The Problem with Bush and Cheney´s "Faulty Intelligence" Defense

The Problem with Bush and Cheney´s "Faulty Intelligence" Defense
Submitted by davidswanson on Wed, 2005-11-23 06:10. Media

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
By Kristina Borjesson

Weighed down by the detritus of their war-selling campaign, including the Plame affair, President Bush and Vice President Cheney came out swinging against charges that they misused pre-war intelligence. The intelligence was faulty, not manipulated, they say. "While it is perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war," the president declared, "it is irresponsible to re-write the history of how the war began."

Re-writing history may be wrong, but reviewing it is instructive. The record shows that Bush and Cheney´s claims that they were duped by bad intelligence are disingenuous.

Upon arriving at the White House, they began an extensive campaign to get to Iraq. They assembled an ad hoc bureaucracy for gathering and diffusing intelligence--true or faulty, it didn´t matter--to sell the war. They paid Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (a group that the CIA had previously dismissed as an unreliable intelligence source) for faulty intelligence that served their agenda. Another aspect of their campaign was pressuring and punishing those who disputed or refuted the intelligence. The Plame affair resulted from that.

Ron Suskind reported in his book, The Price of Loyalty, that ten days into the Bush administration´s tenure, former treasury secretary Paul O´Neill attended a meeting where the president turned to Condi Rice and in what several observers understood was a scripted exchange said, "What´s on the agenda?" "How Iraq is destabilizing the region, Mr. President," she replied, after which then-CIA director George Tenet gave a presentation that raised the possibility of Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. At the end of the meeting, the president assigned Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and General Henry H. Shelton to look at "military options." A little less than year later, Rumsfeld expressed his desire to find evidence in the ruins of 9/11 that was "good enough to hit SH [Saddam Hussein]."

From there, members of the administration associated with Bush and Cheney´s offices, oversaw an ad hoc bureaucracy comprised of several groups designed to gather, package and sell intelligence promoting the war.

There was the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, run by Cheney´s Middle East Advisor, David Wurmser. According to intelligence expert and author James Bamford, this group was assigned to produce evidence for pretexts for attacking Iraq. Knight Ridder´s Jonathan Landay said that the group was tasked to look for links between Saddam and al Qaeda. This linking exercise resulted in a post-war memo that was released by the conservative Weekly Standard under the headline: "Case Closed: The U.S. Government´s Secret Memo Detailing Cooperation Between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden." The Defense Department and the CIA disowned the memo as a legitimate analysis. Nonetheless, Cheney called it the "best source of information" on the Saddam/bin Laden connection.

Then there was the Office of Special Plans [OSP] for advance war planning and media strategy. Created by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, it was hidden away on the Pentagon´s fifth floor. The OSP operated in secret. Retired Air Force Lieutenant Karen Kwiatkowski, who was on staff there, says, "We were instructed at a staff meeting that this office was not to be discussed or butterflyd and if people in the Joint Staff, among others, asked, we were to offer no comment." One of the OSP´s tasks, according to Bamford, was to "target doubters and non-believers in the government, from the CIA to the Secretary of State. Those who wouldn´t go along with the OSP´s false information [courtesy of Ahmed Chalabi] or agenda, like CIA intelligence experts and General Anthony Zinni, former commander of Middle East Forces, were attacked and put on enemies lists."



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