Paul Did It?

WASHINGTON, D.C: A Pentagon committee led by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, advisedPresident Bush to include a reference in his January State of the Union address about Iraq trying to purchase500 tons of uranium from Niger to bolster the case for war in Iraq, despite the fact that the CIA warnedWolfowitz’s committee that the information was unreliable, according to a CIA intelligence official and fourmembers of the Senate’s intelligence committee who have been investigating the issue.

The Senators and the CIA official said they could be forced out of government and brought up on criminalcharges for leaking the information to this reporter and as a result requested anonymity. The Senators saidthey plan to question CIA Director George Tenet Wednesday morning in a closed-door hearing to find out whetherWolfowitz and members of a committee he headed misled Bush and if the President knew about the erroneousinformation prior to his State of the Union address.

Spokespeople for Wolfowitz and Tenet vehemently denied the accusations. Dan Bartlett, the White Housecommunications director, would not return repeated calls for comment.

The revelations by the CIA official and the senators, if true, would prove that Tenet, who last week saidhe erred by allowing the uranium reference to be included in the State of the Union address, took the blamefor an intelligence failure that he was not responsible for. The lawmakers said it could also lead to awidespread probe of prewar intelligence.

At issue is a secret committee set up in 2001 by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the Office ofSpecial Plans, which was headed by Wolfowitz, Abrum Shulsky and Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense forPolicy, to probe allegations links between Iraq and the terrorist organization al-Qaeda and whether thecountry was stockpiling a cache of weapons of mass destruction. The Special Plans committee disbanded in Marchafter the start of the war in Iraq.

The committee’s job, according to published reports, was to gather intelligence information on the Iraqithreat that the CIA and FBI could not uncover and present it to the White House to build a case for war inIraq. The committee relied heavily on information provided by Iraqi defector Ahmad Chalabi, who has providedthe White House with reams of intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs that has been disputed.Chalabi heads the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles who have pushed for regime change in Iraq.

The Office of Special Plans, according to the CIA official and the senators, routinely provided Bush,Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice with questionableintelligence information on the Iraqi threat, much of which was included in various speeches by Bush andCheney and some of which was called into question by the CIA.

In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, Rumsfeld became increasingly frustrated that the CIA could notfind any evidence of Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program, evidence that would havehelped the White House build a solid case for war in Iraq.

In an article in the New York Times last October, the paper reported that Rumsfeld had ordered the Officeof Special Plans to "to search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists" thatmight have been overlooked by the CIA.

The CIA official and the senators said that’s when Wolfowitz and his committee instructed the White Houseto have Bush use the now disputed line about Iraq’s attempts to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger in aspeech the President was set to give in Cincinnati. But Tenet quickly intervened and informed Stephen Hadley,an aide to National Security Adviser Rice, that the information was unreliable.

Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in aninterview with the New Yorker magazine in May that the Office of Special Plans "started picking out thingsthat supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the President. It’snot intelligence. It’s political propaganda."

Lang said the CIA and Office of Special Plans often clashed on the accuracy of intelligence informationprovided to the White House by Wolfowitz.

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the author of a May New Yorker story on the Office of Special Plans,reported, "former CIA officers and analysts described the agency as increasingly demoralized. George knowshe’s being beaten up," one former officer said of George Tenet, the CIA director. "And his analysts areterrified. George used to protect his people, but he’s been forced to do things their way." Becausethe CIA’s analysts are now on the defensive, "they write reports justifying their intelligence rather thansaying what’s going on. The Defense Department and the Office of the Vice-President write their own pieces,based on their own ideology. We collect so much stuff that you can find anything you want."

"They see themselves as outsiders, " a former C.I.A. expert who spent the past decade immersed inIraqi-exile affairs said of the Special Plans people, told Hersh. He added, "There’s a high degree ofparanoia. They’ve convinced themselves that they’re on the side of angels, and everybody else in thegovernment is a fool."

By last fall, the White House had virtually dismissed all of the intelligence on Iraq provided by the CIA,which failed to find any evidence of Iraq’s weapons programs, in favor of the more critical informationprovided to the Bush administration by the Office of Special Plans

Hersh reported that the Special Plans Office "developed a close working relationship with the (IraqiNational Congress), and this strengthened its position in disputes with the C.I.A. and gave the Pentagon’spro-war leadership added leverage in its constant disputes with the State Department. Special Plans alsobecame a conduit for intelligence reports from the I.N.C. to officials in the White House."

In a rare Pentagon briefing recently, Office of Special Plans co-director Douglas Feith, said the committeewas not an "intelligence project," but rather an group of 18 people that looked at intelligenceinformation from a different point of view.

Feith said when the group had new "thoughts" on intelligence information it was given; they shared itwith CIA director Tenet.

"It was a matter of digesting other people's intelligence," Feith said of the main duties of his group."Its job was to review this intelligence to help digest it for me and other policy makers, to help usdevelop Defense Department strategy for the war on terrorism."