Ex-CIA official: Bush ‘cherry-picked’ intelligence

WASHINGTON – The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of “cherry-picking” intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war and of ignoring warnings the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.

Paul Pillar, who was national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies’ mistakes in concluding that Saddam’s government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration’s decision to invade.

“Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war,” Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration “went to war without requesting – and evidently without being influenced by – any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.”

“It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between (Bush) policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicized,” Pillar wrote.

Pillar’s critique is one of the most severe indictments of White House actions by a former Bush official since Richard Clarke, a former National Security Council staff member, went public with his criticism of the administration’s handling of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and its failure to deal with the threat beforehand.

It is also the first time that such a senior intelligence officer has so directly and publicly condemned the administration’s handling of intelligence.

Pillar, retired after 28 years at the CIA, was an influential behind-the-scenes player and was considered the agency’s leading counterterrorism analyst. By the end of his career, he was responsible for coordinating assessments on Iraq from all 15 agencies in the intelligence community. He is now a professor in security studies at Georgetown University.

White House officials did not respond to a request to comment for this article. They have vehemently denied accusations that the administration manipulated intelligence to generate public support for the war.

“Our statements about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein were based on the aggregation of intelligence from a number of sources and represented the collective view of the intelligence community,” national security adviser Stephen Hadley said in a White House briefing in November. “Those judgments were shared by Republicans and Democrats alike.”

Thursday, the Senate Republican Policy Committee issued a statement to counter what it described as “the continuing Iraq prewar intelligence myths,” including charges that Bush “misused” intelligence to justify the war.” In his article, Pillar said he believes the “politicization” of intelligence on Iraq occurred “subtly” and in many forms, but almost never resulted from a policymaker directly asking an analyst to reshape his or her results. “Such attempts are rare and when they do occur … are almost always unsuccessful.”

Instead, he describes a process in which the White House helped frame intelligence results by repeatedly posing questions aimed at bolstering its arguments.

The Bush administration, Pillar wrote, “repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war,” including information on the “supposed connection” between Saddam and al-Qaida, which analysts had discounted. “Feeding the administration’s voracious appetite for material on the Saddam-al Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of time and attention.”

The result of the requests, and public statements by the president, Vice President Dick Cheney and others, led analysts and managers to conclude the United States was heading for war well before the March 2003 invasion, Pillar asserted.

They thus knew, he wrote, that senior policymakers “would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision. … (They) felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious.”

Pillar wrote that the prewar intelligence asserted Saddam’s “weapons capacities,” but he said the “broad view” within the United States and overseas “was that Saddam was being kept `in his box”’ by U.N. sanctions, and the best way to deal with him was through “an aggressive inspections program to supplement sanctions already in place.”