From Rahul Mahajan, AlterNet. I believe this states a good portion of what people are now ignoring. What causes us to be so blind to our past, and even more detrimentally, our future? Why do we routinely ignore long term thought processes? read on...
"Last week, the "Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction" issued what may be the last in a series of in-depth reports by U.S. government on the "intelligence failures" surrounding the invasion of Iraq.
Wade through the close to 3,000 pages of these reports and one conclusion is inescapable: those of us who opposed the invasion of Iraq were right on every count.
We knew that the Bush administration's case of war was no more than a mish-mash of evasion, misdirection, and outright lies -- and we didn't need the vast resources of these investigative commissions to figure it out. The evidence – be it in the form of intelligence leaks, news reporting (though less often in the U.S. and rarely on the front page), or congressional testimony -- was out in the open for all to see.
The al Qaeda Connection
In the lead up to the war, Bush administration officials constantly insinuated a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, and even the 9/11 attacks. Vice President Cheney, over and again, referred to a ****-and-bull story about a Prague meeting between Mohammed Atta and the Iraqi intelligence. The Atta story was debunked in The New York Times as early as October 2002 – more than four months before the invasion.
The other "damning" piece of evidence of this al Qaeda connection was a sighting of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Baghdad. As it turns out, the only person who helped out Zarqawi was George Bush. By eliminating Saddam, the U.S. has created a power vacuum that has made Zarqawi a major player in post-war Iraq. There was never any evidence emerged that he was getting resources, assistance, or cover from the old regime. The 9/11 commission later confirmed that there was absolutely no evidence linking Iraq to al Qaeda.
The N-Bomb Scare
Starting in August 2002, Dick Cheney and others raised the specter of Iraq armed with a nuclear bomb, ready to take out New York or Atlanta. On March 16, 2003, Cheney even said, of Saddam, "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
According to the WMD Commission report, the CIA believed that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapon program – which is still quite different from actually having nuclear weapons. But even this modified judgment was based on controversial evidence, such as the presence of a certain kind of aluminum tubes. As news reports before the invasion show, intelligence analysts were split over these tubes; where the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency thought they were designed to serve as uranium-enrichment centrifuges, the State Department and the Department of Energy were convinced they were conventional artillery shells.
The latter were right, but we didn't need to wait for the WMD report to tell us that. The International Atomic Energy Association's Mohammed el Baradei told The Washington Post exactly that in January, 2003: "It may be technically possible that the tubes could be used to enrich uranium, but you would have to believe that Iraq deliberately ordered the wrong stock and intended to spend a great deal of time and money reworking each piece." He repeated his assessments with even greater force in a report to the U.N. on March 7 – two weeks before the invasion.
There is, of course, also the now long-debunked claim made by President Bush in his January, 2003 State of Union speech – the claim that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium from Niger.
In February 2003, IAEA inspectors – having finally gained access to the Niger documents – pointed out that they were very crude forgeries, a fact that was covered in some newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, well before the war. The Bush administration did not, however, abandon its claim until six months later, when former Ambassador Joe Wilson revealed that the administration knew there was no evidence of any attempt to buy uranium a full year before the Bush speech.
What WMDs?
As the WMD commission report reveals, when it came to Saddam's much-touted biological weapons program, the Bush administration relied entirely on "evidence" provided by an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball." He provided over 100 detailed reports, claiming, for example, that Iraq had mobile biological weapons laboratories.
Opponents of the war repeatedly challenged these claims, pointing out that such labs if they existed would be unbelievably dangerous. Moreover, there was no evidence of their existence since U.N. inspectors on the ground found little proof to back his assertions. At the time, Curveball's German handlers warned U.S. intelligence analysts that he was unreliable and most likely an outright liar. He even showed up drunk for a meeting. Although several reports of his unreliability were sent up the chain of command, the administration continued to treat his pronouncements as gospel.
The Bush administration's claims about Iraq's biological warfare capabilities also reveal that the errors surrounding the decision to invade Iraq entailed not just "faulty intelligence," but outright deception. How else to characterize Bush's claim on Oct. 7, 2002, that Saddam was planning to "target" the United States with his vaunted "unmanned aerial vehicles? As his own Air Force experts had pointed out at the time, these vehicles only had a limited range of which had a claimed range of only 400 miles and were not even big enough to carry such a payload.
Name the Elephant
For the most part, the latest report does not tell us anything we did not already know. Since early 2004, when the David Kay report offered the initial findings of the Iraq Survey Group, various government investigations have confirmed that Iraq simply was not a threat to the United States. There was the Senate Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 Commission reports issued in July, followed in October by the Duelfer report that summed up the final conclusions of the Iraq Survey Group.
Yet none of these reports – including this latest version – is willing to acknowledge the proverbial elephant in the debate over Iraq, i.e. the complicity of the Bush administration in creating this so-called "intelligence failure." The WMD Commission concludes that intelligence analysts found what they wanted to find rather than being guided by the facts. But it carefully makes a point of any wrongdoing on the part of the administration: "The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."
Similarly, the commission reserves particularly harsh criticism for the way the president's "Daily Brief" is prepared, characterizing them as "more alarmist and less nuanced" than longer reports, such as the famously flawed October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. Their "attention-grabbing headlines and drumbeat of repetition" supposedly gave top officials the impression that dramatic claims were much better sourced and heavily corroborated than, in fact, they were.
The commission clearly does its best to lend credence to the Bush White House's self-serving rationale: a scaremongering intelligence community stampeded the administration into war. How odd that a president who went on vacation when confronted with an earlier such "attention-grabbing headline" in an Aug. 6, 2001 PDB -- "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in U.S." -- should be so easily scared.
Those of us who knew better in opposing the invasion of Iraq know better now. We know that "intelligence failure" is just a neat rhetorical device to shift the blame from the coterie of top officials who deliberately deceived us into a war to the intelligence agencies who were pressured to come up with those lies. The WMD commission was not created to help us arrive at the truth, but to head off any chance of a serious investigation into the administration's wrongdoings.
So in the end, the commission did its job well. It's unfortunate that its job was a political cover-up. "
On Thursday, President Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction intelligence released a 692-page report that harshly criticizes the U.S. intelligence establishment. It notes that "the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of it pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure." That's no news flash. The Senate intelligence committee issued a report last July that said the same. But like the Senate committee, Bush's commission--cochaired by Judge Laurence Silberman, a Republican, and former Sen. Chuck Robb, a Democrat--ignored a key issue: whether Bush and his aides overstated and misrepresented the flawed intelligence they received from the intelligence agencies. As I wrote about days ago, Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the intelligence committee, promised last summer that his committee would investigate the administration's prewar use (or abuse) of the WMD intelligence after the 2004 election, but more recently Roberts backed away from that vow, claiming such an inquiry would now be pointless. The commission, which claimed it found no evidence that Bush officials pressured intelligence analysts to rig their reports, notes in a footnote:
Our review has been limited by our charter to the question of alleged policymaker pressure on the Intelligence Community to shape its conclusions to conform to the policy preferences of the administration. There is a separate issue of how policymakers used the intelligence they were given and how they reflected it in their presentations to Congress and the public. That issue is not within our charter and we therefore did not consider it nor do we express a view on it.
So two years after Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, there still has been no official inquiry into how he and his lieutenants handled the pre-war intelligence. The question is whether Bush and other administration officials exaggerated the intelligence community's overstatements. And the evidence suggests they did. Bush claimed Saddam Hussein was "dealing with" al Qaeda before the war, but the CIA had not reported that. Bush said Hussein had amassed a "massive stockpile" of biological weapons, yet the intelligence community had only reported (errantly) that Iraq had an active research and development program for biological weapons. Bush and his Republican allies in Congress have so far succeeded in keeping his role in the WMD scandal out of the picture. (Democrats, where are you?)
The presidential WMD commission found numerous problems within the intelligence community. It says, "we still know disturbingly little about the weapons programs and even less about the intentions of many of our most dangerous adversaries." (This is bad news for anyone who wants to bomb Iran or North Korea.) The report is mostly depressing, as it describes severe dysfunctions within the intelligence establishment. But the commission casts little, if any, blame toward the person ultimately responsible for the intelligence community: the president of the United States. And the current president even bestowed upon former CIA Director George Tenet, who was at the helm during this period of screw-ups, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz received one, too. And yesterday the Rand Corporation released a report concluding that his Pentagon failed to plan adequately for the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. The Rand study says that stabilization and reconstruction issues "were addressed only very generally" and "no planning was undertaken to ensure the security of the Iraqi people.")
The WMD commission took only a few modest steps toward addressing--in the most general terms--the role played by Bush and the policymakers in the Iraq WMD intelligence failure. For instance, the commission notes:
The Intelligence Community needs to be pushed. It will not do its best unless it is pressed by policymakers-sometimes to the point of discomfort. Analysts must be pressed to explain how much they don't know; the collection agencies must be pressed to explain why they don't have better information on key topics. While policymakers must be prepared to credit intelligence that doesn't fit their preferences, no important intelligence assessment should be accepted without sharp questioning that forces the community to explain exactly how it came to that assessment and what alternatives might also be true.
It's obvious that Bush did not push the intelligence services in this fashion. As the White House has conceded, Bush did not even read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq produced in October 2002. This was the intelligence community's ultimate summary of its intelligence on Iraq. A close reading of the document could have led Bush or national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (who also did not read the 90-page paper) to raise the sort of questions the commission suggests. But that did not happen. When Silberman was asked at a press conference if Bush had been inquisitive enough, he referred to a passage in Bob Woodward's latest book in which Bush is depicted asking Tenet if the intelligence is sound and Tenet maintains it is a "slam-dunk." That clearly was not good enough.
The commission also observes,
The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. That said, it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom.
The commission suggests that it is partly the responsibility of the president to guarantee that conventional wisdom is questioned. But Bush did no such thing. With this report, the CIA is again cast as the fall guy. And Bush escapes merrily.
A government nonproliferation expert with experience dealing with intelligence analysts, who has read the report, sent me his/her assessment. This source asked to go unnamed, fearing retribution at the workplace for publicly blasting the report. Below is an excerpt of his/her analysis:
[The commission] focuses on how and why the dogs barked [and got it wrong]. The real point, however, is: why didn't someone look out the window? And why have no policymakers taken responsibility, anywhere, for drastically wrong assessments on Iraq?
The Commission's report is a good read and thorough. The recommendations -- to collect better intelligence, do better analysis, and communicate better -- however, reflect the absurdity of having intelligence experts tell each other how to do their job better. The users of intelligence should be involved. The Commission had 60 staff members, but only three have identifiable expertise in nonproliferation and none have nonproliferation policy experience. Why didn't the Commission include more nonproliferation experts?
There are lots of reasons. ...The Commission was appointed by the president and it is politically easier for this administration to focus on intelligence rather than policy failures, for obvious reasons. Nonproliferation experts might point out that even though the intelligence was flawed, someone with enough nonproliferation experience would have asked more questions. Despite the fascinating details of how and why the intelligence on uranium from Niger was faulty, an expert would point out that there were tons of natural and low-enriched uranium already in Iraq: even if Iraq got uranium from Niger, it wouldn't make a discernible difference in the quantity it could enrich. Iraq's first choice would be to take the safeguarded material (just as it planned to do before the 1991 war) and use that. Faster and less complicated. A nonproliferation expert would also know that the CIA's arguments that Iraq was reconstituting its cadre of nuclear weapons personnel were an old, tired mantra repeated since the early 1990s. In interagency meetings ten years ago, I used to ask them, what evidence do you have? "Well," the analysts would say, "we think he's doing it." Apparently their evidence never got any better.
For Bush--or the commission--to say he was misled by the intelligence community is not a sufficient explanation or defense. First, Bush didn't ensure the intelligence he received was solid. Then he and his lieutenants repeatedly said in public that the intelligence was beyond doubt, and they made dramatic assertions about the supposed threat presented by Hussein's WMDs that went far beyond what the intelligence (wrongly) claimed. In keeping the spotlight exclusively on the intelligence gang and not turning it also on the policymakers at the White House, the WMD commission has served Bush well, but not the public. "
