[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Editorial: How to Skew Intelligence

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Editorial: How to Skew Intelligence

October 23, 2004
 


 

It's long been obvious that the allegations about Saddam
Hussein's dangerous weapons and alliance with Osama bin
Laden were false. But as the election draws closer, the
remaining question is to what extent President Bush's team
knew the allegations were wrong and used them anyway to
persuade Americans to back the invasion of Iraq. 

A report issued Thursday by the senior Democrat on the
Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin of Michigan,
shows that on the question of an Iraqi-Qaeda axis, Mr.
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others offered an
indictment that was essentially fabricated in the office of
Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy. 

Mr. Levin's report does not prove that President Bush knew
that the Hussein-bin Laden alliance was fiction. But
officials like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his
deputy, Paul Wolfowitz - as well as Mr. Cheney's chief of
staff and the deputy national security adviser - knew that
Mr. Feith's tailored conclusions were contrary to the views
of the entire intelligence community. Mr. Cheney presented
them to the public as confirmed truth about Iraq and Al
Qaeda. 

The Levin report is a primer on how intelligence can be
cooked to fit a political agenda. It is another sad
reminder of this administration's refusal to hold anyone
accountable for the way the public was led into the war
with Iraq. 

It focuses on the intelligence operation set up by Mr.
Rumsfeld, who had been advocating an invasion of Iraq long
before Mr. Bush took office and wanted more damning
evidence against Baghdad after 9/11 than the Central
Intelligence Agency had. 

This operation, run by Mr. Feith, tried to persuade the
Pentagon's own espionage unit, the Defense Intelligence
Agency, to change its conclusion that there was no alliance
between Iraq and Al Qaeda. When the Defense Intelligence
Agency rebuffed this blatant interference, Mr. Feith's team
wrote its own report. 

It took long-discredited raw intelligence and resurrected
it to create the impression that there was new information
supporting Mr. Feith's preordained conclusions. It
misrepresented the C.I.A.'s reports and presented
fifth-hand reports as authoritative, all to depict Iraq as
an ally of Al Qaeda. 

Bipartisan reports from the 9/11 commission and the Senate
Intelligence Committee concluded that the intelligence
community had been right and Mr. Feith wrong: there was no
operational relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and no
link at all between Mr. Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. 

For those who were confused before the war, and still are,
by all the Bush administration's claims - that the hijacker
Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi official shortly before
9/11, that a member of Al Qaeda set up a base in Iraq with
the help of Mr. Hussein, that Iraq helped Al Qaeda learn to
make bombs and provided it with explosives - the evidence
is now clear. The Levin report, together with the 9/11
panel's findings and the Senate intelligence report, show
that those claims were all cooked up by Mr. Feith's shop,
which knew that the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence
Agency had already shown them to be false. 

We don't know exactly how much of that the White House knew
because Mr. Feith tried to confuse things. He eliminated
points that the C.I.A. disputed when he showed the
intelligence agency his report, and he put them back in
when he sent it to the White House. 

The Bush administration called Mr. Levin's report
pre-election partisan sniping. It is far more than that,
but voters, unfortunately, won't get final answers. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee, which has reported on
the C.I.A.'s actions before the war, has delayed a review
of the administration's behavior until after the election.
We also will not see the C.I.A.'s own report because Mr.
Bush's new intelligence chief, Porter Goss, has rebuffed a
bipartisan request from Congress to release it. 

Voters have to decide whether to hold Mr. Bush accountable
for the skewed intelligence cooked up by his administration
to justify the war. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/opinion/23sat1.html?ex=1099555154&ei=1&en=577eff4cd98a6785


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