In "A dance to the music of time," our own Paul Mirengoff recalled his undergraduate admiration of fellow Dartmouth student Paul Pillar. Paul M. recalled that in addition to being a fabulous student and a loyal friend, Pillar was the straightest arrow he knew. Paul's recollections were occasioned by word of Pillar's then-forthcoming Foreign Affairs essay, now published as "Intellgence, policy and the war in Iraq."

This past Friday the Wall Street Journal published a critical column on Pillar's essay by former CIA officer Guillermo Christensen: "Un-intelligence." Today the Daily Standard has posted Thomas Joscelyn's devastating critique of Pillar's essay: "Rogue bureaucrat." Joscelyn's critique is mandatory reading.

JOHN adds: Joscelyn's article is indeed devastating. An excerpt:

Thus, contrary to Pillar's claims, his own division at the CIA thought there were good reasons based on "new intelligence" to investigate the matter--without any "specific request" from the Bush administration--in the months leading up to the war.

Why did officials at the CIA think that the issue warranted an additional investigation? The reality of this matter is far more complicated than the quick and dirty narrative Pillar gives us.

Although the Senate Intelligence Report is heavily redacted, the excerpts of Iraqi Support for Terrorism that were made available for public consumption, as well as the Senate Intelligence Committee's own analysis, paint a very different picture than the one Pillar wants us to see. The CIA, we learn, had failed to collect first-hand human intelligence inside either the Iraqi regime or al Qaeda. Despite this poor collection effort, however, the CIA had acquired intelligence on a relationship between the two--primarily from foreign government services and open sources.

The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded, for example that "despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al-Qaida." In fact, the CIA "did not have a focused human intelligence (HUMINT) collection strategy targeting Iraq's links to terrorism until 2002." The CIA's intelligence collection was so bad that the agency did not have "any unilateral sources that could provide information on the Iraq/al-Qaida relationship" and was "entirely dependent on foreign government services for that information."

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Pillar does not tell us about the old guard at the CIA's poor track record in collecting intelligence. That is not surprising. Good bureaucrats, after all, defend the bureaucracy from outside criticism.

Instead, he pretends to dismiss the issue with absolute certainty--as if he had been reviewing concrete intelligence collected by his colleagues over all these years.

Nor does Pillar tell us that when the CIA revisited the issue they did compile evidence of a relationship. Any intelligence analysis, by its very nature, must deal with vagaries and uncertainties. But here we come to the most egregious aspect of Pillar's Foreign Affairs piece. He avoids substantive discussion of the actual intelligence the CIA had amassed from various other sources; evidence that, in many instances, cuts against his out-of-hand dismissal.

Again, we turn to what Pillar's own division at the CIA told the administration on the eve of war. "Our knowledge of Iraq's ties to terrorism is evolving," the CIA wrote in Iraqi Support for Terrorism. "Regarding the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," the CIA assessed, "reporting from sources of varying reliability points to a number of contacts, incidents of training, and discussions of Iraqi safehaven for Osama bin Laden and his organization dating from the early 1990s."

There was evidence that al Qaeda had metastasized inside regime-controlled Iraq. According to the Senate Intelligence Report, "Iraqi Support for Terrorism described a network of more than a dozen al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-associated operatives in Baghdad, and estimated that 100-200 al-Qaeda fighters were present in northeastern Iraq in territory under the control of Ansar al-Islam." Furthermore, "A variety of reporting indicates that senior al-Qaeda terrorist planner al-Zarqawi was in Baghdad between May-July 2002 under an assumed identity." Regarding those hundreds of al Qaeda operatives who set up shop in northeastern Iraq, "it would be difficult for al-Qaeda to maintain an active, long-term presence in Iraq without alerting the authorities or obtaining their acquiescence."

Alarmingly the CIA noted, "The most disturbing aspect of the relationship is the dozen or so reports of varying reliability mentioning the involvement of Iraq or Iraqi nationals in al Qaeda's efforts to obtain CBW training." Elsewhere, the CIA's analysts noted that they could not determine if some of these nationals were working for the Iraqi regime or not. But still, "The general pattern that emerges is of al Qaeda's enduring interest in acquiring, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) expertise from Iraq."

We know more now about the relationships between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups than the CIA knew in 2003, including the three (at least) terrorist training centers that Saddam ran up until the outbreak of the war. But the CIA's own reports to the Bush administration refute Pillar's suggestion that the Iraq/al Qaeda connection was somehow a neocon fantasy.

Posted by Scott at 06:04 PM  |    |