Bush Announces Plan to Establish Commission to Investigate Iraqi Intelligence

U.S. President George W. Bush said today that he plans to appoint an “independent bipartisan commission” to review U.S. intelligence on WMD proliferation, according to CNN.com (see GSN, Jan. 30).

We … want to look at our war against proliferation and weapons of mass destruction in a broader context,” Bush said. “So I’m putting together a independent, bipartisan commission to analyze where we stand, what we can do better as we fight this war against terror,” he said.

Bush also said that he wanted to talk with former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq David Kay before naming the commission (CNN.com, Feb. 2).

The nine-member commission will include independent experts and members of Congress, sources said yesterday. One possible member is former U.S. national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, a senior Bush administration official said.

Yesterday, a spokeswoman for Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said Rockefeller would oppose Bush’s plan of naming all the commission’s members.

“It has to be a nonpartisan, nonpolitical commission,” said Rockefeller spokeswoman Wendy Morigi. “The senator doesn’t see how they could possibly meet that criteria if they want to appoint their own panel,” she said.

While the decision to create a commission comes amid calls for an independent inquiry into prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq, the commission’s investigation will have a much broader focus, the official said (Edwin Chin, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 2).

In addition to Iraq, the commission might also investigate the failure of U.S. intelligence to detect preparations for Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons tests in 1998, to detect the progress made by Iran and Libya in developing nuclear weapons with the aid of Pakistani scientists and the failure to detect al-Qaeda’s focus to attack the United States, said officials familiar with discussions on the creation of the commission.

“It became clear to the president that he couldn’t sit there and seem uninterested in the fact that the Iraq intel went off the rails,” said one senior official involved in the discussions. “He had to do something, and he chose to enlarge the problem, beyond the Iraq experience,” the official said (David Sanger, New York Times, Feb. 2).

Kay, who has recently been critical of prewar intelligence on Iraq, said yesterday that he supported the creation of the commission.

“I think it is very important, not only for the nation. It’s important for our credibility as a global power in our relations with allies as we move forward,” Kay said on Fox News Sunday. “I suspect there are fundamental flaws in the way we collect and analyze intelligence. I think it’s important to know that an honest effort is underway to find the causes,” he said (Chen, Los Angeles Times).

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said he supported the commission as long as it did not interfere with an inquiry being conducted by his committee, which plans to present a draft report to lawmakers this week.

The Senate intelligence committee “for the last six, seven, eight, nine months, has had 10 staffers working 24/7 on floor-to-ceiling documents and doing the most thorough investigative job on the entire intelligence community that’s been done in 20 years,” Roberts said last week. “We now have our draft report.  I would at least like to get the draft report out and make it public, and then if people feel like they have to have an independent investigation, that’s fine,” he said (Sanger, New York Times).

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Porter Goss (R-Fla.) said one result of the commission should be to explain to the public the limitations of intelligence gathering.

“The intelligence community will never bat 1.000 [a perfect record]; it can’t get there,” Goss said Friday. “We’ve been watching too many James Bond movies, to think it always comes out all right in the end. It doesn’t,” he said (Douglas Jehl, New York Times, Feb. 2).

In the United Kingdom, pressure is increasing on Prime Minister Tony Blair to follow Bush and establish an inquiry on prewar British intelligence, according to Reuters.

Conservative Party leader Michael Howard plans to present a motion this week in the British Parliament calling for an investigation. Howard said Bush’s decision gives Blair little choice but to do the same.

“Now I think it is quite clear that there does need to be an inquiry,” Howard said today. “I hope the prime minister won’t continue to be the odd man out, won’t continue to be isolated on this,” he said (Katherine Baldwin, Reuters, Feb. 2).

Meanwhile, an internal report submitted last week to CIA Director George Tenet is critical of the agency’s prewar analysis of Iraq, according to the Los Angeles Times. 

The report was prepared by former CIA Deputy Director Richard Kerr, who has led a three-month review of raw intelligence used by the CIA to create its assessments on Iraq since the end of the 1991 Gulf War.

“It is very hard to see (the prewar analysis on Iraq) as anything but a failure in terms of the specifics that we provided” to policy-makers, Kerr said.

He also said that the CIA has yet to acknowledge the fundamental problems revealed by the failure to find alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

“They’re going to have to face up to it and deal with it in a direct way, and I don’t think they have,” Kerr said. “I don’t think they have systematically looked at how they did this, at this whole problem, looking at the lessons and trying to understand the strengths and shortcomings” of their assessments on Iraq,” he added.

A CIA spokesman Friday refused to comment on Kerr’s report, saying it had not yet been reviewed by Tenet. He added, though, that the CIA continues to support its assessments and that the search for alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction has not yet been completed.

“We just think it’s premature to leap to the conclusion that there are no weapons,” the CIA spokesman said (Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 31).

The CIA’s internal review and the inquiries being conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees have all found no evidence that CIA analysts shaped their assessments due to pressure from the White House, according to intelligence and congressional officials.

Kerr said an examination of the work done by CIA analysts showed that their assessments were constant over several years.

“There was pressure and a lot of debate, and people should have a lot of debate, that’s quite legitimate,” Kerr said. “But the bottom line is, over a period of several years,” the analysts’ assessments “were very consistent. They didn’t change their views,” he said (Dana Priest, Washington Post, Jan. 31).

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times Friday, Kay said that he had “no eureka moment” that prewar assessments of Iraqi WMD efforts had been wrong, but instead that it was a long-evolved view.

“As we found stuff and didn’t find stuff, as we connected dots and unconnected others, it became increasingly clear that the reality on the ground clearly didn’t match the prewar estimates,” Kay said. “It was a slow build from day one,” he added.

Kay also said that he stepped down as chief U.S. weapons inspector because of diversions of resources from his Iraq Survey Group to other missions, such as counterinsurgency operations.

“It was changing the survey group from something that was totally focused on WMD to something that had multiple missions,” he said. “To me, that was the only mission. I almost cannot think of interagency operations that have ever worked. They end up being mush,” Kay added.

Bush administration officials, though, were critical of Kay’s view.

“On one hand, he says resources were diverted and impeded his ability to find weapons, and on the other hand he doesn’t think there were any,” said one official. “He can’t have it both ways,” the official said.

Kay said that by November, he was in “fairly regular dialogue” with the CIA over his doubts that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction would be found. After returning to the United States in December, Kay met for an hour in early January with Tenet and CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin to deliver a final oral report, according to the Times.

An intelligence official said that during the meeting, Kay told Tenet and McLaughlin “he was going to keep a low profile” after resigning. “They were a little surprised” that Kay “decided to embark on a spate of media appearances,” the intelligence official said (Drogin/Miller, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 1).

According to information taken from a number of sources, including current and former senior intelligence officials and current and former Bush administration officials, the presentation on Iraqi WMD efforts made by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council a year ago was based on limited and circumstantial evidence, the New York Times reported (see GSN, Jan. 9).

Kay and others supportive of the Bush administration have said that too much importance was given to untested human intelligence sources and that the possibility that satellite images and intercepted communications might have benign meanings was not adequately considered. Other officials said, though, that Powell’s presentation put forward a case that did not take into account information that might have weakened worst-case scenarios.

“They took every piece of information that proved their point and listed it,” a former senior intelligence official who took part in the prewar debates said, referring to the senior CIA officials whose analytical conclusions formed the basis of Powell’s presentation. 

“They would disregard or make fun of any contrary evidence. They forgot they were making mere guesses, and even guesses have to be taken with caution. They didn’t hedge or caveat.  Instead they would say we’re right and you’re wrong and it’s a matter of national security,” the former senior intelligence official said.

A senior intelligence official said Saturday that U.S. intelligence agencies “continue to a believe that given the information available to us at the time, it is hard to see how analysts could reasonably have come to any other overall judgments than the ones they reached.”

“There are still millions of documents that have yet to be examined, thousands of scientists and former government officials yet to be thoroughly debriefed, and countless possible hiding sites which have yet to be searched,” the senior intelligence official said. “We find it puzzling that those who say the intelligence community reached its conclusions on limited evidence are reaching opposite conclusions on even less,” the official added (Jehl/Sanger, New York Times, Feb. 1).

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