I saved the following articles posted here before. Thought it appropriate to post again as a refresher:
The spies who pushed for war
Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force
Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian
As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war.
It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses. This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of intelligence.
According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior members of the administration created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency. snip
The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.
In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.
<snip>
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html---
No weapons in Iraq? We'll find them in Iran
By Neil Mackay Sunday Herald
Sunday 01 June 2003
Ironically, it was the ultra-hawkish US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who let the cat out of the bag when he said on Wednesday: 'It is possible Iraqi leaders decided they would destroy (WMDs) prior to the conflict.' If that was true then Saddam had fulfilled the criteria of UN resolution 1441 and there was absolutely no legal right for the US and UK to go to war. Rumsfeld's claim that Iraq might have destroyed its weapons makes a mockery of the way the US treated the UN's chief weapons inspector Dr Hans Blix. The US effectively told him he wasn't up to the job and the Iraqis had fooled him.
<snip>
With September 11 as his ideological backdrop, Rumsfeld decided in autumn 2001 to establish a new intelligence agency, independent of the CIA and the Pentagon, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP). He put his deputy, Wolfowitz, in charge. The pair were dissatisfied with the failure of the CIA among others to provide firm proof of both Saddam's alleged WMD arsenal and links to al-Qaeda.
<snip>
That was the policy blueprint, but to deliver it Rumsfeld turned to the Office of Special Plans. Put simply, the OSP was told to come up with the evidence of WMD to give credence to US military intervention. But what do conventional intelligence experts make of the OSP? Colonel Patrick Lang is a former chief of human intelligence for the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the 1990s. He was also the DIA's chief of Middle East intelligence and was regularly in Iraq. He said of the OSP : 'This office had a great deal of influence in a number of places in Washington in a way that seemed to me to be excessive and rather ill-advised. 'The regular organisations of the intelligence community have very rigorous rules for how you evaluate information and resources, and tend to take a conservative view of analytic positions because they're going to dictate government decisions. 'That wasn't satisfactory in Secretary Rumsfeld's Pentagon so he set up a separate office to review this data, and the people in this office, although they're described as intelligence people, are by and large congressional staffers. They seemed to me not to have deceived intentionally but to have seen in the data what they believe is true. I think it's a very risky thing to do.'
<snip>
In a further curious twist, an intelligence source claimed the real 'over-arching strategic reason' for the war was the road map to peace, designed to settle the running sore of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The source said: 'I believe that Britain and America see the road map as fundamental. They were being told by Ariel Sharon's government that Israel would not play ball until Saddam was out of the picture. That was the condition. So he had to go.'
<snip>
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0601-02.htm---
<snip>
"They are running their own intelligence operation, including covert action, and are using contractors outside the government to do some of the leg work," said a former top CIA official. "Their area of work has been concentrated on Iraq, which is why the intelligence on WMD was so bad, but they have a much broader portfolio. The office is undergoing some scrutiny from inside the government given its poor track record and the lack of 'sanity checking' their products with the intelligence community. A lot of material they produce is not shared with CIA, not coordinated, and finds its way into public policy statements by the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney."
</snip>
more . . .
http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.06.06/news6.html---
White man's burden - EXCELLENT Ha'aretz article to bookmark
Edited on Wed Jul-09-03 10:29 PM by Tinoire
This excellent analysis is an absolute keeper!
Peace
<snip>
In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town: the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history. They believe that the right political idea entails a fusion of morality and force, human rights and grit. The philosophical underpinnings of the Washington neoconservatives are the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Edmund Burke. They also admire Winston Churchill and the policy pursued by Ronald Reagan. They tend to read reality in terms of the failure of the 1930s (Munich) versus the success of the 1980s (the fall of the Berlin Wall).
Are they wrong? Have they committed an act of folly in leading Washington to Baghdad? They don't think so. They continue to cling to their belief. They are still pretending that everything is more or less fine. That things will work out. Occasionally, though, they seem to break out in a cold sweat. This is no longer an academic exercise, one of them says, we are responsible for what is happening. The ideas we put forward are now affecting the lives of millions of people. So there are moments when you're scared. You say, Hell, we came to help, but maybe we made a mistake.
<snip>
((William Kristol))
Kristol is pleasant-looking, of average height, in his late forties. In the past 18 months he has used his position as editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard and his status as one of the leaders of the neoconservative circle in Washington to induce the White House to do battle against Saddam Hussein. Because Kristol is believed to exercise considerable influence on the president, Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he is also perceived as having been instrumental in getting Washington to launch this all-out campaign against Baghdad. Sitting behind the stacks of books that cover his desk at the offices of the Weekly Standard in Northwest Washington, he tries to convince me that he is not worried. It is simply inconceivable to him that America will not win. In that event, the consequences would be catastrophic. No one wants to think seriously about that possibility.
<snip>
((Charles Krauthammer))
And what if the experiment fails? What if America is defeated?
This war will enhance the place of America in the world for the coming generation, Krauthammer says. Its outcome will shape the world for the next 25 years. There are three possibilities. If the United States wins quickly and without a bloodbath, it will be a colossus that will dictate the world order. If the victory is slow and contaminated, it will be impossible to go on to other Arab states after Iraq. It will stop there. But if America is beaten, the consequences will be catastrophic. Its deterrent capability will be weakened, its friends will abandon it and it will become insular. Extreme instability will be engendered in the Middle East.
You don't really want to think about what will happen, Krauthammer says looking me straight in the eye. But just because that's so, I am positive we will not lose. Because the administration understands the implications. The president understands that everything is riding on this. So he will throw everything we've got into this. He will do everything that has to be done. George W. Bush will not let America lose.
<snip>
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=280279&sw=n---
The CIA declined to say how the agency eventually obtained the documents. Officials at several other U.S. agencies, including the State Department, declined to say whether another U.S. government agency possessed or viewed them before Bush's speech last January.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030716/ap_on_go_ca---
Published on Wednesday, May 7, 2003 in the Times/UK
America's Weapons Evidence Flawed, Say Spies
by Tim Reid in Washington
<snip>
Present and former CIA officials, quoted in The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine, claimed that a small number of powerful neo-conservative ideologues in the Pentagon were so determined to prove the existence of a banned weapons program and links to al-Qaeda that they manipulated intelligence.
According to a report written by Seymour Hersh, the veteran New Yorker investigative reporter, the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP) relied too heavily on suspect intelligence provided by Iraqi defectors with links to the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi exile.
<snip>
One former CIA official told Mr Hersh: “One of the reasons I left was my sense that they (OSP) were using the intelligence from the CIA and other agencies only when it fits their agenda. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with . . . as if they were on a mission from God. If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.”
<snip>
Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence agency, told Nicholas Kristof, of The New York Times, that when experts wrote reports skeptical about the existence of weapons of mass destruction “they were encouraged to think it over again”.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0507-09.htm---
Published on Sunday, June 8, 2003 by The Sunday Herald
Revealed: The Secret Cabal Which Spun for Blair
by Neil Mackay
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/unmovic/2003/0608secrBritain ran a covert 'dirty tricks' operation designed specifically to produce misleading intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction to give the UK a justifiable excuse to wage war on Iraq. Operation Rockingham, established by the Defense Intelligence Staff within the Ministry of Defense in 1991, was set up to 'cherry-pick' intelligence proving an active Iraqi WMD program and to ignore and quash intelligence which indicated that Saddam's stockpiles had been destroyed or wound down.
The existence of Operation Rockingham has been confirmed by Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, and a US military intelligence officer. He knew members of the Operation Rockingham team and described the unit as 'dangerous', but insisted they were not 'rogue agents' acting without government backing. 'This policy was coming from the very highest levels,' he added.
<snip>
Sources in both the British and US intelligence community are now equating the JIC with the Office of Special Plans (OSP) in the US Pentagon. The OSP was set up by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to gather intelligence which would prove the case for war. In a staggering attack on the OSP, former CIA officer Larry Johnson told the Sunday Herald the OSP was 'dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace', adding that it 'lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam'.
He added: 'It's a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary. They should be eliminated.' Johnson said that to describe Saddam as an 'imminent threat' to the West was 'laughable and idiotic'. He said many CIA officers were in 'great distress' over the way intelligence had been treated. 'We've entered the world of George Orwell,' Johnson added. 'I'm disgusted. The truth has to be told. We can't allow our leaders to use bogus information to justify war.'
<snip>
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/unmovic/2003/0608secr---
America And Impeachment
` Kent Southard, Bush Watch
The simple, unadorned facts are these - the only 'intelligence' source that professed unequivocally that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD and an ongoing nuclear weapons program was the Pentagon's Office of Special Programs, established by Donald Rumsfeld and which had no agents in the field, only a half-dozen 'analysts' that were actually Republican congressional staffers. Their reports were contradicted by every other intelligence organization in the world, including our CIA and DIA and Britain's MI6. The only source for OSP's 'intel' was Ahmed Chalabi, a convicted swindler who left Iraq during the Eisenhower administration, and who had been promised by the Bush administration to be the top candidate to rule Iraq should Saddam Hussein be overthrown.
<snip>
This was all obviously known by the Bush administration, and accordingly it is also obvious that the administration lied through its teeth about the reasons for warring on Iraq, lied in every generality and every particular. Virtually every member of this administration that wanted this war is also a signator of the Project for a New American Century, whose plan formulated some years ago calls for domination of the world's oil supply, starting with an invasion of Iraq.
These are the simple, unadorned facts. Either the American people demand an Impeachment of this president and vice-president and they are removed from office; or else the America of the founding fathers is finished, and we might as well admit it. --06.16.03
http://www.bushwatch.com/kent.htmMore Missing Intelligence
by Robert Dreyfuss
<snip>
According to the former official, also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was a secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit, which paralleled Shulsky's--and which has not previously been reported--prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in Sharon's office, not inside Israel's Mossad intelligence service, because the Mossad--which prides itself on extreme professionalism--had views closer to the CIA's, not the Pentagon's, on Iraq. This secretive unit, and not the Mossad, may well have been the source of the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium for weapons from Niger in West Africa, according to the former official.
<snip>
Astonishingly, the Bush Administration did not even bother to prepare and internally publish an intelligence estimate about postwar Iraq. (An "estimate," in intelligence jargon, is a formal evaluation produced after sifting, sorting and analyzing various bits and pieces of raw intelligence. So-called National Intelligence Estimates are produced by a unit that reports immediately to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet.) "Back in the old days, there would have been an estimate," says Raymond McGovern, the twenty-seven-year CIA warrior who formed Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity this past January. "In their arrogance, they didn't worry about it."
<snip>
Other sources concur. "There was no intelligence estimate done, and there weren't a lot of questions being asked," says Melvin Goodman, a former CIA analyst with the Center for International Policy. "And I know for a fact that at CIA and NSA , none of them thought that postwar Iraq would be governable." Goodman says that CIA and DIA experts on Iraq were not called in by the Pentagon, and no intelligence roundtables were held to evaluate the situation. Most of the intelligence about how easily the INC and its allies could assume power in Iraq was coming from the INC itself, says a former State Department official. "And I know for a fact that when the subject came up, intelligence officers were extraordinarily skeptical of the exiles' information."
<snip>
On the eve of the invasion, there was something akin to panic at the Norfolk,Virginia-based US Joint Forces Command, which was responsible for supporting the Pentagon's Iraq task force, then headed by retired Gen. Jay Garner. "They were scared shitless," says a former US official who was in close contact with the command. "They were making it up as they went along." He adds, "There was a great deal of ignorance. They didn't know the names of the tribes, much less how they relate to each other. They didn't have the expertise, and they didn't have enough time to assemble the expertise."
<snip>
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030707&s=dreyfuss---
Bush 'skewed facts to justify attack on Iraq'
A growing number of US national security professionals are accusing the Bush Administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq.
A key target is a four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or terror groups.
This team, self-mockingly called the cabal, "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defence Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence.
...
The INC, which brought together groups opposed to Saddam, worked closely with the Pentagon to build a case against Iraq. "There are current intelligence officials who believe it is a scandal," Mr Cannistraro said.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/31/1054177765483.htmlCheney Investigated Forged Niger Uranuium Document
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush, and other very senior policy makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy makers at the table.
Cheney got into the operational side of intelligence as well. Reports in late 2001 that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger stirred such intense interest that his office let it be known he wanted them checked out. So, with the CIA as facilitator, a retired U.S. ambassador was dispatched to Niger in February 2002 to investigate. He found nothing to substantiate the report and lots to call it into question. There the matter rested – until last summer, after the Bush administration made the decision for war in Iraq.
...
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=6e9d5502599dc6a2http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic...
Plans For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11
(CBS) CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.
That's according to notes taken by aides who were with Rumsfeld in the National Military Command Center on Sept. 11 – notes that show exactly where the road toward war with Iraq began, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin.
...
Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld.
"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not." (Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hours after 9/11 attack)
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/04/september11/main520830.shtmlhttp://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic...
A call to maintain CIA independence.
As the White House searches for every possible excuse to go to war with Iraq, pressure has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates to fit a political agenda. In this case, the agencies are being pressed to find a casus belli for war, whether or not one exists.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements, and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," Vince Cannistraro, the agency's former head of counterterrorism, told The Guardian, a London newspaper.
This confirms what Knight-Ridder reporters found: "A growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war," the news service reported recently. "They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary."
...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2002-10-24-oped-bamford_x.htmU.S. Insiders Say Iraq Intel Deliberately Skewed
...
The DIA was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD," or weapons of mass destruction, he added in a phone interview. He said the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy.
Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of Central Intelligence Agency counterterrorist operations, said he knew of serving intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for playing up "fraudulent" intelligence, "a lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi."
...
They believe the administration, before going to war, had a "moral obligation to use the best information available, not just information that fits your preconceived ideas."
CHEMICAL WEAPONS REPORT 'SIMPLY WRONG'
The top Marine Corps officer in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway, said on Friday U.S. intelligence was "simply wrong" in leading military commanders to fear troops were likely to be attacked with chemical weapons in the March invasion of Iraq that ousted Saddam.
Richard Perle, a Chalabi backer and member of the Defense Policy Board that advises Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, defended the four-person unit in a television interview.
...
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&ncid=578&e=2&u=/nm...
CIA had doubts on Iraq link to al-Qaida
The debunking of the Bush administration's pre-war certainties on Iraq gathered pace yesterday when it emerged that the CIA knew for months that a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida was highly unlikely.
As President George Bush was forced for the second time in days to defend the decision to go to war, a new set of leaks from CIA officials suggested a tendency in the White House to suppress or ignore intelligence findings which did not shore up the case for war.
...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,974182,00.htmlEx-CIA Officers Questioning Iraq Data
A small group composed mostly of retired CIA officers is appealing to colleagues still inside to go public with any evidence the Bush administration is slanting intelligence to support its case for war with Iraq.
Members of the group contend the Bush administration has released information on Iraq that meets only its ends -- while ignoring or withholding contrary reporting.
They also say the administration's public evidence about the immediacy of Iraq's threat to the United States and its alleged ties to al-Qaida is unconvincing, and accuse policy-makers of pushing out some information that does not meet an intelligence professional's standards of proof.
"It's been cooked to a recipe, and the recipe is high policy," said Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran who briefed top Reagan administration security officials before retiring in 1990. "That's why a lot of my former colleagues are holding their noses these days." ---
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030314/ap_on_go_prhttp://www.democraticunderground.com/duforum/DCForumID61/18413.htmlPublic was misled, claim ex-CIA men
A GROUP of former US intelligence officials has written to President Bush claiming that the US Congress and the American public were misled about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war.
The group’s members, most of them former CIA analysts, say that they have close contacts withsenior officials working inside the US intelligence agencies, who have told them that intelligence was“cooked” to persuade Congress to authorise the war.
The manipulation of intelligence has, they say, produced “a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions”. They write in the letter to Mr Bush: “While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes, never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorise launching a war.
“You may not realise the extent of the current ferment within the intelligence community and particularly the CIA. In intelligence, there is one unpardonable sin — cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy. There is ample indication that this has been done in Iraq.”
...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-698028,00.htmlMEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0207-04.htmU.S. diplomats also tried to stop this invasion:
U.S. Diplomat's Letter of Resignation
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/27/international/27WEB-TNAT.htmlLetter of Resignation (Mary Wright)
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/marywright.aspU.S. Mongolian Diplomat Resigns Over Iraq (Fourth U.S. Diplomat)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=542&e=84&u=/ap/200303...
Third U.S. Diplomat Resigns Over Iraq Policy
http://truthout.org/docs_03/032303G.shtmlSecond US Diplomat Resigns in Protest
http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/03.03/0314krieger_diplo_resign.htmU.S. diplomat resigns over Iraq war plans
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N10105063.htmNiger-Uranium Timeline
http://www.deanforamerica.com/site/PageServer?pagename=niger_timelineTHE BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND WMDs: THEN AND NOW
http://www.deanforamerica.com/site/PageServer?pagename=bush_wmd_summar---
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