MORE ON THE COOKED WMD INTELLIGENCE

(Once again, via Crooks & Liars)

Jonathan Schwarz of Tiny Revolution finds a very interesting tidbit in The Italian Letter by Peter Eiser and Knut Royce:

There's some amazing stuff in it about Alan Foley, the head of the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC). WINPAC led the CIA's analysis of Iraq's purported WMD, and so Foley is at the very center of what happened.


So why, then, would WINPAC report that Iraq had WMD? Here's the answer (p. 119):

One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center's analysts: "If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so." The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.

Jonathon further writes that this incident had been reported at least twice before:

this appears in Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy by Lindsay Moran:

a colleague who worked in the office covering Iraqi counterproliferation reported to me that her mealy-mouthed pen pusher of a boss had gathered together his minions and announced, "Let’s face it. The president wants us to go to war, and our job is to give him a reason to do it."

This is from Pretext for War by James Bamford:

At one point in January 2003, the person's boss called a meeting and gave them their marching orders. "And he said, 'You know what—if Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so'... He said it
at the weekly office meeting.

Just as a reminder, this is what Sir Richard Dearlove ("C") , the head of Britain's version of the CIA, thought in 2002:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in Attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove
Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.