DoD Inspector General

The Defense Department Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble briefed members of the Senate Armed Services Committee February 9. Gimble later briefed staff from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Armed Services Committee, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

His (pdf) "Report on the Review of Pre-Iraqi War Activities by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy" is posted on the OIG website. So is the "Executive Summary."

Here are some key findings from the report:

The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy [OUSD(P)] developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence Iraq and al-Qaida relationship, which included assessments on the some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision makers.

Gimble is referencing Doug Feith in this sentence.

In response to questions from Senator Levin (MI), the report notes that Feith produced an alternative intelligence briefing with conclusions that differed from those of the intelligence community -- and were "not fully supported by underlying intelligence."

The Executive Summary added this:

we believe the actions were inappropriate because a policy office was producing intelligence products and was not clearly conveying to senior decision-makers the variance with the consensus of the Intelligence Community.

Question: why did it take so long to reveal these simple conclusions?

Alternative read: isn't it great that the Democratic Congress was able to demand this information in short order?

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Phase II

Earlier this week, Democrats used Senate rules to force the completion of the second phase of the Intelligence Committee's investigation into Iraq-related intelligence.

Phase II is supposed to investigate the Bush administration's uses of the Iraq information.

What might the Senate find?

Here are some things I'd like them to unearth:

1. Office of Special Plans was thoroughly politicized.

Ranking Democrat Jay Rockefeller already wondered aloud if the Pentagon's Doug Feith was "running a private intelligence failure, which is not lawful." Various journalists have charged that OSP received information directly from the Iraqi National Congress -- and then "stovepiped" that data to the White House and Office of the Vice President. INC already says that the bogus intelligence didn't matter since the group succeeded in achieving its political goals. Is the same true of the Feith-based crowd?

2. The key intelligence report followed the political uses of the intelligence, not vice versa.

The White House was making bold statements about alleged Iraq threats before any new National Intelligence Estimate was produced. Veep Dick Cheney talked tough to the VFW in August and President Bush lectured the UN in mid-September. Condi Rice worried about smoking gun mushroom clouds on national TV in September.

The NIE came out in October.

3. Analysts were forced to work with politicians looking over their shoulders.

The administration denies that it pressured CIA analysts, but Cheney and Scooter Libby apparently visited Langley on multiple occasions to challenge the intelligence analysts working on Iraq.

4. The attempt to discredit Joe Wilson meant that intelligence was politicized.

Someone leaked Valerie Plame's identity to Robert Novak in order to discredit Wilson -- and perhaps to silence future critics. We still don't know who talked to Novak. Patrick Fitzgerald might not be willing to say anything more than "Official A," but the Senate can learn the truth and expose the leaker.

5. The administration ignored the caveats in the intelligence data and completely overlooked the 2003 IAEA and UN findings.

Go back sometime and look at the certainty in the administration's words. Officials kept using these clauses when talking about Iraqi WMD: "there is no doubt," "we know for a fact," "intelligence...leaves no doubt," "there is no question," etc. And they compounded this error by not only ignoring the IAEA, but also by denigrating the institution that got it right.

Doug Feith is Quitting

Feith has been serving as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. And he's a prominent neocon.

Effective this summer, he's out! This is the DoD press release.

First Bolton, now Feith.

Wolfowitz?

Investigations update

I need to update the "neo-convicts" post already.

First, all four investigations I mentioned yesterday may be the same.

The Franklin case is apparently linked to the Plame leak and linked to the Feith op and linked to the Chalabi case.

Former CIA agent and current MSNBC talking head Larry Johnson said the other day that the Franklin affairs "was linked to the investigation on the forged uranium documents." I've found a MSNBC transcript from August 27 on LexisNexis:

I've heard about this investigation for, you know, several months now. And you know it is -- it actually is tied into the forged memo regarding the sale of uranium to Iraq from Niger.

(CROSSTALK)

JOHNSON: What I've been told is that there's a strong belief that the forgery was carried out by Israel in an effort to help build up the evidence to allow the United States to justify going to war. So, this whole thing that started with the outing of Valerie Plame, the CIA officer, started growing and expanding when they saw that there's this forged memo and then people linked to the office of -- in the office of Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Fife [sic] at the Department of Defense were seen as having some very close contacts and sharing information with the Israeli intelligence sources.

The Marshall, Rozen, and Glastris story doesn't mentioned Israeli agents present at the Franklin/Rhode meetings with Ledeen, Ghorbanifar and SISMI in Rome.

Hmmmm.

Warren Strobel of Knight-Ridder more directly makes a connection that I suggested yesterday. The Franklin-Israel investigation does tie directly to the Chalabi-Iran leaks:

An FBI probe into the handling of highly classified material by Pentagon civilians is broader than previously reported, and goes well beyond allegations that a single mid-level analyst gave a top-secret Iran policy document to Israel, three sources familiar with the investigation said Saturday.

The probe, which has been going on for more than two years, also has focused on other civilians in the Secretary of Defense's office, said the sources, who spoke on condition they not be identified, but who have first-hand knowledge of the subject.

In addition, one said, FBI investigators in recent weeks have conducted interviews to determine whether Pentagon officials gave highly classified U.S. intelligence to a leading Iraqi exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, which may in turn have passed it on to Iran....both center on the office of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's No. 3 official.

Richard Sale of UPI links several investigations together indirectly. For example, he ties the "non lawful" intelligence op Feith was allegedly running to the neocons in Vice President Cheney's office -- the primary area of interest to the Plame investigators, apparently:

[William] Luti, a former Navy captain, switched to the Pentagon from Vice President Richard Cheney's staff, according to a congressional investigative memo.

According to other congressional memos, Luti was made deputy undersecretary and reported directly to Feith.

Luti also presided over the NESA office that worked closely with OSP "with sometimes an interchangeable staff," according to one congressional memo described the OSP "as a loose group of acolytes and hired hands" for Cheney, and (Cheney's chief of staff) I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Feith -- all "performing a mixture of intelligence, planning and other unspecified operational duties in support of preordained policy."

In regard to the Chalabi leak, Sale specifically discusses Harold Rhode a great deal, saying that he has had his security clearances lifted in the past (as did Ledeen in the '80s) and may even now be on administrative leave:

According to one former senior U.S. intelligence official who maintained excellent contacts with serving U.S. intelligence officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, "Rhode practically lived out of (Ahmad) Chalabi's office."

This same source quoted the intelligence official with the CPA as saying, "Rhode was observed by CIA operatives as being constantly on his cell phone to Israel," and that the information that the intelligence officials overheard him passing to Israel was "mind-boggling," this source said.

It dealt with U.S. plans, military deployments, political projects, discussion of Iraq assets, and a host of other sensitive topics, the former senior U.S. intelligence official said.

Sale also reports that Michael Ledeen worked on a contract basis for OSP under Feith!

Cheney's office, where Libby and Hannah worked, dispatched Luti to Feith, who already served as boss to Franklin, Ledeen, and Rhode. Did these guys prompt someone (Israel? Italy?) to cook up the Niger uranium story, burn Plame when that forgery was found out, and leak all kinds of state secrets to their pals in Israel and the INC? And then, Chalabi screwed them all over by leaking to Iran?

That's the picture that may be coming into focus.

It is such a tangled web. Thanks go out to uggabugga for the visual aid.



Notes: Wolfowitz's name is starting to pop up in the stories, but so far I've seen no allegations tied to him.

Also, one potential problem with Sale's story is that he quotes Karen Kwiatkowski and may have used her as a source for many of his claims. Some bloggers wonder if she's 100% reliable on all this, since she allegedly tried to peddle her story to one of Lyndon LaRouche's rags. The Weekly Standard throws a lot of mud too.

Neo-convicts?

If 2002 was the year of the neocon in Washington, 2004 (well, maybe 2005) may yet prove to be the year of the neo-convict.

The neocons and their associates are apparently the subject of three investigations by various parts of the Justice Department and have the attention of several key Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee as well. All these inquiries seem to overlap, as all involve key national security figures and topics.

Here are the investigations. I'll try to highlight a few points of overlap.

1. Most recently, a former Defense Intelligence Agency expert on Iran is apparently under investigation by the FBI for allegedly leaking to Israel information about US policy toward Iran. The Washington Post reported on August 29, 2004:

FBI officials have been quietly investigating for months whether [Lawrence] Franklin gave classified information -- which officials said included a draft of a presidential directive on U.S. policies toward Iran -- to two Israeli lobbyists here who are alleged to have passed it on to the Israeli government.

Franklin works in the Bush Pentagon in the office of William Luti, deputy undersecretary of defense for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. Luti's office is under the purview of Douglas Feith, the #3 man in Secretary's Rumsfeld's civilian chain-of-command.

Franklin last appeared in this blog as part of a travel story, as he and some prominent neocons had an interesting adventure in Rome during December 2001 and June 2002.

More on that below.

2. Earlier this summer (the first week of June), various media sources reported that Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi leaked to Iran highly classified US intelligence information. The fear is that Chalabi told Iran that the US had broken its codes -- and could therefore easily monitor Tehran's secret communications. From Newsweek:

"This is an enormous loss to the U.S. intelligence community," one former U.S. intelligence official said today about the reported leak of the secret code system. "Obviously, the Iranians are not going to use that code anymore. We're going from having a complete window into what their intelligence service was doing to having no window at all."

That's very bad, whether you think Iran is evil, or not.

Where did Chalabi receive top US secrets? That is the $100,000 question:

[There are a] spate of media reports alleging that Chalabi or one of his associates told the Iranians that U.S. intelligence had cracked a secret code system used by the Iranian intelligence service. U.S. political activists close to Chalabi have told reporters in recent days that Chalabi learned about the codebreaking in Baghdad from a drunken U.S. official....

But, given that Chalabi is not a U.S. citizen and does not have a U.S. security clearance, the more critical issue for investigators will be to find out who in the U.S. government might have leaked such highly sensitive information to Chalabi and the INC, some officials say. Law-enforcement sources indicated that the American investigation will likely focus on whether sensitive information might have been leaked to Chalabi by officials in either the Pentagon or the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

Some sources say the investigation is centering upon US authorities based in Baghdad.

The New York Times more specifically said that investigators were taking aim at Chalabi's neocon supporters, but didn't name any names:

The inquiry, still in an early phase, is focused on a very small number of people who were close to Mr. Chalabi and also had access to the highly restricted information about the Iran code.

Some of the people the F.B.I. expects to interview are civilians at the Pentagon who were among Mr. Chalabi's strongest supporters and served as his main point of contact with the government, the officials said.

After a little digging on the internet, I discovered two guys who are often named as suspects by bloggers.

First, consider Harold Rhode, who met with Michael Ledeen, Manucher Ghorbanifar, Larry Franklin, and the head of Italian Intelligence (SISMI) in Rome in December 2001, possibly to talk about Iraq's alleged uranium trade:

Rhode got another big break when Pentagon hawks sent him to Baghdad this spring as their chief liaison (read: handler) to Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmed Chalabi, the hawks' favorite exile.

But problems cropped up then, too, when, during his stay at the occupation headquarters in Baghdad, Rhode quickly alienated most of the American military and civilian pros in the country...Later he holed himself up with Chalabi at the latter's hunt-club headquarters...

So after working with Feith in the DoD, Rhode was Chalabi's handler in Iraq and lived in his compound. Interesting, eh?

Anyone else a viable possibility? Well, I always shop for neocons at Benador Associates. From the agency's webpage:

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, having recently served 18 months in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as an Iraq and Iran advisor, during which time he was also seconded to the Coalition Provisional Authority [CPA] governance team. The only CPA official to live outside the American security bubble, Rubin was free to travel Iraq and without restriction to a single region, and so was able to maintain extensive contacts with ordinary Iraqis, be they Arab Sunnis or Shi'a, or Kurds.

Both Rubin and Rhode are neocons who were living in Iraq, had ready access to Chalabi, and served in the Pentagon during the buildup to the war.

Motive, means and opportunity?

3. As I've occasionally discussed, someone leaked Valerie Plame's name in an attempt to discredit Joseph Wilson in June 2003. At the time, Wilson was publicly challenging the administration's claim that it had not known that the uranium from Africa story was based on fabricated documents at the time of the President's 2003 State of the Union Address.

While some fingers were first pointed at Karl Rove, the Justice Department investigation has apparently centered upon the neocons in the Vice President's office: Lewis "Scooter" Libby's name has appeared prominently, as has John Hannah's , in numerous news stories.

Libby is a neocon who signed the Project for a New American Century's "Statement of Principles," dated June 3, 1997. Other notable Bush administration signatories include Elliott Abrams, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

I'm not sure why Feith was not part of PNAC, but he did work for Richard Perle in DoD earlier in his career.

4. In an attachment to the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Iraq, US Senators Jay Rockefeller (WV), Richard Durbin (IL) and Carl Levin (MI) criticize Doug Feith's office for running a private intelligence failure that was "non lawful" during the runup to the war in Iraq. Here's what they say:

The Intelligence Community’s findings did not support the link between Iraq and the 9/11 plot Administration policy officials wanted to help galvanize public support for military action in Iraq. As a result, officials under the direction of Under Secretary Feith took it upon themselves to push for a change in the intelligence analysis so that it bolstered Administration policy statements and goals.

After Feith and crew failed to convince the intelligence agencies to change their assessment, they took their case directly to the White House in a September 16, 2002, briefing. CIA Director George Tenet learned of this briefing in March 2004.

Following the publication of the Intelligence Community’s terrorism and weapons of mass destruction analytical estimates and the subsequent congressional vote authorizing the use of force in Iraq, Administration public statements leading up to the war became increasingly hyperbolic and urgent.

The qualifications the Intelligence Community placed on what it assessed about Iraq’s links to terrorism and alleged weapons of mass destruction programs were spurned by top Bush Administration officials, early casualties in the war with Iraq....

By the time American troops had been deployed overseas and were poised to attack Iraq, the Administration had skillfully manipulated and cowed the Intelligence Community into approving public statements that conveyed a level of conviction and certainty that was not supported by an objective reading of the underlying intelligence reporting.

Again, Rockefeller called Feith's intelligence op "non-lawful," but it's hard to say whether he was referring to the Office of Special Plans, the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group or the Rome adventure.

Maybe it's a trifecta?

In any case, all these investigations (save the Plame) are focusing on the same small group of neocons who are suddenly facing some serious problems.

As Jim Lobe wrote back in June, "the neocon retreat has turned into a rout."

Feith's "not lawful" shop

OK, so the talented blogger Digby links to me and my top post for most of the weekend is on my fantasy baseball team. Ugh.

My regular readers might put up with such ramblings, but the new crowd was bound to be disappointed.

How's this...

Earlier today, the Senators who directed the Intelligence investigation said some interesting things about the Pentagon's intelligence operations -- both the regular DIA and Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans.

You know, the operation Senator Rockefeller already said was "not lawful."

Kansas Republican and Committee Chair Pat Roberts was not at all happy with the way DIA disclosed sources and methods -- to the CIA!

Roberts cited false information on Iraq that the Bush administration had taken from a source code-named Curveball.

"Curveball really provided 98 percent of the assessment as to whether or not the Iraqis had a biological weapon," Roberts said.

"Yet the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, knew of his background. He has a very troubled background."

Based on this source's claims, the administration argued that Iraq had biological weapons capability, Roberts said.

"That's the kind of flaw in intelligence and I think -- I won't say willful -- but the DIA should have shared that information with the CIA. And the CIA should have gone from there."

In fact, Roberts said, much information about Curveball was redacted, or blacked out, from the version of the report that was made public.

"I can't really tell you some of the more specific details that would make your eyebrows even raise higher," Roberts said.

I think we can imagine, eh?

Senator Rockefeller emphasize the problematic OSP under Feith:

"There's always the question whether or not he [Feith] was running a secret intelligence operation that bypassed the entire intelligence community. And the law says you've got to inform the intelligence community of anything that you're doing," Rockefeller said.

The press reports suggest that other Senators are interested in digging around the Pentagon. I'm sure there's plenty to learn.

Let the fun begin.