By T.Christian Miller and Maura Reynolds
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
July 10, 2004
WASHINGTON — Friday's Senate report on prewar intelligence drew a new
battle line in the presidential campaign by failing to settle a politically
volatile question: Did the White House pressure the CIA to concoct reasons to
invade Iraq?
The question split the Senate Intelligence Committee's
otherwise bipartisan unanimity on the intelligence failures in Iraq, with
Democrats saying they had a "major disagreement" with Republicans over the
issue.
Republicans noted in the report's conclusion that no
intelligence analysts had said they were pressured. But Democrats objected,
saying there was ample evidence that top Bush administration officials had
intimidated analysts to twist their judgments about whether Iraq possessed
weapons of mass destruction.
In the end, the committee decided to put
off consideration of the Bush administration's use of intelligence, all but
guaranteeing the issue a prominent role in the campaign.
"The
committee's report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in
which the intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments on
matters relating to Iraq when the most senior officials in the Bush
administration had already forcefully and repeatedly stated their conclusions
publicly," said Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W. Va.), the committee's
ranking minority member.
Standing nearby, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.),
the committee's chairman, shot back: "I do not think there is any evidence of
undue pressure on any analyst."
Many of the intelligence analysts who
came before the committee did report feeling pressure — especially from
the Defense Department — on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Analysts said they were repeatedly told to go back and review old intelligence
reports and documents to determine whether they had overlooked connections
between the regime of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and Osama bin
Laden.
However, the committee's conclusion noted that no analysts
reported changing a decision on Iraq, on its links to Al Qaeda or its threat
capabilities because of political pressure.
Many analysts said the
pressure served only to make sure they weren't missing anything.
"I
think there was intense pressure in the prewar period, and I felt the pressure
… to ensure we got this one right," the deputy director of the CIA's
terrorism analysis office told the committee. "We couldn't afford not to get it
right."
Democrats on the committee, while acknowledging that they had
unanimously approved the report, said they disagreed with the conclusion that
there had been no political pressure.
Of particular concern was an
intelligence meeting in August 2002 attended by representatives from the office
of Doug Feith, the Pentagon's deputy undersecretary for policy and a fervent
proponent of the war. The Pentagon officials criticized the CIA's failure to
turn up a link between Bin Laden and Hussein and presented evidence that they
said had been ignored.
Several analysts told the committee it was
unusual to have the Pentagon representatives attend their meeting, which was an
initial gathering to begin a broader look at the links between Iraq and
terrorism. Nonetheless, none of the analysts said they had changed their
conclusions as a result of the Feith staff's presence.
Democrats,
however, said the meeting was a clear indication that the administration had
created a climate of pressure that affected analysts.
The meeting "is
clear evidence of the administration politicizing an analytical process that
should be protected from the meddlesome reach of policy officials," read a
dissent to the report by Rockefeller and other Democrats.
The campaign
of Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumed Democratic nominee for
president, said the Bush administration had been trying to shift blame for
failures connected to the Iraq war to the intelligence community, and that it
"fails to take responsibility for its own failings."
"Nothing in this
report absolves the White House of its responsibility for mishandling of the
country's intelligence," Mark Kitchens, a campaign spokesman, said in a written
statement. "The fact is that when it comes to national security, the buck stops
at the White House, not anywhere else."
On the campaign trail Friday,
neither Kerry nor his running mate, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, discussed
the Senate committee report or the issue of alleged pressure on intelligence
analysts.
While lawmakers and other officials grappled with the report
and its implications, President Bush escaped the fray, spending the day on a bus
tour of the Pennsylvania countryside and addressing the issue in a controlled,
friendly environment.
"There have been some failures," Bush said in a
response to a question from the crowd in a university gym in Kutztown, Pa., a
small farm town in heavily Republican Berks County. "We thought there was going
to be stockpiles of weapons. I thought so. The Congress thought so. The U.N.
thought so."
The Senate committee's next task is to investigate the
administration's use of intelligence in the run-up to the war, but there was no
timetable for a second report.
Some political analysts said it was
likely that Republicans would bottle up any further conclusions until after the
November elections.
"The last thing you want is an official document
saying that the White House contorted the evidence to persuade the people to go
to war in Iraq," said Bruce Cain, the director of UC Berkeley's Institute of
Government Studies. "I think the Republicans would fight to the death to keep
it out."
But even if the Senate committee does not draw conclusions
about the president's role and his degree of accountability, analysts said, the
American public may.
Predictably, Democrats and Republicans differed
over what that judgment would be.
"I don't think the buck stops at
[CIA Director] George Tenet's desk," Democratic strategist Howard
Wolfson said. "There is only one person who can lead us into war…. The
buck always stops with the president. And if [the White House] points
fingers at the CIA, it will only look like they are passing the buck."
But Karlyn Bowman, an election analyst with the conservative American Enterprise
Institute, said the American public is not much interested in revisiting the
lead-up to the Iraq war. "It's hard to rewind the clock, and I think the public
doesn't have much time for that," she said.
Also left unsettled was the
question of whether Bush would quickly name a replacement for Tenet, who
announced in June that he would resign. His last day on the job is Sunday.
Originally, White House aides had said Bush was likely to wait until after
the November election to nominate a director because he did not want to draw
more attention than necessary to the intelligence failures.
The Senate
report, however, could prompt Bush to fill the post soon in order to put the
issue to rest before November.
Highlights of report by Senate
panel
Some findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report
on prewar intelligence about Iraq:
• Most major judgments in
the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's alleged nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons programs were "either overstated or were not
supported by the underlying intelligence reporting."
•
Intelligence officials didn't explain to policymakers the uncertainties behind
their judgments. The October 2002 estimate "portrayed what intelligence
analysts thought and assessed as what they knew and failed to explain the large
gaps in the information on which the assessments were based."
• Intelligence agencies suffered from a collective presumption that
Iraq had an active and growing program to develop weapons of mass destruction.
This bias led analysts and their managers to interpret ambiguous evidence as
conclusive and ignore evidence that pointed to a lack of such a weapons
program.
• Intelligence officials relied too heavily on
information from the United Nations. After U.N. weapons inspectors left in
1998, there was no CIA officer or intelligence agent inside Iraq to
investigate.
• The United States depended too heavily on
defectors and foreign governments' intelligence. U.S. agencies lacked direct
access to many of these sources and could not determine their credibility.
• The CIA "abused its unique position in the intelligence
community" by failing to share information with other agencies or to fully
consider conflicting information from analysts outside the CIA.
• The October 2002 assessment that Iraq "is reconstituting its
nuclear program" was not supported by evidence provided to the Senate
committee.
• The intelligence estimate's statement that
"Iraq also has been vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake"
overstated what was known.
• The CIA and the Defense
Intelligence Agency did not examine forged documents about Iraq's alleged
efforts to buy uranium carefully enough to recognize they were faked. The CIA
continued to approve administration speeches saying Iraq might be seeking
uranium in Africa, including President Bush's 2003 State of the Union
address.
• The committee concluded that Iraq tried to
procure high-strength aluminum tubes for its conventional rocket program, not
for a nuclear weapons program, as the CIA asserted.
• The
National Intelligence Estimate overstated what was known with statements such as
"Baghdad has biological weapons," Baghdad has mobile biological weapons labs and
"chances are even that smallpox is part of Iraq's offensive biological weapons
program."
• Much of the information provided or cleared by
the CIA for inclusion in Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's February 2003
speech to the United Nations justifying war with Iraq "was overstated,
misleading or incorrect."
• The committee "found no evidence
that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or press analysts
to change their judgments."
• The CIA reasonably assessed
that there probably were several contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda throughout
the 1990s, but they did not add up to a formal relationship.
• The CIA's assessment that there was no evidence of Iraqi complicity
or assistance in an Al Qaeda attack "was reasonable and objective."
Source: Associated Press