skip

Excerpt from
http://www.counterpunch.org/leopold07192003.html

Tenet told the Intelligence Committee that his own spies at the CIA
determined that much of the intelligence information they collected on
Iraq could not prove that the country was an imminent threat nor could
they find any concrete evidence that Iraq was stockpiling a cache of
chemical and biological weapons. But the Office of Special Plans,
using Iraqi defectors from the Iraqi National Congress as their main


intelligence was rewritten, it was delivered to the office of National
Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, where it found its way into various
public speeches given by Vice President **** Cheney, Deputy Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush, the Senators said.

Moreover, these Senators allege that the office of the Vice President
and the National Security Council were fully aware that the
intelligence Wolfowitz's committee collected may not have been
reliable. The Senators said they are discussing privately whether to
ask Wolfowitz to testify before a Senate hearing in the near future to
determine how large of a role his Special Plans committee played in
providing the President with intelligence data on Iraq and whether
that information was reliable or beefed up to help build a case for
war.

A week ago, Tenet claimed responsibilty for allowing the White House
to use the now disputed claim that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium
from Niger to build an atomic bomb in Bush's State of the Union
address. Last week, these Senators and a CIA intelligence official
said the Office of Special Plans urged the White House to use the
uranium claim in Bush's speech.

But Democrats in the Senate are now asking what role the secret
committee set up by Wolfowitz played in hyping the intelligence on
Iraq's weapons programs.

Secretary of State Colin Powell appears to be the only White House
official who questioned the accuracy of the intelligence information
coming out of the Office of Special Plans. A day before he was set to
appear before the United Nations Feb. 5 to argue about the Iraqi
threat and to urge the Council to support military action against the
country, Powell omitted numerous claims provided to him by the Office
of Special Plans about Iraq's weapons program because the information
was unreliable, according to an early February report in U.S. News and
World Report.

Powell was so disturbed about the questionable intelligence on Iraq's
alleged weapons of mass destruction that he put together a team of
experts to review the information he was given before his speech to
the U.N.

Much of the information Powell's speech was provided by Wolfowitz's
Office of Special Plans, the magazine reported, to counter the
uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq.

Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's
banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, the
magazine said. At one point, he became so infuriated at the lack of
adequate sourcing by the Office of Special Plans to intelligence
claims he said, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to
the magazine.

Spokespeople for Wolfowitz, Rice and the Vice President all denied the
accusations, saying it was the CIA who provided the White House with
the bulk of intelligence on Iraq and that there is no reason to
believe the information isn't accurate. Tenet's spokespeople would not
return several calls for comment.

===================================

Does anyone think Tenet is going to continue being the fall guy here?
I don't think so. More of the article at the above URL.

-Skip

agave

Finally getting to the root of the matter!
about time.

agave

skip

Excerpt from
http://www.counterpunch.org/leopold07192003.html

Tenet told the Intelligence Committee that his own spies at the CIA
determined that much of the intelligence information they collected on
Iraq could not prove that the country was an imminent threat nor could
they find any concrete evidence that Iraq was stockpiling a cache of
chemical and biological weapons. But the Office of Special Plans,
using Iraqi defectors from the Iraqi National Congress as their main


intelligence was rewritten, it was delivered to the office of National
Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, where it found its way into various
public speeches given by Vice President **** Cheney, Deputy Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush, the Senators said.

Moreover, these Senators allege that the office of the Vice President
and the National Security Council were fully aware that the
intelligence Wolfowitz's committee collected may not have been
reliable. The Senators said they are discussing privately whether to
ask Wolfowitz to testify before a Senate hearing in the near future to
determine how large of a role his Special Plans committee played in
providing the President with intelligence data on Iraq and whether
that information was reliable or beefed up to help build a case for
war.

A week ago, Tenet claimed responsibilty for allowing the White House
to use the now disputed claim that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium
from Niger to build an atomic bomb in Bush's State of the Union
address. Last week, these Senators and a CIA intelligence official
said the Office of Special Plans urged the White House to use the
uranium claim in Bush's speech.

But Democrats in the Senate are now asking what role the secret
committee set up by Wolfowitz played in hyping the intelligence on
Iraq's weapons programs.

Secretary of State Colin Powell appears to be the only White House
official who questioned the accuracy of the intelligence information
coming out of the Office of Special Plans. A day before he was set to
appear before the United Nations Feb. 5 to argue about the Iraqi
threat and to urge the Council to support military action against the
country, Powell omitted numerous claims provided to him by the Office
of Special Plans about Iraq's weapons program because the information
was unreliable, according to an early February report in U.S. News and
World Report.

Powell was so disturbed about the questionable intelligence on Iraq's
alleged weapons of mass destruction that he put together a team of
experts to review the information he was given before his speech to
the U.N.

Much of the information Powell's speech was provided by Wolfowitz's
Office of Special Plans, the magazine reported, to counter the
uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq.

Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's
banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, the
magazine said. At one point, he became so infuriated at the lack of
adequate sourcing by the Office of Special Plans to intelligence
claims he said, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to
the magazine.

Spokespeople for Wolfowitz, Rice and the Vice President all denied the
accusations, saying it was the CIA who provided the White House with
the bulk of intelligence on Iraq and that there is no reason to
believe the information isn't accurate. Tenet's spokespeople would not
return several calls for comment.

===================================

Does anyone think Tenet is going to continue being the fall guy here?
I don't think so. More of the article at the above URL.

-Skip

agave

Finally getting to the root of the matter!
about time.

agave

harry hope

Democrats in the Senate are now asking what role the secret committee
set up by Wolfowitz played in hyping the intelligence on Iraq's
weapons programs.

At one point, he became so infuriated at the lack of adequate sourcing
by the Office of Special Plans to intelligence claims he said, "I'm
not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine.

The Office of Special Plans, using Iraqi defectors from the Iraqi


world's most lethal weapons.

Once the intelligence was rewritten, it was delivered to the office of
National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, where it found its way into
various public speeches given by Vice President **** Cheney, Deputy
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush, the Senators said.

Moreover, these Senators allege that the office of the Vice President
and the National Security Council were fully aware that the
intelligence Wolfowitz's committee collected may not have been
reliable.


http://www.counterpunch.org/leopold07192003.html

July 19, 2003

Tenet: Wolfowitz Did It

The Yellowcake Blame Game

By JASON LEOPOLD

When George Tenet, the director of the CIA, testified before the
Senate Intelligence Committee last week about dubious intelligence
data on the Iraqi threat that made it into President Bush's State of
the Union address in January, he said an ad-hoc committee called the
Office of Special Plans, set up Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and
other high-profile hawks rewrote the intelligence information on Iraq
that the CIA gathered and gave it to White House officials to help
Bush build a case for war, according to three Senators on the
intelligence committee.

Tenet told the Intelligence Committee that his own spies at the CIA
determined that much of the intelligence information they collected on
Iraq could not prove that the country was an imminent threat nor could
they find any concrete evidence that Iraq was stockpiling a cache of
chemical and biological weapons.

But the Office of Special Plans, using Iraqi defectors from the Iraqi
National Congress as their main source, rewrote some of the CIA's
intelligence to say, undeniably, that Iraq was hiding some of the
world's most lethal weapons.

Once the intelligence was rewritten, it was delivered to the office of
National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, where it found its way into
various public speeches given by Vice President **** Cheney, Deputy
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush, the Senators said.

Moreover, these Senators allege that the office of the Vice President
and the National Security Council were fully aware that the
intelligence Wolfowitz's committee collected may not have been
reliable.

The Senators said they are discussing privately whether to ask
Wolfowitz to testify before a Senate hearing in the near future to
determine how large of a role his Special Plans committee played in
providing the President with intelligence data on Iraq and whether
that information was reliable or beefed up to help build a case for
war.

A week ago, Tenet claimed responsibilty for allowing the White House
to use the now disputed claim that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium
from Niger to build an atomic bomb in Bush's State of the Union
address.

Last week, these Senators and a CIA intelligence official said the
Office of Special Plans urged the White House to use the uranium claim
in Bush's speech.

But Democrats in the Senate are now asking what role the secret
committee set up by Wolfowitz played in hyping the intelligence on
Iraq's weapons programs.

Secretary of State Colin Powell appears to be the only White House
official who questioned the accuracy of the intelligence information
coming out of the Office of Special Plans.

A day before he was set to appear before the United Nations Feb. 5 to
argue about the Iraqi threat and to urge the Council to support
military action against the country, Powell omitted numerous claims
provided to him by the Office of Special Plans about Iraq's weapons
program because the information was unreliable, according to an early
February report in U.S. News and World Report.

Powell was so disturbed about the questionable intelligence on Iraq's
alleged weapons of mass destruction that he put together a team of
experts to review the information he was given before his speech to
the U.N.

Much of the information Powell's speech was provided by Wolfowitz's
Office of Special Plans, the magazine reported, to counter the
uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq.

Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's
banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, the
magazine said.

At one point, he became so infuriated at the lack of adequate sourcing
by the Office of Special Plans to intelligence claims he said, "I'm
not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine.

Spokespeople for Wolfowitz, Rice and the Vice President all denied the
accusations, saying it was the CIA who provided the White House with
the bulk of intelligence on Iraq and that there is no reason to
believe the information isn't accurate.

Tenet's spokespeople would not return several calls for comment.

Separately, the CIA, earlier this year, brought back four retired
officials, led by former CIA deputy director Richard Kerr, to examine
the agency's pre-war intelligence and reporting on the Iraqi threat.

Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board is also probing the issue, but whether any of the
investigations include the Office of Special Plans is still undecided.

Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter for the New Yorker, wrote an
expose on the Office of Special Plans in May.

In his story, he claims a Pentagon adviser told him that the committee
"was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true_that Saddam
Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous
arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons
that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States."

Feith, in a rare Pentagon briefing in May, denied that the Office of
Special Plans was cherry-picking intelligence information to build a
case for war in Iraq.

The Office of Special Plans "was not involved in intelligence
collection," Feith said.

"Rather, it relied on reporting from the CIA and other parts of the
intelligence community.

Its job was to review this intelligence to help digest it for me and
other policymakers, to help us develop Defense Department strategy for
the war on terrorism... in the course of its work, this team, in
reviewing the intelligence that was provided to us by the CIA and the
intelligence community, came up with some interesting observations
about the linkages between Iraq and al Qaeda."

To date, however, the Pentagon has failed to provide any proof of a
link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Still, the OSP or "The Cabal," as the group calls itself, according to
the New Yorker story, played a significant role in convincing the
White House that Iraq was a threat to its neighbors in the Middle East
and to the United States.

But the intelligence information and the Iraqi defectors the group
relied heavily upon to prove its case were widely off the mark.

For example, according to one CIA intelligence official in charge of
weapons of mass destruction for the agency, the OSP is responsible for
providing thee White House with the information that thousands of
high-strength aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were intended for a secret
nuclear weapons program.

Bush said last September in a speech that attempts by Iraq to acquire
the tubes point to a clandestine program to make enriched uranium for
nuclear bombs.

But experts contradicted Bush, saying that the evidence is ambiguous
at best.

It was later determined by the International Atomic Energy Agency that
the tubes were designed to was to build rockets rather than for
centrifuges to enrich uranium.

Furthermore, the Iraqi defectors feeding the OSP with information
about the locations of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction were
said to be unreliable and responsible for sending U.S. military forces
on a "wild goose chase," according to another CIA intelligence
official.

Case in point:

In 2001, an Iraqi defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, told the OSP
he had visited twenty secret facilities for chemical, biological and
nuclear weapons.

Saeed, a civil engineer, supported his claims with stacks of Iraqi
government contracts, complete with technical specifications.

Saeed said Iraq used companies to purchase equipment with the blessing
of the United Nations - and then secretly used the equipment for their
weapons programs.

He claimed that chemical and biological weapons labs could be found in
hospitals and presidential palaces, which turned out to be completely
untrue, when the locations were searched.

The OSP provided the National Security Council with Saeed's findings
last year and the information found its way into a White House report
in December called, "Iraq: A Decade of Deception and Defiance"
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/decade/sect3.html>

But the information never held up and turned out to be another big
intelligence failure for the Bush administration.

Judith Miller first brought the existence of Saeed to light in a New
York Times story in December 2001 and again in January.

The White House, in September 2002, cited the information provided by
Saeed in a fact sheet.

Whether a bipartisan probe into the OSP is convened remain to be seen,
but one thing is certain, the committee of pseudo spies wields an
enormous amount of power.

Larry C. Johnson, a former counter-terrorism expert at the CIA and the
State Department, says he's spoken to his colleagues working for both
agencies and its clear that the OSP has politicized the intelligence
process.

"What they're experiencing now is the worst political pressure. Anyone
who attempted to challenge or rebut OSP was accused of rocking the
boat. OSP came in with an agenda that they were predisposed to
believe," he said.

Vincent Cannistrano, who worked for the CIA for 27 years, told the
National Journal last month that the OSP "incorporated a lot of
debatable intelligence, and it was not coordinated with the
intelligence community."

__________________________________________________

A lota snakes crawlin' around that Bush White House.

Harry

p-3

I wonder why HillBill Clinton got away with it and your all over GW Bush
for the same thing?

harry hope

Democrats in the Senate are now asking what role the secret committee
set up by Wolfowitz played in hyping the intelligence on Iraq's
weapons programs.

At one point, he became so infuriated at the lack of adequate sourcing
by the Office of Special Plans to intelligence claims he said, "I'm
not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine.

The Office of Special Plans, using Iraqi defectors from the Iraqi


world's most lethal weapons.

Once the intelligence was rewritten, it was delivered to the office of
National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, where it found its way into
various public speeches given by Vice President **** Cheney, Deputy
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush, the Senators said.

Moreover, these Senators allege that the office of the Vice President
and the National Security Council were fully aware that the
intelligence Wolfowitz's committee collected may not have been
reliable.


http://www.counterpunch.org/leopold07192003.html

July 19, 2003

Tenet: Wolfowitz Did It

The Yellowcake Blame Game

By JASON LEOPOLD

When George Tenet, the director of the CIA, testified before the
Senate Intelligence Committee last week about dubious intelligence
data on the Iraqi threat that made it into President Bush's State of
the Union address in January, he said an ad-hoc committee called the
Office of Special Plans, set up Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and
other high-profile hawks rewrote the intelligence information on Iraq
that the CIA gathered and gave it to White House officials to help
Bush build a case for war, according to three Senators on the
intelligence committee.

Tenet told the Intelligence Committee that his own spies at the CIA
determined that much of the intelligence information they collected on
Iraq could not prove that the country was an imminent threat nor could
they find any concrete evidence that Iraq was stockpiling a cache of
chemical and biological weapons.

But the Office of Special Plans, using Iraqi defectors from the Iraqi
National Congress as their main source, rewrote some of the CIA's
intelligence to say, undeniably, that Iraq was hiding some of the
world's most lethal weapons.

Once the intelligence was rewritten, it was delivered to the office of
National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, where it found its way into
various public speeches given by Vice President **** Cheney, Deputy
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush, the Senators said.

Moreover, these Senators allege that the office of the Vice President
and the National Security Council were fully aware that the
intelligence Wolfowitz's committee collected may not have been
reliable.

The Senators said they are discussing privately whether to ask
Wolfowitz to testify before a Senate hearing in the near future to
determine how large of a role his Special Plans committee played in
providing the President with intelligence data on Iraq and whether
that information was reliable or beefed up to help build a case for
war.

A week ago, Tenet claimed responsibilty for allowing the White House
to use the now disputed claim that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium
from Niger to build an atomic bomb in Bush's State of the Union
address.

Last week, these Senators and a CIA intelligence official said the
Office of Special Plans urged the White House to use the uranium claim
in Bush's speech.

But Democrats in the Senate are now asking what role the secret
committee set up by Wolfowitz played in hyping the intelligence on
Iraq's weapons programs.

Secretary of State Colin Powell appears to be the only White House
official who questioned the accuracy of the intelligence information
coming out of the Office of Special Plans.

A day before he was set to appear before the United Nations Feb. 5 to
argue about the Iraqi threat and to urge the Council to support
military action against the country, Powell omitted numerous claims
provided to him by the Office of Special Plans about Iraq's weapons
program because the information was unreliable, according to an early
February report in U.S. News and World Report.

Powell was so disturbed about the questionable intelligence on Iraq's
alleged weapons of mass destruction that he put together a team of
experts to review the information he was given before his speech to
the U.N.

Much of the information Powell's speech was provided by Wolfowitz's
Office of Special Plans, the magazine reported, to counter the
uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq.

Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's
banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, the
magazine said.

At one point, he became so infuriated at the lack of adequate sourcing
by the Office of Special Plans to intelligence claims he said, "I'm
not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine.

Spokespeople for Wolfowitz, Rice and the Vice President all denied the
accusations, saying it was the CIA who provided the White House with
the bulk of intelligence on Iraq and that there is no reason to
believe the information isn't accurate.

Tenet's spokespeople would not return several calls for comment.

Separately, the CIA, earlier this year, brought back four retired
officials, led by former CIA deputy director Richard Kerr, to examine
the agency's pre-war intelligence and reporting on the Iraqi threat.

Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board is also probing the issue, but whether any of the
investigations include the Office of Special Plans is still undecided.

Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter for the New Yorker, wrote an
expose on the Office of Special Plans in May.

In his story, he claims a Pentagon adviser told him that the committee
"was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true_that Saddam
Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous
arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons
that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States."

Feith, in a rare Pentagon briefing in May, denied that the Office of
Special Plans was cherry-picking intelligence information to build a
case for war in Iraq.

The Office of Special Plans "was not involved in intelligence
collection," Feith said.

"Rather, it relied on reporting from the CIA and other parts of the
intelligence community.

Its job was to review this intelligence to help digest it for me and
other policymakers, to help us develop Defense Department strategy for
the war on terrorism... in the course of its work, this team, in
reviewing the intelligence that was provided to us by the CIA and the
intelligence community, came up with some interesting observations
about the linkages between Iraq and al Qaeda."

To date, however, the Pentagon has failed to provide any proof of a
link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Still, the OSP or "The Cabal," as the group calls itself, according to
the New Yorker story, played a significant role in convincing the
White House that Iraq was a threat to its neighbors in the Middle East
and to the United States.

But the intelligence information and the Iraqi defectors the group
relied heavily upon to prove its case were widely off the mark.

For example, according to one CIA intelligence official in charge of
weapons of mass destruction for the agency, the OSP is responsible for
providing thee White House with the information that thousands of
high-strength aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were intended for a secret
nuclear weapons program.

Bush said last September in a speech that attempts by Iraq to acquire
the tubes point to a clandestine program to make enriched uranium for
nuclear bombs.

But experts contradicted Bush, saying that the evidence is ambiguous
at best.

It was later determined by the International Atomic Energy Agency that
the tubes were designed to was to build rockets rather than for
centrifuges to enrich uranium.

Furthermore, the Iraqi defectors feeding the OSP with information
about the locations of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction were
said to be unreliable and responsible for sending U.S. military forces
on a "wild goose chase," according to another CIA intelligence
official.

Case in point:

In 2001, an Iraqi defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, told the OSP
he had visited twenty secret facilities for chemical, biological and
nuclear weapons.

Saeed, a civil engineer, supported his claims with stacks of Iraqi
government contracts, complete with technical specifications.

Saeed said Iraq used companies to purchase equipment with the blessing
of the United Nations - and then secretly used the equipment for their
weapons programs.

He claimed that chemical and biological weapons labs could be found in
hospitals and presidential palaces, which turned out to be completely
untrue, when the locations were searched.

The OSP provided the National Security Council with Saeed's findings
last year and the information found its way into a White House report
in December called, "Iraq: A Decade of Deception and Defiance"
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/decade/sect3.html>

But the information never held up and turned out to be another big
intelligence failure for the Bush administration.

Judith Miller first brought the existence of Saeed to light in a New
York Times story in December 2001 and again in January.

The White House, in September 2002, cited the information provided by
Saeed in a fact sheet.

Whether a bipartisan probe into the OSP is convened remain to be seen,
but one thing is certain, the committee of pseudo spies wields an
enormous amount of power.

Larry C. Johnson, a former counter-terrorism expert at the CIA and the
State Department, says he's spoken to his colleagues working for both
agencies and its clear that the OSP has politicized the intelligence
process.

"What they're experiencing now is the worst political pressure. Anyone
who attempted to challenge or rebut OSP was accused of rocking the
boat. OSP came in with an agenda that they were predisposed to
believe," he said.

Vincent Cannistrano, who worked for the CIA for 27 years, told the
National Journal last month that the OSP "incorporated a lot of
debatable intelligence, and it was not coordinated with the
intelligence community."

__________________________________________________

A lota snakes crawlin' around that Bush White House.

Harry

p-3

I wonder why HillBill Clinton got away with it and your all over GW Bush
for the same thing?

skip

Bush went to war based on faulty information. Clinton did not.

-Skip

skip

Bush went to war based on faulty information. Clinton did not.

-Skip