CIA analysts 'disagreed with more than 50%' of Pentagon team's 'controversial' Iraq WMD findings

Raw Story
Feb. 11, 2007

CIA analysts "disagreed with more than 50%" of a Pentagon team's "controversial" Iraq WMD findings, the LA Times reports.

"As the Bush administration began assembling its case for war, analysts across the U.S. intelligence community were disturbed by the report of a secretive Pentagon team that concluded Iraq had significant ties to Al Qaeda," Greg Miller and Julian E. Barnes write for the LA Times.

The article continues, "Analysts from the CIA and other agencies 'disagreed with more than 50%' of 26 findings the Pentagon team laid out in a controversial paper, according to testimony Friday from Thomas F. Gimble, acting inspector general of the Pentagon."

Excerpts from article:

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The dueling groups sat down at CIA headquarters in late August 2002 to try to work out their differences. But while the CIA agreed to minor modifications in some of its own reports, Gimble said, the Pentagon unit was utterly unbowed.

"They didn't make the changes that were talked about in that August 20th meeting," Gimble said, and instead went on to present their deeply flawed findings to senior officials at the White House.

The work of that special Pentagon unit — which was run by former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith — is one of the lingering symbols of the intelligence failures leading up to the war in Iraq.

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FULL LA TIMES ARTICLE AT THIS LINK