CONTINUING DANCE OF THE WMD FAIRIES

From the Los Angeles Times via the Houston Chronicle:

Special Pentagon unit left CIA out of the loop

A special intelligence unit at the Pentagon privately briefed senior officials at the White House on alleged ties between Iraq and al-Qaida without the knowledge of CIA Director George Tenet, according to new information presented at a Senate hearing Tuesday.

The disclosure suggests that the controversial Pentagon office played a greater role than previously understood in shaping the administration's views on Iraq's alleged ties to the terrorist network behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and bypassed usual channels to make a case that conflicted with the conclusions of CIA analysts.

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It's hard to imagine that Tenet didn't know what was going on. I've known about this end-run around the CIA since last summer--I thought I had even posted about it, but I went hunting through the Real Art archives and failed to find it; I must have read the article and left it at that. At any rate, this alternative intelligence operation, which, as far as I can tell, was more about selling the Iraq invasion than it was about trying to ascertain the truth about WMDs, has been in the public discourse since May at the very least.

From the New Yorker via Common Dreams:

Selective Intelligence
Donald Rumsfeld Has His Own
Special Sources. Are They Reliable?

The hostility goes both ways. A Pentagon official who works for Luti told me, “I did a job when the intelligence community wasn’t doing theirs. We recognized the fact that they hadn’t done the analysis. We were providing information to Wolfowitz that he hadn’t seen before. The intelligence community is still looking for a mission like they had in the Cold War, when they spoon-fed the policymakers.”

A Pentagon adviser who has worked with Special Plans dismissed any criticism of the operation as little more than bureaucratic whining. “Shulsky and Luti won the policy debate,” the adviser said. “They beat ’em—they cleaned up against State and the C.I.A. There’s no mystery why they won—because they were more effective in making their argument. Luti is smarter than the opposition. Wolfowitz is smarter. They out-argued them. It was a fair fight. They persuaded the President of the need to make a new security policy. Those who lose are so good at trying to undercut those who won.” He added, “I’d love to be the historian who writes the story of how this small group of eight or nine people made the case and won.”

According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States.

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This whole blame-it-on-Tenet thing is just crazy, anyway. If anyone can recall, Rumsfeld and company heavily criticized the CIA in the run up to the war because their intelligence was indicating that Saddam was not a major threat. Never mind the fact that the corporate news media is, as usual, totally failing to do its job here: why isn't Tenet, himself, reminding everybody of what really happened last year? It's clear that Tenet is trying to dance a delicate dance in a metaphoric mine field--the poor guy doesn't want to lose his job. If he is too quick to take the blame for the WMD fiasco, he gets fired and burned in effigy. If he puts the blame where it belongs, on the White House, he gets fired and burned in effigy.

This makes my brain hurt.

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