Trump Falsely Smears CIA on Iraq War Intelligence
1. THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE MADE THE INTELLIGENCE CASE FOR WAR, NOT THE CIA
As someone that claimed that he was against the Iraq war, Trump should know that it was the Department of Defense [Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle] that made the intelligence case for war with Iraq and not the CIA. Here is what we know following the investigations of the intelligence failures on Iraq funding terrorists and having weapons of mass destruction:
THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE RELIED ON CHALABI FOR CASE FOR WAR EVEN THOUGH THE CIA SAID HE WAS NOT CREDIBLE
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle decided to rely on the intelligence of an Iraqi defector, Ahmad Chalabi, to make their intelligence case for war. The CIA specifically told them Chalabi was NOT credible.
"From the beginning, the military and the CIA did not trust Chalabi, with General Tommy Franks specifically despising him. When Chalabi demanded to be on the scene for the fall of Saddam's statue, Franks said no, defying Secretary Rumsfeld."
www.foxnews.com…/war-in-iraq-what-really-happened.h… www.newyorker.com…
"[T]he Bush administration 'trusted him [Chalabi] more than they trusted the CIA,' said one U.S. intelligence official." www.mcclatchydc.com…/iraq-int…/article24463924.html…
[F]ormer C.I.A. Middle East station chief told me, essentially because the agency had doubts about Chalabi’s integrity. (In 1992, Chalabi was convicted in absentia of bank fraud in Jordan. He has always denied any wrongdoing.) 'You had to treat them with suspicion,' another former Middle East station chief said of Chalabi’s people. 'The I.N.C. has a track record of manipulating information because it has an agenda. It’s a political unit—not an intelligence agency.'”
"With the Pentagon’s support, Chalabi’s group worked to put defectors with compelling stories in touch with reporters in the United States and Europe. The resulting articles had dramatic accounts of advances in weapons of mass destruction or told of ties to terrorist groups. In some cases, these stories were disputed in analyses by the C.I.A."
The Department of Defense, relying on Chalabi, produced a defector that they said claimed he received instructions on how to use chemical and biological weapons.
"A month later, however, a team of C.I.A. agents went to interview the man with their own interpreter. “He says, ‘No, that’s not what I said,’ "the former intelligence official told me. “He said, ‘I worked at a fedayeen camp; it wasn’t Al Qaeda.’ He never saw any chemical or biological training.” Afterward, the former official said, 'the C.I.A. sent out a piece of paper saying that this information was incorrect. They put it in writing.” But the C.I.A. rebuttal, like the original report, was classified. “I remember wondering whether this one would leak and correct the earlier, invalid leak. Of course, it didn’t.'”
Joe Wilson, former Ambassador and CIA agent, told the Administration that Chalabi was lying Iraq buying Uranium from Africa. House Congressional Record, 2004 page 11324. In response, he and his wife were attacked by the Bush Administration. According to testimony in the House Congressional Hearing on the Intelligence failures:
“The CIA had been skeptical of Chalabi for years.” “Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Wolofowitz, Mr. Feith, along with Mr. Cheney, bought Chalabi’s likes hook, line, and sinker. It is because he was telling them, in my judgment, what they wanted to hear.”
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“What happened here was that the CIA had good reason not to trust the information that they were getting from Mr. Chalabi, and they kept telling the White House that. But the people in this administration, if they have a belief, it mist be right, and it really does not matter what the evidence is. So what they did was, Mr. Rumsfeld set up his own intelligence agency, heretofore never in existence in the Pentagon; and it was their special little intelligence shop which they staffed with the people who worked for the neocons, who were basically going to tell the neocons whatever they wanted to hear.”
House Congressional Hearing June 2, 2004, page 11324.
The White House relied on the intelligence from Rumsfeld’s special intelligence agency even though the CIA kept saying the intelligence was not accurate.
2. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE SET UP IT’S OWN INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, “OFFICE OF SPECIAL PLANNING,” TO REVIEW & CHERRY-PICK INTELLIGENCE TO MAKE CASE FOR WAR
Moreover, we know that the CIA said that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle "cherry-picked" the CIA intelligence to build a case to go to war. It was NOT the CIA giving them bad intelligence. Here is an article that shows that the Bush Administration had, at that time, intelligence reports showing that no weapons of mass destruction existed: www.theatlantic.com…/remembering-why-americ…/244306/ Rumsfeld, Wolofitz, and Perle set up an Office of Special Planning to sort through all of the intelligence information and to cherry-pick it to find a case for war. From the above New Yorker article on this:
"Rumsfeld and his colleagues believed that the C.I.A. was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. 'The agency [CIA] was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,' the Pentagon adviser told me."
From the New York Times:
"The C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies found little evidence to support the Pentagon's view of an increasingly unified terrorist threat or links between Mr. Hussein and Mr. bin Laden, and still largely dismiss those ideas."
www.nytimes.com…/how-pair-s-finding-on-terror-led-t…
The Defense Department specifically set up an "Office of Special Plans" to look through all of the intelligence themselves for the very reason that the CIA had not found evidence. Richard Perle said that they needed a new group to sort through the intelligence:
"Because the CIA and the DIA were not looking. They had filtered out the whole set of possibilities, because it was inconsistent with their model. If you're walking down the street, [if] you're not looking for hidden treasure, you won't find it. If you're looking for it, you may find something. In this case, they hadn't been looking." Frontline interview with Richard Perle July 10, 2003.
“Within a very short period of time, the Office of Special Plans began to find "links" that nobody else had previously understood or recorded in a useful way.” "Rumsfeld had ordered up an intelligence operation 'to search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists' that might have been overlooked by the C.I.A."
"The former intelligence official went on, 'One of the reasons I left was my sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with—to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.” He added, 'If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.'”
