IRAQ: CIA Chief Clueless on Neo-Con Intelligence Channel
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Was Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet really the last person in Washington to find out that both the president and vice president were being fed phoney or "sexed up" intelligence about pre-war Iraq by a Pentagon office staffed by ideologically driven neo-conservatives?
It is highly doubtful, but in his desperate attempt to walk a tightrope between his increasingly irreconcilable loyalties to the administration of President George W. Bush and to his own intelligence professionals, Tenet is suggesting that he really was in the dark about what was going on just a few miles down the Potomac River from CIA headquarters.
Just a month ago, in a rousing defence of the intelligence community's professionalism, Tenet boasted to students at Georgetown University that he and only he was the sole purveyor of intelligence information to the president.
But on Tuesday he admitted to members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that he was unaware until just last week that officials based in the Pentagon's policy office had given intelligence briefings directly to the White House.
"Is that a normal thing to happen, that there (is) a formal analysis relative to intelligence that would be presented to the NSC (National Security Council) that way, without you even knowing about it?" an incredulous Democratic senator, Carl Levin, asked Tenet during contentious hearings.
"I don't know. I've never been in the situation," Tenet replied, insisting, "I have to tell you senator, I'm the president's chief intelligence officer; I have the definitive view about these subjects".
"I know you feel that way," Levin said, betraying a hint of sarcasm.
The exchange reflected the latest development in what is building into one of the biggest intelligence crises in modern U.S. history, one the administration is trying desperately, but with increasing difficulty, to quash.
The scandal, which is based on Washington's abject failure one year after invading Iraq to find any evidence to back up the administration's pre-war claims that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein possessed massive stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons; reconstituted his nuclear-weapons programme (to the extent that, according to Vice President Dick Cheney, he had obtained weapons); and had operational ties with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, has been building since last summer.
But it gained momentum in January when the CIA's chief weapons inspector, David, Kay admitted that U.S. intelligence, including himself, had been "almost all wrong" on its pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities.
Both Kay and the administration, as well as members of Congress from Bush's Republican Party, immediately blamed the official intelligence community, which Tenet heads as CIA director, for the failure.
But opposition Democrats, backed up by former intelligence officials and some media reporting, charged the administration had systematically exaggerated and manipulated the intelligence by both intimidating the professional analysts who disagreed with them and by producing its own intelligence, much of which now appears to have been fabricated, through unofficial channels.
As a result, the intelligence committees in both houses have expanded their investigations in recent weeks.
While it is now clear that professional intelligence analysts made some serious errors assessing Iraq's WMD programmes - largely through a combination of assuming "worst-case scenarios" in the absence of hard evidence and lacking reliable agents or assets in Iraq either as informants or investigators -- the "Feith factor" has now emerged as the key focus of the committees' work.
Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith set up two groups, the Office of Special< (END)
