Pre-War Intelligence Gathering Under Fire

By Julian E. Barnes
The Los Angeles Times

Friday 09 February 2007

Washington - Senate Democrats assailed Pentagon officials today for insisting to the White House in the months before the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein had direct links to Al Qaeda - despite doubts within the U.S. intelligence community.

Defense Department Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble told the lawmakers that he questioned Douglas J. Feith, the influential former undersecretary, about the incident.

Feith was a prime architect of Bush administration policies and presented policymakers with allegations of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda that did not accurately reflect the views of U.S. intelligence agencies.

"He said it was left out because it was critical of the intelligence community," Gimble said.

"It's damn suspicious to me," said Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.). "You're telling the CIA - you're giving them an assessment that disagrees in a number of respects with theirs, but leave out a slide that says that you have fundamental problems with how the intelligence community is assessing information…. You remove it when you're talking to the CIA and then you reinsert it when you present this same assessment to the White House. That's mighty bloody suspicious."

Republicans defended the Pentagon's intelligence gathering operation under former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld during the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said Feith's group at the Pentagon asked "probing questions" that improved the intelligence process.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman denied that the policy shop produced its own intelligence, saying they were looking at the intelligence community's work "with a critical eye."

The testimony follows a critical report released by the inspector general's office.

Its findings lend credence to charges by White House critics that Feith, who has since left the department, was out of line when he sought to discredit analyses by CIA intelligence officials that discounted alleged ties between Al Qaeda and then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Feith, in responding to the investigation, defended his actions and said he was pleased that the report found he had done nothing illegal.

The report says that Feith's office "developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and Al Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community."

Levin, in a statement released Thursday, said the report found that Feith acted inappropriately, taking on a role that should have been reserved for the intelligence analysts.

The report is sure to add fuel to the controversy over President Bush's main justifications for overthrowing Hussein.

Before the invasion, Bush and other administration officials warned that Hussein had stockpiles of banned biological and chemical weapons and had ties to Al Qaeda terrorists.

The alleged caches of weapons have not been found and the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Hussein and Al Qaeda.

Levin has been highly critical of Feith in the past, saying he played a key role in helping Bush make a misleading case for war. In 2005, Levin requested the probe into Feith's activities.

In his statement, Levin called the inspector general's report "devastating," and said he was going to push for the full, classified version of the investigation to be made public.

In a statement, Feith said it "is good but not surprising" that the report found that his office's activities "were all legal and authorized" and that he and his aides "did not mislead Congress." But he took issue with the conclusion that his actions were inappropriate.

"I disagree with the inspector general's opinions here mainly because, if heeded, they would discourage policy officials from asking tough questions about the quality of CIA work," he said.

At the Pentagon, Feith created the Office of Special Plans, an organization that drafted plans for the war in Iraq. Feith has long rejected claims by critics that the office generated misleading intelligence.

Analysts in the Office of Special Plans believed that the CIA was ignoring links between Al Qaeda operatives and Iraq.

Feith resigned from the Pentagon in 2005 and teaches at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) said in a statement Thursday that his panel had never been informed about the activities of Feith's office.

"Individuals in that office produced and disseminated intelligence products outside of the regular intelligence channels," Rockefeller said. "These intelligence products were inconsistent with the consensus judgments of the intelligence community and as a result policy makers received distorted intelligence."

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Times staff writers Greg Miller and Johanna Neuman contributed to this report.

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