The WaPo writes a dismissive article today on the new book written by Douglas Feith:

In the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making on Iraq, one of the key architects of the war blasts former secretary of state Colin Powell, the CIA, retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up to the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country.

Douglas J. Feith, in a massive score-settling work, portrays an intelligence community and a State Department that repeatedly undermined plans he developed as undersecretary of defense for policy and conspired to undercut President Bush’s policies.

Among the disclosures made by Feith in “War and Decision,” scheduled for release next month by HarperCollins, is Bush’s declaration, at a Dec. 18, 2002, National Security Council meeting, that “war is inevitable.” The statement came weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Feith, who says he took notes at the meeting, registered it as a “momentous comment.”

Although he acknowledges “serious errors” in intelligence, policy and operational plans surrounding the invasion, Feith blames them on others outside the Pentagon and notes that “even the best planning” cannot avoid all problems in wartime. While he says the decision to invade was correct, he judges that the task of creating a viable and stable Iraqi government was poorly executed and remains “grimly incomplete.”

A majority of the blame, Feith writes, can be laid at the feet of Bremer and the State Department/CIA which jives completely with Kenneth Timmerman’s book Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender. One example is the Chalabi issue. In one segment Timmerman writes about a May 2004 meeting between the President and his principal advisors where Ambassador Robert Blackwill made a plea to sideline Ahmad Chalabi, who at the time was a member of the Governing Council and was being talked about to be a candidate for PM.

Blackwill argued that Chalabi was on the take and then through out a charge that he was meeting with Iranians in Kurdistan.

While Cheney had been critical of the CIA for leaking derogatory information on Chalabi to the press, he agreed that the information on these latest alleged meetings between Chalabi’s people and the Iranians was troubling. But so was the meeting hosted by the Brits ten days earlier in Basra with a top Iranian Foreign Ministry official, to which Bremer sent his foreign affairs advisor, State Department diplomat Ron Neumann. Certainly no decision was made by this group to talk directly to the Iranians, he pointed out. Did that make Jerry Bremer an Iranian agent?

Undaunted, Blackwill urged the principals as a precauction to terminate the intelligence-collection program with the Iraqi National Congress (a Chalabi organization). Even though DIA director Admiral Lowell Jacoby wanted to continue the program and U.S. Field commanders had testified publicly that INC information had saved the lives of U.S. soldiers, the CIA was trying to place the blame on the INC for its own mistakes in analysing Saddam’s WMD programs. “The CIA was pissed with us because we kept coming up with stuff they didn’t have,” said Chalabi aide Zaab Sethna.

Chalabi later alleged in U.S. court filings that King Abdullah II of Jordan “traveled to the United States and personally delivered to President George Bush a file containing the false accusation that Chalabi had informed the Iranian government that the United States had broken its encryption code and thus could intercept its secret communications.”

Timmerman writes about the fact that, at the time, Bremer was the sole person who named Iraqi judges and those judges reported to him. On May 20, 2004, one of those judges issued a arrest warrant for Chalabi and his house and office was raided. He even authorized the use of coalition forces to help out on the raid.

The raid turned up nothing of value. Instead they took

“a family Koran, a set of prayer beads, and documents relating to the INC’s investigation of the UN oil-for-food scandal. (The INC was instrumental in exposing the massive bribery scheme, and had compiled documents seized in former government ministries that identified hundreds of United Nations and foreign government officials who had taken kickbacks from Saddam Hussein.)

Back in Washington, former Pentagon official Michael Rubin was livid. “This is a huge blow to America’s prestige. The message we’ve just sent is that we do not stand by our allies, that the United States can’t be trusted. We’ve just told Arab liberals and democrats that it’s just plain crazy to work with America.”

Rubin, who had recently returned from a job with the CPA, spoke by phone with Sunni clerics, Shiite professionals, and independent Kurdish businessmen in Iraq in the hours immediately after the Baghdad raid. “Everyone in Iraq believes that because of U.S. actions, we are now heading for civil war,” he said. “We have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Basically, Bremer had gone mad,” he told me.

Bremer and the CPA later claimed they had seized counterfeit Iraqi money. Only problem was that they seized “several specimen counterfeit bills, stamped “COUNTERFEIT” in large letters by the Iraqi Central Bank.”

Timmerman writes about the “leaks” by senior U.S. officials to the MSM which alleged dozens of nefarious deeds by Chalabi.

To anyone who didn’t know Chalabi and hadn’t experienced the deep, personal animosity the CIA continued to harbor toward him, the allegations were stunning.

Time reported that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation into Chalabi’s relationship with the Iranians. Newsweek added that the gumshoes were seeking to determine “who in the U.S. government might have leaked such information to Chalabi or the INC.” News of the FBI involvement, and the opening of a U.S. based investigation, amounted to two additional leaks of highly sensitive classified information. All came from “senior” administration officials and were prima facie violations of the Espionage Act.

As the days wore on the alleged misdeeds by Chalabi grew more and more incredible, including a story that Chalabi had learned about the US breaking the Iranian code from a drunk soldier and then he passed it on to the Iranians. The Iranian station chief then sent word of this news back to Tehran, USING THE BROKEN CODE!

It was so ridiculous that no serious person could possible fall for it, said Michael Ledeen, a prominent neo-con author and longtime Chalabi supporter. “Basically it assumes, A, that Chalabi is an idiot. And, B, that the Iranian station chief in Baghdad is an idiot. And the one thing we know for sure in all of this is that the Iranian intelligence service is very good, and they don’t have idiots as station chiefs in places like Baghdad.”

Ledeen was right. The story was laughably absurd. Although the Chalabi “scandal” was front-page news all across America, the president managed to put enough distance between himself and Chalabi that his misfortunes did not translate into a significant loss of public confidence in the president or in the war.

But it was just the beginning. The shadow warriors were playing for keeps.

It appears Feith’s new book will go into the shadow warriors a bit along with others inside the administration who put roadblocks in the way of Iraqi success. But to come to this conclusion you have to wade through the dismissive tone of this WaPo piece written by Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung.

In his book, Feith defends the intelligence activities on grounds that the CIA was “politicizing” intelligence by ignoring evidence in its own reports of ties between Hussein and international terrorists.

Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, are described as repeatedly working behind the scenes to undercut sound proposals by Feith and other Pentagon officials and to undermine decisions Bush had made. Feith criticizes Powell’s failure to persuade France and Germany to support U.S. war policy at the United Nations, and to gain Turkey’s approval for U.S. troop movements in its territory, as failures of effort and commitment. Feith also asks what would have happened if Powell had argued with Bush against overthrowing Hussein. Powell might have persuaded the president, Feith writes, or, if not, could have resigned.

In an introduction to the manuscript, Feith writes that he has tried to avoid polemic and seeks only to contribute to the historical record. He argues, as have other Iraq hawks such as Richard Perle — a former Reagan administration Pentagon official and outside Rumsfeld adviser — that the administration’s careful approach to Iraq, including a swift transition to Iraqi control, was prevented from succeeding by ill-informed or disloyal subordinates.

The idea to which Feith appears most attached, and to which he repeatedly returns in the book, is the formation of an Iraqi Interim Authority. Feith’s office drew up a plan for the body — to be made up of U.S.-appointed Iraqis who would share some decision-making with U.S. occupation forces — in the months before the invasion. But while he says that Bush approved it, he charges that Bremer refused to implement it.

The key mistake that the United States made in Iraq, Feith asserts, was “the mishandling of the political transition.” The good that Bremer did, he concludes, “was outweighed by the harm caused by the fact of occupation.”

Others have criticized Feith’s plan as relying too heavily on Iraqi exile politicians, including Ahmed Chalabi. Feith says that he considered Chalabi one of the most astute and democratically minded Iraqis but that he had no special brief for him. Instead, he charges that the State Department, the CIA and the military’s Central Command were pathologically opposed to the exiles and to Chalabi in particular.

Feith continually denounces the CIA, accusing it of producing poor intelligence, intruding on the formulation of policy, and then using leaks to the media to defend itself and attack its bureaucratic opponents. Most notably, he charges that intelligence officials ignored and refused to investigate possible links between al-Qaeda and Hussein’s government.

In summarizing his view of what went wrong in Iraq, Feith writes that it was a mistake for the administration to rely so heavily on intelligence reports of Hussein’s alleged stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and a nuclear weapons program, not only because they turned out to be wrong but also because secret information was not necessary to understand the threat Hussein posed.

Hussein’s history of aggression and disregard of U.N. resolutions, his past use of weapons of mass destruction and the fact that he was “a bloodthirsty megalomaniac” were enough, Feith maintains.

Couldn’t of said it better myself.

A great section of author Kenneth Timmerman’s new book Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender is the section about a supposed failing of the Bush administration. That failing being the fact that Bush didn’t purge the CIA and other segments of the government of liberal influences as Clinton did of conservative influences when he came in. Who was at fault for this?

Carl Levin understood that no president could govern effectively without putting his own highly skilled political appointees into key government positions. Although their numbers were small – the congressional “Plum Book” that was published every time a new president came into office listed just 7,000 in the year 2000 – they were critical. These were the men and women who gave direction to the unwieldy federal bureaucracy. Effective political appointees were essential for any president to transform his political vision into action. Without them, a president was like a cork bobbing in the ocean, swept by the wind and the currents.

Levin and other top Democrats in the U.S. Senate were determined to prevent George W. Bush from getting the people he wanted into positions of power. Since all top nominees had to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, that gave the Democrats – who held a 50-49-1 majority once Vermont Republican James Jeffords quit the Republican party unexpectedly in May 2001 – powerful tools.

Senate confirmation has always been a contentious process. Since the Nixon years, Senators Edward Kennedy and Joseph Biden have held conservative judges hostage to a litmus test on abortion and other left-wing causes. But at the start of the Bush administration, the Democrats took aim not at judges (that would come later) but at the president’s counter-terrorism and national security team.

For nearly seven months, Levin and this Democratic teammates prevented confirmation hearings of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s top advisor’s – Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, Assistant Secretary of Defense fo International Security Programs J.D. Crouch, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Peter W. Rodman. “While Levin was holding up their appointments, the incoming Pentagon policy team had no legal or political authority to do their vital jobs – a fact that helps explain why it took eight months for the Bush administration to draw up a strategic operational plan to destroy al-Qaeda,” wrote J. Michale Waller, a defense and intelligence policy specialist at the Institute of World Politics.

The joke around the building was that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz the only political appointees who had cleared the Senate, “it was Home Alone 3,” one appointee said.

The sabotage continued via Clinton “holdovers,” people such as Peter F. Verga, Clinton’s deputy undersecretary of defense for policy integration, a major intelligence post. While “Verga made himself useful to the Rumsfeld team, he beavered to curry favor at the top, in part by snipping and playing bureaucratic games to make life difficult for the incoming defense policy team, Waller wrote.

Ken deGraffenreid was the administration’s pick to replace Verga. A former White House hand from the Nixon days, he had been writing about intelligence reform for years, so Rumsfeld decided to give him an opportunity to put his theories to work. By the time his appointment finally cleared the Senate, it was already July. But even then, the bureaucratic fencing continued.

“Verga just stayed in place,” deGraffenreid recalls. “I arrived – I had put my company out of business – and this guy wouldn’t leave his job. He had big office and I was put in the back room, next to the refrigerator, the copying machine, and the coffee-maker.”

That wasn’t the worst, deGraffenreid said. “I’m an old Navy pilot. I’ve lived in a hangar, so that part didn’t bother me. But then I went to Doug [Feith], and to use an old Navy term, I said, ‘What the f—?” Verga had used the six months he was alone in his office with only Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz above him to ingratiate himself with his new bosses. “He made them feel they owed him something, so they kept him in place,” deGraffenreid said.

It reminded him of Cook County, Illinois, where he had grown up. “If you wanted your street paved, you went to Mayor Daley. The Pentagon in July 2001 was like Cook Country in 1962. The Clintonistas were the Mayor Daley who ran the place. It took me six months to get rid of the son of a bitch,” he said of Verga. “I’m not sure that Rumsfeld and his undersecretaries ever recovered from that situation.”

Feith’s reputation as someone who refused to confront the partisan Democrats in the bureaucracy who was undercutting his own employees became legendary over the next five years. “They asked us to stick out our necks for this president,” another appointee who worked with Feith told me in confidence. “And then they chopped them off.”

While any new administration needs the benefit of experience of career diplomats, military officers, and intelligence experts, since the September 11 attacks these positions became critical in a way that only happens in times of war.

Richard Clarke was just the sort of person a new administration would want to have around as it crafted its approach to the terrorist threat from al-Qaeda. As counterterrorism “czar” during most of the eight Clinton years, he arguably knew more about al-Qaeda then any other American official.

But as Clarke’s strident and highly personal denunciation of the president and his top advisor’s during his March 2004 testimony before the 9/11 Commission showed, that experience could become a double-edged sword. Clarke’s self-serving account of how the Bush team failed to grapple with the al-Qaeda threat during the first eight months in office conveniently left out the failures of eight years of the Clinton administration, when the United States was attacked five times by al-Qaeda and did almost nothing in response. Clarke also neglected to mention in his public testimony that until just two months before the September 11 attacks, “nearly all the senior counterterrorism and intelligence officials on duty at the time were holdovers from the Clinton administration,” Waller noted.

“We were really quite taken aback by Clarke’s public testimony,” 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman told me the day after Clarke appeared before the Commission. “It differed dramatically with the fifteen hours of detailed, dispassionate testimony he gave in closed session, which was much more of an indictment of the eight Clinton years then the eight months of Bush. There was just a lot more policy to criticize. There wasn’t a lot of policy to criticize under Bush because the administration didn’t have its people in place for most of the eight months. Hell hath no fury like a bureaucratic scorned.” Lehman believed Clarke was bitter because the Bush White House hadn’t recognized his talents and given him the same power he had under Clinton, when he was treated as a member of the cabinet.

It appears those eight months of sabotage done by the Democrats worked quite well, and it continued for many years. To this day we live with the Democrat burrowers who have dug themselves into the State Department and never left. Hell, out of the 270 political appointee positions at the Pentagon, almost every single one was held by a holdover for the first five years of Bush’s presidency.

More on that in the next post.

Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender, a book by Kenneth Timmerman, is chock full of facts on how various people within our State Department and Intelligence agencies undermined the war. As I did with The Looming Tower I am going to take excerpts from the book for the readers to check out and digest. The first one being about those sixteen words and the Niger deal. You know those words. Tenet wrote in his book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA:

Later some would allege that this handful of words was critical to the decision that led the nation to war. Contemporaneous evidence doesn’t support that, but just try convincing people of that today.

But as Timmerman notes:

The real question is not whether the administration “lied” about the prewar intelligence. The Robb-Silberman Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, which delivered a 610-page report on the subject in March 2005, stated categorically that the CIA continued to believe in the authenticity of the Niger documents when Bush made the sppech, and that “no one in the Intelligence Community had asked that the line [the famous sixteen words] be removed.” The CIA continued to claim that it never actually looked at the documents until after the scandal broke, because they had other sources for the conclusion that Saddam Hussein was seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

A later Senate Select intelligence committee report, issued May 25, 2007, revealed that “the Intelligence community used or cleared the Niger-Iraq uranium intelligence fifteen times before the President’s State of the Union address and four times after, saying in several papers that Iraq was “vigorously pursuing uranium from Africa” [emphasis in the original]. According to Richard Perle, Sire Richard Dearlove, who was head of British intelligence at the time, insisted over breakfast in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in early 2007 that he still stood by the original story. “Dearlove told me that the basis he used for the assessment that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger had nothing to do with the bogus documents,” Perle told me.

The real question was whether the Niger documents were a plant, and elaborate sting operation by the President’s enemies aimed at leading him into an error they would later claim he had known about all along.

It all started with a former Italian policeman named Rocco Martino whom the French intelligence codenamed Giacomo.

…he had worked for Egyptian intelligence and the Italian military, and in 1996 became a paid informer for the French Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieur (DGSE). In 1999, he provided his French intelligence clients with genuine documents that revealed how Niger planned to expand trade with Iraq, apparently through clandestine uranium sales.

The French continued to express interest in Niger, so Martino looked for more documents. Through an old contact at Italy’s military intelligence agency, Colonel Antonia Nucera, he hooked up with a sixty-year old Italian secretary at the Niger embassy. She was on the books of SISMI (Servizio per la Informazione e la Sicurezza Militare) as a paid informer, code-named La Signora.

“I limited myself to supplying Martino with copies of embassy documents in which there were traces of Niger agreements, in particular with Iraq,” she later told Rome judge Franco Ionta.

In 2001 there was a break-in to the Niger embassy and the place was ransacked. At the time they believed nothing of value had been stolen but soon after the breakin the fake Niger documents began to appear.

Some accounts say Martino forged them while others say SISMI did and had Martino peddle them.

“I began to have my suspicions about Rocco Martino after the theft in the embassy in 2001,” said La Signora. What tipped her off was Martino’s insistence on having a copy of a Niger-Iraq uranium contract that didn’t exit. “Martino always told me that if ever he got hold of an eventual contract between the two parties he would have gained a considerable sum from a certain intelligence company in Brussel to which he belonged.” Everyone understood she was referring to French intelligence, the DGSE.

In the summer of 2001 Martino handed the forged document to the DGSE after which the French told the US State Department that they had information that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from Niger and the rest is history.

But all that is not the real story here. The real story is how people inside our own government conspired to keep the fact that these were forgeries a secret.

On October 15, 2001, the day Berlusconi finally met with Bush in the Oval Office, the new head of SISMI, Nicolo Pollari, briefed the CIA Rome station chief on the alleged Niger-Iraq uranium deal. Pollari knew he had to play his cards close to the vest, because signatures and named had been altered on the Niger documents. So rather then give the doctored documents to CIA station chief Jeff Castelli, he let him look through them and scribble a few hasty notes on their content.

Castelli’s report to Langley formed the basis for the first intelligence reports on the Niger deal which was picked up by Castelli’s division chief Tyler Drumheller who later put it into the daily Senior Executive Intelligence Brief on October 18, 2001.

Pollari went back to Castelli three days later with a page and a half note, explaining that the “information comes from a credible source,” a reference to the SISMI informant, La Signora.

Castelli forwarded three reports on three seperate occasions to Drumheller. After he retired from the Agency in February 2005, Drumheller became an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, and claimed that Castelli considered the Niger reports “bullshit.”

Neither Castelli nor Drumheller ever tried to expose them as forgeries, however. On the contrary: their reporting helped to validate the forged Niger documents, as the Robb-Silberman Commission investigating U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s WMD program later found.

It was an extraordinary accomplishment by the shadow warriors. They had taken fakes and laundered them through the system, all the while claiming their innocence.

Meanwhile, Rocco Martino went to London, where he delivered a copy of the Niger documents to MI6. British intelligence contributed its own reports to Washington based at least in part on the faked documents. These reports also flowed through the CIA’s European division chief, Tyler Drumheller. This created the illusion of multiple, independent reporting streams on the alleged deal. Bush ultimately relied on the British reports, summarized in a public dossier released by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office in September 2002, for the basis of the sixteen words on Iraq’s uranium procurement efforts that made its way into his State of the Union message in January 2003.

Later, the Director of the Office of Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), Greg Thielman, would tell reporters that he had seen through the scam from the start. Italian reporters asked him what SISMI’s role in the whole thing was:

“SISMI, like the CIA and the entire Anglo-Saxon intelligence community, is ready and willing to satisy the hawks in the U.S. administration.”

But Thielman’s description didn’t fit the likes of CIA officers Jeff Castelli or Tyler Drumheller, who opposed the “hawks of the U.S. administration.” It was another careful piece of subterfuge by the shadow warriors.

After leaving INR in September 2002, Thielman revealed his true colors, going to work for the Democratic staff of the Senate intelligence committee. By this point, [Carl] Levin was gearing up to spring his trap. And all the while this extraordinary intelligence coup against the President by CIA and State Department intelligence officers and their accomplices in Congress was being set in motion, no one pursued the very real contacts between Saddam’s nuclear advisor, Wissam al-Zahawie, and the Niger government.

More to come.