Roberts' Iraq Stonewall Crumbles
Over the past week, Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas chose to ignore the old dictum, "when in a hole, stop digging."
As I wrote last week, Roberts has been a key leader of an elaborate GOP effort to stonewall investigation into the Bush administration's uses and misuses of pre-Iraq war intelligence. Stung by the closed Senate session in which Democrats savaged his obvious obstructionist tactics, Roberts came out swinging. Now, Roberts is insisting that there is no evidence of "political manipulation or pressure" in the use of pre-war intelligence.
To bolster his case, Roberts cited the British Butler Report, his own Senate Select Committee on Intelligence "Phase 1" Report, as well as the Silberman-Robb Commission Report. (To access these and other relevant documents, visit the Perrspectives Iraq/WMD Intelligence Resource Center.) On CBS Face the Nation on Sunday, Roberts stated flatly, "we interviewed over 250 analysts and we specifically asked them: 'Was there any political manipulation or pressure?' Answer: 'No.'"
Unfortunately for Roberts, a growing mountain of evidence suggests otherwise. Let's start with the CIA. Roberts' claims to the contrary, current and former CIA personnel reported persistent and intense pressure to produce findings to support preconceived Bush administration policies. In a damning piece in the American Prospect, Robert Dreyfus concluded that:
The pressure directed at Tenet, McLaughlin, and scores of other CIA managers, analysts, and field officers was intense. Subsequent official investigations, by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and by the commission co-chaired by Lawrence Silberman and Charles Robb, blithely passed over the question of whether intelligence analysts were pressured by the administration. Both studies determined that analysts were not pressured, a conclusion that CIA and other U.S. intelligence professionals find laughable -- especially the idea that analysts would answer in the affirmative when asked by commissioners or senators if they had been pressured.
A litany of intelligence community employees past and present confirm this assessment. W. Patrick Lang, formerly head of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East section, grumbled, "The senior guys got together and said, 'You guys weren't pressured, right? Right?'" 32 year CIA veteran Richard Kerr, brought out of retirement to lead an investigation of the agency's failures on Iraq WMD was even more blunt about the pressure brought to bear by the Bush administration. In a series of five reports, Dreyfus noted, Kerr found that "unlike the outside reports that looked at the same issues, however, Kerr's concluded that CIA analysts felt squeezed -- and hard -- by the administration." Kerr bluntly stated that the squeeze came from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others within the administration:
"Everybody felt pressure. A lot of analysts believed that they were being pressured to come to certain conclusions…I talked to a lot of people who said, 'There was a lot of repetitive questioning. We were being asked to justify what we were saying again and again.' There were certainly people who felt they were being pushed beyond the evidence they had…"It was a continuing drumbeat: 'how do you know this? How do you know that? What about this or that report in the newspaper?'"
Michael Scheuer, the former CIA agent who gained prominence with his 2004 anonymous book, Imperial Hubris, backs Kerr's assessment. Scheuer noted the dissent within the CIA over the claims made in the controversial October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a document critical in the march to war. "I know a lot of people in the Iraq shop who were dissenting," he said. "There were people who were disciplined or taken off accounts. There was a great deal of dissent about that [NIE]. No one thought it was conclusive. One gentleman that I talked to, a senior Iraq analyst, regrets to this day that he did not go public."
Former CIA officer Larry Johnson noted that it was WINPAC that most vociferously advanced the Bush administration's case in the face of solid opposition from the agency's Near East Division. "The Near East Division people didn't buy into what the Bush administration wanted to do in regard to Iraq, but much of WINPAC did," Johnson said. "Bush, and the White House, favored WINPAC over [the Near East Division]. There were people in the agency who tried to speak out or disagree…who got fired, got transferred, got outed, or criticized. Others decided to play ball."
For Senator Roberts, the story only gets worse when it comes to fictional linkage between Al Qaeda, 9/11 and Saddam's regime in Iraq. As one former high-level official put it:
"We, at CIA, were convinced within days -- within hours, by midday on September 11 -- that we had evidence that it was al-Qaeda and had no reason to suspect that Iraq was involved. That was our position, and we held to it firmly."
As it turns out, the Bush administration was undeterred. The New York Times reported this weekend that analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded by February 2002 that reports from captured Al Qaeda leader Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi about his organization's presence in Iraq were fabrications. Despite DIA's conclusion that al-Libi "was intentionally misleading the debriefers," Bush, Cheney and Powell "cited Mr. Libi's information as 'credible' evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons." The President mentioned the claim in his now infamous October 2002 address in Cincinnati. Secretary of State Powell repeated the fictions in his February 2003 performance before the UN Security Council. Though al-Libi recanted in January 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney was insisting as late as September 2003 that "there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s."
Through the fall of 2002, the Bush team kept up the pressure on the intelligence community for validation of the White House's claimed Al Qaeda-Saddam links. As Scheuer reported, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith's office kept up the drumbeat, even though "the agency reviewed more than 70,000 documents and pieces of data, concluding that there was no tie between Hussein and al-Qaeda."
The manipulation of pre-war intelligence and browbeating of intelligence analysts by the Bush team also was at work with the President's now infamous 16 words regarding uranium in Niger. Joseph Wilson, of course, in February 2002 reported that rumors of Iraq seeking yellow cake in Niger were unfounded. As then Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley said, CIA chief George Tenet himself insisted that the claims that the Iraqis sought uranium in Niger be pulled from President Bush's October 7, 2002 address in Cincinnati. As well he should have; apparently, the CIA by that time had suspected that documents provided by Italian sources regarding Iraqi purchases of uranium were forgeries, a concern shared by the Italians themselves in January 2003. (As the Butler Report notes, the IAEA concluded in April 2003 that the Italian documents were fake.) Nevertheless, the claims reemerged in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address and the rest is history.
It is worth noting that Hadley of all people should be well acquainted with the Italian forgeries and their subsequent uses and misuses by the Bush White House. After all, it was Hadley whom Italian SISMI intelligence director Nicollo Pollari briefed about the Niger documents on September 9, 2002 after the CIA proved so skeptical.
All of which brings us back to Pat Roberts. In the glare of the klieg lights, Roberts declared this week that there was "no political manipulation or pressure." Now it's his turn to feel the heat.
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