THE INTELLIGENCE BATTLE

A long-awaited Senate Intelligence report released yesterday concludes that the CIA gave the White House inaccurate, inadequate and generally sloppy information about the military strength of Iraq in the months leading up to the war. The report, signed and supported by Republicans and Democrats unanimously, may be the closest admission this country has officially produced that shows it went to war under a false impression of the enemy.

The natural follow-up to such a powerful investigation is reform, and the reshaping of the intelligence-gathering operations of the United States may consume Congress for the next couple of years. Getting this reform right, however, not only helps protect the nation against terrorism; it could restore its standing in the world.

The assemblage of examples against the nation’s intelligence community is damning. Its 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, for instance, stated Iraq “is reconstituting its nuclear program,” “has chemical and biological weapons” and was developing an unmanned aerial vehicle “probably intended to deliver biological weapons.” A CIA white paper from that same year was unequivocal in its conclusion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

A notable speech in February 2003 by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations was supposed to contain conclusions about Iraq’s military strength only if those conclusions had been backed by solid, multiple sources by the CIA. Some of the details in that speech have been discovered to have come from a single doubtful source (the report of mobile biological labs) or an outright fabricator.

Mindful that the intelligence community made a convenient target of blame for the White House since doubts about the extent of Iraq’s weaponry became apparent, Congress has been careful with its condemnation. A second Senate Intelligence report, on how the administration handled the information it was given, is expected after the election, but the conclusions in yesterday’s report make it clear that a major intelligence overhaul is crucial.

It makes no sense, says Sen. Olympia Snowe, a member of the committee, to have one person who is the director of the CIA and also has the conflicting duty of being responsible for the rest of the 14 agencies within the intelligence community. She joins with other senators in proposing a director of National Intelligence “with cabinet-level status – so that person is guaranteed to the have the ear of the president now and in the future – and who sole responsibility is to direct and coordinate the entirety of our national intelligence community to ensure consistent priorities and that all the gears of our intelligence gathering, analysis and reporting are synchronized and focused.”

The turf fight over this proposal, especially for budget authority, will be ferocious. The stakes of allowing the bureaucratic ineptness described in the report to continue are too high not to engage in it.