By
Kenneth R.
Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com |
September 14, 2006
If you thought efforts were
over to rewrite history on the lead-up to the war in Iraq and to
smear the head of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, then
think again.
A remarkable pair of reports released last week by the Senate Select
committee on Intelligence re-examine for the umpteenth time the
pre-war intelligence on Iraqi WMD programs and Saddam’s alleged
ties to al-Qaeda. The reports were produced at the demand of
committee Democrats as part of a vast fishing expedition aimed at
buttressing their old saw, Bush lied-People died.
What’s remarkable about these reports are not the facts
they contain, although they are jammed packed with new information,
culled from the more than 40,000 finished intelligence reports
produced by CIA on Iraq in the six years leading up to the war.
The absolutely stunning news, totally unreported by the formerly
mainstream media, is the scurrilous effort by committee Democrats to
falsify the facts, introduce phony and erroneous conclusions, and
then parade about on their political high-horse to journalists who
never bothered to read the actual reports.
In an unprecedented move for a committee that until 2004 was known
for bipartisan efforts to conduct oversight of the intelligence
community, the committee chairman –Sen. Pat Roberts (R, Ks) –
actually dissented from the report’s published
conclusions on intelligence provided by Chalabi’s Iraqi
National Congress, as did most of the majority members.
The full report, accessible
as a PDF file here,
makes fascinating reading. To understand what actually happened,
readers need to turn directly to page 123 of the printed report,
which details how the committee arrived at the final version.
Here you read how Vice Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, D-WV,
outvoted Roberts thanks to the defection of Senators Olympia Snowe,
RINO-ME, and Chuck
Hagel, R-France, and
succeeded in superimposing totally bogus conclusions on an otherwise
factual report.
“Paraphrasing the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan,” Roberts
wrote in his dissent, “everyone is entitled to their own
opinion, but not their own set of facts& I will continue to draw
the line when it comes to amending conclusions in a way that
mischaracterizes or ignores the underlying facts.”
Roberts then dissected one by one the “myths” about
alleged INC efforts to influence the judgment of the U.S.
intelligence community on Iraqi WMD programs and Saddam’s ties
to terror that the Democrats (plus Snowe and Hagel) adopted in the
report’s conclusions.
Primary among them was the myth that the INC was “engaged in a
disinformation campaign to supply erroneous information to the
Intelligence community” that
influenced the now infamous October 2002 National Intelligence
Estimate¬Ýon Iraqi WMD
programs.
“The facts detailed in the findings portion of this report&
do not support this theory,” Roberts stated blandly. On the
contrary, “INC information did not significantly affect
intelligence judgments” on Iraqi WMD programs. Nor did the INC
supply information “used to support the Intelligence community’s
key judgments about Iraq’s links to terrorism.”
For example, “of the 45 human intelligence (HUMINT) sources
cited in the WMD NIE, only two were affiliated with the INC –
and that does not account for the vast amount of information in the
WMD NIE derived from signals intelligence, imagery, and HUMINT
sources not specifically cited,” Roberts wrote.
In addition, he stated, “the INC did not supply information
used to support the Intelligence Community’s key judgments
about Iraq’s links to terrorism.”
Despite this, Rockefeller and his colleagues asserted that “false
information from the Iraqi National Congress-affiliated sources was
used to support key Intelligence Community assessments on Iraq and
was widely distributed in intelligence products prior to the war,”
and cited “over 250 intelligence information reports”
from just a single INC-affiliated defector.
And of course: the chief villains in this enterprise to peddle “false”
intelligence from the INC were the Office of the Vice President, and
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Doug Feith, Rockefeller and his
colleagues claimed.
Even the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research
(INR), often cited by the New York Times and SSIC Democrats for its
wisdom in resisting INC information, couldn’t quite stomach
this blatant twisting of the truth.
Referring specifically to the two INC-affiliated defectors whose
information was included in the 2002 NIE, the INR told the committee
that the defectors “did not influence any INR
assessments relating to prohibited weapons programs.” Regarding
to terrorism, INR said it “did not make much use of INC
reporting& in the years before Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
[emphasis in the original]
The CIA also conducted a review at the request of Intelligence
Committee staff of how it used INC-related defector information and
found that aside from two sources, “most of the other reports
were of marginal value to the CIA finished intelligence production
and had almost no impact on CIA analytic assessments.”
Furthermore, the CIA found “no evidence” that the INC had
fabricated information of consciously provided false information
aimed at “convincing the United States that Iraq possessed
weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists,” as
the Democrats asserted [p159]
“If you’re trying to say that the INC is the one that
pushed us to go to war because of the WMD reporting, that’s
wrong,” one CIA officer told the committee. (p144).
“The facts are clear,” Roberts concluded. “The
prewar assessments of Iraq’s WMD programs were a tragic
intelligence failure. However, the real causes of that failure&
had nothing to do with Ahmed Chalabi and the INC.”
You would think such unambiguous findings would lay to rest the old
conspiracy-laden allegations that Chalabi’s INC concocted a
bunch of stories to sucker the U.S. into war.
But the Democrats have shown that they will not hesitate to use the
Senate intelligence committee for partisan goals, with reckless
disregard not just of the facts, but of their own obligations to
conduct oversight of the intelligence community.
This ultimately is the most disturbing aspect of this latest chapter
in the Bush lied-People died attacks. As Pat Roberts warned, “Rather
than perpetuating an ongoing effort to rewrite history, the committee
should be focusing all its resources on a host of troubling issues:
monitoring Intelligence Community reforms, balancing acquisition
requirements with budgetary constraints, corrected the flawed
tradecraft which led to the Iraq intelligence failure, and assessing
collection and analysis of intelligence on Iran, North Korea, and
al-Qa’ida.”
Those are serious issues, that could become life and death issues –
especially if Congress continues to ignore them.
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