Missed Clues, Dropped balls
A scathing report on the CIA--and a big pass for the White House
Ever since the first American troops entered Iraq, the Bush administration has had an increasingly difficult time explaining why, exactly, it took the nation to war. None of the various justifications--weapons of mass destruction, ties to terrorism, creating a burgeoning democracy in the Middle East--seem quite as compelling anymore. Even as reports of American casualties continue to filter in from Iraq almost daily, it now appears that the entire case for war was fundamentally flawed.
Indeed, the assertions about Iraq laid out by the U.S. intelligence community and repeated even more vehemently by top Bush administration officials--that Iraq had reconstituted its weapons of mass destruction programs--were wrong and not even supported by reliable top-secret data, according to a bipartisan report issued late last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee. "We went to war in Iraq," declared Sen. John Rockefeller, the democratic vice chair of the committee, "based on false claims."
The Senate panel's report is only the latest dissection of the intelligence community and its failings in recent years. The report rips apart the CIA's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which formed the basis for the Bush administration's case for war. It concludes that most of the document's central judgments on the existence of weapons of mass destruction were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting." The final judgment on the intelligence community pulls no punches, calling the flawed analysis "the result of a combination of systemic weaknesses, primarily in analytic tradecraft, compounded by a lack of information sharing, poor management, and inadequate intelligence collection." Or, as one committee aide puts it, "This is total failure."
The report came as CIA Director George Tenet was emptying out his desk for retirement. He comes in for some tough criticism, even as the Senate panel concluded that there was no evidence that the CIA's errant assertions were the result of political pressure. But Rockefeller issued a separate dissent, asserting that there indeed were several reports of strong pressure on analysts from policymakers to come to strong conclusions, especially on Iraqi links to terrorism. He mentioned a statement by the CIA's ombudsman that the "hammering" of analysts was more severe than he had ever seen in his 32-year career. Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, who chairs the committee, disagreed, saying that policymakers were supposed to challenge and question the intelligence community in order to spur better analyses.
Curveball. As bad as it all looks, it could have been even worse for President Bush. Republicans on the committee blocked the panel from looking into how the administration used--or misused--intelligence in making the case for war in this first report. This angered several insiders, who noted that the CIA didn't declare war on Iraq. "It's not as if this group of people in the administration were reluctantly pushed into a decision by this finding," says a senior intelligence official who retired recently. "They were looking for a justification for a decision that they already reached." Instead, the committee will take this on in a second report that will most likely appear after the election.
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