Pentagon still paying informants with faulty intelligence

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department continues to pay millions for information from the former Iraqi opposition group that produced exaggerated intelligence that President Bush used to argue his case for war.

The Pentagon has set aside between $3 million and $4 million this year for the Information Collection Program of the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi, said two senior U.S. officials and a U.S. Defense Department official.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because intelligence programs are classified.

Seven separate investigations are under way into prewar intelligence that Iraq was hiding illicit weapons and had links to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. An inquiry by the Senate Intelligence Committee is examining the Iraqi National Congress' role.

The Defense Department official defended the current support of the Iraqi National Congress effort and said it had helped the CIA-led team that was trying to determine what happened to Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

Iraqi National Congress-supplied informants also had identified insurgents who were waging a guerrilla war that had claimed the lives of more than 500 U.S. troops and hundreds of Iraqis, he said.

“To call all of it (Iraqi National Congress intelligence) useless is too negative,” said the official, who described the Information Collection Program as a massive undertaking.

“You never take anything at face value,” he continued. “When the INC (Iraqi National Congress) gives information, we absolutely pursue it. You never know what that golden nugget is going to be.”

Chalabi, who built close ties to officials in Vice President Dick Cheney's office and among top Pentagon officials, is on the Iraqi Governing Council, a body of 25 Iraqis installed by the United States to help administer the country after the ouster of Saddam Hussein last April.

The former businessman, who lobbied for years for a U.S.-backed military effort to topple Hussein, is publicly committed to making peace with Israel and providing bases in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East for use by U.S. forces fighting the war on terrorism.

The Iraqi National Congress' Information Collection Program started in 2001 and was “designed to collect, analyze and disseminate information” from inside Iraq, according to a letter the group sent in June 2002 to the staff of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Some of the group's information alleged that Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program, which was destroyed by United Nations inspectors after the 1991 Gulf War, and was stockpiling banned chemical and biological weapons, according to the letter.

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by Knight Ridder Newspapers, said the information went directly to “U.S. government recipients,” including William Luti, a senior official in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office, and John Hannah, a top national security aide to Cheney.

The letter appeared to contradict denials made last year by top Pentagon officials that they were receiving intelligence on Iraq that bypassed established channels and vetting procedures.

The Iraqi National Congress also supplied information from its collection program to leading news organizations in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, according to the letter to the Senate committee staff.

The State Department and the CIA, which soured on Chalabi in the 1990s, viewed the information as highly unreliable because it was coming from a source with a strong self-interest in convincing the United States to topple Hussein.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded since the invasion that defectors turned over by the Iraqi National Congress provided little worthwhile information and that at least one, the source of an allegation that Hussein had mobile biological warfare laboratories, was a fabricator. A Defense Department official said the group did provide valuable material on Hussein's military and security apparatus.

Even so, dubious information supplied by the group found its way into the Bush administration's arguments for war, which included charges that Hussein was concealing illicit arms stockpiles and was supporting al-Qaida.

No illicit weapons have been found, and senior U.S. officials said no compelling evidence could be found that Hussein cooperated with al-Qaida to attack Americans.

The Information Collection Program is now overseen by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's main intelligence arm, which took over when the State Department gave it up in late 2002.

A senior administration official questioned whether the United States should be funding the program.

“A huge amount of what was collected hasn't panned out,” he said. “Some of it has turned out to have been either wrong or fabricated.”

The senior administration official also sought to justify the initial decision to support the program.

Prior to the invasion, U.S. intelligence agencies had no better human sources in Iraq and had no choice but to rely on the Iraqi National Congress, minority Kurdish guerrilla groups and other sources who claimed to have knowledge of Hussein's illegal arms programs, ties to terrorist groups and his military forces, he said.

“The evidence now suggests that at some points along the way, we may have been duped by people who wanted to encourage military action for their own reasons,” he conceded.

In a related development, U.S. officials said that on top of the Pentagon funds, Chalabi's organization asked the State Department in August for $5 million in unspent financing that was approved by Congress before the war.

The request for the money follows the awarding to the national congress of $3.1 million in April 2003, following the fall of Baghdad, according to a State Department statement.

State Department lawyers questioned the decision to turn over the $3.1 million, said a State Department official.

Keep remembering how the military used the wrong street maps and ended up bombing the Chinese embassy in Sarajevo in '98-'99.

They were working off a map three years old, and wrong. That's a bit ironic because in my career I seldom had a map that new, and often was working on maps that were twenty years or more older.

Even in the final years of the cold war, most of our maps of Russia were based on aerial surveys done by the German Luftwaffe in WWII.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

In the intelligence business two things are constant: your adversary does not want you to learn what you want to learn, and people lie to you. Indeed, most of the people you deal with are people you would not care to have courting your daughter, to put it mildly.

That doesn't prevent you from learning a lot of useful information. The Times has had a hardon for Chalabi for ages; he's key to their juvenile we-did-it-for-the-oil conspiracy. While Chalabi's guys reported stuff that agreed with many other sources, pre-war intelligence in Iraq depended on far more than these defectors. That the defectors had an agenda was understood by all that handled them and by all that read the reporting on same.

We had extensive information from human and technical sources on Iraqi WMD, which, in retrospect, was wrong. This is nothing new, it has happened before (think of the National Redoubt in WWII) and it will happen again because intelligence is a human activity and humans are imperfect creatures.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

Interpretation of intelligence by certain sub-intelligence offices in the Administration were all wrong

I'm not suggesting that the claims of Iraqi WMD were right; the physical evidence certainly seems to indicate the contrary.

I'm only saying that this was a very, very widespread belief in the intelligence community, and it wasn't coming from Douglas Feith or Cheney or anybody, it was coming from the analysts who were working with the raw intelligence, and their reports customarily included extracts from the raw intel. For example, a SIGINT report will include some parts of the actual transcript, an IMINT report will not only explain what was in the pictures but includes the pictures so that the recipient can see for himself.

I certainly didn't see all of this stuff (my interests are in other areas), but I did read the daily classified world intel briefings, which during the buildup included a lot on Iraq and a lot on Iraqi WMD. I saw a great deal of what seemed to be conclusive evidence, and I was convinced at the time. When our guys went to sites where we had very extensive technical reporting indicating that chemical weapons were there, and there were no chemical weapons there, you could have knocked me over with a feather.

I don't think Douglas Feith has any impact on an E-4 transcribing an audiotape or warrant officer matching up a truck in a photograph with a picture of a known Russian chemical decontamination vehicle. Moreover, Ahmed Chalabi can't influence that kind of intelligence gathering. All the various disciplines of intelligence normally reinforce, and, significantly, provide a cross-check on each other.

In this case, that system failed and our decision makers got bad input. I think that is a consensus point. The question is, why? Reporters seek a conspiratorial answer, especially reporters, like those at the Times, with more of a political axe to grind than a concern for facts. But the facts don't support a conspiracy, yet, and they probably won't.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

While less than thrilled that an insider is publicly apologizing for gross government incompetence, at least I appreciate the spin control effort and your candid admission that you were duped. Perhaps next time you will pay more attention to counter claims.

However, the fact is that you again are claiming a 'consensus' that never existed. Rice and Powell are on record in early 2001 saying Saddam had no WMDs, clearly, they were privy to information that was at least more correct than the nonsense that was vetted.

Karen Kwiatkowski reports here, here and here in the American Conservative certainly lend a first hand report on how the intelligence centers that were set up to bypass traditional means operated and how poorly they preformed. (Why have there been no firings?)

Your tolerance for gross incompetence if not running the gambit all the way to willful incompetence and acts of anti-patriotism that border on treason, without any suggest remedy is downright frightening considering you were one of the dupes.

I do believe the grand jury involved in investigating the forged Niger documents will provide us with a picture of who attempted to dupe the administration even if ultimately, the Grand Jury will fail to get to the bottom of this sad episode.

Your accusations of "gross incompetence, willful incompetence, anti-patriotism, and treason" are empty without proof.

I put my life on the line to fight the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, thanks heaps for the accusation.

As far as the "American Conservative" is concerned, I've seen Buchanan express far more approval of Francisco Franco than he ever has for American institutions. I don't care what Buchanan and his crowd say for the same reason I don't care what David Duke says. It may be a crushing disappointment for Pat but Fascism is dead and buried, and history records that we didn't need it to beat an equally evil system, Communism (by the way, I put my life on the line in that one, too. Pat didn't. How 'bout you? - But I think I know the answer).

As someone who has seen every phase of the intelligence cycle at first hand, I've seen errors throughout. The system catches and corrects them, sooner or later, or it doesn't and we act on them, and sometimes get our heinies kicked. Examples: The Ranger attack at Pointe du Hoc (D-Day; the guns the Rangers got creamed destroying turned out not to be operational); The Bay of Pigs ("The Cubans will rise up..."); Son Tay ("There are 112 US Prisoners here..."); the Mayaguez raid (The Marines uncharacteristically left bodies behind, after attacking what turned out to be the wrong place, for the wrong reasons).

There are other errors less well known to the public. For example, one stick that Kennedy beat Nixon with was the "missile gap" -- the perception that the Russians were ahead in missile technology and production. In fact, while low-level intel looked that way, very-close-hold intel (U2 overflight photos, long since declassified) told Eisenhower and Nixon that there was no gap. But Nixon couldn't defend against the charge without leaking the information -- which he didn't do.

Unfortunately, Pat and his fellows are so determined to lay this particular error at the feet of the Joooooz That Control The World, they don't see it as an error. It is a troubling error because it was a very big one.

The difference between the Powell press statement you link to and the statements of the President pre/Iraq are more a matter of tone than of substance. Powell says that SH has not developed "significant" WMD, yes, but he also says that SH is trying to, and that the US has a major interest in preventing him from so doing; the President stressed the importance of moving "before the threat is imminent" which has become in the verbiage of the appeasenik left and their fellow-travelers on the isolationist/fascist right a claim that the threat was "imminent."

That's the same Powell that sat in front of the UN waving a vial. But you want to take him out of the consensus based on a questionable interpretation of a couple lines at a press availability with Mr Mubarak? Huh. I don't think Mr Powell would agree with you.

If Pat doesn't like the trend of things he could always run for office.... oh yeah, he did. He got 100% of the elderly-Baltic-camp-guard vote but not many others, didn't he?

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

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