Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said last week during an interview that one of her predecessors, James Clapper, was responsible for creating allegedly false intelligence to justify the U.S. invading Iraq in 2003.
In an interview with New York Post columnist Miranda Lambert’s “Pod Force One” podcast, Gabbard was asked about joining the military in the wake of 9/11 and her 2004 deployment to Iraq. After recalling that a friend was killed by an IED and on the terrible prices paid by some of her other fellow service members, Gabbard told Devine that their “memories, their service, their sacrifice, the sacrifices of their families motivates the work that we do every day to make sure that the president has the best, most objective, relevant intelligence so that he can make the best-informed decisions.”
Gabbard then noted that she knows firsthand from the Iraq War “what the implications are when you have intelligence weaponized and in that case manufactured … to start a regime-change war that I served in and that so many of my friends served in and too many of my friends and too many Americans lost their lives in.”
Gabbard singled out former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as one of the key figures behind the deception that paved the way for America’s invasion of Iraq. Before joining former President Barack Obama’s inner circle, Clapper served as director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency under President George W. Bush—a Pentagon unit tasked with analyzing spy-satellite imagery and other technical intelligence, including soil samples.
In 2004, President Bush established the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction to examine the intelligence used to justify the 2003 invasion. The commission concluded in a 2005 report that the intelligence community was dead wrong about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programs — as in, there weren’t any.
“James Clapper was on the team that created that manufactured intelligence assessment that led to the Iraq War — about the WMDs,” Gabbard told Devine. “He writes about it in his book, saying that he and his team of intelligence analysts created something that was not there.”
“When you look at his actions then and you look at his actions in 2016 as Obama’s director of national intelligence, you see someone who has no problem whatsoever politicizing, and manufacturing, and weaponizing intelligence for a political outcome,” added Gabbard.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe recently declassified the appendix to the 2023 Durham report, which Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) quickly made public.
The appendix revealed that Clapper was among a select group of senior Obama officials briefed at the White House on August 3, 2016, about credible intelligence indicating that the Clinton campaign planned to discredit Trump by falsely linking him to Russia, then leveraging law enforcement and the intelligence community to advance the effort.
Ratcliffe named Clapper as one of the intelligence officials who “pushed the known fake Steele dossier into intelligence community assessments and as the basis for Crossfire Hurricane and all that,” and accused the former DNI of manipulating intelligence “to get Trump.”
