Pentagon probe slams ex-official's Iraq intelligence

WASHINGTON, Saturday (AFP) -Former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's top policy aide produced “inappropriate” intelligence reports linking Saddam Hussein and the Al-Qaeda terror network to bolster the case for war with Iraq, according to a Pentagon investigation.

The classified document, whose summary was made public on Friday, is the result of an investigation by the Defense Department's acting inspector general, Thomas Gimble, of the Iraq intelligence work conducted by the office of former US defense under secretary Douglas Feith.

The probe was launched in November 2005 at the request of Congress to determine whether Feith's the so-called Office of Special Plans had conducted “unauthorized, unlawful or inappropriate intelligence activities” on Iraq between September 2002 and June 2003, the summary said. The investigators concluded that the actions “were not illegal or unauthorized,” having been approved by then-deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

But, they said, “the actions were, in our opinion, inappropriate given that the intelligence assessments were intelligence products and did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the intelligence community.”That condition occurred because of “an expanded role and mission from policy formulation to alternative intelligence analysis and dissemination.”As a result, it said, the office of Feith, a neoconservative supporter of the invasion of Iraq, did not provide “the most accurate analysis of intelligence” to senior decision-makers.

The White House reacted by pointing out that President George W. Bush “has long acknowledged that intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq was inaccurate” and that he had “taken dramatic actions in order to revamp the intel community ... so that those inaccuracies don't happen again.”The existence of links between the Al-Qaeda terror network and the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was one of the main arguments of the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq. The Pentagon report is a “devastating condemnation” of the work done by Feith's office, said Democratic Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“Indeed, Vice President Cheney said the principal Feith office assessment was the 'best source of information' on the alleged relationship between Iraq and Al-Qaeda,” Levin said. Levin was hearing testimony of the Pentagon's Gimble Friday, who was scheduled to present the investigation's classified findings.

The Pentagon investigation focused on the Policy Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group, created by then-deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz following the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States to look for state sponsors of terrorism.Feith, who resigned his Pentagon post in 2005 and now teaches at Georgetown University in Washington, lashed back at critics and said the report vindicates him.

“The policy office has been smeared for years by allegations that its pre-Iraq war work was somehow 'unlawful' or 'unauthorized' and that some information it gave to congressional committees was deceptive or misleading,”he said in a statement.However Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democrat who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that Feith may have violated the 1947 National Security Act by failing to keep Congress informed.