US insiders say Iraq intelligence deliberately skewed

3.00pm

WASHINGTON - A growing number of United States national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the US$30 ($52.54) billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq.

A key target is a four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or terrorist groups.

This team, self-mockingly called the Cabal, "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defence Intelligence Agency, which co-ordinates military intelligence.

The DIA was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD", or weapons of mass destruction, he added in a phone interview.

He said the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating US foreign policy.

Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of Central Intelligence Agency counterterrorist operations, said he knew of serving intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for playing up "fraudulent" intelligence, "a lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi".

The INC, which brought together groups opposed to Saddam, worked closely with the Pentagon to build a for the early use of force in Iraq.

"There are current intelligence officials who believe it is a scandal," he said in a telephone interview. They believe the administration, before going to war, had a "moral obligation to use the best information available, not just information that fits your preconceived ideas."

The top Marine Corps officer in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway, said on Friday US intelligence was "simply wrong" in leading military commanders to fear troops were likely to be attacked with chemical weapons in the March invasion of Iraq that ousted Saddam.

Richard Perle, a Chalabi backer and member of the Defence Policy Board that advises Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, defended the four-person unit in a television interview.

"They established beyond any doubt that there were connections that had gone unnoticed in previous intelligence analysis," he said on the PBS NewsHour Thursday.

A Pentagon spokesman, Marine Lt. Col. David Lapan, said the team in question analysed links among terrorist groups and alleged state sponsors and shared conclusions with the CIA.

"In one case, a briefing was presented to Director of Central Intelligence Tenet. It dealt with the links between Iraq and al Qaeda," the group blamed for the Sept. 2001 attacks on the United States, he said.

Tenet denied charges the intelligence community, on which the United States spends more than $30 billion a year, had skewed its analysis to fit a political agenda, a cardinal sin for professionals meant to tell the truth regardless of politics.

"I'm enormously proud of the work of our analysts," he said in a statement on Friday ahead of an internal review. "The integrity of our process has been maintained throughout and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong."

Tenet sat conspicuously behind Secretary of State Colin Powell during a key February 5 presentation to the UN Security Council arguing Iraq represented an ominous and urgent threat -- as if to lend the CIA's credibility to the presentation, replete with satellite photos.

Powell said Friday his presentation was "the best analytic product that we could have put up."

Greg Thielmann, who retired in September after 25 years in the State Department, the last four in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research working on weapons, said it appeared to him that intelligence had been shaped "from the top down".

"The normal processing of establishing accurate intelligence was sidestepped" in the runup to invading Iraq, said David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security and who deals with US intelligence officers.

Anger among security professionals appears widespread. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group that says it is made up mostly of CIA intelligence analysts, wrote to US President George Bush May 1 to hit what they called "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions."

"In intelligence there is one unpardonable sin - cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy," it wrote. "There is ample indication this has been done with respect to Iraq."

Two United States soldiers were killed and seven injured on Friday when their military vehicle was involved in a traffic accident in Iraq, the US Central Command said.

The soldiers were among a growing number of American military casualties in recent days in both firefights and traffic mishaps in Iraq.

The command, which oversees American military operations in Iraq, said in a brief release that the two soldiers, attached to the 101st Airborne Division, were killed when their Light-Medium Tactical Vehicle crashed between Mosul and Tikrit north of Baghdad.

No details of the accident were given, but the announcement said the injured soldiers were evacuated to a military hospital for treatment.

Friday's incident brought to at least 10 the number of American soldiers killed in ambush attacks or accidents in Iraq this week.

- REUTERS


Herald Feature: Iraq