It's all about Cheney, War Stories Edition

Ronald [Nancy] Reagan knew Dick Cheney was a nut case, Bush 41 knew Cheney was a nut case but Bush 43 let him take charge of foreign and defense policy. Over at Slate Daniel Benjamin tells us that when it came to foreign policy he was President Cheney.

With a national security staff that numbered 14 last year (Al Gore usually had four or five), Cheney's office has a finger in every pie. Several of the State Department's top diplomats, including Eric Edelman, now undersecretary of defense for policy, and Victoria Nuland, now ambassador to NATO, are alums of Cheney's office. According to David L. Phillips' Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco, the dominant figure in some of the key interagency deliberations on postwar Iraq was not the State Department official who chaired them but Samantha Ravich, a former Cheney aide who has since left the government. In addition, Cheney has remarkable influence over his onetime boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

[.....]

Cheney's connection with intelligence and, particularly, Pentagon intelligence is not exactly new. The transmission lines for many of the bogus claims in 2002 and 2003 about the purported ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida ran from the civilian Office of the Secretary of Defense through Cheney's office. Although the Libby indictment might lead some to believe that OVP was running an apolitical enforcement operation, it was doing much more than that. Cheney's team was producing the basic justification for going to war.

News accounts have placed the origin of much of the bad intelligence in the Office of Special Plans, which was run by Abram Shulsky, a graduate-school pal of former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. In fact, the bad intel came largely out of something called the Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which reported to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. This group consisted of just two people: Michael Maloof, a controversial former aide to Richard Perle whose security clearances were eventually suspended, and David Wurmser, a longtime neoconservative advocate of toppling Saddam Hussein. (Since late 2003, Wurmser has worked in OVP.)

And it was Cheney's "intelligence" not intelligence from the CIA or the State Department that was used to brief the President and the Congress. It was Cheney's "intelligence" that was the basis for Powell's speech to the United Nations. The CIA knew the intelligence was faulty.

The wide airing of CTEG material clearly irked George Tenet, who declared at one point when pressed by congressmen in 2003 that he would "talk to" Cheney about some of the claims he was making. Whatever passed between them, Cheney was not deterred. In January 2004, he told a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News that the Standard article was the "best source of information" on Saddam's ties to al-Qaida. In June 2004, Cheney was still claiming that 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta met an Iraqi agent in Prague.

The war within a war was Cheney's war against the "realists" in the CIA and at the State Department.

Much is still to be learned about how intelligence was used and abused in CTEG and OVP. But one story gives a hint of what the historians may find: When I interviewed him several months ago, Powell's former chief of staff Larry Wilkerson recounted the story of a meeting in the White House situation room during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq when policymakers met with top intelligence officials from a number of agencies. After the intelligence officials made their presentations, Douglas Feith "leapt to his feet, pointed to a certain National Intelligence Officer and declared 'You people don't know what you're talking about.' "

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