Pentagon pushed faulty Iraq War intelligence

A special unit run by former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld's top policy aide produced "alternative" intelligence reports that wrongly concluded that Saddam Hussein's regime had cooperated with al-Qaida, a Pentagon inspector general's investigation has determined. Working under Douglas Feith, who at the time was under secretary of defense for policy, the group "developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers," the report concluded. Feith's office was the source for some of the most glaring examples of faulty intelligence during the run-up to the war. In 2002, it promoted the idea that there had been a meeting between the lead Sept. 11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. At the time, the CIA had doubts about reports of the meeting. The agency and the FBI later concluded that it never took place. The unit also deliberately undermined the work of intelligence agencies in briefings in August 2002 for Vice President Dick Cheney and officials at the National Security Council. The briefings repeated the claims about the Prague meeting but did not mention the CIA's extreme skepticism. Instead, the briefings alleged "fundamental problems with the way that the intelligence community was assessing the information." The Feith operation dates to shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the Pentagon established a small team of civilians to sift through existing intelligence with the aim of finding possible links between terror networks and governments. Bush administration officials contended that intelligence agencies were ignoring reports of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaida. The inspector general's report also criticized a July 2002 memo, written by an intelligence analyst detailed to Feith's office, entitled, "Iraq and al-Qaida: Making the Case." The memo said that, while "some analysts have argued" that Osama bin Laden would not cooperate with secular Arab entities like Iraq, "reporting indicates otherwise." The Bush administration's primary justification for invading Iraq was its assertion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Iraq's supposed ties to al-Qaida–and therefore its connection to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks–were an important secondary argument, and one that resonated with the public in the lead-up to the war with Iraq. The evidence that Feith's unit cited in making its case for significant collaboration between Baghdad and al-Qaida has crumbled under post-war scrutiny. The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that Saddam Hussein was so wary of the terrorist network that he barred anyone in his government from dealing with al-Qaida. Feith's unit, however, found that there were "multiple areas of cooperation" between Iraq and al-Qaida, "more than a decade of numerous contacts," and "shared interest and pursuit of [weapons of mass destruction]." The report's conclusions were discussed during a Feb. 9 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Pentagon Inspector General Thomas Gimble told the committee that the office headed by Feith took "inappropriate" actions in advancing conclusions on al-Qaida connections not backed up by the nation's intelligence agencies. He said that while the actions of the group "were not illegal or unauthorized," they "did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to senior decision makers" at a time when the White House was moving toward war with Iraq. Gimble said formal intelligence findings did not corroborate some of the Pentagon unit's crucial assertions: that Hussein's government and al-Qaida had a "mature symbiotic relationship," that it involved a "shared interest and pursuit of" unconventional weapons, and that there were "some indications" of coordination between Iraq and al-Qaida on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Analysts from the CIA and other agencies "disagreed with more than 50 percent" of 26 findings the Pentagon team laid out in one controversial paper, he said. The dueling groups sat down at CIA headquarters in late August 2002 to try to work out their differences. But while the CIA agreed to minor modifications in some of its own reports, Gimble said, the Pentagon unit was utterly unbowed. "They didn't make the changes that were talked about in that Aug. 20 meeting," Gimble said, and instead went on to present their deeply flawed findings to senior officials at the White House. "I can't think of a more devastating commentary," said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat. He cited Gimble's findings that Feith's office was, despite doubts expressed by the intelligence community, pushing conclusions that there were "multiple areas of cooperation" between Iraq and al-Qaida, including shared pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. "That was the argument that was used to make the sale to the American people about the need to go to war," Levin said. "They arrived at an alternative interpretation of the Iraq/al-Qaida relationship that was much stronger than that assessed by the intelligence community and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the administration," he said. The Pentagon report was requested in 2005 by a Republican senator, Pat Roberts, Levin's predecessor on the committee. The committee and a number of official inquiries had criticized the administration's prewar intelligence, but Democratic senators, led by Levin, demanded further investigation of Feith's operation. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, John D. Rockefeller of West Virginia, said in a statement that because the inspector general considered the work of Feith's group to be "intelligence activities," the committee would investigate whether the Pentagon violated the National Security Act of 1947 by failing to notify Congress about the group's work. Feith, who left the Pentagon in 2005 for a post at Georgetown University, played down the influence of his unit. "This was not an alternative intelligence assessment," he told the Washington Post. "It was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance."