Senate committee shuts down investigation into * admin. distorting intel

G_j

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Fri Mar-11-05 08:08 AM
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Senate committee shuts down investigation into * admin. distorting intel

Edited on Fri Mar-11-05 08:16 AM by G_j

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/9aeaab52-91ba-11d9-8a7a-00000e2511c8,dwp_uuid=c1a5b968-e1ed-11d7-81c6-0820abe49a01.html

US Senate ends probe into prewar intelligence on Iraq

By Edward Alden in Washington
Published: March 10 2005 23:36 | Last updated: March 11 2005 00:44

The Senate committee overseeing US intelligence has shut down its investigation into whether top administration officials distorted intelligence evidence to build the case for war on Iraq.

Senator Pat Roberts, who heads the committee, said on Thursday he was satisfied administration officials had accurately portrayed what turned out to be flawed intelligence claiming the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed mass destruction weapons.

<snip>
It also said at the time it would conduct a second phase of the investigation to look into several additional issues.

In particular, the committee agreed to examine whether public statements by US officials were substantiated by intelligence information, and whether the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (OSP), which reported to Douglas Feith, the defence undersecretary, had played a significant role in pushing the intelligence community to take a harder line on Iraq.

<snip>
But the closing of the Senate investigation will effectively leave all blame for the failures with the professional intelligence community, rather than with political appointees.

..more..

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(this is part of what Pat Roberts is covering up)

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html

The Lie Factory

Late last year, a special Mother Jones investigation detailed how, only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.

By Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest

January/February 2004 Issue

It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.

So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence� -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials� -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February� -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war. ..more..

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