Decoding the Senate Intelligence Committee Investigation on Iraq
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By ANDREW ROSENTHAL
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
THE NEW YORK TIMES
July 18, 2004
The Senate Intelligence Committee's report on American intelligence failures in Iraq has produced a rare and curious thing — agreement between left and right. For opposite reasons, both are pushing the absurd notion that the report told us that President Bush was not to blame for giving Americans false information about Iraq.
The left has denounced the report as a whitewash that unfairly clears Mr. Bush of charges that he or his aides prodded the Central Intelligence Agency into hyping the Iraqi weapons programs, and purposefully misrepresented the threat from Saddam Hussein. The right agrees with the conclusion, and calls it a vindication of the president.
In fact, the sadly incomplete report does nothing of the kind. It takes the public up to the question of Mr. Bush's involvement and then ducks, announcing that an examination of the president's role is due after the election. Thanks to that compromise, the Republicans did not block it, and Democrats could justify endorsing it as an unfinished work.
The 511-page report, which was released by the committee last week after about 20 percent was censored by the administration, does not tell us what the C.I.A. and other agencies told Mr. Bush before he concluded that Iraq had dangerous weapons and that Saddam Hussein had to go. It focuses on something called a "National Intelligence Estimate," which came out in October 2002, months and months after the administration had already set its face toward war. The estimate was requested by Congress, and it was supposed to summarize the views of the C.I.A., along with those of the Defense Department's intelligence experts and other agencies, like the State Department and Department of Energy, that might have important information to offer.
Three versions of the report on Iraq were prepared, all of them concluding that Saddam Hussein was a major threat. But the first, long, classified one was peppered with reservations. A declassified version that was given to Congress erased most of the doubts. The even shorter public version had no caveats at all.
What we need to know now is how the report came up so positive. The Senate committee said its staff "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." Republican members in particular have repeatedly assured the public that no one reported any direct arm-twisting. But that is a lot less meaningful than it sounds.
The people helping to prepare the report worked for officials like Vice President Dick Cheney; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; George Tenet, the director of central intelligence; and to a lesser degree Secretary of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. By the time they began working on the intelligence estimate, most of their bosses had already advised the president that Saddam Hussein needed to go, and some had also taken a public stand.
On Aug. 26, for instance, Mr. Cheney told the V.F.W. National Convention that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and was working on a nuclear weapon. "Simply stated," he added, "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors."
Simply stated, there was plenty of doubt about all of these things and most of them were not true. In fact, members of the intelligence community were voicing doubts at the time that Mr. Cheney spoke. We do not know for certain whether these dissenting voices were heard by Mr. Cheney or Mr. Bush. But certainly, Mr. Tenet, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Powell and Ms. Rice had access to them.
So while the Senate report has told us that no government employee complained of direct pressure from the White House to give the intelligence estimate a positive spin, it has not told us how so much negative assessment got left out or how top Bush officials came to make public statements that contradicted information that was readily available within the administration. The Department of Energy categorically refuted the claim that the Iraqis were working on nuclear weapons in April 2001, 16 months before Mr. Cheney's V.F.W. speech, according to the Senate report. The C.I.A. knew it, the Defense Department knew it, the State Department knew it. But these dissenting views did not make it into the intelligence estimate.
So it's not exactly true, as Mr. Bush said on Wednesday, that "the United States Congress, including members of both political parties, looked at the same intelligence" that he had. And we have still not seen the intelligence reports Mr. Bush got. We do not even know what Mr. Bush was told about the intelligence estimate. The C.I.A. gave him his own, one-page summary, which the White House will not show to the Senate.
One of Mr. Bush's central charges against Saddam Hussein was his supposed link with Al Qaeda, which Mr. Bush still mentions even though the Senate report said there was no evidence of a link. On this point, the report said, the intelligence community's negative view was widely disseminated among top officials.
Mr. Cheney likes to refer to a meeting between the hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi official that supposedly took place in Prague in April 2001. But the C.I.A. does not believe it happened. In a memo recently released by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, Mr. Tenet said the agency did not have "any credible information that the April 2001 meeting occurred."
In today's political climate, it took some courage for the Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Pat Roberts, to do any investigating at all. But he was ultimately overwhelmed by the politics of Iraq.
The British report on the intelligence debacle, also released last week, made it plain that the push for war was political, not based on new urgency about a threat from Iraq. Even with fears justifiably heightened after the 9/11 attacks, it said, "there was no recent intelligence that would itself have given rise to a conclusion that Iraq was of more immediate concern than the activities of some other countries."
So how did the Bush administration wind up passing out so much disinformation? Americans are going to have to wait for the Senate's judgment on this crucial question until after the election.
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