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Bush may have appointed a commission to look into the Iraq intelligence imbroglio. But pretty much everything any voter needs to know is here, in this old article by the New Republic's Franklin Foer and Spencer Ackerman on the Office of the Vice President (OVP), Cheney. Lots interesting here too to mine about John Hannah, who UPI's Richard Sales reports is a focus of the Plame-leakgate investigation.
"...But Cheney's office didn't escape the government bubble so much as create a new one. Any doubts expressed by the intelligence community about the OVP's sources, especially Chalabi, were ignored. During his stint as an adviser to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Hannah had been one of the Clinton administration's most fervent INC supporters. Working for Cheney, he stayed in regular contact with the exile group. "He relied on Ahmed Chalabi for insights and advice," says a former Bush administration official. Cheney himself became an increasingly vocal Chalabi advocate. At an NSC meeting in the fall of 2002, the State Department and Pentagon feuded over releasing even more funding to the INC. In a rare burst of open influence, Cheney "weighed in, in a really big way," according to a former NSC staffer. "He said, 'We're getting ready to go to war, and we're nickel-and-diming the INC at a time when they're providing us with unique intelligence on Iraqi WMD.'" To the OVP, the CIA's hostility to such "unique" INC intelligence was evidence of the Agency's political corruption. Before long, "there was something of a willingness to give [INC- provided intelligence] greater weight" than that offered by the intelligence community, says the former administration official.
Chalabi was not the only source Hannah used to get alternative information to Cheney. In 2001, Luti had moved from the OVP to across the Potomac to become Feith's deputy for Near East and South Asia (nesa). By late 2002, Luti's Iraq desk became the Office of Special Plans (OSP), tasked with working on issues related to the war effort. In addition to actual planning, the OSP provided memoranda to Pentagon officials recycling the most damaging--and often the most spurious--intelligence about Iraq's Al Qaeda connections and the most hopeful predictions about liberated Iraq. In the fall of 2002, one of the memos stated as fact that September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent months before the attacks--a claim the FBI and CIA had debunked months earlier after an exhaustive investigation. And the OSP didn't just comb through old intelligence for new information. It had its own sources. For example, one of Luti's aides, a Navy lieutenant commander named Youssef Aboul-Enein, was tasked with scouring Arabic-language websites and magazines to come up with what Aboul-Enein would call "something really useful"--statements by Saddam praising the September 11 attacks, Palestinian suicide bombings, or any act of terrorism.
"According to those who worked in nesa, Luti's efforts had a specific customer: Cheney. "Cheney's the one with the burr under his saddle about Iraq," says retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked for Luti from May 2002 until the eve of the war. During that time, Luti held only about six or seven staff meetings, she says, and "I heard Scooter Libby's name mentioned in half those meetings." Discussing Iraq, Luti would say "things like, 'Did you give something to Scooter?' 'Scooter called; hey, call him back,' ... [or] 'Oh, well, did you talk to Scooter about that?'" And Luti would make trips across the Potomac to see his old colleagues at the OVP. White House officials would often see Luti disappearing into Hannah's office before going on to Libby's.
"The OVP didn't just generate this information for themselves. They tried to pump it back into the intelligence pipeline on visits to Langley. "Scooter and the vice president come out there loaded with crap from OSP, reams of information from Chalabi's people" on both terrorism and WMD, according to an ex-CIA analyst. One of the OVP's principal interlocutors was Alan Foley, director of the CIA's Nonproliferation Center. Cheney's office pelted Foley with questions about Iraq's nuclear weapons program-- especially about Saddam's alleged attempts to purchase uranium from Niger. According to a colleague, Foley "pushed back" by "stressing the implausibility of it." Months earlier, after all, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson had gone to Niger at the behest of the CIA--a visit that had itself been instigated by questions raised by Cheney in an Agency briefing-- and concluded that the sale almost certainly did not occur. But Cheney kept pressing, and it took its toll on Foley. "He was bullied and intimidated," says a friend of Foley.
"In the view of many at Langley, the OVP wasn't simply highlighting what it considered weaknesses in CIA analysis. Rather, it was trying to stifle information that it considered counterproductive to the case for war. The tone of the questioning, some analysts felt, was less inquisitive than hostile. "It was done along the lines of: 'What's wrong with you bunch of assholes? You don't know what's going on, you're horribly biased, you're a bunch of pinkos,'" says a retired analyst close to his active-duty colleagues. Some analysts saw the questioning as a method of diverting overtaxed CIA analysts from producing undesired intelligence product. On one occasion, officials asked analysts hard at work on Iraq to produce a paper on the history of the British occupation of Mesopotamia following World War I. The request might seem reasonable on the surface--after all, an occupation ought to be informed by precedent. But policymakers in the OVP and the DOD could just as easily have picked up histories of Iraq from the library and let the CIA go back to work on classified analysis. But, after enduring the questioning for months, an ex-analyst explains, "It gets to the point where you just don't want to fight it anymore."
"Eventually the OVP's alternative analyses found their way into the administration's public case for war. The distance between the OVP and the intelligence community was greatest on terrorism, and the OVP was determined to win. Libby wrote a draft of Colin Powell's February speech to the U.N. Security Council that outlined a far different threat than the secretary of State envisioned. "[The OVP] really wanted to make it a speech mostly about the link to terrorism," says one former NSC official. Although Powell and his staff balked at the most controversial--and poorly substantiated--details, Libby still provided the initial outline for the speech.
"Cheney's own public statements went far beyond what the CIA and other intelligence agencies had verified. In an August 2002 speech in Nashville, Cheney asserted, "The Iraqi regime has in fact been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago." The intelligence community was in fact deeply divided over whether the nuclear program was again active, and a classified DIA report a month later indicated that the Agency had "no reliable information" about Iraq's chemical weapons program. But these doubts never seeped into Cheney's public statements. Days before the invasion, Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," "We know [Saddam is] out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons, and we know that he has a longstanding relationship with ... the Al Qaeda organization." By contrast, the intelligence agencies assessed that, despite some apparently fruitless contact between Saddam's henchmen and Al Qaeda terrorists in Sudan in the mid-'90s, Iraq and Osama bin Laden were two unrelated threats.
"The OVP never considered that it could be wrong, despite the fact that none of its senior members had intelligence training. The CIA, on the other hand, rather than behaving as a rigid and unshakable bastion of unquestionable truth, subjected its judgments to rigorous criticism. On Iraq, the CIA had what is known as the "red cell," a team of four highly regarded retired analysts who conducted alternative assessments of Iraq's ties to terrorism. The OVP, by contrast, put its judgments through no comparable wringer. Perhaps that is why so much of what they embraced was wrong. On the ground in Iraq today, there is no evidence that Saddam reconstituted his nuclear weapons program; according to chief American arms-hunter David Kay's interim report, the evidence of any ongoing chemical or biological weapons programs is fragmentary at best. A classified study prepared by the National Intelligence Council in early 2003 found that only one of Chalabi's defectors could be considered credible, The New Republic has learned. A more recent investigation undertaken by the DIA has found that practically all the intelligence provided by the INC was worthless."
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Worth rereading the whole thing.