The CIA Made Me Do It

The CIA, those masters of black ops and covert manipulation, have been snookered and so have the American people. The Senate Intelligence Committee investigating the mishandling of intelligence which led to the invasion of Iraq because of alleged WMD and Saddam's supposed ties with al Qaeda, have laid the blame on the CIA. This is an historic moment. It's not often that the CIA sits still for being scapegoated.

Is it possible that the members of this committee don't know what's been going on at the Pentagon and didn't read any of the numerous publications that had stories about Donald Rumsfeld's private office of NeoCons tucked away in the Pentagon called the Office of Special Plans? The only other explanation would be that the report these senators produced is an attempt to white-wash the president in an election year and claim the guilty party is someone no longer connected to the administration, George Tenet, the former director of the CIA who resigned last month.

The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was set up shortly after 9-11 by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld at the suggestion of his Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz and funded by a black budget, thus bypassing Congress and any oversight. The NeoCon hawks had wanted to replace Iraq's leader since 1991. All they needed was a justification to give the American people. When the CIA could find no evidence of Saddam's WMD or links to al Qaeda, the OSP which included Douglas Feith, William Luti, Abram Shulsky, Richard Perle, John Bolton, among others, were given the task, outside of the intelligence community. These men are not only staunch supporters of the NeoCon political philosophy of Leo Strauss, and members of either the Project For A New American Century (PNAC) or the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), they are also Zionists. Determined to promote their agenda, these amateur intelligence analysts collected information from Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi and others in his anti-Saddam exile group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and other information discarded as unreliable by the CIA . The CIA told the OSP that Chalabi and his group were not credible, but the Iraqis were telling the administration what it wanted to hear so the warning went unheeded. In fact, some of the more extreme right wingers went so far as to accuse the CIA of trying to suppress information about Saddam's ties to the 9-11 terrorists and WMD.

Rumsfeld's private intelligence department took their reports directly to vice president Cheney and National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice, without having the information vetted by CIA intelligence experts or anyone else except politically appointed idealogues. They also re-wrote many of the CIA reports on weapons and took out the caveats like "may", "likely", and "probably".

Another source of information for the OSP was a parallel group in Ariel Sharon's office, who would visit the Pentagon office without going through the regular protocols and provide more of the unsubstantiated war- promoting fear stories that the Mossad was unwilling to sanction.

A good deal of this unverified "intelligence" found its way into speeches by the president, vice president and other administration officials and became talking points for the hawks in the lead-up to war.

The Senate report also remarkably came to the conclusion that the administration did not pressure the CIA to find proof of Saddam's weapons stockpile and his ties to al Qaeda. Vice President Cheney visited CIA headquarters several times as did his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Pentagon consultant Newt Gingrich. Administration visits to CIA Headquarters are unprecedented. There have been several members of the intelligence community who resigned or retired and have been quite vocal in publicly describing the pressure they felt to come up with the results the White House wanted. The most well-known of these are Greg Thielmann, Karen Kwiatkowski, Vincent Cannistraro and Patrick Lang. There have also been scores of agents who gave interviews and were identified only as "a CIA source", who told similar stories of intimidation to make the intelligence fit the agenda. Why is the Senate Intelligence Committee unaware of such readily available information?

A particularly troubling aspect of the report is that it is incomplete. The section that will deal with whether or not the administration deliberately exaggerated or manipulated the intelligence information to lead us to war won't be released until after the election. Shouldn't the American people have the answer to that question before they vote? If the Republicans don't want that information to come out until after November, perhaps we already have our answer.

7-12-04