Senator Levin releases report on pre-war intelligence
Senator Carl Levin Releases Report on Pre-War Intelligence
Levin’s report (in PDF) is a page turner. It “focuses on 1) the establishment of a non-Intelligence Community source of intelligence analysis in the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, and 2) the extent to which policy makers utilized that alternative source rather than the analyses produced by the Intelligence Community with regard to the issue of any relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda before the Iraq war.”
The report demonstrates how intelligence relating to the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship was exaggerated by high ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the Administration’s decision to invade Iraq when the intelligence assessments of the Intelligence Community did not make a sufficiently compelling case. The Intelligence Community’s analysis of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship as a relatively weak one was as definitive as reliable reporting would permit, and their conclusions were subsequently supported by the 9/11 Commission and the Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq.
Add to this report George Tenet’s speech last night before the Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan where he called the “war on Iraq “wrong”" as well as posts on LAZ over the past couple of days regarding the administration’s and republican Senators’ stonewalling on the release of key documents — CIA’s 2004 Iraq National Intelligence Estimate (”NIE) and Richard CLarke’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee — and we have a smoking gun, not in Iraq, but pointing directly at the president. It seems like the wheels on the administration’s little red wagon are falling off.