"The Rendon Group == Proof The Administration Manipulated Intelligence"

[understandinglife]

None of al-Haideri’s claims were true. Today’s Rolling Stone reveals that the administration’s use of al-Haideri’s lies to justify the Iraq war were “the product of a clandestine operation … that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling a war.”

At the center of this operation was John Rendon and The Rendon Group, “a controversial, secretive firm that has been criticized as ineffective and too expensive,” more than $56 million since the 9/11 attacks. (Taxpayers are paying him $311.26/hour.)

The Rendon Group personally set up the Iraqi National Congress and helped install Ahmad Chalabi as leader, whose main goal — “pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein” — Rendon helped facilitate. Pentagon documents show that Rendon has the highest level of government clearance (above Top Secret), which helped it with its INC work — “a worldwide media blitz designed to turn Hussein…into the greatest threat to world peace.”

While the White House continues to insist it did not manipulate intelligence before the Iraq war, it sure seems that it hired John Rendon and his group to do just that.

Numerous links available at the ThinkProgress post:
http://thinkprogress.org/2005/11/17/rendon-group

I had just finished reading the above when I checked at TPM and noticed that Mark Schmitt had an extensive post in the TPMCafe and one excerpt seemed to fit well with the above report from ThinkProgress:

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I think that the way we're looking at these questions is a little quaint. We're asking very traditional questions: Was information withheld? Was there deceit about the information? Those are the familiar Watergate/Iran-contra questions. But they overlook the Ideology of Information that the administration created.

By this I mean the whole practice of evaluating all information going into the war not for its truth value, but for whether it promoted or hindered the administration's goal of being free to go to war. The President could have been given every bit of intelligence information available, and he and/or Cheney would have reached the same decision because they would have discarded, discounted, or disregarded most of it.

Information that was Useful to that goal was put in one box, Not Useful put in another. Entire categories of information were assigned to the Not Useful box because their source was deemed an opponent of U.S. military action, or assumed to have some other motive. All information from the UN inspectors went into the Not Useful box because they were deemed war opponents, or because it was believed that giving any credence to the inspectors would lead back into the mid-1990s cycle of inspections and evasions of inspections. Any information from the CIA was considered Not Useful because they were deemed to have overlooked Saddam's arsenal in the 1990s. The fact that Saddam did everything the inspectors and the U.S. asked, even to the point of destroying the missiles whose specifications exceeded an agreement, was Not Useful or irrelevant because Saddam's motive was to avoid war. (Of course it was!)

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It is important to call attention to the Ideology of Information promoted during that period because it is very much alive. It is inherent in the Plame leak and to this day in the criticisms of Wilson -- the argument that he was the one who revealed information in his op-ed. It is inherent in the Bush and Cheney speeches: criticism and second thoughts, reminders of alternative information are all deemed simply Not Useful. It's something much deeper and sicker than just withholding or manipulating information.

Much more at the link to Ideology of Information:

http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/11/17/173326/24

And, we know how invaluable the services of Judith Miller, almost all of the major broadcast and print media corporations were to the distribution of the propaganda.


Peace.

[northamericancitizen]

1. udl please explain something for me

In the article you just posted it says that the Pentagon and the CIA were together in selling the war.

From what I understand the WH and Pentagon are not to happy with the CIA and vice-versa.


Is it:
They were together, WH gets upset at Wilson, outed Plame and now CIA is upset and is backing down from their "arrangement"?

or:
there is 2 different clan at the CIA?

Thank you

lise

[understandinglife]

2. I think the second option is more likely. And, for those of us who ..

.. have thought, from the outset, that the outing of Mrs Wilson was not merely a poke in the eye to Ambassador Wilson, but a whack at a faction within the CIA that refused to play Cheney's game.

One can imagine that disrupting core elements within the CIA that were very much anti-neocon, anti-Bolton, anti-Cheney could be conveniently done under the "cover" of "getting even with Joe Wilson."

Remember that characters like Fred Fleitz, very much a "Bolton man" was also CIA:

Fred Fleitz apparently had worked with John Bolton in the past, and when Bolton went to work at the State Department he requested of the CIA that Fleitz be assigned to him there. The person at CIA who ”facilitated” that request was Alan Foley, then director of the CIA office of Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control (Winpac). Foley was Bolton’s main contact at CIA in the area of WMD, and he spoke regularly with both Fleitz and Bolton "at least once a week or three times a month," according to his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff during Bolton’s confirmation hearings for his United Nations appointment. What is so interesting about this is that Alan Foley, as the head of Winpac, would have almost certainly known and worked closely with one Valerie Plame Wilson who worked in Non-Proliferation Division of the CIA, the operational side that worked hand-in-hand with Alan Foley's Winpac in the area of WMD.

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2005/10/28/194938/44

We have much to uncover, still, in other words.


Peace.

[northamericancitizen]

7. Thank you udl. True: "We have much to uncover, still..."

We have to find all the pieces in order to finish this puzzle. Then the whole ugly picture will be there for everyone to see.

lise

[understandinglife]

3. James Bamford: The Man Who Sold the War

The Man Who Sold the War

Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war

By JAMES BAMFORD

The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.
On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

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Much more - and an excellent read:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8798997?pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7&rnd=1132253345109&has-player=false

James Bamford is the best-selling author of "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies" (2004) and "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" (2001). This is his first article for Rolling Stone.

OK


Peace.

[understandinglife]

5. "We lost control of the context," Rendon warned. "That has to be fixed for

... the next war."

One dangerous dude.


Peace.

[understandinglife]

6. "In the end, he could not identify a single site where illegal weapons

... were buried."

Not one, got that Judy, Bill and Arthur.


Peace.

[damntexdem]

4. Thanks for the posts. If these are supported by evidence, ...

it would seem that Fitzpatrick should be interested, as should the bipartisan ad hoc committee studying misuse of intelligence info.