[Mb-civic] Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq
Intelligence 'Misused' to Justify War, He Says

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 10, 2006; A01

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle 
East until last year has accused the Bush administration of 
"cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had 
already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country 
could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow 
Saddam Hussein.

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near 
East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. 
intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government 
possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments 
did not drive the administration's decision to invade.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even 
with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the 
upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the 
administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without 
being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on 
any aspect of Iraq."

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in 
making even the most significant national security decisions, that 
intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, 
that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and 
intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work 
was politicized," Pillar wrote.

Pillar's critique is one of the most severe indictments of White House 
actions by a former Bush official since Richard C. Clarke, a former 
National Security Council staff member, went public with his criticism 
of the administration's handling of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and its 
failure to deal with the terrorist threat beforehand.

It is also the first time that such a senior intelligence officer has so 
directly and publicly condemned the administration's handling of 
intelligence.

Pillar, retired after 28 years at the CIA, was an influential 
behind-the-scenes player and was considered the agency's leading 
counterterrorism analyst. By the end of his career, he was responsible 
for coordinating assessments on Iraq from all 15 agencies in the 
intelligence community. He is now a professor in security studies at 
Georgetown University.

White House officials did not respond to a request to comment for this 
article. They have vehemently denied accusations that the administration 
manipulated intelligence to generate public support for the war.

"Our statements about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein were based on 
the aggregation of intelligence from a number of sources and represented 
the collective view of the intelligence community," national security 
adviser Stephen J. Hadley said in a White House briefing in November. 
"Those judgments were shared by Republicans and Democrats alike."

Republicans and Democrats in Congress continue to argue over whether, or 
how, to investigate accusations the administration manipulated prewar 
intelligence.

Yesterday, the Senate Republican Policy Committee issued a statement to 
counter what it described as "the continuing Iraq pre-war intelligence 
myths," including charges that Bush " 'misused' intelligence to justify 
the war." Writing that it was perfectly reasonable for the president to 
rely on the intelligence he was given, the paper concluded, "it is 
actually the critics who are misleading the American people."

In his article, Pillar said he believes that the "politicization" of 
intelligence on Iraq occurred "subtly" and in many forms, but almost 
never resulted from a policymaker directly asking an analyst to reshape 
his or her results. "Such attempts are rare," he writes, "and when they 
do occur . . . are almost always unsuccessful."

Instead, he describes a process in which the White House helped frame 
intelligence results by repeatedly posing questions aimed at bolstering 
its arguments about Iraq.

The Bush administration, Pillar wrote, "repeatedly called on the 
intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to 
the case for war," including information on the "supposed connection" 
between Hussein and al Qaeda, which analysts had discounted. "Feeding 
the administration's voracious appetite for material on the Saddam-al 
Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of time and attention."

The result of the requests, and public statements by the president, Vice 
President Cheney and others, led analysts and managers to conclude the 
United States was heading for war well before the March 2003 invasion, 
Pillar asserted.

They thus knew, he wrote, that senior policymakers "would frown on or 
ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and 
welcome analysis that supported such a decision. . . . [They] felt a 
strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend 
with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious."

Pillar wrote that the prewar intelligence asserted Hussein's "weapons 
capacities," but he said the "broad view" within the United States and 
overseas "was that Saddam was being kept 'in his box' " by U.N. 
sanctions, and that the best way to deal with him was through "an 
aggressive inspections program to supplement sanctions already in place."

"If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a 
policy implication," Pillar wrote, "it was to avoid war -- or, if war 
was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath."

Pillar describes for the first time that the intelligence community did 
assessments before the invasion that, he wrote, indicated a postwar Iraq 
"would not provide fertile ground for democracy" and would need "a 
Marshall Plan-type effort" to restore its economy despite its oil 
revenue. It also foresaw Sunnis and Shiites fighting for power.

Pillar wrote that the intelligence community "anticipated that a foreign 
occupying force would itself be the target of resentment and attacks -- 
including guerrilla warfare -- unless it established security and put 
Iraq on the road to prosperity in the first few weeks or months after 
the fall of Saddam."

In an interview, Pillar said the prewar assessments "were not 
crystal-balling, but in them we were laying out the challenges that 
would face us depending on decisions that were made."

Pillar wrote that the first request he received from a Bush policymaker 
for an assessment of post-invasion Iraq was "not until a year into the war."

That assessment, completed in August 2004, warned that the insurgency in 
Iraq could evolve into a guerrilla war or civil war. It was leaked to 
the media in September in the midst of the presidential campaign, and 
Bush, who had told voters that the mission in Iraq was going well, 
described the assessment to reporters as "just guessing."

Shortly thereafter, Pillar was identified in a column by Robert D. Novak 
as having prepared the assessment and having given a speech critical of 
Bush's Iraq policy at a private dinner in California. The column fed the 
White House's view that the CIA was in effect working against the Bush 
administration, and that Pillar was part of that. A columnist in the 
Washington Times in October 2004 called him "a longstanding intellectual 
opponent of the policy options chosen by President Bush to fight terrorism."

Leaked information "encouraged some administration supporters to charge 
intelligence officers (including me) with trying to sabotage the 
president's policies," Pillar wrote. One effect of that, he said, was to 
limit challenges to consensus views on matters such as the Iraqi weapons 
program.

When asked why he did not quit given his concerns, Pillar said in the 
interview that he was doing "other worthwhile work in the nation's 
interest" and never thought of resigning over the issue.

Pillar suggests that the CIA and other intelligence agencies, now under 
Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte, remain within the 
executive branch but "be given greater independence."

The model he cites is the Federal Reserve, overseen by governors who 
serve fixed terms. That, he said, would reduce "both the politicization 
of the intelligence community's own work and the public misuse of 
intelligence by policymakers."


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR2006020902418.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060210/2ba0803e/attachment.htm