Listening to DissentHow should a president handle uncertainties or disputes on intelligence?
Posted Tuesday, June 10, 2008, at 12:30 PM ET
On June 5, the Senate intelligence committee released its long-awaited report on whether President George W. Bush and his top officials knowingly exaggerated or falsified intelligence when making the case for invading Iraq.
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StumbleUponThe 171-page document is neither quite as damning as the committee's press release suggests nor remotely as exonerating as a Washington Post editorial would have you believe.
But more significant are the report's implications (buried between its lines) for how the next president should change the way that National Intelligence Estimates are written—and, even more, the way that they are read.
The committee examined dozens of public statements about Iraq made by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and so forth—then compared their claims with what classified intelligence analyses were reporting at the time. All the statements turned out to be wrong. But were the officials simply, and perhaps unwittingly, reciting mistaken intelligence reports? Or were they exaggerating, twisting, or even falsifying what those reports were really saying?
Some of the officials' claims, the committee concludes, were "substantiated by available intelligence information." This was the case for allegations about Iraq's biological weapons facilities, its ballistic-missile programs, and its support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaida.
In several instances, the claims were backed by the intelligence estimate's majority view but were disputed by some of the agencies. (An NIE is a consensus product, put together by the nation's 16 intelligence agencies; if some of the agencies disagree on some point, they often file a dissenting footnote.) This was the case for the claims that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program and that it was building unmanned aerial vehicles for the purpose of dropping biological weapons on Americans and our allies. The Senate report chides the officials for failing, at times willfully, to take these dissents into account.
On a few other issues, officials made claims with great confidence, whereas the intelligence reports expressed considerable uncertainty. This was the case for claims about chemical-weapons production and the prospects of postwar stability.
Finally, several claims had no basis in, or were even contradicted by, the official intelligence reports. These include the claim that Saddam Hussein intended to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, that he had a partnership with al-Qaida, that he had WMD facilities in deep underground bunkers, and that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague in 2001.
It is worth noting that the claims that reflected U.S. intelligence—on biological weapons, ballistic missiles, and support for non-al-Qaida terrorist groups—were, while serious, not the sorts of threats that would rally a nation to war. Meanwhile, the claims that did galvanize support for the invasion—on nuclear weapons and alliances with al-Qaida—either exaggerated or falsified the intelligence of the day.
Another intriguing point, made fleetingly in the Senate report's preface, is that the committee reviewed "only finished analytic intelligence documents"—not "less formal communications between intelligence agencies and other parts of the executive branch." In other words (though the authors don't put it in these terms), the committee once again evaded the key question of whether the White House pressured the Central Intelligence Agency into hardening its October 2002 NIE on Iraq.
Unless this question is addressed, the report is beside the point. Its full, ungainly title is "Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information." If those same government officials politicized the intelligence information, then the report only perpetuates the sham. (I am not saying this is the case, only that the committee should have investigated whether it is—should have reviewed those "less formal communications.")
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