A former CIA official who coordinated United States intelligence on the Middle East has accused the Bush administration of ”cherry-picking” intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, The Washington Post reported on Friday.
The newspaper said Paul Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, also accused the administration of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
”Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war,” Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.
Instead, he asserted, the administration ”went to war without requesting — and evidently without being influenced by — any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq”.
Pillar said mistakes made by US intelligence agencies in concluding that Hussein’s government possessed weapons of mass destruction did not drive the administration’s decision to invade, according to The Post.
”It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicized,” Pillar wrote.
The paper said Pillar was an influential behind-the-scenes player and was considered the agency’s leading counterterrorism analyst.
By the end of his career, he was responsible for coordinating assessments on Iraq from all 15 agencies in the intelligence community. He is now a professor in security studies at Georgetown University.
In his article, he said he believes that the ”politicization” of intelligence on Iraq occurred ”subtly” and in many forms, but almost never resulted from a policymaker directly asking an analyst to reshape his or her results, the report said.
Instead, Pillar describes a process in which the White House helped frame intelligence results by repeatedly posing questions aimed at bolstering its arguments about Iraq, The Post said.
The Bush administration, Pillar wrote, ”repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war”, including information on the ”supposed connection” between Hussein and al-Qaeda, which analysts had discounted. – AFP
