Dupes

Remember the Rendon Group? They have long been a CIA and Defense Department contractor, helping to sell wars that America favors for one reason or another.

Rendon essentially created the Iraqi National Congress and then worked with INC-produced "defectors" to help create the myth that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Under the Iraq Liberation Act, Congress created a nice pot of money to make all this possible.

Journalist Jack Fairweather reveals more detail about the INC's and Rendon's shady operations in the March/April 2006 Mother Jones. Fairweather interviewed a former INC official he pseudonymously calls "Haider," who more than debunks the story of General Jamal al-Ghurairy.

Ghurairy had granted an anonymous interview to PBS's "Frontline" on November 6, 2001, describing the infamous "Salman Pak" training facility, where Iraqis and various foreign nationals allegedly practiced airline hijackings. A New York Times reporter, Chris Hedges, was also present and he too bought the general's story:

"These Islamic radicals were a scruffy lot. They needed a lot of training, especially physical training. But from speaking with them it was clear they came from a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco. We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States. The gulf war never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States. We were repeatedly told this."

The tale was also in the White House's "A Decade of Deception and Denial," September 12, 2002, which was used to launch the pro-war PR campaign.

Though the Salman Pak tale has previously been debunked, Fairweather details the extent of the ruse:

Unfortunately, the story was an elaborate scam. The purported general had indeed met with American intelligence agents in Turkey, but unbeknownst to Hedges the agents had dismissed his claims out of hand. What the reporters also didn’t know, and what has never before been reported, is that it now appears that the man himself was a fake. According to an ex-INC official, the Ghurairy who met with the Times and PBS was actually a former Iraqi sergeant, then living in Turkey and known by the code name Abu Zainab. The real Lt. General Ghurairy, it seems, had never left Iraq.

Fairweather interviewed the real general recently and identifies the imposter who portrayed him for the INC. Haider admits that "defectors" were often coached as to what "bullshit" (his word) to say.

Let's keep this kind of stuff in mind as the Iran debate proceeds.


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Filed as: Iraq lies

More on the lies that lead to war

Journalist James Bamford has a tremendously explosive story about the Rendon Group in Rolling Stone magazine (posted November 17, 2005). The story mentions some of the Rendon group's activites over much of the past twenty years, "selling" virtually every war and military intervention the US has fought since Panama.

Most of the article is about Iraq's non-existent WMD.

For some years, the Rendon Group has been a Defense Department contractor, after years of working with CIA. The contracts have apparently been worth between $50-100 million between 2000 and 2004. The story credits Rendon with essentially creating the Iraqi National Congress and explicitly linking dubious Iraqi defectors to journalist Judith Miller of the New York Times. Consider the story of Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, who claimed to be an Iraqi

civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

The CIA determined that this story was a complete fabrication in December, 2001.

But the Rendon Group worked with the INC, the White House's Office of Global Communications, and the White House Iraq Group in order to coordinate the Iraq message in the buildup to war. Rendon and the INC took al-Haideri to Bangkok to meet with a couple of journalists:

[The INC's] Zaab Sethna, who organized the al-Haideri media exclusive in Thailand for [Australian freelance television reporter Paul] Moran [a covert Rendon operative] and Judith Miller...

...the falsified story about weapons of mass destruction that he [Moran] and Sethna had broadcast around the world lived on....In a report ironically titled "Iraq: Denial and Deception," the administration referred to al-Haideri by name and detailed his allegations -- even though the CIA had already determined them to be lies. The report was placed on the White House Web site on September 12th, 2002, and remains there today. One version of the report even credits Miller's article for the information.

Apparently, Rendon also worked with Donald Rumsfeld's short-lived Office of Strategic Influence and its less prominent successor, Information Operations Task Force.

The entire story reminds me of the false reports from the first Persian Gulf war claiming that Iraqi soldiers had removed babies from incubators in Kuwait -- and left them to die. In that case, the PR firm Hill and Knowlton coached the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States to tell this lie to Congress.

President George Herbert Walker Bush, former director of the CIA, personally referenced this story when making the case for the earlier war. More than once. OK, many, many times.

Obviously, this is a followup to The Lies that Lead to War.

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."

Duped by the Propaganda Machine

The July/August Columbia Journalist Review has a terrific piece by Douglas McCollam on the vast campaign by the Iraqi National Congress to dupe both the world's major media outlets and western governments in hopes of fomenting US war against Iraq.

The INC's "nformation-collection program" was also feeding this bogus data to DIA and to the OSP at the same time -- as well as directly to the Vice President's office.

In retrospect, it must now be seen as one of the most successful (and heinous) fifth column attacks in world history.

McCollam begins his story by referencing a memo sent by Entifadh Qanbar, the spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress’s Washington office, to the US Congress. The memo notes 108 stories successfully "planted" by the INC in major media outlets between October 2001 and May 2002 (incidentally, this was Laurie Mylroie's heydey too). The INC provided "defectors" who supplied false information about Iraqi WMD and links to terrorism.

The consequences were devastating:

The balance of the stories, however, advanced almost every claim that would eventually become the backbone of the Bush administration’s case for war, including Saddam Hussein’s contacts with al Qaeda, his attempts to develop nuclear weapons, and his extensive chemical and bioweapons facilities — all of which are now in grave doubt. Similar stories appeared earlier and later, but this nine-month period following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was crucial in creating the perception that the Iraqi dictator was a grave threat to the U.S. “The INC’s agenda was to get us into a war,” says Helen Kennedy, a reporter for the New York Daily News, whose name appears on the list. “The really damaging stories all came from those guys, not the CIA. They did a really sophisticated job of getting it out there.”

Remember, the CIA was preparing its fall 2002 NIE in this climate -- and Bush administration officials were making public speeches at the same time.

I keep meaning to point out, in fact, that Bush gave his most significant speech on Iraq to the UN on September 12, 2002, weeks before the CIA's NIE was even released.

Does that sound like a form of political pressure?

Since INC was getting cash from Congress, and may have used this cash to produce the bogus intelligence, I wonder if they broke any laws that might make them criminally liable?

Photo memories -- with new captions

The water is rising and the mice are jumping off the ship.

Yesterday, the President denied having "had any extensive conversations" with INC leader Ahmed Chalabi, now being investigated as an Iranian spy.

Atrios easily punctured this lie. Bush previously said he met privately with Chalabi in the Oval office and in Iraq on his Thanksgiving visit. And, of course, Chalabi was Laura Bush's guest at the State of the Union address.

Perhaps more importantly, for a variety of reasons (some legal), Dick Cheney acknowledged in December 2001 that he had met frequently with Chalabi:

"THE VICE PRESIDENT: The policy towards Iraq clearly is going to evolve over time. But they remain very much an area of concern for us because of the threat that Saddam Hussein has represented in the past and does in the future.

In the course of addressing that threat, we'll want to work with our friends and allies in the region. We'll want to work, I think, with the Iraqi opposition, with the Iraqi National Congress. I personally met with Mr. Chalabi myself in years past, and I would expect that they will be a part of a continuing effort as we think about how best to deal with that threat."

Atrios posted a photo of Bush posing with Chalabi, and others have posted the photo of Chalabi sitting near Laura Bush -- so I decided to fill out this little photo book.

Remember, images matter.



I found these with minimal effort:



That's Ahmed Chalabi with Senator Trent Lott (R-MS).

Chalabi and Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC)

Chalabi with Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA).


That's Chalabi with "dictator of Iraq" Paul Bremer looking at the coffin of the UN's Vieira de Mello (who died in the bombing of the UN headquarters last year).

In case you missed it, current UN envoy to Iraq Lakhdar Brahimi just called Bremer the "dictator of Iraq," so this entire mess is becoming more colorful. As are the photo captions.

Oh, and war enthusiast Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins wrote this in the New York Times in response to Bush's recent War College address:

"Let’s face it: Iraq is not going to be America’s showcase in the Arab-Muslim world The president's insistence that he had sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, "not to make them American" is now — painfully — beside the point. The unspoken message of the speech was that no great American project is being hatched in Iraq. If some of the war's planners had thought that Iraq would be an ideal base for American primacy in the Persian Gulf, a beacon from which to spread democracy and reason throughout the Arab world, that notion has clearly been set aside.

...We shall not chase the Syrian dictator to a spider hole, nor will we sack the Iranian theocracy."

Anyone know of other images I could add to the gallery?


Update: I found a website that has photos of Chalabi with Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, and James Woolsey.

Oh, those Straussians

Journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote yesterday that the apparent recent divide between the United States and Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress is a ruse. Let's use this post as a chance to celebrate the con in neocon, eh?

To review, the US started the week by cutting off funding to Chalabi's group (to the tune of $340,000 per month). That's some stipend, eh?

Today, US forces have raided Chalabi's house in Baghdad (though one report said it was his office) and carted off boxes full of files. Here's what he said in response:

Hours after the raid, Chalabi repudiated the American occupation authority and declared himself a leader of the new Iraq.

"My relationship with the Coalition Provisional Authority doesn't exist."

That sounds like a complete fissure in the relationship.

That would be huge, because just three months ago Chalabi was so connected to the Pentagon that he was willing for the INC to take the fall for the faked intelligence. Then again, strong evidence suggests that the INC was responsible for much of the bad WMD intelligence.

But, Dreyfuss says it is a trick -- and quotes a neocon, Michael Rubin, formerly in the Pentagon, now at AEI, who says so:

"By telegraphing that he is not the favorite son of America, the administration will bolster him, showing he is his own man."

Here's Dreyfuss's final paragraph:

In other words, it’s all a big con game. The still-neocon-dominated Pentagon—which this week stopped funding Chalabi’s INC —is playing its last card, hoping that it can boost Chalabi’s sagging fortunes by pretending to sever ties with him. That, the neocons hope, will allow Chalabi to strengthen his ties to Sistani, the king-making mullah who, they hope, holds Iraq’s fate in his wrinkled hands.

My guess is that some politicos at the Pentagon spent some recent time watching "House of Games," "The Sting," "Matchstick Men" and other flicks about confidence games and, as I said, decided to emphasize the con in neocon.

How can you blame them? I love this genre, and would probably toss in "A Big Hand for the Little Lady."

Moreover, the time may be right. As one of my old debate coaches used to say, "When it's fourth-and-long, and you're behind late in the game...throw deep."

For more info about the neocons and the INC, check out Laura Rozen's new piece in the American Prospect. I know people are interested in this stuff since I get several hits every week for my early February blog entry highlighting the known links among neocon Michael Ledeen, Iran-contra figure (and con man) Manucher Ghorbanifar, and the Niger-uranium story. Rozen mentions these figures in passing, along with the DoD's Doug Feith (who may yet be punished for leaking a widely repudiated memo about alleged Iraq-al Qaeda links).

INC Inc.

It has long been known that the intelligence provided by Iraqi defectors, including those associated with the Iraqi National Congress, was mostly bogus.

Now, INC leader Ahmad Chalabi says the INC is willing to take the fall for the bogus intelligence -- effectively getting the White House and the CIA off-the-hook. Consider this statement from yesterday:

Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. "We are heroes in error," he told the Telegraph in Baghdad.

"As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants."

The story points out that the information about the famous mobile bio warfare labs originated from a defector coached by the INC. Ultimately, US intelligence sources didn't figure all this out until after the war -- and after Colin Powell talked about them at the UN Security Council.

On a related note, Chalabi is apparently learning about defense contracting from Dick Cheney. His family members and business associates are doing nicely in the rebuilding of Iraq:

U.S. authorities in Iraq have awarded more than $400 million in contracts to a start-up company that has extensive family and, according to court documents, business ties to Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon favorite on the Iraqi Governing Council.

The most recent contract, for $327 million to supply equipment for the Iraqi Armed Forces, was awarded last month and drew an immediate challenge from a losing contester, who said the winning bid was so low that it questions the "credibility" of that bid.

The article, by Knut Royce in Newsday, reports also that another $80 million contract is being used to hire Chalabi guards (the Iraqi Free Congress) -- who may then constitute a private army.

Whenever you read a story about oil field security over 4000 miles of pipeline, keep in mind that Chalabi associates may be responsible for their defense -- thanks to your money.


Note: Thanks to the Dreyfuss Report for some of these links.

Update: Jim Lobe has a good piece on this too -- Thanks to a reader for the pointer.

Good Read: The Lie Factory

The January/February Mother Jones has a good article on "The Lie Factory," by Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest. It's not on-line at the website, but it's apparently available at some non-subscriber sites.

Basically, Dreyfuss and Vest recap the role of the neocons fomenting war against Iraq. They have a brief (if familiar) rundown of all the key players and included a nice flow chart of the bureaucracy. The neocon view isn't really all that shocking anymore, but it should be. Consider this:

Led by [Richard] Perle, the neocons seethed with contempt for the CIA. The CIA'S analysis, said Perle, "isn't worth the paper it's printed on." Standing in a crowded hallway during an AEI event, Perle added, "The CIA is status quo oriented. They don't want to take risks."

Dreyfuss and Vest also interviewed a bunch of people who worked in intelligence before the Iraq war who say that intelligence was manipulated. For example, consider this:

[Lt. Col. Karen] Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence-it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together."

After cherry-picking what they wanted, the neocons embedded within the Pentagon (in the Office of Special Plans) made sure their intell found its way up to the very top of the administration:

According to Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, [Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William] Luti and [OSP director Abram N.] Shulsky ran NESA and the Office of Special Plans with brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the party line. "It was organized like a machine," she says. "The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission." At NESA, Shulsky, she says, began "hot-desking," or taking an office wherever he could find one, working with [Douglas] Feith and Luti, before formally taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues like Iraq's WMD and its links to Al Qaeda. Shulsky constantly updated these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney. "Of course, we never thought they'd go directly to the White House," she adds.

Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over to 'Scooter' right away." She later found out that "Scooter" was none other than Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox.

"Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work directly on a project for the vice president," she says. "It was a little clue that we had an informal network into Vice President Cheney's office."

In addition to these dubious administrative practices, the neocons also applied pressure on career intell people who were not parroting the party line:

According to Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official and an intelligence specialist at the National War College, the OSP officials routinely pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters. "People were being pulled aside [and being told], 'We saw your last piece and it's not what we're looking for,'" he says. "It was pretty blatant." Two State Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann and Christian Westermann, have both charged that pressure was being put on them to shape intelligence to fit policy, in particular from Bolton's office. "The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.," Thielmann told the New York Times. "And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things."

As I've reported before, they also relied upon very unreliable information fed them by the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi.

According to multiple sources, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into U.S. intelligence channels. That information would flow sometimes into NESA/OSP directly, sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service, and sometimes through the INC's own U.S.-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon. The INC's intelligence "isn't reliable at all," according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism.

"Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches."

Some of the people quoted in the piece were not in government now, but they too offer interesting insights. Bluntly, as Secretary Powell has recently confirmed, there was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda (and 9/11):

While the CIA and other intelligence agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith obsessively focused on Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence professionals. Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq," he says. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact."

Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar and author, says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Instead, says Luttwak, the White House was groping for a rationale to satisfy the United Nations' criteria for war. "Cheney was forced into this fake posture of worrying about weapons of mass destruction," he says. "The ties to Al Qaeda? That's complete nonsense."

That link was trumped up. Obviously, this whole thread figures into my paper on "The Bush Doctrine and Norms of Deliberation."