Senators Debate Significance of Pentagon Report On Intelligence

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is in the process of producing a "Phase II" of its investigation of the lead-up to the war, dealing with allegations that the administration emphasized unproven intelligence that supported its charges against Hussein and played down information that undercut them. The committee has been awaiting the inspector general's report.

Gimble repeatedly emphasized yesterday that his report "was an investigation of a process" at the Pentagon and not of any individuals. That process was inappropriate, he said, because it purported to produce an "intelligence product" but its conclusions did not acknowledge alternative views within the intelligence community.

"The condition occurred because the role of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense Policy was expanded from the mission of doing defense policy to analyzing and disseminating alternative intelligence," Gimble said. "As a result, the office did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to the senior decision-makers."

"I don't know whether it was intentional or whether it was a good-faith judgment," Gimble said. "That's not my position, and I wouldn't have a thought on that. All I can tell you is, at the end of the day, when those things went forward, there was two sets of facts out there; one of them got passed over, and it would happen to be the one that's in the very community that we look to to have this kind of information."

Focused on the question of Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda, Gimble's report concentrated on findings that Feith's office presented in three briefings in August and September 2002 -- one to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, one to the CIA, and one at the White House to then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then Vice President Cheney's chief of staff.

Laying out a chronology of events, Gimble said Wolfowitz asked Feith in January 2002 "to assess the links between al-Qaeda and Iraq." The following July, he told the committee, a group of Pentagon employees assigned to Feith's office "compiled a position paper that was later translated into a briefing."

The briefing, titled "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Making the Case," was given to Rumsfeld on Aug. 8. In a memo to Feith's office that day, Wolfowitz described it as "excellent."

"The secretary was very impressed," Wolfowitz wrote. "He asked us to think about some possible next steps to see if we can illuminate the differences between us and the CIA. The goal is not to produce a consensus product, but rather to scrub one another's arguments."

Rumsfeld then directed that the briefing be presented to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.

Before an Aug. 15 briefing for Tenet, however, analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA and other agencies critiqued the briefing. In particular, they questioned Feith's conclusion that a "known contact" had taken place in Prague in April 2001 between a senior Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the leader of the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center in September of that year. "Essentially, they disagreed with more than 50 percent of it and either agreed or partially agreed with the remainder," Gimble said yesterday.

The CIA described the intelligence concerning the alleged contact with Atta as "contradictory at best," a Gimble aide testified at yesterday's hearing.

At the subsequent CIA briefing, Tenet called the presentation "useful," Gimble said. But Tenet remarked in an interview with the inspector general's office, Gimble said, that "he only said that it was 'useful' because he didn't agree with it and he was just trying to nicely end the meeting."

For the CIA briefing, Gimble said, Feith removed a slide concluding that there were "fundamental problems with the way the intelligence community was assessing the information." Gimble said that Feith told the inspector general's office he had taken it out "because it was critical of the intelligence community." The slide was reinserted for the later White House briefing.

After his session with Feith's group, Tenet arranged for a meeting between the group and intelligence community analysts to go over agreements and disagreements. As a result of that Aug. 20 session, Gimble said, the CIA agreed to make "some minor changes" in its analysis and to "footnote" its disagreements with the Pentagon presentation. Such footnotes are normally used in community intelligence documents to warn policymakers that there are other opinions.

Briefing Hadley and Libby, Gimble said, Feith's group did not mention that the intelligence community disagreed with more than half of its conclusions. Tenet, Gimble said, did not learn of the White House briefing until two years later.

Hadley, he said, declined to be interviewed by the inspector general's office, on the advice of the White House counsel. Libby was not asked for an interview, Gimble said. Levin said yesterday that he wants to question both.