[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Decoding the Senate Intelligence Committee Investigation on Iraq

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Decoding the Senate Intelligence Committee Investigation on Iraq

July 18, 2004
 By ANDREW ROSENTHAL 



 

The Senate Intelligence Committee's report on American
intelligence failures in Iraq has produced a rare and
curious thing - agreement between left and right. For
opposite reasons, both are pushing the absurd notion that
the report told us that President Bush was not to blame for
giving Americans false information about Iraq. 

The left has denounced the report as a whitewash that
unfairly clears Mr. Bush of charges that he or his aides
prodded the Central Intelligence Agency into hyping the
Iraqi weapons programs, and purposefully misrepresented the
threat from Saddam Hussein. The right agrees with the
conclusion, and calls it a vindication of the president. 

In fact, the sadly incomplete report does nothing of the
kind. It takes the public up to the question of Mr. Bush's
involvement and then ducks, announcing that an examination
of the president's role is due after the election. Thanks
to that compromise, the Republicans did not block it, and
Democrats could justify endorsing it as an unfinished work.


The 511-page report, which was released by the committee
last week after about 20 percent was censored by the
administration, does not tell us what the C.I.A. and other
agencies told Mr. Bush before he concluded that Iraq had
dangerous weapons and that Saddam Hussein had to go. It
focuses on something called a "National Intelligence
Estimate," which came out in October 2002, months and
months after the administration had already set its face
toward war. The estimate was requested by Congress, and it
was supposed to summarize the views of the C.I.A., along
with those of the Defense Department's intelligence experts
and other agencies, like the State Department and
Department of Energy, that might have important information
to offer. 

Three versions of the report on Iraq were prepared, all of
them concluding that Saddam Hussein was a major threat. But
the first, long, classified one was peppered with
reservations. A declassified version that was given to
Congress erased most of the doubts. The even shorter public
version had no caveats at all. 

What we need to know now is how the report came up so
positive. The Senate committee said its staff "did not find
any evidence that administration officials attempted to
coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their
judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."
Republican members in particular have repeatedly assured
the public that no one reported any direct arm-twisting.
But that is a lot less meaningful than it sounds. 

The people helping to prepare the report worked for
officials like Vice President Dick Cheney; Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; George Tenet, the director of
central intelligence; and to a lesser degree Secretary of
State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national
security adviser. By the time they began working on the
intelligence estimate, most of their bosses had already
advised the president that Saddam Hussein needed to go, and
some had also taken a public stand. 

On Aug. 26, for instance, Mr. Cheney told the V.F.W.
National Convention that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda
and was working on a nuclear weapon. "Simply stated," he
added, "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has
weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is
amassing them to use against our friends, against our
allies and against us. And there is no doubt that his
aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future
confrontations with his neighbors." 

Simply stated, there was plenty of doubt about all of these
things and most of them were not true. In fact, members of
the intelligence community were voicing doubts at the time
that Mr. Cheney spoke. We do not know for certain whether
these dissenting voices were heard by Mr. Cheney or Mr.
Bush. But certainly, Mr. Tenet, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Powell
and Ms. Rice had access to them. 

So while the Senate report has told us that no government
employee complained of direct pressure from the White House
to give the intelligence estimate a positive spin, it has
not told us how so much negative assessment got left out or
how top Bush officials came to make public statements that
contradicted information that was readily available within
the administration. The Department of Energy categorically
refuted the claim that the Iraqis were working on nuclear
weapons in April 2001, 16 months before Mr. Cheney's V.F.W.
speech, according to the Senate report. The C.I.A. knew it,
the Defense Department knew it, the State Department knew
it. But these dissenting views did not make it into the
intelligence estimate. 

So it's not exactly true, as Mr. Bush said on Wednesday,
that "the United States Congress, including members of both
political parties, looked at the same intelligence" that he
had. And we have still not seen the intelligence reports
Mr. Bush got. We do not even know what Mr. Bush was told
about the intelligence estimate. The C.I.A. gave him his
own, one-page summary, which the White House will not show
to the Senate. 

One of Mr. Bush's central charges against Saddam Hussein
was his supposed link with Al Qaeda, which Mr. Bush still
mentions even though the Senate report said there was no
evidence of a link. On this point, the report said, the
intelligence community's negative view was widely
disseminated among top officials. 

Mr. Cheney likes to refer to a meeting between the hijacker
Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi official that supposedly took
place in Prague in April 2001. But the C.I.A. does not
believe it happened. In a memo recently released by Senator
Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, Mr. Tenet said the agency
did not have "any credible information that the April 2001
meeting occurred." 

In today's political climate, it took some courage for the
Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Senator
Pat Roberts, to do any investigating at all. But he was
ultimately overwhelmed by the politics of Iraq. 

The British report on the intelligence debacle, also
released last week, made it plain that the push for war was
political, not based on new urgency about a threat from
Iraq. Even with fears justifiably heightened after the 9/11
attacks, it said, "there was no recent intelligence that
would itself have given rise to a conclusion that Iraq was
of more immediate concern than the activities of some other
countries." 

So how did the Bush administration wind up passing out so
much disinformation? Americans are going to have to wait
for the Senate's judgment on this crucial question until
after the election. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/opinion/18SUN3.html?ex=1091175120&ei=1&en=1e2dd885adca1b64


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