It is a disgrace that you are reading about this
"supplementary annexe" in the Telegraph instead of
hearing about it on SeeNotNews or reading about it
from Associated Press, but thanks to the Internet
Information Rebellion, here it is...
Julian Coman, Telegraph (UK): According to dramatic
testimony contained in the annexe, Mr Feith's cell
undermined the credibility of CIA judgments on Iraq's
alleged al-Qa'eda links within the highest levels of
the Bush administration.
The cell appears to have been set up by Mr Feith as an
adjunct to the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon
intelligence-gathering operation established in the
wake of 9/11 with the authority of Paul Wolfowitz. Its
focus quickly became the al-Qa'eda-Saddam link.
On occasion, without informing the then head of the
CIA, George Tenet, the group gave counter-briefings in
the White House. Sen Jay Rockefeller, the most senior
Democrat on the committee, said that Mr Feith's cell
may even have undertaken "unlawful"
intelligence-gathering initiatives.
The claims will lead to calls by Democrats for the
resignation of Mr Feith, the third-ranking civilian at
the Department of Defence and a leading "neo-con"
hawk. "Tenet fell on his sword," said one Democrat
official, "even though it's clear that he was placed
under tremendous pressure to come up with the 'right'
intelligence product for the administration on Iraq.
"The testimony to the committee on Feith and other
Pentagon officials shows just what kind of pressure
was being exerted. And when that didn't work, the
Pentagon was just coming up with its own answers and
feeding them to the White House. And on al-Qa'eda they
got it all wrong."
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
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Fury over Pentagon cell that briefed White House on Iraq's 'imaginary' al-Qaeda links
By Julian Coman in Washington
(Filed: 11/07/2004)
A Senior Pentagon policy maker created an unofficial
"Iraqi intelligence cell" in the summer of 2002 to
circumvent the CIA and secretly brief the White House
on links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'eda,
according to the Senate intelligence committee.
The allegations about Douglas Feith, the number three
at the Department of Defence, are made in a
supplementary annexe of the committee's review of the
intelligence leading to war in Iraq, released on
Friday.
According to dramatic testimony contained in the
annexe, Mr Feith's cell undermined the credibility of
CIA judgments on Iraq's alleged al-Qa'eda links within
the highest levels of the Bush administration.
The cell appears to have been set up by Mr Feith as an
adjunct to the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon
intelligence-gathering operation established in the
wake of 9/11 with the authority of Paul Wolfowitz. Its
focus quickly became the al-Qa'eda-Saddam link.
On occasion, without informing the then head of the
CIA, George Tenet, the group gave counter-briefings in
the White House. Sen Jay Rockefeller, the most senior
Democrat on the committee, said that Mr Feith's cell
may even have undertaken "unlawful"
intelligence-gathering initiatives.
The claims will lead to calls by Democrats for the
resignation of Mr Feith, the third-ranking civilian at
the Department of Defence and a leading "neo-con"
hawk. "Tenet fell on his sword," said one Democrat
official, "even though it's clear that he was placed
under tremendous pressure to come up with the 'right'
intelligence product for the administration on Iraq.
"The testimony to the committee on Feith and other
Pentagon officials shows just what kind of pressure
was being exerted. And when that didn't work, the
Pentagon was just coming up with its own answers and
feeding them to the White House. And on al-Qa'eda they
got it all wrong."
Last night a senior Pentagon adviser confirmed that Mr
Feith was being targeted by senators unhappy that the
administration has so far escaped censure for its use
of intelligence.
"There are senators who are clearly gunning for
Douglas Feith now. This is turning into a classic
conspiracy investigation. They want to get Feith and
see if, through Feith, they can go up the ladder to
even bigger fish."
Mr Feith's role is to be examined further in the
second phase of the Senate committee's investigations,
which will deal with the Bush administration's use of
the intelligence it received. The report by the
Republican-dominated committee lambasted the CIA for
intelligence failures while concluding that there was
no evidence that the Bush administration tried to
coerce officials to adapt their findings.
Yet the annexe - written by three leading Democratic
senators - contains the strongest evidence yet that
Pentagon hardliners sought to sideline the CIA during
a drive to talk up a connection between Saddam and
Osama bin Laden.
After the September 11 attacks, tension had grown
between Pentagon officials and CIA agents, who
suspected the Department of Defence of relying too
heavily on dubious testimony from Iraqi defectors in
order to justify a war against Iraq.
The CIA's investigation of links between Iraq and
al-Qa'eda was almost the only aspect of the agency's
intelligence-gathering to escape severe censure in the
511-page report. Sen Rockefeller, the senator for West
Virginia, said: "Our report found that the
intelligence community's judgments were right on
Iraq's ties to terrorists. There was no evidence of
the formal relationship, however you want to describe
it, between Iraq and al-Qa'eda, and no evidence that
existed of Iraq's complicity or assistance in
al-Qa'eda's terrorist attacks."
Pentagon officials who appeared before the Senate
committee testified that Mr Feith and others believed
that the CIA was not sufficiently aggressive in its
investigation of links between Saddam and al-Qa'eda.
During the summer of 2002, administration hardliners
believed that evidence of a connection between Iraq
and the terrorist organisation would provide a
clinching argument for war.
After the publication in June 2002 of a cautious
report by the CIA entitled Iraq and al-Qa'eda: A Murky
Relationship, Mr Feith passed on a written verdict to
the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, that the
report should be read "for content only - and CIA's
interpretation should be ignored".
In August 2002, Mr Feith's cell gave a briefing to Mr
Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, which
included a stinging condemnation of the CIA's
intelligence assessment techniques.
In sharp contrast to the Senate intelligence
committee's criticisms of "over-reaching" and
"exaggeration" by CIA agents, the Pentagon briefing
criticised the agency for requiring "juridical
evidence" for its findings and for the "consistent
underestimation" of the possibility that Iraq and
al-Qa'eda were attempting to conceal their
collaboration.
In another incident, Mr Feith's Pentagon cell
postponed the publication of a CIA assessment of
Iraq's links to terrorism after a visit to CIA
headquarters at which "numerous objections" were made
to a final draft.
In particular, Pentagon officials insisted that more
should be made of an alleged meeting between the
September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi
official in Prague in April 2001. The CIA judged
reports of the meeting not to be credible, a verdict
vindicated on Friday by the Senate committee report.
Most remarkably, on September 16, 2002, two days
before the CIA was to produce its postponed
assessment, Mr Feith's cell went directly to the White
House and gave an alternative briefing to
Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and to
the National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's
deputy.
The briefing contained the section alleging
"fundamental problems" with CIA
intelligence-gathering. It also gave a detailed
breakdown of the alleged meeting between Atta and an
Iraqi agent.
The following week, senior Bush officials made
confident statements on the existence of a link
between Saddam and al-Qa'eda. Mr Tenet would learn of
the secret briefing only in March 2004.
6 June 2004: The first fall guy