Edmonton Journal July 27, 2003
Did Bush cry wolf on Iraq?
Whoppers of mass deception?: The evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda was fragmented at best. But President George W. Bush had a war to sell. Now these gaps in intelligence have become gaps in credibility for his administration
CanWest News Service
In a speech last August, U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney said he was convinced that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein "will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon." Iraq, he continued, was amassing weapons of mass destruction to use "against our friends, against our allies and against us."
Cheney's address kicked off a seven-month campaign by President George W. Bush and his top aides to persuade the United States and the world that Iraq was a gathering threat that could be stopped only by war.
Nearly a year later, that case appears to be coming apart, with some key pieces of evidence in doubt and others disproved outright.
The unaccounted-for chemical and biological weapons that Bush, Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and others cited have yet to be found, and may never be. Nor has evidence turned up of an advanced nuclear-weapons program.
Saddam may not have been an imminent threat to the world at all, but a regional bully whose weapons programs weren't nearly as advanced as widely believed, according to current and former intelligence officials and other analysts.
Critics and even nonpartisan analysts say the White House took what America's spy agencies knew about the Iraqi threat and pushed it to the limits of credibility, and beyond.
The U.S. and Britain presented "worst-case estimates to the public and the UN without sufficient qualification, and ... their intelligence communities came under serious political pressure to make something approaching a worst-case interpretation of the evidence," wrote military analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Retired Lieutenant General Patrick Hughes, a former director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, said policy-makers have long had a tendency to hype intelligence information. "What we have going on is this proclivity, not just in this administration, by decision-makers to fail to put things in the right context," he said.
Failing to include the caveats included in intelligence reports -- that a piece of evidence might lead to a certain conclusion -- amounted to misleading the public in making the case for the Iraq war, Hughes said. "If you are not sure of it, you have to say that," he said.
"They were definitely making things a little bit clearer than the truth in order to sell the war," said John Pike, who is the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a think-tank in Alexandria, Va. "They were acting like it was an electoral campaign -- you can say all kinds of wild things and whatever it would take to get people to buy the war."
President Bush has rejected postwar criticism from what he derisively called "revisionist historians."
As his defenders point out, bipartisan majorities in the U.S. Congress supported the war. Even European nations that refused to join the fighting argued not with the premise that Saddam was hiding weapons he was banned from having, but with Bush's proposed solution.
Presidential Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Bush's case for confronting Iraq "was based on solid evidence." But it also was based on assumptions about Iraq that government officials presented as certainties after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Bush acted not "because we had discovered dramatic new evidence," Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress this month. "We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light through the prism of our experience on Sept. 11."
Bush's most potent argument for war was that Saddam might share chemical or biological weapons with al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups to use against the U.S. Right behind that was the contention that Iraq was close to having a nuclear weapon.
Neither has been proved true. Nor has administration claims of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, which were disputed by counterterrorism experts even before the war.
The intelligence behind such claims was thin at best, said a former U.S. official who had access to classified material about Iraq. "Normally, you'd credit this to being ambiguous and therefore inconclusive. (In this case) everything was spun," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
On March 16, four days before the war began, Cheney made the White House's most alarming claim about Saddam's nuclear weapons program: "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
That and similar statements went far beyond an October intelligence assessment, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, that said Iraq "probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade" if left unchecked.
One piece of evidence cited by Bush in his January state of the union address was that Iraq had tried to buy large quantities of uranium ore in Africa.
Documents from the African country of Niger that backed the allegation were known at the time by a wide circle of intelligence and diplomatic personnel to have been forgeries, and the White House has conceded that Bush shouldn't have made the claim.
In making the case against Iraq, Bush and his aides also cited stocks of chemical and biological weapons that UN weapons inspectors knew once existed but were never accounted for. The White House suggested these caches still existed.
None has turned up, and an internal CIA study found that most U.S. intelligence on Iraqi arms dated from before the first UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998.
A Defence Intelligence Agency report last year said there was "no reliable information" on whether Iraq was producing and stockpiling chemical weapons.
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How did all this happen? Beginning last summer, Bush administration officials insisted they had compelling new evidence about Iraq's prohibited weapons programs, and only occasionally acknowledged in public how little they actually knew about the status of Baghdad's chemical, biological or nuclear arms.
Some officials belittled the on-again, off-again United Nations inspections after the Gulf War in 1991, suggesting the inspectors had missed important evidence. "Even as they were conducting the most intrusive system of arms control in history, the inspectors missed a great deal," Cheney said in August, before the inspections resumed.
Last fall, as the debate intensified over whether to have inspectors return to Iraq, senior Bush administration officials continued to suggest the U.S. had new or better intelligence that Iraq's weapons programs were accelerating -- information that the UN lacked.
"After 11 years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more," Bush declared in a speech in Cincinnati in October. "And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon."
Now, with the failure so far to find prohibited weapons in Iraq, U.S. intelligence officials and senior members of the administration have acknowledged there was little new evidence flowing into U.S. intelligence agencies in the five years since UN inspectors left Iraq, creating an intelligence vacuum.
In recent interviews, intelligence and other officials described the CIA and the White House as essentially blinded after the UN inspectors withdrew from Iraq in 1998. They were left grasping for whatever slivers they could obtain, like unconfirmed reports of attempts to buy uranium, or fragmentary reports about the movements of suspected terrorists.
Richard Kerr, who headed a four-member team of retired CIA officials that reviewed prewar intelligence about Iraq, said analysts at the CIA and other agencies were forced to rely heavily on evidence that was five years old at least.
Intelligence analysts drew heavily "on a base of hard evidence growing out of the lead-up to the first (Gulf) war, the first war itself and then the inspections process," Kerr said. "We had a rich base of information," he said, and, after the inspectors left, "we drew on that earlier base."
"There were pieces of new information, but not a lot of hard information, and so the products that dealt with WMD were based heavily on analysis drawn out of that earlier period," Kerr said, using the shorthand for weapons of mass destruction.
Even so, days before Bush's state of the union address in January, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, described the intelligence as not only convincing but up to date.
"It is a case grounded in current intelligence," he told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, "current intelligence that comes not only from sophisticated overhead satellites and our ability to intercept communications, but from brave people who told us the truth at the risk of their lives. We have that; it is very convincing."
In February, CIA director George Tenet expressed confidence in much of the intelligence about Iraq, saying it "comes to us from credible and reliable sources."
"Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources," Tenet added. "And it is consistent with the pattern of deception and denial exhibited by Saddam Hussein over the past 12 years."
It was Cheney who, in September, was clearest about the fact the U.S. had only incomplete information. But he said that should not deter the country from taking action. It's in the American character, he said, "to say, 'Well, we'll sit down and we'll evaluate the evidence. We'll draw a conclusion.' But we always think in terms that we've got all the evidence. Here, we don't have all the evidence. We have 10 per cent, 20 per cent, 30 per cent. We don't know how much. We know we have a part of the picture. And that part of the picture tells us that (Saddam) is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."
- - - Within the White House, the intelligence agencies, the Defence and State Departments, the shortage of fresh evidence touched off a struggle.
Officials in Bush's National Security Council and the vice-president's office wanted to present every shred of evidence against Saddam. Those working for Secretary of State Colin Powell, and some analysts in the intelligence agencies, insisted that all the dots must be connected before the U.S. endorsed the evidence as the predicate for war.
This struggle, several officials said, explains the confusion about how the administration assembled its case, and how some evidence could be interpreted differently in public presentations before the war.
An internal CIA review of prewar intelligence on Iraq has found that the evidence collected by the CIA and other intelligence agencies after 1998 was mostly fragmentary and often inconclusive.
In a series of interviews, officials said both the Bush administration and congressional committees were aware of the decline in hard evidence collected on Iraq's weapons programs after 1998.
In part, the officials said, that was a result of the embarrassment of 1991, when it turned out the CIA had greatly underestimated the progress Saddam had made in the nuclear arena.
Cheney often cited that experience as he pressed for firmer conclusions. So has Bush.
Analysts say the cost of overestimating the threat posed by Saddam was minimal, while the cost of underestimating it could have been considerable.
The arguments over evidence spilled into public view during the debate about whether UN inspectors should be sent back to Iraq at all. Cheney had declared in August that returning them to Iraq would be dangerous, that it would create a false sense of security. When inspectors returned in November, senior administration officials were dismissive of their abilities. They insisted the American intelligence community had better information on Iraq's weapons programs than the UN, and would use that data to find Baghdad's weapons after Saddam was toppled.
In hindsight, it is now clear just how dependent the U.S. intelligence community was on the UN inspections process.
The inspections aided intelligence agencies directly, by providing witnesses' accounts from ground level, and indirectly, by prodding the Iraqis and forcing them to try to move and hide people and equipment, activities that American spy satellites and listening stations could monitor. Watching from space as Iraq tried to hide things from the inspectors proved to be invaluable in gauging the scope of the Iraqi weapons efforts, current and former intelligence officials said.
Several current and former intelligence officials said the U.S. did not have any high-level spies in Saddam's inner circle who could provide current information about his weapons programs. That weakness could not be fixed quickly. "You can't decide six months before a war" to try to recruit spies, observed a former military intelligence officer. "It takes years."
According to Kerr, the former CIA analyst, given the history of Iraq's weapons programs, "it would have been hard for analysts to go the other way" and conclude the programs were moribund.
"It would have been very hard for any group of analysts, looking at the situation between 1991 through 1995, to conclude that the WMD programs were not underway," Kerr said. And once the inspectors left, he said, "it was also hard to prove they weren't underway."
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By the time Powell arrived at the CIA on Jan. 31, three days after Bush's state of the union speech, the presentation he was scheduled to make at the UN in just five days was in tatters.
Powell's chief of staff had called his boss the day before to warn that "we can't connect all the dots" in the intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs.
Powell's staff had discovered that statements in intelligence assessments did not always match up with the documentary evidence that Powell had insisted on including in his presentation.
Apart from some satellite photographs of facilities rebuilt after they had been bombed during the Clinton administration in 1998, the only new pieces of evidence that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear program focused on what he was trying to buy.
While the National Intelligence Estimate clearly stated that Saddam "probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade," Powell's own intelligence unit, in a dissenting view, said, "the activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case" that Iraq was pursuing what it called "an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."
So Powell walked a careful path, focusing on Iraq's acquisition efforts for centrifuge parts, needed to turn the dross of uranium into the gold of nuclear fuel. But when discussing, for example, the aluminum tubes Iraq had ordered in violation of UN penalties, he did not go as far as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who said in September the equipment was "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs."
Powell, at the UN, acknowledged that the findings about the tubes was disputed. But he did not quote his own intelligence unit, which in that same dissent in the National Intelligence Estimate wrote that it "considers it far more likely that the tubes are intended for another purpose, most likely the production of artillery rockets."
Curiously, as he prepared for his presentation, Powell rejected advice that he hold up such a tube during his speech. Asked about that decision in a recent interview, he joked that the tube would block his face, and then said, "Why hold up the most controversial thing in the pitch?"
Similarly, Powell was more cautious than Bush in describing Saddam's meetings with what the president, in his Cincinnati speech, had called Iraq's "nuclear mujahedeen." Powell was urged by some in the administration to cite those meetings, and to illustrate it with a picture of one of the sessions.
"Now tell me who these guys are," Powell asked a few nights before his presentation, when the CIA showed him the picture, a participant in the conversation recalled.
"Oh, we're quite sure this is his nuclear crowd," came the response. "How do you know?" Powell pressed. "Prove it. Who are they?" No one could answer the question.
"There were a lot of cigars lit," Powell recalled, referring to the evidence. "I didn't want any going off in my face or the president's face."
The CIA also had scant new evidence about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but specialists began working on the issue under the direction of Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defence for policy. These analysts did not develop any new intelligence data, but looked at existing intelligence reports for possible links between Iraq and terrorists that they felt might have been overlooked or undervalued.
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This Office of Special Plans, essentially Rumsfeld's own intelligence unit at the Pentagon, may turn out to be one of the more controversial agencies in the lead-up to the war. With its own intelligence collectors and analysts scrutinizing information on Iraq, it may have prodded staff to "hype" intelligence for evidence the administration wanted, say officials and experts.
"Separate from the formal intelligence community, it appears as if the Pentagon had contractors and former CIA officials doing private collecting for them," says Sam Gardiner, a retired air force colonel who teaches at the National Defense University. "The materials seem to have gone directly to the (National Security Council) and the White House. The State Department certainly did not have an opportunity to footnote their disagreement."
An aide to Rumsfeld suggested the defence secretary look at the work of the analysts on Feith's staff. At a Pentagon news conference last year, Rumsfeld said, "I was so interested in it, I said, 'Gee, why don't you go over and brief George Tenet?' So they did. They went over and briefed the CIA. So there's no -- there's no mystery about all this."
At the CIA, analysts listened to the Pentagon team, nodded politely, and said, "Thank you very much," said one government official. This official said the briefing did not change the agency's reporting or analysis in any substantial way.
Several current and former intelligence officials have said analysts at the CIA felt pressure to tailor their reports to conform to the administration's views, particularly the theories Feith's group developed. "There were a lot of questions from policy-makers," Kerr said, "and people feel there was a lot of pressure."
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The debate over what the U.S. and Britain knew about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- and when they knew it -- has become so heated and public that it may affect the nature and usefulness of future intelligence operations.
For one thing, the unveiling of specific data about Iraq and its dissection in the media could make it harder to convince the spy services of other nations to co-operate fully again with U.S. or British counterparts. In the shadowy world of intelligence-sharing, few like uncontrolled publicity. Spies or other human-intelligence "assets" within target countries may become similarly leery.
For another, the Bush administration may now be the White House that cried wolf. Unless convincing evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction surfaces, and soon, critics might charge that intelligence evidence regarding other crises, such as North Korea, is being manipulated for political purposes.
"We need public hearings, even an independent investigation," said Jim Walsh, an international-security expert at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
If nothing else, Bush's new strategy of preemption, based on taking out regimes posing imminent threats, relies more on intelligence than on other tools. "The one thing the pre-emption strategy requires more than any other strategy we've had since the Second World War is intelligence not only of high quality, but intelligence that is seen as completely credible," Walsh said.
Each day that passes without evidence to back up either British or U.S. claims -- and with the daily ambushes of U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- there is growing skepticism about the war's rationale and whether Saddam posed an "imminent" threat.
"It's both important and worthwhile that we sort this thing out," says former CIA Director Stansfield Turner. "We should be concerned that ... our intelligence is being questioned. That's going to make it more difficult to keep up the program inside Iraq. But it's also going to make it more difficult to persuade other countries to go along with us on other operations around the world."
Journal News Services
GRAPHIC: Colour Photo: The White House, Via New York Times, File; George W. Bush rehearsing his state of the union speech last January. Building his case for war against Iraq, Bush said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The White House now concedes this was bad information and shouldn't have been included in the address.; Graphic;Diagram: Journal Stock; (See hard copy for Graphic;Diagram).
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