Senate report: Iran intel kept from US agencies

[maddezmom]

Source: AP

WASHINGTON - Pentagon officials concealed from U.S. intelligence agencies potentially useful tips from Iranian agents in 2001 and 2002, including one that Tehran allegedly sent hit teams to Afghanistan to kill Americans, a Senate committee reported Thursday.

The Iranians also told Pentagon employees at a December 2001 meeting in Rome of a purported tunnel complex used to store weapons and covertly move personnel out of Iran after Sept. 11, 2001, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In addition, the Iranians told of a long-standing relationship with the Palestine Liberation Organization and the growth of anti-government sentiment inside Iran.

The information was questionable, the report suggests, citing the sources: a discredited former arms dealer who was peddling a plan to overthrow the Iranian government and a former U.S. official whose leads had failed to yield any substance for the CIA.

Nonetheless, the report sheds new light on the mistrust and lack of cooperation by Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with the CIA after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Two Republicans, Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, joined with majority Democrats on the report.



Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080605/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_iran_intelligence

[ck4829]

1. Let me guess who one of the sources are

Manucher Ghorbanifar, right?

(PS "Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian middleman already dismissed by the CIA as untrustworthy, also attended, as did a representative from an unspecified foreign government's intelligence service." Ha! Looks like I was right.)

[Stardust]

2. K&R

[rodeodance]

3. This is the infamous Phase II report that Sen Roberts kept holding back!!

The report released Thursday follows, by years, an earlier committee effort that assessed the quality of pre-war intelligence on Iraq and found it severely lacking. This report is known as "phase II" and spawned a nasty partisan fight in the committee. It plows well-tread political ground by contrasting what Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said between October 2002 and March 2003, when the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began, with intelligence reports that since have been released.

"These reports are about holding the government accountable and making sure these mistakes never happen again," said the committee's chairman, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.

According to Rockefeller, the problem was the Bush administration concealed information that would have undermined the case for war. "We might have avoided this catastrophe," he said.

Bush's press secretary, Dana Perino, said the problem was flawed intelligence heading into the war. "We had the intelligence that we had, fully vetted, but it was wrong. And we certainly regret that," she said.

The Senate report, however, found that intelligence supported most of the administration's statements about Iraq before the war. But officials often did not mention the level of dissension or uncertainty in the intelligence agencies about the information they were presenting.

[rodeodance]

4. Report accuses Bush of misrepresenting Iraq intel **new headline! Much better***

[maddezmom]

5. they Senate issued 2 reports one on Iraq and another on Iran

:hi:

[maddezmom]

6. Newsweek 5/9: Keeping Secrets From the CIA. Why was CIA cut out of clandestine meetings with Iranian

Keeping Secrets From the CIA. Why was CIA cut out of clandestine meetings with Iranian informants?
Posted by maddezmom in Editorials & Other Articles
Fri May 09th 2008, 09:38 AM
The Senate Intelligence Committee is about to release a report that sheds new light on "inappropriate" back-channel contacts between Pentagon officials and a group of Iranian informants—including a key figure from the Iran-contra affair.

In December 2001, two Pentagon Mideast experts—Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode—secretly traveled to Rome. They met with a group of Iranians who supposedly had information about plans by Iranian-backed terrorists to attack Americans—including U.S. troops who were then closing in on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The meetings were approved by high-level officials at the White House and the Pentagon. The CIA, however, was kept in the dark. When the CIA and the State Department found out about the meetings a few weeks later, they strenuously protested to the White House and demanded that the contacts be terminated immediately. At least officially, the White House complied.

Now, years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee is finally producing a report on its investigation of those meetings. The document is part of the panel's "phase two" investigation into the misuse of pre-Iraq War intelligence. The report is not likely to satisfy either the White House or the administration's most vocal critics. While Intelligence Committee officials are keeping details of the report under wraps, several sources familiar with its contents—who asked for anonymity discussing an unpublished report—said that congressional investigators found nothing illegal about the secret contacts. The meetings were brokered by two Iran-contra figures: Michael Ledeen, a Washington academic and prominent neoconservative activist who was close to a number of senior Bush administration officials at the time, and Manucher Ghorbanifar, a Paris-based Iranian businessman who served as a middleman for arms deals in the 1980s and was long ago branded a "fabricator" by the CIA. U.S. intelligence agencies said at the time that Ghorbanifar had a history of offering information that proved unreliable.

But in the report, the panel does conclude that senior Bush administration officials (including then deputy Defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and deputy national-security adviser Stephen Hadley) approved the meetings without informing the CIA or its director at the time, George Tenet, thereby allowing intelligence gathering outside of normal channels. The sources say the report also suggests that Ledeen misled the National Security Council about the meetings--a charge that Ledeen strongly denied this week in an e-mail exchange with NEWSWEEK.

more: http://journals.democraticunderground.com/maddezmom/511

[sabra]

7. McClatchyDC: Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon?

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/560125.html

WASHINGTON --
A small group of Pentagon officials collected dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran from Iranian exiles whom Defense Department counterintelligence investigators said might have ''been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service . . . to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government,'' the Senate Intelligence Committee reported Thursday.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have tried to use a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator and who remain determined to combat what President Bush this week called an ''existential'' threat from Iran.

A 2003 report by the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity, the Senate committee said, concluded that Michael Ledeen -- the American civilian who brokered the contacts through Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile whom the CIA in 1984 labeled a ''fabricator,'' and other Iranians -- ``was likely unwitting of any counterintelligence issues related to his relationship with Mr. Ghorbanifar.''

However, it said, ``their association was widely known, and therefore it should be presumed other foreign intelligence services, including those of Iran, would know.''

Stephen Cambone, then the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, shut down the investigation after only a month, but the investigators recommended that an analysis be conducted into whether Ghorbanifar or his associates tried ``to directly or indirectly influence or access U.S. government officials.''

Senior Pentagon officials never followed up on the recommendation, the Senate panel found.