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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Observers have long noted that the 2002 NIE, even with all of its qualifications and footnotes, was far more confident about the presence of Iraqi WMD than previous intelligence estimates had been. "The truth is that the U.S. unclassified assessments offered fairly reasonable judgments until 2002," Joseph Cirincione, the director of nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in a 2004 article. "A marked shift, however, occurred with the October 2002 NIE. The findings became far more dramatic, specific and certain."
At roughly the same time, the intelligence community released a white paper to the public that eliminated many of the caveats about the Iraqi WMD intelligence. The paper even included a sentence that suggested Iraq had the potential to target the "US Homeland" with biological weapons. According to Democratic senators, this assertion has no basis in the classified version of the document.
It is still unknown what role, if any, Cheney and his staff played in these anomalies. But the Fitzgerald investigation has already offered a window into the inner workings of how Libby dealt with these issues. In her testimony before the grand jury, Miller said that Libby told her that the classified version of the 2002 NIE had firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium.
He was, at minimum, overstating the case. As Newsweek has reported, the classified estimate "showed almost precisely the opposite."
The so-called Niger documents, which were given to an Italian journalist in 2002, were later discredited by the United Nations as crude fabrications. Speculation has swirled ever since about who created and distributed the documents. In March 2003, at the request of Sen. Rockefeller, the FBI opened an inquiry into the matter. Since then, both Sen. Rockefeller and Sen. Roberts have been briefed on the progress of the investigation, according to a Senate aide.
This summer, Sen. Rockefeller asked Sen. Roberts for permission to have the FBI brief the entire Intelligence Committee on the matter. No briefing has been scheduled, and it is not clear if the FBI findings will ever be made public.
But a recent report by UPI, quoting sources at NATO, revealed that Fitzgerald's team "sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government." This included a full, as yet unpublished, report to the Italian Parliament on the documents. It is possible that Fitzgerald now knows more about the origins of the forged Niger documents than many members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
(In a series of articles that ran this week, the leading Italian newspaper La Repubblica claimed that the Italian military intelligence service, or SISMI, was behind the forgeries, and that the head of SISMI bypassed the CIA and took the documents directly to Stephen Hadley, at the time the deputy national security advisor. According to the articles, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi wanted to curry favor with the Bush administration. Laura Rozen gives an account of the articles in the American Prospect.)
Here, the question is not whether Cheney and high-ranking Pentagon civilians circumvented the normal intelligence vetting process, but to what extent. It is known that both Cheney and other top administration officials, including Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith and former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton, were contemptuous of the traditional intelligence process. Feith was in charge of a secret shop, the Office of Special Plans or OSP, whose main purpose was to cherry-pick intelligence that could be used to support the war. Administration officials also made widespread use of bogus intelligence from Iraqi exiles without going through ordinary channels. Back in 2002, a lobbyist for the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a discredited group of Iraqi expatriates with close ties to the White House, wrote a memo describing his contacts in the U.S. government. Among those listed, according to a report in Newsweek, were John Hannah, an aide to Vice President Cheney, and William Luti, who would work as an aide to Feith in the OSP.
Such high-level contacts with what was essentially a foreign -- if denationalized -- group of intelligence agents has raised eyebrows in Congress. Under the National Security Act of 1947, federal officials engaged in intelligence activity must inform the Senate Intelligence Committee. "If they were undertaking intelligence activities and they were not notifying this committee, they would be in violation of the law," says an aide to Sen. Rockefeller.
Fitzgerald, who has interviewed Hannah as part of his investigation, may be able to shed light on this episode.
Since the invasion, other reports have suggested that officials close to Vice President Cheney embarked on additional intelligence-gathering missions overseas, including a secret meeting in Rome with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer. According to Democratic senators, Feith's shop also directly briefed the White House in September 2002 on an alternative analysis of Iraqi intelligence, one that has since been shown to be even less credible than the CIA estimates. The now-departed Feith, meanwhile, has been pummeled in the press by his former colleagues. Most recently, former State Department Chief of Staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson told a think tank audience, "Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man." (Wilkerson was actually complimentary compared to Gen. Thomas Franks, who according to Bob Woodward called Feith "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.")
Last year, the Pentagon stopped cooperating with the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sen. Roberts has, so far, refused to force cooperation, all but sinking the hopes of Americans who want the government to get to the bottom of its own missteps.
But then there is Fitzgerald. It will be a remarkable irony if an investigation into a relatively minor misdeed ends up doing what Congress could not: shedding light on the hidden machinations of an administration bent on war.
