Iraq-"Evidence" : "Outdated, "Fragmentary" and "Circumstantial"

SPECIAL INFO: Meacher TV Interview now up as Online Video (09/26)

Bush officials defend Iraq intelligence

Chuck Schumer: NYC Press Conference about Wilsongate at 3 PM EST

CNN -Monday, September 29, 2003

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Bush administration officials used Sunday's talk shows to shrug off criticism that going to war with Iraq was based on outdated, "fragmentary" and "circumstantial" evidence, as was asserted in a letter to the CIA director from the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee...

...The letter to CIA Director George Tenet was sent last week by Rep. Porter Goss of Florida, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Jane Harman of California, the committee's ranking Democrat.

The committee spent the past several months going through 19 volumes of classified material Bush officials used to make their case for war with Iraq, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

Porter and Harman told Tenet they found "significant deficiencies" in the U.S. intelligence community's ability to collect fresh intelligence on Iraq after U.N. weapons inspectors left in 1998, the Post reported.

They said intelligence agencies instead relied on "past assessments" and "some new 'piecemeal' intelligence" that "were not challenged as a routine matter," the Post reported.

From the WP article

...The committee reviewed the underlying information used by U.S. intelligence agencies to write a classified October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. The NIE was the most comprehensive assessment of Iraq available to lawmakers before the war, and many based their approval of Bush's war resolution on it.

The letter acknowledges one sharp difference between the two committee leaders. Harman, the letter indicated, believes the NIE judgments "were deficient with regard to the analysis and presentation." Goss believes the judgments were not deficient and were properly couched to reflect the incomplete nature of the intelligence. A congressional source said Goss "does not believe that [the intelligence] community's judgments were inaccurate."

As to Iraq's ties to terrorists, the committee scrutinized three volumes of data and found "substantial gaps" in credible information from human sources that would have allowed U.S. intelligence agencies "to give policymakers a clear understanding of the nature of the relationship." Instead, the agencies had a "low threshold" or "no threshold" on using information the intelligence community obtained on Iraq's alleged ties to al Qaeda.

"As a result, intelligence reports that might have been screened out by a more rigorous vetting process made their way to the analysts' desks, providing ample room for vagary to intrude," the letter states. The agencies did not clarify which of their reports "were from sources that were credible and which were from sources that would otherwise be dismissed in the absence of any other corroborating intelligence."

Goss and Harman were particularly critical of the underlying intelligence used to conclude that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program.

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney still links Iraq to 9/11 and contends that an Iraqi agent and "hijacker" Mohammad Atta met in Prague before the attack.

The report was made first public in the british Hollinger Paper "Daily Telegraph". One of their directors is PNAC-member and NeoCon Richard Perle.

Agency Belittles Information Given by Iraq Defectors

NY Times -September 29, 2003

...An internal assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that most of the information provided by Iraqi defectors who were made available by the Iraqi National Congress was of little or no value, according to federal officials briefed on the arrangement.

In addition, several Iraqi defectors introduced to American intelligence agents by the exile organization and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program, the officials said.

The arrangement, paid for with taxpayer funds supplied to the exile group under the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, involved extensive debriefing of at least half a dozen defectors by defense intelligence agents in European capitals and at a base in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil in late 2002 and early 2003, the officials said. But a review early this year by the defense agency concluded that no more than one-third of the information was potentially useful, and efforts to explore those leads since have generally failed to pan out, the officials said...

... Two other Defense Department officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, defended the arrangement. While the credibility of the Iraqi defectors debriefed under the program had been low, they said, it had been roughly on par with that of most human intelligence about Iraq. The officials also said the Defense Intelligence Agency had been generally skeptical of the defectors from the start, on the ground that they were motivated more by the money and the desire to stir up sentiment against Saddam Hussein than by a desire to provide accurate information.

Updates (09/29):

Tonight, on CNBC, CheckPoint, ex-CIA Larry C. Johnson was interviewed about the "Iraq Evidence". He accused Paul Wolfowitz of having the war planned since 1998. (Developing Story, no link yet)

US paid $1m for ' useless intelligence' from Chalabi

Independent -30 September 2003

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

Information from Iraqi defectors made available by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress before the US invasion was of little or no use, a Pentagon intelligence review shows.

The Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) said defectors introduced to US intelligence agents by the organisation invented or exaggerated their claims to have personal knowledge of the regime and its alleged weapons of mass destruction. The US paid more than $1m for such information.

In 1998, Congress provided $97m to the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the London-based group that claimed to be an umbrella organisation for Iraqi interests. Its chairman, Mr Chalabi, is president of Iraq's Governing Council.

The defectors were interviewed before the war in various European capitals and the Kurdish-controlled city of Arbil in northern Iraq. Defectors were also made available to newspapers and magazines which reported stories about the cruelty of Saddam's regime and his efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

But the DIA review, mentioned in a leaked letter to Stephen Cambone, the under secretary of defence for intelligence, makes clear that no more than a third of the information was potentially useful, and efforts to explore even these leads were generally unproductive.

Opinion about the INC in the Bush administration was already divided. The Pentagon and those pushing for war against Iraq were quick to cite the information it provided and to promote the cause of Mr Chalabi, but the CIA and the State Department were much more cautious about the organisation's reliability.

"The [INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all," Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counter-terrorism expert, said before the war. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defence Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi's own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches."

Information provided by Mr Chalabi was used extensively by the administration and US journalists. Surces said The New York Times reporter Judith Miller relied on the INC for many of her stories about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Most of the claims in those stories have since proved unfounded but in an e-mail to a colleague she wrote: "I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years, and have done most of the stories about him for our paper. He has provided most of the front-page exclusives on WMD to our paper."

A DIA spokesman, Ken Gerhart, said yesterday he "would not comment on classified information". Mr Cambone was unavailable for comment.

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