See previous post for my initial comments on the politics of the report.
I’m gong to comment here in some details on the Committee’s WMD conclusions and mention a few other aspects of the report that stood out for me. I haven’t made any kind of comprehensive review of the Senate Committee report myself. The issue of alleged links between Iraq and terrorists including al-Qaeda is one that is treated at some length in the report. But we need to remember that this was not the administration’s justification for war: the WMDs were, especially the alleged nuclear program. The alleged links to al-Qaeda were mostly claimed through innuendo and were used as a way to link the Iraq War to the public’s post-9/11 war fever. The (non-existent) Saddam/al-Qaeda cooperation was a propaganda prop, as was the promise to liberation the oppressed Iraqi people (some of whom the US has been torturing in the gulag for months now). They were not the reasons given to Congress, the US public and the world to justify war.
Conclusions on weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)
It’s very clear from the Committee’s findings, though, that the WMD claims were false. For instance, the report finds on the critical NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) of October 2002, “Most of the major key judgments [were] either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting.” (Sec. I.B.3, Conclusion 1) It goes on to specify that this was true of the NIE’s findings on the Iraqi nuclear program, the chemical and biological programs, and the prohibited missiles.
The nuclear program claims were the most alarming for the Congress and the public. The Senate Committee, a year and a half after the president took the country to war based on these false claims, now says of the dual-use equipment on which those phony claims were based, “none of the intelligence reporting indicated that the equipment was being acquired for suspect nuclear facilities.” (my emphasis)
The claim about mobile biological weapons labs – also phony – was based on a single human intelligence (HUMINT, in intelligence jargon) source “to whom the Intelligence Community (IC) never had direct access.” (my emphasis)
The report blames the failures it describes on “a combination of systematic weaknesses, primarily in analytic trade craft, compounded by a lack of information sharing, poor management, and inadequate intelligence collection.” This is clearly part of the Bush alibi, which is to say the president and the other chief decision-makers in deciding to go to war and kill people were all dupes of George Tenet and the CIA. Everyone who’s followed this story, not least the warmakers and war fans themselves, know this is false.
But the statement I just quoted in itself is more likely true, at least in part. And here “poor management” can also stand for Tenet’s willingness to bend the analysis he did receive to match the Iraq hawks’ case for war. There have been many indications in published reports that the CIA did in fact have inadequate intelligence in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. And that shortcoming led them to perhaps place excessive reliance on information from Israeli intelligencethat was also not entirely uninfluenced by a political/strategic agenda.
As I said in the introduction, the key to successfully combating the current terrorist threat facing the US and other countries is good intelligence information that is credible for policymakers and for the public. There are problems with the information provided by the intelligence agencies and even more critical problems in the way that the administration used its lie factories at the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President to cook up phony intelligence. It’s vital for the good of the country, however little Bush partisans may actually care about that, for these problems to be fixed.
The Committee also found that intelligence agencies did not “adequately explain” to policymakers” the uncertainties and qualifications that went along with their findings. (Sec. I.B.3, Conclusion 2) However one views the ways in which Cheney and others put pressure on the regular intelligence agencies to slant their reports to justify going to war and killing people, the Senate report makes a valid point that it is the responsibility of the established intelligence agencies to explain the differences between solid information, guesses, and judgments – and “to make sure that policymakers understand the difference.”
At one level, this is also a lesson from Corporate Politics 101. If your boss is want to do something deceptive, it’s just plain good sense to make sure you have some contemporary documentation that shows you were not a willing part of it. In the case of intelligence analyses justifying war, the stakes are much higher than a few points swing in a company’s stock price.
In expanding on this conclusion, the Committee notes of Iraq’s alleged WMDs that US intelligence analysts had “very little direct knowledge about the current state of those programs.” On this basis, the president put our soldiers into the nightmare we now have in Iraq.
The Committee also reported that the intelligence community suffered from “group think” in assuming that Iraq had active WMD programs. (Sec. I.B.3, Conclusion 3) I’m more skeptical about this aspect of the report’s findings. For one thing, if there was such a wide consensus about the reality of Iraq’s WMD programs, which did the administration need to set up its lie factories to cook up even more hyped-up information?
For another, it makes sense for intelligence analysts to be cautious in their assessments. Iraq did have WMD programs at one time. And not all of the documented stocks had been completed accounted for, although the older stocks would have been largely inert by 2002. So it makes sense that the analysts were looking for indications about possible programs. But the previous conclusion itself, that qualifications weren’t adequately surfaced to policymakers, shows that “group think” on Iraqi WMDs was possibly not the degree of problem among intelligence analysis that the report suggests. The “group think” conclusion reads to me like garnish to boost the clownish case that Tenet deceived the Bush warhawks into going to war.
Incidentally, it’s good to see that the Senate report talks about how the inspectors “left Iraq” in 1998. The mantra that Saddam “kicked the inspectors out” has become a seemingly ineradicable part of the story. Actually, what happened was that Iraq started blocking access to sites, claiming that the US had spies on the UN inspection team, which the US government later admitted to have been the case. Scott Ritter, then the head of the UN inspection team, pulled the teamout on his own initiative. It’s a footnote to history now, but one more reminder of how badly our political leaders and our lazy media failed the country in the run-up to war.
The Committee’s conclusion that a “layering effect” occurred in which assumptions were built on other false assumptions (Sec. I.B.3, Conclusion 4) seems to me like another way of restating the same findings. (This report was the product of a committee, after all, so one shouldn’t expect the highest literary standards.) The same might be said about Conclusion 5 as well, having to do with poor supervision of analysts. We’re talking about a highly secretive agency, so it’s hard to see how us lay readers can make much of a judgment on this aspect of the report, in any case.
The Committee’s finding that the problems of “a broken corporate culture and poor management… will not be solved by additional funding and personnel” has received a lot of attention. (Sec. I.B.3, Conclusion 6) I find that to be a refreshing conclusion, however arbitrarily it gets batted around in future discussions about reorganizing the main intelligence agencies.
Not to quibble too much, but do we have to use “corporate culture” to talk about government agencies? The CIA isn’t a corporation. “Agency culture” or “institutional culture” would do just as well.
But it’s also important to remember that this applies as well to the use of “lie factories” to “stovepipe” phony intelligence to senior policymakers and bypass the intelligence analysis process. No matter how good the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) are doing there jobs, if an administration just establishes its own information to create disinformation for Congress and the public, the same problems can occur.
The report notes that US intelligence was “depended too heavily on defectors and foreign government services” in their Iraqi intelligence. In this case, “foreign government services” most likely means primarily Israeli intelligence. It seems that nearly everyone from anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists to pragmatic realists is ready to attribute superhuman powers to Israeli intelligence. The actual record does not seem to justify that assumption.
The report also notes that American intelligence often did not have direct access to the sources, and so they were relying on the credibility of the services in question. This points to another key issue in combating transnational terrorism. Intelligence agencies of friendly nations need to develop as much cooperation as possible. But credibility of information is key to this. Mutual credibility. And there is certainly a lot of skepticism among foreign governments about the claims of American intelligence right now based on the Iraq War experience.
The Committee’s report takes a gratuitous shot at Joseph Wilson and his debunking of the fake yellowcake-from-Niger claim: “The Committee does not fault the CIA for exploiting the access of the spouse of a CIA employee traveling to Niger. The Committee believes, however, that it is unfortunate, considering the significant resources available to the CIA, that this was the only option available.”
Most people that have followed that aspect of the story believe that it was even more unfortunate that the US and British governments decided to use that forged document about Niger yellowcake to promote the case for going to war and killing people ever after it had been effectively debunked.
The report’s conclusion that the CIA “abused its unique position” among other intelligence agencies in a way that damaged prewar intelligence seems pretty lightweight to me. (Sec. I.B.3, Conclusion 7) The CIA is supposed to be the government’s main source for intelligence analysis. A big reason for having a central, systematic source for analysis is to avoid having US policymakers being hoodwinked by the kind of faked intelligence reports from defectors that were “stovepiped’ to the “lie factories” to cook up a more convincing case for war.
This section is probably far more comprehensible to someone with more detailed knowledge about the bureaucratic structures of the intelligence agencies than I. Some of it probably involves propositioning for upcoming discussion on reorganizations. There’s no one magic right or wrong organizational structure for intelligence. There needs to be some good central coordination, and there needs to be systematic protection from abuses of power and sloppy analysis. But there are many ways to provide an organizational structure to get those results.
Other noteworthy sections
The crassness of the attempt to whitewash Cheney’s pressure on the intelligence analysts shows up in Sec. I.C.3, Conclusion 11, which says, “Several of the allegations of pressure on Intelligence Community (IC) analysts involved repeated questioning.” It goes on to explain piously that, why, that’s what officials are supposed to do.
Anyone with half sense can tell the difference between having policymakers ask reasonable questions and having the Vice President of the United States – especially the snarling and surly Dick Cheney – standing over the analysts’ shoulder browbeating them to twist their conclusions to justify war and to give him and the rest of the Iraq hawks an alibi when the claims turned out to be bogus.
For those interested in the particulars of Joe Wilson’s handling of the Niger investigation, there is a long section on that. For Republicans who love to dance on commas, it will provide a bit of material for nitpicking Wilson’s charges about the Bush administration’s handling of the Niger information. It doesn’t change the main point at all, though: the claims were bogus. For us fans of the incomparable Daily Howler, it’s interesting to see that the report notes that the word “Niger” was removed from Bush’s 2003 SOTU. The Howler has repeatedly noted the laziness of our political press in mentioning over and over that Bush had referred to uranium from Niger in that speech. Although his claim was based on the phony Niger yellowcake claim, he did not actually mention Niger in that speech.
There are also sections on the infamous aluminum tubes and other aspects of the (non-existent) Iraqi nuclear-weapons program; the (non-existent) Iraqi biological weapons program; the mobile labs whose purpose turned out to be producing hydrogen gas for balloons; critical threats like the Iraqi castor-oil production facility; the (non-existent) Iraqi chemical weapons program; and prohibited delivery systems i.e., missiles and the “unmanned aerial delivery vehicles” (UAV) that supposedly could elude the US continental defense system and spray Iraq’s (non-existent) biological weapons on us; and, discussions of how the information on these horrible threats was used in various key policy speeches by administration officials; a more detailed treatment of the issue of administration pressure on intelligence analysts; Iraq’s alleged links to anti-American terrorists; and, the intelligence assessment of Iraq’s threats to Middle East stability and security.
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