The Department of Defense (DoD) was asked by Sen. Carl Levin and other Congressional leaders to determine if Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith had acted criminally by presenting a pair of briefings to the Bush Administration before the invasion of Iraq. DoD’s interim Inspector General found that there was no criminal activity, but that Feith and his policy office had acted “inappropriately.” Specifically, the Inspector General’s report said that Feith and his office had, "developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers.” It was also determined that because Feith and his office were a policy forming entity, and not an intelligence agency, that they had misrepresented themselves.
What’s interesting here is that the very same members of Congress who continue to point fingers at Doug Feith and his office are without a doubt guilty of the very same charges they imagined and demanded be investigated! Most of those who have called for the criminal investigation into Feith and his office (particularly Senator Carl Levin and Senator Rockefeller) have been members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Oversight. However, they would have us believe that they are really members of the Senate Intelligence Agency; an entity that does not exist.
This committee has repeatedly been called upon to investigate and report to the public on intelligence failures. It has produced reports that reviewed the actions of all 16 intelligence agencies and combined those to form conclusions that would aid in future oversight and enhance (or often rebuild) intelligence agency capabilities. However, the committee has increasingly moved towards a different role; a role where it no longer reports on the conclusions of intelligence agencies and now forms its own. It then presents these conclusions to the American public as though they were the conclusions of any-let alone all-of the American community of intelligence agencies. I doing so, they are misrepresenting the findings of their reports to the ultimate American policy makers: The American People
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Oversight (often called the Senate Intelligence Committee) is not an intelligence agency. It has no more right, ability, or reasonability to form its own intelligence conclusions than Doug Feith or any other non-intelligence agency. It does was not created to develop, produce, and disseminate intelligence data as though it were an intelligence agency. If Feith is guilty of acting inappropriately by misrepresenting his office as an intelligence agency, then so too are all the members of the Senate Intelligence Agency-err, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Oversight (often called the Senate Intelligence Committee).
The problem that Senator Levin and others claimed to have had with the reporting from Feith’s office was that it was “cherry-picked” and provided raw intelligence reports and preliminary assessments without the proper context, without the caveats that accompanied them, and as though they were fully presented. This is, however, exactly what one finds when reading the reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding their investigations into the 911 attacks, pre-war intelligence on Iraq, and post-war evaluation of evidence collected since the invasion. In all three cases, reports have been given by the Senate Intelligence Agency to the American people that were was “cherry-picked,” provided raw intelligence reports and preliminary assessments did so without the proper or correct context, and almost always without the caveats that accompanied them.
Perhaps the greatest example of this is the question of ties between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda. The 911 Commission looked into the relationship between the regime and Al Qaeda, but-as members reported after their final report was released-there was little information on the subject. After all, from 1998 to 9/11/01, there were barely 40 people in all of the intelligence services collecting information on Al Qaeda and Bin Laden. Similarly, after 1998 the CIA didn’t have a single spy inside Iraq, and they were relying entirely on information that was years old, came second or third-hand, and was often based on mass media reports or unreliable escapees from the regime. With little information collected on Al Qaeda, and almost no new information collected regarding Iraq…it’s no wonder that there was little information on the relationship between the two. 911 Commission members clarified their claims that there was “no evidence of a collaborative relationship” by saying there was almost no evidence collected. What they failed to point out was that of the scant information regarding the relationship between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda, almost none of it had been analyzed. It was a taboo subject in the CIA before 911.
From both Houses of Congress, the White House, and from others an analysis was demanded into determining the depth and danger of the relationship between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda. Yet, across the board, all 16 intelligence agencies flat out refused to form a conclusion as to whether or not the relationship was a threat to the United States or whether or not to even say that there was a relationship at all. There was just not enough information to form a conclusion one way or the other.
Of all the intelligence agencies, only the CIA was willing to even broach the matter with a pamphlet/”report,” but that was only after being pressed hard by the White House, the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the State Department, the Defense Department, etc. The CIA report was murky, vague, and non-conclusive, and it made no bones about it by pointing out the limited means with which a conclusion could be formed by titling the paper (not big enough to even call a report), "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship," June 21, 2002.
In fact, there were several pre-war publications that tried to determine if there was a relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam’s regime (a claim stemming from the 1990’s via mainstream media and the Clinton Administration), but none of them made any conclusions as to the depth of the relationship (depth that could run the gamut from no relationship at all to the closest of allies). Among these reports were:
- President’s Daily Brief (PDB) -Sept, 21, 2001
- NESA Report on Iraq’s Ties to Terrorism (terrorism in general/not specific to Al Qaeda). -October 2001
- "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship" -6/12/02
- “Iraqi Support for Terrorism 2002”-9/18/02
- Letter from DCI Tenet, head of the CIA, to Sen. Bob Graham, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee-10/7/02
- “Report of the Joint Inquiry Into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001-By the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence”-December 2002
- “Iraqi Support for Terrorism 2003”-January 2003
- “Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Investigation Into Pre-War Intelligence on Iraq (Phase I report)”-July 7, 2004
- “911 Commission Final Report”-July 22, 2004
- “Iraqi Perspective Project Report” (DoD)-March 2006
- “Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on Postwar Findings About Iraq’s WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How They Compare with Prewar Assessments (Phase II report)” -September 9, 2006
This last report-like its predecessors-cited the refusal of every intelligence agency to conduct a post-war investigation into pre-war intelligence regarding the threat posed by a relationship between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda. The committee took that problem, and rather than perform oversight of the agencies and demand investigations, the Senate Intelligence Committee took it upon itself to act as an intelligence agency and form an intelligence assessment on its own.
The CIA has not published a “fully researched, coordinated and approved position” on the postwar reporting on the former regime’s links to al-Qaeda, but has published such a paper on the postwar reporting on Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi and the former Iraqi regime. The CIA told the Committee that regarding Iraq’s links to terrorism, “the research the Counterterrorist Center has done on this issue has called into question some of the reports of contacts and training…revealed other contacts of which we were unaware, and shed new light on some contacts that appeared in prewar reporting. On balance, this research suggests that the prewar judgment remains valid.“l54 (Previous investigations had determined that pre-war judgments were “accurate” and “reasonable.”)
Amazingly enough, the conclusions formed by the Senate Intelligence Agency and presented in this report are not at all supported by the report itself and are often directly in contradiction to statements previous to those “conclusions.” The former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee knew that the report was a political lie, and he made it very clear in the additional comments section of the report,
“Simply stated, this second series of reports is designed to point fingers in Washington and at the Administration. The conclusions in the reports were crafted with more partisan bias than we have witnessed in a long time in Congress. The “Phase II” investigation has turned the Senate Intelligence Committee, a committee initially designed to be the most bipartisan committee in the Senate, into a political playground stripped of its bipartisan power, and this fact has not gone unnoticed in the Intelligence Community.” (pg146).
With those words, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Oversight (i.e. the Senate Intelligence Committee) turned itself into the Senate Intelligence Agency, and with the release of their non-conclusive conclusions (statements that aren’t even backed by the report itself), the would-be Congressional intelligence agency and its members became as guilty of misleading policy makers, of cherry-picking intelligence reporting, of forming incorrect and misleading conclusions, and of acting as inappropriately as Doug Feith and his office…if not equally as illegally.
Crossposted from The New Media Journal
Author of “Reparations and America’s 2nd Civil War
Reparations and America’s 2nd Civil War: Malensek, Scott: 9798864028674: Amazon.com: Books