The Senate intelligence committee report on the pre-Iraq War intelligence is obvious a very important document. We’re in the middle of the Presidential election campaign, so it’s inevitable – particularly given the decadent state of our mainstream media – that partisan charges will loom large in the discussions of the report.
But it’s important to remember that there are real national security issues at stake here. The United States went to war and occupied Iraq, alienating most of the world and probably permanently wrecking the country’s most long-standing treaty alliance (NATO) in the process, based on alleged “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. The Senate report, which runs to 422 pages before appendices, is a long, detailed and more than a little depressing reminder that those claims were wildly wrong. Not just exaggerated, not just overstated, but astonishingly wrong.
It’s a big thing. We went to war and are killing people and put our soldiers in harm’s way where they are being killed still, based on these false claims. In international law, it was an illegal war of aggression, no matter how much contempt Republican war fans have for the whole concept of international law these days. (Or even American law when it comes to torture in the gulag, exposing undercover CIA agents for political purposes, or passing critical signals intelligence to Iranian agents like Ahmed Chalabi.)
It’s painfully obvious that the Republicans who dominate the Senate and the committee want to emphasize the failures of the CIA and to exonerate administration officials who pressured the intelligence agencies to cook the data. The Republicans are delaying any report on the administration’s misuse of the intelligence data until after the election.
But the general outlines of that aspect of the problem are already well known and have been extensively documented in news reports and even scholarly analyses. Pressure by administration officials, most dramatically in Vice President Cheney’s repeated and thoroughly inappropriate visits to CIA analysts preparing intelligence assessments, was certainly brought to bear, despite the coverup attempt in the Senate Committee report.
Even more important, both Rumsfeld’s Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President set up their own rump operations to interpret intelligence reports. The Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP) was the more extensively discussed of the two. It was set up especially to bypass the CIA and other established government intelligence services and get raw intelligence reports “stovepiped” to itself, where it could then be cooked into a case of war. Much of the information so used came from émigré sources who wanted to promote a US invasion, and particularly those connected with Ahmed Chalabi, the neoconservatives’ favorite for Iraqi leader before the exposure of his group’s espionage services for Iran. German reporter Hans Leyendecker has aptly described the OSP as the Pentagon’s Lügenfabrik, or “lie factory,” and the description could also apply to the similar group in Cheney’s office.
One of the main participants in the OSP, Richard Perle, justified the use of the Lügenfabrik approach in his 2003 book, co-authored with David Frum:
If we want to protect ourselves until the CIA determines that it is five minutes to midnight, we will run the ugly risk of discovering that we have waited too long. …
The CIA is an information collection and analysis agency, but not always a very good one. America’s amazing technology allows us to gather immense quantities of data. But that data yields useful intelligence only if it is analyzed without ideological prejudices or institutional biases. A good intelligence analyst must constantly question his own ideas about the phenomena he studies. Alas, the CIA does not live up to this standard. Over time, it has become an agency with very strong, mostly liberal policy views, and these views have again and again distorted its analysis and presentation of its own information.
It’s amusing, in a grim sort of way, to note that this position is almost the exact opposite of the Republican Party line of the current moment that poor Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were misled by the CIA which was grossly over-exaggerating the Iraq threat, when a “liberal” bias would have presumably led them to do the opposite. But I don’t want to get caught up in that kind of snarky silliness. The Perle/Frum criticism of the CIA just quoted is just “projection,” though of an ideological rather than psychological sort. Setting up an ideologically oriented group to mis-analyze intelligence data is exactly what the “lie factories” were.
So, no one should let the Committee report’s focus on the CIA distract from the very serious problem represented by the informal “lie factories” the administration set up to cook the intelligence information.
It would also be a shame if partisan considerations wound up making people think that the CIA was simply a scapegoat in this. Former CIA director George Tenet was apparently inclined to skew his high-level intelligence assessments to give the administration the case for war it wanted.
But the CIA itself was not producing top-quality intelligence. We already knew about bad CIA assessments of things like the “mobile biological weapons labs” and aluminum tubes that were alleged to be part of Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program. Some of the problems identified in the Senate report, like excessive reliance of foreign intelligence information that turned out to be wrong, are very real problems that the US intelligence community needs to correct.
The Bush partisans are clearly trying to scapegoat the CIA, and no one who cares about the security issues should be suckered by that. But it would also be a mistake to draw a mirror-image conclusion and assume that the CIA was the “good guys” in this thing and administration’s Lügenfabriken the only problem.
The Senate report provides an important reminder of how pretty much any factory that can produced medicines or agricultural chemicals is technically a “dual-use facility” that could be converted to production of chemical weapons. Likewise for any hospital or university laboratory and biological weapons. Hopefully, Congress, the public and our lazy press corps will be more alert to the ambiguity of alarming reports on “dual-use facilities” in Iran and Syria if Bush gets elected in November and starts preparing the next round of wars of liberation.
An important consideration to keep in mind with the Senate report is that deliberately providing false information to Congress is a crime. Given the flow of bogus policy claims from lobbyists that are the everyday reality of politics, they may seem to be a silly statement (and I can’t cite chapter and verse of the law here). But deliberately providing false information to Congress on a critical national security issue could well be legally actionable, as well as a career-killer for intelligence professionals. This occurred to me particularly in perusing the section late in the report where various CIA analysts denied that they felt pressure from the administration to shade their conclusions to fit the case for war.
The importance of good news reporting
This is a good instance of how most of us are reliant on sound, capable news reporting and analysis. I.e, the kind that one is unlikely to find on Fox News, and is in all-too-short supply in other US media outlets as well. Although the report is published and is easily available online, most citizens, even the most interested ones, are unlikely to read through the entire report. And even if we do, there are parts of it that require some fairly specific knowledge of intelligence organizational structures and procedures to make any kind of real judgment on them.
Consequently, almost all of us will be relying largely on news reporting and analysisto judge what this report means. Partisans can cherry-pick pieces out of the report to prove this or that “gotcha” point. And also to make general statements like, “The Senate report proves that there was good reason to think there were WMDs in Iraq.” Without decent news reporting on the material, many people will wind up having to judge the reliability of such statements based on the volume of tit-for-tat charges and countercharges.
Let’s not forget what a big advantage the Internet provides, though. Fifteen years ago, most people wanting to see the report would have to wait days or weeks to get a full copy. Now, it’s there for any of us how want to and have the time to check ourselves. That’s a very good thing.
In a weird twist, the Senate report “does not address the question of accuracy regarding WMD,” saying that will not be possible until the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) makes its final report. (Sec. I.B.) This is hair-splitting to provide political cover for the Bush team. The weapons that Bush announced so dramatically in his 2003 State of the Union (SOTU) address were not there. The claims were fabrications. To say that because there are more details to be elaborate about precisely how the fabrications were developed is the kind of dancing on commas that conservatives and war advocates have developed such a fondness for the last few years.
See following post for comments on the report itself.
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