Inquiry on Intelligence Gaps May Reach to White House

This New York Time Artical shows that the Senate is finnally catching up to what is commenlly known. The Administration- led by Cheney and Rumsfeld `created' the reason to go to war in Iraq. - I will put a clip from the PBS show ~The Dark Side- from June last year to show you. paul (follower of Basho)




Inquiry on Intelligence Gaps May Reach to White House

By DAVID S. CLOUD
Published: February 10, 2007

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Friday that he would ask current and former White House aides to testify about a report by the Pentagon’s inspector general that criticizes the Pentagon for compiling “alternative intelligence” that made the case for invading Iraq.

The Pentagon is critical of Douglas J. Feith's analyses of Iraq.

The chairman, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said that among those called to testify could be Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, a former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. Both received a briefing from the defense secretary’s policy office in 2002 on possible links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government.

In its report on Thursday, the acting inspector general, Thomas F. Gimble, found that the work done by the Pentagon team, which was assembled by Douglas J. Feith, a former under secretary of defense for policy, was “not fully supported by the available intelligence.”

It was not clear whether Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby would testify. The White House normally resists having top aides testify before Congress.

The Senate Intelligence Committee may also seek to question the men. Tara Andringa, a spokeswoman for Mr. Levin, said Mr. Levin planned to consult with Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of that committee. Mr. Levin is on both committees.

The inspector general’s report found that while the Feith team did not violate any laws or knowingly mislead Congress, it made dubious interpretations of intelligence reports and shared them with senior officials without making clear that its findings had already been discounted or discredited by the main intelligence agencies.

“The actions, in our opinion, were inappropriate, given that all the products did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the intel community, and in some cases were shown as intel products,” Mr. Gimble told the Armed Services Committee in a hearing on Friday.

That set off a two-hour partisan clash. Democrats argued that the report showed intelligence had been manipulated to justify an invasion of Iraq, and Republicans insisted that Mr. Feith’s office did nothing wrong by reaching conclusions that differed from those of the main intelligence agencies and presenting them to higher-ups, who had asked for the re-examination in the first place.

Senator Levin, who has long been a leading critic of Mr. Feith’s role, called the report “a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities” by Mr. Feith. But Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, responded, “I don’t think in any way that his report can be interpreted as a devastating condemnation.”

Mr. Gimble said formal intelligence findings did not corroborate some of the Pentagon’s assertions: that Mr. Hussein’s government and Al Qaeda had a “mature symbiotic relationship,” that it involved a “shared interest and pursuit of” unconventional weapons and that there were “some indications” of coordination between Iraq and Al Qaeda on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The briefers from Mr. Feith’s office should have noted their departures from the formal consensus findings of intelligence agencies, Mr. Gimble said.

Representative Ike Skelton, a Democrat from Missouri and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Mr. Feith’s office exercised “extremely poor judgment for which our nation, and our service members in particular, are paying a terrible price.”

Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, noted that Mr. Feith’s superiors at the Pentagon had asked him to re-examine intelligence on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Therefore, Mr. Sessions said, there was no need for the briefers to point out that their conclusions differed from those of the C.I.A., because the briefing was intended as a “critique” of the agencies’ conclusions.

A similar argument has been made in a formal rebuttal to the inspector general that was prepared by Mr. Feith’s successor at the Pentagon.