Board index » arthritis-lyme » NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL...Dear China and Russia, Well we'd LIKE to cooperate and simply use intelligence to inhibit materials being fed to Iran, but we sorta blew it with the Plame Affair, so we'll just nuke the crap out of em, if it's all the same to you. As we all know there were some messy P

2006-05-08 12:33:34 AM
The Intelligence Business
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Published: May 7, 2006
We've been waiting for well over two years for the Senate Intelligence
Committee to finally hold the Bush administration accountable for the
fairy tales it told about Saddam Hussein's weapons. Republican leaders
keep saying it is a waste of time to find out whether President Bush
and other top officials deliberately misled the world. But Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's bizarre responses the other day to
questions about that very issue were a timely reminder of why this
investigation needs to be completed promptly, thoroughly and fairly.
Unfortunately, Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate panel, is
running it in a way that makes it unlikely that anything useful will
come of it.
It is bad enough that Mr. Rumsfeld and others did not tell Americans
the full truth - to take the best-case situation - before the war.
But they are still doing it. Just look at the profoundly twisted
version of events that the defense secretary offered last week at a
public event in Atlanta.
Ray McGovern, an analyst for 27 years at the Central Intelligence
Agency, stood in the audience and asked why Mr. Rumsfeld lied about
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The secretary shot back, "I did
not lie." Then, even though no one asked about them, he said Colin
Powell and Mr. Bush offered "their honest opinion" based on "weeks and
weeks" of time with the C.I.A. "I'm not in the intelligence business,"
he said, adding, "It appears that there were not weapons of mass
destruction there."
First, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Period.
Second, neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Powell spent long weeks with the
C.I.A., whose analysts were largely cut out of the decision making. And
that was because, third, Mr. Rumsfeld was, and is, very much in the
intelligence business.
The Defense Department controls most of the intelligence budget and is
the biggest user of intelligence. Mr. Rumsfeld also set up his own
intelligence agency within the Pentagon when the C.I.A. and the State
Department refused to tell him what he wanted to hear about Iraq. It
was that office's distortions that formed the basis for what the
administration told Congress and the public.
In Atlanta, Mr. Rumsfeld denied ever saying flatly that there were
dangerous weapons in Iraq. Actually, he did, many times, even as late
as March 30, 2003. On Sept. 27, 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld said there was
"bulletproof" evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq, including
that Iraq had trained Qaeda agents in chemical and biological warfare,
and he repeated that myth in response to Mr. McGovern.
Which brings us back to the Senate committee. In 2004, Democratic
members agreed to split the investigation of Iraq intelligence. The
committee issued a report on how bad the information was, but put off
until after the 2004 election the question of whether the
administration deliberately hyped the evidence. Mr. Roberts tried to
kill the investigation entirely, and after the Democrats forced him to
proceed, he set rules that seem a lot like the recipe for a whitewash.
The investigation, known as Phase 2, is divided into five parts: Did
officials' public statements reflect the actual intelligence? Why did
the government fail to anticipate the postwar disaster in Iraq? Were
there actually any W.M.D. in Iraq? Was the Pentagon's mini-C.I.A. a
proper and legal operation? And did any of the disinformation provided
by the Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi get into any "intelligence
product"?
Mr. Roberts has so gummed up the first part of the investigation that
it is going to take forever to complete and is unlikely to be of much
clarity. The only public statements that matter are those by Mr. Bush
and his top aides. But Mr. Roberts included any statement, by any
public official, including members of Congress, going back to 1991.
Beyond dragging out the process further, the intent, obviously, is to
suggest that Mr. Bush said the same things that Democratic senators and
others did. That has no significance. They did not decide to have a war
and had access only to the sanitized intelligence fed to them by the
administration. Bill Clinton and Mr. Bush's father did think there were
dangerous weapons in Iraq - back in the 20th century. By the time the
war started, those weapons had long been eliminated by inspections and
sanctions.
It is worth knowing why policy makers failed to anticipate the
insurgency and other postwar nightmares, but the structure of this part
of the investigation is flawed as well. The Senate investigation of Mr.
Chalabi's involvement is limited to "intelligence products," which the
C.I.A. produces. But it was not the C.I.A. that predicted rose petals
in Baghdad and a virtually problem-free transition to democracy; it was
Mr. Chalabi and his henchmen, creatures of Mr. Rumsfeld's team at the
Pentagon. And it was the intelligence business that Mr. Rumsfeld now
pretends not to run that used Mr. Chalabi's myths in an attempt to
rebut the skeptical State Department and make dubious information seem
more reliable.
It was helpful of Mr. Rumsfeld to remind us why this inquiry is still
so important. The least Mr. Roberts and his committee can do is to
finish the flawed investigation and make the results public.
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