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PR Push for Iraq War Preceded Intelligence Findings

John Prados | 24.08.2008 14:00 | Analysis | Anti-militarism | Terror War | World

The U.S. intelligence community buckled sooner in 2002 than previously
reported to Bush administration pressure for data justifying an invasion of
Iraq, according to a documents posting on the Web today by National Security
Archive senior fellow John Prados.

The documents suggest that the public relations push for war came before the
intelligence analysis, which then conformed to public positions taken by
Pentagon and White House officials. For example, a July 2002 draft [1] of
the "White Paper" ultimately issued by the CIA in October 2002 [2] actually
pre-dated the National Intelligence Estimate that the paper purportedly
summarized, but which Congress did not insist on until September 2002.

A similar comparison between a declassified draft [3] and the final version
[4] of the British government's "White Paper" on Iraq weapons of mass
destruction adds to evidence that the two nations colluded in the effort to
build public support for the invasion of Iraq. Dr. Prados concludes that the
new evidence tends to support charges raised by former White House press
secretary Scott McClellan and by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
in its long-delayed June 2008 "Phase II" report on politicization of
intelligence.

On June 5, 2008 the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released
a report examining whether the public statements made by U.S. officials,
including President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary
of State Colin L. Powell, and others were consonant with U.S. intelligence
information. This report forms part of a second phase of the SSCI's
investigation of Iraq intelligence issues, most especially Saddam Hussein's
possible Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program, originally approved by
the Intelligence Committee in February 2004 but stalled by its Republican
majority for several years, until the majority changed with the current
110th Congress. Committee chairman Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV)
then ordered work on this inquiry resumed, and the present report is the
result.

The appearance of this long-awaited SSCI "Phase II" report coincided with
controversy over the revelations of former White House press secretary Scott
McClellan who, in a memoir appearing almost simultaneously, argued that "in
the fall of 2002, Bush and his White House were engaging in a carefully
orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to
our advantage." (Note 1 [5] ) A review of new evidence along with
previously-available documents sheds important new light on this debate.
Among the findings:

· The Phase II report on Bush administration public statements, in
conjunction with the SSCI's original July 2004 report on Iraq's alleged
Weapons of Mass Destruction, indicates that political manipulation
extended beyond the intelligence itself to affect investigation of the
intelligence failures on Iraq as well as the Bush administration's use
of that information.
· In conjunction with other recently declassified materials, the Phase II
report shows that the Bush administration solicited intelligence then
used to "substantiate" its public claims.
· A recently declassified draft of the CIA's October 2002 white paper on
Iraqi WMD programs demonstrates that that paper long pre-dated the
compilation of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi capabilities.
· The timing of the CIA's draft white paper coincides with a previously
available draft of the British Government's white paper on Iraqi WMD,
demonstrating that the Bush administration and the Tony Blair government
began acting in concert to build support for an invasion of Iraq two to
three months earlier than previously understood.
· A comparison of the CIA draft white paper with its publicly released
edition shows that all the changes made were in the nature of
strengthening its charges against Iraq by inserting additional alarming
claims, in the manner of an advocacy, or public relations document. The
draft and final papers show no evidence of intelligence analysis applied
to the information contained. Similar comparison of the British white
paper shows the same phenomenon at work.
· Declassified Pentagon documents demonstrate that the CIA white paper was
modified in ways that conformed to the desires of the Undersecretary of
Defense for Policy and his office, in much the same way that British
documents indicate that country's white paper was changed to conform to
the desires of the Blair government.

The many official investigations and unofficial investigations carried out,
plus the statements and speeches of former CIA officials defending
themselves against charges of distortion, have established a few points
beyond question. Most important, following Saddam Hussein's 1998 final
expulsion of UN weapons inspectors from Iraq, very little new information
fell into the hands of U.S. intelligence. Notable exceptions include data
from Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, recruited as a CIA source (Note 2
[6]), and from Iraqi scientists clandestinely approached by the CIA under a
covert program. (Note 3 [7]) Both these streams of information denied the
existence of Iraqi WMD. On the other side were data from Iraqi exile sources
that claimed all sorts of WMD and a set of fabricated documents alleging an
Iraqi deal to buy uranium ore in Niger. The only concrete "find" was of a
shipment of aluminum tubes being imported into Iraq, but analysts were
divided over whether these tubes had anything to do with WMD at all. U.S.
intelligence largely discounted the (accurate) details from Sabri and the
scientists and-despite the CIA's expressed misgivings-made use of the exile
data. This thin data conditioned the intelligence analysis.

There was also a source of intelligence failure that flowed not from bad
information but from analytical procedures. American intelligence knew that
Saddam had worked through the 1990s to deceive UN weapons inspectors-they
assumed he was hiding his WMDs rather than concealing the lack of them. On
specific weapons, for example long-range Iraqi missiles, intelligence took a
standard accounting approach, and since they could not account for every
Iraqi missile, assumed Saddam was hiding a covert force of ballistic
missiles. U.S. intelligence was coming off a record of underestimating Iraqi
WMD progress in the 1980s and now overcompensated in the other direction.

The recent SSCI Phase II report concludes that Bush administration
statements, while "substantiated" by the CIA reporting, went beyond that
data. The Republican minority on the committee attacked that conclusion. The
main defense offered-and repeated by media commentators-is that the root
cause of the administration's Iraq hysteria was intelligence failure, not
intent to manipulate the American public. A typical formulation is that of
columnist Fred Hiatt in the Washington Post, who argued that "the phony
‘Bush Lied' story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact
that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and
everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong."
(Note 4 [8])

But the question of the role of threat manipulation in the origins of the
Iraq war is complex and goes beyond analytical failure. Its center is the
degree to which the Iraq intelligence was politicized. Absent the drumbeat
for war, even exaggerated estimates of Iraqi WMD prowess would have
represented only a standard foreign policy problem. Bush administration
intentions made a difference. Both the SSCI Phase I report and that of the
Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States on Weapons
of Mass Destruction (the Silberman-Robb Commission) investigation, though
arguing that no politicization had occurred, also cited cases suggesting the
opposite. Former national intelligence officer Paul Pillar told an audience
at the Council on Foreign Relations that the Silberman-Robb finding did not
surprise him for two reasons: because any intelligence analyst would be
reluctant to make the damning admission that his paper had been politicized,
and because "in my experience, the great majority of cases of actual
politicization-successful politicization-are invariably subtle." (Note 5 [9]
)

There were several avenues by which the Bush administration made its
preferences clear. Vice President Richard Cheney questioned his CIA briefers
aggressively, pressing them to the wall when he saw intelligence from other
agencies that portrayed a more somber picture than that in CIA's reporting.
He sent briefers back for more information, including in instances when they
checked with headquarters and returned with the same word. Cheney was
especially acerbic on CIA's rejection of claims that one of the 9/11
terrorists had met with Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague. On a number
of occasions, Cheney sent his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, to CIA
headquarters to follow up on his concerns. Mr. Cheney went there himself,
not just once but on almost a dozen occasions. The practice encouraged the
CIA to censor itself, driven, as Pillar put it, by "the desire to avoid the
unpleasantness of putting unwelcome assessments on the desks of
policymakers." (Note 6 [10])

A second avenue to influence U.S. intelligence lay through Donald Rumsfeld's
Pentagon. There, William Luti's Near East and South Asia unit of the Office
of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (OUSDP) was in close touch with
the Vice President's office. Papers circulated back and forth, and both
offices utilized claims from Iraqi exiles-claims that Saddam trained
terrorists or possessed various WMDs-to press the intelligence agencies for
similar information. Under Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense,
and the undersecretary for policy, Douglas Feith, the Pentagon formed a
special group to review reports on Saddam's links to Al Qaeda. This unit,
the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG) has been represented by
Feith as merely charged with assembling a briefing on terrorism, but its
real function was to bring additional pressure to bear on the CIA.

Not all the manipulation was visible. Behind the scenes at the State
Department, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, also closely allied with
the Office of the Vice President, pressured both the State Department and
the CIA to fire individuals who refused to clear text in his speeches
leveling the most extreme charges against other countries. Although Bolton's
actions did not concern Iraq directly, they came to a high point during the
summer of 2002-the exact moment when Iraq intelligence issues were on the
front burner-and they aimed at offices which played a central role in
producing Iraq intelligence. These included the Bureau of Intelligence and
Research at State plus the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and the
Weapons Intelligence, Proliferation and Arms Control (WINPAC) center at CIA.
Analysts working on Iraq intelligence could not be blamed for concluding
that their own careers might be in jeopardy if they supplied answers other
than what the Bush administration wanted to hear.

Under the circumstances, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the
CIA and other intelligence agencies defended themselves against the dangers
of attack from the Bush administration through a process of self-censorship.
That is the very essence of politicization in intelligence. And the degree
to which public statements on Iraq by Cheney, Bush, and others were
"substantiated" by the existing intelligence must be viewed through that
prism.

We shall offer only a few examples here. First is the case of the CIA white
paper, "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs." That document is dated
October 2002 [Document 1 [2] ] and was issued on October 4. It has been
represented as a distillation of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on
Iraq published two days earlier, with the most sensitive, secret information
stripped out. Posted here today is the major portion of the text of the same
paper in draft [Document 2 [1] ], as it existed in July 2002. This document
demonstrates that the white paper existed long before the NIE was even
requested by Congress. In fact the illustrations in the July version are the
same as those in the final report. A close comparison of the text shows,
further, that much of the argumentation is identical, and that the
differences between the two are strictly in the nature of separating text to
insert more charges or to sharpen them. The entire product has the character
of rhetoric. Little of the text shows the kind of approach characteristic of
intelligence analysis. The fact that this document was in preparation at the
CIA in July indicates that the Bush administration was actively engaged in a
process of building support for war months ahead of the time it has
previously been understood to have done so. In fact evidence exists that the
CIA white paper was commissioned as early as May 2002. (Note 7 [11] )

This point is made even sharper by recently declassified Department of
Defense documents, including a memorandum from the OUSDP that details the
kinds of information seen as desirable to obtain from intelligence in order
to strengthen the case for war against Iraq [Document 3 [12] ]. The timing
of this document suggests that this text was a response to the draft CIA
white paper, created at a point when Pentagon critics of CIA reporting were
actively pressing their case against the agency's refusal to accept
arguments that Saddam Hussein was allied with Al Qaeda. Changes in the CIA
white paper between its July draft and the final document track closely with
the OUSDP comments. The net impression is that the CIA white paper was
rewritten to conform to administration preferences. If so, U.S. intelligence
a priori made itself a tool of a political effort, vitiating the
intelligence function and confirming the presence of a politicized process.
The specific analytic failures on Iraq intelligence become much less
significant in such a climate, especially in that they all yielded
intelligence predictions of exactly the kind the Bush administration wanted
to hear.

This impression is strengthened, and suspicions of collusion broadened, when
the record of the British government's white paper on Iraqi WMD is laid side
by side with that of the CIA. In the course of British official
investigations of the antecedents to the war, and the death of physicist
David Kelly, a draft of the British white paper was released that is dated
June 20 [Document 4 [3]]. As in the American case, the Joint Intelligence
Committee, which originated this document and plays a role similar to that
of the National Intelligence Council in the U.S., modified its draft to
issue a final version on September 24, 2002, that was even more somber
[Document 5 [4]]. There is a considerable record on the Blair government's
efforts to shape the content of the British white paper in directions not
supported by the intelligence.

The second example concerns the U.S. government's use of information drawn
from Iraqi exile sources, principally those of the organization known as the
Iraqi National Congress (INC) [Document 6 [13]]. This anti-Saddam group has
had a long and stormy history with the CIA, which actually severed relations
with it, an action the Clinton administration's NSC Deputies Committee
approved in December 1996. The agency was later forced to resume ties, and
even to fund the group, as a result of the Iraq Liberation Act, which
Congress passed in 1998. Proponents of that legislation included many
individuals who became senior officials of the Bush administration. The
State Department took up funding of the INC. Both State and CIA questioned
the value of the intelligence it provided, and State in turn sought to end
the relationship. In 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) took over
responsibility for the Iraqi exiles. During this period the INC opened
channels to the Office of the Vice President as well as Pentagon units
responsible to Douglas Feith. In his own account of this period, Feith takes
pains to defend the exile group and its leaders. (Note 8 [14])

In the summer of 2002, the intelligence community compiled a detailed
assessment of the material provided by the INC on several subjects and found
it to have little current intelligence value, with sourcing and attribution
impossible to verify. (Note 9 [15] ) Despite this, and in spite of the fact
that the INC went beyond providing intelligence to using the defectors it
brought to the attention of the U.S. government as part of an anti-Saddam
publicity campaign, the SSCI report on the group concludes that "false
information from the Iraqi National Congress (INC)-affiliated sources was
used to support key Intelligence Community Assessments on Iraq and was
widely distributed in intelligence products prior to the war" (pp. 113-122).
Intelligence agencies also avoided identifying these sources as INC-related
in their reporting. Among the defectors was the notorious source
"Curveball," whose false allegations concerning Iraqi mobile biological
weapons factories underlay some of the most alarming Bush administration
charges against Baghdad.

This begs the question why, given distrust of the INC's information at both
the CIA and State Department, and an awareness of these doubts even within
the DIA, the data was used at all, much less relied upon. Part of the answer
no doubt has to do with the desperation of U.S. intelligence to obtain any
information from inside Iraq-in itself a reflection of an intelligence
failure. But the other part of the answer most likely flows directly from
the prodding of the intelligence community by high levels at the Pentagon
and White House for reactions to the defector information. This point stands
out in stark relief when contrasted with the fact that the alternate stream
of Iraqi insider information-from high-level agent sources and Iraqi
scientists-seems to have had no discernable role in U.S. intelligence
reporting. That is very arguably politicization.

Our third example has to do with the charges that Saddam sought to buy
uranium ore from the African country of Niger. As widely reported, this
affair involved fabricated documents, a Bush administration effort to
discredit the U.S. envoy sent to check on the report by outing his wife, a
CIA undercover officer; and ultimately, the criminal trial of Vice President
Cheney's top national security aide; but those matters are not of concern
now. What is disturbing here, in the context of politicization of the
intelligence, is the specific treatment the CIA gave to the information it
developed. The record is established by the SSCI Phase I report, the
Silberman-Robb report, and the proceedings of the trial of "Scooter" Libby,
Mr. Cheney's national security assistant. (Note 10 [16] )

On February 13, 2002 Vice President Cheney asked his CIA briefer about
reports that Iraq was procuring uranium in Niger [Document 7 [17] ]. Cheney
represented the information as having come from the DIA, which indeed had
issued an "executive highlight" on February 12. If this was in actuality
what Cheney saw, the DIA was basing its account on information provided by
Italian military intelligence, already aware of the fabricated Nigerien
documents that later became the heart of this affair. The CIA had reported
the same information a week earlier. The briefer promised to check, and the
CIA's WINPAC center prepared a note which observed that the foreign
information on which the claim was based was only single-source and lacked
crucial detail [Document 8 [18] ]. The agency subsequently set up a trip to
Niger by retired Ambassador Joseph V. Wilson IV, who returned with the
conclusion that there was no substance to these claims. Wilson arrived in
Niger on February 26 and returned on March 4. Just as Wilson came home, Vice
President Cheney renewed his inquiry into the Niger allegation, and WINPAC
responded by noting that the foreign intelligence service had no new
information, that the Nigerien government insisted it was making all efforts
to ensure that its uranium was used only for peaceful purposes, and that CIA
was about to debrief "a source who may have information related to the
alleged sale."

Ambassador Wilson was in fact debriefed by two CIA officers on March 5. The
way this was handled is what raises questions. Wilson's data was recorded by
the officers and written up by a reports officer who, according to the SSCI,
"added additional relevant information from his notes." The declassified
text of this March 8, 2002, report [Document 9 [19]] shows that CIA
Headquarters added the comment that the officials who provided information
to Wilson "may have intended to influence as well as inform." The ambassador
himself was described as "a contact with excellent access who does not have
an established reporting record." However, Wilson had in fact carried out a
mission on behalf of CIA previously, and he had been the senior U.S. envoy
in Baghdad (the deputy chief of mission) before the first Gulf War.
Therefore, Wilson did have an established reporting record. The comment
regarding the Nigerien officials was gratuitous. The combination of these
remarks cast doubt within the U.S. government on the information.

The report on Wilson's information was then circulated in routine channels
but never given to the Vice President. Director George Tenet's comment:
"This unremarkable report was disseminated, but because it produced no solid
answers, there wasn't any urgency to brief its results to senior officials
such as the vice president." (Note 11 [20]) But a look at the trip report
we post here shows Wilson's information was in fact quite solid. It simply
does not say the uranium charge was real. Tenet has a secondary defense that
the report was completed just after Vice President Cheney left on a trip to
drum up support for war with Iraq, and that when he returned other matters
seemed more pressing. Yet Cheney had renewed his inquiry into the Niger
claim and surely its refutation had an impact on the arguments he had just
made to encourage support for an American military option.These points drive
the conclusion that the CIA was loathe to confront Mr. Cheney with a direct
refutation of the Niger uranium claim. This too smacks of politicization.

Wilson's was only one of a number of streams of reporting that undermined
the Niger story, including an investigation by French intelligence and
inquiries from the current U.S. ambassador and a senior U.S. military
officer. Likely based on these materials and on the embassy cables reporting
on Wilson from Niger, State Department intelligence filed a report doubting
the claims of a Nigerien sale to Iraq [Document 10 [21]], and filed a
dissent when the claim was included in the 2002 National Intelligence
Estimate. But the developments of early 2002 became only the beginning of a
highly ambivalent treatment of the uranium claim. On the one hand, the CIA
intervened to keep this material out of the major speech President Bush gave
in Cincinnati in October 2002, and also objected when British intelligence
included it in their own white paper about the Iraqi threat. On the other
hand, senior CIA officials mentioned the uranium claim in congressional
testimony at the same time, permitted it to be included in a December 2002
"fact sheet" on Iraq, and mounted only tepid opposition to inclusion of the
charge in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, where it would
become notorious as the "16 Words."

The SSCI later investigated the Iraq intelligence in detail, reporting on it
in 2004. This was followed by the Silberman-Robb commission account. The
SSCI Phase II report on the use of that intelligence [Document 11 [22] ]
examines Bush administration public statements regarding Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction plus certain other topics related to war in Iraq against
the inventory of intelligence reports circulated within the U.S. government.
The idea was to determine whether administration claims were supported by
the available intelligence. The "public statements" were winnowed down to a
few, essentially the speech by Vice President Cheney in Nashville on August
26, 2002, those by President Bush to the United Nations General Assembly, in
Cincinnati, and before the U.S. Congress at the 2003 State of the Union
address (September 12 and October 7, 2002, and January 29, 2003), and the
presentation to the United Nations Security Council by Secretary of State
Powell (February 5, 2003). The subjects covered include nuclear weapons,
biological weapons, chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction generally,
delivery systems, the Saddam Hussein regime's alleged links to terrorists,
Iraqi regime intent, and predictions for post-war Iraq.

In most of these cases the SSCI study found administration claims
"substantiated" by the available intelligence but portraying the data as
more certain than it was, thus going beyond the intelligence, while failing
to convey disagreements among intelligence experts. The Committee found
claims regarding Saddam's intentions were contradicted by the intelligence
(p. 82) and those about a rosy post-Saddam future as not reflecting
intelligence concerns (p. 88). In the case of Bush administration claims
about links between Saddam and terrorists the report reached several
conclusions, judging that the intelligence substantiated general claims of
Iraqi knowledge of and support for terrorist activities, but that claims of
an Iraqi-terrorist alliance or of Iraqi training of terrorists were not
backed up by the intelligence reporting (p. 71-2). In general Bush
administration claims asserted greater certainty than existed in CIA
reports.

This analysis was assailed by Republican members even before the SSCI report
appeared. In minority statements attached to the eventual primary document
(pp. 100-170) they detailed their objections. The minority charges that the
investigation improperly confined itself to comparisons with finished
intelligence products rather than the wider range of material actually
available to top officials, and that it did not make similar assessments of
the statements made by Democratic Party politicians, including Senator
Rockefeller himself. Republican members and staff were not permitted to be
involved in the drafting work on the report and the numerous amendments they
offered were rejected.

The question of whether the "Iraqi threat" resulted from manipulation, as
Scott McClellan and the SSCI majority suggest, or simple intelligence
failure, as in the view of the Committee minority, is a key issue for all
concerned. A real intelligence failure did occur. This is plain from the
Intelligence Committee's 2004 "Phase I" report as well as that of the
Silberman-Robb Commission. (Note 12 [23] ) The present author argued as much
even before those studies appeared. (Note 13 [24] ) The CIA director of that
time, George Tenet, concedes, "In many ways, we were prisoners of our own
history." (Note 14 [25] ) Retired CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman, observing
this analytical effort from the outside, concludes, "The U.S. rush to war
against Iraq marked the worst intelligence scandal in the history of the
United States." (Note 15 [26] ) But intelligence failure was abetted and
magnified by the Bush administration's drive to use charges about alleged
Iraqi WMDs as justification for war.

Ascertaining the truth in this matter does not seem to have been as
important as seeming to do so, at least for the Senate Intelligence
Committee. A review of the minority statements contained in the new SSCI
report in comparison to similar ones in the Phase I report-by the
then-Democratic minority [Document 12 [27] ]-reveals identical complaints
regarding the conduct of the investigation. The present Republican
minority's charge that the report errs on politicization because both the
Phase I SSCI and Silberman-Robb Commission concluded there was no evidence
of this flies in the face of the strong assertions by the Democratic
minority during Phase I that allegations of this type had not been taken
seriously. Current Republican charges that the report erred by failing to
check the public statements of Democrats against the intelligence are a red
herring: they effectively rely upon the Bush administration's success at
hoodwinking political opponents and then take those opponents' statements as
authoritative evidence, an example of reverse logic. The SSCI staff rules
which the Republican minority now says were used to shut it out of the
investigation are the same ones a Republican majority previously relied upon
to limit Democrats' influence on the scope and content of the inquiry.

The preparation of white papers on both the United States and British sides
also needs to be taken into account. That Bush and Blair each turned to
their intelligence agencies for the papers is significant-they were evoking
the imprimatur of secret intelligence to justify policy preferences. Both
papers had the function of justification, not analysis, and neither
government waited until it had compiled all the evidence before demanding
these products. Neither government asked for intelligence estimates,
fashioned in secret, in order to inform policy on Iraq. Instead, both Bush
and Blair did want their intelligence agencies to carry out avowed political
agendas. And the timing of the white paper drafts-now established as being
in the summer of 2002, before there ever was a UN debate or a Security
Council resolution-clearly indicates their true function. The accumulating
weight of evidence currently supports the interpretation Scott McClellan
gives, not that supplied by apologists for the Iraq war.


Notes

1. Scott McClellan, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and
Washington's Culture of Deception. New York: Public Affairs Press, 2008, p.
125.

2. Joseph Weisberg, "With Spies Like These," Washington Post, December 15,
2007, p. A21.

3. James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush
Administration. New York: Free Press, 2006, pp. 85-107.

4. For example, Fred Hiatt, "Bush Lied? If Only It Were That Simple,"
Washington Post, June 9, 2008, p. A17.

5. Paul Pillar Talk, "Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq," Council on
Foreign Relations, March 7, 2006.

6. Ibid.

7. Paul Pillar at the Council on Foreign Relations. In an interview with the
Public Broadcasting Corporation program Frontline, Deputy Director of
Central Intelligence John McLaughlin stated that the white paper had been
requested in the summer of 2002 (Frontline: "The Dark Side, Interview: John
McLaughlin, January 11, 2006, p. 16.
 http://www.pbs.org/wghb/pages/frontline/darkside/interviews/mclaughlin.html)
.

8. United States Congress (109th Congress, 2nd Session), Senate, Select
Committee on Intelligence, Report: The Use by the Intelligence Community of
Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress. Washington, September
8, 2006, pp. 5-34. Douglas Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at
the Dawn of the War on Terroris. New York: Harper, 2008,pp. 243-244, 277,
and passim.

9. SSCI, Iraqi National Congress Report, p. 35-36.

10. For the Libby Trial proceedings see Murray Waas, ed. The United States
v. I. Lewis Libby. New York: Union Square Press, 2007.

11. George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, p. 454.

12. The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States
Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (Silberman-Robb Commission), Report to
the President of the United States. March 31, 2005.

13. John Prados, Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a
War. New York: The New Press, 2004.

14. George J. Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm: My Years
at the CIA. New York: HarperCollins, 2007, p. 330.

15. Melvin A. Goodman, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the
CIA. Lanham (MD): Rowman & Littlefield, 2008, p. 253.



----
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[16]  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/index.htm#10
[17]  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/doc07.pdf
[18]  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/doc08.pdf
[19]  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/doc09.pdf
[20]  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/index.htm#11
[21]  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/doc10.pdf
[22]  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/doc11.pdf
[23]  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/index.htm#12
[24]  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/313
[25]  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/index.htm#14
[26]  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/index.htm#15
[27]  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/doc12.pdf

John Prados
- Homepage: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9930

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