Tenet Points The Finger At Wolfowitz Committee

When George Tenet, the director of the CIA, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about dubious intelligence data on the Iraqi threat that made it into President Bush’s State of the Union address in January, he said an ad-hoc committee called the Office of Special Plans, headed by Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and other high-profile hawks rewrote the intelligence information on Iraq that the CIA gathered and gave it to White House officials to help Bush build a case for war, according to three Senators on the intelligence committee.

Tenet told the Intelligence Committee that his own spies at the CIA determined that much of the intelligence information they collected on Iraq could not prove that the country was an imminent threat nor could they find any concrete evidence that Iraq was stockpiling a cache of chemical and biological weapons. But the Office of Special Plans, using Iraqi defectors from the Iraqi National Congress as their main source, rewrote some of the CIA’s intelligence to say, undeniably, that Iraq was hiding some of the world’s most lethal weapons. Once the intelligence was rewritten, it was delivered to the office of National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, where it found its way into various public speeches given by Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush, the Senators said.

Whether a bipartisan probe into the OSP is convened remain to be seen, but one thing is certain, the committee of pseudo spies wields an enormous amount of power.

Larry C. Johnson, a former counter-terrorism expert at the CIA and the State Department, says he's spoken to his colleagues working for both agencies and its clear that the OSP has politicized the intelligence process.

“What they're experiencing now is the worst political pressure. Anyone who attempted to challenge or rebut OSP was accused of rocking the boat. OSP came in with an agenda that they were predisposed to believe,” he said.

Vinnie Cannistrano, who worked for the CIA for 27 years, told the National Journal last month that the OSP "incorporated a lot of debatable intelligence, and it was not coordinated with the intelligence community."