by Patrick Lang (bio below the fold)


Paul Pillar was the National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East during the period when the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq was written, staffed across the Intelligence Community and approved as the ground truth of the US government. That was in October, 2002. He was supposedly in charge of that process as the member of the National Intelligence Council responsible.


He is now retired and has written an article for “Foreign Affairs” in which he says:

  1. That there was no evidence that Iraq had nuclear weapons and that Iraq was in no way close to possessing a nuclear weapon at the time the NIE was written.

  2. That the supposed Iraq-Al-Qaida connection was fabricated and non-existing.

  3. That the Bush administration was not informed by the work of the Intelligence Community. Rather they used products of the IC to justify strategic decisions already taken.

  4. That contrary to the conclusions of the Senator Roberts led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, analyst were pressured subtly but strongly to produce desired conclusions with regard to this subject.


You can access his article at the Foreign Affairs site), and if you wish you can access my article on much the same subject which was written in early 2004 and published in Middle East Policy in Autumn of that same year.


Pat Lang


Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (interview), CNN and Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room (interview), PBS’s Newshour, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” (interview), and more .


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“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2

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