Use of national intelligence in policy making

The Democratic Policy Committee held a fascinating hearing on Monday June 26, rebroadcast yesterday by C-Span.

C-SPAN ("Senate Democratic Hearing on Pre-War Iraq Intelligence" video).
I am listening to this again as I write this post. It goes for three hours and is a great summary of the scandal on which so many of us have been focusing for quite some time. Senators were trying to find out answers to these and many other questions. Was the process flawed? Did policy push the intelligence?

Chaired by Senator Byron Dorgan, D-North Dakota. Participating legislators included Senators Harry Reed, D-Nevada, Minority Leader; Jeff Bingaman, D-New Mexico; Diane Feinstein, D-California member of the Intelligence Committee; along with Congressman Walter Jones, R-North Carolina. The hearing focused on building a record on the Bush administration's gathering, use and misuse of pre-Iraq war intelligence. Mentioning that he watched a "very disturbing" PBS Frontline program, "The Dark Side." Dorgan presided over an excellent expose of his own.
Sentator Feinstein asserted that "we still do not know the extent of the influence of the Office of Special Plans." Senator Feinstein questioned Wilkerson about an intelligence source known as "Curveball."
A related story on "Curveball," appeared in the Sunday 6/25/06 Washington Post. Tyler Drumheller, head of European operations for the CIA at the time, now states that he warned that "Curveball," was not credible at the time. To quote,

In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.
Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.
A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails."
The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise. "We thought we had taken care of the problem," said the man who was the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year, "but I turn on the television and there it was, again."

Congressman Jones focused on trying to find out "how the neocons got so much power." Wilkerson answered with three words, "The vice-president." White and Pillar discussed the output of Douglas Feith's office at the DOD, characterizing it as "junk, " "scraps," intelligence without professional standards, and White asserted that such intelligence should be completely eliminated.
Two Panels of witnesses included,

• Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Calling the administrations use of manipulated intelligence "the perpetration of a hoax." Characterizing his role of staff assistance - to Powell while preparing Secretary Powell for his presentation to the United Nations - "the lowest point in my professional life."
• Paul Pillar, former CIA Iraq Intelligence Coordinator, 2000-2005 described what he termed a "broken relationship between intelligence and policy," and the "aggressive use of intelligence to justify to the public the decision to go to war in Iraq, a decision that had already been made." The decision to go to war was made by the president around April, 2002, according to Pillar.
• Carl Ford, former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence Research. Speaking about intelligence gathering, "we aren't very good at intelligence analysis." In intelligence "There is only uncertainty." Regarding Congress and the use of intelligence, Ford advised. "Look for the evidence and logic behind our claims. . . Ask whether other agencies agree or not."
• Wayne White, former State Department Principal Iraq Analyst, 2003-2005. "Forces allotted to the Iraqi war were insufficient to the task. . . For example, Centcom wanted to rely on NGO's to provide care to wounded Iraqi civilians, rather than the U.S. military to provide the care required by the Geneva Conventions." "A major blind spot has been the U.S. assessment of the toughness of the Iraqi resistance fighters."
• Michael Smith, London defense correspondent for the London Sunday Times. The British journalist is the one who broke the "Downing Street Memo" story. Smith talked about the series of memos detailing how the U.K. got into the war in Iraq. He mentioned the U.K.'s worries about the illegality of the U.K. entry into the war for the purpose of regime change, because the only legal reasons to go to war can be three: self-defense, humanitarian intervention or under U.N. resolution. The Brists had other worries that the U.S. did not have a plan for what to do after the war. Smith asserted that, in the most important of the memos, Blair and Bush agreed to go to war at a summit meeting at Bush's Texas Crawford Ranch in April of 2002. Bombings (600 bombs dropped on Iraq) began in May of 2002. The most famous info to come out of the DSM story contained the phrase, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
• Rod Barton - senior technical adviser to the Iraq Survey Group involved in the 2003-04 hunt for missing WMD's in Iraq. It found that there was no evidence of WMD's after 1991. This report was suppressed earlier in the year, but then eventually presented in late 2004 to Congress after the election.
• Joseph Cirincionni works for the Carnegi Endowment and has written extensively about what went wrong in the build-up to the war in Iraq. He maintains that we do not yet know everything that was done. He says that the U.N. inspectors have been given short shrift on their work, that they presented a lot of good evidence that was ignored. His research indicates, also that the intelligence was better than what has been claimed by the administration. The intelligence failures were due to political pressure brought to bear on the senior officials in the intelligence community. Cirincionni asserts that the administration used four tactics to manipulate public opinion. 1)They conflated the three different kinds of WMD's (chemical, biological and nuclear) into one level of dangerousness. 2) They suggested a link between Saddam and Al Queda that was never there, implying that Saddam would transfer WMD's to the terrorists. 3) Administration officials consistently dropped caveats and uncertainties in the intelligence and presented the resulting product as evidence to build supporting for going to war. 4) They misrepresented the facts, such as the findings of the U.N. inspectors. Inspectors never found anthrax, as Bush claimed they did, for example. He also elaborated in an effective way, as well, about how the vice-president set up the alternative intelligence neocon network at DOD and NSA and elsewhere. He feels that, if Congress pursues what happened, there is potential for covering up what went on - for perjury and other illegalities. His opinion is that the neocon cabal was probably not illegal, but that lying under oath to cover up what went on would be if that happened.

Tags: Congress intelligence vice-president neocon Iraq CIA Bush administration Democratic Policy Committee Senate