President Bush didn't use intelligence

Paul Pillar, who was the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 (he is now on the faculty of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University), says the Bush administration played on the nation's fears in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, falsely linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein's regime even though intelligence agencies had not produced a single analysis supporting "the notion of an alliance" between the two.

Pillar has written a sunning indictment of administration policies on intelligence in a 4,500 word essay "Intelligence, Policy and the War in Iraq," in the forthcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. He argues from a position of an insider, that connections were drawn between the terrorists and Iraq because "the administration wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to the `war on terror' and the threat the American public feared most, thereby capitalizing on the country's militant post-9/11 mood."

It apparently is the first time such attacks are being made publicly by such a high-ranking intelligence official directly involved behind the scenes--before, during and after the invasion of Iraq nearly three years ago.

The journal provides a summary ..

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.

You can read the whole essay here.