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Thursday, November 17, 2005 |
The Rendon Group: Proof The Administration Manipulated Intelligence.  From “Saddam Hussein’s Development of Weapons of Mass Destruction” [White House website]:
In 2001, an Iraqi defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, said he had visited twenty secret facilities for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. … Mr. Saeed said Iraq used companies to purchase equipment with the blessing of the United Nations - and then secretly used the equipment for their weapons programs.
None of al-Haideri’s claims were true. Today’s Rolling Stone reveals that the administration’s use of al-Haideri’s lies to justify the Iraq war were “the product of a clandestine operation…that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling a war.”
At the center of this operation was John Rendon and The Rendon Group, “a controversial, secretive firm that has been criticized as ineffective and too expensive,” more than $56 million since the 9/11 attacks. (Taxpayers are paying him $311.26/hour.)
The Rendon Group personally set up the Iraqi National Congress and helped install Ahmad Chalabi as leader, whose main goal — “pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein” — Rendon helped facilitate. Pentagon documents show that Rendon has the highest level of government clearance (above Top Secret), which helped it with its INC work — “a worldwide media blitz designed to turn Hussein…into the greatest threat to world peace.”
While the White House continues to insist it did not manipulate intelligence before the Iraq war, it sure seems that it hired John Rendon and his group to do just that.
[Think Progress]
3:02:00 PM 
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Robert Dreyfuss: Torture Prisons in Iraq. Yesterday I was speaking with someone who was involved in the pre-war, 2002-2003 planning for Iraq, and he told me of the exact moment at which some of his colleagues realized that the United States was proceeding with a policy that would turn Iraq over to a horde of Shiite crazies. By the end of 2002, many U.S. policymakers knew full well that post-Saddam Iraq would be run by the likes of the SCIRI Badr Brigade and the terrorist party Al Dawa. But we went ahead anyway. This was not an intelligence failure. This was a deliberate decision.
For months I have been writing (nearly alone, I will say) about the operations of Shiite death squads in Iraq, on the TomPaine.com site and elsewhere. In early 2004 I wrote a piece for the American Prospect about Phoenix-style death squads aided by U.S. forces. Now we see that these death squad-linked gangsters have been running torture prisons in Iraq.
We are reaping the results of what we have planted in Iraq. I've written a book about the background to all of this, as some of you know. We made horrible mistakes in the Middle East for decades, including a pattern during the Cold War of supporting the Islamic right. We're doing it all over again in Iraq. And if we don't watch out, the Muslim Brotherhood will take over Syria and Egypt and the Shiite radicals will spread their influence in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait. It's the Sorcerer's Apprentice gone wild. [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]
9:30:55 AM
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FACT: CIA Faced ‘Significant Pressure’ on Iraq Intel. Senior administration officials, including President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, have suggested recently that U.S. intelligence analysts faced no pressure from administration officials to produce information that would support the case for war.
A White House document released Tuesday says the following:
Congressional And Independent Committees Have Repeatedly Found No Political Pressure To Change Intelligence.
This is false — the answer to whether there was political pressure was left to Phase II of the Senate investigation, which is currently being stonewalled by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS).
But we don’t have to wait for the Senate report to know that intelligence analysts were pressured by the White House. As Knight-Ridder points out:
In a July 2003 report, a CIA review panel found that agency analysts were subjected to “steady and heavy” requests from administration officials for evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaida, which created “significant pressure on the Intelligence Community to find evidence that supported a connection.”
[Think Progress]
9:28:26 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Patricia Thurston.
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