alienation news

Tenet: Wolfowitz Did It

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, set up by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul 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.

"White House officials said the document [the main prewar intelligence summary on Iraq's weapons program partly declassified Friday] was one of those drawn on by speechwriters as they put together the State of the Union address. The official who gave the briefing today said Mr. Bush was unaware of the State Department's skepticism. The president 'is not a fact checker,' the official said. [...]