For Immediate Release: July 9, 2004
“The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is a welcome confirmation of what has been evident from open sources for many months: there was an enormous intelligence failure on WMD in Iraq. However, the report is of little use in guiding intelligence reform because it tells less than half the story.
“Based on Senator Roberts’ and Senator Rockefeller’s descriptions, the intelligence failures that the Committee found were virtually identical to those laid out in the January 2004 Carnegie report, WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications. The Committee also importantly confirms that the content of intelligence reporting shifted dramatically over the course of 2002, culminating in the deeply flawed NIE that was the primary basis for congressional authorization of the war.
“But by concluding that there was no political pressure on the intelligence community, the Committee’s report leaves a huge contradiction hanging in midair. How else can those 2002 changes—all describing a more dire threat—be explained? Demands by top officials for access to raw intelligence and the setting up of an independent intelligence cell in the Pentagon were among many departures from normal practice that are hard to explain in any other way. At some point, if it walks like a duck and quacks, it’s a duck. In ‘Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong’ (Atlantic Monthly, January 2004), Kenneth Pollack made abundantly clear that analysts felt the pressure and were in no doubt about the message.
“By denying the obvious, and by failing to examine the Administration’s role, including top officials’ misuse of the intelligence product, the Senate report leaves an unfair and incorrect impression that the entire blame for this tragic episode rests entirely on the intelligence agencies.”
-Jessica Mathews, president, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
and co-author of WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications
From WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications:
The Carnegie report concluded that, “No changes in the structure or practices of the intelligence community are worth acting on until … the question of political pressure on analysts and the adequacy of agencies’ responses to it” is “firmly established.” If that record “reveals that the content and clarity of the intelligence product were significantly affected by the desire to serve political masters, Congress should seriously consider professionalizing the post of Director of Central Intelligence.”
The Carnegie report also exhaustively detailed the “systematic misrepresentation” of the Iraqi threat by the Administration, over and above the intelligence failures, including:
- “Routinely conflating nuclear, chemical and biological weapons into a single WMD threat.” Officials lumped “the high likelihood that Iraq possessed chemical weapons which themselves constitute only a minor threat, with the complete lack of evidence that it possessed nuclear weapons, which would be a huge threat. Talk of ‘mushroom clouds’ certainly led Americans to believe that the latter were in the picture.”
- “Insisting without evidence, yet treat[ing] as a given truth, that Saddam Hussein would give whatever WMD he possessed to terrorists.” This had two major policy consequences: only through terrorists did Iraq pose a threat to the US homeland. Second, it collapses a deterrable threat (posed by the state of Iraq) and an undeterrable threat (posed by terrorists) into one. If true, this would have meant that deterrence and containment would not be effective, and war was the only option.
- “Many types of misuse of the intelligence product, including the wholesale dropping of caveats, probabilities, and expressions of uncertainty present in intelligence assessments from public statements.”
- Word changes that “make a world of difference… transform[ing] a threat from minor to dire.” For example, in his defining October 7th speech, the President drastically mischaracterized a finding by UN inspectors that Iraq had failed to account for some bacterial growth media. If it had been used, inspectors said, it “could have produced about three times as much” anthrax as Iraq admitted to. The president said: “The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and is capable of killing millions.” [emphases added.] As the Carnegie report put it, “In two sentences, possibility first becomes likelihood, likelihood then subtly becomes fact, and a huge stockpile is created. Finally, biological agent is transformed into weapons, and not just any weapons but extremely sophisticated delivery systems – the only way such weapons could kill “millions.”
More resources available at www.carnegieendowment.org