Posted on 02/23/2004 9:59:23 AM PST by JohnGalt
Pentagon still paying informants with faulty intelligence
Up to $4 million set aside for former Iraqi opposition group
By JONATHAN S. LANDAY, WARREN P. STROBEL and JOHN WALCOTT
Knight Ridder Newspapers
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 $5 million has not been released, they said.
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.
Ahmed Chalabi 2/19/04
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
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
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.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.