News

Half of the story

A Times Editorial
Published July 12, 2004

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The Senate Intelligence Committee report released Friday tells only half the story of the comprehensive U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the war in Iraq. As committee chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., noted, the report concludes that the CIA's assessments of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capabilities were "unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence." The report adds to the damning evidence that the Bush administration chose to launch a pre-emptive war in response to an imaginary threat.

But the report crafted by the committee's Republican majority paints a distorted picture of the political environment in which such fundamentally flawed intelligence became the foundation for war. It drops most of the blame squarely in the lap of outgoing CIA director George Tenet, whose resignation in advance of the report makes him a politically convenient fall guy. Tenet is blamed for giving President Bush and other policymakers skewed advice that omitted intelligence casting doubt on the extent of Iraq's weapons programs. Tenet also is criticized for failing to review President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, in which the president used transparently phony intelligence to support his claim that Iraq had sought nuclear material from Africa.

The criticism of Tenet is accurate as far as it goes. But the report creates the false impression that Tenet and other overzealous intelligence operatives forced exaggerated threat assessments on a skeptical White House. There is ample evidence that just the opposite occurred.

President Bush and other administration officials pressured Tenet for years to provide intelligence to support their contention that Iraq posed an immediate threat. They seized on - and sometimes exaggerated - every scrap that bolstered their case.

Vice President Dick Cheney continues to this day to claim ties between Iraq and al-Qaida that the intelligence community has repudiated. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established a parallel intelligence-gathering operation at the Pentagon because he was dissatisfied with the more equivocal assessments of Iraq provided by the CIA. The president repeatedly warned of an Iraqi chemical, biological and nuclear threat that went beyond even the CIA's exaggerated intelligence. For example, even the CIA's direst assessment concluded that Iraq was several years away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon. Yet the president starkly warned in October 2002 that "facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

Tenet deserves criticism for having allowed his agency's work to be corrupted by political pressure from a White House that was determined to make a case for war. But Tenet and the CIA only marched to the drumbeat for war; they didn't create it.

The Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said he was disappointed in the report's failure to address the political climate in which the CIA was forced to operate. Rockefeller also went beyond the report in addressing the disastrous consequences of those resulting intelligence failures: "Our credibility is diminished. Our standing in the world has never been lower. We have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in the Muslim world. . . . As a direct consequence, our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before."

[Last modified July 12, 2004, 01:00:30]

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