Intelligence Matters

Doubters of the administration’s reasons for invading Iraq may have been disappointed by the commission President Bush assembled to look, in part, into the quality of intelligence provided by the CIA to the White House. That commission has a broader mandate, looking at intelligence gathering generally, than the doubters would like and it won’t report until after the November election.

But its work may not matter much if Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee produce a credible and thorough analysis of pre-war intelligence, which is expected next month. Led by the ranking Democrat on the committee, Sen. Carl Levin, that group has been investigating since June whether U.S. intelligence was manipulated to make the threat from Iraq look worse than it was. Though Armed Services Republicans were invited to join in this investigation, they reportedly declined.

A sense of what may be in this analysis was given Feb. 4, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with Armed Services about proposed Defense spending. Sen. Levin used the opportunity to ask about Iraq, specifically about a September 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency study called, “Iraq, Key WMD Facilities: An Operational Support Study.” Part of the Feb. 4 hearing went as follows:

“Sen. Levin: Part of that study has now been declassified. It included the following statement: ‘There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons or where Iraq has or will establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities.’ That’s September, DIA, which was classified until recently. Now, on September 19th of 2002, the same month of that classified DIA assessment, you publicly stated that Saddam has, quote, ‘amassed large clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons and that we know he continues to hide biological and chemical weapons, moving them to different locations as often as every 12 to 24 hours and placing them in residential neighborhoods.’ How do you explain the contrast between the DIA-reported intelligence that said there was no reliable information about production or stockpiling of chemical weapons and your public statements that you knew that Saddam has such weapons? What explains the discrepancy there?

“Secretary Rumsfeld: I don’t – needless to say, I’m sure I never saw that piece of intelligence. And whether or not it was the DIA’s view overall or an analyst’s view, I can’t tell from the way you’ve presented it. I have relied not on any one single intelligence entity, like the DIA or the CIA. I’ve relied on the intelligence community’s assessments. And the intelligence community’s assessments were what they were. And they were as I stated them.”

This is telling for several reasons – and not just because it reflects the president’s own comment the day the war began, of which he was reminded Sunday by NBC’s Tim Russert. Then, the president said, “intelligence has left no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” It is important to remember the DIA report was significant news last spring when it became unclassified, so much so that its director, Adm. Lowell Jacoby, felt obliged to issue a clarifying comment to make sure that the quotation used by Sen. Levin was not the only passage repeated. Adm. Jacoby pointed out the assessment also stated, “Iraq will develop various elements of its chemical industry to achieve self-sufficiency in producing the chemical precursors required for CW [chemical weapons] agent production.”

Secretary Rumsfeld was very busy last spring, but it is difficult to understand why he wouldn’t have been briefed about this assessment, if not before the war then certainly after it was widely disseminated. Yet he appeared never to have heard of it. More, after the secretary was so forcefully certain of what was known, someone might have pointed out that there were analysts at Defense who were less certain.

Anyway, Sen. Levin’s investigation should produce provocative reading.