Hill Probers Fault Iraq Intelligence

[dutchdemocrat]

Hill Probers Fault Iraq Intelligence
Panels' Early Findings Are Similar to Kay's
By Dana Priest and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 30, 2004; Page A01


The House and Senate intelligence committees have unearthed a series of failures in prewar intelligence on Iraq similar to those identified by former weapons inspector David Kay, leading them to believe that CIA analysts and their superiors did not seriously consider the possibility Saddam Hussein no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction, congressional officials said.

The committees, working separately for the past seven months, have determined that the CIA relied too heavily on circumstantial, outdated intelligence and became overly dependent on satellite and spy-plane imagery and communications intercepts.

Like Kay, the committees have found that CIA operatives and analysts failed to detect that the Iraqi chain of command for developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons had fallen apart, and that Iraqi scientists and others were engaged in their own campaign to deceive the Iraqi leader, telling him they had weapons that did not exist.


More...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61648-2004Jan29?language=printer

[Melinda]

1. CIA my ass, it was Wolfowitz & Cheney's "Office of Special Plans"

Cripes, that little fact is all over the web. One snippet:

July 25, 2003—A half-dozen former CIA agents investigating prewar intelligence have found that a secret Pentagon committee, set up by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2001, manipulated reams of intelligence information prepared by the spy agency on the so-called Iraqi threat and then delivered it to top White House officials who used it to win support for a war in Iraq.

The former CIA agents were asked to examine prewar intelligence last year by Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet. The former agents will present a final report on their findings to the Pentagon, the CIA and possibly Congress later this year. More than a dozen calls to the White House, the CIA, the National Security Council and the Pentagon for comment were not returned.

The ad hoc committee, called the Office of Special Plans, headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and other Pentagon hawks, described the worst-case scenarios in terms of Iraq's alleged stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and claimed the country was close to acquiring nuclear weapons, according to four of the CIA agents, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the information is still classified, who conducted a preliminary review of the intelligence.

The agents said the Office of Special Plans is responsible for providing the National Security Council and Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Rumsfeld with the bulk of the intelligence information on Iraq's weapons program that turned out to be wrong. But White House officials used the information it received from the Office of Special Plans to win support from the public and Congress to start a war in Iraq even though the White House knew much of the information was dubious, the CIA agents said.


http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/072503Leopold/072503leopold.html

[Journeyman]

2. If we accept this as "truth". . .

then how do we reconcile that BushCo didn't have the intellectual savvy to recognize the errors inherent in the CIA's analysis? Either way it's viewed -- CIA incompetence or PNAC perfidy -- BushCo is revealed as incompetent.

[0rganism]

3. Yes indeed, there was some faulty intelligence at work

We should have known, when Laura started wearing that "I'm with stupid" shirt to dinner parties.