• Gimble admitted that the Pentagon officials who presented the briefing saw it as a policy briefing.

• The officials who received the briefing knew it was a policy briefing. They knew the briefers were from my Policy organization and were not speaking for the intelligence community.

• Though his entire case against the Pentagon officials depended on this characterization of the briefing as an "intelligence activity," Gimble simply asserts the point.
  • The IG report offers no analysis of when an event or paper qualifies as an "intelligence activity."

  • Edelman's memo (pages 35-43) analyzes this issue meticulously and exposes Gimble's opinion as nonsense.

IG’S INCOHERENCE

• Based on his report and his Senate testimony (February 12, 2007), Gimble appears to have had four things in mind when he used the word "inappropriate."

1. He thinks the briefing at issue might have been mistaken for an "intelligence product."
   • The briefing was given by Defense Department policy officials in September 2002 to Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley and the Vice President's Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

   • Amazingly, Gimble admitted that his office never interviewed Hadley or Libby to ask if they thought this was an intelligence briefing.

   • Hadley and Libby knew that the briefers were Defense Department policy officials who worked for me.

   • One of the briefing slides was "Fundamental Problems With How the Intelligence Community Is Assessing Information." This was clearly not an intelligence product.

2. Gimble complains that the briefers did not set out the intelligence community's views and explain how their own views differed.
   • But the briefers were policy officials and it would have been wrong for them to claim to state the intelligence community's views.

   • Gimble complains that the Pentagon officials improperly acted as if they were intelligence officials briefing an intelligence product. But the Pentagon officials did not think of themselves as working for the intelligence community or briefing an intelligence product - nor should they have.

   • Gimble then argues that they should have acted as if they were intelligence officials by applying to themselves the DIA's rules on how intelligence officials can express views that dissent from the intelligence community consensus.

   • But that would have made them appear to be intelligence officials. They were scrupulously careful to avoid that. In his poorly reasoned complaint, Gimble slaps them coming and going.

3. Gimble thinks the briefers did not present the "most accurate analysis of intelligence."
   • Gimble's reason for this conclusion is that the briefing was at "variance with the consensus of the Intelligence Community."

   • As I said in my Washington Post oped, "Of course it was at variance! It was a critique. That's why it was prepared in the first place."

4. Gimble says the briefing "undercut" the intelligence community by "indicating" that there are "'fundamental problems' with the way that the intelligence community was assessing information."
   • But Gimble never evaluated whether the CIA or the briefers were right about the issue. He admitted in his Senate testimony that he "didn't make an assessment on the validity of either side of this issue."

   • Senator Saxby Chambliss (Republican-Georgia) noted that the briefers were "very accurate" that "there were fundamental problems." Mr. Gimble admitted: "You can find examples of having problems. I'm not sure that I can make an overall assessment of the overall intelligence processes based on this one review."