friendsofliberty.com
Calling ALL Spooks and Spies
Thu Feb 5 15:21:37 2004
64.140.158.147

Calling ALL Spooks and Spies
http://www.friendsofliberty.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1449


Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Virginia, who specializes in politics and national security issues. http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9562

Calling all spooks and spies. If you want to help Congress get to the bottom of the scandal over Iraq intelligence, now’s your chance. Later this week, a key member of Congress will issue an all-points call for intelligence analysts to blow the whistle on President Bush, Vice President Cheney and others in the Bush administration who may have distorted, exaggerated, manipulated or lied about intelligence on Iraq in the run up to war.

By creating a "tip line" on his official Web site, Democratic congressman from California Henry Waxman is encouraging current and former U.S. national security officials to come forward and disclose how the administration played with intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda. A ranking member on the House Committee on Government Reform, Rep. Waxman is making it possible for officials to go on the record or remain anonymous, according to one of his aides.

The announcement that Rep. Waxman intends to ask whistleblowers from the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies to come forward will be included in a letter to Rep. Tom Davis, the Virginia Republican who chairs the committee...

The letter will also ask Davis to begin an official investigation of how the name of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was leaked to the media. Wilson, a retired diplomat, helped quash forged documents that Iraq sought to buy uranium for bomb-making in Niger, and subsequently Plame, who was an undercover CIA officer, was outed by anonymous U.S. officials.

Waxman’' effort, which is sure to be controversial, is a sign that the simmering scandal about U.S. intelligence on Iraq won’t go away during 2004. The Senate intel committee is locked in a partisan dispute over Republican efforts to stonewall an inquiry into the Bush administration’s use of intelligence to justify war, including the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (OSP) and its subordinate intelligence unit. Yet there are signs that more and more disgruntled officials, including CIA officers, may come forward in the weeks to come. In The American Conservative, Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who has already talked to some reporters, has begun penning a breathtaking account of her year in the Pentagon’s Office of Near East and South Asia affairs, which was headed by Capt. William Luti, a pro-war neocon. The OSP, headed by Abe Shulsky, another neocon, fell under Luti's shop.

Meanwhile, Newsweek reports that Luti was a recipient of intelligence passed on to him by the Washington office of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the former Iraqi exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, the darling of the neocons and their candidate to be Iraq's next prime minister. The INC—whose intelligence was widely considered bogus and unreliable by the U.S. intelligence community—served as a conduit for hair-raising but unproven (and later disproven) reports about Iraq WMD and terrorism links. Now, Newsweek has obtained a memo from the INC's Washington rep that claims the INC fed its intelligence to Luti and directly to Vice President Cheney's office.

Heaping more doubts on the integrity of the fact-finding process is new information from Israel suggesting that Israeli intelligence officials, too, joined U.S. and British intelligence in exaggerating the threat of Iraqi WMD. A report by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University last month called for an official investigation of how Israeli intelligence assessed the Iraqi threat. According to informed U.S. sources, a secret intelligence team was set up in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office before the war in Iraq to generate data adding yet more justifications for war—intelligence that Sharon’s office then shared, in English, with Luti’s OSP—even though the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, was said to be much more cautious and restrained about the threat to Israel from Iraq.
http://www.friendsofliberty.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1449
========================
Searched the web for APFN CIA "IRAQ WMD".


NETWORK - NETWORK = NETWORK

• Waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; — RESEARCHER, Thu Feb 5 15:44
• Panel Discussion on Ultimate Security: Combating WMD — The Century Foundation, Thu Feb 5 19:29