Bush cronies trying to protect Bush. An interesting commentary from a foreign press. They commend the Butler report in the UK but do not give good grades for the US Senate intelligence committee's report.
What's missing from the intelligence report
Andrew Rosenthal NYT
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Did Bush really know
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NEW YORK 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 George W. Bush was not to blame for giving Americans false information about Iraq.
The left has denounced the report as a whitewash that unfairly clears Bush of charges that he or his aides prodded the CIA 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 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 after about 20 percent was censored by the administration, does not tell us what the CIA and other agencies told Bush before he concluded that Iraq had dangerous weapons and that Saddam 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.
Three versions of the report on Iraq were prepared, all of them concluding that Saddam 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.
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." 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 needed to go, and some had taken a public stand.
On Aug. 26, for instance, Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention of 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."
Simply stated, there was plenty of doubt. In fact, members of the intelligence community were voicing doubts at the time that Cheney spoke. We do not know for certain whether these dissenting voices were heard by Cheney or Bush. But certainly, Tenet, Rumsfeld, Powell and 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 Cheney's VFW speech, according to the Senate report. The CIA knew it, the Defense Department knew it, the State Department knew it. But these dissenting views did not make it into the intelligence estimate.
We still haven't seen the intelligence reports Bush got. We don't even know what Bush was told about the intelligence estimate. The CIA gave him his own, one-page summary, which the White House will not show to the Senate.
One of Bush's central charges against Saddam was his supposed link with Al Qaeda, which Bush still mentions even though the Senate report said there was no evidence of a link.
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 CIA does not believe it happened. In a memo recently released by Senator Carl Levin, a democrat, 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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