Leader Who Wants His Own Facts
by Shaun Waterman
It is becoming clearer by the day that the Bush administration has been less than honest about what it was told regarding Iraq before its ill-judged invasion.
We already know about the yellowcake and the aluminum tubes -- the two pieces of now obviously flawed intelligence about Iraq's alleged nuclear program that underlay President Bush's famous statement that it would be foolish to wait for the evidence of a smoking gun that "might come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
We know about the secret caveats to the published summaries of intelligence about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programs.
We know -- and knew before the war began -- that the best estimate of U.S. intelligence was that going to war with Iraq would increase the danger that Saddam Hussein might pass weapons of mass destruction (which it now turns out he did not have) to terrorists.
We even know, thanks to Sen. Bob Graham's recent book, "Intelligence Matters," that as early as February 2002, vital intelligence and military assets like the Predator UAV were being deployed away from Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, to Iraq -- a full 14 months before the start of hostilities there.
But now we learn that the National Intelligence Council -- an independent body charged with distilling the wisdom of the U.S. intelligence community -- predicted as early as January 2003 that a U.S. invasion could precipitate a multi-faceted insurgency that might tear the country asunder.
This was at the time that the administration and its allies were predicting that the occupation would be "a cakewalk" and that U.S. troops would be greeted with flowers.
But clearly, the NIC was -- in the words of President Bush -- "just guessing" when they predicted the insurgency, or said earlier this year that the best anyone could hope for in Iraq was a tenuous and temporary stability.
The president later corrected himself, saying he should have said that The National Intelligence Estimate was just, well ... just an estimation.
It is in retrospect perhaps a shame that he did not evidence such skepticism about the NIC's products when they accorded, at least in part, with his view of Iraq as a gathering danger.
Then the NIE was not guesswork, not even an estimate. It was intelligence that had to be acted upon. It was facts that could not responsibly be ignored.
This is an administration -- and a president -- with a uniquely strong ability to see only what it wants and disregard inconvenient facts. They want that to which Daniel Patrick Moynihan reminds us no one is entitled. They want their own facts.
In the summer of 2003, when things in Iraq had already started to sour, though I, for one, had no idea how bad they were going to get, I had dinner with a senior administration official. Was there anything, I asked him, that he would have done differently, knowing what he knew now? Absolutely, he replied: there should have been daily briefings in Baghdad, to get the message out more effectively.
I was flabbergasted. Here was one of the architects of the war, telling me that the only mistake had been not spinning hard enough. He, too, wanted his own facts
Last month, former CIA official Ray McGovern and famed Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, called on public servants with access to material that showed the administration's dishonesty on the war to make unauthorized disclosures. To place their moral duty to see the truth out above their bureaucratic duty to protect policymakers from the glare of public disclosure.
Within a week, the details of the NIE about Iraq's bleak future, then the memos about the insurgency, were leaked.
McGovern modestly denies any causal relationship between the events, suggesting rather that both are products of a growing unease within the intelligence and policy communities about the lack of candor that characterizes the administration's portrayal of what it knew and when.
Bush has defended his actions in Iraq by citing the intelligence he had access to and asking, in effect, whether any responsible president could have ignored such a threat.
But saying "the CIA made me do it," won't cut much ice in an election campaign. Especially if they were just guessing.
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