Guess they thought no one would untangle their web of lies. When you invest so much effort into tangling the web—in this case, corrupting intelligence analysis in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq—it becomes hard to know when to stop. Vice President Dick Cheney went to inordinate lengths, including 10 visits to CIA headquarters, to ensure that that crucial NIE on weapons of mass destruction was alarmist enough to scare Congress into authorizing war. And when the evidence turned out to be flimsy, Cheney had a back-up plan: The CIA made me do it.
Ever since their exaggerated claims about Iraq’s possession of WMD turned out to be baseless, the Bush administration’s defense has rested on blaming the government’s intelligence analysts. But one of the great revelations from Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s court filing last week is more evidence that the White House—not the CIA—distorted intelligence on Iraq. It was then-chief of staff I. Lewis Libby, acting on orders from Cheney, who presented evidence of Iraq seeking nuclear weapons material to reporters as a “key judgment” from the NIE, when in fact it was a subject of debate in the intelligence community.
The White House plan to scapegoat the intelligence community about Iraq—aided by eager-to-please CIA Director George Tenet—worked beautifully. But only for a while. The plan faltered once it became clear there were no WMD and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson blew the whistle on the centerpiece report used to deceive Congress and conjure up the specter of a mushroom cloud. That report conveyed the cockamamie story about Iraq seeking uranium in the African country of Niger, in which Cheney took uncommon interest.
Cockamamie? Easy to say in retrospect, you say. No, it was easy to say from the outset. And that is why CIA analysts in early 2002 threw it into the circular file, where it deserved to be—for several good reasons. For starters, the government of Niger does not control the uranium mined there. Rather, it is tightly controlled and monitored by an international consortium led by the French. CIA analysts all agreed that the notion that Baghdad could somehow siphon off some of that uranium and spirit it back to Iraq was preposterous.
The Pentagon’s own intelligence-gathering unit—the Defense Intelligence Agency —however, immediately recognized the report for its huge potential to please Vice President Cheney, not to mention its direct boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and wrote it up in a DIA publication. The various investigations of intelligence performance on Iraq show that Cheney took a real shine to the report. Never mind its dubious provenance, or that it could be shown to be false on its face; it served his goal of portraying Iraq as a threat.
The DIA report was on Cheney’s desk one morning in February 2002, when the CIA briefer arrived with the the president’s Daily Brief. I’ll bet Cheney rues that day, for he made the mistake of asking the briefer to find out what CIA analysts thought of the Iraq-Niger report. CIA managers decided to send Joe Wilson to Niger to seek more information on the report. Who better? Wilson, fluent in French, had served in Niger, and had been our last acting ambassador in Baghdad. And he had been asked by the CIA to perform similar special assignments since his retirement from the Department of State.
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