Feb. 10, 2006A former top CIA official said the Bush administration used prewar Iraq intelligence selectively to make the public case for war after having already decided to invade the country, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, Feb. 8).
“Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war,” Paul Pillar, national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. The administration “went to war without requesting — and evidently without being influenced by — any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.”
“It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policy-makers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized,” Pillar wrote.
Pillar, now a security studies professor at Georgetown University, was considered the CIA’s top counterterrorism analyst prior to his retirement. He was responsible for coordinating assessments on Iraq from throughout the U.S. intelligence community, according to the Post.