council in a report due to be released on Monday, the officials said.

Moreover, there were clues from the beginning that should have raised doubts about claims that the tubes were part of a secret Iraqi nuclear weapons program, according to U.S. and international experts on uranium enrichment. The quantity and specifications of the tubes -- narrow, silver cylinders measuring 81 millimeters in diameter and about a meter in length -- made them ill-suited to enrich uranium without extensive modification, the experts said.

But they are a perfect fit for a well-documented 81mm conventional rocket program in place for two decades. Iraq imported the same aluminum tubes for rockets in the 1980s. The new tubes it tried to purchase actually bear an inscription that includes the word "rocket," according to one official who examined them.

"It may be technically possible that the tubes could be used to enrich uranium," said one expert familiar with the investigation of Iraq's attempted acquisition. "But you'd have to believe that Iraq deliberately ordered the wrong stock and intended to spend a great deal of time and money reworking each piece."

As the U.N. inspections continue, some weapons experts said the aluminum tubes saga could undermine the credibility of claims about Iraq's arsenal. To date, the Bush administration has declined to release photos or other specific evidence to bolster its contention that Iraq is actively seeking to acquire new biological, chemical and nuclear arms, and the means to deliver them.

The U.N. inspections earlier this month turned up 16 empty chemical warheads for short-range, 122mm rockets. But inspectors said that so far they have found no conclusive proof of a new Iraqi effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction in searches of facilities that had been identified as suspicious in U.S. and British intelligence reports. U.N. officials contend that Iraq retains biological and chemical weapons and components it acquired before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

"If the U.S. government puts out bad information it runs a risk of undermining the good information it possesses," said David Albright, a former IAEA weapons inspector who has investigated Iraq's past nuclear programs extensively. "In this case, I fear that the information was put out there for a short-term political goal: to convince people that Saddam Hussein is close to acquiring nuclear weapons."

The Bush administration, while acknowledging the IAEA's findings on the aluminum tubes, has not retreated from its earlier statements. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer reacted to the IAEA's initial report on Jan. 8 by asserting that the case was still open.

"It should be noted," Fleischer said, "that the attempted acquisition of such tubes is prohibited under the United Nations resolutions in any case." U.N. sanctions restrict Iraq's ability to import "dual-use" items that potentially could be used for weapons.

U.S. intelligence officials contend that the evidence, on balance, still points to a secret uranium enrichment program, although there is significant disagreement within the intelligence services. Those supporting the nuclear theory said they were influenced by "other intelligence" beyond the specifications of the tubes themselves, according to one intelligence official. He did not elaborate.

IAEA officials said the investigation of the tubes officially remains open. Earlier this week, Iraq agreed to provide inspectors with additional data about its intended use for the tubes.

The controversy stems from a series of Iraqi attempts to purchase large quantities -- thousands or tens of thousands -- of high-strength aluminum tubes over the last two years. Apparently none of the attempts succeeded, although in one instance in 2001 a shipment of more than 60,000 Chinese-made aluminum tubes made it as far as Jordan before it was intercepted, according to officials familiar with Iraq's procurement attempts.

Since then, the officials said, Iraq has made at least two other attempts to acquire the tubes. The more recent attempts involved private firms located in what was described only as a "NATO country." In all, more than 120,000 of the tubes were reportedly sought.

In each of the attempts, Iraq requested tubes made of an aluminum alloy with precise dimensions and high tolerances for heat and stress. To intelligence analysts, the requests had a ring of familiarity: Iraq had imported aluminum tubes in the 1980s, although with different specifications and much larger diameter, to build gas centrifuges -- fast-spinning machines used in enriching uranium for nuclear weapons. Through a crash nuclear program launched in 1990, Iraq succeeded in enriching nearly enough uranium for one bomb before its plans were disrupted in 1991 by the start of the Gulf War, according to U.N. weapons inspectors.

By several accounts, Iraq's recent attempts to buy aluminum tubes sparked a rancorous debate as Bush administration officials, intelligence analysts and government scientists argued over Iraq's intent.

"A number of people argued that the tubes could not possibly be used as artillery rockets because the specifications were so precise. It would be a waste of dollars," said one knowledgeable scientist.

Ultimately, the conclusion in the intelligence discussion was that Iraq was planning to use the tubes in a nuclear program. This view was favored by CIA analysts. However, there were dissenting arguments by enrichment experts at the Energy Department and officials at the State Department. What ultimately swung the argument in favor of the nuclear theory was the observation that Iraq had attempted to purchase aluminum tubes with such precise specifications that it made other uses seem unlikely, officials said.

By contrast, in Britain, the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a Sept. 24 white paper that there was "no definitive intelligence" that the tubes were destined for a nuclear program.

The tubes were made of an aluminum-zinc alloy known as 7000-series, which is used in a wide range of industrial applications. But the dimensions and technical features, such as metal thickness and surface coatings, made them an unlikely choice for centrifuges, several nuclear experts said. Iraq used a different aluminum alloy in its centrifuges in the 1980s before switching to more advanced metals known as maraging steel and carbon fibers, which are better suited for the task, the experts said.

Significantly, there is no evidence so far that Iraq sought other materials required for centrifuges, such as motors, metal caps and special magnets, U.S. and international officials said.

Bush's remarks about the aluminum tubes caused a stir at the IAEA's headquarters in Vienna. Weapons experts at the agency had also been monitoring Iraq's attempts to buy the aluminum but were skeptical of arguments that the tubes had a nuclear purpose, according to one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The IAEA spent seven years in the 1990s documenting and ultimately destroying all known vestiges of Iraq's nuclear weapons program, including its gas centrifuges.

After returning to Iraq when weapons inspections resumed in November, the IAEA made it a priority to sort out the conflicting claims, according to officials familiar with the probe. In December, the agency spent several days poring through files and interviewing people involved in the attempted acquisition of the tubes -- including officials at the company that supplied the metal and managers of the Baghdad importing firm that apparently had been set up as a front company to acquire special parts and materials for Iraq's Ministry of Industry. According to informed officials, the IAEA concluded Iraq had indeed been running a secret procurement operation, but the intended beneficiary was not Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission; rather, it was an established army program to replace Iraq's aging arsenal of conventional 81mm rockets, the type used in multiple rocket launchers.

The explanation made sense for several reasons, they said. In the 1980s, Iraq was known to have obtained a design for 81mm rockets through reverse-engineering of munitions it had previously purchased abroad. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iraqis built tens of thousands of such rockets, using high-strength, 7000-series aluminum tubes it bought from foreign suppliers. U.N. inspectors in the 1990s had allowed Iraq to retain a stockpile of about 160,000 of the 81mm rockets, and an inspection of the stockpile last month confirmed that the rockets still exist, though now corroded after years of exposure in outdoor depots.

By all appearances, the Iraqis were "trying to buy exact replacements for those rockets," said Albright, the former IAEA inspector.

Albright, now president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington research group, said that even a less sinister explanation for the aluminum tubes did not suggest Iraq is entirely innocent.

"But if Iraq does have a centrifuge program, it is well-hidden, and it is important for us to come up with information that will help us find it," Albright said. "This incident discredits that effort at a time when we can least afford it."

Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.

Neglecting Intelligence, Ignoring Warnings

A chronology of how the Bush Administration repeatedly and deliberately refused to listen to intelligence agencies that said its case for war was weak

January 28, 2004
Updated January 29, 2004

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.as...JRJ8OVF&b=24889

Former weapons inspector David Kay now says Iraq probably did not have WMD before the war, a major blow to the Bush Administration which used the WMD argument as the rationale for war. Unfortunately, Kay and the Administration are now attempting to shift the blame for misleading America onto the intelligence community. But a review of the facts shows the intelligence community repeatedly warned the Bush Administration about the weakness of its case, but was circumvented, overruled, and ignored. The following is year-by-year timeline of those warnings.

2001: WH Admits Iraq Contained; Creates Agency to Circumvent Intel Agencies

In 2001 and before, intelligence agencies noted that Saddam Hussein was effectively contained after the Gulf War. In fact, former weapons inspector David Kay now admits that the previous policy of containment – including the 1998 bombing of Iraq – destroyed any remaining infrastructure of potential WMD programs.

OCTOBER 8, 1997 – IAEA SAYS IRAQ FREE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS: "As reported in detail in the progress report dated 8 October 1997…and based on all credible information available to date, the IAEA's verification activities in Iraq, have resulted in the evolution of a technically coherent picture of Iraq's clandestine nuclear programme. These verification activities have revealed no indications that Iraq had achieved its programme objective of producing nuclear weapons or that Iraq had produced more than a few grams of weapon-usable nuclear material or had clandestinely acquired such material. Furthermore, there are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for t he production of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance." [Source: IAEA Report, 10/8/98]

FEBRUARY 23 & 24, 2001 – COLIN POWELL SAYS IRAQ IS CONTAINED: "I think we ought to declare [the containment policy] a success. We have kept him contained, kept him in his box." He added Saddam "is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors" and that "he threatens not the United States." [Source: State Department, 2/23/01 and 2/24/01]

SEPTEMBER 16, 2001 – CHENEY ACKNOWLEDGES IRAQ IS CONTAINED: Vice President Dick Cheney said that "Saddam Hussein is bottled up" – a confirmation of the intelligence he had received. [Source: Meet the Press, 9/16/2001]

SEPTEMBER 2001 – WHITE HOUSE CREATES OFFICE TO CIRCUMVENT INTEL AGENCIES: The Pentagon creates the Office of Special Plans "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…The rising influence of the Office of Special Plans was accompanied by a decline in the influence of the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. bringing about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community." The office, hand-picked by the Administration, specifically "cherry-picked intelligence that supported its pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest" while officials deliberately "bypassed the government's customary procedures for vetting intelligence." [Sources: New Yorker, 5/12/03; Atlantic Monthly, 1/04; New Yorker, 10/20/03]

2002: Intel Agencies Repeatedly Warn White House of Its Weak WMD Case

Throughout 2002, the CIA, DIA, Department of Energy and United Nations all warned the Bush Administration that its selective use of intelligence was painting a weak WMD case. Those warnings were repeatedly ignored.

JANUARY, 2002 – TENET DOES NOT MENTION IRAQ IN NUCLEAR THREAT REPORT: "In CIA Director George Tenet's January 2002 review of global weapons-technology proliferation, he did not even mention a nuclear threat from Iraq, though he did warn of one from North Korea." [Source: The New Republic, 6/30/03]

FEBRUARY 6, 2002 – CIA SAYS IRAQ HAS NOT PROVIDED WMD TO TERRORISTS: "The Central Intelligence Agency has no evidence that Iraq has engaged in terrorist operations against the United States in nearly a decade, and the agency is also convinced that President Saddam Hussein has not provided chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda or related terrorist groups, according to several American intelligence officials." [Source: NY Times, 2/6/02]

APRIL 15, 2002 – WOLFOWITZ ANGERED AT CIA FOR NOT UNDERMINING U.N. REPORT: After receiving a CIA report that concluded that Hans Blix had conducted inspections of Iraq's declared nuclear power plants "fully within the parameters he could operate" when Blix was head of the international agency responsible for these inspections prior to the Gulf War, a report indicated that "Wolfowitz ‘hit the ceiling’ because the CIA failed to provide sufficient ammunition to undermine Blix and, by association, the new U.N. weapons inspection program." [Source: W. Post, 4/15/02]

SUMMER, 2002 – CIA WARNINGS TO WHITE HOUSE EXPOSED: "In the late summer of 2002, Sen. Graham had requested from Tenet an analysis of the Iraqi threat. According to knowledgeable sources, he received a 25-page classified response reflecting the balanced view that had prevailed earlier among the intelligence agencies--noting, for example, that evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program or a link to Al Qaeda was inconclusive. Early that September, the committee also received the DIA's classified analysis, which reflected the same cautious assessments. But committee members became worried when, midway through the month, they received a new CIA analysis of the threat that highlighted the Bush administration's claims and consigned skepticism to footnotes." [Source: The New Republic, 6/30/03]

SEPTEMBER, 2002 – DIA TELLS WHITE HOUSE NO EVIDENCE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS: "An unclassified excerpt of a 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency study on Iraq's chemical warfare program in which it stated that there is ‘no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has - or will - establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities.’" The report also said, "A substantial amount of Iraq's chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998 as a result of Operation Desert Storm and UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) actions." [Source: Carnegie Endowment for Peace, 6/13/03; DIA report, 2002]

SEPTEMBER 20, 2002 – DEPT. OF ENERGY TELLS WHITE HOUSE OF NUKE DOUBTS: "Doubts about the quality of some of the evidence that the United States is using to make its case that Iraq is trying to build a nuclear bomb emerged Thursday. While National Security Adviser Condi Rice stated on 9/8 that imported aluminum tubes ‘are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs’ a growing number of experts say that the administration has not presented convincing evidence that the tubes were intended for use in uranium enrichment rather than for artillery rocket tubes or other uses. Former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright said he found significant disagreement among scientists within the Department of Energy and other agencies about the certainty of the evidence." [Source: UPI, 9/20/02]

OCTOBER 2002 – CIA DIRECTLY WARNS WHITE HOUSE: "The CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa." [Source: Washington Post, 7/23/03]

OCTOBER 2002 — STATE DEPT. WARNS WHITE HOUSE ON NUKE CHARGES: The State Department’s Intelligence and Research Department dissented from the conclusion in the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD capabilities that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. "The activities we have detected do not ... add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquiring nuclear weapons." INR accepted the judgment by Energy Department technical experts that aluminum tubes Iraq was seeking to acquire, which was the central basis for the conclusion that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, were ill-suited to build centrifuges for enriching uranium. [Source, Declassified Iraq NIE released 7/2003]

OCTOBER 2002 – AIR FORCE WARNS WHITE HOUSE: "The government organization most knowledgeable about the United States' UAV program -- the Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center -- had sharply disputed the notion that Iraq's UAVs were being designed as attack weapons" – a WMD claim President Bush used in his October 7 speech on Iraqi WMD, just three days before the congressional vote authorizing the president to use force. [Source: Washington Post, 9/26/03]

2003: WH Pressures Intel Agencies to Conform; Ignores More Warnings

Instead of listening to the repeated warnings from the intelligence community, intelligence officials say the White House instead pressured them to conform their reports to fit a pre-determined policy. Meanwhile, more evidence from international institutions poured in that the White House’s claims were not well-grounded.

LATE 2002-EARLY 2003 – CHENEY PRESSURES CIA TO CHANGE INTELLIGENCE: "Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated trips to CIA headquarters in the run-up to the war for unusual, face-to-face sessions with intelligence analysts poring over Iraqi data. The pressure on the intelligence community to document the administration's claims that the Iraqi regime had ties to al-Qaida and was pursuing a nuclear weapons capacity was ‘unremitting,’ said former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro, echoing several other intelligence veterans interviewed." Additionally, CIA officials "charged that the hard-liners in the Defense Department and vice president's office had 'pressured' agency analysts to paint a dire picture of Saddam's capabilities and intentions." [Sources: Dallas Morning News, 7/28/03; Newsweek, 7/28/03]

JANUARY, 2003 – STATE DEPT. INTEL BUREAU REITERATE WARNING TO POWELL: "The Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the State Department's in-house analysis unit, and nuclear experts at the Department of Energy are understood to have explicitly warned Secretary of State Colin Powell during the preparation of his speech that the evidence was questionable. The Bureau reiterated to Mr. Powell during the preparation of his February speech that its analysts were not persuaded that the aluminum tubes the Administration was citing could be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium." [Source: Financial Times, 7/30/03]

FEBRUARY 14, 2003 – UN WARNS WHITE HOUSE THAT NO WMD HAVE BEEN FOUND: "In their third progress report since U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 was passed in November, inspectors told the council they had not found any weapons of mass destruction." Weapons inspector Hans Blix told the U.N. Security Council they had been unable to find any WMD in Iraq and that more time was needed for inspections. [Source: CNN, 2/14/03]

FEBRUARY 15, 2003 – IAEA WARNS WHITE HOUSE NO NUCLEAR EVIDENCE: The head of the IAEA told the U.N. in February that "We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq." The IAEA examined "2,000 pages of documents seized Jan. 16 from an Iraqi scientist's home -- evidence, the Americans said, that the Iraqi regime was hiding government documents in private homes. The documents, including some marked classified, appear to be the scientist's personal files." However, "the documents, which contained information about the use of laser technology to enrich uranium, refer to activities and sites known to the IAEA and do not change the agency's conclusions about Iraq's laser enrichment program." [Source: Wash. Post, 2/15/03]

FEBURARY 24, 2003 – CIA WARNS WHITE HOUSE ‘NO DIRECT EVIDENCE’ OF WMD: "A CIA report on proliferation released this week says the intelligence community has no ‘direct evidence’ that Iraq has succeeded in reconstituting its biological, chemical, nuclear or long-range missile programs in the two years since U.N. weapons inspectors left and U.S. planes bombed Iraqi facilities. ‘We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its Weapons of Mass Destruction programs,’ said the agency in its semi-annual report on proliferation activities." [NBC News, 2/24/03]

MARCH 7, 2003 – IAEA REITERATES TO WHITE HOUSE NO EVIDENCE OF NUKES: IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei said nuclear experts have found "no indication" that Iraq has tried to import high-strength aluminum tubes or specialized ring magnets for centrifuge enrichment of uranium. For months, American officials had "cited Iraq's importation of these tubes as evidence that Mr. Hussein's scientists have been seeking to develop a nuclear capability." ElBaradei also noted said "the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that documents which formed the basis for the [President Bush’s assertion] of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic." When questioned about this on Meet the Press, Vice President Dick Cheney simply said "Mr. ElBaradei is, frankly, wrong." [Source: NY Times, 3/7/03: Meet the Press, 3/16/03]

MAY 30, 2003 – INTEL PROFESSIONALS ADMIT THEY WERE PRESSURED: "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 official at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). 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 said. Greg Thielmann, an intelligence official in the State Department, said it appeared to him that intelligence had been shaped 'from the top down.'" [Reuters, 5/30/03 ]

JUNE 6, 2003 – INTELLIGENCE HISTORIAN SAYS INTEL WAS HYPED: "The CIA bowed to Bush administration pressure to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs ahead of the U.S.-led war in Iraq , a leading national security historian concluded in a detailed study of the spy agency's public pronouncements." [Reuters, 6/6/03]

Agency Challenges Evidence Against Iraq Cited by Bush
By Michael R. Gordon
New York Times

Friday 10 January 2003

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/011103C.iaea.refutes.htm

WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 -- The key piece of evidence that President Bush has cited as proof that Saddam Hussein has sought to revive his program to make nuclear weapons was challenged today by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

In his remarks to the United Nations General Assembly in September, President Bush cited Iraq's attempts to buy special aluminum tubes as proof that Baghdad was seeking to construct a centrifuge network system to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs.

"Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon," Mr. Bush said.

But Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the I.A.E.A., offered a sharply different assessment in a report to the United Nations Security Council today.

Dr. ElBaradei said Iraqi officials had claimed that they sought the tubes to make 81-millimeter rockets. Dr. ElBaradei indicated that he thought the Iraqi claim was credible.

"While the matter is still under investigation and further verification is foreseen, the I.A.E.A.'s analysis to date indicates that the specifications of the aluminum tubes sought by Iraq in 2001 and 2002 appear to be consistent with reverse engineering of rockets," the agency said in its report. "While it would be possible to modify such tubes for the manufacture of centrifuges, they are not directly suitable for it."

While the discussion of Iraq's procurement efforts is highly technical, it is politically very significant. The primary rational for going to war with Iraq rests on fears that Baghdad is striving to develop a nuclear weapon. The argument for military intervention, in effect, is that Iraq was much closer to a nuclear weapon before the 1991 Persian Gulf war than most experts thought and might be again.

United States officials have long been concerned that Iraq would try to revive its nuclear weapons program and have cited several pieces of evidence.

First, after the 1991 gulf war United Nations inspectors learned that Iraq had planned to build a centrifuge plant of 1,000 machines. Second, British intelligence has reported that Iraq wanted to produce a special magnet that would be suitable for a gas centrifuge system.

Another important indicator, officials said, was Iraq's efforts to procure special aluminum tubes. In a report titled "A Decade of Deception and Defiance," the White House asserted that Iraq had sought to buy thousands of tubes over a 14-month period to make centrifuges for enriching uranium. Though the shipments were blocked, officials said, the White House said they demonstrated that Iraq was striving to become a nuclear power.

Still, American intelligence was never of a single mind on the question of aluminum tubes. While there have been varying assessments, the dominant view among American intelligence analysts -- one backed by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency -- is that the precise dimensions and specifications of the tubes indicated that they were intended for use in making centrifuges. But some officials in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department have questioned this analysis, saying that the tubes might be intended to make rockets.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have taken the position that the C.I.A.'s case is compelling. Senior officials said that some of the tubes sought were of a type used to make centrifuges and carried technical specifications that made it difficult to think they could be used for anything else.

Asked about the new assessment, a senior Bush Administration official said: "I think the Iraqis are spinning the I.A.E.A. The majority of the intelligence community has the same view as before."

The agency, however, is not alone in questioning the United States view. In its report on Iraq's efforts to make weapons of mass destruction, Britain concluded that Iraq was "almost certainly" seeking the means to enrich uranium to make a nuclear weapon. But referring to Iraq's attempts to buy aluminum tubes Britain also concluded that "there is no definitive intelligence that it is destined for a nuclear program."

Today's assessment also raises new questions. The I.A.E.A. said that Iraq had offered only limited cooperation and that there were still important questions about its suspected effort to develop a nuclear program. But the agency also noted that the presence of its inspectors would make it hard for Iraq to resume its nuclear program.

To investigate the case of the aluminum tubes, Dr. ElBaradei said, inspectors visited Iraqi rocket factories, interviewed Iraqi officials, took samples of aluminum tubes that Iraq managed to buy, and reviewed Iraqi documents on purchases they had sought to carry out.

Iraq's attempts to buy aluminum tubes "was the key piece of evidence to support the assessment that Iraq was pursuing or trying to revive its gas centrifuge program," said Gary Samore, director of studies for the International Institute of Strategic Studies and the senior proliferation official on President Clinton's National Security Council. As a result of the agency's report, he added, "this particular piece of evidence is now much more ambiguous."

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article....RTICLE_ID=33682
Tuesday, July 22, 2003

THE STATE OF THE URANIUM
Energy, State ruled out tubes as part of program
Bush asserted aluminum gear tied to Saddam's nuke-weapons ambitions

By Paul Sperry

WASHINGTON – Declassified portions of a top-secret intelligence report reveal both the State and Energy departments ruled out the possibility deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein sought high-strength aluminum tubing for the development of nuclear weapons.

The 81 mm tubes were a key component of President Bush's charge that Iraq was "reconstituting" its nuclear weapons program.

Energy "assesses that the tubes probably are not part of the program," states the declassified summary, or "key judgments," of the still-secret National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE. The 90-page report was prepared last October by the U.S. intelligence community.

State's intelligence branch, known as the INR, agreed.

"INR accepts the judgment of technical experts at the U.S. Department of Energy who have concluded that the tubes Iraq seeks to acquire are poorly suited for use in gas centrifuges to be used for uranium enrichment," page 5 of the report says. And it "finds unpersuasive the arguments advanced by others to make the case that they are intended for that purpose."

Less than a week after the report was circulated, however, Bush nonetheless insisted in a key Iraq speech in Cincinnati that the tubes "are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."

He repeated the charge against Hussein in his Jan. 28 State of the Union address: "Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear-weapons production."

The assertion came right after Bush's now-disputed 16-word allegation that Hussein also had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

In the NIE report, State argued it was "far more likely that the tubes are intended for another purpose, most likely the production of artillery rockets."

It based its alternative view on the "very large quantities being sought [thousands of tubes], the way the tubes were tested by the Iraqis, and the atypical lack of attention to operational security in the procurement efforts," among other reasons.

The International Atomic Energy Agency reached a similar conclusion in early January, finding the tubes better suited for conventional artillery rockets than centrifuge rotors.

Then, in a March 7 report to the U.N. Security Council, IAEA officially ruled out the possibility the tubes were sought for a nuclear program.

Citing blueprints and invoices seized in Baghdad, the group noted Iraq had for two decades unsuccessfully tried to manufacture 81 mm artillery rockets that could perform better while resisting rust. The failure led Baghdad to look outside the country for higher-grade metals with "anodized" coatings – a thin outer film better suited for rockets than centrifuges.

Nuclear experts also agree the size of the tubes didn't fit the specifications for use as centrifuge rotors, and Iraq would have had to retool the imports if it intended to use them for refining uranium.

"The tubes are not intended for use in Iraq's nuclear weapon programs," State's INR concluded in the secret high-level report.

In fact, INR rejected the administration's view that Iraq was vigorously pursuing nuclear weapons, citing "inadequate" evidence.

"The activities we have detected do not add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons," the report said.

Though such efforts were still possible, INR said it found "the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment."

U.S. inspectors scouring Iraq so far have uncovered no hard evidence Baghdad had, in fact, "reconstituted" its nuclear-weapons program, as the White House repeatedly charged before the war. And they have found no banned weapons of any kind – nuclear, biological or chemical.

The White House, under increasing pressure to explain evidence it used to support the war, Friday released select portions of the secret NIE report. It did not post the eight pages of released text (parts of which are redacted) on its website, however. And it only made them available to select media through the National Security Council press office, not the main White House press office.

WorldNetDaily late Friday received from the NSC a copy of the eight-page release from the still-secret report, entitled "Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction."

The report is not the same as the 25-page unclassified public report – entitled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs" – the CIA posted on its website in October.

Did They Lie?: the Debate over Iraq War Intelligence
Niko Kyriakou

http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/122530...Version=enabled

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 19 (OneWorld) - According to terrorism and nuclear experts, the Bush administration probably tweaked some, but not all of the intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq.

Raucous debates in Congress and the Senate this week have led both Democratic and Republican legislators, including Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE), to push for a renewed investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee into whether the administration skewed pre-war intelligence.

The Pentagon also announced Friday, after requests by Senators Pat Roberts, a Republican, and Carl Levin, a Democrat, the launch of an investigation into the Office of Special Plans, a unit created to analyze intelligence prior to the War.

Some legislators have charged the Office with "cherry-picking" data that boosted the administration's case for war.

In response, the president has said that some legislators are trying to re-write history and Vice President Dick Cheney called Democratic critiques that intelligence was manipulated "reprehensible."

But looking back at what was known about the administration's main justifications for invading Iraq, terror and weapons experts say that a clear pattern emerges of evidence being ignored.

Officials serving during George W. Bush's first term built their case largely on the idea that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, as well as a growing capability to develop not just more chemical and biological, but also nuclear weapons.

Bush officials also stressed the severity of the threat these weapons posed in the hands of Saddam Hussein, a known villain, terrorism supporter, and U.S.-antagonist.

"Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror, the instruments of mass death and destruction. And he cannot be trusted. The risk is simply too great that he will use them, or provide them to a terror network," President Bush told the nation from Cincinnati in October of 2002.

Prior to the war, most weapons of mass destruction (WMD) experts agreed that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, and those stockpiles have since been found in Iraq. They also agreed that Iraq had the capability to produce more of such weapons.

"Virtually every intelligence service in the world believed that Saddam had the infrastructure to manufacture WMDs--not nuclear--but chemical and biological weapons," said Jeffrey M. Bale, a senior researcher at the non-partisan, Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

While a host of other countries were also known to have chemical or biological weapons, including Syria, North Koran, Iran, the former Yugoslavia and former Soviet Union, China, Pakistan, and India, Saddam had distinguished himself by showing a willingness to use those weapons.

"But, there was very little evidence that Saddam had a nuclear program," said Bale, an expert in the Center's Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism Research Program.

Only a "handful" of evidence suggested Iraq still had a nuclear program, and this small amount was "exaggerated," Bale told OneWorld.

There was some truth to the assertion that Iraq was tied to terrorist groups, Bale said, but claims that Iraq was specifically linked to Al-Qaeda--the group that posed the biggest threat to the United States--he called "rubbish."

"There were low-level meetings between some Iraqi intelligence officials with some people claiming to represent Al-Qaeda, but they never amounted to anything."

"Intelligence was tweaked in the sense that the people in the Bush team were convinced of certain things and basically, every bit of information that supported what they already believed they accepted, and ignored all the evidence that suggested their views were wrong."

The question of culpability--whether officials unintentionally deluded themselves about Iraq's terror links and nuclear programs, or whether they actually knew that their claims were false--is probably unanswerable.

"I think they honestly believed it," Bale said.

Imad Khadduri, an Iraqi scientist who worked on the Iraq nuclear weapons program beginning in 1981 and who left Iraq in the late 1990s, is less forgiving.

"The intelligence was definitely concocted. I was in the nuclear Iraq program for 30 years and I left in '98. It was never resurrected since '91.

"Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, and the Office of Special Plans under them--they cherry-picked only the bad information," Khadduri told OneWorld.

Prior to the war, Khadduri said he tried frantically to alert officials that Iraq's WMD programs were inactive and spoke extensively to the media, but he said no government agents ever contacted him.

"In January 2003 I predicted that 'rivers of blood will flow.' I know my people," Khadduri said.

The president and his aides have distanced themselves from the blame for faulty intelligence saying that Congress and the administration had access to the same intelligence.

“They looked at the same intelligence I did, and they voted--many of them voted to support the decision I made. It’s irresponsible to use politics," Bush said from Asia this week.

But David Ensor, a CNN national security correspondent says this is inaccurate.

"The White House had access to far more than lawmakers did. Presidential daily briefs on intelligence are never given to Congress," Ensor said earlier this week.

The administration is also claiming that independent reviews have already determined it did not misrepresent intelligence before the war.

But again, Ensor disagreed, saying, "No commission or committee has yet spoken on whether the White House misrepresented pre-war intelligence. The Senate Intelligence Committee, under pressure from Democrats, is working on it. The orders to the Silberman Commission [on U.S. intelligence capabilities relating to WMD] from the White House specifically left it out."

Bush has also argued against the idea that evidence was distorted by saying that the entire world's intelligence agencies agreed with U.S. intelligence assessments on Iraq.

But critics argue that U.N. inspections teams clearly told the entire world's intelligence agencies that Iraq was not a threat.

"It was then and is now flatly untrue to say that the world was agreed that there were mass destruction weapons or programs in Iraq; the responsible U.N. agencies were not at all reaching that conclusion," said John Burroughs, executive director of the New York-based Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy.

In early 2003, just before the U.S. invaded Iraq, the International Atomic Energy Agency's head Mohamed ElBaradei said that there was no evidence of a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear program, and claimed that inspection teams needed just three more months to confirm the absence of a program.

Similarly, Hans Blix, head of UNMOVIC, the United Nations body responsible for chemical and biological weapons inspections, said in early 2003 that his team had not found any programs or weapons, but that more time was needed due to uncertainties about whether Iraq had fully destroyed all its prohibited materials.

"Condoleezza Rice, President Bush, Dick Cheney, all of them--starting in the summer of '02--were saying Iraq had an active weapons program that was soon going to produce a weapon.

"Meanwhile the U.N. agency was getting it right," Burroughs told OneWorld.

"People [in the U.S.] supported the war because the role of international institutions is systematically undervalued in the U.S., not only by the Bush administration but by Democrats as well--they should have been clearer than they were in the months leading up in the war that the evidence was mounting against the Bush administration's view."

"Intelligence analysis must be better shielded from political pressure," he said.

Proof The Administration Manipulated Intelligence :

The Rendon Group personally set up the Iraqi National Congress and helped install Ahmad Chalabi as leader, whose main goal — “pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein” — Rendon helped facilitate.
http://thinkprogress.org/2005/11/17/rendon-group/

In case you missed it:

How The Rendon Group Spun the Iraq Propaganda for Chalabi's Inc :

Documentary focusing on the tactics used by the U.S and it's allies in the build up to,and during, the Iraq War, featuring Ray Mcgovern and Seymour Hersh amongst others.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11054.htm

Prewar Nuclear Myths and Realities from the Arms Control Association : Chronology of Bush Administration Claims that Iraq Attempted to Obtain Uranium from Niger (2001-2003)

11/21/2005 4:28:00 PM
To: National Desk

Contact: Paul Kerr, 202-463-8270 ext. 102, Daryl G. Kimball, 202-463-8270 ext. 107, both of the Arms Control Association

WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 /U.S. Newswire/ -- One of the chief arguments used by the Bush administration to justify the U.S.-led March 2003 invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. For instance, only three days before U.S.-led coalition forces invaded Iraq Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons." Central to the administration's argument were erroneous claims that Iraq had recently attempted to obtain lightly-processed uranium, or "yellowcake," from Africa and that it had attempted to acquire specialized aluminum tubes as part of a uranium enrichment program to produce fissile material, which is necessary for making nuclear weapons.

The claim regarding the uranium deal remains contentious to this day because President George W. Bush cited it in his January 28, 2003 State of the Union Address and because officials in the White House and the Office of Vice President Cheney waged a public campaign to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who publicly challenged the uranium claim in the summer of 2003.

Contrary to White House assertions that the "intelligence was all wrong," as early as a year before the invasion U.S. intelligence assessments and senior U.S. officials disagreed about the reliability of the information supporting the main nuclear weapons-related claims.

Furthermore, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors working on the ground in Iraq from November 2002 until March of 2003 found no evidence that Baghdad had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. The evidence from the field should have made it clear that UN inspections and sanctions had constrained Saddam's unconventional arsenal and led the administration to reevaluate its own intelligence assessment. But it did not.

The chronology of events involving the internal intelligence assessments and international inspections (see http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/IraqUraniumClaim.asp) clearly demonstrates that senior Bush administration officials disregarded intelligence assessments that did not support the claim that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program and that the administration did not provide an accurate picture of the military threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Congress or to the American people.

As Greg Thielmann, a former senior official in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, described the situation at a July 2003 ACA press briefing, "Some of the fault lies with the performance of the intelligence community, but most of it lies with the way senior officials misused the information they were provided."

Now, the administration's handling of the uranium and other pre-war intelligence regarding Iraq is the subject of the delayed, "second phase" investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).

"Among other issues, the SSCI investigation should examine who in the White House and other agencies chose to put forward dubious claims about Iraqi attempts to secure uranium from Africa despite clear warnings from the CIA Director and other members of the intelligence community that such claims were not reliable," said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.

"It is also essential that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigate why Bush administration officials also failed to take into consideration the weapons intelligence findings and assessments of the IAEA and UN inspectors working in Iraq, which strongly repudiated the nuclear program reconstitution claim, as well as the Bush administration's faulty claim that Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs," Kimball urged.

Prior to the March 2003 invasion, ACA publicly argued that "continued, tough inspections can provide the necessary confidence that Iraq cannot reconstitute militarily significant chemical, biological, or nuclear capabilities and help produce more definitive findings to help Security Council members bridge their differences" about military action.

"Intelligence is meant to inform government decision-making, not to be invoked or discarded selectively to justify predetermined political decisions," Kimball concluded.

------

The Arms Control Association is an independent, nonprofit membership organization dedicated to promoting public understanding of and support for effective arms control policies.

http://www.usnewswire.com/

National Security Archive Update, August 17, 2005

State Department experts warned CENTCOM before Iraq war about lack of plans for post-war Iraq security

Planning for post-Saddam regime change began as early as October 2001

http://www.nsarchive.org

Washington, D.C., August 17, 2005: Newly declassified State Department documents show that government experts warned the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in early 2003 about "serious planning gaps for post-conflict public security and humanitarian assistance," well before Operation Iraqi Freedom began.

In a February 7, 2003, memo to Under Secretary of State Paula Dobriansky, three senior Department officials noted CENTCOM's "focus on its primary military objectives and its reluctance to take on 'policing' roles," but warned that "a failure to address short-term public security and humanitarian assistance concerns could result in serious human rights abuses which would undermine an otherwise successful military campaign, and our reputation internationally." The memo adds "We have raised these issues with top CENTCOM officials."

By contrast, a December 2003 report to Congress, also released by the State Department, offers a relatively rosy picture of the security situation, saying U.S. forces are "increasingly successful in preventing planned hostile attacks; and in capturing former regime loyalists, would-be terrorists and planners; and seizing weapons caches." The document acknowledges that "Challenges remain."

Since then, 1,393 U.S. military fatalities have been recorded in Iraq, including two on the day the report went to Congress.

The new documents, released this month to the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act, also provide more evidence on when the Bush administration began planning for regime change in Iraq -- as early as October 2001.

The declassified records relate mainly to the so-called "Future of Iraq Project," an effort, initially run by the State Department then by the Pentagon, to plan for the transition to a new regime after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. They provide detail on each of the working groups and give the starting date for planning as October 2001.

Entire sections of a Powerpoint presentation the State Department prepared on November 1, 2002 -- including those covering "What We Have Learned So Far" and "Implications for the Real Future of Iraq" -- have been censored as still-classified information.

Please follow the link below for more on the new documents:

http://www.nsarchive.org

________________________________________________________

THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1121/dailyUpdate.html
Germany: CIA knew 'Curveball' was not trustworthy

German intelligence alleges Bush administration repeatedly 'exaggerated' informant's claims in run-up to war.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

Five top German intelligence officers say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly ignored warnings about the veracity of the information that an Iraqi informant named 'Curveball' was giving about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. The Los Angeles Times, in a massive report published Sunday, reports that "the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq." They also say that 'Curveball,' whom the Germans described as "not a psychologically stable guy," never claimed that he had produced germ weapons, nor had he ever seen anyone do it.
According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.
Curveball's German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm. "This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."

The Times report also says that the White House ignored evidence presented by the United Nations that showed that Curveball was wrong, and that the CIA "punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and [the CIA] refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after the invasion." Much of the information Curveball gave to the CIA later turned out to be stories he had gleaned from research on the Internet.




11/17/05

Arab opinions of US: good news, bad news

11/16/05

Discovery of abused Iraqi prisoners sparks outrage

11/15/05

Indonesian police: More bombmakers on the loose



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The Independent reports that proof of Curveball's lack of credibility came when the US sent its own team of inspectors to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They discovered the informants's personnel files in Baghdad.

It showed he had been a low-level trainee engineer, not a project chief or site manager, as the CIA had insisted. Moreover he had been dismissed in 1995 – just when he claimed to have begun work on bio-warfare trucks.
The Independent also provides what it calls its list of "intelligence red herrings." There was Curveball himself. There was Ahmed Chalabi, who brought to US attention defectors that "proved to be false, as was his claim that US invaders would be met with bouquets." There was the Niger-Iraq uranium story, which later turned out to have been fabricated by a former Italian spy. And there was Iraq's possession of aluminum tubes, which the administration said were for nuclear weapons, yet turned out to be for small conventional military rockets.
David Wise, author of "Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America," writes in a separate article in the Los Angeles Times that the argument over the war has taken on a simplistic "either/or form." Either the CIA provided bad intelligence, or the Bush administration "exaggerated and shaped" the intelligence. Wise argues that both things actually happened.

Another startling example of the administration's use of bad intelligence to promote its cause originated with the Iraqi defector aptly codenamed "Curveball." The defector, though discredited as being a fabricator, claimed he was an eyewitness to Iraq's production of biological weapons in mobile labs. The "intelligence" found its way into then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in February 2003 that helped build the case for war.
Once again, the intelligence was wrong, but the administration seized on it to ballyhoo its arguments. Had the White House bothered to ask, it would have learned that the CIA had never talked to "Curveball" before Powell's speech. When the agency did seek to interview the source, whose reports were provided by the German intelligence service, it was told, "You don't want to see him because he's crazy." Yet "Curveball" was the principal source that the administration relied on in claiming to the world that Iraq had biological weapons.

On Sunday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld struck back against those who have charged the administration with manipulating prewar information, saying that "it does great disservice to the country." The Washington Times also reports that Mr. Rumsfeld refused to set a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq, and that "such talk encourages the terrorists and sends the wrong message to the Iraqis."
"Think of the enemy listening to an argument that we should withdraw immediately, or soon," he said. "All they would say to themselves is, 'Fair enough. All we have to do is wait 'em out.'?"
"Put yourself in the shoes of the Iraqis, the Iraqi people, who risked their lives to run for public office and to go out and vote to ratify a constitution, and who are getting prepared to have an election," Mr. Rumsfeld told CBS' "Face the Nation."

The Guardian reports that Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice both denied Sunday that they had told Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward about the CIA identity of former ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valarie Plame. The Washington Post's ombudsman criticized Mr. Woodward yesterday for withholding what he knew about the leak investigation from his editor and for making public statements that were dismissive of the Plame investigation without disclosing his involvement.
Deborah Howell said the newspaper took a "hit to its credibility" and called for Woodward's work to be overseen. "He has to operate under the rules that govern the rest of the staff - even if he's rich and famous," she wrote.
Finally, the Associated Press reported Friday that the Inspector General's office for the Department of Defense said it had begun an investigation into the "Pentagon team [known as The Office of Special Plans] that former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith used to build the US case against Saddam Hussein and plan the Iraq war."
In a letter Wednesday to Feith's successor, Eric Edelman, and to Rumsfeld's intelligence chief, Stephen Cambone, the inspector general's office asked for points of contact for the investigation no later than Dec. 1.
"The overall objective will be to determine whether personnel assigned to the Office of Special Plans from September 2002 through June 2003 conducted unauthorized, unlawful or inappropriate intelligence activities," the letter said. A copy was released by the Pentagon late Friday afternoon.

Mr. Feith called the allegations "groundless," and said that the matter had been "carefully reviewed already," referring to a bipartisan congressional inquiry in 2004.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/22/1515236

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005
Colin Powell's Former Chief of Staff Col. Wilkerson on Prewar Intel, Torture and How a White House "Cabal" Hijacked U.S. Foreign Policy

We spend the hour with a former senior member of the Bush administration: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. He served as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. In the interview, Wilkerson discusses what he calls a "White House cabal", led by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld; pre-war intelligence and Powell's February 2003 speech before the United Nations; the "memory lapse" by Gen. Peter Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and much more. [includes rush transcript - partial]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vice President Dick Cheney launched a fresh attack Monday on critics of the Iraq war. In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C., Cheney again denied that the Bush administration manipulated prewar intelligence to build support for the invasion.

Vice President Dick Cheney, November 21, 2005:
"The flaws in the intelligence are plain enough in hindsight. But any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false. Senator John McCain put it best: 'It is a lie to say that the president lied to the American people.' American soldiers and Marines serving in Iraq go out every day into some of the most dangerous and unpredictable conditions. Meanwhile, back in the United States, a few politicians are suggesting these brave Americans were sent into battle for a deliberate falsehood. This is revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety. It has no place anywhere in American politics, much less in the United States Senate."

Cheney's public appearance Monday was his second in less than a week and the latest in a series over the past ten days by senior officials to rebut growing charges that the administration manipulated prewar intelligence and to counter growing pressure in Congress to withdraw troops from Iraq.
Today, we are joined by a former senior member of the Bush administration, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. He served as chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. Last month, he caused a stir when he made a speech at the New America Foundation.


Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, October 19, 2005:
"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made."

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us today from a studio in Washington DC for the hour.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005.

AMY GOODMAN: Vice President Dick Cheney launched a fresh attack Monday on critics of the Iraq war. In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., Cheney again denied the Bush administration manipulated prewar intelligence to build support for the invasion.

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: The flaws in the intelligence are plain enough in hindsight, but any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false. Senator John McCain put it best: It is a lie to say that the President lied to the American people. American soldiers and marines serving in Iraq go out every day into some of the most dangerous and unpredictable conditions. Meanwhile, back in the United States, a few politicians are suggesting these brave Americans were sent into battle for a deliberate falsehood. This is revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety. It has no place anywhere in American politics, much less in the United States Senate.

AMY GOODMAN: Cheney's public appearance Monday was his second in less than a week and the latest in a series over the past ten days by senior officials to rebut growing charges that the administration manipulated prewar intelligence to counter growing pressure in Congress to withdraw troops from Iraq. Today, we're joined by a former senior member of the Bush administration, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. He served as chief of staff to then Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. Last month, he caused a stir when he made a speech at the New America Foundation.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: What I saw was a cabal between the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us today from a studio in Washington, D.C. Welcome to Democracy Now!

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, why don't you lay it out? Explain what exactly you see happening right now.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, I listened to the comments that you were playing from the Vice President with great interest. I read some of them this morning in the paper, but my concern as a former member of the Defense Department, a soldier for 31 years, is with the difficulties that this administration has put in the face of our brave men and women in Iraq today, and to a certain extent in Afghanistan and in other places where they're stationed around the world. And the difficulties I refer to come from the two decisions that I had the most insight into that were made in this more or less alternative decision-making process. And those two decisions were the inept and incompetent planning for post-invasion Iraq, and the some two years after that in which we have been involved in essentially a pickup game, an ad hoc approach, and the decision that came also from that alternative decision-making process to depart from the Geneva Conventions and from international law, in general, dealing with treatment of detainees, which has rebounded to America's discredit around the world, hurt our credibility and made the job of our brave men and women in the field even more difficult.

AMY GOODMAN: This issue of torture goes back, even before the pictures that we saw in April of 2004 of the prisoners that were tortured at Abu Ghraib. You were there when the discussions were taking place. What was your position? What exactly did you hear?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, it's not so much discussions as the fact that just prior to those photographs going public, the photographs of Abu Ghraib, the Secretary of State walked through my door into my office and said, -- we had adjoining offices -- and he said, “I want you to get all of the paperwork you can, get everything together, establish an audit trail and a chronology and so forth. I want to know how we got to where we are.” And over the course of the next few months, I got my hands on every piece of paper that I could, open source, classified, sensitive and otherwise, and I built for myself a chronology, an audit trail, and gained profound insights into how we got to where we were.

And what I found was that the statutory process, that is, the process in which the principals and the President meet to make national security decisions, worked. And that process produced a compromise, a compromise reflected in the President's memorandum which said although he recognized we were in a new situation, fighting al-Qaeda terrorists, for example, nonetheless, the spirit of Geneva would be adhered to by our armed forces in the field, consistent with military necessity. Now, my critics have said that phrase gave the President an out. I don't agree. It did not say “consistent with national security demands.” It did not say “consistent with the demands of the war on terror.” It said “consistent with military needs.” Now, military needs are very simple and clear to a man like me who spent 31 years in the military. It means that if one of my buddy's life is threatened or my life is threatened, I can take drastic action. I can even shoot a detainee. And I can expect not to be punished under Geneva, or at least if I am court-martialed, I have a defense.

It doesn't mean that I can take a detainee in a cold, dark cell in Bagram, Afghanistan, for example, in December 2002, shackled to the wall, and pour cold water on him at intervals when the outside temperature is 50 degrees anyway, and eventually kill him, which is what happened. And the first thing I came across in my research was two deaths in Bagram, Afghanistan, in December 2002. And now we know after the army has finally, two years, conducted its investigations, we now know that one of those individuals who was murdered at Bagram was very likely innocent.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain these discs that you found. You found them in December 2002?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: No, this is what I discovered was the first occasion -- this was available to me in open source information, too, because The New York Times had done a really fine job of beginning an investigation of this. And what I found was these two deaths, and the suspicion was aroused in me, because at the time the Army coroner had declared the deaths homicides, and the Army had declared the deaths as a result of natural causes. And so, as I began to investigate, and as others began to investigate and began to talk to me and to feed me information, and as I began to look at the documents that were official and otherwise, I began to construct a case that showed that the Army had obfuscated, it had blocked at every level of command, trying to get to the bottom of these two killings.

And let me just add, when I left the State Department and had to turn over my papers, the deaths were up to over 70. And I have sources inside the government now that tell me the deaths may be up to 90. Now, this is people detained by the United States, either the armed forces, the Central Intelligence Agency or others, and these are people who have died in detention. Now, all of these cases, I hope, are not murder. But many of these cases still need to be investigated, and something needs to be done in the way of accountability.

AMY GOODMAN: And these are deaths in Afghanistan?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: These are in all of our facilities.

AMY GOODMAN: In Iraq.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: In Iraq, at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you know about the secret detention facilities?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I can’t give you any insights into that. I did not know anything about that when I was in government. Those things, presidential findings, if they exist, are usually kept very close hold. Only very few people know about them. I have my suspicions. I suspect that if the Vice President is lobbying the Congress of the United States on behalf of torture, that we must have some kind of clandestine operation going on, but I can’t offer you any insights into that.

Let me just make one other point. You're probably aware that recently the Minister of the Interior in Iraq was discovered to have a prison where principally Shia were being abused, being abused rather drastically, as I understand it. Imagine, if you will, General George Casey, our commander in Iraq and our ambassador in Baghdad, Khalilzad, imagine them having to go to Hakeem, the Minister of the Interior, and speaking to him in strong words about this abuse. Imagine Hakeem looking at them and laughing, because he could cite Abu Ghraib, he could cite Guantanamo, he could cite Bagram, and this position that we have assumed has just hurt our credibility and our image all around the world. Pardon me, my cell phone is ringing.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. We're going to go back to this point in just a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. He is the former chief of staff of Colin Powell as Secretary of State. He served as his chief of staff from 2002 to 2005 and has called the decision-making that went on in the lead-up to Iraq, those in charge, as a cabal. Colonel Wilkerson, before we go to that, I wanted to go back to what you were saying about those that were detained, over 170 Sunni men being detained, found tortured, and your response to that.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, it just reinforces my position that we cannot afford to be, as a country, as a people, seen as tolerating torture in any way, fashion or form, or unusual and degrading punishment as the International Convention Against Torture delineates it. It just undercuts our image. It undercuts our credibility. More important than that, it undercuts our political values and who we are.

And let me just give you a broader context for why that is so important. This is not a conflict of bombs, bullets and bayonets. This is not a conflict where the military should be the leading instrument. Yes, we had to go to Afghanistan because we had no choice. Al-Qaeda was resident there. The people who actually plotted and the people who planned the 9/11 tragedy were resident there. We had to go after them. The Taliban would not give them up. We had to go after them. The military instrument was appropriate there.

But the military instrument is not appropriate to this wider conflict, because this wider conflict is a conflict of ideas. It is our ideas, which are the political values upon which America is based, indeed, upon western liberalism is based, and the ideas of Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other evil people like those. And if we think that this conflict can be won with bombs, bullets and bayonets, we are sadly mistaken. I was a soldier for 31 years. You do not fight ideas with bombs, bullets and bayonets. You fight them with your ideas, because your ideas are better. And so, when you detract from the better of your ideas, when you give people in the world, especially the millions of moderate Muslims who might be sitting on the fence right now in this conflict, when you give them reason to doubt your credibility, to doubt your ideas, give them reason to criticize you, you're actually defeating yourself. And we just can’t continue to do that sort of thing, because this is a war of ideas, and we're going to win it with our ideas, triumphant over the ideas of people like bin Laden and Zarqawi.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Wilkerson, in the run-up to the invasion, the Bush administration issued dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons program, to portray Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat and to build support for the invasion. President Bush repeatedly said Iraq had had mobile factories, brewing biological poisons. Colin Powell, your chief, the Secretary of State, also made the allegation in his prewar presentation to the United Nations in February of 2003.

COLIN POWELL: One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents. Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with you what we know from eyewitness accounts. We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War.

Although Iraq's mobile production program began in the mid-1990s, U.N. inspectors at the time only had vague hints of such programs. Confirmation came later, in the year 2000. The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer, who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during biological agent production runs. He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. 12 technicians died from exposure to biological agents. He reported that when UNSCOM was in country and inspecting, the biological weapons agent production always began on Thursdays at midnight, because Iraq thought UNSCOM would not inspect on the Muslim holy day, Thursday night through Friday. He added that this was important because the units could not be broken down in the middle of a production run, which had to be completed by Friday evening before the inspectors might arrive again. This defector is currently hiding in another country with a certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein will kill him if he finds him. His eyewitness account of these mobile production facilities has been corroborated by other sources.

AMY GOODMAN: Then Secretary of State, Colin Powell, speaking at the United Nations February 5, 2003. The Iraqi chemical engineer Powell referred to is an informant codenamed “Curveball.” In a major article this past weekend, The Los Angeles Times reported five senior officials from Germany's federal intelligence service say they warned U.S. intelligence that information provided by Curveball could not be trusted or confirmed. The L.A. Times reports the C.I.A. corroborated Curveball's story with three sources. Two had ties to Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress. All three turned out to be frauds. The German authorities also told The Los Angeles Times that the informant suffered from emotional and mental problems and was not psychologically stable. Lieutenant Wilkerson, your response, and your involvement in the preparation of this absolutely key speech in the lead-up to the invasion?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, I must tell you that when I heard Secretary Powell uttering those words yet again, my heart sank another inch or two. I have said before, I'll say it again, it was a low point in my professional career. I was in charge of the task force at the Secretary's orders to put together his presentation on 5 February, 2003 at the U.N. Security Council, and I spent six, seven days and nights at the Central Intelligence Agency barely sleeping, as did my team, and then two days in New York with the same routine, putting this production together.

And I have read the stories, and I have heard people in the government who now continue to talk to me, talk about Curveball. I have also heard them talk about Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, whose story also, gained under other than Geneva Convention interrogation techniques, has now been recanted. That was the story that connected al-Qaeda and Baghdad very closely prewar. I have heard that story blown out of the water. Now I have heard the Curveball story blown out of the water.

I have no other defense than to say I sat in the room with the Secretary of State and the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, and listened to George Tenet and listened to John McLaughlin, his deputy, the D.D.C.I., and listened to his best national intelligence officers assure the Secretary of State, assure me, that this was a sound source, that indeed it was multiple-sourced, that everything we were seeing about the biological weapons labs was accurate. We could depend on it. It was a slam dunk. And now I have serious questions about -- after reading the L.A. Times piece, the Washington Post piece, I have serious questions in my mind about how we got to that point, because no one ever said a word to us during that intense preparation period, about Ibn Shaykh al-Libi's possible lack of veracity, because of the way he was interrogated, or more seriously, about Curveball and the doubts that existed in a number of places about his veracity.

AMY GOODMAN: What does it mean to say you spent time at the C.I.A., as Vice President Dick Cheney did, and the allegations over and over again that to go there, to spend that kind of time meant, what many said about Cheney's visit, it wasn't to gather information but to twist the information, to intimidate the analysts?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, I, of course, can’t speak to that. I wasn't there when Vice President Cheney went out. I understand he went out nine or ten times. That does seem to be an inordinate number of times for a vice president to visit the Central Intelligence Agency over that short a period of time, but why I was there was because the President had announced in his State of the Union address that we were going to New York, and we were going to present our position, and Secretary Powell was selected to be the presenter thereof.

And so, when he walked through my door and said, “Here, I need you to go out to the agency, get a task force together and develop this presentation,” I was not going out there to bring any pressure on the agency. Quite the contrary. The agency gathered all of the intelligence community around me, and we attempted to go through the best intelligence that the United States, the British, the Germans, the French, the Jordanians and others had and to develop this presentation. So, I don't think there was any pressure associated with my visit to the agency.

AMY GOODMAN: In September of 2003, the Vice President went on the offensive to justify the invasion of Iraq. In a lengthy interview on NBC's Meet the Press, he portrayed Iraq as the geographic base for the September 11 attacks. In the interview, he reasserted the debunked claim that Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer.

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: With respect to 9/11, of course, you have had the story that's been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohammed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack. But we have never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don't know.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, that claim had been found to be untrue. The F.B.I. investigated, found nothing to substantiate the report of the meeting. In fact, the F.B.I. concluded Atta was most likely in Florida at the time. Even the Czech president, Vaclav Havel, told The New York Times in October 2002, that there was no evidence to confirm reports of the meeting. In an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, David Wise wrote that only moments before Powell addressed the U.N. in February 2003, Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of staff at the time, was frantically trying to reach you, Colonel Wilkerson, by cell phone to persuade Powell to include the supposed link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 in the speech.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yes, I know David. He's an excellent writer, and he's a very incisive voice in terms of criticizing the intelligence community, in particular. As far as the call on the floor of the U.N. Security Council goes, I was not taking any calls that morning. I had told all of the people who were supporting me that I was getting ready for the presentation, that I wasn't going to take any calls. I broke my own rule and took one call from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, feeling that it was in my interest to take my boss's call. But I didn't take the call from Vice President's chief of staff, Scooter Libby. I referred it to someone else. So I'm not here to say that Scooter Libby called on the floor of the U.N. Security Council to the point that you're addressing or that David addressed; the person to whom I did refer the call could probably assure you of that, because that's the information I obtained later.

But more important than that is, I think, is the story you referred to did keep coming up. It came up a number of times in rehearsals where Dr. Rice, Mr. Hadley, Scooter Libby, Mr. Armitage, the Secretary and I, and the D.C.I. and D.D.C.I., were all present. And I remember one time vividly, because Mr. Tenet and the Secretary of State had agreed that that story did not have enough firmness, did not have enough foundation to be included in his remarks, everyone agreed on that, but I remember one story in particular or one scene in particular where we were rehearsing it, it was one of the later rehearsals in the D.C.I.'s conference room out at Langley, and Stephen Hadley leaned forward and said, “What happened to the Mohammed Atta story?” And the Secretary looked at him and fixed him with his eyes and said, “We took that out.” And to Mr. Hadley's credit, he sheepishly grinned and leaned back in his chair and said, “Oh, yes, I remember now.” So we had completely discounted that story by the time we made the presentation in New York.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet Cheney continued to assert it.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I can’t explain it. I can’t explain it.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you talk to his aides and say that our own intelligence community, the president of the Czech Republic, are saying this isn’t true; in fact, that Atta was probably here in Florida at the time?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, there is still some conjecture. There are people in the government and out of the government who believe there are people in the Czech government, if not in the Czech community at large, who still cling to that story. So, while I say we discounted it entirely, there may be some people out there who still believe it, and perhaps there are people on the Vice President's staff and indeed the Vice President himself may believe it. That's the nature of intelligence. You have to go, I think, with the majority opinion. And overwhelmingly, the majority opinion of both foreign and U.S. intelligence communities, is that that meeting never occurred.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what you mean by a “cabal”?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, I'm a student of the national security decision-making process. I have taught it at two of the nation's war colleges, four years at the Marine College, two years at the Naval War College. I have watched it up close and personal through my time with General Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, through Bush 1, as we like to say now, 41, George H.W. Bush, through the first year of the Clinton administration and now four years intimately with the State Department in the 43's administration, George W. Bush's administration. And I have studied it extensively all the way back to the 1947 National Security Act. And I know what the statutory decision-making process is supposed to be. I know what it evolved to be in the year 2000-2001, when President Bush took over.

I also know that every president -- every president -- since 1947, Harry Truman forward to the present situation, has deviated from the process at one time or another. That's the President's prerogative. That's the way our government is set up. The President can take advice from other people. He can let other people make decisions. And he can decide to remain aloof from those decisions, witting of the decisions, or he can decide to be unwitting of those decisions, or he can actually be ignorant of those decisions. You can cite many examples: Iran-Contra, Watergate, the last few years of the Vietnam War are examples of failures in this kind of alternative decision-making process. You could cite successes, too. Henry Kissinger accumulated power like no other person in the history of America. He was both National Security Adviser and Secretary of State for Richard Nixon at the same time, concentrating power that still trickles down in history's pages.

But usually what happens is when a president trusts an alternative process that's not transparent, that's not secret, if it results in success, no one ever questions it. But if it results in failure, as did Iran-Contra, as did Watergate, as did the Bay of Pigs for John F. Kennedy, then people start looking. Historians look. Congressmen look. Senators look. Everyone wants to look. The American people want to know the truth when you fail. And my point is, two of these decisions into which I had the most profound insights, the post-invasion planning for Iraq and the detainee abuse issue, have resulted in fairly large failures, and so they need to be looked at. They need to be investigated. And we need to have the insights gained so that we can try to insure that these kind of failures don't occur again in the future.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. We'll come back with him in just a minute.

Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel
Submitted by davidswanson on Tue, 2005-11-22 19:59. Evidence
By Murray Waas, special to National Journal

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Much of the contents of the September 21 PDB were later incorporated, albeit in a slightly different form, into a lengthier CIA analysis examining not only Al Qaeda's contacts with Iraq, but also Iraq's support for international terrorism. Although the CIA found scant evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the agency reported that it had long since established that Iraq had previously supported the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization, and had provided tens of millions of dollars and logistical support to Palestinian groups, including payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

On November 18, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said he planned to attach an amendment to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill that would require the Bush administration to give the Senate and House intelligence committees copies of PDBs for a three-year period. After Democrats and Republicans were unable to agree on language for the amendment, Kennedy said he would delay final action on the matter until Congress returns in December.

The conclusions drawn in the lengthier CIA assessment-which has also been denied to the committee-were strikingly similar to those provided to President Bush in the September 21 PDB, according to records and sources. In the four years since Bush received the briefing, according to highly placed government officials, little evidence has come to light to contradict the CIA's original conclusion that no collaborative relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

"What the President was told on September 21," said one former high-level official, "was consistent with everything he has been told since-that the evidence was just not there."

In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties, and they cited the possibility that Iraq might share chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack against the United States.

Democrats in Congress, as well as other critics of the Bush administration, charge that Bush and Cheney misrepresented and distorted intelligence information to bolster their case for war with Iraq. The president and vice president have insisted that they unknowingly relied on faulty and erroneous intelligence, provided mostly by the CIA.

The new information on the September 21 PDB and the subsequent CIA analysis bears on the question of what the CIA told the president and how the administration used that information as it made its case for war with Iraq.

The central rationale for going to war against Iraq, of course, was that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons, and that he was pursuing an aggressive program to build nuclear weapons. Despite those claims, no weapons were ever discovered after the war, either by United Nations inspectors or by U.S. military authorities.

Much of the blame for the incorrect information in statements made by the president and other senior administration officials regarding the weapons-of-mass-destruction issue has fallen on the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

In April 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a bipartisan report that the CIA's prewar assertion that Saddam's regime was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons program" and "has chemical and biological weapons" were "overstated, or were not supported by the underlying intelligence provided to the Committee."

The Bush administration has cited that report and similar findings by a presidential commission as evidence of massive CIA intelligence failures in assessing Iraq's unconventional-weapons capability.

Bush and Cheney have also recently answered their critics by ascribing partisan motivations to them and saying their criticism has the effect of undermining the war effort. In a speech on November 11, the president made his strongest comments to date on the subject: "Baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will." Since then, he has adopted a different tone, and he said on his way home from Asia on November 21, "This is not an issue of who is a patriot or not."

In his own speech to the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, Cheney also changed tone, saying that "disagreement, argument, and debate are the essence of democracy" and the "sign of a healthy political system." He then added: "Any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false."

Although the Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 commission, pointed to incorrect CIA assessments on the WMD issue, they both also said that, for the most part, the CIA and other agencies did indeed provide policy makers with accurate information regarding the lack of evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002.

The next day, Rumsfeld said, "We have what we consider to be credible evidence that Al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts with Iraq who could help them acquire … weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities."

The most explosive of allegations came from Cheney, who said that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, had met in Prague, in the Czech Republic, with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, five months before the attacks. On December 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press: "[I]t's pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in [the Czech Republic] last April, several months before the attack."

Cheney continued to make the charge, even after he was briefed, according to government records and officials, that both the CIA and the FBI discounted the possibility of such a meeting.

Credit card and phone records appear to demonstrate that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va., at the time of the alleged meeting, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials. Al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence official with whom Atta was said to have met in Prague, was later taken into custody by U.S. authorities. He not only denied the report of the meeting with Atta, but said that he was not in Prague at the time of the supposed meeting, according to published reports.

In June 2004, the 9/11 commission concluded: "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

Regarding the alleged meeting in Prague, the commission concluded: "We do not believe that such a meeting occurred."

Still, Cheney did not concede the point. "We have never been able to prove that there was a connection to 9/11," Cheney said after the commission announced it could not find significant links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. But the vice president again pointed out the existence of a Czech intelligence service report that Atta and the Iraqi agent had met in Prague. "That's never been proved. But it's never been disproved," Cheney said.

The following month, July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in its review of the CIA's prewar intelligence: "Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al-Qaeda."

One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made statements that contradicted what they were told in CIA briefings might have been that they were receiving information from another source that purported to have evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from a covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the September 11 attacks by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.

Feith was a protégé of, and intensely loyal to, Cheney, Rumsfeld, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and Cheney's then-chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. The secretive unit was set up because Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Libby did not believe the CIA would be able to get to the bottom of the matter of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties. The four men shared a long-standing distrust of the CIA from their earlier positions in government, and felt that the agency had failed massively by not predicting the September 11 attacks.

At first, the Feith-directed unit primarily consisted of two men, former journalist Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, a veteran of neoconservative think tanks. They liked to refer to themselves as the "Iraqi intelligence cell" of the Pentagon. And they took pride in the fact that their office was in an out-of-the-way cipher-locked room, with "charts that rung the room from one end to the other" showing the "interconnections of various terrorist groups" with one another and, most important, with Iraq, Maloof recalled in an interview.

They also had the heady experience of briefing Rumsfeld twice, and Feith more frequently, Maloof said. The vice president's office also showed great interest in their work. On at least three occasions, Maloof said, Samantha Ravich, then-national security adviser for terrorism to Cheney, visited their windowless offices for a briefing.

But neither Maloof nor Wurmser had any experience or formal training in intelligence analysis. Maloof later lost his security clearance, for allegedly failing to disclose a relationship with a woman who is a foreigner, and after allegations that he leaked classified information to the press. Maloof said in the interview that he has done nothing wrong and was simply being punished for his controversial theories. Wurmser has since been named as Cheney's Middle East adviser.

In January 2002, Maloof and Wurmser were succeeded at the intelligence unit by two Naval Reserve officers. Intelligence analysis from the covert unit later served as the basis for many of the erroneous public statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others regarding the alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, according to former and current government officials. Intense debates still rage among longtime intelligence and foreign policy professionals as to whether those who cited the information believed it, or used it as propaganda. The unit has since been disbanded.

Earlier this month, on November 14, the Pentagon's inspector general announced an investigation into whether Feith and others associated with the covert intelligence unit engaged in "unauthorized, unlawful, or inappropriate intelligence activities." In a statement, Feith said he is "confident" that investigators will conclude that his "office worked properly and in fact improved the intelligence product by asking good questions."

The Senate Intelligence Committee has also been conducting its own probe of the Pentagon unit. But as was first disclosed by The American Prospect in an article by reporter Laura Rozen, that probe had been hampered by a lack of cooperation from Feith and the Pentagon.

Internal Pentagon records show not only that the small Pentagon unit had the ear of the highest officials in the government, but also that Rumsfeld and others considered the unit as a virtual alternative to intelligence analyses provided by the CIA.

On July 22, 2002, as the run-up to war with Iraq was underway, one of the Naval Reserve officers detailed to the unit sent Feith an e-mail saying that he had just heard that then-Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz wanted "the Iraqi intelligence cell … to prepare an intel briefing on Iraq and links to al-Qaida for the SecDef" and that he was not to tell anyone about it.

After that briefing was delivered, Wolfowitz sent Feith and other officials a note saying: "This was an excellent briefing. The Secretary was very impressed. He asked us to think about possible next steps to see if we can illuminate the differences between us and CIA. The goal was not to produce a consensus product, but rather to scrub one another's arguments."

On September 16, 2002, two days before the CIA produced a major assessment of Iraq's ties to terrorism, the Naval Reserve officers conducted a briefing for Libby and Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser to President Bush.

In a memorandum to Wolfowitz, Feith wrote: "The briefing went very well and generated further interest from Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby." Both men, the memo went on, requested follow-up material, most notably a "chronology of Atta's travels," a reference to the discredited allegation of an Atta-Iraqi meeting in Prague.

In their presentation, the naval reserve briefers excluded the fact that the FBI and CIA had developed evidence that the alleged meeting had never taken place, and that even the Czechs had disavowed it.

The Pentagon unit also routinely second-guessed the CIA's highly classified assessments. Regarding one report titled "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship," one of the Naval Reserve officers wrote: "The report provides evidence from numerous intelligence sources over the course of a decade on interactions between Iraq and al-Qaida. In this regard, the report is excellent. Then in its interpretation of this information, CIA attempts to discredit, dismiss, or downgrade much of this reporting, resulting in inconsistent conclusions in many instances. Therefore, the CIA report should be read for content only-and CIA's interpretation ought to be ignored."

This same antipathy toward the CIA led to the events that are the basis of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity, according to several former and current senior officials.

Ironically, the Plame affair's origins had its roots in Cheney and Libby's interest in reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to build a nuclear weapon. After reading a Pentagon report on the matter in early February 2002, Cheney asked the CIA officer who provided him with a national security briefing each morning if he could find out about it.

Without Cheney's knowledge, his query led to the CIA-sanctioned trip to Niger by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, to investigate the allegations. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were most likely not true.

Despite that conclusion, President Bush, in his State of the Union address in 2003, included the Niger allegation in making the case to go to war with Iraq. In July 2003, after the war had begun, Wilson publicly charged that the Bush administration had "twisted" the intelligence information to make the case to go to war.

Libby and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove told reporters that Wilson's had been sent to Niger on the recommendation of his wife, Plame. In the process, the leaks led to the unmasking of Plame, the appointment of Fitzgerald, the jailing of a New York Times reporter for 85 days, and a federal grand jury indictment of Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly attempting to conceal his role in leaking Plame's name to the press.

The Plame affair was not so much a reflection of any personal animus toward Wilson or Plame, says one former senior administration official who knows most of the principals involved, but rather the direct result of long-standing antipathy toward the CIA by Cheney, Libby, and others involved. They viewed Wilson's outspoken criticism of the Bush administration as an indirect attack by the spy agency.

Those grievances were also perhaps illustrated by comments that Vice President Cheney himself wrote on one of Feith's reports detailing purported evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In barely legible handwriting, Cheney wrote in the margin of the report:

"This is very good indeed … Encouraging … Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."

-- Murray Waas is a Washington-based writer and frequent contributor to National Journal. Several of his previous stories are also available online.

The Truth About "Curveball" and Bush's Case for War
Submitted by davidswanson on Tue, 2005-11-22 18:42. Media
By Joel Wendland
http://www.politicalaffairs.net

The Bush administration's case for war continues to fall apart. It has taken far too long and at such a great expense in lives and resources, but more revelations in the Los Angeles Times show that the administration manipulated intelligence in order to strong arm Congress and confuse the public into supporting its war.

The Los Angeles Times reported last week that some information used to support the cause for war was nothing more than "watercooler gossip."

According to this account, an Iraqi engineer who left Iraq and sought asylum in Germany, code named "Curveball," never was connected to any WMD production in Iraq. Apparently, in order to gain legal residency in Germany, Curveball had told German intelligence agents that Saddam had developed mobile laboratories for manufacturing WMD.

In his widely watched testimony to the UN Security Council in February 2003, former Secretary of State Colin Powell used artist rendered images of these "mobile laboratories" to gain support for war and to stave off strong opposition. President Bush also used Curveball's information in many of his public speeches in the run up to the war.

What Bush (or Colin Powell) did not tell the American people was that the German intelligence service had discredited this information. In fact, they alerted the CIA that they couldn't prove what Curveball had said.

Turns out, Curveball was never actually involved in making mobile laboratories, he never saw them, and never helped make WMD. His information, furthermore, was vague and could never be confirmed – unless one is willing to accept the work of the UN weapons inspectors who never found such a thing as negative confirmation.

No such mobile laboratories were found in Iraq by US military weapons hunters either.

Even more damaging was the discovery of Curveball's personnel file in Iraqi government offices. Curveball was a nobody whose beef with the Iraqi government probably stemmed from his dismissal from his job and subsequent arrest on sex crime charges. In fact, German intelligence agents told the Los Angeles Times that they had informed the CIA that Curveball was "not a … psychologically stable guy."

By now most thinking Americans understand that the claims Bush made in his 2003 State of the Union address about Iraq’s attempt to purchase nuclear materials from Niger were false. We also know that at the time the claim was made, the Bush administration probably knew that this particular information lacked credibility and should not have been used to make a case for war with Iraq.

The explosive CIA leak scandal that has reached into the White House and may put more top administration advisers and policy makers into legal jeopardy has also had the side-effect of publicizing the fact that the administration leaked classified information about a CIA operative in order to smear a critic of the war.

That critic, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, revealed that information about the Niger deal with Iraq was wrong. Subsequent revelations in early March 2003 (before the war!) showed that in fact the documents used by the administration to prove that Saddam had tried to buy nuclear materials from Niger had been forged.

Still the administration silenced its critics and pressed on with its war plans.

By May of 2005 just days before the British elections, the London Times published what came to be known as the Downing Street Memo which showed that top British government officials in the spring of 2002 (well before Bush made a public case for war to the American people) felt that the administration was intent on war and planned to use fixed intelligence to support its goal. (Read these memos at AfterDowningStreet.org)

Subsequently, a handful of additional leaked memos and reports by British advisers indicated that the Bush administration was formulating a far-reaching public relations campaign despite faulty intelligence to convince the public and Congress to support its war aims.

During the war itself, the intelligence community leaked snippets of information to the US media that much of its advice to the administration had been ignored or de-emphasized in order to advance scenarios that supported the war agenda. Some insiders called this "stove-piping," or making sure that only information that supported the war was used.

Other serious problems with the administration's case for war included bad information provided by Iraqi defectors (access to whom earned Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi defector with strong ties to the administration, about $39 million taxpayer dollars). Much of the information provided by Chalabi’s defectors was known to be wrong, inaccurate, or simply made up at the time.

One prisoner, an Al-Qaeda trainer captured in Afghanistan named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, told intelligence operatives that Saddam had trained Al-Qaeda members to make bombs. The Pentagon’s own intelligence agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, had discredited this person as "intentionally misleading the debriefers" in order to gain favors in February 2002.

Again, Bush used this discredited information a full year later in a speech to build support for war.

The administration also pointed to what they believed was an attempt by Saddam to purchase aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons production. The claim got wide publicity and was even featured in a major New York Times story written by now retired reporter Judith Miller.

Neither the administration nor the Times addressed the much more reasonable explanation offered by experts at the time the story broke that the tubes were for civilian uses. Again, the administration insisted all of this proved Saddam was trying to build nuclear weapons.

No such program was ever confirmed by UN weapons inspectors or unearthed by US military WMD hunters after the war began.

These revelations have led the majority of Americans, according to recent public opinion surveys, to believe that the administration deliberately lied or manipulated information to mislead the public and Congress into supporting war.

Bush's approval rating has fallen to the low 30s, and growing distrust of the Republicans has more Americans believing the Democrats might be able to better handle foreign policy issues. At least one survey shows that a majority of Americans favor impeachment for Bush if it is shown that he did indeed mislead us into war.

As expected the Republicans in Congress have blocked or stalled all efforts to investigate the use of pre-war intelligence. The administration has even accused members of Congress and the majority of the American people who want an investigation as aiding "the enemy."

For his part, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained away the administration’s misuse of intelligence known to lack credibility as the fault of the intelligence community itself. He told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Monday that every bit of intelligence has opposing interpretations, but he wouldn’t admit that it was a bad idea to endanger the lives of US troops and Iraqi civilians by starting a war based on intelligence that he knew to have been discredited.

The faulty case for war and the administration’s subsequent failure to bring the occupation to a speedy end has ruined the potential for US leadership in a global campaign against terrorism. It has discredited the Bush administration and has heightened global mistrust of the US no matter how shrill and nasty the rhetoric from the Vice President gets.

It has strengthened the hand of the extremists who have increased their followings and with it global violence. Multilateral efforts have been fractured. Close to 2,100 US soldiers have died and more than 15,000 have been wounded. Dozens of Iraqis are being killed and injured daily in the violence. The cause of peace and democracy has been setback decades because of the administration’s misleadership and manipulations.

Staying in Iraq is not a solution to the problems created by the administration’s lies. As writer Rahul Mahajan recently pointed out on his blog EmpireNotes.org, "the United States has proved itself incapable of playing even a marginally positive role in anything to do with Iraq."

If terrorist attacks, political fragmentation, and regional instability are what the Bush administration fears upon withdrawal, how do they describe what is happening there now?

A complete reversal of the administration’s agenda and endless war is the first step toward rebuilding a viable foreign policy that aims at ending terrorism and stabilizing the Middle East.

--Joel Wendland can be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.

ADMINISTRATION
Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel
By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.


The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.






The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Much of the contents of the September 21 PDB were later incorporated, albeit in a slightly different form, into a lengthier CIA analysis examining not only Al Qaeda's contacts with Iraq, but also Iraq's support for international terrorism. Although the CIA found scant evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the agency reported that it had long since established that Iraq had previously supported the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization, and had provided tens of millions of dollars and logistical support to Palestinian groups, including payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

On November 18, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said he planned to attach an amendment to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill that would require the Bush administration to give the Senate and House intelligence committees copies of PDBs for a three-year period. After Democrats and Republicans were unable to agree on language for the amendment, Kennedy said he would delay final action on the matter until Congress returns in December.

The conclusions drawn in the lengthier CIA assessment-which has also been denied to the committee-were strikingly similar to those provided to President Bush in the September 21 PDB, according to records and sources. In the four years since Bush received the briefing, according to highly placed government officials, little evidence has come to light to contradict the CIA's original conclusion that no collaborative relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

"What the President was told on September 21," said one former high-level official, "was consistent with everything he has been told since-that the evidence was just not there."

In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties, and they cited the possibility that Iraq might share chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack against the United States.

Democrats in Congress, as well as other critics of the Bush administration, charge that Bush and Cheney misrepresented and distorted intelligence information to bolster their case for war with Iraq. The president and vice president have insisted that they unknowingly relied on faulty and erroneous intelligence, provided mostly by the CIA.

The new information on the September 21 PDB and the subsequent CIA analysis bears on the question of what the CIA told the president and how the administration used that information as it made its case for war with Iraq.

The central rationale for going to war against Iraq, of course, was that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons, and that he was pursuing an aggressive program to build nuclear weapons. Despite those claims, no weapons were ever discovered after the war, either by United Nations inspectors or by U.S. military authorities.

Much of the blame for the incorrect information in statements made by the president and other senior administration officials regarding the weapons-of-mass-destruction issue has fallen on the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

In April 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a bipartisan report that the CIA's prewar assertion that Saddam's regime was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons program" and "has chemical and biological weapons" were "overstated, or were not supported by the underlying intelligence provided to the Committee."

The Bush administration has cited that report and similar findings by a presidential commission as evidence of massive CIA intelligence failures in assessing Iraq's unconventional-weapons capability.

Bush and Cheney have also recently answered their critics by ascribing partisan motivations to them and saying their criticism has the effect of undermining the war effort. In a speech on November 11, the president made his strongest comments to date on the subject: "Baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will." Since then, he has adopted a different tone, and he said on his way home from Asia on November 21, "This is not an issue of who is a patriot or not."

In his own speech to the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, Cheney also changed tone, saying that "disagreement, argument, and debate are the essence of democracy" and the "sign of a healthy political system." He then added: "Any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false."

Although the Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 commission, pointed to incorrect CIA assessments on the WMD issue, they both also said that, for the most part, the CIA and other agencies did indeed provide policy makers with accurate information regarding the lack of evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002.

The next day, Rumsfeld said, "We have what we consider to be credible evidence that Al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts with Iraq who could help them acquire … weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities."

The most explosive of allegations came from Cheney, who said that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, had met in Prague, in the Czech Republic, with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, five months before the attacks. On December 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press: "[I]t's pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in [the Czech Republic] last April, several months before the attack."

Cheney continued to make the charge, even after he was briefed, according to government records and officials, that both the CIA and the FBI discounted the possibility of such a meeting.

Credit card and phone records appear to demonstrate that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va., at the time of the alleged meeting, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials. Al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence official with whom Atta was said to have met in Prague, was later taken into custody by U.S. authorities. He not only denied the report of the meeting with Atta, but said that he was not in Prague at the time of the supposed meeting, according to published reports.

In June 2004, the 9/11 commission concluded: "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

Regarding the alleged meeting in Prague, the commission concluded: "We do not believe that such a meeting occurred."

Still, Cheney did not concede the point. "We have never been able to prove that there was a connection to 9/11," Cheney said after the commission announced it could not find significant links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. But the vice president again pointed out the existence of a Czech intelligence service report that Atta and the Iraqi agent had met in Prague. "That's never been proved. But it's never been disproved," Cheney said.

The following month, July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in its review of the CIA's prewar intelligence: "Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al-Qaeda."

One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made statements that contradicted what they were told in CIA briefings might have been that they were receiving information from another source that purported to have evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from a covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the September 11 attacks by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.

Feith was a protégé of, and intensely loyal to, Cheney, Rumsfeld, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and Cheney's then-chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. The secretive unit was set up because Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Libby did not believe the CIA would be able to get to the bottom of the matter of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties. The four men shared a long-standing distrust of the CIA from their earlier positions in government, and felt that the agency had failed massively by not predicting the September 11 attacks.

At first, the Feith-directed unit primarily consisted of two men, former journalist Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, a veteran of neoconservative think tanks. They liked to refer to themselves as the "Iraqi intelligence cell" of the Pentagon. And they took pride in the fact that their office was in an out-of-the-way cipher-locked room, with "charts that rung the room from one end to the other" showing the "interconnections of various terrorist groups" with one another and, most important, with Iraq, Maloof recalled in an interview.

They also had the heady experience of briefing Rumsfeld twice, and Feith more frequently, Maloof said. The vice president's office also showed great interest in their work. On at least three occasions, Maloof said, Samantha Ravich, then-national security adviser for terrorism to Cheney, visited their windowless offices for a briefing.

But neither Maloof nor Wurmser had any experience or formal training in intelligence analysis. Maloof later lost his security clearance, for allegedly failing to disclose a relationship with a woman who is a foreigner, and after allegations that he leaked classified information to the press. Maloof said in the interview that he has done nothing wrong and was simply being punished for his controversial theories. Wurmser has since been named as Cheney's Middle East adviser.

In January 2002, Maloof and Wurmser were succeeded at the intelligence unit by two Naval Reserve officers. Intelligence analysis from the covert unit later served as the basis for many of the erroneous public statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others regarding the alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, according to former and current government officials. Intense debates still rage among longtime intelligence and foreign policy professionals as to whether those who cited the information believed it, or used it as propaganda. The unit has since been disbanded.

Earlier this month, on November 14, the Pentagon's inspector general announced an investigation into whether Feith and others associated with the covert intelligence unit engaged in "unauthorized, unlawful, or inappropriate intelligence activities." In a statement, Feith said he is "confident" that investigators will conclude that his "office worked properly and in fact improved the intelligence product by asking good questions."

The Senate Intelligence Committee has also been conducting its own probe of the Pentagon unit. But as was first disclosed by The American Prospect in an article by reporter Laura Rozen, that probe had been hampered by a lack of cooperation from Feith and the Pentagon.

Internal Pentagon records show not only that the small Pentagon unit had the ear of the highest officials in the government, but also that Rumsfeld and others considered the unit as a virtual alternative to intelligence analyses provided by the CIA.

On July 22, 2002, as the run-up to war with Iraq was underway, one of the Naval Reserve officers detailed to the unit sent Feith an e-mail saying that he had just heard that then-Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz wanted "the Iraqi intelligence cell … to prepare an intel briefing on Iraq and links to al-Qaida for the SecDef" and that he was not to tell anyone about it.

After that briefing was delivered, Wolfowitz sent Feith and other officials a note saying: "This was an excellent briefing. The Secretary was very impressed. He asked us to think about possible next steps to see if we can illuminate the differences between us and CIA. The goal was not to produce a consensus product, but rather to scrub one another's arguments."

On September 16, 2002, two days before the CIA produced a major assessment of Iraq's ties to terrorism, the Naval Reserve officers conducted a briefing for Libby and Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser to President Bush.

In a memorandum to Wolfowitz, Feith wrote: "The briefing went very well and generated further interest from Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby." Both men, the memo went on, requested follow-up material, most notably a "chronology of Atta's travels," a reference to the discredited allegation of an Atta-Iraqi meeting in Prague.

In their presentation, the naval reserve briefers excluded the fact that the FBI and CIA had developed evidence that the alleged meeting had never taken place, and that even the Czechs had disavowed it.

The Pentagon unit also routinely second-guessed the CIA's highly classified assessments. Regarding one report titled "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship," one of the Naval Reserve officers wrote: "The report provides evidence from numerous intelligence sources over the course of a decade on interactions between Iraq and al-Qaida. In this regard, the report is excellent. Then in its interpretation of this information, CIA attempts to discredit, dismiss, or downgrade much of this reporting, resulting in inconsistent conclusions in many instances. Therefore, the CIA report should be read for content only-and CIA's interpretation ought to be ignored."

This same antipathy toward the CIA led to the events that are the basis of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity, according to several former and current senior officials.

Ironically, the Plame affair's origins had its roots in Cheney and Libby's interest in reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to build a nuclear weapon. After reading a Pentagon report on the matter in early February 2002, Cheney asked the CIA officer who provided him with a national security briefing each morning if he could find out about it.

Without Cheney's knowledge, his query led to the CIA-sanctioned trip to Niger by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, to investigate the allegations. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were most likely not true.

Despite that conclusion, President Bush, in his State of the Union address in 2003, included the Niger allegation in making the case to go to war with Iraq. In July 2003, after the war had begun, Wilson publicly charged that the Bush administration had "twisted" the intelligence information to make the case to go to war.

Libby and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove told reporters that Wilson's had been sent to Niger on the recommendation of his wife, Plame. In the process, the leaks led to the unmasking of Plame, the appointment of Fitzgerald, the jailing of a New York Times reporter for 85 days, and a federal grand jury indictment of Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly attempting to conceal his role in leaking Plame's name to the press.

The Plame affair was not so much a reflection of any personal animus toward Wilson or Plame, says one former senior administration official who knows most of the principals involved, but rather the direct result of long-standing antipathy toward the CIA by Cheney, Libby, and others involved. They viewed Wilson's outspoken criticism of the Bush administration as an indirect attack by the spy agency.

Those grievances were also perhaps illustrated by comments that Vice President Cheney himself wrote on one of Feith's reports detailing purported evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In barely legible handwriting, Cheney wrote in the margin of the report:

"This is very good indeed … Encouraging … Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."

-- Murray Waas is a Washington-based writer and frequent contributor to National Journal. Several of his previous stories are also available online.

http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/...005/1027nj1.htm

Cheney, Libby Blocked Papers To Senate Intelligence Panel
By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.


Cheney had been the foremost administration advocate for war with Iraq, and Libby played a central staff role in coordinating the sale of the war to both the public and Congress.

Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.

The new information that Cheney and Libby blocked information to the Senate Intelligence Committee further underscores the central role played by the vice president's office in trying to blunt criticism that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence data to make the case to go to war.

The disclosures also come as Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wraps up the nearly two-year-old CIA leak investigation that has focused heavily on Libby's role in discussing covert intelligence operative Valerie Plame with reporters. Fitzgerald could announce as soon as tomorrow whether a federal grand jury is handing up indictments in the case.

Central to Fitzgerald's investigation is whether administration officials disclosed Plame's identity and CIA status in an effort to discredit her husband, former ambassador and vocal Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, who wrote newspaper op-ed columns and made other public charges beginning in 2003 that the administration misused intelligence on Iraq that he gathered on a CIA-sponsored trip to Africa.

In recent weeks Fitzgerald's investigation has zeroed in on the activities of Libby, who is Cheney's top national security and foreign policy advisor, as well as the conflict between the vice president's office on one side and the CIA and State Department on the other over the use of intelligence on Iraq. The New York Times reported this week, for example, that Libby first learned about Plame and her covert CIA status from Cheney in a conversation with the vice president weeks before Plame's cover was blown in a July 2003 newspaper column by Robert Novak.

The Intelligence Committee at the time was trying to determine whether the CIA and other intelligence agencies provided faulty or erroneous intelligence on Iraq to President Bush and other government officials. But the committee deferred the much more politically sensitive issue as to whether the president and the vice president themselves, or other administration officials, misrepresented intelligence information to bolster the case to go to war. An Intelligence Committee spokesperson says the panel is still working on this second phase of the investigation.

Had the withheld information been turned over, according to administration and congressional sources, it likely would have shifted a portion of the blame away from the intelligence agencies to the Bush administration as to who was responsible for the erroneous information being presented to the American public, Congress, and the international community.

In April 2004, the Intelligence Committee released a report that concluded that "much of the information provided or cleared by the Central Intelligence Agency for inclusion in Secretary Powell's [United Nation's] speech was overstated, misleading, or incorrect."

Both Republicans and Democrats on the committee say that their investigation was hampered by the refusal of the White House to turn over key documents, although Republicans said the documents were not as central to the investigation.

In addition to withholding drafts of Powell's speech -- which included passages written by Libby -- the administration also refused to turn over to the committee contents of the president's morning intelligence briefings on Iraq, sources say. These documents, known as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB, are a written summary of intelligence information and analysis provided by the CIA to the president.

One congressional source said, for example, that senators wanted to review the PDBs to determine whether dissenting views from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Department of Energy, and other agencies that often disagreed with the CIA on the question of Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction were being presented to the president.

An administration spokesperson said that the White House was justified in turning down the document demand from the Senate, saying that the papers reflected "deliberative discussions" among "executive branch principals" and were thus covered under longstanding precedent and executive privilege rules. Throughout the president's five years in office, the Bush administration has been consistently adamant about not turning internal documents over to Congress and other outside bodies.

At the same time, however, administration officials said in interviews that they cannot recall another instance in which Cheney and Libby played such direct personal roles in denying foreign policy papers to a congressional committee, and that in doing so they overruled White House staff and lawyers who advised that the materials should be turned over to the Senate panel.

Administration sources also said that Cheney's general counsel, David Addington, played a central role in the White House decision not to turn over the documents. Addington did not return phone calls seeking comment. Cheney's office declined to comment after requesting that any questions for this article be submitted in writing.

A former senior administration official familiar with the discussions on whether to turn over the materials said there was a "political element" in the matter. This official said the White House did not want to turn over records during an election year that could used by critics to argue that the administration used incomplete or faulty intelligence to go to war with Iraq. "Nobody wants something like this dissected or coming out in an election year," the former official said.

But the same former official also said that Libby felt passionate that the CIA and other agencies were not doing a good job at intelligence gathering, that the Iraqi war was a noble cause, and that he and the vice president were only making their case in good faith. According to the former official, Libby cited those reasons in fighting for the inclusion in Powell's U.N. speech of intelligence information that others mistrusted, in opposing the release of documents to the Intelligence Committee, and in moving aggressively to counter Wilson's allegations that the Bush administration distorted intelligence findings.

Both Republicans and Democrats on the committee backed the document request to the White House regarding Libby's drafts of the Powell speech, communications between Libby and other administration officials on intelligence information that might be included in the speech, and Libby's contacts with officials in the intelligence community relating to Iraq.

In his address to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, Powell argued that intelligence information showed that Saddam Hussein's regime was aggressively pursuing programs to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons

Only after the war did U.N. inspectors and the public at large learn that the intelligence data had been incorrect and that Iraq had been so crippled by international sanctions that it could not sustain such a program.

The April 2004 Senate report blasted what it referred to as an insular and risk- averse culture of bureaucratic "group think" in which officials were reluctant to challenge their own longstanding notions about Iraq and its weapons programs. All nine Republicans and eight Democrats signed onto this document without a single dissent, a rarity for any such report in Washington, especially during an election year.

After the release of the report, Intelligence Committee, Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Vice Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said they doubted that the Senate would have authorized the president to go to war if senators had been given accurate information regarding Iraq's programs on weapons of mass destruction.

"I doubt if the votes would have been there," Roberts said. Rockefeller asserted, "We in Congress would not have authorized that war, in 75 votes, if we knew what we know now."

Roberts' spokeswoman, Sarah Little, said the second phase of the committee's investigation would also examine how pre-war intelligence focused on the fact that intelligence analysts -- while sounding alarms that a humanitarian crisis that might follow the war - failed to predict the insurgency that would arise after the war.

Little says that it was undecided whether the committee would produce a classified report, a declassified one that could ultimately be made public, or hold hearings.

When the 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee was made public, Bush, Cheney, and other administration officials cited it as proof that the administration acted in good faith on Iraq and relied on intelligence from the CIA and others that it did not know was flawed.

But some congressional sources say that had the committee received all the documents it requested from the White House the spotlight could have shifted to the heavy advocacy by Cheney's office to go to war. Cheney had been the foremost administration advocate for war with Iraq, and Libby played a central staff role in coordinating the sale of the war to both the public and Congress.

In advocating war with Iraq, Libby was known for dismissing those within the bureaucracy who opposed him, whether at the CIA, State Department, or other agencies. Supporters say that even if Libby is charged by the grand jury in the CIA leak case, he waged less a personal campaign against Wilson and Plame than one that reflected a personal antipathy toward critics in general.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Powell as Secretary of State, charged in a recent speech that there was a "cabal between Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense [Donald L.] Rumsfeld on critical decisions that the bureaucracy did not know was being made."

In interagency meetings in preparation for Powell's U.N. address, Wilkerson, Powell, and senior CIA officials argued that evidence Libby wanted to include as part of Powell's presentation was exaggerated or unreliable. Cheney, too, became involved in those discussions, sources said, when he believed that Powell and others were not taking Libby's suggestions seriously.

Wilkerson has said that he ordered "whole reams of paper" of intelligence information excluded from Libby's draft of Powell's speech. Another official recalled that Libby was pushing so hard to include certain intelligence information in the speech that Libby lobbied Powell for last minute changes in a phone call to Powell's suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel the night before the speech. Libby's suggestions were dismissed by Powell and his staff.

John E. McLaughlin, then-deputy director of the CIA, has testified to Congress that "much of our time in the run-up to the speech was spent taking out material... that we and the secretary's staff judged to have been unreliable."

The passion that Libby brought to his cause is perhaps further illustrated by a recent Los Angeles Times report that in April 2004, months after Fitzgerald's leak investigation was underway, Libby ordered "a meticulous catalog of Wilson's claims and public statements going back to early 2003" because Libby was "consumed by passages that he believed were inaccurate or unfair" to him.

The newspaper reported that the "intensity with which Libby reacted to Wilson had many senior White House staffers puzzled, and few agreed with his counterattack plan, or its rationale."

A former administration official said that "this might have been about politics on some level, but it is also personal. [Libby] feels that his honor has been questioned, and his instinct is to strike back."

Now, as Libby battles back against possible charges by a special prosecutor, he might be seeking vindication on an entirely new level.

-- Murray Waas is a Washington-based journalist. His previous articles, focusing on Rove's role in the case, Libby's grand jury testimony, the apparent direction of Fitzgerald's investigation, and the Secret Service records that prompted Miller's key testimony also appeared on NationalJournal.com

http://thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/...2205/news3.html

November 22, 2005


Dems win McCain’s backing
By Alexander Bolton

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has emerged as a leading opponent of the Bush administration’s policy on interrogating detainees in the war on terrorism, wants Senate investigators to interview senior administration officials about their statements regarding the threat posed by Saddam Hussein before the war.

McCain backed Democratic calls for interviews of top-level administration officials in an interview last week. But his position is at odds with many in his party, including Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), whom McCain may face in the 2008 GOP presidential primary.

Lawmakers facing a difficult reelection in 2006 and have an eye on the 2008 presidential election seem torn between McCain and their party line. Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), a centrist Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee who is one of the chamber’s most vulnerable incumbents, said he would reserve judgment on whether senior administration officials should testify before the intelligence panel. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), who is also expected to run for president in 2008, noted that Roberts is his home-state colleague and deferred comment until he learned more about the matter.

McCain, who is a senior member of the Armed Services Committee but does not sit on the intelligence panel, said the interviews could give senators and the public a way to evaluate the officials’ statements, but he also said he recognizes boundaries protecting the president and vice president.

“In general, I think everyone should be interviewed that was involved,” he said. “The president of the United States and the vice president of the United States have a special status, and you’ve got to be concerned about the executive-congressional relationship.”

“I think certainly Cabinet secretaries who are confirmable by the Senate should be interviewed,” he said, acknowledging that he is not intimately familiar with the mechanics of the Senate probe. McCain said that the former national-security adviser should also be exempted from Senate interviews because of the sensitivity of that official’s communications with the president.

McCain’s parameters appear to include Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense who played an important role in the months before the war in analyzing Iraqi intelligence for the White House. Democrats have accused Feith of overstepping legal boundaries and want to interview him about his activities.

So far at least one other Republican, Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.), who is also facing a difficult race next year, is siding with McCain.

“Why not come in and defend what you say?” said Chafee. “I agree with McCain.”

Senate Democrats have called for an evaluation of pre-invasion statements about the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons capabilities by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is pressing for some of those officials to be interviewed as part of that evaluation process and has argued that a thorough report cannot be written without interviews, but Republicans have so far resisted.

Roberts said it is too early to decide whether or not to interview senior administration officials about their statements. He said that those decisions should be made after the committee completes its report on prewar intelligence, known as phase two of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s investigation into pre-war intelligence.

“That would be premature until we get the report done,” he said.

Roberts has also said that he doesn’t want to subpoena or investigate Feith until the Department of Defense inspector general has finished a review of Feith’s work.

Republican strategists fear the prospect of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz trying to justify statements they made about the Iraqi threat using hazy intelligence. Democrats recognize this and have stepped up their efforts in recent weeks to spur action on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s plodding investigation. Earlier this month, Democrats forced the Senate into closed-session to pressure Republicans to speed up the pace of the probe.

Lack of agreement between Republicans and Democrats over the interviews is one of the main hurdles to completing the probe. Three Democrats on the Intelligence Committee highlighted the issue in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) last week.

In recent weeks, Democrats have tried to focus media and public attention on the prewar statements of Bush administration officials as polls have shown waning public support for the war.

Senate Republicans have tried to remind the public about statements Democrats made at the time about the threat posed by Hussein.

Frist distributed a memo during a closed-door luncheon meeting of the Republican conference last week urging Republicans to counter the Democrats’ attack.

“Democrats are claiming the Bush administration manipulated and “cherry-picked” intelligence before commencing military operations in Iraq,” he wrote. “By making such claims, they are waging a public-relations campaign of mass deception.”

Jonathan Allen contributed to this report.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0511/S00304.htm


Jason Leopold: How Pre-War Iraq Intel Was Cooked
Thursday, 24 November 2005, 3:11 pm
Article: Jason Leopold

How Pre-War Iraq Intel Was Cooked

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
From: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/112305Z.shtml
Wednesday 23 November 2005
Democrats leading the charge into the second phase of a bipartisan investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence have said this week that they will spend the next month or so working with Pentagon officials who last week agreed to probe a top secret spy shop once headed by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith that many longtime CIA and FBI officials and other intelligence analysts believe was responsible for providing the Bush administration with bogus intelligence used to justify war with Iraq.

When the probe is complete, which aides to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) - both of whom are aggressively working to collect pre-war intelligence documents that undercut administration's claims that Iraq posed a grave threat to national security - said will likely be in early 2006, there could be some sort of "public reprimand" brought against lower-level administration officials who work or worked at the Defense Department, the National Security Council, and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, for "cherry-picking" questionable intelligence on Iraq and using it to win public support for the war.

Based on the way the probe is starting to shape up, it's clear the administration, particularly Feith, who resigned earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and possibly Cheney will bear the brunt of the blame, because the three of them sidestepped the usual intelligence gathering process that historically was handled by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency in favor of their own clandestine intelligence gathering operations in which questionable information on the so-called Iraqi threat was collected and used by administration officials to build a case for war but wasn't vetted by career intelligence analysts, said a senior aide to McCain who requested anonymity for fear of angering members of the GOP.

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Last month, under pressure from Democrats and some Republicans, and with public support for war eroding, the Pentagon's Inspector General agreed to probe Feith's secret spy group, the Office of Special Plans, and whether the operation played a role in manipulating pre-war Iraq intelligence in addition to knowingly passing dubious intelligence from defectors from Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress to the White House to convince lawmakers and the American public into backing the war.

The White House has been dogged by questions since the start of the Iraq war more than two years ago regarding whether the intelligence information it had relied upon was accurate and whether top White House officials knowingly used unreliable intelligence in the buildup to war.

The furor started when President Bush said in his January 2003 State of the Union address that, according to British intelligence, Iraq had tried to purchase uranium ore from Africa. The intelligence was based on forged documents.

In July 2003, CIA Director George Tenet took responsibility for allowing Bush to cite the 16 words in his State of the Union, despite the fact that he had warned Rice's office that the claims were likely wrong. Later that month, then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said he had received two memos from the CIA in 2002 alerting him to the fact that the uranium information should not be included in the State of the Union address. Hadley, who also took responsibility for failing to remove the uranium reference from Bush's speech, said he forgot to advise the President about the CIA's warnings.

The White House and the Pentagon seized upon the uranium claims before and after Bush's State of the Union address, telling reporters, lawmakers and leaders of other nations that the only thing that could be done to disarm Saddam Hussein was a pre-emptive strike against his country.

The only White House official at the time who didn't cite the uranium claim as proof Iraq intended to obtain a nuclear bomb was Secretary of State Colin Powell. Greg Thielmann, who resigned in 2002 from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research - whose duties included tracking Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs - says he personally told Powell that the allegations were "implausible" and the intelligence it was based upon was a "stupid piece of garbage."

What's interesting about the Office of Special Plans is that, two years ago, Levin had called on his Republican colleagues to investigate the operation after a number of CIA agents came forward and complained that the unit had been cherry-picking intelligence information that was questionable at best. The probe never got off the ground.

But back in 2003, just a few months after the start of the Iraq war, numerous Democratic lawmakers had called on the Republican-controlled Senate and Congress to launch an immediate investigation into the OSP's activities.

In a July 9, 2003, letter to Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) said Feith's OSP appeared to be competing with "other United States intelligence agencies respecting the collection and use of intelligence relating to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and war planning."

"I also think it is important to understand how having two intelligence agencies within the Pentagon impacted the Department of Defense's ability to focus the necessary resources and manpower on pre-war planning and post-war operations," Tauscher's letter said.

Congressman David Obey (D-Wis.) agreed. Back in 2003, he had also called for a widespread investigation of Feith and the OSP to find out whether there was any truth to the claims that the OSP willfully manipulated intelligence on the Iraqi threat. During a July 8, 2003, Congressional briefing, Obey described what he knew about Special Plans and why an investigation into the group was crucial.

"A group of civilian employees in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, all of whom are political employees, have long been dissatisfied with the information produced by the established intelligence agencies both inside and outside the Department. That was particularly true, apparently, with respect to the situation in Iraq," Obey said. "As a result, it is reported that they established a special operation within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which was named the Office of Special Plans. That office was charged with collecting, vetting, and disseminating intelligence completely outside the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that the information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with the established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the National Security Council and the President without having been vetted with anyone other than (the Secretary of Defense)."

"It is further alleged that the purpose of this operation was not only to produce intelligence more in keeping with the pre-held views of those individuals, but to intimidate analysts in the established intelligence organizations to produce information that was more supportive of policy decisions which they had already decided to propose."

Republicans successfully thwarted a probe back then, but now some high-ranking Republican lawmakers are saying that their "hands are tied" and that they must go along with the intelligence investigation, no matter how bad it may turn out for the White House, because they risk losing their seats in the Senate and Congress, come the November mid-term elections, if they are perceived as thwarting the probe - this in addition to a number of scandals that have plagued the White House, notably the leaking of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA status to reporters as retribution against her husband for speaking out against the administration.

Moreover, with public support for the war waning and with the US soldier body count surpassing 2,000, Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has agreed to take a look at Feith and the OSP. In September, Roberts informed the Pentagon's Inspector General that the OSP, an important part of the second phase of the pre-war intelligence probe, must become part of the overall investigation.

By working with the Inspector General, Democrats argue, Republicans are hoping some information about the OSP's work won't become public knowledge because Rumsfeld still presides over the Pentagon. However, Levin's office said a preliminary probe launched two years ago into the OSP has already turned up explosive details about the operation.

The OSP, which was also headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, described the worst-case scenarios on Iraq's alleged stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and claimed the country was close to acquiring an atomic bomb, according to four of the CIA agents, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the information is still classified.

The agents said the OSP was responsible for providing then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Cheney, and Rumsfeld with the bulk of the intelligence information on Iraq's weapons program that turned out to be wrong. But White House officials used the information it received from the OSP anyway, despite warnings from intelligence officials at the CIA and analysts at the State Department.

The agents said the OSP told the National Security Council in 2002 that Iraq's attempt to purchase aluminum tubes were part of a clandestine program to build a nuclear bomb. The OSP and the White House Iraq Group (another top secret operation headed by Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card and his deputy Karl Rove) leaked the aluminum tube story to Judith Miller, the former reporter for the New York Times, who resigned this month after spending 85 days in jail for refusing to testify about her source in the Plame Wilson case.

Miller wrote the aluminum tube story, which was published on the front page of the Times in September 2002. Shortly after the story was published, Bush and Rice both pointed to the piece as evidence that Iraq posed a grave threat to the United States and to its neighbors in the Middle East, even though experts in the field of nuclear science, the CIA, and the State Department advised the White House that the aluminum tubes were not designed for an atomic bomb.

Furthermore, the CIA had been unable to develop any links between Iraq and the terrorist group al-Qaeda. But under Feith's direction, the Office of Special Plans came up with information of an Iraq/al-Qaeda relationship by looking at existing intelligence reports that they felt might have been "overlooked or undervalued," according to a 2002 Defense Department briefing headed by Rumsfeld, who added that he had "bulletproof" evidence that Iraq was harboring al-Qaeda terrorists.

In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, Rumsfeld became increasingly frustrated that the CIA could not find any evidence of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program, evidence that would have helped the White House build a solid case for war in Iraq.

In an article in the New York Times in October 2002, the paper reported that Rumsfeld had ordered the Office of Special Plans to "to search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists" that might have been overlooked by the CIA.

At a Defense Department briefing following the Times report, Rumsfeld downplayed the allegation, saying that whenever Feith handed him intelligence on Iraq's WMDs, Rumsfeld would respond by saying, "Gee, why don't you go over and brief George Tenet? So they did. They went over and briefed the CIA. So there's no there's no mystery about all this."

CIA analysts listened to the Pentagon team, nodded politely, and said, "Thank you very much," said one government official, according to a July 20 report in the New York Times. That official said the briefing did not change the agency's reporting or analysis in any substantial way.

Several current and former intelligence officials told the Times that they felt pressure to tailor reports to conform to the administration's views, "particularly the theories Feith's group developed."

Moreover, the agents said the OSP routinely rewrote the CIA's intelligence estimates on Iraq's weapons programs, removing caveats such as "likely," "probably" and "may" as a way of depicting the country as an imminent threat. The agents would not identify the names of the individuals at the OSP who were responsible for providing the White House with the wrong intelligence. But, the agents said, the intelligence the committee gathered was personally delivered by Feith to the White House, to Cheney's office, and to Rice without first being vetted by the CIA.

Feith, who has since returned to work in the private sector, did not return calls made over the past week.

In cases where the CIA's intelligence wasn't rewritten, the OSP provided the White House with uncorroborated intelligence it obtained from Chalabi, who the CIA has publicly said is unreliable, the CIA agents said, and Iraqi defectors employed by his agency.

Several other current and former CIA analysts working in the counter proliferation division prior to the Iraq war said they were pressured by the Pentagon and the OSP to hype and exaggerate intelligence to show Iraq as being an imminent threat to national security.

Patrick Lang, the former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence, said OSP "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as a grave threat. Lang said that the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating US foreign policy.

Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of CIA counter-terrorist operations, said he had spoken to a number of working intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for playing up "fraudulent" intelligence, "a lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi."

In an October 11, 2002, report in the Los Angeles Times, several CIA agents "who brief Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz on Iraq routinely return to the agency with a long list of complaints and demands for new analysis or shifts in emphasis."

"There is a lot of unhappiness with the analysis," usually because it is seen as not hard-line enough, one intelligence official said, according to the paper.

Another government official said CIA agents "are constantly sent back by the senior people at Defense and other places to get more, get more, get more to make their case," the paper reported.

By last fall, the White House had virtually dismissed all of the intelligence on Iraq provided by the CIA, which failed to find any evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, in favor of the more critical information provided to the Bush administration by the Office of Special Plans

In a rare Pentagon briefing recently, Office of Special Plans co-director Douglas Feith said the committee was not an "intelligence project," but rather a group of 18 people who looked at intelligence information from a different point of view.

Feith said that when the group had new "thoughts" on intelligence information, it was given; they shared it with CIA director Tenet.

"It was a matter of digesting other people's intelligence," Feith said of the main duties of his group. "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."


*************
Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak invesigation, and will be a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.

http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?Do...ge=../index.cfm
November 28, 2005

Who Cooked the WMD Intel?

This commentary, titled: “The Dog That Didn’t Bark: Cooked Intelligence,” first appeared in CounterPunch on Nov. 28, 2005.

In November, the U.S. Senate erupted into rancor over a Democratic tactic to force the body into a secret, closed door session. Despite bitter complaints from Republicans, the stratagem worked, and now a long deferred investigation of White House influence on the U.S. intelligence community will commence.

This event and the furor earlier over the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby for leaking a CIA agent's name to columnist Robert Novak have a common theme: the damage to the U.S. intelligence community's ability to gather and report accurately information on threats to the nation.

Reports of these events have thus far ignored the source of the problem: an intelligence establishment made dysfunctional by efforts to cow and politicize it from the White House. This is, to borrow from Sherlock Holmes, the dog that didn't bark.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Back in 2003 when it became clear that there were no "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, there were investigations into how U.S. intelligence got it so wrong. In 2004, two of them, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and former UN inspector David Kay's Iraq Survey Group, issued their reports. Both contained scathing criticism but also carefully avoided any examination of political interference. The Senate committee chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said he would look into it after the 2004 elections but later decided it wasn't worth the bother. More recently, under duress and in the spotlight, he changed his mind again.

The new inquiry should not have been necessary; it could have been resolved by the bipartisan Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, known as the Silberman-Robb Commission. The Commission's report initially looked promising. It unmistakably laid out that the United States has a dysfunctional and inadequate intelligence-gathering and analysis system. It noted:

"We conclude that the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure. Its principal causes were 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."

However, the Commission chose to overlook the painfully obvious political influence. It did not address the climate of policy-level expectations that indirectly demanded one type of answer when, for example, a secretary of defense declared one piece of dubious evidence "bullet proof," and the impact of repeated searches for analysis when someone of the Vice President's stature repeatedly went to intelligence facilities to ask the same question, again and again. And, the Commission chose not to examine what was done with intelligence products in response.

Perhaps one of the report's most extraordinary omissions was the failure to acknowledge the existence of the highly political Office of Special Plans within the Pentagon that sought to discredit any intelligence that did not support a neo-conservative agenda.

Put another way, the crux of the issue is the relationship between the producer and consumer. While the precise dimensions of the relationship vary from one administration to another, one thing is clear. For it to work properly there must be a clear division between production and consumption.

Sadly, that is not the case today. Currently, the intelligence community appears to suffer from a specific form of 'group-think:' analysis characterized by uncritical acceptance of a prevailing point of view imposed from above. Contradictory evidence is discarded; policies are rationalized collectively, and dissenters and those seeking more inquiry are to be attacked.

Judging by George Tenet's famous remark to President Bush that "it's a slam dunk case" that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, group think is at its worst at the very top. However, it is not as apparent whether yet another inquiry, even one demanded by political opponents, will awaken a sleeping dog that no politician from any party will want to be too alert.

# # #

David Isenberg is a senior research analyst at the British American Security Information Council and is an Adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information in Washington. He is the author of "See, Speak, and Hear No Incompetence: An Analysis of the Findings of The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction" from BASIC.


Author(s): David Isenburg

Posted on Wed, Nov. 30, 2005

Bush officials withheld key information on Iraq, former senator says

By Frank Davies

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - In the months before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration resisted pleas from senators to assess the risks of a war, especially the prospect of Iraqi resistance, and failed to share with senators key information about weaknesses in the case for war, former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., charged Wednesday.

Graham, who was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the run-up to the Iraq war, said that in September 2002, six months before U.S. forces invaded, he asked then-CIA Director George Tenet to analyze the "readiness and willingness" of Iraqis to resist the American presence. He also asked Tenet to look beyond the removal of Saddam Hussein, he said.

"They ignored our requests. To the administration, it was always going to be Paris in 1944: We would be embraced, we'd go home and the Iraqi people would be happy," said Graham, who's teaching at Harvard University.

As a result, "there was no effort to assess a range of possibilities, including an insurgency," he said.

In a major speech Wednesday, President Bush defended the decision to go to war and the need for U.S. forces to stay in Iraq "to assure victory." He also described the fight against the insurgency as "the central front" in the war on terrorism.

Graham said the effort to link Iraqi insurgents to global terrorism ignored the fact that few of the insurgents were foreigners and paralleled the administration's efforts in 2002 to suggest links among Iraq, al-Qaida and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that didn't exist.

His comments also rebutted assertions by the administration that the Senate had access to the same intelligence regarding Iraq that guided Bush's decisions.

The National Journal reported last week that the CIA told Bush during his daily briefing 10 days after the 9-11 attacks that there was no link to Iraq, a finding that was repeated later in a longer CIA report.

Graham said that information was never passed to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

He said the administration also withheld from the Senate warnings from German intelligence that an Iraqi defector, code-named Curveball, was untrustworthy. Curveball was the source for administration allegations that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell made before the U.N. Security Council that Saddam had built mobile germ facilities in Iraq. American forces never found such laboratories in Iraq.

"We're seeing more evidence all the time that they were manipulating the intelligence, selecting what they wanted to hear and getting that on the front page, and trashing everything else," Graham said.

The White House did not respond directly to Graham's assertions. A senior administration official who asked not be further identified said only that "CIA records confirm 30 separate briefings on Iraq-related intelligence were given to members of Congress or their staff between October 2002 and March 2003."

The CIA had no comment Wednesday.

The administration has backed away from suggestions that Iraq and al-Qaida were linked before the war, but with foreign fighters now in Iraq, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are portraying the war against the insurgency as a test of wills with global terrorists.

"They attacked us on 9-11 here in the homeland, killing 3,000 people. Now they are making a stand in Iraq," Cheney said last week.

Graham, who retired from the Senate this year, was among the 23 senators who voted against the resolution on the use of force in Iraq in October 2002. He said at the time that Iraq would become a diversion from the real war on terrorism and would drain resources and personnel from Afghanistan, where U.S. forces had routed the Taliban government, which had supported al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

"From the very beginning the administration defined the war in Iraq as a central piece in the war on terror," Graham said Wednesday. "You can try to sell that argument through repetition, even if the facts are against you."

FBI Is Taking Another Look at Forged Prewar Intelligence
By Peter Wallsten, Tom Hamburger and Josh Meyer, Times Staff Writers


WASHINGTON — The FBI has reopened an inquiry into one of the most intriguing aspects of the pre-Iraq war intelligence fiasco: how the Bush administration came to rely on forged documents linking Iraq to nuclear weapons materials as part of its justification for the invasion.

The documents inspired intense U.S. interest in the buildup to the war — and they led the CIA to send a former ambassador to the African nation of Niger to investigate whether Iraq had sought the materials there. The ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson IV, found little evidence to support such a claim, and the documents were later deemed to have been forged.

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But President Bush referred to the claim in his 2003 State of the Union address in making the case for the invasion. Bush's speech, Wilson's trip and the role Wilson's wife played in sending him have created a political storm that still envelops the White House.

The documents in question included letters on Niger government letterhead and purported contracts showing sales of uranium to Iraq. They were provided in 2002 to an Italian magazine, which turned them over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome.

The FBI's decision to reopen the investigation reverses the agency's announcement last month that it had finished a two-year inquiry and concluded that the forgeries were part of a moneymaking scheme — and not an effort to manipulate U.S. foreign policy.

Those findings concerned some members of the Senate Intelligence Committee after published reports that the FBI had not interviewed a former Italian spy named Rocco Martino, who was identified as the original source of the documents. The committee had requested the initial investigation.

"This is such a high-profile issue for a lot of reasons, and we think it's important to make sure there aren't lingering questions," said an aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee. "There's always a chance that you do a little more investigating and you uncover something you hadn't seen before or you hadn't realized."

A senior federal law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation, confirmed late Friday that the bureau had reopened the inquiry.



Federal officials familiar with the case say investigators might examine whether the forgeries were instigated by U.S. citizens who advocated an invasion of Iraq or by members of the Iraqi National Congress — the group led by Ahmad Chalabi that worked closely with Bush administration officials in the buildup to the war.

But the senior federal official said, "I don't expect the results to be any different. I think the answer is going to be that [Martino] wasn't acting in behalf of any government or intelligence agency. This guy was trying to peddle this to whoever he could."

Until now, the FBI's inquiry had been limited to probing whether foreign governments were involved in the forgeries, despite a broader request from Rockefeller that the FBI look into whether the forgeries reflected a "larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq."

"I was surprised that [the FBI] ever closed it without coming to a conclusion as to the source," said former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who was chairman of the Intelligence Committee when the Niger uranium claims first surfaced in the U.S. "It looks as if it's a fairly straightforward investigation trail to who the source was. And I'm glad the FBI has resumed the hunt."

The claim that Iraq had obtained or was seeking uranium in Niger was a central part of the administration's case for war. It was mentioned explicitly in late 2002 by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and in January 2003 by Bush to illustrate the threat posed by Iraq's then-president, Saddam Hussein.

In March 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that the documents on which the Niger claim was partly based were forgeries. Then-CIA Director George J. Tenet later took responsibility for allowing the claim into Bush's State of the Union speech.

The issue erupted in July 2003, when Wilson published his findings in a New York Times opinion piece. Administration officials leaked the identity of Wilson's wife, covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, allegedly as part of an effort to discredit Wilson — prompting a separate investigation into the potentially illegal unmasking of a covert agent.

The Plame case — in which Vice President Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has been charged with obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements — has raised questions about the administration's use of intelligence and how it targeted its critics.

Citing concern that the forged Niger documents might be evidence of a "larger deception campaign," Rockefeller initially had requested that the FBI determine the source of the forgeries and why the intelligence community did not realize earlier that the documents were fraudulent, among other questions.

A senior FBI official said the bureau's initial investigation found no evidence of foreign government involvement in the forgeries. But the FBI did not interview Martino, a central figure in a parallel drama unfolding in Rome.

In late October, Martino told the Los Angeles Times through his lawyer that he did not realize that the documents were forged.

Recent accounts in the Italian press said that Martino, a businessman and former freelance spy who was fired from the Italian military intelligence agency, obtained the documents from a female friend who worked at Niger's embassy in Rome. Martino has said he was working with a more senior Italian intelligence agent, Col. Antonio Nucero, and peddled the documents to French intelligence and eventually, in 2002, to Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba.

Burba, a reporter for the magazine Panorama, later told The Times that she was angry that the fraudulent documents "had been used to justify a war." The magazine is owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a close U.S. ally and supporter of the Iraq invasion.

Last month, Martino was further implicated when Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italian military intelligence, denied that his agency was involved in fabricating the documents. Instead, Pollari told the parliamentary intelligence committee that the dossier came from Martino.

The agency soon realized the documents were fake, Pollari said, according to legislators who were at the meeting. Although Martino's role has long been known, it remains unclear whom he was working with and whether the entire scheme was his idea alone.

After the Pollari testimony, Martino was quoted in an Italian newspaper as saying that he was working for the intelligence agency and not on his own. He acknowledged his role of "postman," as he put it, but said that his instructions were coming from Nucero.

"I did not make this thing up," he was quoted as saying in the newspaper Il Giornale. "I didn't even know where Niger was."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Rome contributed to this report.

December 5, 2005
'Urban Myth' – or Treason?
The Niger uranium forgery cover-up unravels
by Justin Raimondo
The War Party certainly has its party line down pat. In response to allegations that he had deliberately misinformed the Americans about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" and alleged links to al-Qaeda, Ahmed Chalabi recently declared:

"The fact that I misled the U.S. is an urban myth."

The same phrase popped up when an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney denied that his boss was the recipient of bogus "intelligence" in the run-up to war, or is in any way beholden to the neocons:

"'That's an urban myth,' said this aide, who declined to be identified."

This is a longtime favorite theme song sung by government officials who would rather not even discuss an inconvenient issue, and it often works, but not so well these days. The stench of fraud – and worse – is rising over Washington so that the whole city seems permeated by a permanent miasma, a poisonous cloud so thick that denials seem to stick in the throat even before they are uttered. A majority of Americans believe this administration lied them into war, and the parents of our fallen soldiers remember that as they mourn. What must they be thinking? The voters, too, will remember – and our newly awakened mainstream media is unlikely to let them forget.

Amid all the lies – the nuclear centrifuges that didn't exist, the links to 9/11 that were strongly implied but never proven and later denied – one in particular stands out: the by now famous "16 words" that crept into the president's 2003 State of the Union address, in which he stated that Saddam was trying to procure uranium from "an African nation" as a preliminary step toward creating a nuclear weapon.

This falsehood leaps out at one in its brazenness, to begin with, because it was based on a cache of forged documents: not mistaken intelligence, but a deliberate attempt to deceive. Secondly, these documents fell into the hands of the U.S. government under highly suspicious circumstances and arrived in Washington – and found their way into the president's crucially important speech – via a circuitous and highly suspect route.

Furthermore, distinguishing itself from the many tall tales spun by Chalabi, and dressed up to look half credible by the neocons, this particular one takes on special importance because it stands at the center of a scandal that already threatens the War Party at its very core: the burgeoning investigation by special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald into top officials in this administration, including but not limited to I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

It was former ambassador to Gabon Joseph C. Wilson, after all, who was sent to the African nation of Niger to investigate what turned out to be bogus reports of an attempt by Saddam to ship uranium from that country: and it was his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, who was exposed by a White House cabal acting under the direction of Libby and possibly others. As the special counsel looks into the matter and prepares what many anticipate as fresh indictments, the question of who outed Plame has taken center stage. However, the real underlying crime here is something much bigger and much more dramatically illustrative of how government officials doctored intelligence in order to make the case for war.

Who forged the Niger uranium documents? This is the most intriguing mystery surrounding the murky "intelligence" that lured us into the quicksands of Iraq. It continues to fascinate for the simple reason that here is the smoking gun, the plainly conclusive evidence that it wasn't all just a great big mistake, another unfortunate "massive intelligence failure" like the one that made 9/11 possible, but was instead part of a covert campaign of deception that succeeded magnificently – which is precisely why its authors are so reluctant to take "credit" for it.

When the scientists over at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced the whole thing was a hoax, and that the documents finally handed over to them were crude forgeries, the FBI went through the motions of launching an investigation. That inquiry, apparently, never got off the ground – because, as Joshua Marshall long ago pointed out, they never attempted to interview a key figure in the case. In any event, just about a week or so ago the FBI announced that their nonexistent investigation had reached its conclusion: the forgeries, they said, had been a financial scam pulled off by the man they had never bothered to interview: one Rocco Martino, an international flimflam man, in league with the mysterious "La Signora," a Mata Hari type who had access to Rome's Niger embassy like you or I might have access to our own boudoir.

Case closed. Move along, nothing to see here…

It wasn't long, however, before the case was mysteriously reopened, and – as far as I'm concerned – with quite a flourish. As the Los Angeles Times reports:

"The FBI has reopened an inquiry into one of the most intriguing aspects of the pre-Iraq war intelligence fiasco: how the Bush administration came to rely on forged documents linking Iraq to nuclear weapons materials as part of its justification for the invasion. …


"The FBI's decision to reopen the investigation reverses the agency's announcement last month that it had finished a two-year inquiry and concluded that the forgeries were part of a moneymaking scheme – and not an effort to manipulate U.S. foreign policy.

"Those findings concerned some members of the Senate Intelligence Committee after published reports that the FBI had not interviewed a former Italian spy named Rocco Martino, who was identified as the original source of the documents. The committee had requested the initial investigation."

The Times piece goes on to cite Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.), and the concerns of others on the Senate committee, as if this is what motivated the reopening of the investigation, but that may not be the case, as indicated further on in the piece:

"Federal officials familiar with the case say investigators might examine whether the forgeries were instigated by U.S. citizens who advocated an invasion of Iraq or by members of the Iraqi National Congress – the group led by Ahmed Chalabi that worked closely with Bush administration officials in the buildup to the war.


"But the senior federal official said, 'I don't expect the results to be any different. I think the answer is going to be that [Martino] wasn't acting in behalf of any government or intelligence agency. This guy was trying to peddle this to whoever he could.' …

"A senior FBI official said the bureau's initial investigation found no evidence of foreign government involvement in the forgeries. But the FBI did not interview Martino, a central figure in a parallel drama unfolding in Rome."


This startling information – that American citizens, working in tandem with an unnamed foreign power, who wanted war and were willing to pass off forgeries as authentic intelligence to achieve their ends, may have been behind the Niger uranium scam – is fed to the reader with a big dollop of official denials, but let's focus on the facts, not the spin, and ask: what new evidence points in the direction of a U.S.-based cabal of forgers?

First they tried to explain it away as the prank of a few Italian fraudsters, in it for the money, and now perhaps they want to blame Chalabi and the Iraqis – who are conveniently beyond the reach of the law. It won't be long now before they're dismissing the whole matter as yet another "urban myth." I would note, however, that the FBI doesn't just reopen an investigation on Sen. Rockefeller's say-so: they must have some fresh leads, some new information that implicates these unnamed "U.S. citizens" as being somehow involved in the scheme.

I would also note that, for the first time, this affair – which has always smelled to me like a covert action carried out by professionals – is being framed as an investigation into an attempt to skew U.S. intelligence-gathering by agents of a foreign power. We are talking, here, about espionage.

Why reopen the investigation now, when they just closed it a short time ago? What new evidence do the Feds have – and what (or who) is their source?

We probably won't know the answers to the first two questions for at least a while, but we can credibly speculate about the third. There are, to be sure, several possible sources of fresh leads in the Niger uranium forgery case, but two of the most obvious are the Plame investigation and the lesser-known but just as important upcoming trial of Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, two high officials of AIPAC facing charges of spying for Israel. Their co-conspirator, the Pentagon's former top Iran expert, a man by the name of Larry Franklin, has already pleaded guilty to charges of handing Rosen and Weissman highly secret information: the AIPAC duo are charged [.pdf] with handing those vital U.S. secrets over to Israeli embassy officials.

The Plame investigation is the more high profile, albeit less likely, possible source, if only because Fitzgerald's investigation is part and parcel of the Niger uranium saga. Even if the scope of Fitzgerald's probe is limited to what actions were taken against Plame-Wilson, it would hardly be surprising if, in the course of his investigation, Fitzgerald came upon evidence of other crimes – especially the central, underlying crime at the center of Niger-gate.

The AIPAC case, however, seems the more likely source, in part because its central figure – Larry Franklin – pops up in the Niger uranium narrative at a highly auspicious point in the timeline: according to the Italian daily La Repubblica, he was present at a December 2001 meeting in Rome with the head of Italian military intelligence and two Americans, Michael Ledeen and Harold Rhode, both of whom might be called "instigators" when it comes to the invasion of Iraq – a meeting previously reported in The Washington Monthly.

La Repubblica goes into much more detail, however, describing the origins of the forgery as a composite project that evolved over time, and pointing to the Rome conclave as the point where the various elements came together. Passing through multiple channels (SISMI [Italian military intelligence], Martino, and Elisabetta Burba, an Italian journalist, and then to the American embassy) until their true origins were lost in the mists and murk, the documents were cleaned up and filtered in the form of "intelligence" reports by Ledeen, who acted as the conduit to Washington via the infamous Office of Special Plans – one of those end-running ad hoc agencies set up by the neocons to bypass the normal intelligence vetting process, which has itself lately become the subject of an investigation.

La Repubblica confirms what Antiwar.com has been reporting, in part, specifically the key role played by Ledeen. It also confirms what the blogger known as eRiposte over at The Left Coaster has meticulously documented: that certain U.S. government officials must have known the Niger uranium documents were bogus.

Now we are learning that, not only did they know, but they also continued the process of cleaning up the forgeries so as to make them more credible to the IAEA. The Left Coaster reports that Private Eye, a British magazine, has blown this case wide open in a piece that reveals the complicity of U.S. officials, and gives us the money quote:

"When the US State Department finally gave international weapons inspectors its 'evidence' that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from the African State of Niger in 2003, they held back the one document even their own analysts knew was 'funky' and 'clearly a forgery.' Experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency quickly discovered that all the papers were fake, but they did this by spotting errors that had slipped passed the State Department and CIA: The fact that the U.S. government handed over the whole bundle of what became known as the 'Niger Forgeries' except the one paper they recognized as a hoax suggests they were trying to pass off documents they knew were phony as the real thing."


This story is breaking fast: La Repubblica has come out with yet another story on this, one that points in the same direction: the journalistic team of Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D'Avanzo shows that the latest tack of the forgers and their enablers, which is to blame it all on the French – even going so far as to accuse Martino (the designated fall guy) of being in the pay of Paris – is nothing but a serio-comic diversion, another attempt to blow smoke in the faces of their pursuers, who are by now numerous and increasingly insistent. What the War Party needs to worry about at this point is that some of their nemeses may possess subpoena power.

La Repubblica reveals not only the utter absurdity of the "theory" that this was all a French setup, and that the evil anti-Americans of Paris cooked up a scheme to embarrass their American rivals and tormentors – a contention for which there is not a lick of evidence – but also reports that the Americans had the forgeries (or summaries of them) much earlier than previously believed, in the summer of 2002: the Americans came to the French with the forgeries for verification and were told they were bogus. As for the photos submitted to the Italian parliamentary committee investigating the matter and published in the Italian media, which show Martino meeting with his "French connection" in Brussels, La Repubblica conveys the amusement of the French counterintelligence chief, Alain Chouet:

"I'm laughing because these photos prove the opposite of what Sismi says. Let me explain. This photo proves:

"a. Sismi was shadowing Rocco Martino in the summer 2002, therefore they already knew who he was, what he was doing or what he was trying to do.

"b. Rocco Martino's 'contact' was Jaques Nadal. Well. Do you know when Jaques Nadal was posted to the Brussels station? I appointed him between April and May 2002. Therefore, if you want to claim that Nadal was Rocco's 'French contact', which is true according to the photo, the contact dates back to the summer 2002. Not before. (nor later, of course, in 2003, when all the world knew that those documents were a forgery and the meeting would have been meaningless). The photo, in short, proves the exact contrary of what it was meant to prove, that is that the French were behind Rocco."

Chouet's testimony is extremely damaging to the forgers and the cabal that passed their handiwork up to the highest reaches of the U.S. government, where their fraud became fodder for George W. Bush's cadre of neocon speechwriters. It blows their alibi to smithereens, because Chouet shows that everything they're saying about the forgeries – in Washington, as well as in Rome – is a lie.

The cover-up is unraveling. This crew, which believes in lying – for a "noble" cause – as a matter of high principle, is about to meet a richly deserved fate – that is, if the FBI and Congress will take off their blinders and confront what is staring at them – and the rest of the country – in the face. I don't place much hope in the latter – for obvious reasons – so that leaves us with law enforcement. The crime here is knowingly passing false intelligence to U.S. policymakers, including the president, possibly violating several laws in the process – up to and including certain sections of the Espionage Act [.pdf], which criminalizes:

"Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States."

Surely the injection of lies into the U.S. intelligence stream, which poisoned our ability to make judgments about the decision to make war on Iraq, interfered with the normal operation of the U.S. military – which was, at the time the deception was carried out, not yet mired in what Gen. William Odom calls "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history."

They lied us into a disastrous war – you can't "interfere with the operation or success of the military" much more than that. And if a foreign intelligence service was involved, and the Los Angeles Times is right about the direction of the FBI investigation, then what we are talking about here is nothing less than treason.

What Happened to Iraq's WMD
How politics corrupts intelligence
- Scott Ritter
Sunday, December 4, 2005


The recent exchange of vitriol between Republican and Democratic lawmakers over the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and more specifically the disconnect between the intelligence data cited by the Bush administration as justification for invading Iraq and the resultant conclusion by the CIA that all Iraqi WMD had already been eliminated as early as 1991, has once again thrust the issue of the use of intelligence for political purposes front and center.

Democrats accuse the president and his supporters of deliberately misleading them and the American people about the nature of the Iraqi threat. Republicans respond that the Democrats are rewriting history, that all parties involved had access to the same intelligence data and had drawn the same conclusions. Typical of the Republican-led rebuttal are statements made by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who noted that "every intelligence agency in the world, including the Russian, French, including the Israeli, all had reached the same conclusion, and that was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction."

But this is disingenuous. The intelligence services of everyone else were not proclaiming Iraq to be in possession of WMD. Rather, the intelligence services of France, Russia, Germany, Great Britain and Israel were noting that Iraq had failed to properly account for the totality of its past proscribed weapons programs, and in doing so left open the possibility that Iraq might retain an undetermined amount of WMD. There is a huge difference in substance and nuance between such assessments and the hyped-up assertions by the Bush administration concerning active programs dedicated to the reconstitution of WMD, as well as the existence of massive stockpiles of forbidden weaponry.

The actions and rhetoric of the Bush administration were aided by the tendency by most involved to accept at face value any negative information pertaining to Hussein and his regime, regardless of the source's reliability. This trend was especially evident in Congress, responsible for oversight on matters pertaining to foreign policy, intelligence and national security.

One might be inclined to excuse lesser members of the legislative branch for such actions, given their lack of access to sensitive intelligence, but not so senior figures who sit on oversight committees, such as California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who occupied a seat on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. Today, Feinstein all-too conveniently "regrets" her vote in favor of war on Iraq, but defends her yes vote in 2002 by noting that "the intelligence was very conclusive: Saddam possessed biological and chemical weapons." This is a far different from the statement Feinstein made to me in the summer of 2002, when she acknowledged that the Bush administration had not provided any convincing intelligence to back up its claims about Iraqi WMD.

In contrast to Feinstein's actions, Sen. Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who also sat on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, noted in September 2002 that the Bush administration's decisions regarding Iraq had been made in the absence of a National Intelligence Estimate from the CIA. The CIA hastily rushed to produce such a document, but the resulting report appeared as much to be an example of intelligence being fixed around policy, as opposed to policy being derived from intelligence. Graham, his eyes opened by the seemingly baseless rush toward conflict in Iraq, voted no on the war. Feinstein and others, their eyes wide shut, voted yes.

The crux of the problem of this Iraqi WMD intelligence "failure" lies in the fact that the U.S. intelligence community and the products it produces are increasingly influenced by the corrupting influences of politics. The politicization of the intelligence community allows the process of fixing intelligence around policy to become pervasive, and the increasingly polarized political climate in America prevents any real checks and balances through effective oversight, leaving Americans at the mercy of politicians who have placed partisan politics above the common good. The recent overhaul of the U.S. intelligence community, which resulted in the creation of the national intelligence chief, only reinforces this politicization, because the new director reports directly to the president and is beyond the reach of congressional oversight.

The only true fix to the problems of intelligence that manifested themselves in the Iraqi WMD debacle is to depoliticize the process. The position of national intelligence chief should be a 10-year appointment, like that of the director of the FBI, and subject to the consent of Congress. Likewise, all intelligence made available to the president to make national security policy should be shared with select members of Congress, from both parties, so that America will never again find itself at war based upon politically driven intelligence. Finally, and perhaps most important, the American people should start exercising effective accountability regarding their elected officials, so that those who voted yes for a war based on false and misleading information never again have the honor and privilege of serving in high office.


Scott Ritter is a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq (1991-98) and the author of "Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein" (Nation Books, 2005).

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file...EDGQIF5U1L1.DTL

Freeh and Weldon Respond to 9/11 Commission

Former Director Freeh and Congressman Weldon respond to 9/11 Commission Co-Chairs on Able Danger
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What did the 9/11 Commission know and when did they know it? That’s what I want somebody with subpoena power to ask about Operation Able Danger.

Or, as former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh said to me today, “Why is the 9/11 Commission talking about hurricanes and tunnels and all these other things when it looks like they may have missed the single most important fact with respect to September 11th?”


Freeh was answering my request for a response to comments made by Lee Hamilton and Tom Kean on Meet the Press, yesterday.

And he said much more. But first some background.

Operation Able Danger was a intelligence data mining process that – according to several of its participants – identified Mohamed Atta well in advance of 9/11 as a potential bad guy in this country to do bad things. One of those individuals, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, has told me that in the summer of 2000, government lawyers, using an information sharing argument, prevented Able Danger representatives from getting the information about Atta to the FBI.

“We didn’t make it to the FBI, and that was the problem,” he told me. “We had information initiated by the Army. It was what they call ‘open source’ information which suggested that some of those bad guys, including Atta and three of his associates, were themselves associated with the Brooklyn cell. That was information that the lawyers said, ‘ah, they are here legally’, and put stickies over their faces.”

Stickies? He’s talking about the yellow things, the post-it notes.

In other words, the response of government lawyers to the identification by Able Danger of Mohamed Atta, was to put a post-it note over his face, literally taking him off of the government radar screen.

Fast forward two years after 9/11, Shaffer was in Afghanistan in service to his country. His work in the field of human intelligence operations would earn him a bronze star. While he was in Afghanistan, the word went out that the 9/11 Commission was coming to town, and anyone with information about events of significance pre-9/11 should make themselves known. He did - to no less than the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow. He told me that he told Zelikow about Able Danger and Atta.

“My bottom line to them was that through a data processing exercise, we were able to identify two of the cells which conducted the 9/11 attack to include Atta.”

One would think that the revelation about Atta would have been one of the most significant aspects of the work of the 9/11 Commission. Instead, it was not even mentioned in the 664-page final book report.

Congressman Curt Weldon has appropriately been on the warpath asking why the 9/11 Commission was silent about Able Danger. And he wants to know what happened to the chart that was presented in the Summer of 2000, the one that got the “stickies”.

Weldon is not the only one asking questions. So too is Louis Freeh, who wrote a widely circulated Wall Street Journal article on the subject last month.

Yesterday, Tim Russert asked the 9/11 Commission co-chairs to respond to Freeh.

Lee Hamilton told Russert: “Look, we looked at Able Danger very, very carefully. We do not think there was anything there of great significance. Now, something could come out in the future. I don't know. But in Mr. Freeh's article he did not present any new evidence at all. Our investigators were informed about Able Danger. We requested all of the documents relating to Able Danger. We reviewed these documents. We had investigators meet with some of these people in Afghanistan and other places. The bottom line is that they can furnish no documentary evidence to support their charges that they had a chart, for example, with Mohamed Atta's name on it.”

Tom Kean agreed.

“We had an awful lot of people coming forward, 50 or 60, saying they saw Mohamed Atta here, they saw Mohamed Atta there; they had this and that. There was absolutely no evidence to back this up. There still isn't any evidence to back it up. If people want to look into it, they're welcome to. We still haven't seen the evidence to indicate it. We saw every file. The Pentagon denies it. They say they haven't gotten any information.”

Today, I had the opportunity to ask former Director Freeh to respond. He was very direct.
“We had given the Commission the mandate of looking at any and all relevant information to figure out what happened with respect to September 11: why did it occur, what law enforcement, intelligence, government, and private agencies had a stake in that or input into it, and come up with the definitive report to explain to the American people and the world, our take and our evaluation of the evidence with respect to 9/11. Not even a footnote in the report was about Able Danger when we have two very credible military intelligence experts - these aren’t day loaders – who say that Atta was identified a year prior to September 11th at least by name, and maybe by photo, and more importantly, that they gave this information to the 9/11 Commission staff members ten days before final report’s release, and yet not a footnote and not a reference. In hindsight, when confronted with this, somebody on behalf of the Commission said this was ‘historically insignificant’. Well, the Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating this, the question is why didn’t the 9/11 Commission investigate it?”

Freeh called the words of Hamilton and Kean a “silly response”.

And he underscored that the Able Danger participants who have come forward “are not informants or criminals who have to prove their case. They are intelligence officers who had that job to perform.”

“I take exception to this notion that it was fully investigated. The longest period of time they had was 10-days. That was what they had. How could you fully investigate, with all due respect to Mr. Hamilton who is not an investigator, a fact of that potential significance within ten days?” wondered Freeh.

“As for me reviewing new evidence, that is not my job. It was the 9/11 Commission job to go out and not only find, but to fully and fairly evaluate evidence, and how could they do that in ten days, it is ridiculous,” Freeh continued.

While I was interviewing Director Freeh, Congressman Curt Weldon called. He was much more blunt.

“Lee Hamilton has just lied to the American people. They did NO investigation.”

Somebody ask the Howard Baker question, please.

General gave OK for Able Danger

Former military chief confirms al-Qaida mission

By James Rosen

Gen. Hugh Shelton, who was the military's top commander during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, confirmed that four years before the tragedy he authorized a secret computer data-mining initiative to track down Osama bin Laden and operatives in the fugitive terrorist's al-Qaida network.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11244.htm

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/3513439.html


Claim of al-Qaida ties to Iraq called coerced
•Captive made false statements the U.S. heeded to avoid being treated harshly, some say



By DOUGLAS JEHL
New York Times

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and al-Qaida on detailed statements made by a prisoner in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.

The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and al-Qaida only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of al-Qaida members and others detained as part of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used Libi's accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and al-Qaida included training in explosives and chemical weapons.

The fact that Libi recanted after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and that intelligence based on his remarks was withdrawn by the CIA in March 2004 has been public for more than a year. But U.S. officials had not previously acknowledged either that Libi made the false statements in foreign custody or that Libi contended that his statements had been coerced.

A government official said that some intelligence provided by Libi about al-Qaida had been accurate and that Libi's claims that he had been treated harshly in Egyptian custody had not been corroborated.

A classified Defense Intelligence Agency report issued in February 2002 that expressed skepticism about Libi's credibility on questions related to Iraq and al-Qaida was based in part on the knowledge that Libi was no longer in U.S. custody when he made the detailed statements and that he might have been subjected to harsh treatment, the officials said. They said the CIA's decision to withdraw the intelligence based on Libi's claims had been made because of his later assertions, beginning in January 2004, that he fabricated them to obtain better treatment from his captors.

At the time of his capture in Pakistan in late 2001, Libi, a Libyan, was the highest-ranking al-Qaida leader in U.S. custody.

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French Told CIA of Bogus Intelligence
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The foreign spy service warned the U.S. various times before the war that there was no proof Iraq sought uranium from Niger, ex-officials say.

By Tom Hamburger, Peter Wallsten and Bob Drogin
Times Staff Writers

December 11 2005

PARIS; More than a year before President Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...0,3678379.story

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10414514/site/newsweek/

Intel: Still No Connection

Newsweek
Dec. 19, 2005 issue - Evidence validating claims by the Bush administration of a pre-war relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda seems more elusive than ever. Counterterrorism officials familiar with some of the latest assessments of intel collected in Iraq, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitive subject matter, say that the more U.S. analysts pore through raw info, the less evidence they find of any significant connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden's terror network.

Following the invasion of Iraq, U.S. operatives collected millions of documents generated by Saddam's regime. An intel unit run by the Pentagon is in charge of analyzing the material—a cache, two leading GOP legislators recently alleged, so voluminous that it will take years to sort through. Last month Sen. Pat Roberts and Rep. Pete Hoekstra, chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees, suggested that one way to process the data more quickly would be for U.S. intelligence agencies to release large quantities of documentation to the public so people with certain skills (such as foreign-language or document-examining expertise) could help intel officials hunt for gems among heaps of slag. Most of the seized Iraqi material is unclassified, but current U.S. intel policy allows only people with security clearances to examine the material, which Roberts and Hoekstra claim "nearly guarantees that exploitation will take decades, if ever, to complete." A spokesman for Hoekstra said the congressman isn't concerned that making Iraqi documents public would either bolster or undermine the administration's arguments for war: "He just wants to know what they say." Judith Emmel, a spokeswoman for John Negroponte, said the intel czar's office was "carefully examining this very important proposal."

—Mark Hosenball

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view....13-065042-1536r

Security & Terrorism
Dems ask for closed session on Iraq intel
WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 (UPI) -- The top two Democrats who last month forced the Senate into a controversial closed session asked Tuesday for another closed session on pre-war intelligence.

The Senate last month agreed to appoint a six-member bipartisan task force to monitor the Senate Intelligence Committee's progress in completing the second phase of an investigation into whether pre-war intelligence was intentionally mischaracterized or misused by Bush administration officials.

The first phase of the report, released July 9, 2004, found numerous failures in the gathering and analysis of intelligence about Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.

The second phase was to be the far more controversial part -- examining whether U.S. officials made public statement about Iraq before the war that were not substantiated by intelligence, among other things.

That report has yet to be completed and released, and the bipartisan task force has not yet reported to the Senate the projected timetable for that report.

"The investigation into how our country went to war is much too important to let languish," wrote Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and assistant leader Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., Senate majority leader.

"As a result, critical questions remain about the committee's progress on its investigation, its timeline for completing that investigation, and what remaining steps need to be taken to ensure a prompt, thorough, and complete review," Reid and Durbin wrote Tuesday.

They requested a briefing in closed session this week from the task force, and have asked for monthly updates until phase two of the report is finished.