by John M. Curtis
(310) 204-8700

Copyright April 1, 2005
All Rights Reserved.

nnouncing grave problems in the U.S. intelligence community, a presidential commission blasted prewar intelligence on Iraq, specifically, misguided data on Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Calling the prewar intelligence estimate “dead wrong,” the report fingered America's spy agencies for ineptitude and disorganization. Intelligence departments were “often unable to gather intelligence on the very things we care about the most,” attributing failures, for the most part, on poor communication and bureaucratic resistance. With over 1,500 U.S. casualties and nearly $200-billion spent on Iraq, prewar intelligence failures are proving most costly. Miscalculations and incompetence can't explain how the nation's most sophisticated agencies and brightest minds blew it. Six-hundred-and-one pages of unclassified material doesn't tell the whole story.

      Blaming intelligence failures on “turf battles” between the CIA, FBI and the Pentagon also doesn't account for the colossal breakdown that led the nation to war without a credible threat to national security. “The war between the agencies that are tasked to fight the war on terror will continue,” the panel concluded, putting special pressure on newly minted national intelligence czar, former U.N. ambassador John D. Negroponte, now responsible for coordinating the U.S. intelligence apparatus. It's questionable whether Negroponte, an appointee of President George W. Bush, will operate independent of the White House. “The central conclusion is one that I share. America's intelligence community needs fundamental change,” said Bush, agreeing only with the idea that intelligence operations run through the White House—setting a dangerous precedent.

      Intelligence failures before the Iraq War were due not only to miscalculations and ineptitude but carefully planned activities. When you examine the role of Vice President Dick Cheney, and specifically his connection to the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency and Office of Special Plans, you see tightly controlled operations. It was the DIA and OSP that placed its faith in the defector codenamed “Curveball,” whose identity was somehow omitted in the panel's 601-page report. Press reports outed “Curveball” as the brother of a top aid to Ahmed Chalibi, the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group funded by the Pentagon and CIA to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Chalibi was on the Pentagon's payroll during the Clinton years, until cutoff for fraud and mismanagement. He was resurrected by Bush before the Iraq War but eventually discredited and dumped.

      Calling the CIA and National Security Agency “vast government bureaucracies,” the panel concluded that communication problems among intelligence agencies led to Sept. 11 and the prewar breakdown. “Change within this community is going to be very difficult,” said Sen. Charles S. Robb (D-Va.) at a press briefing, stating the obvious but failing to see how Cheney's neatly orchestrated operation exploited Chalibi's contacts to advance the White House case for war. It was no accident that the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, controlled by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald M. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and former Defense Policy Board President Richard Perle, fed the White House intelligence. It stretches credulity to the breaking point to believe former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's recent claim that he was duped.

      After Powell pitched the U.S. case for war at the U.N. Feb. 5, 2003, he insisted, just recently, he was given bad intel. But a closer look at the record shows that Powell was inside the loop and knew that Chalibi was the main source about Saddam's alleged arsenal of WMD. Before Powell's speech, former CIA Director George J. Tenet told Powell he couldn't vet his assertions about Saddam's mobile weapons' labs. As late as Jan. ‘04, Cheney stubbornly insisted that “the trucks” were “conclusive” proof of WMD, despite being told by Tenet that the “trucks” were not WMD. All the while, the White House trashed former chief U.N. Weapons Inspector Dr. Hans Blix, who begged for more time to prove Saddam had no WMD. Before Chalibi was dumped by the Pentagon in 2004, he and “Curveball” called the shots. Far from a failure, prewar intelligence was meticulously planned and orchestrated.

      Blaming prewar mistakes on a colossal intelligence failure fans the smokescreen that allowed Chalibi and “Curveball” to build the case for war. Former CIA Director Tenet knew he couldn't vet “Curveball's” assertions about truck-based germ labs. Key men at the White House and Pentagon, including Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle, also knew that “Curveball's” fabrications served the White House case for war. Lone voices, like Dr. Hans Blix, were discredited by the White House. Saying that U.S. intelligence “was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments” misreads the real facts behind the Iraq War: That Bush loyalists at the White House and Pentagon manipulated U.S. intelligence. Appointing another loyalist like Porter Goss to head the CIA puts the White House in bed with the intelligence community, assuring, if nothing else, an encore.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He's editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

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