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Editorial: Official office of spin
Unhappy with the intelligence it was getting from established spy agencies, the Bush administration set up a special intelligence shop under then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, one of the architects of the Iraq war.
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More from OpinionSpecifically, the administration was irritated that the CIA and others were unable to establish a clear connection between Iraq and al-Qaida. The special office provided one, citing "a mature and symbiotic relationship" between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida that turned out never to have existed.
Even so, that supposed connection, a mutual pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, became one of the justifications for the war.
Now comes a critical report on the operation by the Pentagon's acting inspector general, Thomas Gimble, saying that Mr. Feith's office relayed conclusions "not fully supported by the available intelligence" and "inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community."
This is a bureaucratically polite way of saying "wrong and misleading," but given the predisposition of the Bush administration for war with Iraq, welcome even so.
Defenders of Mr. Feith's policy shop and the Pentagon under former Secretary Donald Rumsfeld note that while the actions were "inappropriate," they were both legal and authorized. This is hardly an exacting standard for drawing conclusions that could — and did — lead to war.
Critics charged that this Office of Special Plans operating outside normal channels was intended to spin intelligence to support the White House case for war, and nothing in the inspector general's report much disputes that judgment.
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