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Bush barking up the CIA's
tree
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- Wounded by the total collapse of its prewar
contentions that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had large
stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the
administration of US President George W Bush has embarked
on a strategy of diversion and delay.
It hopes to
divert attention from the role played by senior
administration officials in influencing and exaggerating
the intelligence assessments of the Iraqi threat in the
runup to the war by focusing debate instead on flaws in
the intelligence, and how it can be improved in the
future. The administration hopes to delay until well
after the November presidential elections the reporting
deadline for a proposed commission that will study the
fiasco.
"This is damage control,"
said one congressional aide, adding that the president's
re-election chances might well hinge on whether he is
able to pull off the strategy. "Bush wants to get this
out of the headlines and into a commission that won't
say anything until he's re-elected."
Bush, who
is helped by the fact that Republicans control key
committees in Congress, appears able to count as well on
David Kay, whose statements after he resigned as the man
in charge of the US hunt for weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) in Iraq last week set off the White House's latest
maneuvers.
Kay's admission that "we were almost
all wrong" about Iraq's WMD stockpiles and alleged
reconstitution of a nuclear-weapons program, and his
endorsement of the proposal to create a commission to
examine the causes of the intelligence failures,
initially forced the administration on the defensive.
But in absolving the administration of the charge of
pressuring the intelligence community's analysts to
exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq's alleged WMD
programs, Kay threw Bush a life preserver.
But
to veteran intelligence analysts, Kay's life preserver
could more accurately be called a lie preserver. In
their view, the professional intelligence community did
indeed make serious mistakes. But they charge as well
that the administration effectively encouraged it to
make those mistakes and, to make matters worse,
deliberately exaggerated the assessments to make the
Iraqi threat sound more ominous than even the
intelligence community's flawed reports said it was.
"Did the intelligence shape policy, or did the
policy shape intelligence?" asked Melvin Goodman, a top
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Soviet expert during
the Cold War who currently teaches at the National War
College.
Like other
intelligence veterans who have remained in touch with
their former colleagues, Goodman says that Kay's
assertions that the administration did not pressure
analysts are simply "wrong". "I've talked with analysts at
CIA and DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], and they
all claim there was tremendous pressure put on them."
Goodman said.
The fact, according to Goodman,
that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created an Office
of Special Plans (OSP) outside the formal intelligence
channels with the specific mandate to reassess raw
intelligence in order to find alleged links between
Saddam and al-Qaeda suggests that the administration was
applying that pressure in unconventional ways. "When
Rumsfeld couldn't get what he wanted, he created his
OSP," Goodman said. "That really gives away the whole
game right there."
Other retired analysts, such
as the CIA's former top counter-terrorist specialist,
Vincent Cannistraro, have cited Vice President Dick
Cheney's repeated trips to CIA headquarters to
personally question analysts as another example of how
pressure was exerted on analysts.
Greg
Thielmann, a WMD specialist at the State Department's
Bureau of Intelligence and Research who worked on Iraq
until his retirement in late 2002, also disputes Kay's
assertion that the administration had nothing to do with
the intelligence failure.
"Everyone knew that
the White House was deaf to any information that would
not substantiate its charges; that is a very
unproductive environment for any intellectual inquiry,"
he said in a telephone interview. "The White House was
never searching for the truth; it was searching for
arguments to make the case for war." He continued, "They
were searching for evidence to support the conclusions
they had already reached."
"The
perfect example is what the White House did not do in
February 2003, after UN inspectors had been on the ground in
Iraq for three months looking under roofs,
examining facilities, interviewing weapons scientists, and giving us
a lot better and fresher information base than we had
had for the previous four years," said Thielmann.
"As far as I know, the White House never
asked the intelligence community to update [its] October
[2002] assessment to see whether any of its key
judgments about Iraq should be modified in light of
what the inspectors were seeing on the ground. And the
reason is that the administration did not care what was
going on on the ground. It was interested in going to
war and convincing the American people and the
international community that war was necessary," he
said.
The analysts' views about the way in which
the administration's drive to war affected the
intelligence assessments are largely shared by Democrats
on the two congressional intelligence committees that
have been already been investigating the performance of
the intelligence community for months behind closed
doors.
The committees, however, have split along
partisan lines over the same question. Republicans have
insisted that what faults have been uncovered lie
exclusively with the intelligence professionals, while
Democrats say that they have accumulated evidence of
constant pressure and interference by senior
administration figures, particularly senior Pentagon
officials, Cheney and his chief of staff, I Lewis Libby.
But Republican control of the two intelligence
committees means that the administration has been able
to effectively limit the scope of their investigations,
making it far more difficult for Democrats to obtain
additional evidence by forcing key officials to testify
or to publicize their findings.
Democrats are
clearly worried now that a Bush-appointed presidential
commission will be similarly limited in what it can or
cannot investigate. They are also concerned that the
commission's work schedule might be designed to bury the
issue of whether the administration deliberately misled
the country into going to war until after the elections.
"You don't take national security and say, 'Oh,
let's just put it on hold for a year, until an election
is over,'" the ranking Democrat on the Senate
Intelligence Committee, Senator Jay Rockefeller, told
Fox News on Sunday.
The administration
is already pressuring the commission established
to investigate the September 11, 2001 attacks on New
York and the Pentagon either to publish its final report
by its May 29 deadline - six months before the elections
- or wait until early next year if it needs more time,
presumably so as not to influence the elections.
Members of that body, which is headed by former
Republican New Jersey governor Thomas Kean but evenly
divided between Democrats and Republicans, have
complained that administration delays have pushed back
their work schedule, but that they could finish the
report by July or August.
(Inter Press
Service)
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