Sorry if you have already discussed this.

Detailed presentation of the way intell was misused.

A few telling excerpts:

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"In order to present a public case that heightened the sense of threat from Iraq, Administration officials reflected more closely the analysis of Under Secretary Feith’s policy office rather than the more cautious analysis of the IC."

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Administration officials were apparently using intelligence analyses that originated outside of the IC. Those intelligence analyses claiming a close relationship were produced by the office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, and presented to high level Administration officials. Vice President Cheney specifically stated that the Feith analysis was the “best source of information.”

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The Administration’s pattern of utilizing the stronger, less supportable analyses regarding the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship was not limited to building its case before the Iraq war. It continued well after the war started. For example, it was recently discovered that Under Secretary Feith failed to make corrections requested by the CIA to a classified document on that topic which he first provided to the SSCI in October 2003. The CIA subsequently reviewed the document and requested many changes be made to accurately reflect their assessments of the underlying intelligence. A new document was submitted by the DOD to the SASC in January, 2004, which was represented to contain the required changes.But, in September 2004, when Senator Levin obtained a copy of the changes the CIA originally requested, it became apparent that key changes had not been made and the pattern of misrepresenting intelligence was continuing.

The non-IC or “alternative” intelligence analysis conducted by the DOD neatly fit the Administration’s desire to build a strong case for an invasion of Iraq to overthrow the Saddam regime, particularly given the fact that the usual source of intelligence analysis, the IC, was skeptical about the existence of a close or cooperative relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

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The fact that a Policy office undertook such an intelligence review, rather than relying on the IC, suggests a determination to reach a particular conclusion.

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Feith’s office, convinced the relationship was significant, advanced the DOD perspective in two ways: by attempting to change the IC’s views (or at least the content of IC products), and by taking its interpretation straight to policymakers, including in the White House.

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Under Secretary Feith briefed Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Tenet and Tenet’s senior staff in mid August. The DOD policy office analysts met with IC experts on August 20, 2002 at an IC “coordination meeting” planned to finalize the text of the IC’s Iraqi Support for Terrorism report. The SSCI interviewed eight of the twelve staff who attended the meeting; each IC analyst described the presence of the DOD staff as “unusual,” since “members of an intelligence consumer organization such as OUSDP [the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy] normally do not participate in the creation of intelligence products.”18
The IC analysts said that Feith’s staff were concerned about “too many caveats in the reporting and the ‘tone’” of the draft IC report. Feith’s staff also pressed dubious information, including criticizing the draft IC report for omitting reference to the “key issue of Atta.”19

The Feith staff also had a harsh critique of the CTC report Iraq and al Qaida:
Interpreting a Murky Relationship. One of his staff wrote “in its interpretation of this information, CIA attempts to discredit, dismiss, or downgrade much of this reporting, resulting in inconsistent conclusions in many instances. Therefore, the CIA report should be read for content only – and CIA’s interpretation ought to be ignored.”20

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However, documents provided to the SASC indicate that Feith’s staff requested, both verbally and in written form, at least 32 changes to the draft, including inserting raw intelligence reports that had previously been omitted, deleting others, and altering the characterization of certain issues and raw reporting. Although the substance of all the related documents remains classified, a comparison of the Feith staff’s requests for changes to the final report indicates that half of the changes they advocated were made, either as requested or with caveats. Specifically, 16 changes were made, 14 were not, and for 2 the outcome is indeterminate.

Thus, even though IC analysts refused to incorporate information which they believed was dubious into their judgments about the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, and the IC analysis remained skeptical of that relationship, nonetheless raw, questionable intelligence reports were incorporated in the IC document because of advocacy by Under Secretary Feith and his staff.

Administration officials relied on or cited these reports in their public statements about the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship and selectively used or cited questionable reports that went beyond the IC’s judgments.