US intelligence is an oxymoron

In the two years leading up to the attack on Iraq, US intelligence agencies received but

dismissed reports from Iraqi scientists, defectors and other informants who said Saddam Hussein's government did not possess illicit weapons, according to government officials,

says the March 6 New York Times.

Those reports were never publicly acknowledged by government officials before the war.

The first public hint of those reports came in a speech on Friday by Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, she said "indications" were emerging from the panel's inquiry into prewar intelligence that "potential sources may have been dismissed because they were telling us something we didn't want to believe: that Iraq had no active W.M.D. programs."

Other government officials privately confirmed Ms. Harman's account.

Let me repeat and summarize just to make sure that this is clear: In the two years preceding the invasion of Iraq, US intelligence was told - not once by one source, but several times by several sources - that Saddam Hussein did not have banned weapons. And those sources were deliberately ignored because they didn't tell us what we wanted to hear.

So who were we listening to? Why, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, that's who - because he did tell us what we wanted to hear: that Iraq had biochemical weapons in such quantities as to make your head swim and nukes were just a trip to the uranium shop away. As is now clear to everybody (except perhaps for George "It's too soon to tell" Tenet), the information supplied by Chalabi's crew was wildly exaggerated where it was not downright false or completely fabricated. Chalabi doesn't even deny that, saying last month that as long as it resulted in Saddam's ouster, it doesn't matter.

So what do we do with Chalabi and his gang, liars where they weren't incompetents and incompetents where they weren't liars? Why, we continue to pay him lots of money, of course.

Washington (Reuters, March 10) - The United States pays the Iraqi National Congress exile group headed by Ahmed Chalabi about $340,000 a month for intelligence about insurgents and other matters, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

The money is apparently being paid by the DIA, as indicated by this exchange:

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing this week, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat, asked CIA Director George Tenet about continued payments to the INC. Tenet replied, "We're not paying them."

She then turned to Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and asked if he was paying them. Jacoby replied: "Senator, you have me in a situation where this would be best dealt with in closed session. I could give you detail."

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, "what a bunch of maroons."

Footnote: The times says that the CIA refused to comment on Jane Harman's remarks.

But an intelligence official said: "Human intelligence offering different views was by no means discounted or ignored. It was considered and weighed against all the other information available, and analysts made their best judgments."

Considering that it's hard to imagine how what we got could have been more wrong, if that actually, truly, sincerely did represent their "best judgment," it is so - what's a good phrase - mind-bogglingly stupid that it makes you wish it had been plain, straightforward deception, which at least allows room for basic competence.