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Saturday, Nov 22, 2008
A Senate report conveniently blames the CIA, not Bush, for hyping the threat of WMD in Iraq -- thanks to Democrats who allowed the GOP to mug them.
Jul 9, 2004 | On one of the signal debates of the 2004 presidential campaign -- whether President Bush hyped intelligence to lead the nation into an unnecessary war against Iraq -- the Republicans may have already won an important battle. On Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee issues its much-anticipated report excoriating the nation's spy agencies for their dire -- and wrong -- conclusions about Iraq's weapons capabilities. The report shifts blame from the White House to beleaguered CIA Director George Tenet, whose resignation takes effect on Sunday.
The panel's Republican chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, will pivot off the report in a news conference Friday morning to argue that Democratic demands for a "Phase 2" of the investigation examining the administration's decision to invade Iraq are "null and void," as a spokeswoman for the senator put it earlier this week. But Senate Democrats laid the groundwork for their own political defeat in February when they agreed to delay the second phase of the investigation until after the November election.
"I sort of attribute it to just bad negotiations," said a former top aide to a Democratic senator who has been closely involved in intelligence oversight. "I'm not sure if there was any other external factor. I think there's some sense we've got to push the envelope, but that we're the minority and there's only so much we can do. It sort of defines the Democrats' approach in the Senate."
The 500-plus-page report offers 120 bipartisan conclusions about the intelligence community's failures. Democrats, and some Republicans as well, offer additional and individual views. But the thrust of the report is that the intelligence agencies badly erred in concluding that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions" and that Iraq "probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade," as the notorious October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which represented the consensus judgment of the intelligence community prepared by the CIA, stated. Former weapons inspector David Kay has testified repeatedly that his Iraq Survey Group found no evidence of a chemical, biological or nuclear weapons program.
Roberts, a White House ally, had been at best ambivalent about pursuing an investigation of intelligence on WMD. Only reluctantly did he agree to examine the intelligence agencies' work. In a January interview with National Public Radio, however, he said he thought it prudent to delay any probe of the administration's role in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. "Let's at least wait until we get the [initial phase of the] inquiry done. Then, if there's something terribly egregious, I have no problem with looking at it," he said.
More recently, Roberts has backpedaled. Of the "Phase 2" examination of the administration's use of intelligence, he told the congressional newspaper Roll Call: "I am not even sure it is within our jurisdiction." However, the resolution establishing the committee clearly extends its purview to the "use of information" about "collected, analyzed, produced and disseminated intelligence."
But the Republicans hold a trump card: choice of staff. Unique among Senate committees, the Republican chairman of the intelligence panel has the final say on the hiring and firing of committee aides, giving Democrats little leverage. "The Republicans ultimately and effectively, at the end of the day, controlled this investigation. There's no doubt about it. And they tried to put a bipartisan patina on it, but anybody who accepts that on face value is out of touch," said the former Democratic aide.
The joint news conference to be held by Roberts and the intelligence panel's top Democrat, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, was scripted in advance and was previewed for reporters earlier this week by aides to the two senators. Roberts will argue that the report puts to rest the question of whether President Bush misled the nation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Instead, it was Bush who was misled by the Central Intelligence Agency, Roberts will contend. He will also note that of 200 intelligence analysts interviewed by the panel, none said they were ordered by the administration to tailor their reports to bolster the argument for war.
Rockefeller will parry that the issue is more complicated. Did the administration's predetermination that Iraq was a threat influence a politically pliable intelligence bureaucracy to produce judgments that would support that conclusion? And what about those intelligence analysts who said they felt no pressure -- did the committee ask them the right questions? Perhaps no one directly told them to change their conclusions, Rockefeller will argue, but it's less clear whether they faced more subtle institutional pressures to exaggerate the threat.
Democrats can also be expected to raise the issue of how administration officials characterized the intelligence in public statements. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice famously warned that the United States should not wait for a "smoking gun" that was a "mushroom cloud." But the intelligence at the time, although concluding that Saddam was reconstituting a nuclear program, said that the Iraqi leader was still years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
In the Senate, the intelligence committee's report was delayed for weeks as the panel and the CIA wrangled over how much of it to declassify. The panel pushed for complete declassification, but the CIA would agree to make only about 80 percent of the material public. The dispute over declassification has pushed back planned public hearings on the report from this month to sometime in the fall.
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