a little info on access to classified intel, history of using of false accusations for political agenda, SIC discovery of forged documentation.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content?030331fa_fact1

Quote:

Presidentâ??s Daily Brief, known as the P.D.B., one of the most sensitive intelligence documents in the American system. Its information is supposed to be carefully analyzed, or â??scrubbed.â? Distribution of the two- or three-page early-morning report, which is prepared by the C.I.A., is limited to the President and a few other senior officials. The P.D.B. is not made available, for example, to any members of the Senate or House Intelligence Committees.

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Forged documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and British policy toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997, after an impasse over U.N. inspections. Then as now, the Security Council was divided, with the French, the Russians, and the Chinese telling the United States and the United Kingdom that they were being too tough on the Iraqis. President Bill Clinton, weakened by the impeachment proceedings, hinted of renewed bombing, but, then as now, the British and the Americans were losing the battle for international public opinion. A former Clinton Administration official told me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading false information about Iraq.

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Did a poorly conceived propaganda effort by British intelligence, whose practices had been known for years to senior American officials, manage to move, without significant challenge, through the top layers of the American intelligence community and into the most sacrosanct of Presidential briefings? Who permitted it to go into the Presidentâ??s State of the Union speech? Was the messageâ??the threat posed by Iraqâ??more important than the integrity of the intelligence-vetting process? Was the Administration lying to itself? Or did it deliberately give Congress and the public what it knew to be bad information?

Asked to respond, Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had not obtained the actual documents until early this year, after the Presidentâ??s State of the Union speech and after the congressional briefings, and therefore had been unable to evaluate them in a timely manner. Harlow refused to respond to questions about the role of Britainâ??s MI6. Harlowâ??s statement does not, of course, explain why the agency left the job of exposing the embarrassing forgery to the I.A.E.A. It puts the C.I.A. in an unfortunate position: it is, essentially, copping a plea of incompetence.

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A former intelligence officer told me that some questions about the authenticity of the Niger documents were raised inside the government by analysts at the Department of Energy and the State Departmentâ??s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. However, these warnings were not heeded.

â??Somebody deliberately let something false get in there,â? the former high-level intelligence official added. â??It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up.â?

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It canâ??t help the Presidentâ??s case, or his international standing, when his advisers brief him with falsehoods, whether by design or by mistake.

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On March 14th, Senator Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally asked Robert Mueller, the F.B.I. director, to investigate the forged documents. Rockefeller had voted for the resolution authorizing force last fall. Now he wrote to Mueller, â??There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.â? He urged the F.B.I. to ascertain the source of the documents, the skill-level of the forgery, the motives of those responsible, and â??why the intelligence community did not recognize the documents were fabricated.â?


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