This video from the USA is called Cheney: I never linked Iraq with 9/11. Oh really?
From The Raw Story in the USA:
Senator calls report ‘devastating condemnation’ of Office of Special Plans
Larisa Alexandrovna
Published: Thursday February 8, 2007
Contrary to speculation and some earlier reports, the Department of Defense [Pentagon] Inspector General’s office did not exonerate the controversial [Pentagon] Office of Special Plans, which has been accused of cooking pre-war intelligence on Iraq, nor was its then chief overseer, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, vindicated.
According to a statement released by Armed Services Committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) Thursday night to RAW STORY, the IG’s report is a “devastating condemnation of the activities of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.”
In a separate statement, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, states that whether the intelligence activities “were authorized or not, it appears that they were not in compliance with the law.”
Citing excerpts from the IG’s unclassified executive summary of the classified report, Levin’s statement shows that Feith is not alone to share the blame for creating a parallel intelligence channel that the IG describes as “inappropriately performing Intelligence Activities of developing, producing, and disseminating that should be performed by the Intelligence Community.”
Pointing the finger higher up and directly at former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his then Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, the IG concluded, according to Levin’s statement, that Feith’s “inappropriate activities were authorized by the Secretary of Defense or the Deputy Secretary of Defense.”
Although recently replaced by Robert Gates as Defense Secretary, Rumsfeld continues to occupy an office in the Pentagon.
Wolfowitz is now the head of the World Bank, while Feith is a visiting professor at Georgetown University.
A Glimpse:
Specifically addressed in the IG’s executive summary and cited in Levin’s statement is the much-touted alleged connection between Iraq and al-Qaida that the Bush administration, and, in particular, Vice President Dick Cheney, used as one of the selling points to build their case for war against Iraq.
See also here.
And here.
On Rumsfeld: here.
Related articles
*CIA doubts didn’t deter Feith’s team*
Posted by: “hapi22” hapi22@earthlink.net robinsegg
Sun Feb 11, 2007 8:46 am (PST)
Misleading the American people was Doug Feith’s goal, so when the
professional intelligence people told him that what he was pushing was
not based on fact, Feith — at the behest of his masters, Bush, Cheney
and Rumsfeld — DID NOT CARE and continued the deception
Doug Feith was the head of a very small team that Rumsfeld set up within
the Pentagon specifically to create its own intelligence. The point was
to sell the invasion of Iraq., so any intelligence that did not lead to
war was IGNORED.
———————————————————-
**CIA doubts didn’t deter Feith’s team*
*
*Intelligence agencies disagreed with many of its prewar findings.*
/by Greg Miller and Julian E. Barnes
The Los Angeles Times
February 10, 2007/
WASHINGTON — As the Bush administration began assembling its case
for war, analysts across the U.S. intelligence community were disturbed
by the report of a secretive Pentagon team that concluded Iraq had
significant ties to Al Qaeda.
Analysts from the CIA and other agencies “disagreed with more than 50%”
of 26 findings the Pentagon team laid out in a controversial paper,
according to testimony Friday from Thomas F. Gimble, acting inspector
general of the Pentagon.
The dueling groups sat down at CIA headquarters in late August 2002 to
try to work out their differences. But while the CIA agreed to minor
modifications in some of its own reports, Gimble said, the Pentagon unit
was utterly unbowed.
“They didn’t make the changes that were talked about in that August 20th
meeting,” Gimble said, and instead went on to present their DEEPLY
FLAWED findings to senior officials at the White House.
The work of that special Pentagon unit — which was run by former
Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith — is one of the lingering
symbols of the intelligence failures leading up to the war in Iraq.
[NOTE FROM ME: It was NOT a case of ” intelligence failures”; it was
a case of people purposely disseminating FALSE intelligence, cooked
up intelligence, manufactured intelligence.]
.
The Bush administration’s primary justification for invading Iraq was
always its assertion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass
destruction. But Iraq’s supposed ties to Al Qaeda — and therefore its
connection to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — were an important
secondary argument, and one that resonated with many Americans in the
lead-up to the war with Iraq.
The CIA and many other intelligence agencies were wrong in their
assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs. But the agency was always deeply
skeptical about the ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Most of the evidence that Feith’s Office of Special Plans cited in
making its case for significant collaboration between Baghdad and Al
Qaeda has crumbled under postwar scrutiny. The Senate Intelligence
Committee has concluded that Saddam Hussein was so wary of the terrorist
network that he barred anyone in his government from dealing with Al Qaeda.
Although the Pentagon Inspector General’s report released Friday did not
address the accuracy of such assessments, it documented the unusual
efforts by Defense Department policymakers to bypass regular
intelligence channels and influence officials at the highest level of
government.
Feith’s work was of critical importance to Vice President Dick Cheney,
who once referred to the Pentagon team’s conclusions as the “best
source” for understanding the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
The activities of Feith’s group weren’t illegal, Gimble concluded. But
they were, “in our opinion, inappropriate, given that the intelligence
assessments were [presented as] intelligence products and did not
clearly show the variance with the consensus of the intelligence community.”
The Pentagon team touted a series of claims that have not survived
postwar review. Among them was the allegation that Mohammed Atta, the
presumed ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, had met with an Iraqi
agent in Prague before the attacks.
A critical question raised by the inspector general’s report is whether
Feith and his office were just critiquing CIA analysis, or were creating
their own intelligence assessment, a role that is supposed to be left to
the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) noted
Friday that Cheney has referred to Feith’s work as an “assessment,”
suggesting it was a formal intelligence document. But Feith maintained
in interviews he was not creating an intelligence “product,” but was
just checking the work of the CIA.
Laurence H. Silberman, a semiretired U.S. appeals court judge and
co-chairman of a presidential commission on Iraq’s weapons, said it is
appropriate to question intelligence.
“Policymakers, whether they are in Defense, State, the White House or
Congress, are absolutely entitled to question the intelligence
community, look over the material and come up with their own views,” he
said.
.
[NOTE FROM ME: As the saying goes: Everyone is entitled to his own
opinion, but NOT to his own set of facts. Facts are facts and lies
are lies, and what Feith and his gang were selling as “intelligence”
were lies.]
.
Feith’s work had the blessing of his boss, former Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld. The operation was set up at the behest of
then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz with approval from
Rumsfeld, Gimble noted. By most accounts, those three officials had
distrust, if not disdain, for the work of the CIA and other intelligence
agencies.
But Robert M. Gates, the new secretary of Defense and former CIA
director, said that groups outside the CIA and other chartered
intelligence agencies should not be involved in freelance analysis.
“Based on my whole career, I believe all intelligence activities need to
be carried on by the established institutions, where there is
appropriate oversight,” he told reporters traveling with him in Europe
for meetings on security.
Gimble provided new details on the chain of events leading from the
creation of the Feith team, through a series of briefings it made for
senior officials and culminating in a presentation before deputies in
the National Security Council at the White House.
The initial instruction to search for links between Iraq and Al Qaeda
came from Wolfowitz in January 2002, Gimble said.
By that July, Feith had assembled a group of analysts detailed from
other agencies to draft a document outlining evidence that the officials
thought other agencies had ignored.
[NOTE FROM ME: So-called intel is vacuumed up from all sorts of
places and from all sorts of people, some reliable and some
unreliable. NOT everything that gets vacuumed up should be
respected; it is up to experienced intelligence people to learn to
be able to tell the difference between garbage and real info. Feith
and his gang took info that experienced intelligence analysts had
rejected — rejected for valid reasons, such as the source was a
known liar — and spoon-fed that rejected info to the higher-ups as
accurate info and NEVER bothered to tell the higher-ups that the
info had been discredited by experienced intelligence analysts.
Feith passed the info off as solid evidence. That is tantamount to
lying … and those were the lies that got us into the Iraq war.]
.
The team presented its findings to Rumsfeld on Aug. 8. Rumsfeld found it
so compelling that he urged Feith to arrange a briefing for then-CIA
Director George J. Tenet at the CIA. In the meantime, the team’s paper
began to circulate among analysts at other agencies who took issue with
MORE THAN HALF of its contents.
“There were like 26 points,” in the Feith team’s paper, Gimble said.
“And essentially [experts at other agencies] DISAGREED with MORE
THAN 50% of it, and either agreed or partially agreed with the remainder.”
When the team briefed Tenet and other senior CIA officials on Aug. 15,
the audience was polite but unimpressed. Tenet described the meeting as
“useful,” Gimble said, but “in our interviews with him he later said
that he only said that it was ‘useful’ because he didn’t agree with it
and he was just trying to, you know, nicely end the meeting.”
That encounter led to the “roundtable” meeting at the agency five days
later where CIA experts urged the Pentagon unit to at least include
footnotes acknowledging the LONG LIST of DISAGREEMENTS.
Nevertheless, the Pentagon team {Feith & co.] pressed on.
P.J. Crowley, a retired Air Force colonel and a senior fellow at the
Center of American Progress, said that the intelligence peddled by
Feith TAINTED the public dialogue.
“They weren’t creating intelligence, but they were assembling the pieces
to create a rationale for war,” Crowley said. “Their production was
discredited, but they had the desired effect. The little pieces ended up
infecting the process.”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
/greg.miller@latimes.com/
//
/julian.barnes@latimes.com/
//
/Times staff writer Peter Spiegel in Seville, Spain, contributed to this
report./
Read this at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-na-feith10feb10,0,4114134.story?track=mostviewed-homepage
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