News

June 6, 2008

Iraq report rips U.S. leaders

Senators: Invasion misused intelligence. Carney once worked in criticized group.

From staff and wire reports

WASHINGTON — President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials promoted the invasion of Iraq with public statements that weren’t supported by intelligence or that concealed differences among intelligence agencies, the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday in a report that was delayed by bitter partisan infighting.

A second report found that a special office, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, set up under then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld conducted “sensitive intelligence activities” that were inappropriate “without the knowledge of the Intelligence Community or the State Department.” That report revealed that Pentagon counterintelligence officials suspected that Iran might have tried to use the group to influence administration policymakers.

Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller, D-W. Va., said the administration’s actions went far beyond simply being misled by bad intelligence.

“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence,” Rockefeller said in a statement. “But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.

“Before taking the country to war, this administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced,” Rockefeller said. “Unfortunately, our committee has concluded that the administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence.”

The White House dismissed the main report as a partisan rehash of what’s already known about erroneous U.S. intelligence on Iraq.

“The majority report today is a selective view,” said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. “The administration statements on Iraq were based on the very same intelligence that was given to the Congress. And they came to the same conclusion, as did other countries around the world. The issue . . . ultimately turned out to be false, and we have fully admitted that.

“The fact that the intelligence turned out to be wrong on WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) does not mean that anyone purposefully lied,” Perino said.

Four Republicans on the committee — Orrin Hatch of Utah, Christopher Bond of Missouri, Richard Burr of North Carolina and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia — denounced the report as “inconclusive, misleading and incomplete.”

However, two Republicans, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snow of Maine, joined Democrats to approve the report on a 10-5 vote.

The Senate report, the first official examination of whether top officials knew that their public statements were unsubstantiated when they made them, reviewed five speeches by officials including Bush, Cheney and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Statements by Bush, Cheney and other top officials that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons in violation of U.N. resolutions were “generally substantiated” by what turned out to be erroneous U.S. intelligence analyses, the report said.

However, while intelligence reports “generally substantiated” their claims that Iraq had secretly restarted a nuclear weapons program, the committee said, Bush and other officials failed to disclose that the State Department disputed that finding.

Before he was elected to Congress, U.S. Rep. Chris Carney, D-Dimock Twp., worked in the Pentagon, where he was a senior counterterrorism and intelligence adviser in the much scrutinized Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group.

Carney is not named in either report and his spokeswoman said Carney was “not involved in those actions referenced in the report.” The freshman congressman did not respond to an interview request.

Carney was involved in preparing some of the intelligence involved in shaping decisions about the war, though to what extent is unclear. In interviews published in various newspapers including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the International Herald Times, Carney discussed his role in the tiny intelligence unit created by Douglas Feith, then under secretary of defense for policy.

In a Nov. 20, 2006, interview published in the New Yorker, Carney discussed his role in the group and the lead-up to the war. An excerpt from the story says: “Carney said that if Congress ends up investigating the role his Pentagon office played in supplying flawed intelligence, he won’t know which side of the table to sit on. ‘Maybe I’ll ask myself some tough questions,’ he said with a laugh.”

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