BLAME GAME newyorker.com
[ Skipping ahead to the end, we get the obvious-to-all-but-true-believers conclusion on intelligence:
We know that Vice-President Dick Cheney, who continues to insist that some W.M.D.s might be found, visited the C.I.A. several times before the war for face-to-face meetings with Iraq analysts, and that senior Pentagon officials were running their own intelligence operation, the Office of Special Plans. Until a full account is provided, the suspicion will remain that in Washington, as in London, the handling of intelligence had more to do with persuading the public to support a war that had already been decided on than with calmly assessing threats. Whatever finally emerges, the C.I.A. should not be used as a scapegoat. Intelligence, by its very nature, is usually uncertain and often wrong. It should always be treated with skepticism and caution, two attributes that were, and are, conspicuously missing from the Bush White House.
True believers version: it's all the CIA's fault, if that's the version W's propagandists are putting out today. Tomorrow, the story may be different, who can say? Article in full: ]
by John Cassidy
Issue of 2004-02-09
Posted 2004-02-02
"We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here.” Thus David A. Kay, the Central Intelligence Agency’s former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, publicly confirmed what had become increasingly obvious: the assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed arsenals of weapons of mass destruction posing an international threat were false. Kay, who has spent much of the last nine months in Baghdad heading the Iraq Survey Group, told Reuters, “I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War. . . . A combination of U.N. inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them.” As for Iraq’s nuclear program, which the American and British governments claimed could, under certain circumstances, produce a crude atomic bomb within a year, Kay said, “It really wasn’t dormant, because there were a few little things going on, but it had not resumed in anything meaningful.”
Kay’s findings are all the more striking because he did not, and does not, oppose the war. We have often fought wars “on the right side for the wrong reason,” he said last week. He coupled his mea culpa with a call for an independent investigation into the errors made by the intelligence agencies. Such an inquiry is certainly necessary. Last summer, the White House released a declassified version of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that represented the consensus of the intelligence community. Originally presented to the White House in October, 2002, it stated: “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions”; “Baghdad has begun renewed production of mustard, sarin, GF (cyclosarin), and VX”; and “Baghdad has established a large-scale, redundant, and concealed BW agent”—biological weapons—“production capability.”
American intelligence experts were not alone in their assessments. Analysts in the British, French, and German intelligence agencies believed that Saddam had at least some chemical and biological munitions. David Kelly, the late British weapons scientist, shared this view. During the nineteen-nineties, when he worked as a U.N. weapons inspector, he played a key role in forcing the Iraqi government to admit the existence of its biological-weapons program. After Kelly and his colleagues left Iraq, in 1998, he never doubted that Saddam was trying to hide something.
But what? It’s a long leap from the fact that most experts believed Iraq had some unconventional weapons to the claim, which some defenders of George Bush and Tony Blair are adopting as a fallback position, that it was faulty intelligence, not faulty policy, which led us to our current predicament in Iraq. (Bill O’Reilly, of the Fox News Channel, has called on the President to admit that the C.I.A. sold him a bill of goods and to fire the agency’s director, George Tenet, who, in case you’ve forgotten—O’Reilly hasn’t—was a Democratic appointee.)
Kelly, who consulted for MI6, the British equivalent of the C.I.A., and for the British Defence Intelligence Staff, was in a position to observe what was really happening inside the intelligence agencies. In May of last year, he talked to Andrew Gilligan, a BBC journalist, who put together a piece claiming that Downing Street had “sexed up” an intelligence dossier that it published in September of 2002, by stating that Iraq’s military was prepared to launch W.M.D.s within forty-five minutes of an order to use them. The Ministry of Defence publicly identified Kelly as the source of Gilligan’s story, and, a week later, he committed suicide, thereby sparking a controversy that threatened Blair’s political survival. But last week, in a move that surprised even Blair loyalists, Lord Hutton, a senior judge, concluded a public inquiry into the case with a report that cleared the Government of any wrongdoing. (The report prompted the resignation of the BBC’s top two executives.) Lord Hutton, however, did not claim that the intelligence in the dossier was accurate; he simply said that, at the time, Downing Street had no reason to question its authenticity.
This raises the fundamental question that any broader inquiry ought to focus on: what was the relationship between the intelligence agencies and the policymakers who ultimately decided to invade Iraq? In Britain, some intelligence analysts tried to tone down the contents of the Downing Street dossier. In a reporter’s taped interview that was played during the Hutton inquiry, David Kelly explained that these analysts were less worried about Iraq’s current capabilities, which they believed to be modest, than about the threat that Saddam’s regime might someday represent. “But that, unfortunately, wasn’t expressed strongly in the dossier, because that takes away the case for war, to a certain extent,” Kelly said.
At least some American intelligence analysts appear to have shared their British colleagues’ opinion that Iraq represented a significant but manageable threat, and that the U.N.’s economic sanctions were curtailing Saddam’s weapons programs. It is therefore imperative to learn precisely how the National Intelligence Estimate was put together and why it reached such alarmist conclusions. David Kay told a Senate committee that he doesn’t know any C.I.A. analysts who felt compelled to slant their assessments in the run-up to the war. However, as Seymour M. Hersh has reported in this magazine, senior members of the Bush Administration did press the intelligence agencies to provide evidence supporting the President’s claim that Iraq represented a grave danger. Other journalists have made similar charges.
We know that Vice-President Dick Cheney, who continues to insist that some W.M.D.s might be found, visited the C.I.A. several times before the war for face-to-face meetings with Iraq analysts, and that senior Pentagon officials were running their own intelligence operation, the Office of Special Plans. Until a full account is provided, the suspicion will remain that in Washington, as in London, the handling of intelligence had more to do with persuading the public to support a war that had already been decided on than with calmly assessing threats. Whatever finally emerges, the C.I.A. should not be used as a scapegoat. Intelligence, by its very nature, is usually uncertain and often wrong. It should always be treated with skepticism and caution, two attributes that were, and are, conspicuously missing from the Bush White House. |
