"Then-Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith sent two Pentagon employees to the Rome meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian dissident already dismissed by the CIA as untrustworthy, and several Iranians who were former and current members of the security service. It also involved an unspecified foreign government's intelligence service.
Ghorbanifar used one of those meetings to press for regime change in Iran, and outlined a plan for it on a napkin, according to the report, saying it would cost about $5 million to start.
The report said then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley failed to inform then-CIA Director George Tenet and then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage fully about the meeting, either before or after it occurred. It said, however, that Hadley and the Pentagon did not exceed their authority in conducting the meeting.
It also said that Defense Department officials refused to allow "potentially useful and actionable intelligence" to be shared with intelligence agencies, even the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency.
Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans strongly dissented from the report, calling it a "disappointment" to those looking for evidence that anything "unlawful" occurred." AP
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If you can remember back that far, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the SSCI, began an investigation several years ago into both the quality of the intelligence information that was the supposed basis of the US decision to go to war against Iraq and the use that the Bush Administration made of it in obtaining national agreement for that decision.
At the time the Republicans controlled the senate, and they managed (with the help of a few collaborators) to push through a report that essentially blamed the intelligence agencies for poor work and which carefully made a case (by bullying people in the IC) that no one in the intelligence community had been bullied into doing such poor work. It was a "put up job." That was "phase one."
At the same time it had been agreed among the members of the SSCI that there would be a second phase of the investigation which was to examine the use that the Bush Administration made of all that ersatz information. The Republican chairman of the SSCI stonewalled the work of the second phase until the Republicans lost control of Congress in '06. With the Democrats in charge the work went forward, and today we have the report.
