Wolfowitz Committee Instructed White House To Use Iraq/Uranium Reference

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The Office of Special Plans, according to the CIA official and the senators, routinely provided Bush, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice with questionable intelligence information on the Iraqi threat, much of which was included in various speeches by Bush and Cheney and some of which was called into question by the CIA.

In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld became increasingly frustrated that the CIA could not find any evidence of Iraq's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons program, evidence that would have helped the White House build a solid case for war in Iraq.

In an article in The New York Times last October, the paper reported that Rumsfeld had ordered the Office of Special Plans to 'to search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists' that might have been overlooked by the CIA.

The CIA official and the senators said that's when Wolfowitz and his committee instructed the White House to have Bush use the now-disputed line about Iraq's attempts to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger in a speech the president was set to give in Cincinnati. But Tenet quickly intervened and informed Stephen Hadley, an aide to national security adviser Rice, that the information was unreliable.

Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in an interview with the New Yorker magazine in May that the Office of Special Plans 'started picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the president. It's not intelligence. It's political propaganda.'

Lang said the CIA and Office of Special Plans often clashed on the accuracy of intelligence information provided to the White House by Wolfowitz.

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the author of a May New Yorker story on the Office of Special Plans, reported, 'former CIA officers and analysts described the agency as increasingly demoralized. George knows he's being beaten up,' one former officer said of Tenet. 'And his analysts are terrified. George used to protect his people, but he's been forced to do things their way.' Because the CIA's analysts are now on the defensive, 'they write reports justifying their intelligence rather than saying what's going on. The Defense Department and the Office of the Vice-President write their own pieces, based on their own ideology. We collect so much stuff that you can find anything you want.'

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