The Political Chase

It depends on what the definition of critique is

It is commonly accepted that the Bush administration lied about the evidence justifying the war in Iraq. Last week, a Defense Department inspector general formally spilled the beans that former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith played a substantial role in trumping up “evidence” suitable to the administration’s objectives. In short, he may have broken a couple of substantial laws by doing so — providing false information and failure to inform Congress about intelligence activities.

On CNN’s Late Edition today, Mr. Feith boldly and vehemently asserted he was merely critiquing “the intelligence community’s consensus.” From books I had previously read, my recollection of Mr. Feith’s activities was well beyond commentary on other agencies’ reports.

The real story is, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz did not like the information the CIA provided (it was reasonably accurate), so Rumsfeld assumed the responsibility of creating reports that contained information they liked to read. As Rumsfeld’s lieutenant, Feith established and managed a group of creative writers. (Risen, 2006, pp. 70-72).

James Risen of the New York Times dispels the notion of critiquing in his book State of War. The last paragraph quoted is the money paragraph.

A wing of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had for years done some limited clandestine intelligence work, but it had never been involved in the kind of high-risk operations that Rumsfeld had in mind for the secret units that he created. Unlike the clandestine service of the CIA, Rumsfeld’s new covert units — given the benign-sounding name of “operational support elements” — didn’t fall under the government’s existing rules governing covert action, rules that required explicit presidential authorization and congressional notification. In fact, the Defense Department didn’t seem to believe its special teams needed to tell anyone else in the government what they were doing…Rumsfeld was creating his own private spy service, buried deep within the Pentagon’s vast black budget, with little or no accountability.

…

They believed that the opportunity for war with Iraq presented by the attacks on New York and Washington could best be exploited by linking Baghdad to 9/11. Failing that, it might be possible to tie Iraq more generally to al Qaeda.

The problem for the hard-liners was that the CIA was the keeper of the vast majority of classified intelligence on al Qaeda, and the agency’s analysts had seen no evidence of Iraqi involvement in 9/11 and had no conclusive proof of a terrorist alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Those answers did not satisfy Wolfowitz, or his equally certain lieutenant, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith.

Wolfowitz had [decided] that the [CIA] had not been sufficiently hawkish, and now, in the aftermath of 9/11, he once again found that the CIA was being soft, this time on the possibility that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks on the United States. Wolfowitz felt there “was intellectual dishonesty in the intelligence community,” recalled one former Pentagon official. As Wolfowitz listened to intelligence briefings from CIA analysts on al Qaeda after 9/11, he angrily concluded that they were not even considering alternative possibilities that included Iraqi involvement. The CIA was an arrogant, rogue institution, he believed, unwilling to support administration policy makers.

Wolfowitz and the like-minded Feith created a special intelligence unit, known as the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group, to sift through raw intelligence reports, searching for ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. The group was set up in Feith’s office; it’s real purpose was to serve as a Team B for the neoconservatives at the Pentagon, a counterweight and rival to the CIA in the struggle to shape intelligence on Iraq. (Risen, pp. 70-72).

Sifting through raw intelligence reports searching for ties between Iraq and al Qaeda seems a bit more involved than writing a review of somebody’s formally submitted report, don’t you think? Furthermore, Feith was not qualified to critique or create intelligence reports. He had no prior experience in analyzing intelligence information.

Reference:

Risen, J. (2006). State of war : the secret history of the CIA and the Bush administration. New York: Free Press.