- Yesterday's Senate report on the intelligence failures
that helped speed the march to war in Iraq was in many ways a political
coup for the Republican party, that defused a potentially dangerous landmine
between President Bush and re-election in November.
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- The Democratic members of the Senate intelligence committee
were persuaded to sign a report containing a central finding they disagreed
with - that senior administration officials did not pressure CIA analysts
to produce assessments that would support a war.
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- In return, the Democrats would be allowed to pursue the
question of the White House's role in the intelligence fiasco in "phase
two" of the investigation. The only catch is, that phase two will,
in all probability not be finished until after the election.
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- Asked why he had agreed to sign the report, the leading
Democrat on the committee, Jay Rockefeller, said that he accepted the bulk
of the report, slamming the CIA for chronic timidity, lack of any actual
spies where they were most needed, and its lack of intellectual rigour
in challenging its own assumptions.
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- The John Kerry presidential campaign is unlikely to thank
him. The headlines from the report are likely to come from lines such as:
"The committee found no evidence that the [intelligence community's]
mischaracterisation or exaggeration of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities was the result of political pressure."
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- That was, however, not what the Democrats on the commission
believed, nor is it necessarily what the investigation proved. In the body
of its report the senate committee reported that the CIA ombudsman had
talked to 24 CIA officers about pressure from administration officials.
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- The ombudsman told the committee that about half a dozen
mentioned "pressure" from the administration; several others
did not use that word, but spoke in a context that implied it.
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- At its core, the row over the Bush administration's role
in persuading the country into the Iraq war came down to a single semantic
question about the meaning of "pressure". Like much else, it
was a question left unresolved by yesterday's report.
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- Both sides agreed that CIA analysts came to the wrong
conclusions over Iraq's possession of WMD. They also agreed that before
coming to those conclusions they were subjected to intense questioning
and "repetitive tasking" (being asked to do their work over again)
from senior administration officials.
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- The Republicans called that rigorous and conscientious
leadership, pointing out that CIA analysts are trained to respond to vigorous
questioning.
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- The dissenting Democrats argued that the questioning
from the White House was almost exclusively in one direction. Analyst assessments
that were generally sceptical were much more likely to be sent back with
queries scrawled in the margins than assessments that found that there
were indeed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and links between Baghdad
and al-Qaida.
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- According to Mr Rockefeller, George Tenet had told the
inquiry that analysts had come to him complaining about pressure. Another
intelligence veteran had testified that "the hammering of analysts
was greater than any he had seen in 32 years at the CIA".
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- Yet when the analysts came before the committee, as the
report points out, none "stated that the questions were unreasonable,
or that they were encouraged by the questioning to alter their conclusions
regarding Iraq's links to al-Qaida".
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- Critics of the investigation have put that reticence
down to the fact that CIA minders were present at the questioning and to
the fact that, in purely career terms, it would be worse to admit changing
analysis in response to political pressure, than getting the analysis wrong
in the first place.
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- Whether or not the analysts who spoke to the committee
felt they could speak freely or not, none implicated the administration.
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- However, the senate committee found that Doug Feith,
the undersecretary of defence for policy, had set up an Iraq "intelligence
cell" inside the Pentagon to forage through old reports about links
between Baghdad and al-Qaida, which Mr Feith's boss, Donald Rumsfeld, and
the vice-president, Dick Cheney, used to second guess the CIA's scepticism
on the matter. Much of the intelligence it processed came from the Iraqi
National Congress (INC) and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi.
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- But as Mr Rockefeller put it yesterday, the committee
felt it had only scratched the surface. "We've done a little bit of
work on the number three guy in the defence department, Douglas Feith,
part of his alleged efforts to run intelligence past the intelligence community
altogether, his relationship with the INC and Chalabi, who was very much
in favour with the administration. And was he running a private intelligence
failure, which is not lawful?"
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- It was a rhetorical question the senator could not answer.
Judgment on the role of Mr Feith and Mr Chalabi was put off until phase
two of the investigation.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1258055,00.html
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