Never enough time to do it right but always enough time to do it over,” reads an e-mail from last year. Perhaps the most infamous e-mail of all time also emanates from the same department. “[W]e could probably take out OBL without much backlash…The President even talked about it,” read a memo in late summer 2002. The author was the deputy director of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center, which determined whether images were good enough for analysts to look at. In other words, an intelligence community employee was looking into how best to go after Osama bin Laden and proposed that the CIA assassinate him. “…the powers of the Presidency would be such that no court, and no Congress could touch him,” wrote another analyst. These missives are typical of many thousands of pages of internal intelligence documents released to the American Civil Liberties Union under a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 2005 by the ACLU and the New York Times. The ACLU is suing for additional documents from the time period, which it hopes will expose more instances of “abuses, crimes, lies, and bad government decisions,” according to the ACLU’s attorney, Christopher Anders. The ACLU is particularly interested in the role of a counterterrorism bureaucracy known as the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. The organization “was like the place that greenlighted every single strike against al-Qaeda,” said Anders. These documents are a unique window into the inner workings of America’s pre-9/11 intelligence apparatus, revealing to a degree never before seen what was happening in its most shadowy corners and the extent of the bureaucracy’s influence over the conduct of the war on terrorism. After al-Qaeda’s Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush directed intelligence agencies to shift their focus from foreign enemies to al-Qaeda and other domestic terrorists, and from terrorism to homeland security. The Office of Intelligence Policy and Review was created to help enforce this directive and to determine whether al-Qaeda suspects were acting alone or in coordination with other terrorists. The OIPR was modeled on the Office of Special Plans, set up to determine the threat posed by Iraq before the invasion of that country in 2003. A series of revelations about the role of the Office of Special Plans in influencing U.S. policy toward Iraq was first made public by the journalist Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker in 2004. Hersh wrote that the Office of Special Plans “reached a conclusion that it wanted — that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda — before it had finished gathering and assessing the evidence.” Hersh also revealed that the CIA’s senior director for the Middle East and North Africa had threatened to resign over that agency’s intelligence missteps on Iraq. The documents obtained by the ACLU contain numerous additional examples of pressure from the Office of Special Plans and the counterterrorism bureaucracy on the CIA to make up for what it perceived to be inadequacies in the intelligence gathering and analysis program in the years leading up to 9/11. In August 2001, senior CIA analysts were working under orders from the Office of Special Plans to “find and fix” references to Iraq and al-Qaeda in the agency’s reports on al-Qaeda. The first reference to the Office of Special Plans within the CIA occurred when then-Deputy Director of the Counterterrorism Center James Pavitt was asked to brief the White House’s Special Situation Group, a “principally” National Security Council-level counterterrorism body. In his notes about that briefing, Pavitt wrote that he told the group that the Office of Special Plans was doing “a yeoman’s job.” A few weeks later, on Sept. 16, 2001, then-CIA Director George Tenet sent an internal message to CIA field stations around the world stating, “You will, without exception, feed into NSA [the National Security Agency], Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA. No piece of this action should go unseen or unattended to… No information is too small.” Pavitt was apparently a strong supporter of this mandate. An internal CIA e-mail written in 2002 by the Counterterrorism Center’s director, Cofer Black, stated that when the director of the Counterterrorism Center and the acting head of the Counterterrorism Center traveled to CIA stations around the world for briefings, “The message is … very simple … You can choose to ignore it or feed it into [the Office of Special Plans]… You will be told very politely what to do and if you are smart, you will comply.” In a June 27, 2002, message, the CIA’s inspector general, Fred Hitz, wrote that “CIA should not be in the business of producing intelligence on any matter that relates to counterterrorism.” He added that “the Office of Special Plans” is “creating a climate in which the production of intelligence can be viewed as nothing more than a product line to be marketed to the consumer.” Pavitt and his underlings routinely made threats to subordinates at the CIA if their performance was not up to par. On Feb. 14, 2002, an internal CIA memo sent from Cofer Black to the CIA’s General Counsel described an argument that had arisen between the agency’s counterterrorism chief and his deputy over another agency employee who was allegedly underperforming. Black wrote that the deputy and his counsel had “threatened that ‘we’d be looking for jobs at other [CIA] components’ if we don’t get going on the review.” Black’s memo is stamped “TOP SECRET / EYES ONLY” and signed by his superior, Cofer Black. In a Jan. 23, 2002, letter, then-CIA Deputy Director Jami Miscik asked CIA Director Tenet to remind the CIA’s counterterrorism staff about the rules regarding contacts with the media. “It is important that you not allow the performance of these folks to be overshadowed by what in my view are the overblown views of the media and your congressional oversight,” Miscik wrote. The documents obtained by the ACLU also include a memo from June 13, 2002, indicating that the Office of Special Plans had asked the CIA to identify by name people within the FBI, the State Department and other agencies who might be suspected of being “double agents” for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and his connections to terrorist groups. Although it is not possible to prove that the Office of Special Plans had any effect on the CIA’s flawed intelligence assessment of Iraq before the 2003 invasion, these documents are certainly consistent with Hersh’s reporting about that agency and should increase scrutiny of the Office of Special Plans’ role in shaping intelligence on Iraq. The Office of Special Plans was shut down in the summer of 2003 and was replaced by the office of the director of national intelligence, which was created by the same Presidential order signed by Bush two days after the 9/11 attacks. The new office is also headed by a CIA official, while several other senior officials are still serving with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. The ACLU has filed Freedom of Information Act requests for documents that detail the role of the Office of Special Plans in overseeing the CIA and in its prewar intelligence efforts on Iraq. These efforts would become a “war within a war” within the CIA, and the Office of Special Plans’ most fervent supporters were a number of agency officials who would become key players in the CIA’s effort to find evidence linking Iraq to al-Qaeda. One of those officials, who helped oversee the agency’s prewar Iraq intelligence efforts, was George Tenet, who was eventually forced to step down as CIA director in 2004 for his poor performance and lack of candor in assessing the effectiveness of the Iraq war. The office was also under the direction of the agency’s chief of European operations, Cofer Black, who in 2003 wrote a newspaper op-ed on the eve of the war that declared, “What the world needs now is a new war. And this time the U.S. will be clearly seen as the aggressor.” Black was also a witness in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case. In his e-mail to Pavitt, dated June 9, 2003, CIA Director Tenet stated that the CIA’s Iraq counterterrorism group had “begun a serious and very timely investigation of Iraq’s attempts to buy weapons of mass destruction.” The following day, Tenet was asked by President Bush to meet with top military officials to discuss Iraq intelligence and military plans for a possible invasion. “I need to know now the impact the new Iraq intelligence is going to have on UBL,” wrote Bush in an e-mail that day. Bush was referring to Usama bin Laden by his al-Qaeda code name. On July 11, 2003, Condoleezza Rice, then the White House national security adviser, spoke to two CIA station chiefs in Europe who were the CIA’s chief on the Iraq terrorism team and its chief on weapons of mass destruction. “We need to talk about our policy on Iraq,” Rice told them, according to the documents. The CIA station chiefs were asked to tell the White House how many Iraqis were actually in the country illegally, and in late summer 2003 the CIA was reporting to Tenet that as many as 5,000 Iraqis were staying in the country illegally. The e-mails and other materials show that the CIA had begun “scrubbing” some of the evidence presented to the United Nations by the Czech Republic and other countries suggesting that there were links