Avoiding A Critical Inquiry
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Editorial
The Washington Post
By John D. Rockefeller IV
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
washingtonpost.com
No decision can be more sobering and important for our president and the country than the decision to send America's sons and daughters to war. Since Sept. 11, 2001, that decision has become even more difficult. Now the United States may have no choice but to be ready to strike preemptively if a threat from terrorists or rogue nations rises to a clear and present danger. But initiating war by preemptive attack unquestionably requires that an enemy have not only the desire but also the capability to carry out an attack against our citizens.
In the case of Iraq the president unequivocally told the country that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction of such force and readiness that our nation was at risk. The president's case was based in part on U.S. and foreign intelligence and in part on the judgments of his administration. I and many others supported the Iraq war resolution largely because of those presentations. And while today there is no question that Saddam Hussein was a brutal and dangerous dictator, we must face the fact that both the intelligence agencies and the administration increasingly appear to have been wrong in their assessment of the threat Hussein posed to the United States.
Now we must find out why. Today, and in the future, the resolve of the American people is fundamental to our success in the war on terrorism. If we are less than fully honest about how and why we went to war in Iraq, the risk is great that people will not support preemptive action when a more clear and present danger emerges in the future.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was created in 1976 in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate expressly as a check on potential abuse of intelligence by the executive branch. When no weapons of mass destruction were found after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, the committee correctly began an inquiry into the accuracy and quality of prewar intelligence. But the committee's Republican chairman has refused to look at the whole picture, excluding from the inquiry the subject of how intelligence was used, or potentially misused, and whether policymakers in any way shaped the intelligence they received.
In what is beginning to look like a coordinated effort to shield the administration from scrutiny, Republicans claim that reviewing the ways intelligence was used is not part of the committee's responsibilities. In this they plainly misread the committee's history and organizing resolution, which explicitly calls for oversight of "the collection, analysis, production, dissemination, or use of information which relates to a foreign country . . . and which relates to the defense, foreign policy, national security or related policies of the United States."
The chairman recently went so far as to say that "there is no doubt how the intelligence was used" prior to the war, and so there is "nothing to review" [Pat Roberts, op-ed, Nov. 13]. In fact, there is disconcerting evidence that in this administration, the policymaking is driving the intelligence rather than the other way around. This has added to a growing doubt among the American people about why we went to war, and it is our job to conduct for them a thorough review of the underlying facts.
Many of our unanswered concerns remain classified, but even those that have been widely reported clearly merit the committee's oversight. Consider, for example:
• The highly unusual role of Defense Department officials in preparing and collecting information outside the normal intelligence channels.
• The unexplained and possibly unsupported shift in the 2000 and 2002 intelligence assessments regarding Iraq's nuclear programs.
• The presentation of fraudulent information regarding Iraq's nuclear program in the president's State of the Union address -- and assertions by intelligence analysts that their judgments were discounted when they did not support the administration's pro-war policies.
Faced with Republicans' continuing refusal to conduct a complete investigation into these matters, my staff recently drafted an options memo on the use or potential misuse of intelligence. The memo, intended only for me, was pilfered from the usually secure Senate intelligence committee and distributed to the media. It has become a convenient excuse for Republicans to shut down the committee and curtail the investigation.
The Senate intelligence committee must, in a fair and objective manner, pursue the inquiry into prewar intelligence to the end -- not to score political points on either side but because it's our job to identify mistakes or abuses. Failure to get to the truth about why we went to war jeopardizes the trust and resolve of the American people.
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The writer is a Democratic senator from West Virginia and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
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