The Intelligence Was Being Fixed Around The Policy

The latest "book about politics I simply have to read but have such a backlog that I won't get around to it for two years" appears to be The Italian Letter, which has actually been out there for a little while. Because talking about the run-up to war is "old news" and coincidentally deeply embarrassing to the traditional media, not much has been made of the revelations in the book, which generally concerns the Niger forgeries but also delves a bit into prewar intelligence. Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution notices some facts that should be, well, relevant:

There were strong indications that Foley all along was toeing a line he did not believe. Several days after Bush's State of the Union speech, Foley briefed student officers at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, DC. After the briefing, Melvin Goodman, who had retired from the CIA and was then on the university's faculty, brought Foley into the secure communications area of the Fort McNair compound. Goodman thanked Foley for addressing the students and asked him what weapons of mass destruction he believed would be found after the invasion. "Not much, if anything," Goodman recalled that Foley responded. Foley declined to be interviewed for this book [...]

One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center's analysts: "If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so." The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.

"Foley" is Alan Foley, and at the time he was in charge of the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC). So this is a fairly important person in the chain of command on intelligence, particularly WMD intelligence, which was a central foundation for the war. And here we have him allegedly telling his staffers to find some justification for a preordained policy. Schwarz finds this passage, of someone high up the intelligence ladder telling subordinates to find the intelligence to justify the war, in several other books, but never attributed to Foley. He writes:

Any serious congressional strategy to end this war would include nationally televised hearings about this and all the other lies that got us into Iraq. The seriousness of the Democrats can be judged by such hearings' non-existence.

Of course, the thing is that they're somewhat embarrassed about it as well. After all, 94 senators didn't read the pre-war NIE on Iraq, and they weren't all Republicans. This is a time period that neither party wants to revisit, particularly in an election season where the front-runners on both sides of the aisle have so much culpability for this mistake. And yet it's crucial that they do revisit this time period. For the fact that it was impossible to take the nation to war without lying informs the fact that the policy is never likely to work. The mission was so unclear that lies had to be invented to give it shape. We found out this week that Doug Feith's office was making up names of Dutch companies that were supposedly the key to linking Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden:

On or around 25 July 2002, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (OUSDP) of the US gave a briefing entitled 'Assessing the Relationship Between Iraq and al-Qaida'. This alternative intelligence report wrote that Osama Bin Laden's al-Hijra Company had contacts with the Netherlands-based company Vlemmo NV, which was allegedly involved in the purchase by Iraq of military equipment, Verhagen confirmed.

But "the company Vlemmo is unknown in the Netherlands," according to the minister. "The company has never been registered with the Chamber of Commerce in the Netherlands and is also not known to the tax service. That the company may have served as a front for illegal arms trade with Iraq is equally unknown to me."

The 2002 OUSDP report was made public last month by the chairman of the US Senate's defence committee, Carl Levin. "The contents of the intelligence report has only become known to me following the recent publication of the document," said Verhagen.

Feith, aka "the stupidest fucking man on the planet" according to Tommy Franks, was busily construcing false companies in the Netherlands on which to lay his claims while systematically shutting out of government anyone who actually knew anything about the Middle East:

Patrick Lang told a hilarious story the other night, for example, about a job interview he had with Douglas Feith, a key architect of the invasion of Iraq.

It was at the beginning of the first Bush term. Lang had been in charge of the Middle East, South Asia and terrorism for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1990s. Later he ran the Pentagon's worldwide spying operations.

"He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me," Lang recalled, "which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers -- they always had briefing papers, you know -- about me.

"He's looking at this stuff, and he says, 'I've heard of you. I heard of you.'

"He says, 'Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?'

"And I said, 'Yeah, that's really true.'

"That's too bad," Feith said.

The audience howled.

"That was the end of the interview," Lang said. "I'm not quite sure what he meant, but you can work it out."

They didn't want anyone around who had a clue because their pretexts for war were so transparent they wouldn't be sufficient to cover Janet Jackson's nipple and pass FCC standards.

It's nice that the Senate is finally able to put together a Phase II report about prewar intelligence. But based on these stunning revelations which are going almost entirely unnoticed, it's clear that more is needed. Remember when everyone thought that the Downing Street Memo would be enough to bring down the Bush Administration? It wasn't. But not because it wasn't an excellent launching pad to investigate how the President deliberately misled this country into an unnecessary war. It's because there wasn't any follow-up, with the Republicans in power. Now that's not the case; Democrats are in power, and we're continuing to flounder in this foreign policy nightmare. And it will not improve until we confront the fact that we were pushed to war under false pretenses, and are therefore over there illegally, without a clear mission, and must leave.