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Pastimes : Rarely is the question asked: "is our children learning" -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SalemsHex who wrote (1973)	2/7/2004 12:13:53 PM
From: SalemsHex	Respond to of 2171

Don't blame the spies 02/05/04 President George W. Bush is directing a bipartisan group to examine intelligence failings in Iraq. Yet that isn't the right question. In fact, it's exactly the wrong question. Intelligence failures are code for political failures. Spies don't fail. Their political bosses fail by not giving them the money they need or by pigeonholing the facts they uncover into boxes of preconceptions that distort their meaning. By not listening to the caveats from the experts, by cherry-picking the evidence and willfully ignoring interpretations that conflict with the driving ideology, officialdom corrupts the process. When officials start talking about "intelligence failures," the proper response is to start checking their closets for wrong-doing or mistakes. With Iraq, the evidence strongly suggests that supposed intelligence mess-ups were actually failures of omission, commission and willful blindness by administration figures who wanted war with Iraq. A politically motivated attempt to shift the blame to "intelligence services" or to scapegoat CIA chief George Tenet without searching deeper to see where political interference tainted the process would be a disservice to history and to the national security interests of this country. That is particularly so now, when the terrorism war requires a revitalized human intelligence effort, not a demoralized one. In August 2002, while Bush was still fence-sitting, Vice President Dick Cheney began talking up the case for war. He told a veterans convention "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." The next month, as detailed in compelling after-action reports by Bart Gellman and others at the Washington Post, White House National Security Adviser Condi Rice began throwing around apocalyptic language about "mushroom clouds" and seized shipments of aluminum tubes that are "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." They weren't. The CIA's hastily assembled "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraqi weapons programs, sent to Capitol Hill in October 2002 when Congress was preparing to vote on authorizing the use of force against Iraq - and far more sharply worded on the threat than previous CIA reports - weakly caveated the tubes by saying that a minority of intelligence specialists believed "that these tubes are probably intended for conventional weapons programs." Even that was wrong. Former Iraq weapons inspector David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, says in a December 2003 paper that almost all the administration's top nuclear weapons experts were skeptical. The NIE process allowed military analysts to carry the day over technical experts with actual insights into Iraq's weapons programs and past acquisition patterns, Albright says. Coincidentally, the Pentagon had in place a politically driven new intelligence office that morphed in the fall of 2002 into the Office of Special Plans, whose main purpose appears to have been to filter intelligence to get the best "spin" for war. The CIA looks co-opted, too. Immedi ately before and after the Bush adminis tration took the nation to war against Iraq last year, the CIA took the unusual step of putting out public "white papers" - on Iraqi mobile bio-weapons labs, hu man shields and terrorists' pursuit of weapons of mass destruction - that sup ported the administration's view of the threat, but not necessarily the view of the intelligence community as a whole. In so doing, the CIA fell into the trap of using untested and largely uncorroborated sources, some of them reportedly supplied by the Iraqi National Congress, an émigré group headed by Ahmad Chalabi that diplomats felt was peddling questionable and false data in order to spur a U.S. inspired overthrow of Saddam. The Washington Times reported last year that two of the four sources the CIA claimed in its white paper on the mobile labs were defectors, although it didn't say whether they came from Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. For most of its information on the labs, the CIA cited one source, described as "a chemical engineer that managed one of the plants." How wrong he was. In his testimony to Congress last week, the CIA's former chief weapons hunter David Kay admitted that almost all U.S. intelligence experts - apart from the CIA - now believe the mobile labs were for something more benign, such as making hydrogen for weather balloons. There is nothing new about in telligence snafus. During the Cold War, when Soviet intelligence was king, even analysis of canned-pea pro duction was part of the effort to assess our chief adversary's mili tary strength. The CIA missed the 1991 collapse of the U.S.S.R. because it was focused on mili tary hardware and undervalued the shaky political constructs on which Soviet power rested. Yet that reflected the market: The Oval Office wanted an intel ligence estimate that overstated the Soviet threat. The CIA correctly predicted civil war in the Balkans; it was a warning the White House didn't heed. Secretary of State Jim Baker's last-minute effort to mediate a compromise lasted about 2½ minutes. In 1950, U.S. intelligence services picked up on North Korean and Chinese troop movements before the war and before the Chinese intervention. Both times, U.S. officials refused to believe they'd fight without an OK from Communism central in Moscow. Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers paid the ultimate price for that error. That's why it is important to get to the bottom of things if politics corrupted intelligence findings and if that corruption drove the decision to attack Iraq. That is the appropriate focus for an independent inquiry. Sullivan is The Plain Dealer's foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages. Contact Elizabeth Sullivan at: bsullivan@plaind.com, 216-999-6153 cleveland.com