Innocents at home

James Risen, reporting in the New York Times for July 6, says that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has uncovered evidence that the

Central Intelligence Agency was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, but the C.I.A. failed to give that information to President Bush, even as he publicly warned of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons, according to government officials.

Several commentators have mentioned this, noting how it means the intelligence community knew - or at the very least had damned good reason to believe - the Iraq did not have any banned weapons in the time leading up to the war and in fact had abandoned work on them.

But frankly, I noticed something else. I noticed that in a 1700-word article about intelligence failures, there is exactly one reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency - that to a case of where the CIA used a source the DIA thought unreliable. There is exactly one reference to Ahmed Chalabi - that to a case where the CIA is criticized for using a source connected to him. And there is not one reference to the Office of Special Plans, the outfit set up by White House insiders to "stovepipe" intelligence data to the Bushites - that is, to evade the usual vetting. Seymour Hersh, writing more than a year ago in the May 12, 2003 issue of the New Yorker, said

[a]ccording to the Pentagon adviser [a Hersh source], Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true - that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States. ...

Rumsfeld and his colleagues believed that the C.I.A. was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. "The agency was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism," the Pentagon adviser told me. "That's what drove them. If you've ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data." The goal of Special Plans, he said, was "to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can't see."

That is, OSP was created to do an end run around the CIA precisely because the Shrub team was convinced the spooks were soft on Iraq! Except now we're apparently to believe that we really got Iraq all wrong because the CIA was actually too harsh on Iraq and misled the poor naifs in the White House.

Now, it is true that the CIA did toughen up it's stance in the fall of 2002, that is, the fall preceding the war. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in the executive summary of its detailed report on WMD in Iraq, says that

[p]rior to 2002, the intelligence community appears to have overestimated the chemical and biological weapons in Iraq but had a generally accurate picture of the nuclear and missile programs.

The dramatic shift between prior intelligence assessments and the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), together with the creation of an independent intelligence entity at the Pentagon and other steps, suggest that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002.

(The full report, which runs 105 pages, is available in .pdf format here.)

Note that this change happened after the Bushites started playing up the "threat" from Iraq, which they had started doing that summer. And the pressure was on, as the Guardian (UK) reported on July 17, 2003.

Mr Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's unsubstantiated claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been trying to buy uranium in Africa, but he also said his agency was under pressure to justify a war that the administration had already decided on.

The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. ...

Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican party leader who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his official title. ...

Mr Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace.

Despite that, Risen writes that

[w]hile the Senate panel has concluded that C.I.A. analysts and other intelligence officials overstated the case that Iraq had illicit weapons, the committee has not found any evidence that the analysts changed their reports as a result of political pressure from the White House, according to officials familiar with the report.

Just incredible. Just insane. And just what I expected on June 24:

This is part of a PR campaign, folks! A carefully-constructed White House plot to blame the entire mess on the CIA so they can walk! Pay attention!

And keep doing it.

Footnote one: Some more info about the "shadowy" OSP:

- Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski discusses her experiences with OSP in the March 10 Salon.

- Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest write about "The Lie Factory" in the January-February 2002 Mother Jones.

Footnote two: Don't bother looking for current references to the OSP; it was given back its old name - the Northern Gulf Affairs Office - in July, 2003.