“There were adjustments made depending on the audience”

...The debate before the Senate Armed Services Committee was touched off by a report by the Pentagon inspector general’s office, which investigated the Pentagon’s intelligence-gathering and found it seriously flawed, especially in its search for links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.



Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the committee, called the report “a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities” carried out by Douglas J. Feith, who was under secretary of defense for policy just before the invasion of Iraq early in 2003.

“Well, unfortunately, the damage has already been done,” Mr. Levin said. “Senior administration officials used the twisted intelligence produced by the Feith office in making the case for the Iraq war...”

The long-awaited report by Thomas F. Gimble, the Pentagon’s acting inspector general, concluded that, while the Feith team did not violate any laws or knowingly mislead Congress, it developed dubious intelligence that was inconsistent with the findings of the wider intelligence community.

Mr. Gimble told the committee today that, while the Pentagon’s in-house intelligence-gathering was not illegal or unauthorized, “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.”

When Mr. Inhofe pressed Mr. Gimble on whether he agreed with Mr. Levin’s characterization of his report, Mr. Gimble said he viewed the document as “a flat, fact-based report of the events that occurred. I don’t have an opinion as to whether it’s devastating or not devastating.”

On Thursday, as details of Mr. Gimble’s report were beginning to come out, Mr. Feith issued a statement saying his office’s activities had been authorized by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Deputy Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and that his office properly shared its findings.

The report could add fuel to the growing debate in Congress over the administration’s conduct of the war, and whether and how lawmakers should declare their opposition to it.

Mr. Levin said he wanted his committee to hear from Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. Both Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby received a Pentagon briefing in September of 2002 on supposed Al Qaeda-Iraq links that Mr. Gimble’s report said did not fully reflect intelligence agency views.

Some of the administration’s most severe critics have long accused the White House of implying a link between the Al Qaeda terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and the regime of Saddam Hussein -- a notion largely discredited by the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks.

Senator James Webb, Democrat of Virginia, embraced Senator Levin’s remarks and said the intelligence operation in Mr. Feith’s office had helped to create “a misunderstanding that persists to this day and affects the debates that are going on now...”

...Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, drew from Mr. Gimble a statement that Mr. Feith had not been entirely consistent in his intelligence briefings, in ways Mr. Gimble said he could not go into for security reasons.

“He changed the briefing for his audience?” Mr. Reed asked

“There were adjustments made depending on the audience,” Mr. Gimble replied.

“Well, why would he do that?” the senator asked. “Why would he make changes based on the audience?”

“I don’t think I’m in a position to make a comment on why he would do what he did,” Mr. Gimble said.

Of course, the Rethuglicans and Lieberman simply respond, "Does Not!".

The same kind of people that look at the Grand Canyon and think it was done by Noah's Flood believe them, too.

More on the report from Truthout's Jason Leopold:

A long-awaited report on the veracity of pre-war Iraq intelligence has found that a secretive policy shop exaggerated the Iraqi threat, providing the White House with cherry-picked information about links between Iraq and al Qaeda. The shop, operating out of the Pentagon, was set up by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Its goal was to lay the groundwork for a pre-emptive military strike against Iraq.

The report would appear to confirm British intelligence assertions that surfaced in a document widely referred to as the Downing Street Memo that the facts against the threat posed by Iraq were being fixed around the Bush administration's policy leading up to the invasion of Iraq...

The Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General produced the report, which focuses largely on the work of former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Feith's Office of Special Plans sent the Bush administration bogus intelligence on Iraq's weapons program and ties to terrorist organizations that supported the administration's policy.

An executive summary of the report was released late Thursday by Senator Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Levin has spent the past two years battling the former Senate Republican leadership to conclude its so-called Phase II investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence.

Last month, in an interview with McClatchy Newspapers, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he was told by Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kans.), who was formerly in charge of the second phase of the Senate's investigation, that Vice President Dick Cheney applied "constant" pressure on Roberts to drag out the probe on pre-war intelligence. A spokeswoman for Cheney denied the allegation...

The inspector general's unclassified executive summary of the report, as characterized by Levin, states:

The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy developed, produced and disseminated to senior decision-makers alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaeda relationship. These assessments included some conclusions inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community,

The inspector general also stated that the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy "was inappropriately performing intelligence activities of developing, producing, and disseminating that should be performed by the intelligence community."

The inspector general concluded that these "inappropriate" activities were authorized by Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense, or Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of defense.

Senior administration officials, including Vice President Cheney, made numerous public statements that reflected the views of the Feith alternative analysis, which were inconsistent with the analysis and judgments of the intelligence community. Indeed, Vice President Cheney said the principal Feith office assessment was the "best source of information" on the alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Rockefeller said the conclusions of the report are damning. Moreover, he said, his committee was kept in the dark about the Office of Special Plans and the fact that it was engaged in intelligence-gathering activities.

"The IG has concluded that this office was engaged in intelligence activities," Rockefeller said. "The Senate intelligence committee was never informed of these activities. Whether these actions were authorized or not, it appears that they were not in compliance with the law. In the coming days, I will carefully review all aspects of the report and will consult with [Senate intelligence committee] Vice Chairman [Kit] Bond to determine whether any additional action by the Senate intelligence committee is warranted."

The White House and the Pentagon have been dogged by questions about Feith and OSP's activities dating back to the beginning of the Iraq War. It was during that time that a number of CIA analysts spoke privately with Democratic lawmakers and complained that Feith's unit had been cherry-picking intelligence information that provided worst-case scenarios about Iraq's weapons programs. Levin and Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), called for an immediate investigation...

In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, Rumsfeld became increasingly frustrated that the CIA could not find any evidence of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program - evidence that would have helped the White House to build a solid case for war in Iraq. Rumsfeld helped set up the Office of Special Plans in 2001 and tapped Feith to head the office.

The OSP, according to published reports, was to gather intelligence information on the Iraqi threat that the CIA and FBI could not uncover, and present it to the White House to build a case for war in Iraq. The committee relied heavily on information provided by Iraqi defector Ahmed Chalabi, who has provided the White House with reams of disputed intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. Chalabi heads the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles who have pushed for regime change in Iraq.

The Office of Special Plans routinely provided President Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, who headed the National Security Council at the time, with questionable intelligence information on the Iraqi threat. Much of that information was included in various speeches by Bush and Cheney, and some was never vetted for accuracy by career CIA analysts.

In an article in the New York Times in October 2002, the paper reported that Rumsfeld had ordered the OSP to "to search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists" that might have been overlooked by the CIA.

Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in an interview with the New Yorker in May 2003 that the Office of Special Plans "started picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the president. It's not intelligence. It's political propaganda."

Lang said the CIA and the OSP often clashed on the accuracy of intelligence information provided to the White House by Paul Wolfowitz.

By the fall of 2002, the White House had virtually dismissed all of the intelligence on Iraq provided by the CIA, in favor of the more critical information provided to the Bush administration by the Office of Special Plans. The CIA had failed to find any evidence of Iraq's weapons programs.

In a rare Pentagon briefing four years ago, Douglas Feith said the Office of Special Plans was not an "intelligence project," but rather a group of eighteen people who looked at intelligence information from a different point of view. Feith now teaches a seminar on Iraq War planning at Georgetown University.