Cheney's Miserable Judgment

Last week on the Daily Show, former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke made the following quip about Dick Cheney's seemingly uncanny ability to find and repeat bad intelligence (here's the video clip).

He had the best way of picking, you know,
there's all sorts of intelligence out there, and
he picked out the worst reports. The Mohammed
Atta report is from a drunk, literally, we know
that. The report about getting uranium from
Niger in Africa, turns out to be a forged document
that if you just look at it, it's like written in
crayons, you know . . .

I laughed hard at the time, but I remembered Clarke's line tonight when I was reading Murray Waas' latest article. In an important piece in the National Journal, Waas reports:

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly
classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence
community had no evidence linking the Iraqi
regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and
that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq
had any significant collaborative ties with
Al Qaeda, according to government records and
current and former officials with firsthand
knowledge of the matter."

This was a part of the President's Daily Brief ("PDB") on September 21, 2001. Waas reports that the very existence of this document was not disclosed until 2004, and it has still not been given to the Senate Intelligence Committee, despite numerous requests.

But this was a good year and a half before the invasion of Iraq. Perhaps the assessment changed? Apparently not.

"What the President was told on September 21,"
said one former high-level official, "was
consistent with everything he has been told
since-that the evidence was just not there."

So why did Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of them make all kinds of public statements to the contrary? Well, the answer to that question is perhaps the strangest part of this whole affair. As Waas explains:

One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld
made statements that contradicted what they
were told in CIA briefings might have been that
they were receiving information from another
source that purported to have evidence of
Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from
a covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the
September 11 attacks by then-Undersecretary
of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.

This is the same Douglas J. Feith who was famously described by General Tommy Franks as "the f*cking stupidest guy on the face of the earth." His "covert intelligence unit" was nothing more than a couple of guys--David Wurmser and Michael Maloof, neither of whom had any experience analyzing intelligence--sitting a back room rifling through old intelligence reports. Yet the White House--Cheney in particular--relied almost exclusively on their conclusions, even when they were flatly contradicted by the rest of the intelligence community.

Waas ends his piece with this juicy detail:

Those grievances [with the CIA] were also
perhaps illustrated by comments that Vice
President Cheney himself wrote on one of
Feith's reports detailing purported evidence
of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam
Hussein. In barely legible handwriting,
Cheney wrote in the margin of the report:

"This is very good indeed . . . Encouraging . . .
Not like the crap we are all so used to getting
out of CIA."

I realize that the intelligence community--the CIA in particular--has been very wrong on many occasions. But what does it say about the judgment of our Vice President that he was so willing to embrace the conclusions of a few yahoos with no experience over the consensus of intelligence professionals? Hell, he might as well have been taking daily briefings from bloggers. Their conclusions couldn't have been that much more off the mark. This whole episode would almost be funny if the consequences weren't so disastrous.