* Seymour Hersh: Bush & Cheney corrupted the Iraq intelligence (10-27-03)

Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker (10-27-03) …

• Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered.
• Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.
• The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions.
• … what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.
• There was also a change in procedure at the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy.
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long complained about the limits of American intelligence.
• After he became Secretary of Defense, a separate intelligence unit was set up in the Pentagon’s policy office, under the control of William Luti, a senior aide to Feith. This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials.
• The State of the Union speech was confounding to many members of the intelligence community, who could not understand how such intelligence could have got to the President without vetting.
• The former White House official told me, “Maybe the Secretary of Defense and his people are short-circuiting the process, and creating a separate channel to the Vice-President. Still, at the end of the day all the policies have to be hashed out in the interagency process, led by the national-security adviser.” What happened instead, he said, “was a real abdication of responsibility by Condi.”

             

LMW COMMENT … The separate Pentagon office which produced so much misinformation about Iraq and its ability to produce and deliver anthrax to the eastern U.S., is featured in my novel CASE CLOSED, to be published in the summer of 2009.

                

            

            

            

             

                       

 read the entire article at … http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/10/27/031027fa_fact