WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 (UPI) -- A new report from the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee says a key figure at the Pentagon deliberately exaggerated the connection between Iraq and al-Qaida to bolster public and congressional support for the war.
The alleged relationship was one of the two main reasons for the war in Iraq. The other was Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, an arsenal that has not yet been found or proven to even exist.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., sponsored the study, which was researched over the last 16 months. According to Levin, the Defense Department developed and disseminated an "alternative" assessment of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida that made claims that could not be substantiated by the CIA and the intelligence community, and, therefore, provided inaccurate intelligence information about Saddam Hussein's relationship with al-Qaida to policymakers.
"We've seen this shaping of intelligence before the Iraq war. We saw it with the Iran-contra (scandal). ... We saw it in the Gulf of Tonkin resolution when intelligence was distorted in order to sell Congress" on the Vietnam War, Levin said at a press conference Thursday.
"This report shows that in the case of Iraq's relationship with al-Qaida, intelligence was exaggerated to support administration policy aims ... (and was) determined to find a strong connection between Iraq and al Qaida," the report states.
Levin said the study was limited by his inability to get multiple documents from the Pentagon and the CIA.
The Defense Department issued a statement Thursday, saying it cooperated "carefully" with Levin, "knowing that Sen. Levin might decide, as he did, not to seek a unanimous -- or at least bipartisan -- report."
Levin said he attempted to get a bipartisan report but was rebuffed by his Republican colleagues.
According to Sen. John Warner, R-Va., Senate Select Committee of Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts and he "decided the Senate intelligence committee would perform the Senate's initial oversight responsibilities on these matters."
Administration assertions of a connection between Iraq and al-Qaida are primarily based on a meeting allegedly held by Sept. 11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague in April 2001, a few months before the attacks. A report issued by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in June 2004 said the CIA determined by the spring of 2002 that it is unlikely the meeting ever occurred.
Vice President Dick Cheney said on MSNBC's Capital Report on June 17, 2004, that the only evidence there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11 was the alleged meeting in Prague, and conceded the intelligence on that was shaky.
"We have never been able to prove that there was a connection there on 9/11," Cheney said.
Even President George W. Bush in a press conference on Jan. 31, 2003, three months before the war, said he could not make a direct connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks.
However, as recently as January 2004, Cheney said, "There's overwhelming evidence that there was a connection between al-Qaida and the Iraqi government." In September 2003, on NBC's "Meet the Press," Cheney said success in Iraq would strike "a major blow" at the "geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
Bush said in a speech on the deck of an aircraft carrier in May 2003 that the toppling of Saddam Hussein means "we have removed an ally of al-Qaida." In press conferences and on news programs, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice both discussed long-standing contacts and interactions between al-Qaida and Baghdad going back a decade.
Those statements seem to have had an effect on public perceptions. A large number of Americans have come to believe Iraq was intimately involved with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to polls. Immediately after the attacks, only 3 percent of those polled suggested Iraq was involved. But by January 2003, 44 percent of Americans polled by Knight-Ridder said they believed most or some of the hijackers were Iraqis. None were.
A Harris Poll conducted in September showed 55 percent of Americans now believe the administration's statements about Iraq and its connection to al-Qaida was misleading. However, a Newsweek poll of 1,000 adults showed 42 percent still think Iraq was directly connected to the Sept. 11 attacks, a link that has been discarded by the Sept. 11 Commission Report.
The Levin report suggests the link between 9/11 and Iraq -- disavowed by the president in January 2003 -- was in fact championed by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.
In October 2001, Feith created a cell within his department to assess intelligence reports in light of the new "war on terror" declared by the president. He told reporters in June 2003 the purpose of the office was not to gin up intelligence, but to "educate a lot of people about the fact that there was more cooperation and interconnection among these terrorist organizations and state sponsors across ideological lines than many people had appreciated before."
The group went about their work by sifting through intelligence reports from various agencies, trying to find links that might have been missed by those not expressly searching for them, Feith told reporters in June 2003.
In August 2002, Feith's team briefed Rumsfeld on their findings, "Assessing the Relationship Between Iraq and al-Qaida." Rumsfeld asked that it be briefed to the CIA. On Sept. 16, 2002, the team briefed senior staff in the office of the vice president and the National Security Council.
Levin's staff requested copies of each of the three presentations and found important discrepancies. For instance, one slide of the briefing omitted from the presentation to the CIA, but included in the presentation to the White House, had a reference to the Prague 2001 meeting as a "known Iraq-al-Qaida contact."
By that time, however, the CIA had discovered evidence that the meeting probably had never taken place.
According to the Levin study, only one slide from the presentations has been declassified in its entirety, and he offered it as evidence that Feith's office was not just taking a fresh look at intelligence but attempting to undercut professional analysts' work on the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida.
The slide is titled "Fundamental Problems with How the Intelligence Commuity is Assessing Information." It says the intelligence community's "standard of evidence is too high," and that it underestimated the lengths to which Iraq and al-Qaida would go to hide their relationship. Feith's group also criticized the intelligence community's judgment that the extremely religious al-Qaida and the secular Saddam Hussein would be unlikely to cooperate.
In fact, CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate intelligence committee in February 2002 -- six months before his August briefing -- that "it would be a mistake to dismiss the possibility of state sponsorship (of al-Qaida) whether Iranian or Iraqi and we'll see where that evidence takes us."
Levin's report also says the Feith briefing to the White House had anumber of slides containing information that varied from that which was given to the CIA. "Unbeknownst to the intelligence community, policymakers were getting information that was inconsistent with and thus undermined the professional judgments of the intelligence community's experts," the reports says.
Those changes, according to the report, included additional information about the alleged and apparently discredited Prague meeting.
"The intelligence community never had the opportunity to defend its analysis ... (or) point out problems with DOD's 'alternative' view of the Iraq-al-Qaida relationship when it was presented to policymakers at the White House," it says.
Tenet was unaware Feith's staff had briefed the White House in September 2002 on the matter until February 2004, the report states.
Feith's staff also criticized a report by the CIA's counterterrorism center titled "Iraq and al-Qaida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship," insisting, "it should be read for content only -- and CIA's interpretations ought to be ignored."
This is significant, Levin contends. It suggests that a political wing of the Pentagon -- the office of policy -- was second-guessing professional intelligence analysis because it didn't comport with its own findings.
The Defense Department protested Thursday that the earlier Senate intelligence committee report, which was bipartisan and unanimously accepted, found "no evidence administration officials tried to coerce, influence or pressure intelligence analysts to change their judgments about Iraq's WMD capabilities or links to terrorism."
While committee chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said in July he saw no evidence of political pressure, the committee had not yet reviewed the role Feith's office played in the development and dissemination of pre-war intelligence. The Feith role will be covered in phase two of the study that will not be completed until after the November election.
