• June 2008 Senate Intelligence Committee Report
• Invading Iraq Was Considered at High Levels Prior to 9/11/2001
• Bush Administration Stance After 9/11. Propping Up All Arguments for War, Ignoring/Marginalizing Arguments Against.
• Example Evidence #1: The Aluminum Tubes.
• Example Evidence #2: Curveball and the Mobile Chemical and Biological Weapons Labs.
• Example Evidence #3: Yellowcake Uranium from Niger
• Example Evidence #4: Al-Libi and the "Sinister Nexus" Between Iraq and Al Qaeda
• Paul Pillar, Senator Bob Graham and The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)

(U) Conclusion 1: Statements by the President, Vice President, Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor regarding a possible Iraqi nuclear weapons program were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates, but did not convey the substantial disagreements that existed in the intelligence community. Prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, some intelligence agencies assessed that the Iraqi government was reconstituting a nuclear weapons program, while others disagreed or expressed doubts about the evidence. The Estimate itself expressed the majority view that the program was being reconstituted, but included clear dissenting views from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which argued that reconstitution was not underway, and the Department of Energy, which argued that aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were probably not intended for a nuclear program.

p.15

(U) Conclusion 4: Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing. The intelligence community assessed that Saddam Hussein wanted to have chemical weapons production capability and that Iraq was seeking to hide such capability in its dual use chemical industry. Intelligence assessments, especially prior to the October 2002 NIE, clearly stated that analysts could not confirm that production was ongoing.

p.38

(U) Conclusion 12: Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qalda with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence. Intelligence assessments, including multiple CIA reports and the November 2002 NIE, dismissed the claim that Iraq and al-Qa'ida were cooperating partners. According to an undisputed INR footnote in the NIE, there was no intelligence information that supported the claim that Iraq would provide weapons of mass destruction to al-Qa'ida. The credibility of the principal intelligence source behind the claim that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with biological and chemical weapons training was regularly questioned by DIA, and later by the CIA. The Committee repeats its conclusion from a prior report that "assessments were inconsistent regarding the likelihood that Saddam Hussein provided chemical and biological weapons (CBW) training to al-Qa'ida."

p.71

(U) Conclusion 15: Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information. The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate assessed that Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons, and was unwilling to conduct terrorist attacks the US using conventional, chemical or biological weapons at that time, in part because he feared that doing so would give the US a stronger case for war with Iraq. This judgment was echoed by both earlier and later intelligence community assessments. All of these assessments noted that gauging Saddam's intentions was quite difficult, and most suggested that he would be more likely to initiate hostilities if he felt that a US invasion was imminent.

p.82

(U) Conclusion 16: Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products. There were relatively few intelligence products on this subject prior to January 2003, and senior policymakers did not request them. The Committee recognizes that there were many other sources of information available to policymakers that would inform their views about post-war Iraq. The Committee did not explore these other sources as it is beyond the scope of this report.

p.88

ON THE. AFTERNOON January 30, ten days after his inauguration as the forty-third president, George W Bush met with the principals of his National Security Council for the first time...

...[Bush] turned to Rice. "So, Condi, what are we going to talk about today? What's on the agenda?"

"How Iraq is destabilizing the region, Mr. President," Rice said, in what several observers understood was a scripted exchange. She noted that Iraq might be the key to reshaping the entire region. Rice said that CIA director Tenet would offer a briefing on the latest intelligence on Iraq. Tenet pulled out a long scroll, the size of an architectural blueprint, and flattened it on the table.

It was a grainy photograph of a factory. Tenet said that surveillance planes had just taken this photo. The CIA believed the building might be "a plant that produces either chemical or biological materials for weapons manufacture."...

Over the next minutes, speculative, nonspecific talk volleyed across the table about how to remedy inadequate intelligence, discover the nature of Saddam's weapons program, and bomb selected Iraqi targets.

Those present who had attended NSC meetings of the previous administration--and there were several--noticed a material shift. "In the Clinton administration, there was an enormous reluctance to use American forces on the ground; it was almost a prohibition," one of them recalled. "That prohibition was clearly gone, and that opened options, options that hadn't been opened before."

The hour almost up, Bush had assignments for everyone. Powell and his team would look to draw up a new sanctions regime. Rumsfeld and Shelton, he said, "should examine our military options." That included rebuilding the military coalition from the 1991 Gulf War, examining "how it might look" to use U.S. ground forces in the north and the south of Iraq and how the armed forces could support groups inside the country who could help challenge Saddam Hussein. Tenet would report on improving our current intelligence. O'Neill would investigate how to financially squeeze the regime.

Meeting adjourned. Ten days in, and it was about Iraq. ..

...THE NEXT MEETING Of the NSC principals was called for 3 p.m. on Thursday, February 1 [2001], in the White House Situation Room.

O'Neill arrived a few minutes early and read the cover sheet of his briefing materials.

Purpose: To review the current state-of-play (including CIA briefing on Iraq) and to examine policy questions on how to proceed.

Attachments:

Tab A:Agenda and Policy Questions (from NSC) - SECRET

Tab B:Economic Background on Iraq (from Deutsche Bank)

Tab C: Executive Summary: Political-Military Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq Crisis (interagency working paper)--SECRET

Tab D: Summary of United States Sanctions on Iraq "Iraq Sanctions Regime," State Department, for use in public statements...

..."There was never any rigorous talk about this sweeping idea that seemed to be driving all the specific actions," O'Neill said, echoing the comments of several other participants in NSC discussions. "From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.' "

Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy at Defense, fidgeted and scowled. Hadley asked him if he was all right. "Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin

I answered as clearly and forcefully as I could: "We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United

"Well, there are others that do as well, as least as much. Iraqi terrorism, for example," Wolfowitz replied, looking not at me but at Hadley.

"I am unaware of any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism directed at the United States, Paul, since 1993, and I think FBI and CIA concur in that judgment, right, John?" I pointed at CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who was obviously not eager to get in the middle of a debate between the White House and the Pentagon but nonetheless replied, "Yes, that is right, Dick. We have no evidence of any active Iraqi terrorist threat against the U.S."

Finally, Wolfowitz turned to me. "You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist."

I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.

On September 12th, I left the video conferencing center and there, wandering alone around the situation room, was the president. He looked like he wanted something to do. He grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. "Look," he told us, "I know you have a lot to do and all, but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way."

I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. "But, Mr. President, Al Qaeda did this."

"I know, I know, but - see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred-"

"Absolutely, we will look-again." I was trying to be more respectful, more responsive. "But you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of Al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen."

"Look into Iraq, Saddam," the president said testily and left us.

We will always try to consult with our friends in the region so that they are not surprised and do everything we can to explain the purpose of our responses. We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime's ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.

As late as March 19, 2002--two months after Bush had pronounced Iraq part of an Axis of Evil along with Iran and North Korea--DIA chief Wilson, in little-noticed testimony before the Senate armed services committe had not even listed Iraq as among the five most pressing "near-term concerns" to U.S. interests. Years of UN sanctions, combined with the American military presence in the region, had succeeded, Wilson said, in "restraining Saddam's ambitions," and his military had been "significantly degraded." Saddam's army was much "smaller and weaker" than during the Persian Gulf War and was beset by manpower and equipment shortages and "fragile" morale.

Wilson also testified that Iraq possessed only "residual" amounts of weapons of mass destruction, not a growing arsenal. He made no reference to any nuclear program or to any ties Saddam Hussein might have to al-Qaeda. "I didn't really chink they had a nuclear program," Wilson said years later. "I didn't think they were an immediate threat on WMD."

G. Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Pressure Conclusions

(U) Conclusion 83. The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities...

(U) Conclusion 84. The Committee found no evidence that the Vice President's visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to pressure analysts were perceived as intended to pressure analysts by those who participated in the briefings on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, or did pressure analysts to change their assessments.

(section X)

Another form of pressure on the Intelligence Community during 2002 came from policymakers repetitively tasking analysts to review. reconsider. and revise their analytical judgments. Evidence of this pressure comes from a number of reputable sources.

The CIA's independent review on U.S. intelligence on Iraq. conducted by a panel of former senior agency analysts and led by Richard Kerr. limner Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, reported that:

Requests for reporting and analysis of [Iraq's links to al Qaeda] were steady and heavy in the period leading up to the war, creating significant pressure on the Intelligence Community to find evidence that supported a connection." (Kerr Report. July 2003)

Earlier this year, Mr. Kerr publicly elaborated on how the relentless, repetitive questioning and tasking from senior policymakers in the Bush Administration pressured Intelligence Community analysts:

"There was a lot of pressure. no question." says Kerr. "The White House. State, Defense, were raising questions, heavily on W.M.D. and the issue of terrorism. Why did you select this information rather than that? Why have you downplayed this particular thing?... Sure. I heard that some of the analysts felt pressure. We heard about it from friends. There are always some people in the agency who will say, 'We've been pushed too hard.' Analysts will say, 'You're trying to politicize it.' There were people who felt there was too much pressure. Not that they were being asked to change their judgments, but they were being asked again and again to restate their judgments - do another paper on this, repetitive pressures. Do it again."

Was it a case, then, of officials repeatedly asking for another paper until they got the answer they wanted? "'there may have been some of that." Kerr concedes. The requests came from "primarily people outside asking for the same paper again and again. There was a lot of repetitive tasking. Some of the analysts felt this was unnecessary pressure." The repetitive requests, Kerr made clear, came from the C.I.A.'s "senior customers." including "the White House, the vice president, State. Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff." (Vanity Fair May 2004)

The Kerr report findings were confirmed to the Committee by a second independent investigation: the CIA Ombudsman. According to the Ombudsman's charter, this individual serves as an "independent. informal, and confidential counselor for those who have complaints about politicization, biased reporting, or the lack of objective analysis."

The CIA Ombudsman interviewed about two dozen analysts and managers involved in the preparation of the CIA's June 2002. document entitled "Iraq and al-Qaida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship." It was in the scope note of this document that the CIA stated its approach as being "purposefully aggressive" in seeking to draw connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

The Ombudsman told the Committee that he felt the "hammering" by the Bush Administration on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had previously witnessed in his 32-year career with the agency. Several analysts he spoke with mentioned pressure and gave the sense that they felt the constant questions and pressure to reexamine issues were unreasonable.

In his interview with the Committee, Director Tenet confirmed that some agency officials raised with him personally the matter of the repetitive tasking and the pressure it created during this time period. The Director's counsel to those who raised the issue was to "relieve the pressure" by refusing to respond to repeated questions where no additional information existed.

(additional views section)

When Bruce Hardcastle, a defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Counterterrorism, explained to the Bush officials that they were misreading the evidence, according to Patrick Lang, former head of Human Intelligence at the CIA, the Bush Administration not only removed Hardcastle from his post, "they did away with his job. They wanted just liaison officers who were junior. They didn't want a senior intelligence person who argued with them. Hardcastle said, 'I couldn't deal with these people.' They are such ideologues that they knew what the outcome should be and they thought when they didn't get it from intelligence people they thought they were stupid. They start with an almost pseudo-religious faith. They wanted the intelligence agencies to produce material to show a threat, particularly an imminent threat. Then they worked back to prove their case. It was the opposite of what the process should have been like."

Anthony Zinni's passage from obedient general to outspoken opponent began in earnest in the unlikeliest of locations, the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He was there in Nashville in August 2002 to receive the group's Dwight D. Eisenhower Distinguished Service Award, recognition for his 35 years in the Marine Corps.

Vice President Cheney was also there, delivering a speech on foreign policy. Sitting on the stage behind the vice president, Zinni grew increasingly puzzled. He had endorsed Bush and Cheney two years earlier, just after he retired from his last military post, as chief of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in Iraq.

"I think he ran on a moderate ticket, and that's my leaning -- I'm kind of a Lugar-Hagel-Powell guy," he says, listing three Republicans associated with centrist foreign policy positions.

He was alarmed that day to hear Cheney make the argument for attacking Iraq on grounds that Zinni found questionable at best:

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney said. "There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

Cheney's certitude bewildered Zinni. As chief of the Central Command, Zinni had been immersed in U.S. intelligence about Iraq. He was all too familiar with the intelligence analysts' doubts about Iraq's programs to acquire weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. "In my time at Centcom, I watched the intelligence, and never -- not once -- did it say, 'He has WMD.' "

Though retired for nearly two years, Zinni says, he remained current on the intelligence through his consulting with the CIA and the military. "I did consulting work for the agency, right up to the beginning of the war. I never saw anything. I'd say to analysts, 'Where's the threat?' " Their response, he recalls, was, "Silence."

Zinni's concern deepened as Cheney pressed on that day at the Opryland Hotel. "Time is not on our side," the vice president said. "The risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action."

Zinni's conclusion as he slowly walked off the stage that day was that the Bush administration was determined to go to war. A moment later, he had another, equally chilling thought: "These guys don't understand what they are getting into."

Around the same time [late 2002 - early 2003], Drumheller began getting far more credible intelligence from a high-level informant within the Iraqi regime's inner circle. Although for security reasons he doesn't mention it in his book, the official -- as revealed by CBS News's "60 Minutes" -- was Naji Sabri, Iraq's foreign minister. "He was the closest thing anyone had to a solid source in Baghdad," Drumheller notes. Sabri made a convincing case that Hussein had destroyed all of his weapons of mass destruction years before. Taking the intelligence together -- Curveball's lies and Sabri's inside information -- Drumheller was convinced that the fast-approaching war was a disastrous mistake.

Like Paul Revere in a trench coat, he began racing through the CIA attempting to spread the warning. But it was too late; war fever had gripped Tenet and his top aides, as well as the CIA's weapons analysts. "The White House took our work and twisted it for its own ends," Drumheller writes, "and Tenet set a tone whereby people knew what he and the White House wanted to hear. We all felt under pressure," and war seemed "inevitable." The Bush administration, he adds, "has compromised the work of this nation's intelligence community like none before."

"The tubes were everything for the administration's case" Albright [physicist, is President of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS)] later said, "they were something tangible they could point to. Without it they had nothing."

Yet Turner's analysis was based on a questionable assumption that the tubes sought by the Iraqis were suitable only for centrifuges and could not be used for anything else. As soon as the CIA's report started circulating within the intelligence community, energy department scientists, experts on nuclear weapons began to challenge Turner's findings. A team of scientists headed by Jon Kreykes, head of the Oak Ridge national laboratory's advanced technology division had been assembled to review the CIA's evidence. It's first report, distributed on April 11, 2001 noted that the diameter of the tubes was half that of a gas centrifuge tested by the Iraqis in 1990. That the tubes were only marginally large enough for practical centrifuge applications and that the tubes had probably not been purchased for use in a centrifuge.

A month later the DOE reported that it had discovered another possible reason why the Iraqis had purchased the tubes. They were quite similar in size to tubes the Iraqis had previously used to build conventional rocket launchers. There were other reasons why the DOE scientists were suspicious of Turner's conclusion, the Iraqis had been buying the tubes fairly openly, sending out multiple purchase orders and faxing them to international suppliers and then haggling over the prices. The Iraqis had even advertised for the tubes over the internet. None of that seemed consistent with a covert nuclear program.

The CIA then got hold of the actual tubes... Even with the tubes in hand, the battle lines did not change. DOE analysts found that the actual tubes indeed matched those that Iraq had previously used for artillery rockets, and Turner was forced to concede that the samples did not fit the dimensions of most gas centrifuge designs. But, he insisted they were a match for a centrifuge developed by a German scientist Gernot Zippe in the 1950s.

Houston Wood, a University of Virginia nuclear scientist who served as a consultant to the energy department team, checked with the aging Zippe. Not so, Zippe told him, not even close. As the Senate Intelligence Committee later found, although the inner diameter of the tubes was close to the dimensions of the Zippe design, the wall thickness of the Iraqi aluminum tubes was more than three times that of the Zippe design. The tubes were twice as long.

Rocket production, not nuclear weapons is the more likely end use for these aluminum tubes read a classified August 17, 2001 Energy Department intelligence report.

Nor was the department alone in its doubts. In late 2001 the state department's bureau of intelligence and research (INR), conducted an internal study of the Iraqi nuclear issue and the tubes. The INR canvassed the nuclear labs and interviewed several nuclear scientists.

We were talking to all these experts and they were telling us 'no no no, this is not the kind of tubes you use for centrifuges' Greg Thielmann the director of proliferation for the INR later said.

In a lengthy memo to Powell late in 2001 and in a follow up report in early 2002 the INR strongly disputed the CIA's tubes argument as well as the rest of the arguments for a resurgent Iraqi nuclear program. The consistent message from INR, Thielmann later noted was that there is no good evidence at all that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program.

Turner refused to back down, in meetings videoconferences with energy department scientists and later with IAEA officials who were also skeptical of his conclusions, he arrogantly dismissed the dissents and was showed no willingness to engage in debates.

He was very condescending recalled Robert Kelly , a weapons inspector with the IAEA that sat in on the meetings with Turner. It was like he was on some sort of messianic mission. If you questioned him he would just say "if you knew what I know, which is what intelligence people always say. It was like he didn't want to hear the right answer."

Some scientists were appalled at the idea that Turner who held a Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering had become the arbiter on such a highly technical and critical issue. "He was not an expert in the sense that he sold himself", said Houston Wood. "I think he was sort of in over his head".

An intelligence analyst who worked at the DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory later noted that it was absurd that the DOE experts had been trumped by a CIA analyst. "The Energy Department's nuclear scientists", this analyst said, "are the most boring people. Their whole lives revolve around nuclear technology. The can talk about gas centrifuges until you want to jump out a window, and maybe once every ten years or longer there comes along an important question concerning gas centrifuges. That's when you should really listen to these guys. If they say that an aluminum tube is not appropriate for a gas centrifuge its like a fish talking about water."

Between July 2001 and July 2002, Turner and the CIA pumped out report after slanted report on the tubes.

Cheney dwelled on that frightening possibility before the war, repeatedly declaring that the US government knew for sure that Iraq had revved up its nuclear program. Yet there was only one strong piece of evidence for this claim--that Iraq had purchased tens of thousands of aluminum tubes for use in a centrifuge that would produce enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb. And that piece of evidence was hotly contested within the intelligence community.

One CIA analyst (whom we name for the first time in Hubris) was fiercely pushing the tube case. Yet practically every other top nuclear expert in the US government (including the centrifuge specialists at the Department of Energy) disagreed. This dispute was even mentioned in The Washington Post in September 2002. But neither Cheney nor Bush (nor national security adviser Condoleezza Rce) took an interest in this important argument. Instead, they kept insisting the tube purchases were proof Saddam was building a bomb. They were wrong. And the nuclear scientists at the Department of Energy (again, as our book notes) were ordered not to say anything publicly about the tubes.

Powell's presentation relied heavily on the claims of one especially dubious Iraqi defector, dubbed "Curve Ball" inside the intel community. A self-proclaimed chemical engineer who was the brother of a top aide to Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmad Chalabi, Curve Ball had told the German intelligence service that Iraq had a fleet of seven mobile labs used to manufacture deadly biological weapons. But nobody inside the U.S. government had ever actually spoken to the informant--except the Pentagon analyst, who concluded the man was an alcoholic and utterly useless as a source. He recalled that Curve Ball had shown up for their only meeting nursing a "terrible hangover."

After reading Powell's speech, the analyst decided he had to speak up, according to a devastating report from the Senate intelligence committee, released last week, on intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war. He wrote an urgent e-mail to a top CIA official warning that there were even questions about whether Curve Ball "was who he said he was." Could Powell really rely on such an informant as the "backbone" for the U.S. government's claims that Iraq had a continuing biological-weapons program? The CIA official quickly responded: "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say," he wrote. "The Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about."

In "On the Brink," written with Elaine Monaghan, Drumheller describes his frustrating -- and ultimately unsuccessful -- efforts to warn senior CIA and White House officials that they were on the road to disaster. Their key source on Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, Drumheller knew, was a fraudster. As Tenet smiled his thanks in the East Room, he probably should have offered to share the award [Presidential medal of freedom] with a former Baghdad taxi driver and con man code-named Curveball, without whom the invasion might never have taken place.

For years, the CIA had zero intelligence on Iraq -- until reports from this Iraqi source began coming in from the German spy organization BND. A defector seeking political asylum in Germany, Curveball told BND officers that he had been an engineer in Iraq and personally knew about Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program -- in particular, a mobile bioweapons van. As Tenet and the White House began building their case for war, which rested heavily on Curveball's claims, Drumheller's German counterpart told him to watch out. "I personally think he could be a fabricator," the German spy said. "He's a very erratic character."

As a CIA official told one of Drumheller's colleagues: "It's time you learned it's not about intelligence anymore. It's about regime change." Added Drumheller: "The books had been cooked, the bets placed. It was insane. I had joined the CIA to stop wars -- but not a needless one launched by my very own government."

Burglary, Forgery, Delivery

The chain of events that led to Friday's indictment [of Scooter Libby] can be traced as far back as 1991, when an unremarkable burglary took place at the embassy of Niger in Rome. All that turned up missing was a quantity of official letterhead with "Republique du Niger" at its top.

More than 10 years later, according to a retired high-ranking U.S. intelligence official, a businessman named Rocco Martino approached the CIA station chief in Rome. An occasional informant for U.S., British, French and Italian intelligence services, Martino brought documents on Niger government letterhead describing secret plans for the sale of uranium to Iraq.

The station chief "saw they were fakes and threw [Martino] out," the former CIA official said. But Italy shared a similar report with the Americans in October 2001, he said, and the CIA gave it circulation because it did not know the Italians relied on the same source.

On Feb. 12, 2002, Cheney received an expanded version of the unconfirmed Italian report. It said Iraq's then-ambassador to the Vatican had led a mission to Niger in 1999 and sealed a deal for the purchase of 500 tons of uranium in July 2000. Cheney asked for more information.

The same day, Plame wrote to her superior in the CIA's Counterproliferation Division that "my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." Wilson -- who had undertaken a similar mission three years before -- soon departed for Niamey, the Niger capital. He said he found no support for the uranium report and said so when he returned.

Martino continued to peddle his documents, with an asking price of more than 10,000 euros -- this time to Panorama, an Italian magazine owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Panorama editor Carlo Rossella said his staff concluded the letters were bogus but in the interim sent copies to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in October 2002. "I believed the Americans were the best source for verifying authenticity," he said. When the documents reached the State Department, according to a commission that investigated prewar intelligence this year, analysts there said they had "serious doubts about the authenticity" of the "transparently forged" documents.

By summer 2002, the White House Iraq Group assigned Communications Director James R. Wilkinson to prepare a white paper for public release, describing the "grave and gathering danger" of Iraq's allegedly "reconstituted" nuclear weapons program. Wilkinson gave prominent place to the claim that Iraq "sought uranium oxide, an essential ingredient in the enrichment process, from Africa." That claim, along with repeated use of the "mushroom cloud" image by top officials beginning in September, became the emotional heart of the case against Iraq.

President Bush invoked the mushroom cloud in an Oct. 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati. References to African uranium remained in his speech until its fifth draft, but a last-minute intervention by Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet excised them.

Tenet's success was short-lived. The uranium returned repeatedly to Bush administration rhetoric in December and January. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice cited the report in a Jan. 23 newspaper column, and three days later, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded, "Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it into material for a nuclear weapon?"

Rocco Martino was the sort of character who resides at the fringes of the intelligence world. A one time Italian military police officer Martino was a dapper silver haired mustachioed fellow who described himself as an international security consultant. In reality he was a snitch he collected and peddled documents to businesses and to journalists and to intelligence agencies for which he occasionally was an informer. That included SISME, the Italian Military Intelligence Agency...

...This professional informant had a checkered past. In 1985 according to court records unearthed by La Republica Martino was arrested in Italy for extortion. In 1993, he was arrested in Germany for possessing stolen checks.

On 7th March, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the UN security council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. "The IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents... are in fact not authentic," ElBaradei said.

One senior IAEA official went further. He told me: "The documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me... that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking."

The IAEA had first sought the documents last September, just after Britain released its dossier. After months of pleading by the IAEA, the US turned them over to Jacques Baute, director of the agency's Iraq nuclear verification office.

It took Baute's team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half dozen letters and other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated 10th October 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger minister of foreign affairs, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the president of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior IAEA official said, that "they could be spotted by someone using Google on the internet."

The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning sign. Niger's "yellow cake" comes from two uranium mines controlled by a French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear power companies in France, Japan, and Spain. "Five hundred tons can't be siphoned off without anyone noticing," another IAEA official told me.

On November 20, 2001 the US ambassador in Niger, Barbara Owens-Kirkpatrick, sent a cable to Washington from her embassy in Niamey. The head of the French led consortium in Niger had assured her there was no possibility that Niger diverted any of the approximately 3000 tons of Yellowcake produced annually in its two uranium mines.

In February, 2002, I was asked by the CIA to meet with the American intelligence community officials charged with understanding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, in order to discuss an intelligence report that had caught the attention of the office of the Vice President. That report concerned the alleged sale of a significant amount of uranium yellowcake from the West African nation of Niger to Iraq. I was asked to attend this meeting because of my extensive experience in Niger and with the government that had been in power in the country during the time the supposed sale had taken place. Additionally, as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported, I had previously traveled to Niger to look into other uranium related matters...

...I traveled to Niger, spent eight days there meeting with former members of the Niger government and satisfied myself that their answers, coupled with the structure of the mining industry, about which I knew quite a bit, and the government decision making process made it highly unlikely that such a transaction had ever taken place. There were two other inquiries made at approximately the same time. Our Ambassador to Niger at the time, Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick and the Deputy Commander in Chief of US Armed Forces in Europe, Marine Corps General Carlton Fulford who also traveled to Niger reported that it was highly unlikely that such a sale had occurred. There were, accordingly, three reports on the subject in the files of the US government by mid March, 2002. Parenthetically, there are those who have questioned my qualifications to make the inquiries, noting that I am not a CIA officer, nor an expert on WMD. Those assertions are true. I am, however, an expert on Niger, and know quite a bit about uranium mining in Africa, having served in three countries in Africa in which uranium is mined, including as Ambassador to Gabon where the mining industry structure is similar to that in Niger. Uranium yellowcake is the result of the separation of ore from the rock in which it is found. It is a mining question, not a nuclear weapon question. My particular value added to the US government's understanding of the issue was my knowledge of the country, its mining industry and my long relationship with key players in Niger's politics. Quite simply I knew them far better than our Ambassador who had arrived during the transition to a new government.

I reported back to the CIA, after having also briefed the Ambassador and embassy officials in Niamey, and went back to my private life.

Somebody, if you've heard about, you probably haven't heard much about, but an enormously important figure is Ibn Shaykh al-Libi.

Ibn Shaykh al-Libi was the first Al Qaeda commander captured during the invasion of Afghanistan. He was for several weeks in the custody of the FBI. The FBI questioned him a great deal. We interviewed the FBI agent, in the book, who was in charge of the Ibn Shaykh al-Libi case who believed he was getting a great deal of useful information about Al Qaeda and Bin Laden's operation from al-Libi.

[Libi] was willing to plead to charges in the United States and become a cooperating witness in a whole bunch of trials that the FBI wanted to bring at the time.

But the CIA, of course, was not happy about this. Now you get into the internicine rivalry between the CIA and the FBI. CIA officials, led by George Tenet, went to the White House and said "the FBI doesn't know how to handle these guys, we do. We know what to do, we should have custody for him, we are the lead agency in the war on terror now."

The decision at the very top to transfer al-Libi into CIA custody, at which point he is gagged, hooded taken on a plane and flown to Egypt. This is the CIA extraordinary rendition program at work. Ibn Shaykh al-Libi was one of the first guys who underwent the CIA extraordinary rendition.

He is taken to Egyptian interrogators. We can all speculate on what Egyptian interrogator do, there is a state department human rights report that documents some of the techniques that Egyptian interogators do, how they handle terror suspects, its pretty grizzly stuff.

It was been repeatedly condemned by the US government during the years before this took place. but of course the world changed after september 11...

After a few weeks under Egyptian interrogation Ibn Shaykh al-Libi starts to tell a story that he had never told before when he had been questioned by the FBI. That is that bin Laden wanted chemical and biological weapons, he didn't have the wherewithall on how to assemble them, so he dispatched two operatives to baghdad to get training in the development of chemical and biological weapons.

This report gets filed to Washington, and everybody says once again says "Aha! we got them!"

Well, not everyone actually. Some very shrewd analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency look at this and say "this story doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, he hasn't said this before, there are no details he can describe, it appears to us like Ibn Shaykh al-Libi is simply telling his interrogators what they want to hear. There's no independent corroboration of this."

This is written and documented in a February 2002 email which is distributed throughout the US intelligence community and promptly forgotten.

A year later, when colin Powell is giving his speech to the [UN] Security Council after he is finished describing the biolabs which came from 'curveball' he goes into a whole other passage to describe the "sinister nexus" that US intelligence has discovered between Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network and the Iraqi regime. He proceeds to describe one particular Al Qaeda commander who has now been freed to tell his story. He proceeds to tell his story...

This is actually a big chunk of Powell's speech, it is two or three graphs and it all comes from what Ibn Shaykh al-Libi told his Egyptian interogators - a story that was doubted and questioned by US intelligence analysts but stated as fact by Powell at the UN.

What's the coda to the story? After the invasion of Iraq, after the war, Ibn Shaykh al-Libi is returned to American custody from Egyptian custody, and as we report in the book and is confirmed by the most recent senate intelligence committe report - Ibn Shaykh al-Libi recants the entire story. Says he only told it because he was being tortured by the Egyptians. The CIA withdrew all its reporting on the account of Ibn Shaykh al-Libi and the sinister nexus between Iraq and Al Qaeda on weapons of mass destruction evaporates like so much else that was said to the American Public in the fall of 2002.

NARRATOR: The National Intelligence Estimate, the NIE, is the highest-level document generated by the intelligence agencies.

W. PATRICK LANG, Fmr. Def. Intel. Agency Officer: A National Intelligence Estimate becomes the truth accepted by the United States government. They hold this thing up, the NIE, and they say, "On page 6, it says so and so," and that is an irrefutable truth.

Sen. BOB GRAHAM: The answer that we got from Director Tenet is, "We've never done a National Intelligence estimate on Iraq, including its weapons of mass destruction." Stunning. We do these on almost every significant activity, much less significant than getting ready to go to war. We were flying blind.

MELVIN GOODMAN, Fmr. CIA Officer: The fact of the matter is, the CIA didn't want to produce one. The White House didn't want one because they didn't want to allow any venting of whatever opposition there was to what they wanted to be the conventional wisdom on weapons of mass destruction.

NARRATOR: And Tenet said the CIA was primarily focused on al Qaeda, not really paying attention to WMD and Iraq.

JOHN BRENNAN, Dpty. Exec. Director, CIA 2001-03: It was an intense period. We still were heavily engaged on trying to counter al Qaeda, the war on terrorism, and so there were a lot of things on George's plate. And he was working, you know, from sun-up to sun-down, and past that, seven days a week.

Sen. BOB GRAHAM: We said, "We don't care. This is the most important decision that we, as members of Congress, and that the people of America are likely to make in the foreseeable future. We want to have the best understanding of what it is we're about to get involved with."

NARRATOR: Congress demanded that the White House prepare an NIE. Tenet was supposed to provide a tough-minded analysis of the WMD allegations in a hurry. A process that ordinarily takes months or years would be reduced to just over two weeks.

DANIEL BENJAMIN, National Security Council 1994-99: I know some of the people who did that, and it's, you know, a mind-boggling task to have to put together an NIE in that amount of time, and particularly in those kinds of very charged circumstances.

NARRATOR: Many members of the CIA believed the vice president himself was determined to control the content of the NIE. The vice president and his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, had made about 10 trips to CIA headquarters, where they personally questioned analysts.

MELVIN GOODMAN: I was at the CIA for 24 years. The only time a vice president came to the CIA building was for a ceremony, to cut a ribbon, to stand on the stage, but not to harangue analysts about finished intelligence.

PATRICK W. LANG: Many, many of them have told me they were pressured. And there are a lot of ways pressure takes a lot of forms.

PAUL PILLAR, National Intel. Officer 2000-05: The questions every morning, the tasks, the requests to look into this angle one more time, turn over that rock again. If you didn't find anything last week, look again to see if there's something there for that about that connection.

VINCENT CANNISTRARO: So you start looking very hard for anything at all that will support the answer that the vice president wants, that the Defense Department wants...

...NARRATOR: The media blitz, the visits by the vice president and his chief of staff­ some in the CIA say it was all a kind of subtle arm-twisting, but later, in a controversial report, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found no pressure. "The committee did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments."

PAUL PILLAR: Politicization, real politicization, rarely works that way. That is to say, you know, blatant, crude, arm-twisting. It's always far more subtle.

NARRATOR: In early October, Tenet delivered the hastily produced NIE. This was the top secret NIE. Much of the evidence was outdated, from the 1990s. There were four or five new allegations. The aluminum tubes, mobile biological, chemical and nuclear programs were alleged. And there were some footnotes where technical disagreements were aired.

VINCENT CANNISTRARO: The CIA's assessment was sheep-herded by a national intelligence officer who works very closely with the vice president's office. It's a flawed­ fatally flawed document, and it should never had seen the light of day.

DAVID KAY: When I read the NIE, I thought they were protecting sources and methods and trying to paint just an adequate job to get past the vote, that there must be more there. When I read it in 2003, after I took this responsibility­ there's an old Peggy Lee song that I like that came to mind, "If That's All There Is."

State/INR Alternative View of Iraq's Nuclear Program

The Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research (INR) believes that Saddam continues to want nuclear weapons and that available evidence indicates that Baghdad is pursuing at least a limited effort to maintain and acquire nuclear weapons-related capabilities. The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq may be doing so, but INR considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment. Lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, INR is unwilling to speculate that such an effort began soon after the departure of UN inspectors or to project a timeline for the completion of activities it does not now see happening. As a result, INR is unable to predict when Iraq could acquire a nuclear device or weapon.

In INR's view Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes is central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, but INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors. INR accepts the judgment of technical experts at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) who have concluded that the tubes Iraq seeks to acquire are poorly suited for use in gas centrifuges to be used for uranium enrichment and finds unpersuasive the arguments advanced by others to make the case that they are intended for that purpose. INR considers it far more likely that the tubes are intended for another purpose, most likely the production of artillery rockets. The very large quantities being sought, the way the tubes were tested by the Iraqis, and the atypical lack of attention to operational security in the procurement efforts are among the factors, in addition to the DOE assessment, that lead INR to conclude that the tubes are not intended for use in Iraq's nuclear weapon program.

... Finally, the claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR's assessment, highly dubious.

Iraq's aggressive attempts to obtain proscribed high-strength aluminum tubes are of significant concern. All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons and that these tubes could be used in a centrifuge enrichment program. Most intelligence specialists assess this to be the intended use, but some believe that these tubes are probably intended for conventional weapons programs.

The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq may be doing so, but INR considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment.

Yesterday, speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," the Senate [intelligence] committee's chairman, Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), said that had Congress known before the vote to go to war what his committee has since discovered about the intelligence on Iraq, "I doubt if the votes would have been there."

Roberts characterized some of the redacted parts of the Senate report as "specific details that would make your eyebrows even raise higher."

In the only comprehensive assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction released to the public before the war, the CIA exaggerated and distorted the evidence it had given Congress just days earlier, according to the Senate intelligence committee's report released last week.

The White Paper, released Oct. 4, 2002, and based on a classified assessment given to Congress, was the public's only look at the intelligence that policymakers used to decide whether Iraq posed enough of a threat to warrant immediate military action.

Yet the 28-page public document turned estimates into facts, left out or watered down the dissent within the government about key weapons programs, and exaggerated Iraq's ability to strike the United States, the investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found.

The heavily redacted White Paper section of the Senate report amounts to a pointed critique of the CIA's willingness to present an unbiased and objective account of the Iraqi threat to the American public.

It also raises questions about the CIA's selective declassification of material, a critique that was made by last year's joint Sept. 11 congressional inquiry and by the subsequent independent Sept. 11 commission.

In one case cited in the Senate report, a "key judgment" in the public document asserted that Iraq could quickly produce and weaponize "lethal and incapacitating biological weapons agents," including anthrax bacteria, "for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert operations, including potentially against the U.S. Homeland."

The statement, the report said, "conveyed a level of threat to the United States homeland inconsistent with the classified National Intelligence Estimate."

The classified version, the Senate report noted, asserted that Iraq would try such attacks "if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge," and that such attacks would be carried out by special Iraqi forces or intelligence operatives.

Three days after the public document was released, President Bush said in a major speech to the nation in Cincinnati: "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

The report also notes that the White Paper dropped such qualifiers as "we judge" and "we assess," making best estimates appear as fact.

Thus the classified report's language, "We assess that Baghdad has begun renewed production of mustard, sarin, cyclosarin, and VX . . . " became "Baghdad has begun renewed production . . . "

Also, the words "we have little specific information on Iraq's CW [chemical weapons] stockpile" were removed from the unclassified paper.

"Removing caveats such as 'we judge' and 'we assess' changed many sentences in the unclassified paper to statements of fact rather than assessments," the report noted. In doing so, the White Paper "misrepresented [the intelligence community's] judgments to the public," the Senate panel concluded.

NARRATOR: The NIE was kept in a locked room where Congress could read it, but few did. In mid-October, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Iraqi war resolution. A declassified version of the NIE, known as the "white paper," was prepared by the CIA and released three days later.

Sen. BOB GRAHAM: And one of the surprising things about it was it was of a very high production level graphs, photographs in color. It was an advocacy piece.

INTERVIEWER: What does it say to you?

Sen. BOB GRAHAM: Oh, it says to me that the decision had been made that we're going to go to war with Iraq, all of this other was just window dressing, and that the intelligence community was being used as almost a public relations operation to validate the war against Saddam Hussein.

NARRATOR: Paul Pillar, a veteran high-ranking CIA analyst, was one of the primary authors of the white paper.

PAUL PILLAR: It was clearly requested and published for policy advocacy purposes. This was not informing a decision. What was the purpose of it? The purpose was to strengthen the case for going to war with the American public. Is it proper for the intelligence community to publish papers with that purpose? I don't think so. And I regret having had a role in that.

MICHAEL SCHEUER, CIA 1982-04: Paul Pillar is a man that I have tremendous respect for and who I think is an ideal intelligence officer. If there was pressures that resulted in Mr. Pillar not being happy with what he finally authored, I can only imagine those pressures must have been extraordinary because he is a man that I would want my son to model himself after. So that to me, that says the pressure from the White House through Mr. Tenet on professional CIA officers was nearly overwhelming.

What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in recent decades...

The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made. It went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

In May [2002], the White House had asked the CIA to prepare a white paper on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, McLaughlin [deputy CIA chief] had passed the request on to Pillar. The draft was completed within weeks. But it wasn't released.

When the request came for declassified NIE Pillar was told to redo the old white paper and keep it in sync with the NIE. The CIA's new white paper "Iraq's weapons of Mass Destruction" was publicly released on Oct 4 just as congressmen and Senators were starting a floor debate which would authorize Bush to launch a war against Iraq whenever he saw fit...

...Afterwards Pillar was embarassed by the white paper. "In retrospect we shouldn't haven't done that white paper at all." He said. It wasn't really intelligence analysis, he believed, the white paper was policy advocacy. He wishes he had mustered the courage to tell the CIA leadership and the White House that he wouldn't put out such a document.

"One of the biggest regrets of my career is I didn't find a way to say 'no'," he would later say. "If I had to do it all over again I would say 'hell no, I am not going to do that'."

Pillar who had always prided himself on his independence and his integrity was ashamed of his role. He and his CIA colleagues, he thought, had been reduced to producing propaganda.