Pentagon report admits fabricated intelligence used to justify Iraq war

A dryly worded report by the Defense Department’s inspector general has further substantiated a conclusion already drawn by the majority of the American people: the Bush administration and senior officials in the Pentagon falsified intelligence to justify an unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq.

The report presented Friday to the Senate Armed Services Committee is entitled “Review of Pre-Iraqi War Activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.” The document amounts to a damning political indictment of a key figure in manufacturing the phony case for a war against Iraq, Douglas Feith, who occupied the undersecretary office—the number-three post in the Pentagon—from July 2001 until his resignation in August 2005.

Feith’s office was used to create an in-house intelligence bureau that consisted of two sections, one known as the Office of Plans, and the other the Policy Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group. The two sections were employed in an attempt to substantiate the two-pronged lie utilized by the Bush administration to foist the war in Iraq upon the American people.

The first was dedicated to manufacturing evidence that Baghdad was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, and the second to substantiate allegations that the Saddam Hussein regime had forged close ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist network blamed for the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington. The combined aim of these efforts—which began in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks—was to terrorize the American people with the prospect of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons being delivered by Iraq into the hands of terrorists for use against US cities.

The Pentagon intelligence shop was seen by the administration as a means of bypassing the Central Intelligence Agency, which chafed at producing the unequivocal indictment against Iraq that the White House wanted. It cherry-picked dubious intelligence to make the preconceived case for war.

The report, produced by the Pentagon’s acting inspector general Thomas Gimble, states that Feith’s office “developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and Al Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers.”

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/pent-f10.shtml
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