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Former Bush Administration Official Questions Whether Iraq Intelligence was Politicized
Recent revelations about the source of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war have prompted a former senior Bush administration official to question whether the intelligence was politicized, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, Nov. 22). “You begin to speculate, you begin to wonder: Was this intelligence spun? Was it politicized? Was it cherry-picked? Did in fact the American people get fooled? I'm beginning to have my concerns,” Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said in an interview with the BBC. Wilkerson said reports on doubts about the credibility of a U.S. informant known as Curveball and of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al-Qaeda military instructor, caused him to question whether the United States was duped. Information provided by al-Libi “led Colin Powell to say at the U.N. on Feb. 5, 2003, that there were some pretty substantive contacts between al-Qaeda and Baghdad.” However, al-Libi’s statements appear to have been “obtained through interrogation techniques other than those authorized by [the] Geneva” Conventions, Wilkerson said. “More important than that, we know that there was a Defense Intelligence Agency dissent on that testimony even before Colin Powell made his presentation,” he added. “We never heard about that.” Wilkerson also criticized Vice President Dick Cheney over prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq and for the lack of a post-war plan in Iraq. When asked if Cheney was guilty of war crimes, Wilkerson said, “Well, that’s an interesting question. It is certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror, and I would suspect that it is, for whatever it’s worth, an international crime as well” (Associated Press/CNN.com, Nov. 29).
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