More Missing Intelligence [on the trail of Joe Wilson's lies]

The Nation ^ | June 19, 2003 | Robert Dreyfuss

[Enchante]

"The same unit [the Office of Special Plans] that fed Chalabi's intelligence on WMD to Rumsfeld was also feeding him Chalabi's stuff on the prospects for postwar Iraq," said a leading US government expert on the Middle East. Says a former US ambassador with strong links to the CIA: "There was certainly information coming from the Iraqi exile community, including Chalabi--who was detested by the CIA and by the State Department--saying, 'They will welcome you with open arms.'"

[Enchante]

How much would I bet that this "former US ambassador with strong links to the CIA" is none other than JOE WILSON, here shopping his 'expertise' to left-wing reporters before June 19, 2003.......

[Enchante]

Posting this article from "The Nation" which does not seem to have been posted on FR previously (as far as I can tell from a search). Here the unnamed "former US ambassador with strong links to the CIA" is not quoted specifically about WMD issues but rather about Chalabi and the Iraqi exiles; nonetheless, I think this is another indication that Joe Wilson had shopped his tales to numerous reporters BEFORE July 2003 while using his wife's CIA employment as a source of (supposed) credibility for his assertions.

[the Real fifi]

Yup. That's what I think.

[shield]

This article will probably always be around...but maybe the whole article should be posted on this thread. I know I've gone back after a few yrs and the article is gone.

[samadams2000]

R-U-S-S-E-R-T

[Howlin]

Scooter ping!

[Enchante]

Good point, here it is:

---

posted June 19, 2003 (July 7, 2003 issue)
More Missing Intelligence

Robert Dreyfuss

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030707/dreyfuss

As the Pentagon scours Iraq for weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi links to Al Qaeda, it's increasingly obvious that the Bush Administration either distorted or deliberately exaggerated the intelligence used to justify the war against Iraq. But an even bigger intelligence scandal is waiting in the wings: the fact that members of the Administration failed to produce an intelligence evaluation of what Iraq might look like after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Instead, they ignored fears expressed by analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department who predicted that postwar Iraq would be chaotic, violent and ungovernable, and that Iraqis would greet the occupying armies with firearms, not flowers.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, it turns out that the same people are responsible for both. According to current and former US intelligence analysts and government officials, the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans funneled information, unchallenged, from Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who in turn passed it on to the White House, suggesting that Iraqis would welcome the American invaders. The Office of Special Plans is led by Abram Shulsky, a hawkish neoconservative ideologue who got his start in politics working alongside Elliott Abrams in Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's office in the 1970s. It was set up in fall 2001 as a two-man shop, but it burgeoned into an eighteen-member nerve center of the Pentagon's effort to distort intelligence about Iraq's WMDs and terrorist connections. A great deal of the bad information produced by Shulsky's office, which found its way into speeches by Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, came from Chalabi's INC. Since the INC itself was sustained by its neocon allies in Washington, including the shadow "Central Command" at the American Enterprise Institute, it stands as perhaps the ultimate example of circular reasoning.

"The same unit [the Office of Special Plans] that fed Chalabi's intelligence on WMD to Rumsfeld was also feeding him Chalabi's stuff on the prospects for postwar Iraq," said a leading US government expert on the Middle East. Says a former US ambassador with strong links to the CIA: "There was certainly information coming from the Iraqi exile community, including Chalabi--who was detested by the CIA and by the State Department--saying, 'They will welcome you with open arms.'" Rumsfeld's willingness to accept that view led him to contradict the Chief of Staff of the US Army, who predicted that it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to control Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, a view that seems prescient today.


According to the former official, also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was a secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit, which paralleled Shulsky's--and which has not previously been reported--prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in Sharon's office, not inside Israel's Mossad intelligence service, because the Mossad--which prides itself on extreme professionalism--had views closer to the CIA's, not the Pentagon's, on Iraq. This secretive unit, and not the Mossad, may well have been the source of the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium for weapons from Niger in West Africa, according to the former official.

The catastrophic result of the belief that it would be easy to pacify postwar Iraq and to create a quisling government in Baghdad, a view that was codified as dogma by the White House, is unfolding daily in Iraq. The country is engulfed in economic and political chaos, armed resistance is growing among the Sunni Muslims in central Iraq, and the powerful and largely hostile Shiite clergy in the south has barely begun to flex its muscles. Not only that, but Iraq watchers report that former Baath Party members are coalescing into nascent political formations, leading armed resistance to the occupation, and that they could emerge as either a strong political party or an underground terrorist group.


Astonishingly, the Bush Administration did not even bother to prepare and internally publish an intelligence estimate about postwar Iraq. (An "estimate," in intelligence jargon, is a formal evaluation produced after sifting, sorting and analyzing various bits and pieces of raw intelligence. So-called National Intelligence Estimates are produced by a unit that reports immediately to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet.) "Back in the old days, there would have been an estimate," says Raymond McGovern, the twenty-seven-year CIA warrior who formed Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity this past January. "In their arrogance, they didn't worry about it."

Other sources concur. "There was no intelligence estimate done, and there weren't a lot of questions being asked," says Melvin Goodman, a former CIA analyst with the Center for International Policy. "And I know for a fact that at CIA and NESA [the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs], none of them thought that postwar Iraq would be governable." Goodman says that CIA and DIA experts on Iraq were not called in by the Pentagon, and no intelligence roundtables were held to evaluate the situation. Most of the intelligence about how easily the INC and its allies could assume power in Iraq was coming from the INC itself, says a former State Department official. "And I know for a fact that when the subject came up, intelligence officers were extraordinarily skeptical of the exiles' information."

On the eve of the invasion, there was something akin to panic at the Norfolk,Virginia-based US Joint Forces Command, which was responsible for supporting the Pentagon's Iraq task force, then headed by retired Gen. Jay Garner. "They were scared shitless," says a former US official who was in close contact with the command. "They were making it up as they went along." He adds, "There was a great deal of ignorance. They didn't know the names of the [Iraqi] tribes, much less how they relate to each other. They didn't have the expertise, and they didn't have enough time to assemble the expertise."

Such expertise would have allowed the Army to foresee that once Saddam was eliminated, Iranian-backed Shiite forces in southern Iraq, with great influence over the 60 percent of Iraqis who are Shiite, would instantly emerge as a powerful claimant to power. Instead of leading to the democracy envisioned by Bush, the war in Iraq could result in a Shiite-dominated fundamentalist regime, a prospect that is starting to seem the most likely. Not the kind of victory Bush wants to take to the US electorate in 2004.

At a June forum on Iraq at the American Enterprise Institute, Kenneth Katzman, the Middle East specialist at the Congressional Research Service, made a chilling prediction of how the crisis in Iraq will continue to unfold, to the discomfort of his AEI hosts. The Shiite forces in southern Iraq, he said, are content for now to let the Sunni-led guerrillas harass and weaken US troops. "The Shiites hope that Sunni violence in central Iraq will force the United States out, and then the Shiites will move in and pick up the pieces," he said. Despite discord and infighting among the Shiites, Katzman said, most of the Shiite leadership is tied closely to the Iranian government and its ultraconservative clergy. For the rest of this year, he predicted, the US forces in Iraq will be unable to pacify the country or halt the violence, and by next year, as the election nears, there will be enormous political pressure for the United States to withdraw--or, in Washington-speak, to develop an "exit strategy." The question for Bush, according to Katzman, is, Does the United States have the political staying power to continue to sustain one or two casualties a day in October 2004?

That's a question that ought to disturb Karl Rove's sleep. And it might be a question that Democratic would-be opponents of the President ought to ponder. A massive failure of US intelligence has led to an emerging disaster in postwar Iraq. It's a true crisis, and one that could determine the fate of Bush's presidency. In Watergate, the refrain was: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" Let me suggest a question for Bush, the know-nothing GOP standard-bearer in 2004: "What didn't the President know, and when didn't he know it?"



Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!

If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.

For reprint rights to this article, e-mail nation@agenceglobal.com.

[shield]

Good. Thanks.

[Always Right]

If you made two columns, the first one which list the lies of the Bush-haters and a second one listing the lies of Bush, the first column would be packed full and the second one would be empty.

[paddles]

And "former State Department official" is none other than the addled and odious Larry Johnson....

[AmeriBrit]

Bookmarked ...thankyou!

[Dems_R_Losers]

God, that article reeks of leftist Jewish-conspiracy theory.

But, if the ambassador is Wilson, it certainly comports with the view that Wilson outed his wife himself, and it confirms his existing ties to The Nation, which he later used to start the bogus claim of a White House conspiracy to retaliate against him.

[Grampa Dave]

A few minutes ago I post the following reply to Shield on his new old thread on Wilson:

"What is interesting about this and another thread is that we and other conservatives keep chipping away at the bs/secrecy surrounding Wilson/Plame/McTraitor and other hater Americans who set up a coup attempt against our president."

"Eventually this will ooze to the surface, Wilson, Plame, McTraitor and others will be exposed as liars, spinners and coup planners. Due to the power of the MSM they will just get hand slaps personally. However, it drive more nails into the coffin being built for the DNC and current rats in charge."

[Always Right]

And "former State Department official" is none other than the addled and odious Larry Johnson....

Larry Johnson and Joe Wilson are somewhere behind most of these anti-Bush stories. It would be quite easy to come up with a Hillaryesque 'vast left-wing conspriracy' that shows the flow of information and most of it would lead back to a handful of Bush-haters.

[Dems_R_Losers]

Other sources concur. "There was no intelligence estimate done, and there weren't a lot of questions being asked," says Melvin Goodman, a former CIA analyst with the Center for International Policy. "And I know for a fact that at CIA and NESA [the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs], none of them thought that postwar Iraq would be governable." Goodman says that CIA and DIA experts on Iraq were not called in by the Pentagon, and no intelligence roundtables were held to evaluate the situation.

The Center for International Policy is the Marxist group headed by William Goodfellow, a/k/a Mr. Dana Priest.

[Dems_R_Losers]

I'm becoming more and more convinced that what we have is not a cabal of Bush-haters, but a cabal of double agents. This is not just about nailing Bush - why bother, after the election when he is a lame duck? It's about de-legitimizing the entire U.S. policy in the Middle East. Now think about who benefits from that. The Cold War may not be over, after all.

[Enchante]

Yes, this whole incestuous VIPS - CIP - Joe Wilson cabal turns up over and over and over again. Here it's Goodman and Ray McGovern quoted by name, and very likely Joe Wilson and Larry Johnson quoted anonymously. If there were any REAL reporters out there they would have been unravelling this stuff 3 years ago!! Just follow the links among Larry Johnson, Joe Wilson, Ray McGovern, Melvin Goodman, Patrick Lang, William Goodfellow, and the leftist reporters who have been their whores...... THERE SHOULD BE NO MORE UNNAMED SOURCES ALLOWED on this stuff - the MSM must be ripped open and raked over the coals, every reporter who has flogged these false stories must be made to come clean.

[Wuli]

Everything said, by the left, about the importance of Chalabi is nothing but their own spin; not the actual views of our intelligence community. Chalabi, and other Iraq exiles gave information to our intelligence agencies. None of it was taken at face value, none of it was given preference over the totality of the rest of our intelligence. Input, yes, absolute definitive truth, no.

The truth is that anyone the "neocons" ever talked to is determined, as a religious belief by the left, that they were working with those "neocons" to subvert the "facts" to the "neocon" agenda. As if such an agenda was needed to have good reasons to go after Saddam.

[the Real fifi]

Yes. The best evidence of that is the media's repeated claim that Chalabi was the source of the flawed source, "Curveball". Although it's been known for some time, German intel provided him to us, that is rarely reported and the sliming of Chalabi continues.

[Peach]

Five witnesses say that Joe Wilson outted his own wife. Oh, the irony.

http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1628703/posts