Ex-CIA official says Bush 'cherry-picked' Iraq intelligence
Paul Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, delivered the scathing criticism in a lengthy article in the latest issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.
"The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made," he wrote.
Pillar alleged the administration of President George W. Bush had ignored warnings that Iraq could easily fall into violence after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein. And the White House asserted that Saddam and Al-Qaeda had forged an alliance without reliable evidence from intelligence agencies.
"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote.
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."
Pillar said US intelligence agencies' mistakes in assessing whether the Hussein government possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had not driven the administration's decision to invade.
"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 policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.
Considered a leading counter-terrorism analyst, Pillar said the clear message from official intelligence analysis was "to avoid war" because the threat posed by Saddam had been largely contained.
Intelligence agencies had warned that occupying Iraq could trigger attacks on US forces and sectarian conflict and play into the hands of Islamic militants in the region, he wrote.
US analysts had predicted that it was likely "war and occupation would boost political Islam and increase sympathy for terrorists' objectives -- and Iraq would become a magnet for extremists from elsewhere in the Middle East."
Pillar 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.
In his article, he said he believes that the "politicization" of intelligence on Iraq had occurred "subtly" and in many forms, but almost never resulted from a policymaker directly asking an analyst to reshape his or her results.
Instead, Pillar describes a process in which the White House helped frame intelligence results by repeatedly posing questions aimed at bolstering its arguments about Iraq.
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 Hussein and Al-Qaeda, which analysts had discounted.
"The greatest discrepancy between the administration's public statements and the intelligence community's judgments concerned not WMD ... but the relationship between Saddam and Al-Qaeda," he wrote.
"The intelligence community never offered any analysis that supported the notion of an alliance between Saddam and Al-Qaeda.
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:yChidF6JFWYJ:www.theallineed.com/news/0602/10200028.htm+bush+cherry+picked&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2&ie=UTF-8
