Pentagon Report Condemns Misleading Iraq Intelligence

Taken from The Guardian, UK, February 9, 2007
By Mark Tran

The row over the use - or misuse of intelligence - in the run-up to the Iraq war reignited today when a watchdog concluded that top Pentagon officials wrongly insisted on a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

The Pentagon's acting inspector general, Thomas Gimble, told the senate armed services committee that the office headed by Douglas Feith, formerly the number three man at the defence department, took "inappropriate" actions in pushing the al-Qaida connection not backed up by America's intelligence agencies.



But Mr Gimble said the actions of the office of the undersecretary of defence for policy "were not illegal or unauthorised".

"I can't think of a more devastating commentary," the Democratic senate armed services committee chairman, Carl Levin, said.

Mr Feith ran the Pentagon's secretive office of special plans when the Bush administration was making the case for invading Iraq. Created by the then-secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, the office reviewed intelligence on Iraq as the Bush administration lacked full confidence in information coming from the CIA.

Mr Feith, who resigned in 2005, was a major cheerleader for invading Iraq, to the irritation of some of the Pentagon's generals. General Tommy Franks, the military commander of the 2003 war in Iraq, once referred to Mr Feith as "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth".

A summary of the inspector-general's report cited the defence policy office's allegations of links between Iraq and al-Qaida, in particular an alleged 2001 meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta, the leader of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre, and an Iraqi intelligence officer. The claim turned out to be unfounded.

"That was the argument that was used to make the sale to the American people about the need to go to war," Carl Levin, the chairman of the senate armed services committee, who has accused the administration of manipulating intelligence material before the war, told the Associated Press.

The Pentagon report was requested in 2005 by a Republican senator, Pat Roberts, Mr Levin's predecessor on the senate intelligence committee. The committee and a number of official inquiries had criticised the administration's prewar intelligence, but Democratic senators, led by Mr Levin, demanded further investigation of Mr Feith's operation.

Mr Feith told the Associated Press that he was pleased to hear that the report had concluded that his office's activities were neither illegal nor unauthorised. He took strong issue, however, with the finding that some activities had been "inappropriate".

He described as "bizarre" the inspector general's conclusion that some intelligence activities by the office of special plans were inappropriate but not unauthorised.