Spies, Lies and the White House

A previously undisclosed CIA report written in the summer of 2002 questioned the "credibility" and "truthfulness" of an Al Qaeda detainee who became a key source for the Bush administration's claims about links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
The statements of the detainee--a captured terrorist operative named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi--were the principal basis for President Bush's contention in a major pre-Iraq War speech that Saddam's regime had "trained Al Qaeda members in bombmaking and poisons and deadly gases." The speech was delivered in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, just as Congress was taking up the White House-backed resolution authorizing the president to invade Iraq.

But two months before Bush's dramatic assertion, the CIA had raised serious doubts about whether al-Libi might be inventing some of what he was telling his interrogators, according to a 171-page Senate Intelligence Committee report on pre-war intelligence released last week.
"Questions persist about [al-Libi's] forthrightness and truthfulness," the CIA wrote in the still-classified Aug. 7, 2002, report, which was circulated throughout the U.S. intelligence community. "In some instances, however, he seems to have fabricated information."

The agency found that al-Libi--in an "attempt to exaggerate his importance"--had told interrogators that he was a member of Al Qaeda's "Shura Council," or governing body. But that claim was not corroborated by other intelligence reporting, the CIA analysis concluded in its report, which was titled: "Terrorism: Credibility of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and the Information He has Provided While in Custody."

The CIA analysis on al-LIbi was described by intelligence officials as a document known as a SPWR--"Senior, Publish When Ready" report. Although it has more limited distribution than some other CIA reports, SPWRs are routinely provided to senior policymakers throughout the U.S. government, including officials of the National Security Council at the White House.

The CIA's al-Libi report is one of several new--but so far largely overlooked--disclosures to be found deep in the fine print of the Senate's long-awaited "Phase 2" report on pre-war intelligence.  The Senate investigation sought to compare the public statements of top administration officials during the run-up to the Iraq War with the underlying intelligence-community reporting within the government that provided the basis for them. After much partisan squabbling within the panel over the issue, the final report (approved by all seven of the panel's seven Democrats and two of its Republicans) reached a largely unremarkable conclusion: that while most of the Bush administration's claims were "substantiated" by some internal intelligence-community reports, the public statements of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others were selective and failed to convey the considerable doubts, dissents and uncertainties within the community about much of the public case for war. (The panel's GOP vice chairman, Sen. Chris (Kit) Bond, and several other Republican members strenously dissented from the report on the grounds that it did not examine the pro-war statements of leading Democrats such as Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John Rockefeller, who now chairs the intelligence panel.)

Among the new nuggets in the report: the Defense Intelligence Agency was concerned that a key corroborating source for the claim that Iraq had developed mobile biological weapons labs "was being coached" by Ahmad Chalabi's controversial Iraqi exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, "to further its political agenda." In May 2002, the DIA cut off contact with the source, an Iraqi officer identified only as "Major General al-Assaf," and issued a warning notice about him after determining his information was "assessed as unreliable and, in some instances, [is] pure fabrication."