Cheney Chronicle IV: Meanwhile ...

The CIA would be impaired for up to "ten years" in its capacity to adequately monitor nuclear proliferation on the level of efficiency and accuracy it had prior to the White House leak of Plame Wilson's identity.

    from The Raw Story 2/13/06

Saturday, February 11, 2006 

Bush ‘cherry-picked’ intelligence on Iraq

Former CIA official accuses govt of ignoring warnings of post-invasion violence in Iraq

WASHINGTON: A former CIA official who coordinated US intelligence on the Middle East has accused the Bush administration of “cherry-picking” intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, The Washington Post reported Friday.

The newspaper said Paul Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, also accused the administration of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

“Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programmes was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war,” Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration “went to war without requesting - and evidently without being influenced by - any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq”.

Pillar said mistakes made by US intelligence agencies in concluding that Hussein’s government possessed weapons of mass destruction did not drive the administration’s decision to invade, according to The Post. “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 policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicized,” Pillar wrote.

The paper said Pillar was an influential behind-the-scenes player and was considered the agency’s leading counterterrorism analyst. By the end of his career, he was responsible for coordinating assessments on Iraq from all 15 agencies in the intelligence community. He is now a professor in security studies at Georgetown University.

In his article, he said he believes that the “politicisation” of intelligence on Iraq occurred “subtly” and in many forms, but almost never resulted from a policymaker directly asking an analyst to reshape his or her results, the report said. Instead, Pillar describes a process in which the White House helped frame intelligence results by repeatedly posing questions aimed at bolstering its arguments about Iraq, The Post said.

The Bush administration, Pillar wrote, “repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war,” including information on the “supposed connection” between Hussein and Al Qaeda, which analysts had discounted. afp

Cheney authorized aide to leak in CIA case, says report

WASHINGTON: Vice President Dick Cheney directed his aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby to use classified material to discredit a critic of the Bush administration’s Iraq war effort, the National Journal reported on Thursday.

Court papers released last week show that Libby was authorized to disclose classified information to news reporters by “his superiors,” in an effort to counteract diplomat Joe Wilson’s charge that the Bush administration twisted intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear weapons to justify the 2003 invasion.

The National Journal, a US weekly magazine, citing attorneys familiar with the matter, reported that Cheney was among those superiors referred to in a letter from prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to Libby’s lawyers. A lawyer for Cheney had no immediate comment. Libby, Cheney’s former chief of staff, faces perjury and other charges in the leak of the identity of Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame, a move that effectively ended her career at the CIA.

Libby has pleaded not guilty to five counts of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice. Cheney’s name has surfaced in other court documents as well.

According to an appeals-court decision made public last Friday, “the vice-president informed Libby ‘in an off sort of curiosity sort of fashion’” that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA one month before her identity was made public. Both documents cite testimony Libby made to a grand jury. reuters