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Wolfowitz
Committee Told White House
to
Hype Dubious Uranium Claims
by
Jason Leopold
July
17, 2003
A
Pentagon committee led by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense,
advised President Bush to include a reference in his January State of the Union
address about Iraq trying to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger to bolster
the case for war in Iraq, despite the fact that the CIA warned Wolfowitz's
committee that the information was unreliable, according to a CIA intelligence
official and four members of the Senate's intelligence committee who have been
investigating the issue.
The
Senators and the CIA official said they could be forced out of government and
brought up on criminal charges for leaking the information to this reporter and
as a result requested anonymity. The Senators said they plan to question CIA
Director George Tenet Wednesday morning in a closed-door hearing to find out
whether Wolfowitz and members of a committee he headed misled Bush and if the
President knew about the erroneous information prior to his State of the Union
address.
Spokespeople
for Wolfowitz and Tenet vehemently denied the accusations. Dan Bartlett, the
White House communications director, would not return repeated calls for
comment.
The
revelations by the CIA official and the senators, if true, would prove that
Tenet, who last week said he erred by allowing the uranium reference to be
included in the State of the Union address, took the blame for an intelligence
failure that he was not responsible for. The lawmakers said it could also lead
to a widespread probe of prewar intelligence.
At
issue is a secret committee set up in 2001 by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
called the Office of Special Plans, which was headed by Wolfowitz, Abrum
Shulsky and Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, to probe
allegations links between Iraq and the terrorist organization al-Qaeda and
whether the country was stockpiling a cache of weapons of mass destruction. The
Special Plans committee disbanded in March after the start of the war in Iraq.
The
committee's job, according to published reports, was to gather intelligence
information on the Iraqi threat that the CIA and FBI could not uncover and
present it to the White House to build a case for war in Iraq. The committee
relied heavily on information provided by Iraqi defector Ahmad Chalabi, who has
provided the White House with reams of intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons
programs that has been disputed. Chalabi heads the Iraqi National Congress, a
group of Iraqi exiles who have pushed for regime change in Iraq.
The
Office of Special Plans, according to the CIA official and the senators,
routinely provided Bush, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and National
Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice with questionable intelligence information on
the Iraqi threat, much of which was included in various speeches by Bush and
Cheney and some of which was called into question by the CIA.
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 last October, 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.
The
CIA official and the senators said that's when Wolfowitz and his committee
instructed the White House to have Bush use the now disputed line about Iraq's
attempts to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger in a speech the President
was set to give in Cincinnati. But Tenet quickly intervened and informed
Stephen Hadley, an aide to National Security Adviser Rice, that the information
was unreliable.
Patrick
Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence
Agency, said in an interview with the New Yorker magazine in May that the
Office of Special Plans "started picking out things that supported their
thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the
President. It's not intelligence. It's political propaganda."
Lang
said the CIA and Office of Special Plans often clashed on the accuracy of
intelligence information provided to the White House by Wolfowitz.
Investigative
reporter Seymour Hersh, the author of a May New Yorker story on the Office of
Special Plans, reported, "former CIA officers and analysts described the
agency as increasingly demoralized. George knows he's being beaten up,"
one former officer said of George Tenet, the CIA director. "And his
analysts are terrified. George used to protect his people, but he's been forced
to do things their way." Because the CIA's analysts are now on the
defensive, "they write reports justifying their intelligence rather than
saying what's going on. The Defense Department and the Office of the
Vice-President write their own pieces, based on their own ideology. We collect
so much stuff that you can find anything you want."
"They
see themselves as outsiders," a former CIA. expert who spent the past
decade immersed in Iraqi-exile affairs said of the Special Plans people, told
Hersh. He added, "There's a high degree of paranoia. They've convinced
themselves that they're on the side of angels, and everybody else in the government
is a fool."
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
Hersh
reported that the Special Plans Office "developed a close working
relationship with the (Iraqi National Congress), and this strengthened its
position in disputes with the CIA and gave the Pentagon's pro-war leadership
added leverage in its constant disputes with the State Department. Special
Plans also became a conduit for intelligence reports from the INC to officials
in the White House."
In
a rare Pentagon briefing recently, Office of Special Plans co-director Douglas
Feith, said the committee was not an "intelligence project," but
rather an group of 18 people that looked at intelligence information from a
different point of view.
Feith
said 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, 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.