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Heads Up: Knight Ridder is going to break something big in tomorrow's papers.....
Update: Here it is:
A former CIA director who advocated war against Saddam Hussein helped arrange the debriefing of an Iraqi defector who falsely claimed that Iraq had biological-warfare laboratories disguised as yogurt and milk trucks.
R. James Woolsey's role as a go-between was detailed in a classified Defense Department report chronicling how the defector's assertion came to be included in the Bush administration's case for war even after the defector was determined to be a fabricator.
A senior U.S. official summarized portions of the report for Knight Ridder on condition of anonymity because it's top secret. The report said that on Feb. 11, 2002, Woolsey telephoned Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Linton Wells about the defector and told him how to contact the man, who'd been produced by an Iraqi exile group eager to oust Saddam. Wells said he passed the information to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Woolsey's previously undisclosed role in the case of Maj. Mohammad Harith casts new light on how prominent invasion advocates outside the government used their ties to senior officials in the Bush administration to help make the case for war. . . By using his Pentagon contacts, Woolsey provided a direct pipeline to the government for Harith's information that bypassed the CIA, which for years had been highly distrustful of the exile group that produced Harith. . .
Francis Brooke, Washington representative of the Iraqi National Congress . . .said intermediaries such as Woolsey and former Pentagon official Richard Perle, another leading war advocate, contacted the Bush administration multiple times on the INC's behalf.
Such referrals were an efficient way to get potentially crucial intelligence to the government, Brooke said. He stressed that the INC made no claims about the defectors' veracity and it was up to U.S. officials to decide whether to use their information. . .
Woolsey denied in a brief exchange with a Knight Ridder reporter July 1 that he brought Harith to the Defense Department's attention. He declined to respond to multiple efforts to contact him this week after Knight Ridder learned new details of the Harith case.
The classified Pentagon report said that on Feb. 11, 2002, Woolsey telephoned Wells, who at that time oversaw the Defense Intelligence Agency, with word that the INC had produced Harith. Wells then informed the DIA through an "executive referral" how to contact Harith through the INC's headquarters in London.
Wells confirmed details of the report in an e-mail to Knight Ridder.
It seems that the CIA was not really the only organization to blame for the administration's pre-war intelligence screw ups, but rather, the one the GOP has determined should take the fall for mistakes championed by the very heart and center of the [paid] neocon INC advocacy machine. That these folks have yet to fess up about their direct roles in delivering the central casting bogus INC defectors into the very bosom of the US government shows serious limits to their moral courage. And why per chance are these parts of the report classified? To protect delicate sensibilities of good friends of the administration?
Update: The classified report described above that describes Woolsey's direct role in delivering the lying INC defector to the Defense Department was a Defense Department report, not the Senate Select Intel Committee report. My mistake.