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Pentagon Office Skewed Prewar Intelligence to Exaggerate Ties Between Iraq, Al-Qaeda, Senator Says By Mike Nartker WASHINGTON — A U.S. Defense Department office headed by Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith skewed prewar Iraq intelligence to exaggerate the alleged ties between former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda, according to a report released yesterday by Senator Carl Levin (Mich.), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee (see GSN, Oct. 5). The 46-page report presents the findings of an inquiry conducted by committee Democrats into prewar Iraq intelligence. It alleges that Feith’s policy office “was predisposed in favor of finding evidence that supported the hypothesis that al-Qaeda had a collaborative relationship with the Iraqi regime” to support the case for war against Iraq. Feith’s office sought to advance such a hypothesis, according to the report, by seeking changes in reports prepared by the U.S. intelligence community and by taking its views directly to senior Bush administration officials. According to the report, Feith’s office sought to recharacterize findings and to include previously omitted “raw” intelligence in reports prepared by the intelligence community, which was more skeptical of the alleged links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. In one example noted by Levin’s report, the office sought more than 30 changes to a 2002 CIA assessment, of which half were made “either as requested or with caveats.” The report also notes the differences made in three versions of a briefing Feith’s office provided separately in 2002 to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to then-CIA Director George Tenet and senior intelligence officials and to senior staff from the vice president’s office and the National Security Council. The report says that one slide included in the briefing to White House officials discussed an alleged 2001 meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and an Iraqi intelligence officer. The slide was not included, though, in the briefing provided to senior intelligence officials, whose personnel had been skeptical that such a meeting ever occurred, the report says. In the runup to Operation Iraqi Freedom, senior White House officials, including President George W. Bush, made a number of statements alleging a long-standing relationship between former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda. In a report released this summer, though, the Sept. 11 commission determined that while there had been contacts between prewar Iraq and al-Qaeda, there was no sign of a developed relationship between the two. “In order to present a public case that heightened the sense of threat from Iraq, administration officials reflected more closely the analysis of Undersecretary Feith’s policy office rather than the more cautious analysis of the IC [intelligence community],” Levin’s report says. Levin’s report came under fire yesterday from both the Pentagon and Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-Va.), with both alleging that the report may be politically motivated. “The Levin report appears to depart from the bipartisan, consultative relationship that exists between the Department of Defense and the Senate Armed Services Committee,” a Pentagon statement said. Both the Pentagon and Warner noted that an inquiry into prewar intelligence on Iraq conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that there was no evidence that intelligence analysts were pressured by the administration to change their assessments on either Iraq’s alleged WMD efforts or links to terrorism. Warner also said in a statement that there was “no conclusive link” between prewar statements made by White House officials on Iraq’s alleged ties to al-Qaeda and the work of Feith’s office. “While certain policy-makers may have had access to the Feith analyses, they had equal access to comparable analyses from all entities in the U.S. intelligence community in formulating their views. And competitive analyses and diversity of views in intelligence actually strengthen the policy-making process, as the 9/11 commission concluded,” he said.
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