Yesterday's sneak preview of the Senate Intelligence Committe report indicated that CIA analysts were not pressured by evil Dick Cheney to exaggerate the threat from Saddam. Today, we offer unequal time for a Democratic rebuttal:
Mr. Roberts said the committee had found no evidence that intelligence analysts were subjected to overt political pressure to tailor their findings — a conclusion that was not embraced totally by committee Democrats, who offered their own statements asserting that that issue had not been satisfactory resolved.
Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, for example, said, "In my view, this remains an open question and needs more scrutiny." And Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, another Democratic committee member, said that while "nobody came before the committee and said, `Look, I had my brains beaten in to change my analysis,' " it was nevertheless true that "policymakers made it very clear what information they were looking for."
Vice Chairman Rockefeller had extended thoughts, which we excerpt in the extended section.
And, for an interesting post from the time-vault, here is an oldie that compared the June 2000 and June 2002 CIA WMD estimates for Iraq. Clinton era versus the war-fever era, if you will. The big change is in the words and emphasis devoted to Iraq's nuclear program, but the actual intel is slight (the aluminum tubes do appear).
I would say that the CIA was clearly feeling a renewed sense of urgency, which is fine as long as that is all it is.
ROCKEFELLER: That's me. (LAUGHTER) Because there are 511 pages in the report. And the vast amount of that report, which covered basically only the prewar intelligence, basically on weapons of mass destruction, was superb. And we had major disagreements on pressure. And I felt that the definition of pressure was very narrowly drawn in the final report. And that is that, sort of, that if somebody came up to you and you were one of the analysts who had been working on WMD, and they said, Did anybody tell you that you had to change your point of view? and the answer was, No, well that was the description of pressure. That's not my description of pressure. That's a description of pressure. But another description of pressure is the total ambience of this cascade of ominous statements, which continued really up to the present, about what was going to happen or the relationship between Al Qaida and Iraq, Mohammed Atta and the rest of it.
So, to me, pressure also can be defined by what else is in our additional views. And that is that George Tenet indicated that he was approached by analysts from the CIA. Going to the director's office? If you've ever done that, it's, sort of, intimidating. And they came to him and he said, to relieve the pressure,
Simply don't answer the question if there is no new information. But the key phrase there is to relieve the pressure. He was agreeing, assenting to the fact that there was. The ombudsman of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose job it is for people to come to with their complaints, a veteran of many years there, said that the hammering on analysts was greater than he had seen in his 32 years of service to the Central Intelligence Agency, and he was referring to pressure. And the former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Robert Kerr (ph), had a group which did analysis of this within the CIA, and he also came up with the same conclusion, that the pressure was there, it's always internal to the analysts and it was external in the whole ambience, the whole sense of what the nation was moving toward, what the policy-makers were in fact moving toward, except that we couldn't discuss that in our report.
ROBERTS: Well, let me respond to that. I hope to heck there was pressure by the policy-makers. You have to be forward-leaning. We just went through 9/11. We were very forward-leaning. There had been a long history in regards to Iraq and the war against Iran and the war, obviously, against Kuwait in '91, when we found out they were much further ahead in regards to their nuclear program.
You know, you can define pressure any way you want. But I think the debate in the committee largely centered around whether or not there were repetitive questions. And that's a job of a policy-maker to ask repetitive questions. As a matter of fact, when they asked the repetitive questions, we got a better product in regards to the section in regards to terrorism. They were pretty reasonable about that and there were repetitive questions. There were not repetitive questions in regard to the WMD section and as a result, we got a product that was flawed. I must say that in regards to all of the talk about the public statements by those in the administration, i.e., the policy-makers, making very declarative and positive comments, even aggressive comments, I know about that. Everybody read about that.
But those of us in the Congress, some of which who are the most severe critics, made the same comments back in '98, '99, 2000. I urge them to read their own comments in regards to the severity and the possibility of the fact that Iraq had WMD and that we had to use the military action. So I think it cuts both ways. Read the report. I do not think there is any evidence of undue pressure on any analyst. Repeatedly, I asked as chairman in public and in the committee if anybody felt pressured, more especially in terms of politics, let me know. Only one individual ever raised his hand and it was about Cuba and it was a completely different kind of thing...
My comment - I am with Roberts. After the surprises about Iraq's weapons progress in the mid 90's, and after 9/11, pressuring folks to take a fresh look at an old problem is hardly unreasonable.
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