The New York Sun; July 12, 2004 Editorial Bush's Intelligence The 511-page "Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq" is a useful document indeed, even with the redactions it was released with Friday by the Senate intelligence committee. The anti-war left is making much of the report's statements taking issue with the information about weapons of mass destruction cited by President Bush in the run-up to the war in Iraq."He misled America about the types of weapons that were there," Senator Kerry said in an interview with the New York Times over the weekend.
Indeed, the Senate report indicates that at several junctures, Mr.Bush,Secretary of State Powell, and the Central Intelligence Agency used language about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs that went beyond what the evidence available to them conclusively proved. These details are significant. In making the case for war, accuracy is important. Even so, on the key point -- that Saddam had some weapons of mass destruction and wanted more -- enough facts are in to suggest that Mr. Bush, Mr. Powell, and the CIA were correct to be concerned. After all,the postwar finds in Iraq have included what American officials have described as "10 or 12 sarin and mustard rounds," a 7-pound block of cyanide salt, "a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B. from which a biological agent can be produced....hidden in the home" of an Iraqi biological weapons scientist, and "1.77 metric tons of low-enriched uranium and roughly 1000 highly radioactive sources." That's not even considering materials that may still be buried, or that may have been smuggled out of Iraq to Syria in the closing days of Saddam's regime. The findings on weapons of mass destruction are hardly the only part of the Senate committee report that are worth taking seriously. Just as significant is the way that the report debunks the claim that the intelligence was politicized or cooked by Vice President Cheney. This claim is common on the left. For instance, David Remnick, in the New Yorker on July 28, 2003, wrote of the "the prospect that intelligence has been manipulated, forged, or bullied into shape" and "the pressure that the Pentagon and the Vice-President's office had been exerting on the C.I.A. to square the evidentiary circle." Yet the Senate committee found "no evidence" that the intelligence community's "mischaracterization or exaggeration of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result of political pressure." Got that? "No evidence." As for "pressure," the committee noted "several of the allegations of pressure on Intelligence Community analysts involved repeated questioning."The report says analysts "should expect difficult and repeated questions." The Senate committee found that in some cases,the questions forced analysts to go back and review things, and come across information they had overlooked earlier."The policymakers probing questions actually improved the CIA's products," the report says. Perhaps the most interesting part of the report, though, is the devastating assessment of America's "human intelligence" -- old-fashioned spying -- ability. "The Intelligence Community did not have a single HUMINT source collecting against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq after 1998," the report says, calling for "dramatic changes in a risk-averse corporate culture." Rather than an indictment of the so-called "neo-cons" for phonying up the pre-war intelligence, the Senate report is in some sense a validation of a critique of the CIA that the "neo-cons" have been making for years. It was Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute who in a 1998 speech called for a congressional investigation into the Near East division of the CIA and said its head "should be removed on grounds of incompetence." It was AEI's Reuel Marc Gerecht, who, writing as Edward Shirley in his 1997 book "Know Thine Enemy," described the CIA as a bastion of bureaucratic mediocrity and incompetence. The director of central intelligence, George Tenet, has resigned, but there are other personnel worth pursuing in the wake of the Senate report. Where, during these errors, was the chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, General Scowcroft? The board "provides advice to the President concerning the quality and adequacy of intelligence collection, of analysis and estimates," according to the White House. Was Mr. Scowcroft asleep at the switch, or too busy with his private consulting to firms in the energy industry? What about Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, whose 2001 book takes the defeatist attitude,"If there is a 'war' against terrorism, it is a war that cannot be won." The book advises, "Give peace a chance." Before moving to replace Mr. Tenet and rebuild America's spying capacity, Mr. Bush would profit by re-reading the warnings of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Dean Acheson about whether America really needs a CIA at all or whether the agency's duties would better be divided between the secretaries of state and defense, as they were for most of American history.
