Tomorrow's news tonight: Senators Urge C.I.A. to Agree to Declassify and Release Report Critical of Its Iraq Work
June 9, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
nytimes.com
ASHINGTON, June 8 — The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee are pressing the Central Intelligence Agency to agree to a broad declassification and release of the panel's 400-page report, which is highly critical of the agency's prewar performance on Iraq.
The agency and, ultimately, the White House have the power to decide how much of the report should be declassified, giving them great influence over a document that will focus on mistakes related to Iraq and its illicit weapons. The Senate could vote to release classified material even over White House objections, but such a step would be rare.
The jockeying pits Senators Pat Roberts of Kansas and John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Republican and Democrat on the panel, against the top C.I.A. officials who must approve decisions involving declassification. Both senators have signaled their belief that the fullest possible disclosure of the agency's performance on Iraq is in the public interest.
A senior intelligence official said Tuesday that the report was "heavily laden" with classified material and that portions would require significant rewriting or deletions before it could be released to the public. But in an interview, Mr. Rockefeller said flatly, "We cannot have this as a heavily redacted document."
Mr. Roberts, the committee chairman, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that he planned "a full court press" to encourage the C.I.A. to release the document in near original form, and he said he had asked White House officials to exert "all possible cooperation" in that effort.
"I feel very strongly that the great majority of this report should be made public," Mr. Roberts said. "Our report is a good one. It's right, and the American people certainly deserve to see it."
The C.I.A. has been reviewing the report for nearly four weeks, and the Senate staff had expected the document to be returned to Capitol Hill by last week. The committee had planned for a public release next week and had tentatively planned a final vote to approve the document this week. At a closed meeting on Tuesday, the panel approved a set of recommendations to be included in the report, Mr. Roberts said, but it is not scheduled to meet again until next week.
A senior intelligence official said Tuesday that there had been discussions in recent weeks between some C.I.A. analysts and Congressional staff members in which the C.I.A. had raised objections "to some things in the report that we know to be factually incorrect." But the official said the analysis that must precede any decision about declassification had not been completed.
"It's being done entirely by career civil servants whose job it is to determine what remains classified and what can be declassified," the official said. The official said that neither George J. Tenet, the departing director of central intelligence, or any other top C.I.A. official, had yet been involved in the decisions about declassification and release of the document. But he said that senior-level officials at the C.I.A. would ultimately sign off on the decision.
The jockeying over the declassification of the report had not previously been disclosed. It parallels the months of wrangling last year over the declassification of another report that was critical of the C.I.A., by the joint Congressional inquiry on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In the interview, Mr. Rockefeller acknowledged that the report "covers very controversial subject matter." Other government officials have said it describes in detail a number of mistakes, including what it portrays as an overreliance by the C.I.A. on uncorroborated sources of information, like those provided by defectors aligned with Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.
Mr. Rockefeller said he recognized that some material from the version of the report sent by the committee to the C.I.A. must remain secret to protect intelligence sources and intelligence-gathering methods. But he said the report "has continuity to it" that would be disrupted by heavy redaction of its passages.
While the document is critical of the C.I.A., Mr. Rockefeller said it provided an important accounting of how the agency reached the decisions that led its prewar judgment that Iraq possessed illicit weapons, a conclusion that the administration cited as a principal justification for going to war.
"This is what the war on terrorism is all about, and we need to be getting it out," Mr. Rockefeller said.
Because the report is still classified, members of the committee and its staff have declined to discuss its findings. But its highly critical tone and its focus on mistakes and miscalculations by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies have been described by current and former government officials who have read the document.
Some people close to Mr. Tenet have said the report may have hastened his resignation, which he announced last week. It takes effect on July 11. While Mr. Tenet had long wanted to step down from the post for personal reasons, he was also aware of the negative thrust of the report, one of three due this summer that are expected to be critical of the agency's performance on issues related to Iraq's supposed illicit weapons, the Sept. 11 attacks, or both.
In a public speech last month, Mr. Roberts said, "I can tell you that our report does not paint a flattering picture of the performance of our intelligence community as they developed their prewar assessments."
Under the process that will apply to the Senate report, the C.I.A. is expected to highlight the passages in the Senate report that it deems to be classified and therefore prohibited by law from being released to the public, a senior intelligence official said. It would be up to the Senate committee to decide whether to release a report that blacks out those passages or to rewrite the report around those deletions, the official said.
The Senate could also vote to release a version of the report containing classified material, and Congressional officials have said that approach remains an option that the panel may pursue. But in the interview, Mr. Rockefeller described that approach as "a very tricky thing to do" and "not necessarily a great precedent."
The Senate report is based on interviews with more than 200 intelligence analysts from the C.I.A. and other agencies. Mr. Tenet and other administration officials have said that it is still too soon to say whether the agency was mistaken in its prewar assessment that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons.
While no such weapons have been found, Mr. Tenet has noted that the search for them is still continuing under the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, headed by Charles A. Duelfer, a senior adviser to the intelligence chief.
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