In July 2003, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paull Wolfowitz tried to explain why, four months after the U.S. invaded Iraq, weapons of mass destruction were nowhere to be found.

“The nature of terrorism intelligence is intrinsically murky,” Wolfowitz said during a July 29, 2003 interview on “Meet the Press.” “If you wait until the terrorism picture is clear, you’re going to wait until after something terrible has happened.”

Two weeks before his appearance on “Meet the Press,” Wolfowitz contacted a person in the editorial department of The Wall Street Journal and asked the individual to write a critical story about Joseph Wilson, who publicly accused the Bush administration weeks earlier of “twisting” intelligence to win public and Congressional support for the Iraq war.

Wilson, a diplomat who had served in Iraq and Africa, was selected by the CIA’s non-proliferation office to travel to Niger in early 2002 to examine the Iraq-yellowcake allegations. Wilson returned to the United States and reported to CIA officials that the claims appeared to have no merit, a finding that matched with inquiries from other U.S. officials.

On July 17, 2003, 11 days after Wilson wrote an op-ed in The New York Times challenging the veracity of the Bush administration’s prewar claims. Wolfowitz faxed the Wall Street Journal a set of “talking points” about the former ambassador that the paper’s editors could use to discredit him in print.

That information was revealed during the federal criminal trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, who was convicted of perjury and obtruction of justice for his role in the leak of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative working, ironically in the CIA’s counter proliferation division.

According to Libby’s March 2004 grand jury transcripts, he said that Vice President Cheney discussed with him getting Wolfowitz to contact the Journal to leak the NIE as a way of undermining Wilson.

“After July 14, in that week, the Vice President thought we should still try and get the [NIE] out. And so he asked me to talk to the Wall Street Journal. I don’t have as good a relationship with the Wall Street Journal as Secretary Wolfowitz did, and so we talked to Secretary Wolfowitz about trying to get that point across [to the Journal], and he undertook to do so,” Libby testified.

The Journal printed, verbatim, Wolfowitz’s talking points in an editorial in its July 17, 2003, edition and then misled its readers about the source of the information.

According to the editorial, “Yellowcake Remix,” the Journal said the data the newspaper received about Iraq’s interest in uranium “does not come from the White House,” despite the fact that Libby testified that he personally lobbied Wolfowitz to leak the NIE to the Journal, and that arguably Wolfowitz’s position as Undersecretary of Defense made him a senior member of the Bush administration.

Wolfowitz is one of the former White House officials and architects of the Iraq war who was singled out in a report released Thursday that said President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld knowingly lied about Iraq’s weapons capabilities and its ties to al-Qaeda.

“Before taking the country to war, this administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” said committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, D- W. Va.
The Senate report is the first document to state that Bush and Cheney knowingly made false allegations about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator who was executed in December 2006.

“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate,” Rockefeller said in a statement.

Despite the report’s findings, Democrats and Republicans were aware prior to the March 2003 invasion that much of the prewar Iraq intelligence derived from Iraqi dissidents who were paid handsomely for information they knew was unreliable information about the imminent threat Iraq posed to the U.S.

“Having concluded that international inspectors are unlikely to find tangible and irrefutable evidence that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration is preparing its own assessment that will rely heavily on evidence from Iraqi defectors, according to senior administration officials,” The New York Times reported Jan. 23, 2003.

Bush administration officials used some of the information provided by the Iraqi defectors in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address even though administration officials knew the information was unreliable.

“The White House asked administration intelligence analysts … to use the information from the defectors as part of a ‘bill of particulars’ that the administration hopes will convince skeptical allies and the American public that Iraq’s behavior warrants military action, the officials said,” the Times reported. “In addition, they said, it may be incorporated into President Bush’s State of the Union address on Jan. 28, [2003].”

Many of the defectors were encouraged to speak to intelligence officials by Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group with close ties to the White House. There continue to be deep divisions in Washington over the value of information from defectors associated with Chalabi’s group.

“The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency has been the most receptive to the defectors intelligence, saying that defectors are critical to penetrating Iraq’s deceptive practices. The CIA has often been dismissive of the defectors and questioned their credibility, according to administration officials,” the Times reported.

Five days before President’s Bush’s State of the Union Speech on Jan. 28, 2003 Wolfowitz spoke to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York and credited Iraqi defectors with providing the Pentagon and other U.S. “intelligence agencies” much of the information on Iraq’s secret weapons programs that has long been dismissed by military personnel in Iraq as unreliable.

Wolfowitz said in his Jan. 23, 2003 presentation to the Council of Foreign Relations that it was Iraqi defectors who told the CIA and the Pentagon about mobile trailers in Iraq that were allegedly used to produce biological weapons.

“We know about that capability from defectors and other sources,” Wolfowitz said during his speech.
“For a great body of what we need to know, we are very dependent on traditional methods of intelligence – that is to say, human beings who are either deliberately or inadvertently communicating to us.”

Secretary of State Colin Powell in his February presentation to the United Nations where he was trying to win support for war, pointed to the trailers as evidence of Iraq’s secret weapons program.

When the trailers were found in May 2003 President Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were quick to point out that the trailers were used to produce lethal chemical weapons, even though no traces of any chemical weapons were found inside the trailers.

But the State Department in a June 2, 2003 classified memorandum disputed the conclusion that the trailers were used to cook up deadly weapons. United Nations weapons inspectors said that the trailers were likely used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons.

Wolfowitz said some of the most valuable information the administration obtained about Iraq’s weapons program came from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a contractor who escaped Iraq in the summer of 2001.

Al-Haideri told American officials that chemical and biological weapons laboratories were hidden beneath hospitals and inside presidential palaces and he provided documents to back up some of his other assertions about Iraq’s weapons programs.

The White House highlighted Haideri’s claims against Iraq in a report called “Iraq; A Decade of Deception and Defiance” and in a fact sheet on Iraq posted on the White Houses web site. But when U.S. forces searched the hospitals and presidential palaces where Haideri said weapons were hidden it turned out to be a hoax.

Last year, the Defense Department Inspector General issued a report on prewar Iraq intelligence that also singled out Wolfowitz. The report said Wolfowitz played a key role in cooking intelligence about Iraq’s ties to al-Qaeda and its supposed cache of chemical and biological weapons.

An executive summary of the report stated that Douglas Feith, who headed the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, “was inappropriately performing intelligence activities of developing, producing, and disseminating that should be performed by the intelligence community.”

The report concluded that these “inappropriate” activities were authorized by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

Thursday’s Senate Intelligence Committee report fueled calls to impeach President Bush for apparently starting a war on false pretenses.

Impeachment proceedings are not being considered by Congress because the Democratic leadership believes it will hurt their party’s chances of securing the White House in November’s presidential election.

But Democrats will change their position on the issue if the Bush administration authorizes a military strike against Iran without first consulting Congress, according to a May 8 letter sent to President Bush by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers.

“Late last year, Senator Joseph Biden stated unequivocally that “the president has no authority to unilaterally attack Iran, and if he does, as Foreign Relations Committee chairman, I will move to impeach” the president.

“We agree with Senator Biden, and it is our view that if you do not obtain the constitutionally required congressional authorization before launching preemptive military strikes against Iran or any other nation, impeachment proceedings should be pursued, Conyers’ letter says.

Still, knowingly using flawed intelligence to win support for the Iraq war amounts to High Crimes and Misdemeanors, an impeachable offense, according to former Nixon counsel John Dean.

“To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked,” Dean wrote in a June 6, 2003 column for findlaw.com.

“Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be “a high crime” under the Constitution’s impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.