WASHINGTON, 12 February 2006 — The Bush Administration disregarded the expertise of the intelligence community, politicized the intelligence process and used unrepresentative data in making the case for war in Iraq, a former CIA senior analyst alleged.
In an article published on Friday in the journal Foreign Affairs, Paul R. Pillar, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, called the relationship between US intelligence and policymaking “broken,” and said the Bush Administration chose war first and then misleadingly used raw data to assemble a public case for its decision to invade.
Pillar said the Bush Administration falsely linked Al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein’s regime even though intelligence agencies had not produced a single analysis supporting “the notion of an alliance” between the two, because “the Administration wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to the ‘war on terror’ and the threat the American public feared most, thereby capitalizing on the country’s militant post-9/11 mood.” “If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war — or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath.” Pillar wrote. The allegations contradict the findings of two official inquiries into the intelligence debacle, which have largely blamed the CIA and absolved the Administration. They also emerged on the day it was reported that Lewis Libby, a former aide to Vice-President Dick Cheney, told a grand jury that he was authorized by his bosses to leak classified information about Iraq in summer 2003 to defend the Administration’s case for war. The statement about Libby’s secret testimony was contained in court papers filed in connection with his obstruction-of-justice case.
The White House made no direct response to Pillar’s claims. Pillar said a CIA assessment of the implications of a US-led occupation had “presented a picture of a political culture that would not provide fertile ground for democracy and foretold a long, difficult, and turbulent transition,” including guerrilla attacks and sectarian conflict.
“The Bush Administration deviated from the professional standard not only in using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant selectively adducing data – ‘cherry-picking’ — rather than using the intelligence community’s own analytic judgments “The greatest discrepancy between the Administration’s public statements and the intelligence community’s judgments concerned not WMD (there was indeed a broad consensus that such programs existed), but the relationship between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. The enormous attention devoted to this subject did not reflect any judgment by intelligence officials that there was or was likely to be anything like the ‘alliance’ the Administration said existed. The reason the connection got so much attention was that the Administration wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to the “war on terror” and the threat the American public feared most, thereby capitalizing on the country’s militant post-9/11 mood”
Experts say the specific critiques are not new. But it apparently is the first time such attacks are being publicly leveled by such a high-ranking intelligence official directly involved behind the scenes—before, during and after the invasion of Iraq nearly three years ago. Because of his position, Pillar would have had access to, and likely intimate knowledge about, virtually every piece of Iraq-related intelligence maintained across all agencies within the US government.
Pillar retired from the CIA last year and is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington.
