Charge that Bush cooked the intel books is shown to be half-baked

Last Friday’s report from the Senate Intelligence Committee is making huge waves. It is primarily a dissection of prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programs. It also covers assessments of Iraqi links to terrorism, and prewar intelligence collection against Iraq. You can find it online at intelligence.senate.gov.

The report clearly shows that the failings of the intelligence community--led by the CIA--in regards to Iraqi WMD were serious, even staggering. The 500-page document sets the stage for a drastic overhaul of US intelligence. Its major conclusions bluntly describe key intelligence judgments on WMD that “either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying reporting”. It also details “a series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft”, “collective presumption and group think”, and a "broken corporate culture and poor management" at the CIA.

But, there are some things it doesn’t do. The Committee’s report doesn’t dismiss the question of Iraqi-al-Qaida links, and in fact buttresses some of the publicly-avail able information that has described very disturbing connections between Saddam’s evil regime and Osama’s murderers (more on this in an upcoming column).

It also doesn’t pin blame for the WMD intel failure on the President. In fact, the Committee’s report explicitly exonerates the administration from charges they pressured, manipulated or “politicized” the intelligence. The report’s major conclusions explicitly state that:

• “The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's WMD capabilities.”

• “The Committee found no evidence that the Vice Presiden't visits to the CIA were attempts to pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure analysts by those who participated in the briefings on Iraq's WMD programs, or did pressure analysts to change their assessments.

• “The Committee found none of the analysts or other people interviewed by the Committee said that they were pressured to change their conclusions related to Iraq's links to terrorism.”

More than 200 analysts, intelligence managers and government officials were interviewed and thousands of documents were reviewed to reach these conclusions. In no case did the Committee find a valid instance of the administration pressuring or manipulating the intelligence analysis on Iraq. All complaints of political pressure turned out to be either baseless, or completely unrelated to Iraq.

What this means is that, as Committee Chairman Senator Pat Roberts (R) said, “In the end, [the intelligence] that the President used to make the extremely difficult decision to go to war was what he got from the Intelligence Community, and not what he or administration officials tried to make it.”

This means that intel failures on Iraqi WMD do not translate into blaming the administration, and don’t support the hysterical “Bush lied!” charge of Michael Moore and left-wing loonies. In fact, given the intelligence picture that Bush was presented with, he was right to move decisively against the Iraqi dictatorship.

But the Democrats on the Committee--led by Vice Chairman John Rockefeller--want to blur the implications of this supposedly bipartisan report. They, and their allies in the mainstream media, seek to morph the clear failings of the intelligence community into an overall indictment of the Bush administration.

You may recall that in November, an internal memo from Senator Rockefeller's staff was leaked (see www.hillnews.com/news/110603/memo.aspx). It laid out a partisan plan to cooperate with Republicans in producing a report as critical as possible of the administration--but then to demand further investigations regardless of the conclusions. According to that memo, once the Democrats "exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority," they could then "pull the trigger on an independent investigation”.

This cynical strategy now appears to be unfolding. At the end of the Committee’s report, the Democrats have included dissenting remarks, accusing the Bush administration of manipulating the intelligence process. This is a tactic specifically called for in the November memo.

Just who is trying to use intelligence for political gain here?

T.T.

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