1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Today, on the normal Friday news-dump, the latest findings come out of the inspector general's office of the Pentagon claiming "...that prewar intelligence work at the Pentagon, including a contention that the CIA had underplayed the likelihood of an al-Qaida connection, was inappropriate but not illegal."

Cooking the books in August 2002, under the watchful eyes of "...Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz who reviewed CIA intelligence analyses for further use..." by the ever loquacious Don Rumsfeld to shove up the stovepipe, at the Office of Special plans, the IG report found that ....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pentagon officials undercut the intelligence community in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq by insisting in briefings to the White House that there was a clear relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, the Defense Department's inspector general said Friday.

Acting Inspector General Thomas Gimble told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the office headed by former Pentagon policy chief Douglas Feith took "inappropriate" actions in advancing conclusions on al-Qaeda connections not backed up by the nation's intelligence agencies.

Gimble said that while the actions of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy "were not illegal or unauthorized," they "did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to senior decision makers" at a time when the White House was moving toward war with Iraq.

"I can't think of a more devastating commentary," said Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.

He cited Gimble's findings that Feith's office was, despite doubts expressed by the intelligence community, pushing conclusions that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague five months before the attack, and that there were "multiple areas of cooperation" between Iraq and al-Qaeda, including shared pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

"That was the argument that was used to make the sale to the American people about the need to go to war," Levin said in an interview Thursday. He said the Pentagon's work, "which was wrong, which was distorted, which was inappropriate ... is something which is highly disturbing.

USA Today - February 9, 2007

Feith has been quoted as saying "Clearly, the inspector general's office was willing to challenge the policy office and even stretch some points to be able to criticize it." And for someone who should really know what he's talking about when it comes to the act of quibbling, Feith also added that he felt this amounted to subjective "quibbling" by the IG.

Now with the smoke and smudge supposedly cleared from the section of stovepipe at the Pentagon and with this latest information out of the way, we can now continue up the stovepipe to the vicinity of, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!

Specifically, to the table of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) and the offices of the vice-president...

And of course, the only way to do that is for the Senate Intelligence Committee to take immediate action to complete and finish that portion of it's work, that was promised to be completed by ex-chairman Pat Roberts in its investigation into the prewar intelligence on Iraq.

It has been two and one-half years (2-1/2) since it released the first part of its findings in July 2004.

Does it really make a difference if we find out what the facts of this matter are? Or do we all simply just sit around and wait for history to write the final chapter?

~OGD~

ps: Maybe by the time they get all of this completed my 6 year old grandson will have graduated college. That way he may have some type of worthwhile employment, so as to help pay the freight on all of this....

04/22/2009: More to Add to the Stove-Pipe

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Some new info for the ... Stove-Pipe . . .

McClatchy: Bush Admin Used Torture To Look For Saddam-Qaida Link

Citing an anonymous intel source and a new Senate report, McClatchy reports the Bush Admin strongly pressured interrogators to use torture to find a Qaida-Saddam link.

Read McClatchy Piece

Senate Report: Torture Policies Went All The Way to the Top

Read Senate Report (pdf)

Was The CIA Always Acting Within Authorization?

Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation -- widely considered torture -- as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation and stress positions and waterboarding, which simulates drowning, insist that they were legal.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly -- Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 -- according to a newly released Justice Department document.

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

Excerpts from Burney's interview appeared in a full, declassified report on a two-year investigation into detainee abuse released on Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., called Burney's statement "very significant."

"I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," Levin said in a conference call with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist."

Levin recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

A senior Guantanamo Bay interrogator, David Becker, told the committee that only "a couple of nebulous links" between al Qaida and Iraq were uncovered during interrogations of unidentified detainees, the report said.

Others in the interrogation operation "agreed there was pressure to produce intelligence, but did not recall pressure to identify links between Iraq and al Qaida," the report said.

The report, the executive summary of which was released in November, found that Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and other former senior Bush administration officials were responsible for the abusive interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rumsfeld approved extreme interrogation techniques for Guantanamo in December 2002. He withdrew his authorization the following month amid protests by senior military lawyers that some techniques could amount to torture, violating U.S. and international laws.

Military interrogator, however, continued employing some techniques in Afghanistan and later in Iraq.

Bush and his top lieutenants charged that Saddam was secretly pursuing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in defiance of a United Nations ban, and had to be overthrown because he might provide them to al Qaida for an attack on the U.S. or its allies.

(John Walcott and Warren P. Strobel contributed to this article.)

ON THE WEB

Senate report, part 1

Senate report, part 2

Report Gives New Detail on Approval of Brutal Techniques

By BRIAN KNOWLTON
Published: April 21, 2009


WASHINGTON -- A newly declassified Congressional report released Tuesday outlined the most detailed evidence yet that the military's use of harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects was approved at high levels of the Bush administration.


The report focused solely on interrogations carried out by the military, not those conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency at its secret prisons overseas. It rejected claims by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others that Pentagon policies played no role in harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or other military facilities.

The 232-page report, the product of an 18-month inquiry, was approved on Nov. 20 by the Senate Armed Services Committee, but has since been under Pentagon review for declassification. Some of the findings were made public in a Dec. 12 article in The New York Times; a spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed the report at the time as "unfounded allegations against those who have served our nation."

The Senate report documented how some of the techniques used by the military at prisons in Afghanistan and at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as in Iraq -- stripping detainees, placing them in "stress positions" or depriving them of sleep -- originated in a military program known as Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape, or SERE, intended to train American troops to resist abusive enemy interrogations.

According to the Senate investigation, a military behavioral scientist and a colleague who had witnessed SERE training proposed its use at Guantánamo in October 2002, as pressure was rising "to get 'tougher' with detainee interrogations." Officers there sought authorization, and Mr. Rumsfeld approved 15 interrogation techniques.

The report showed that Mr. Rumsfeld's authorization was cited by a United States military special-operations lawyer in Afghanistan as "an analogy and basis for use of these techniques," and that, in February 2003, a special-operations unit in Iraq obtained a copy of the policy from Afghanistan "that included aggressive techniques, changed the letterhead, and adopted the policy verbatim."

Months later, the report said, the interrogation officer in charge at Abu Ghraib obtained a copy of that policy "and submitted it, virtually unchanged, through her chain of command." This ultimately led to authorization by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez of the use of stress positions, "sleep management" and military dogs to exploit detainees' fears, the report said.

"The paper trail on abuse leads to top civilian leaders, and our report connects the dots," Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said on Tuesday in a conference call with reporters. "This report, in great detail, shows a paper trail going from that authorization" by Mr. Rumsfeld "to Guantánamo to Afghanistan and to Iraq," Mr. Levin said.