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Ex-CIA official rips war case
Says Iraq data distorted to sway public
By Cam Simpson
Washington Bureau
02/12/06 "Chicago
Tribune" -- -- WASHINGTON -- The former CIA
official charged with managing the U.S. government's secret
intelligence assessments on Iraq says the Bush administration
chose war first and then misleadingly used raw data to assemble
a public case for its decision to invade.
Paul Pillar, who was the CIA's national intelligence officer for
the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, said the Bush
administration also played on the nation's fears in the wake of
the 2001 terrorist attacks, falsely linking Al Qaeda to Saddam
Hussein's regime even though intelligence agencies had not
produced a single analysis supporting "the notion of an
alliance" between the two.
Instead, Pillar writes in the upcoming issue of the journal
Foreign Affairs, connections were drawn between the terrorists
and Iraq because "the administration wanted to hitch the Iraq
expedition to the `war on terror' and the threat the American
public feared most, thereby capitalizing on the country's
militant post-9/11 mood."
The specific critiques in Pillar's 4,500-word essay, titled,
"Intelligence, Policy and the War in Iraq," are not new. But it
apparently is the first time such attacks are being publicly
leveled by such a high-ranking intelligence official directly
involved behind the scenes--before, during and after the
invasion of Iraq nearly three years ago.
Because of his position, Pillar would have had access to, and
likely intimate knowledge about, virtually every piece of
Iraq-related intelligence maintained across all agencies within
the U.S. government.
Pillar also wrote in his essay that the administration went to
war without first considering any strategic-level intelligence
assessments "on any aspect of Iraq" and that the intelligence
community foreshadowed many post-Hussein woes, though the
findings were largely ignored before the March 2003 invasion.
Excerpts from Pillar's article were first reported by The
Washington Post on Friday. Foreign Affairs released a copy of
the essay later in the day.
Pillar, a career intelligence official, retired from the CIA
last year and is now a visiting professor at Georgetown
University in Washington.
The administration responds
The White House did not respond specifically to Pillar's charges
Friday, but Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National
Security Council, did point to previous administration
statements defending its use of intelligence.
The administration first went on the offensive last fall in an
effort to thwart what President Bush, in a Veteran's Day speech,
called a "deeply irresponsible" effort "to rewrite the history
of how that war began."
Jones said Friday that the administration's prewar 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."
But in his essay, the man responsible for coordinating the
intelligence community's collective view of Iraq directly
challenged the notion that the prevailing wisdom within the
nation's spy services supported the decision to invade. In fact,
Pillar wrote, "If the entire body of official intelligence
analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war
."
He also wrote that the Bush administration "used intelligence
not to inform decision-making but to justify a decision already
made"--to topple Hussein's regime.
In making its case, the administration aggressively promoted
pieces of "intelligence to win public support for its decision
to go to war," Pillar said.
He also said: "This meant selectively adducing
data--`cherry-picking'--rather than using the intelligence
community's own analytic judgments."
Pillar's allegations about the public use of selective
intelligence on Iraq comes in the wake of news that Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of
staff, told a grand jury that he was authorized by his bosses to
leak classified information about Iraq in summer 2003 to defend
the administration's case for war. The statement about Libby's
secret testimony was contained in court papers filed in
connection with his obstruction-of-justice case.
Misleading statements
Although he acknowledged the intelligence community was wrong
about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities, Pillar
said that intelligence "was not what led to the war." And he
saved some of his sharpest criticisms for the administration's
repeated public statements in 2002 and 2003 about "links"
between Iraq and Al Qaeda--statements that have been repeated
despite findings from the independent commission that
investigated the Sept. 11 attacks that there was no
collaborative relationship between the two.
"The issue of possible ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda was
especially prone to the selective use of raw intelligence to
make a public case for war," Pillar wrote. "In the shadowy world
of international terrorism, almost anyone can be `linked' to
almost anyone else if enough effort is made . . . . [But] the
intelligence community never offered any analysis that supported
the notion of an alliance between Saddam and Al Qaeda."
He said the administration constantly pressed for more data to
support the purported link, just one way it politically
influenced the outcome.
"Feeding the administration's voracious appetite for material on
the Saddam-Al Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of time and
attention at multiple levels, from rank-and-file
counterterrorism analysts to the most senior intelligence
officials," he wrote. "It is fair to ask how much other
counterterrorism work was left undone as a result."
Although he acknowledged analysts were not strong-armed by
anyone in the administration to bolster the case for war, Pillar
said intelligence officials were more subtly influenced.
Analysts, who often measure success by the attention they
receive from policymakers, "felt a strong wind consistently
blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is
natural and strong, even if unconscious," he said.
He also said he never received a request from any administration
policymaker for any assessments of Iraq "until a year into the
war."
Nicholas Cullather, the former official historian for the CIA
who now teaches at Indiana University, said the article
represents a defense of the longstanding tradition within the
CIA of maintaining a strict separation between intelligence
analysis and policymaking.
But Cullather said that tradition has long been aggressively
opposed by officials who now hold senior positions in the Bush
administration.
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csimpson@tribune.com
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