How Did 'Bogus' Info about Iraq's Nuclear Plans Get Into Bush's Speech?

[Brad Geyer]

1) Intelligence questions

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0603/061003db.htm

2) Radioactive Mystery

How Did 'Bogus' Info about Iraq's Nuclear Plans Get Into Bush's Speech?
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/World/iraq030612_uranium.html



Intelligence questions
By Peter H. Stone, National Journal
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0603/061003db.htm

You can't call it "WMDgate" yet, but the chorus of criticism aimed at the 
Bush administration for overselling, or misleading, the public and lawmakers 
about the existence and threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass 
destruction is climbing rapidly up the decibel meter.


Six weeks after the war, the search for biological and chemical weapons in 
Iraq is still fruitless. Members of Congress, foreign governments, the 
media, and, perhaps most ominously, a growing number of intelligence 
insiders are questioning the accuracy of pre-war intelligence on Iraq's 
weapons and whether it was hyped to build support for going to war.


The adjectives used to describe key parts of the administration's 
intelligence—some of them uttered on the record and some of them without 
attribution—are getting stronger and stronger with each passing day. They 
range from "spurious" and "intellectually dishonest," to "fraudulent" and 
"completely unscrupulous."


Vince Cannistraro, a 27-year veteran of the CIA who left in 1991, is one of 
several former agency officials who say that the administration's 
intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons capabilities now looks way off 
base. "It was at least incorrect and at the worst fraudulent," says 
Cannistraro. "The real story is the politicization of intelligence."


Other agency alumni hold similar views. "I don't like the fact that the U.S. 
government exaggerated that Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction 
were an imminent threat against U.S. forces or allies in the region," says 
Robert Baer, a 21-year CIA operative in the Middle East who retired in 1997. 
"People died. As an American, I'm mad, and I want to know why we're there."


Members of Congress, too, are asking, "Where are the WMD?" The Senate Select 
Committee on Intelligence this week began examining the issue at its weekly 
briefings on intelligence. Sen. Jay Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., the ranking 
Democrat on the committee, says he's "still inclined to believe that some 
weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq," but he has "grave 
misgivings" about the administration's pre-war claims. "We'll continue to 
press and probe and try to get people who know the information," Rockefeller 
added. In addition, the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services panels are 
expected to work together on reviews of CIA documents relating to Iraq's 
weapons of mass destruction, and could launch a broader joint investigation 
later this year.


Meanwhile, in a May 22 letter, Reps. Porter Goss, R-Fla., and Jane Harman, 
D-Calif., the chairman and ranking Democrat respectively on the House 
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, asked CIA Director George J. 
Tenet some tough questions. The House committee, the letter said, is 
"interested in learning, in detail, how the intelligence picture regarding 
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was developed," and it asked for answers 
by July 1. The letter also pressed Tenet to explain "how the CIA's analysis 
of Iraq's linkages to terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda, was derived."


Now some Republicans are accusing the Democrats of making partisan hay out 
of the situation. Goss, for instance, told National Journal, "There's no 
question that partisan politics has crept into the debate.... This is 
largely a media event so far." But Goss, a former CIA official himself, said 
the administration's intelligence product warranted a committee review, 
which will likely lead to hearings later this year.


The administration is starting to mount a defense, albeit with conflicting 
messages and some backtracking from its broader pre-war claims. On his 
recent European trip, President Bush went on Polish television and declared 
that two mobile trailers found in Iraq, which contained fermenters capable 
of making biological weapons, proved the administration's case. "We found 
the weapons of mass destruction," he said. "We found biological 
laboratories."


Moreover, in a highly unusual move, Tenet in a written statement defended 
intelligence on Iraq, saying that the "integrity of our process was 
maintained throughout, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong." 
The CIA had earlier announced that it had started a review to analyze how 
its pre-war assessments of the Iraqi threat measured up against what was 
being discovered after the war.


Tenet's statement came in response to a memo written to Bush, and posted on 
some Internet sites, by a group of retired CIA and State analysts known as 
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. The memo declared that there 
was "growing mistrust and cynicism" among professionals about the 
intelligence that the administration's top officials, including Bush, cited 
to justify the war against Iraq.


These concerns certainly weren't allayed when Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy 
Defense secretary, told Vanity Fair last month that although there were 
three fundamental worries about Iraq's regime—its support for terrorism, 
criminal treatment of its own citizens, and weapons of mass destruction—"the 
truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government 
bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which 
was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason" for the war.


Indeed, senior administration officials hammered that theme home constantly 
in the months preceding the war. Last August 26, for instance, Vice 
President Dick Cheney, addressing a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, 
flatly declared, "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of 
mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against 
our friends, against our allies, and against us."


Further, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his February 5 presentation 
to the United Nations stated, "We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to 
keep his weapons of mass destruction, he's determined to make more." And 
last October, Wolfowitz said that Saddam "will not easily give up those 
horrible weapons that he has worked so hard and paid such a high price to 
develop and retain."


For many critics, the primary problem with the pre-war assessments of the 
Iraqi threat was that the administration slighted more-conservative and 
more-nuanced intelligence reports on Iraq from the CIA, while relying too 
heavily on more-aggressive and more-pessimistic intelligence provided by a 
small and secretive unit that the Pentagon set up in late 2001 called the 
Office of Special Plans. The real mission of OSP, critics allege, was to 
amass intelligence to help administration hard-liners make their case that 
the threat posed by Iraq was imminent.


Cannistraro, along with other former CIA officials, charges that the OSP 
"incorporated a lot of debatable intelligence, and it was not coordinated 
with the intelligence community." Other intelligence veterans also point out 
that the Pentagon unit relied a great deal on the Iraqi National Congress 
and its leader Ahmed Chalabi, who were far from impeccable sources. "Chalabi 
never provided the CIA anything that could be corroborated," Baer says. 
"Chalabi had an agenda—he wanted to go back. You can take his information, 
but you need to caveat it."


Other former intelligence hands say that the caveats didn't happen because 
of pressures to reach certain conclusions. Larry C. Johnson, who did stints 
in counterterrorism at both the CIA and the State Department, says he's been 
told by people still in intelligence that what "they're experiencing now is 
the worst political pressure" they've ever faced. "Anyone who attempted to 
challenge or rebut OSP was accused of rocking the boat." Johnson adds that 
the OSP analysts "came in with an agenda that they were predisposed to 
believe."


Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst who is research director at the Brookings 
Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, says, "One of the lessons 
to take away from the Iraq experience is that defectors are often biased and 
willing to tell the United States what they think we want to hear." The 
Pentagon and its special unit, he continues, "fought constantly with the 
CIA. They beat the crap out of the agency and their own analysis. It was a 
war of attrition, and they ground the agency down."


The real issue, Pollack concludes, "isn't over-reliance on defectors or 
opposition groups, but that some officials in the administration seem to 
have run with defector reports and opposition-group claims that other 
intelligence analysts believe were spurious or of dubious accuracy."


In developing good intelligence, intelligence veterans and others say that 
competition among agencies can be useful, but poses risks.


"Competition is good, up to a point," Rep. Goss says. But "I'm very much 
opposed to competition going to the point of obfuscation. This is a race 
that has to be run freely; you can't trip your opponent in the next lane."


That's what some CIA veterans now say happened in the Bush administration's 
effort to build its case against Iraq. Particularly troubling to former 
analysts are the British intelligence reports cited by Bush in this year's 
State of the Union speech on Iraq's supposed efforts to buy uranium from the 
Republic of Niger for a nuclear weapons program. The documents, according to 
the International Atomic Energy Agency, are now considered forgeries, and 
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has asked inspectors general at 
the CIA and the State Department to investigate.


Looking back, weapons experts are skeptical of America's pre-war 
intelligence on Iraq. "I think it's increasingly unlikely that Iraq was the 
imminent threat which was at the heart of the administration's case for 
pre-emptive action," says Jonathan Tucker, a senior fellow at the U.S. 
Institute of Peace and the author of Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of 
Smallpox. "The administration gave the impression that those weapons were 
deployed and ready to use."


Veteran intelligence operatives fear that the growing doubts about the 
administration's pre-war intelligence will harm U.S. credibility, especially 
in the conflict that everyone acknowledges is a direct threat to 
Americans—the war against terrorism.


"How good other countries believe our intelligence was about Iraq will color 
how they view our intelligence on other issues," Pollack warns. "If they 
believe our intelligence on Iraq was greatly exaggerated, either 
intentionally or unintentionally, then they're likely to be even harder to 
persuade next time around."



2) Radioactive Mystery

How Did 'Bogus' Info about Iraq's Nuclear Plans Get Into Bush's Speech?
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/World/iraq030612_uranium.html

June 12
— Lawmakers investigating why the United States went to war are expected to 
look into how false information about Iraq trying to buy uranium for nuclear 
weapons made it into President Bush's State of the Union speech.

In the Jan. 29 speech, Bush made his case for war on Iraq, in part stating 
that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought 
significant quantities of uranium from Africa." But some U.S. officials say 
American intelligence indicated that was not true.

The mystery about the uranium information is the latest question in a 
growing controversy over what the Bush administration really knew about 
Iraqi weapons programs and whether officials manipulated intelligence.

A former ambassador told ABCNEWS that almost a year before Bush's speech, he 
informed the CIA the information was not credible. The ambassador, who asked 
not to be identified, said that the CIA asked him in February 2002 to 
investigate reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger.

After spending eight days in the west-central African nation, the ambassador 
said he told the CIA that the information about the uranium was "bogus and 
unrealistic."

A CIA official told ABCNEWS that the agency "disseminated the report 
broadly."

Yet almost a year after the findings, Bush used the information in the State 
of the Union by citing British intelligence.

Eight days after the president's speech, Secretary of State Colin Powell did 
not include the information in an address to the United Nations. Powell told 
reporters this month that he did not "sense in going through it all that I 
saw enough substantiation of it that would meet the tests that we were 
applying."

When Desire Trumps Truth?

A CIA official has an idea about how the Niger information got into the 
president's speech. He said he is not sure the sentence was ever cleared by 
the agency, but said he heard speechwriters wanted it included, so they 
attributed it to the British.

"Lower level folks may have said 'we have some concerns about that' — so the 
speechwriters said, 'the British said it … so why can't we say it?' " he 
said.

Asked for an explanation, a senior White House official said "we were very 
careful with what the president said. We vetted the information at the 
highest levels."

But one international nuclear official told the New Yorker magazine that the 
information was so bad, anyone using an Internet search engine could have 
determined it was a forgery.


ABCNEWS' Martha Raddatz contributed to this report.

------------------------------------------------

Let's get these idiots out of the leadership of our country....  PLEASE!  
Anybody but BUSH 2004!
-Brad

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