[A-List] US state: Iraq scandal

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Bush barking up the CIA's tree
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, February 4 2004

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.