Posted on 07/11/2004 6:36:45 AM PDT by TrebleRebel
Fury over Pentagon cell that briefed White House on Iraq's 'imaginary' al-Qaeda links By Julian Coman in Washington (Filed: 11/07/2004)
A Senior Pentagon policy maker created an unofficial "Iraqi intelligence cell" in the summer of 2002 to circumvent the CIA and secretly brief the White House on links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'eda, according to the Senate intelligence committee.
The allegations about Douglas Feith, the number three at the Department of Defence, are made in a supplementary annexe of the committee's review of the intelligence leading to war in Iraq, released on Friday.
According to dramatic testimony contained in the annexe, Mr Feith's cell undermined the credibility of CIA judgments on Iraq's alleged al-Qa'eda links within the highest levels of the Bush administration.
The cell appears to have been set up by Mr Feith as an adjunct to the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon intelligence-gathering operation established in the wake of 9/11 with the authority of Paul Wolfowitz. Its focus quickly became the al-Qa'eda-Saddam link.
On occasion, without informing the then head of the CIA, George Tenet, the group gave counter-briefings in the White House. Sen Jay Rockefeller, the most senior Democrat on the committee, said that Mr Feith's cell may even have undertaken "unlawful" intelligence-gathering initiatives.
The claims will lead to calls by Democrats for the resignation of Mr Feith, the third-ranking civilian at the Department of Defence and a leading "neo-con" hawk. "Tenet fell on his sword," said one Democrat official, "even though it's clear that he was placed under tremendous pressure to come up with the 'right' intelligence product for the administration on Iraq.
"The testimony to the committee on Feith and other Pentagon officials shows just what kind of pressure was being exerted. And when that didn't work, the Pentagon was just coming up with its own answers and feeding them to the White House. And on al-Qa'eda they got it all wrong."
Last night a senior Pentagon adviser confirmed that Mr Feith was being targeted by senators unhappy that the administration has so far escaped censure for its use of intelligence.
"There are senators who are clearly gunning for Douglas Feith now. This is turning into a classic conspiracy investigation. They want to get Feith and see if, through Feith, they can go up the ladder to even bigger fish."
Mr Feith's role is to be examined further in the second phase of the Senate committee's investigations, which will deal with the Bush administration's use of the intelligence it received. The report by the Republican-dominated committee lambasted the CIA for intelligence failures while concluding that there was no evidence that the Bush administration tried to coerce officials to adapt their findings.
Yet the annexe - written by three leading Democratic senators - contains the strongest evidence yet that Pentagon hardliners sought to sideline the CIA during a drive to talk up a connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden.
After the September 11 attacks, tension had grown between Pentagon officials and CIA agents, who suspected the Department of Defence of relying too heavily on dubious testimony from Iraqi defectors in order to justify a war against Iraq.
The CIA's investigation of links between Iraq and al-Qa'eda was almost the only aspect of the agency's intelligence-gathering to escape severe censure in the 511-page report. Sen Rockefeller, the senator for West Virginia, said: "Our report found that the intelligence community's judgments were right on Iraq's ties to terrorists. There was no evidence of the formal relationship, however you want to describe it, between Iraq and al-Qa'eda, and no evidence that existed of Iraq's complicity or assistance in al-Qa'eda's terrorist attacks."
Pentagon officials who appeared before the Senate committee testified that Mr Feith and others believed that the CIA was not sufficiently aggressive in its investigation of links between Saddam and al-Qa'eda. During the summer of 2002, administration hardliners believed that evidence of a connection between Iraq and the terrorist organisation would provide a clinching argument for war.
After the publication in June 2002 of a cautious report by the CIA entitled Iraq and al-Qa'eda: A Murky Relationship, Mr Feith passed on a written verdict to the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, that the report should be read "for content only - and CIA's interpretation should be ignored".
In August 2002, Mr Feith's cell gave a briefing to Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, which included a stinging condemnation of the CIA's intelligence assessment techniques.
In sharp contrast to the Senate intelligence committee's criticisms of "over-reaching" and "exaggeration" by CIA agents, the Pentagon briefing criticised the agency for requiring "juridical evidence" for its findings and for the "consistent underestimation" of the possibility that Iraq and al-Qa'eda were attempting to conceal their collaboration.
In another incident, Mr Feith's Pentagon cell postponed the publication of a CIA assessment of Iraq's links to terrorism after a visit to CIA headquarters at which "numerous objections" were made to a final draft.
In particular, Pentagon officials insisted that more should be made of an alleged meeting between the September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi official in Prague in April 2001. The CIA judged reports of the meeting not to be credible, a verdict vindicated on Friday by the Senate committee report.
Most remarkably, on September 16, 2002, two days before the CIA was to produce its postponed assessment, Mr Feith's cell went directly to the White House and gave an alternative briefing to Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and to the National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's deputy.
The briefing contained the section alleging "fundamental problems" with CIA intelligence-gathering. It also gave a detailed breakdown of the alleged meeting between Atta and an Iraqi agent.
The following week, senior Bush officials made confident statements on the existence of a link between Saddam and al-Qa'eda. Mr Tenet would learn of the secret briefing only in March 2004.
Also see transcript of Tenet exchange (March 2004) concerning Atta in Prague:
http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2004/070804tenetresponse.pdf
Troll Alert!
What a crock this charge is.
#1. In the 90's there were dozens of mainstream news organizations writing articles based on Clinton administration intelligence leaks that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were working closely together.
#2. The Clinton administration obtained an indictment in federal court against Osama bin Laden that specifically mentioned the terorrists connections to Saddam Hussein and their agreement to work together on weapons development.
#3. The AQ terrorists who hid in Iraq, trained in Iraq, worked with Iraq is a long one and none of it has been contradicted.
#4. Links to the above and other articles:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1127451/posts
The link below:
http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2004/070804tenetresponse.pdf
Shows that the Tenet appears to believe the story that Ataa flew to the US from Prague in 2000 simply to avoid "meticulous travel keeping records" in a non-EU country. Tenet conveniently fails to mention that Atta actually took a flight to Prague a few days before this, then flew back to Hamburg. He didn't have a Czech visa. When he got one he then returned to Pargue by bus, disappeared for 24 hours and got a flight to the US.
Why did he need a Czech visa in the first place?
Looks like my belief of a anti-American evil Dum cell within the CIA are correct. Why else would the Evil Dums try to divert attention away from the CIA. The report makes it clear the CIA has been politicized by the evil Dums beyond repair.<p. Just as with the "secret memo" that was outted by a aid in Congress, which outlined the Evil Dums plans to destroy President Bush. The massive diversion effort is underway.<p. Anyone that thinks that this country is safe in the hands of these Anti-American moles is sadly underestimating the danger we are facing.
This clown, TrebleRebel, is a leftist Troll. On the so-called "News.Telegraph" (the British leftist publication the troll references) you will find a link that reads:
"How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party". It's source? http://www.bananarepublicans.org.
That link in the leftist pub should have read, "How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party State".
He is an idiot.
Becki
in Michigan
Hardly, the Telegraph is the most conservative newspaper on the planet. But rant away, while other people seriously discuss the long-standing Atta-Prague issue.
What a pity these Democrats didn’t exert the same effort in investigating Bill Clinton and his exchange of land in America (Grand Escalante) for favors from his Indonesian friends and the sale of our National Security to China. And it is a pity the 9/11 Commission didn’t tie Bill Clinton’s Dereliction of Duty for eight years to the strike on America that fateful day – for some reason all fault belongs to President Bush........
Screaming "Troll" with no justification doesn't help matters. What's your evidence? I don't see anything that suggests the poster is a troll.
>> Screaming "Troll" with no justification doesn't help matters. What's your evidence? I don't see anything that suggests the poster is a troll.
I jumped to that conclusion when I saw the link to the leftist propaganda piece, "Banana Republicans", with no qualifiers or warnings.
The lamestream press could at least try to debunk the story in some kind of detail.
The claims will lead to calls by Democrats for the resignation of Mr Feith
Any calls for the resignation of any member of the Bush administration must be met by forceful demands for the resignation of Senator Rockefeller, who was behind the leaked memo disclosing the treasonous plans of the Democrats to politicize the classified findings of the Senate Intelligence committee.
I haven't heard any discussion of the memo outside of FR recently (although it's possible that I've missed it, since I dropped my cable subscription), yet we are seeing precisely the strategy outlined in the Democrat memo being unveiled before our eyes. Why aren't the Republicans shouting this from the rooftops?
This says enough for me...three partisan creeps added their favorite conspiracy theory to the report. Naturally, it's going to be picked up by the equally partisan press.
BTW: unless things have changed a lot in the interveining decades - DOD would be hard pressed to bypass or upstage CIA. But they DO argue and they CAN delay or criticize. From experience I can add that the military intelligence services are a tad more likely to consider bad news as actionalbe while the civilian agency is more apt to equivocate or dismiss what does not fit the party lilne.
<< .... the Telegraph is the most conservative newspaper on the planet .... >>
In your dreams, maybe.
For starters, there are no conservatives in once great britain [AKA "uk!"] -- only other fasissocialists who differ from Blair's extreme fascissocialists only in their arguments as to how to squander the few remaining productive and industrious [The creative and innovative once found among them long ago became Americans!] Britons' confiscated wealth -- not to permit them to keep it in the first place.
And The Telegraph, which attempts to maintain the illusion of "conservatism" by publishing the odd North American -- and the beautiful Boris -- is in fact only very slightly to the right of the Guardian, The Daily Mirror, The Times, The News of the World, The Independent, the Sunday Mirror and The Sunday Times.
Blessings -- Brian
We're all concerned about folks pushing leftist propaganda on us, but we should try to be careful before attacking someone like that. I don't know Treble Rebel, but he doesn't seem like a bad egg from what I've seen.
1. Atta made 2 prior trips to the Czech Republic in 2000 at a time he was engaged in the 9-11 plot.
2. In applying for his visa (BONN200005260024) Atta identified himself as a" Hamburg student."
3. Al-Ani had an observed meeting on the outskirts of Prague on April 9th. The person with whom al-Ani met was identified by the observer (after 9-11) as Mohamed Atta.
4. A surreptitious search of the Iraq Embassy (presumably conducted after the defeat of Iraq) showed, according to a Czech official, that Al-Ani had scheduled a meeting on April 8, 2001 with a"Hamburg student" on his appointment calendar.
The whole article can be read here.
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