Doug Feith and pre-war intelligence

Anti-war activists and certain members of the U.S. Congress have condemned the behavior of former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith and the former DoD Office of Special Plans.  The critics have used a report by DoD Inspector General Thomas Gimble as the fodder for their assaults.  They claim that it indicates that Feith and DoD’s OSP deliberately misled Congress and distorted the intelligence process to disseminate unsupportable conclusions. 

The spearheads of this dubious assault are, predictably, Senators Carl Levin and Jay Rockefeller, who have announced that the IG’s report is a "devastating condemnation" of DoD officials like Feith and those working under him.

As is so often the case, the record indicates otherwise.

As war with Iraq loomed, the U.S. Intelligence Community was charged with telling policymakers what it knew about Iraq’s nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs. The Community’s best assessments were set out in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, a summation of the Community’s views.The title of this report, Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, foretells its conclusion: that Iraq was still pursuing its programs for weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Specifically, the NIE assessed that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program and could assemble a device by the end of the decade; that Iraq had biological weapons and mobile facilities for producing biological warfare (BW) agent; that Iraq had both renewed production of chemical weapons, and probably had chemical weapons stockpiles of up to 500 metric tons; and that Iraq was developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) probably intended to deliver BW agent. 

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Department of Energy (DOE), the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and all the military intelligence components agreed with this assessment.  Only the Department of State’s, Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) did not agree with the NIE assessments.

The current suggestion that a single individual, or small group of individuals, in DoD mastermined or are particularly to blame for the system wide intelligence failure on Iraq’s pre-war WMD program is itself a blatantly exaggerated and politically distorted assessment.    

The information compiled below is a summary of the relevant facts and events of the case.  It contains numerous statements by Mr. Feith, the DoD IG report, letters by both Senators Levin and Rockefeller, and several commentaries by media figures.

The Record:

• (9/09/05) Letter from Sen. Pat Roberts to then-Do IG Joseph Schimtz
• (2/07/06) Republican Policy Committee Report on pre-war intelligence
• (1/16/07) Comments by the Office of the Undersectary of Defense for Policy on the report of the DoD IG
• (2/09/07) Doug Feith’s statement on the release of the IG report
• (2/09/07) NPR feature on Feith and pre-war intelligence
• (2/11/07) Transcript of Doug Feith interview on Fox News
• (2/12/07) New York Sun op-ed "Vindicating Douglass Feith"
• (2/14/07) Doug Feith’s op-ed in the Washington Post, "Tough Question We Were Right to Ask"
• (2/14/07) Doug Feith’s e-mail to Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday
• (2/17/07) Unpublished letter by Lt. Gen. Michael Dunn (USAF, Ret.) to the New York Times
• (2/18/07) Deborah Howell’s article in the Washington Post, "How a Page 1 Mistake Was Made"
• (2/20/07) Michael Barone op-ed in Washington Times, "The Misuses of Intelligence"
• (2/21/07) Benjamin Zycher’s National Review Online article on Doug Feith and pre-war intelligence