The NIO Speaks

by Patrick Lang (bio below the fold)

Paul Pillar was the National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East during the period when the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq was written, staffed across the Intelligence Community and approved as the ground truth of the US government. That was in October, 2002. He was supposedly in charge of that process as the member of the National Intelligence Council responsible.

He is now retired and has written an article for “Foreign Affairs” in which he says:

That there was no evidence that Iraq had nuclear weapons and that Iraq was in no way close to possessing a nuclear weapon at the time the NIE was written.
That the supposed Iraq-Al-Qaida connection was fabricated and non-existing.
That the Bush administration was not informed by the work of the Intelligence Community. Rather they used products of the IC to justify strategic decisions already taken.
That contrary to the conclusions of the Senator Roberts led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, analyst were pressured subtly but strongly to produce desired conclusions with regard to this subject.

You can access his article at the Foreign Affairs site), and if you wish you can access my article on much the same subject which was written in early 2004 and published in Middle East Policy in Autumn of that same year.

Pat Lang

Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (interview), CNN and Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room (interview), PBS’s Newshour, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” (interview), and more .

Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
Recommended Books || More BooTrib Posts

Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)

“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2

3 Comments

idredit on February 10, 2006 at 9:12 pm

More evidence confirming what we already know – the books, the Memos details the official lies.

Lies marching us to the Iraq war; war decisions made long before the 9/11 event

Lies on Katrina – who knew what and when; revealed only by a hacker’s scorn.

Lies of NSA warrantless Spying; Liberties lost.

Not harmless lies, cause innocent people died. But NO true count. More lies.

Met only by a wimper of outrage, drowned out by those fools who pretend we’re kept safe.

More lies. We’ve lost our republic.

mythmother on February 10, 2006 at 9:16 pm

From the Amy Goodman interview on Democracy Now this morning. She asked if Libbey was trying to implicate Cheney:

MURRAY WAAS: No, to the contrary. He’s trying to — he’s not saying that Cheney directed him to leak information about Valerie Plame, which might have been illegal, or even if it was not considered a crime by the prosecutors, would look like a political dirty trick. So he’s — he might have — he’s charged with making false statements to the F.B.I. and grand jury, perjury, obstruction of justice, and he’s lying about his own role and maybe others he worked with, among them — it’s possible it could be Dick Cheney; we just don’t know — to put this information out there, you know, that Valerie Plame worked for the C.I.A. We just don’t know whether Libby — at this time, whether Libby was acting alone or with others. But he’s definitely not turning on the Vice President, but he’s trying to use the Vice President to say that Cheney knew in a broad way what he was doing, about his general conduct, in order to have — to get a more sympathetic jury and maybe look like part of his behavior was authorized.

BooMan on February 10, 2006 at 9:53 pm

It’s no wonder that Dick Cheney doesn’t like Paul Pillar. He sure stepped out of bounds in this San Francisco Chronicle article back on October 4th, 2002. The article is about whether John Walker Lindh was a source for exposing the alleged al-Qaeda cell in Buffalo.

Instead, it accepted a deal for a 20-year term, which under federal sentencing rules means he could serve as little as 17 years and be released at age 38.

The success of the teenage convert to Islam in going to Yemen and Pakistan to study Arabic and his new religion, then working his way into the ranks of Islamic fundamentalist fighters — and meeting Osama bin Laden at the Farooq camp — points up a weakness in U.S. intelligence gathering, critics say.

“We had a California bubblehead who managed to get himself right into al Qaeda. He even met bin Laden a few times,” former Ambassador Paul Bremer told a forum in Washington sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace. “I do not agree that these groups are impenetrable.”

Bremer, who headed up a national commission in the 1990s that warned of the danger of international terrorism, says the CIA and other spy agencies need to use a little imagination and re-emphasize the patient cultivation of human intelligence.

But Paul Pillar, an analyst at the government’s National Intelligence Council, responded to Bremer by saying that Lindh was not privy to al Qaeda secrets.

“The bubblehead from California was a grunt toting a rifle,” not part of a terrorist cell plotting a massive attack against the United States, Pillar said.

As for meeting bin Laden, Pillar said too much has been made of this. “I’ve met the president. That doesn’t give me an inside line on policy making in the White House,” he said.

idredit on February 10, 2006 at 9:12 pm

More evidence confirming what we already know – the books, the Memos details the official lies.

Lies marching us to the Iraq war; war decisions made long before the 9/11 event

Lies on Katrina – who knew what and when; revealed only by a hacker’s scorn.

Lies of NSA warrantless Spying; Liberties lost.

Not harmless lies, cause innocent people died. But NO true count. More lies.

Met only by a wimper of outrage, drowned out by those fools who pretend we’re kept safe.

More lies. We’ve lost our republic.
mythmother on February 10, 2006 at 9:16 pm

From the Amy Goodman interview on Democracy Now this morning. She asked if Libbey was trying to implicate Cheney:

MURRAY WAAS: No, to the contrary. He’s trying to — he’s not saying that Cheney directed him to leak information about Valerie Plame, which might have been illegal, or even if it was not considered a crime by the prosecutors, would look like a political dirty trick. So he’s — he might have — he’s charged with making false statements to the F.B.I. and grand jury, perjury, obstruction of justice, and he’s lying about his own role and maybe others he worked with, among them — it’s possible it could be Dick Cheney; we just don’t know — to put this information out there, you know, that Valerie Plame worked for the C.I.A. We just don’t know whether Libby — at this time, whether Libby was acting alone or with others. But he’s definitely not turning on the Vice President, but he’s trying to use the Vice President to say that Cheney knew in a broad way what he was doing, about his general conduct, in order to have — to get a more sympathetic jury and maybe look like part of his behavior was authorized.
BooMan on February 10, 2006 at 9:53 pm

It’s no wonder that Dick Cheney doesn’t like Paul Pillar. He sure stepped out of bounds in this San Francisco Chronicle article back on October 4th, 2002. The article is about whether John Walker Lindh was a source for exposing the alleged al-Qaeda cell in Buffalo.

Instead, it accepted a deal for a 20-year term, which under federal sentencing rules means he could serve as little as 17 years and be released at age 38.

The success of the teenage convert to Islam in going to Yemen and Pakistan to study Arabic and his new religion, then working his way into the ranks of Islamic fundamentalist fighters — and meeting Osama bin Laden at the Farooq camp — points up a weakness in U.S. intelligence gathering, critics say.

“We had a California bubblehead who managed to get himself right into al Qaeda. He even met bin Laden a few times,” former Ambassador Paul Bremer told a forum in Washington sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace. “I do not agree that these groups are impenetrable.”

Bremer, who headed up a national commission in the 1990s that warned of the danger of international terrorism, says the CIA and other spy agencies need to use a little imagination and re-emphasize the patient cultivation of human intelligence.

But Paul Pillar, an analyst at the government’s National Intelligence Council, responded to Bremer by saying that Lindh was not privy to al Qaeda secrets.

“The bubblehead from California was a grunt toting a rifle,” not part of a terrorist cell plotting a massive attack against the United States, Pillar said.

As for meeting bin Laden, Pillar said too much has been made of this. “I’ve met the president. That doesn’t give me an inside line on policy making in the White House,” he said.

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Patrick Lang

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