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This is 3,000 times worse than Watergate

And 3,000 times worse then Plamegate!

All of this is beginning to make more sense.

Bruce Hardcastle was a senior officer for the Middle East for the Defence Intelligence Agency. When Bush insisted that Saddam was actively and urgently engaged in a nuclear weapons programme and had renewed production of chemical weapons, the DIA reported otherwise. According to Patrick Lang, the former head of human intelligence at the CIA, Hardcastle "told [the Bush administration] that the way they were handling evidence was wrong." The response was not simply to remove Hardcastle from his post: "They did away with his job," Lang says. "They wanted only liaison officers ... not a senior intelligence person who argued with them."

According to Patrick Lang, former head of Middle East intelligence for the DIA, "The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there's no guts at all in the C.I.A."

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Steering Group

Gene Betit, Arlington, VA
Pat Lang, Alexandria, VA
David MacMichael, Linden, VA
Ray McGovern, Arlington, VA

All friends of JOE WILSON who are screaming the loudest about PLAMEGATE (except for FORMER CIA, Larry Johnson, that is).

Bruce Hardcastle, the Defense Intelligence Agency officer assigned to Bill Luti, provides (did provide) Luti's office with intelligence briefings. But his reports are not appreciated by Luti or his colleagues, because they do not support neoconservatives' assumptions about Iraq's weapon capabilities and terrorist activities. [Salon, 3/10/04 Sources: Paul O'Neill]

a secret September 2002 report of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency informed Secretary Rumsfeld, "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has--or will--establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities," according to a report obtained by U.S. News & World Report. When Bruce Hardcastle, a defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Counterterrorism, explained to the Bush officials that they were misreading the evidence, according to Patrick Lang, former head of Human Intelligence at the CIA, the Bush Administration not only removed Hardcastle from his post, "they did away with his job.

One senior intelligence officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency told the committee that some officials working for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were convinced that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was behind the 1993 World Trade Center attack and may even have been involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"They did not tell us what to say," the intelligence officer told the committee. "There wasn't pressure in that sense. But you certainly had to make sure that your analysis was on target and that you were very precise in the words that you used."

At one point, the committee said, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith established a team that reviewed intelligence on the links between Iraq and al Qaeda. Feith told the committee that the team "found some things that looked very interesting in the year 2002 that apparently didn't register with people or were not given great prominence." Feith's team put together a briefing for Rumsfeld and, later, for CIA Director George J. Tenet, and then attended a meeting of intelligence analysts in August 2002 that sought to assess Iraq's links to terrorism.

Anthony Cordesman, a national security specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, criticized the report for failing to investigate the question of pressure on analysts more deeply. "I know of DIA senior officers pressured out of the Pentagon, and younger analysts who left the community over political pressure," he said in an e-mailed assessment. He said that the committee also failed "to examine the fact that the intelligence community almost always responds to the user's demands and perceptions."

The committee's report said that it made repeated calls for analysts to step forward and reveal whether they were pressured by administration officials, and that the committee sought out and interviewed analysts who had been identified in news reports. Bruce Hardcastle, a senior DIA official for Middle Eastern affairs, was interviewed after a report in The Washington Post said he avoiding meeting with Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William J. Luti because he sharply disagreed with Luti over the imminence of the threat posed by Iraq.

But Hardcastle denied the Post account, telling the committee his dispute with Luti was not over Iraq but concerned the use of the word "assassination" to describe the killings of terrorist leaders by Israeli Defense Forces. He said he did not experience pressure to change assessments on Iraq, but he added: "Generally it was understood how receptive [Defense policy officials] were to our assessments and what kind of assessments they would not be receptive to."