July 8, 2010 -- Retired Air Force General James Clapper, the man President Obama has nominated to replace Dennis Blair as the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), was part and parcel of the Bush administration's cooking of intelligence to "prove" Saddam Hussein's Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), according to senior U.S. intelligence officers.
Clapper was the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) before and during the Iraq war. Clapper was responsible for America's array of imagery intelligence (IMINT) platforms, including spy satellite intelligence showing what Iraq had in its possession and what it did not have.
Clapper served as director of intelligence for three of the unified commands: U.S. Forces Korea, U.S. Pacific Command and Strategic Air Command. Also, he served as senior intelligence officer for the Air Force. Clapper's final military post was as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
WMR has learned that Clapper knowingly fed false Imagery intelligence (IMINT) data on so-called Iraqi WMDs to senior administration officials in order to bolster the case to go to war with Iraq. Clapper has been serving as Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence under Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
After IMINT analysts pointed out that no U.S. satellite or other imagery contained evidence that Iraq had any WMDs, Clapper offered up the excuse that Iraq had transferred the weapons to Syria, its old Baathist rival, ignoring the fact that Iraq's and Syria's Baathist governments were bitter enemies for decades.
Clapper, according to WMR's intelligence sources, also tried to proffer the notion that Saddam Hussein ordered his WMDs to be sunk in Lake Tharthar. No WMDs were ever discovered in the lake.
When he nominated Clapper to be his new DNI, Obama said Clapper "possesses a quality that I value in all my advisers: a willingness to tell leaders what we need to know even if it's not what we want to hear."
During the Bush administration, Clapper, to the contrary, told the White House exactly what they wanted to hear. Once again, Obama's judgment in selecting the DNI has been opened to question.
Clapper's nomination remains stalled in the Senate Intelligence Committee amid doubts by the Democratic and Republican leadership over his fitness to command the U.S. Intelligence Community and his close links to the Pentagon.
Clapper was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from 1992 to 1995 at a time when the agency expanded its covert operations around the world.
The US lent support to various U.S. client dictators, including Uganda's Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda's Paul Kagame in their operations against Rwanda's majority Hutu government and the government of then-Zaire.
On December 3, 2005, WMR reported on the cooking of IMINT by NGA: "Intelligence "cooking" and retaliation also plagues IMINT (Imagery intelligence) community but with a healthy dose of contract fraud.
WMR has already reported on tainted intelligence being created on the orders of the Bush administration in the SIGINT (signals intelligence) and HUMINT (human intelligence) communities.
Largely ignored has been the effect of this policy in the IMINT (imagery intelligence) community.
IMINT analysts carefully scan spy satellite and air reconnaissance photos taken of foreign airfields, weapons labs, shipyards, government office complexes, and other strategic and tactical sites. It is usally considred tha intelligence of last resort when there is an intelligence controversy because it is hard to fudge IMINT.
