Douglas Feith Manipulated CIA's Iraq Info

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Fury over Pentagon cell that briefed White House on Iraq's 'imaginary' al-Qaeda links
By Julian Coman in Washington

A Senior Pentagon policy maker created an unofficial "Iraqi intelligence cell" in the summer of 2002 to circumvent the CIA and secretly brief the White House on links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'eda, according to the Senate intelligence committee.

The allegations about Douglas Feith, the number three at the Department of Defence, are made in a supplementary annexe of the committee's review of the intelligence leading to war in Iraq, released on Friday.

According to dramatic testimony contained in the annexe, Mr Feith's cell undermined the credibility of CIA judgments on Iraq's alleged al-Qa'eda links within the highest levels of the Bush administration.

The cell appears to have been set up by Mr Feith as an adjunct to the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon intelligence-gathering operation established in the wake of 9/11 with the authority of Paul Wolfowitz. Its focus quickly became the al-Qa'eda-Saddam link.

On occasion, without informing the then head of the CIA, George Tenet, the group gave counter-briefings in the White House. Sen Jay Rockefeller, the most senior Democrat on the committee, said that Mr Feith's cell may even have undertaken "unlawful" intelligence-gathering initiatives.

The claims will lead to calls by Democrats for the resignation of Mr Feith, the third-ranking civilian at the Department of Defence and a leading "neo-con" hawk. "Tenet fell on his sword," said one Democrat official, "even though it's clear that he was placed under tremendous pressure to come up with the 'right' intelligence product for the administration on Iraq.

"The testimony to the committee on Feith and other Pentagon officials shows just what kind of pressure was being exerted. And when that didn't work, the Pentagon was just coming up with its own answers and feeding them to the White House. And on al-Qa'eda they got it all wrong."

Last night a senior Pentagon adviser confirmed that Mr Feith was being targeted by senators unhappy that the administration has so far escaped censure for its use of intelligence.

"There are senators who are clearly gunning for Douglas Feith now. This is turning into a classic conspiracy investigation. They want to get Feith and see if, through Feith, they can go up the ladder to even bigger fish."

Mr Feith's role is to be examined further in the second phase of the Senate committee's investigations, which will deal with the Bush administration's use of the intelligence it received. The report by the Republican-dominated committee lambasted the CIA for intelligence failures while concluding that there was no evidence that the Bush administration tried to coerce officials to adapt their findings.

Yet the annexe - written by three leading Democratic senators - contains the strongest evidence yet that Pentagon hardliners sought to sideline the CIA during a drive to talk up a connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden.

After the September 11 attacks, tension had grown between Pentagon officials and CIA agents, who suspected the Department of Defence of relying too heavily on dubious testimony from Iraqi defectors in order to justify a war against Iraq.

The CIA's investigation of links between Iraq and al-Qa'eda was almost the only aspect of the agency's intelligence-gathering to escape severe censure in the 511-page report. Sen Rockefeller, the senator for West Virginia, said: "Our report found that the intelligence community's judgments were right on Iraq's ties to terrorists. There was no evidence of the formal relationship, however you want to describe it, between Iraq and al-Qa'eda, and no evidence that existed of Iraq's complicity or assistance in al-Qa'eda's terrorist attacks."

Pentagon officials who appeared before the Senate committee testified that Mr Feith and others believed that the CIA was not sufficiently aggressive in its investigation of links between Saddam and al-Qa'eda. During the summer of 2002, administration hardliners believed that evidence of a connection between Iraq and the terrorist organisation would provide a clinching argument for war.

After the publication in June 2002 of a cautious report by the CIA entitled Iraq and al-Qa'eda: A Murky Relationship, Mr Feith passed on a written verdict to the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, that the report should be read "for content only - and CIA's interpretation should be ignored".

In August 2002, Mr Feith's cell gave a briefing to Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, which included a stinging condemnation of the CIA's intelligence assessment techniques.

In sharp contrast to the Senate intelligence committee's criticisms of "over-reaching" and "exaggeration" by CIA agents, the Pentagon briefing criticised the agency for requiring "juridical evidence" for its findings and for the "consistent underestimation" of the possibility that Iraq and al-Qa'eda were attempting to conceal their collaboration.

In another incident, Mr Feith's Pentagon cell postponed the publication of a CIA assessment of Iraq's links to terrorism after a visit to CIA headquarters at which "numerous objections" were made to a final draft.

In particular, Pentagon officials insisted that more should be made of an alleged meeting between the September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi official in Prague in April 2001. The CIA judged reports of the meeting not to be credible, a verdict vindicated on Friday by the Senate committee report.

Most remarkably, on September 16, 2002, two days before the CIA was to produce its postponed assessment, Mr Feith's cell went directly to the White House and gave an alternative briefing to Vice-President **** Cheney's chief of staff, and to the National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's deputy.

The briefing contained the section alleging "fundamental problems" with CIA intelligence-gathering. It also gave a detailed breakdown of the alleged meeting between Atta and an Iraqi agent.

The following week, senior Bush officials made confident statements on the existence of a link between Saddam and al-Qa'eda. Mr Tenet would learn of the secret briefing only in March 2004.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/11/wsept11.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/11/ixnewstop.html

[OB Kenobi]

Key Revisions Were Made to CIA Document
By Mark Mazzetti
LA Times

WASHINGTON — In a classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared before the Iraq war, the CIA hedged its judgments about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, pointing up the limits of its knowledge.

But in the unclassified version of the NIE — the so-called white paper cited by the Bush administration in making its case for war — those carefully qualified conclusions were turned into blunt assertions of fact, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar intelligence.


The repeated elimination of qualifying language and dissenting assessments of some of the government's most knowledgeable experts gave the public an inaccurate impression of what the U.S. intelligence community believed about the threat Hussein posed to the United States, the committee said.


Dedicating a section of its 511-page report to discrepancies between the two versions of the crucial October 2002 NIE, the panel laid out numerous instances in which the unclassified version omitted key dissenting opinions about Iraqi weapons capabilities, overstated U.S. knowledge about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons and, in one case, inserted threatening language into the public document that was not contained in the classified version.


"The intelligence community's elimination of the caveats from the unclassified white paper misrepresented their judgments to the public, which did not have access to the classified National Intelligence Estimate containing the more carefully worded assessments," the Senate panel's report concluded.


"The fact that the NIE changed so dramatically from its classified to its unclassified form and broke all in one direction, toward a more dangerous scenario … I think was highly significant," the committee's vice chairman, Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), said Friday.


NIEs commonly take months to prepare, but the Iraq report and its unclassified version were compiled in a matter of weeks, the panel said.


As the Bush administration ratcheted up its case for war in September 2002, senators on the Intelligence Committee wrote to the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, requesting an NIE about Iraq's weapons programs and any connections to Al Qaeda. With Congress set to vote on the war resolution the next month, intelligence officials rushed to produce the estimate.


But the Senate committee's sharpest criticism of the unclassified document focused not on changes made in haste but on the systematic alteration of the classified version.


For example, the panel cited changes made in the section of the NIE dealing with chemical weapons:


"Although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW stockpile," the classified NIE read, "Saddam Hussein probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons" of such poisons.


In the unclassified version of the report, the phrase "although we have little specific information" was deleted. Instead, the public report said, "Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents."


The Senate report also noted one instance in which a dissenting view was left out of the unclassified version.


In that example, the classified NIE stated that Iraq was developing unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, "probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents."


But in a footnote, the U.S. Air Force's director for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance said he did not agree.


By eliminating that footnote from the unclassified version, the panel said, the public NIE "is missing the fact that [the] … agency with primary responsibility for technological analysis on UAV programs did not agree with the assessment."


During a nationally televised speech in October 2002, President Bush ( - ) cited the threat of Iraqi drone aircraft being used for terrorist attacks against the United States. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also discussed the UAVs in his speech to the United Nations ( - ) on Feb. 5, 2003.


The committee's report describes not just sins of omission, but of addition.

The classified NIE stated, for instance, that "Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating BW [biological weapons] agents and is capable of quickly producing … a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives."

In the unclassified version, the words "potentially against the U.S. homeland" are inserted at the end of the statement.

During a briefing before the report was released, one committee aide said the Senate panel had asked Tenet and Stu Cohen — who, as acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council, oversaw production of the NIE — who was responsible for inserting those words into the unclassified document.

"They did not know and could not explain," said the aide, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A similar degree of mystery surrounds the larger question of exactly how the classified NIE morphed into its unclassified version.

According to the committee report, the intelligence community began preparing an unclassified white paper on Iraq's banned weapons in May 2002, at the request of the National Security Council.

Months later, as the administration began to make its public case for war, Congress requested an official NIE. Officials at the National Intelligence Council decided to merge the white paper with declassified elements of the NIE to produce the official unclassified version.

Yet committee staffers said Friday that, after a year of investigating, they were still trying to get to the bottom of how the key differences between the classified and unclassified versions came about.

One such difference, the committee reported, is that the classified version presented intelligence findings as assessments — usually beginning with the words "we assess that" — whereas the white paper omitted those words and stated the assessments as facts.

"We assess that Baghdad has begun renewed production of mustard, sarin, GF [cyclosarin] and VX," the classified NIE read, according to the Senate report.

The unclassified white paper read, "Baghdad has begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents, probably including mustard, sarin, cyclosarin and VX."

According to the intelligence committee report, staffers asked intelligence officials why words like "we judge" and "we assess" were removed during the declassification process.

They were told that, because officials believed the white paper would be made public as representing the view of the entire U.S. government, not simply an intelligence community product, it was more appropriate to take references to "we" out of the document. This was done, committee staffers were told, "purely for stylistic reasons."