Posted on 02/08/2007 2:18:17 PM PST by Hadean
Can't post story because of copywrite complaints, but here's the link:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_PENTAGON_INTELLIGENCE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2007-02-08-16-44-22
From Yahoo News:
WASHINGTON - Some of the Pentagon's pre-war intelligence work, including a contention that the CIA had underplayed the likelihood of significant al-Qaida connections to Saddam Hussein, was inappropriate but not illegal, a Pentagon investigation has concluded.
In a report to be presented to Congress on Friday, the Pentagon inspector general clears former Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith of allegations by some Democrats of illegal activities — specifically, that he misled Congress about the basis of the administration's assertions on the threat posed by Iraq.
Two people familiar with the findings discussed the main points and some details Thursday on condition they not be identified.
The Senate Armed Services Committee has scheduled a hearing Friday to receive the findings by Thomas F. Gimble, the Pentagon's acting inspector general. The committee's chairman, Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., has been a leading critic of Feith's role in pre-war intelligence activities and has accused him of deceiving Congress.
Levin has asserted that President Bush took the country to war in Iraq based in part on intelligence assessments — some shaped by Feith's office — that were off base and did not fully reflect the views of the intelligence community.
Asked to comment on the IG's findings, Feith said in a telephone interview that he had not seen the report but was pleased to hear that it concluded his office's activities were neither illegal nor unauthorized. He took strong issue, however, with the IG's finding that some activities had been "inappropriate."
"The policy office has been smeared for years by allegations that its pre-Iraq-war work was somehow `unlawful' or `unauthorized' and that some information it gave to congressional committees was deceptive or misleading," Feith said.
Feith called "bizarre" the inspector general's conclusion that some intelligence activities by the Office of Special Plans, which was created while Feith served as the undersecretary of defense for policy — the top policy position under Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — were inappropriate but not unauthorized.
"Clearly, the inspector general's office was willing to challenge the policy office and even stretch some points to be able to criticize it," Feith said, adding that he felt this amounted to subjective "quibbling" by the IG.
Feith left his Pentagon post in August 2005 and now teaches at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He has maintained throughout the controversy over the role of the Office of Special Plans, as well as other small groups that were created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, that their intelligence activities were prudent, authorized and useful in challenging some of the intelligence analysis of the CIA.
At the center of the pre-war intelligence controversy was the work of a small number of Pentagon officials from Feith's office and the office of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz who reviewed CIA intelligence analyses and put together their own report. When they briefed Rumsfeld on their report in August 2002 — a period when Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials were ratcheting up their warnings about the gravity of the Iraq threat — Rumsfeld directed them to also brief CIA Director George Tenet.
Their presentation, which included assertions about links between al-Qaida and the Iraqi government, contained a criticism that the intelligence community was ignoring or underplaying its own raw reports on such potential links.
The controversy has simmered for several years. The Senate Intelligence Committee included the Office of Special Plans in its investigation into the prewar intelligence on Iraq, but the committee did not finish that portion of its work when it released the first part of its findings in July 2004.
In a dissenting view attached to the committee's report, three Democratic senators, including Levin, said that Pentagon policymakers sought to undermine the analysis of the intelligence community by circumventing the CIA and briefing their own views directly to the White House. This was a particular problem when the spy agencies' judgments did not conform to the administration's dire views on Iraqi links to al-Qaida, the senators said.
Later, two senators — Levin and Pat Roberts (news, bio, voting record), R-Kan. — separately asked the Pentagon's inspector general to review the role of Feith's office. It was not immediately clear whether the intelligence committee would press ahead with its own investigation, or if the inspector general's report would suffice.
In a response last month to a draft of the IG's report, Feith's successor as undersecretary of defense for policy, Eric Edelman, wrote that the activity deemed by the IG to be "inappropriate" was actually "an exercise in alternative thinking" conducted at Wolfowitz's direction.
Edelman wrote that the IG had misinterpreted "what the (Pentagon's) work actually was — namely, a critical assessment by OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) for policy purposes of IC (Intelligence Community) reporting and finished IC products on contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida."
Pentagon Inspector General's investigation of pre-war Iraq intelligence group out on Friday
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1781405/posts
OSP = Our Sincere People
The ret is simply the Democrats trying to redefine History, just as the 9/11 commission did, , using Sandy Berger to destroy documents from the Library at the NSA, and leabving out cogent protions of the run up to 9/11, most of which happened on the Clinton Watch.
Any simnple fool knows there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and there were plans afoot to use them. Oil for Food was paying for them, and the Froggies and Ruskies were selling the components to Sadaam.
Just ask yourself where the 4 or 5 tons of yellow cake Uranium found in Iraq came from, and then was later shiiped for stirage to Oak Ridge?
I am tired to death of this redefinition of history, and the skewed context of the MSM. We need some effort to balance this propaganda.
Ask yourself , what were the thousands of Russian trucks carrying as they boogied out of Iraq into Syria in the month befor the Iraq War started.Huh?
There is an effort to give CIA monopoly control over information to the president. This is extremely dangerous. The president needs more, not less information, and from more, not fewer voices. The creation of an intelligence "czar" to make sure that competing voices get harmonized into one was a mistake, and this effort to put a wall between the president and military intel analysis is also a mistake.
If NSA, CIA, and Navy intel disagree, the president needs to hear all three differing analyses.
CIA still has not explained where the WMD that they swore were there, have gone. They have simply elided smoothly from swearing they were there, to insinuating that they never believed in them. Either way, you see, they would be right.
Thats good for them, but not particularly helpful to the man who has to make a gut call to act or not act.
Of course, it is not only CIA's mutineers who have back-dated their misgivings about Saddam's WMD; the Democrats who ruled Washington for a decade are on record railing about Saddam's threat to humanity, even voting for his overthrow, only discovering what a pussycat he was "after" they voted to go to war with him.
It was also correct.
Liberals lie and Americans die.
Bingo. Analyses are the products of different minds having applied themselves to the same information. When information is scarce, analyses will necessarily differ, and it is important to give a President access to more, not fewer, analyses.
There is a very dangerous mind-set that seems to guide the "liberal" and other critics of the Bush admin.'s use of intelligence. For one thing, it seems to naively approach all matters of intelligence as if they are simple math problems with Correct Answers. That is not the nature of intelligence, but some critics are now pretending that it is. A foreign policy predicated on the notion that intelligence must be Proven Correct before action is taken would be paralysis; that is what the critics often seem to want.
Also, lurking beneath their charges and complaints seems to be these two concepts:
-"the President must trust The Experts and do whatever they say"
-"and oh yeah, we'll pick The Experts."
Arguments over the "WMD" issue are rife with exchanges like this:
R. But almost everyone in the intelligence community agreed that Saddam had WMDs.
L. Oh yeah? But not [insert name here of dissenter/dissenting group].
R. Mmm. Yeah, there are always gonna be dissenters. And?
L. So that's who should have been listened to. Bush was wrong to listen to, pay attention to, and promulgate the opinions of anyone other than [insert name of whichever analyst agreed with L.'s preconceived opinion].
The lefties will pick the Experts who must dictate and pipeline information, and not listening to those Experts and only those Experts will be made into a crime.
What all of this has to do with "liberalism" or being "progressive" is beyond me, but that's another story....
Good post.
And I remember when inspectors were in country, they were time that they were kept from entering the front door. After trucks pulled away from back door, the Iraqi's let the inspectors in.
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