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Tenet
Tells Senators Wolfowitz Committee Gave White House Dubious Intelligence
by
Jason Leopold
July
19, 2003
When
George Tenet, the director of the CIA, testified before the Senate Intelligence
Committee last week about dubious intelligence data on the Iraqi threat that
made it into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, he said an
ad-hoc committee called the Office of Special Plans, set up Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith
and other high-profile hawks rewrote the intelligence information on Iraq that
the CIA gathered and gave it to White House officials to help Bush build a case
for war, according to three Senators on the intelligence committee.
Tenet
told the Intelligence Committee that his own spies at the CIA determined that
much of the intelligence information they collected on Iraq could not prove
that the country was an imminent threat nor could they find any concrete
evidence that Iraq was stockpiling a cache of chemical and biological weapons.
But the Office of Special Plans, using Iraqi defectors from the Iraqi National
Congress as their main source, rewrote some of the CIA's intelligence to say,
undeniably, that Iraq was hiding some of the world's most lethal weapons. Once
the intelligence was rewritten, it was delivered to the office of National
Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, where it found its way into various public
speeches given by Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld and Bush, the Senators said.
Moreover,
these Senators allege that the office of the Vice President and the National
Security Council were fully aware that the intelligence Wolfowitz's committee
collected may not have been reliable. The Senators said they are discussing
privately whether to ask Wolfowitz to testify before a Senate hearing in the
near future to determine how large of a role his Special Plans committee played
in providing the President with intelligence data on Iraq and whether that
information was reliable or beefed up to help build a case for war.
A
week ago, Tenet claimed responsibility for allowing the White House to use the
now disputed claim that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger to build
an atomic bomb in Bush's State of the Union address. Last week, these Senators
and a CIA intelligence official said the Office of Special Plans urged the
White House to use the uranium claim in Bush's speech.
But
Democrats in the Senate are now asking what role the secret committee set up by
Wolfowitz played in hyping the intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs.
Secretary
of State Colin Powell appears to be the only White House official who
questioned the accuracy of the intelligence information coming out of the
Office of Special Plans. A day before he was set to appear before the United
Nations Feb. 5 to argue about the Iraqi threat and to urge the Council to
support military action against the country, Powell omitted numerous claims
provided to him by the Office of Special Plans about Iraq's weapons program
because the information was unreliable, according to an early February report
in U.S. News and World Report.
Powell
was so disturbed about the questionable intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons
of mass destruction that he put together a team of experts to review the
information he was given before his speech to the U.N.
Much
of the information Powell's speech was provided by Wolfowitz's Office of
Special Plans, the magazine reported, to counter the uncertainty of the CIA's
intelligence on Iraq.
Powell's
team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons
and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, the magazine said. At one
point, he became so infuriated at the lack of adequate sourcing by the Office
of Special Plans to intelligence claims he said, "I'm not reading this.
This is bullshit," according to the magazine.
Spokespeople
for Wolfowitz, Rice and the Vice President all denied the accusations, saying
it was the CIA who provided the White House with the bulk of intelligence on
Iraq and that there is no reason to believe the information isn't accurate.
Tenet's spokespeople would not return several calls for comment.
Separately,
the CIA, earlier this year, brought back four retired officials, led by former
CIA deputy director Richard Kerr, to examine the agency's pre-war intelligence
and reporting on the Iraqi threat. Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board is also probing the issue, but whether any
of the investigations include the Office of Special Plans is still undecided.
Seymour
Hersh, the investigative reporter for the New Yorker, wrote an expose on the
Office of Special Plans in May. In his story, he claims a Pentagon adviser told
him that the committee "was created in order to find evidence of what
Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true
that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous
arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that
threatened the region and, potentially, the United States."
Feith,
in a rare Pentagon briefing in May, denied that the Office of Special Plans was
cherry-picking intelligence information to build a case for war in Iraq.
The
Office of Special Plans "was not involved in intelligence
collection," Feith said. "Rather, it relied on reporting from the CIA
and other parts of the intelligence community. Its job was to review this
intelligence to help digest it for me and other policymakers, to help us
develop Defense Department strategy for the war on terrorism... in the course of
its work, this team, in reviewing the intelligence that was provided to us by
the CIA and the intelligence community, came up with some interesting
observations about the linkages between Iraq and al Qaeda."
To
date, however, the Pentagon has failed to provide any proof of a link between
Iraq and al-Qaeda.
Still,
the OSP or "The Cabal," as the group calls itself, according to the
New Yorker story, played a significant role in convincing the White House that
Iraq was a threat to its neighbors in the Middle East and to the United States.
But the intelligence information and the Iraqi defectors the group relied
heavily upon to prove its case were widely off the mark. For example, according
to one CIA intelligence official in charge of weapons of mass destruction for
the agency, the OSP is responsible for providing thee White House with the
information that thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were
intended for a secret nuclear weapons program.
Bush
said last September in a speech that attempts by Iraq to acquire the tubes
point to a clandestine program to make enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. But
experts contradicted Bush, saying that the evidence is ambiguous at best. It
was later determined by the International Atomic Energy Agency that the tubes
were designed to was to build rockets rather than for centrifuges to enrich
uranium.
Furthermore,
the Iraqi defectors feeding the OSP with information about the locations of
Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction were said to be unreliable and
responsible for sending U.S. military forces on a "wild goose chase,"
according to another CIA intelligence official.
Case
in point: In 2001, an Iraqi defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, told the
OSP he had visited twenty secret facilities for chemical, biological and
nuclear weapons. Saeed, a civil engineer, supported his claims with stacks of
Iraqi government contracts, complete with technical specifications. Saeed said
Iraq used companies to purchase equipment with the blessing of the United
Nations - and then secretly used the equipment for their weapons programs. He
claimed that chemical and biological weapons labs could be found in hospitals
and presidential palaces, which turned out to be completely untrue, when the
locations were searched.
The
OSP provided the National Security Council with Saeed's findings last year and
the information found its way into a White House report in December called,
"Iraq: A
Decade of Deception and Defiance"
But
the information never held up and turned out to be another big intelligence
failure for the Bush administration. Judith Miller first brought the existence
of Saeed to light in a New York Times story in December 2001 and again in
January. The White House, in September 2002, cited the information provided by
Saeed in a fact sheet.
Whether
a bipartisan probe into the OSP is convened remain to be seen, but one thing is
certain, the committee of pseudo spies wields an enormous amount of power.
Larry
C. Johnson, a former counter-terrorism expert at the CIA and the State
Department, says he's spoken to his colleagues working for both agencies and
its clear that the OSP has politicized the intelligence process.
"What
they're experiencing now is the worst political pressure. Anyone who attempted
to challenge or rebut OSP was accused of rocking the boat. OSP came in with an
agenda that they were predisposed to believe," he said.
Vincent
Cannistrano, who worked for the CIA for 27 years, told the National Journal
last month that the OSP "incorporated a lot of debatable intelligence, and
it was not coordinated with the intelligence community."
Jason Leopold, formerly the bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires, is a
freelance journalist based in California. He is currently finishing a book on
the California energy crisis. He can be contacted at jasonleopold@hotmail.com.