*See announcement at end of piece.
I want to establish several points here. First, there is a point in time when one can say that the intelligence definitely changed. Before that point it was cautionary and had caveats. After that point it was more certain and most of the caveats were gone. Second, the reasons for the change are well-documented. Pressure was placed on analysts throughout various agencies to provide the intelligence the administration wanted. Third, many of the same individuals who were applying pressure were also behind the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity. This includes, among others, Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby.
A few months back I wrote
here that the CEIP had documented the change in intelligence in mid 2002. Ivo Daalder has also mentioned that change in his book
America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. Daalder also discussed this at TPM Café
here. Here is an excerpt:
The intelligence community conveyed its uncertainties in its assessments of Iraq's weapons programs before 2002. For instance, in 2001 the CIA concluded that Iraq "probably continued at least low-level theoretical R&D" on nuclear weapons technologies and that "Baghdad may be attempting to acquire materials that could aid in reconstituting its nuclear weapons program." With respect to chemical weapons, the conservative Defense Intelligence Agency concluded even as late as September 2002 that "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." Similar caveats appeared in the CIA's assessment of Iraq's bioweapons program. "We are concerned that Iraq may again be producing biological warfare agents." There were worries and concerns, but nothing definitive. And the intelligence community made sure that policymakers knew the difference.
The caveats disappeared in the summer of 2002. The more categorical tone was especially evident in the National Intelligence Estimate that was produced in two, hurried weeks that September. Stewart Cohen, the acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council who oversaw the drafting of the estimate, wanted to avoid a document full of qualifications. If the major findings used words such as maybe, probably, or likely, Cohen argued, the intelligence estimate would be "pablum." And so the estimate's "Key Judgments" used direct, unvarnished language: Iraq "has chemical and biological warfare agents," Baghdad "is reconstituting its nuclear program," and "all key aspects--research & development, production, weaponization--of Iraq's offensive biological weapons program are active and most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War." All of these claims overstated what the intelligence community in fact knew. As David Kay told Bush when the president asked him why everyone had been so wrong. "People connected the dots without collecting the dots," Kay explained. "The most dangerous thing you can do is connect the dots when you haven't collected the dots. You build a universe that is fact-free."
That particular NIE mentioned by Daalder was produced just in time to share with (and thus deceive) the Congress prior to arguments about giving the President authority to go to war with Iraq. It seems to have been specifically written to provide an answer to Senators Bob Graham and Dick Durban, who pointed out in August 2002 that there was no NIE elaborating real threats. Here is what Karen Kwiatowski said about it (
link):
[T]he National Intelligence Estimate, published in September 2002, as remarked upon recently by former CIA Middle East chief Ray McGovern, was an afterthought. It was provoked only after Sens. Bob Graham and Dick Durban noted in August 2002, as Congress was being asked to support a resolution for preemptive war, that no NIE elaborating real threats to the United States had been provided. In fact, it had not been written, but a suitable NIE was dutifully prepared and submitted the very next month. Naturally, this document largely supported most of the outrageous statements already made publicly by Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld about the threat Iraq posed to the United States. All the caveats, reservations and dissents made by intelligence were relegated to footnotes and kept from the public.
So how did we get to the point where someone like Stewart Cohen could write a misleading NIE without intelligence experts exposing the deceit? The process that led to this did not happen by accident. Perhaps the biggest change was to put in place civilian appointees who would help create and go along with the Bush administration's version of events. Secondly, experts in various departments were forcibly retired or shuffled off to assignments that would limit their ability to respond to intelligence manipulation. Third, individual analysts were pressured to give the answer the Bush administration wanted.
The most overt action by the Bush administration was the formation of the Office of Special Plans, as discussed here and here among numerous other places. Here is an excerpt from the Salon Kwiatowski piece (link):
From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us could do about it.
I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.
I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president.
Another key move was to place John Bolton as a mole of sorts at the State Department. Here is just one episode, courtesy of Seymour Hersh (
link) that gives insight into what Bolton was doing:
Greg Thielmann, an expert on disarmament with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, was assigned to be the daily intelligence liaison to John Bolton, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control, who is a prominent conservative. Thielmann understood that his posting had been mandated by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who thought that every important State Department bureau should be assigned a daily intelligence officer. "Bolton was the guy with whom I had to do business," Thielmann said. "We were going to provide him with all the information he was entitled to see. That's what being a professional intelligence officer is all about."
But, Thielmann told me, "Bolton seemed to be troubled because INR was not telling him what he wanted to hear." Thielmann soon found himself shut out of Bolton's early-morning staff meetings. "I was intercepted at the door of his office and told, `The Under-Secretary doesn't need you to attend this meeting anymore.' " When Thielmann protested that he was there to provide intelligence input, the aide said, "The Under-Secretary wants to keep this in the family."
In addition to putting co-conspirators like Bill Luti, Stewart Cohen and John Bolton in key positions, the administration moved and forcibly retired others. This was particularly true at the Office of Special Plans. Here's some of what Kwiatowski said:
Key professional personnel, longtime civilian professionals holding the important billets in NESA, were replaced early on during the transition. Longtime officer director Joe McMillan was reassigned to the National Defense University. The director's job in the time of transition was to help bring the newly appointed deputy assistant secretary up to speed, ensure office continuity, act as a resource relating to regional histories and policies, and help identify the best ways to maintain course or to implement change. Removing such a critical continuity factor was not only unusual but also seemed like willful handicapping. It was the first signal of radical change.
...the expertise on Middle East policy was not only being removed, but was also being exchanged for that from various agenda-bearing think tanks, including the Middle East Media Research Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
Note: I have previously written about some of the latter here.
A Mother Jones piece (
link) summed it up thusly:
Shulsky's OSP, which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control, banishing veteran experts, -- including Joseph McMillan, James Russell, Larry Hanauer, and Marybeth McDevitt, -- who, despite years of service to NESA, either were shuffled off to other positions or retired...
...Luti and Shulsky ran NESA and the Office of Special Plans with brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the party line.
This all put a lot of pressure on analysts, as Kwiatowski noted (link):
...The message sent by Policy appointees and well understood by staff officers and the defense intelligence community was that senior appointed civilians were willing to exclude or marginalize intelligence products that did not fit the agenda.
Others also placed pressure on agencies and individual analysts. Richard Clarke mentioned that the President and his staff placed pressure on the CIA and FBI and others to give desired answers (link):
"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.
"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'
"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."
Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'
Notice in this quote that "in particular from Bolton's office" implies others were placing pressure (link):
According to Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official and an intelligence specialist at the National War College, the OSP officials routinely pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters. "People were being pulled aside [and being told], 'We saw your last piece and it's not what we're looking for,'" he says. "It was pretty blatant." Two State Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann and Christian Westermann, have both charged that pressure was being put on them to shape intelligence to fit policy, in particular from Bolton's office.
Here is hint at who some of the others might have been, specifically mentioning Cheney, Libby and Perle (link):
That the White House and the Pentagon put enormous pressure on the CIA to go along with its version of events has been widely reported, highlighted by visits to CIA headquarters by Vice President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff. Led by Perle, the neocons seethed with contempt for the CIA...
Seymour Hersh also mentions Cheney's office here. The ellipsis is a discussion of Bolton, which implies that Bolton and Cheney's office were collaborating:
"They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn't have the time or the energy to go after the bad information."
The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. "The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet"--the C.I.A. director--"for not protecting them. I've never seen a government like this."...
...Senior C.I.A. analysts dealing with Iraq were constantly being urged by the Vice-President's office to provide worst-case assessments on Iraqi weapons issues. "They got pounded on, day after day," one senior Bush Administration official told me, and received no consistent backup from Tenet and his senior staff. "Pretty soon you say `Fuck it.' " And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted.
Kwiatowski also ties the Office of Special Plans directly to Cheney's office (
link):
Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues like Iraq's WMD and its links to Al Qaeda. Shulsky constantly updated these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney. "Of course, we never thought they'd go directly to the White House," she adds.
Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over to 'Scooter' right away." She later found out that "Scooter" was none other than Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox.
Intelligence specialist Vicent Cannistraro tied the pressure applied by Cheney (which he later denied on Meet the Press as mentioned
here) and Libby on desk level analysts directly to the decision to send Wilson to Africa. (
PDF link):
The Vice President and his chief of staff Lewis Libby visited CIA headquarters to engage the CIA analysts directly on this issue of uranium acquisition in Africa and the alleged renewal of a nuclear program. I have heard that this unprecedented act, in which a Vice President engages desk level analysts, resulted in a contentious give and take. The analysts maintained their position that there were no supporting intelligence data for the Italian report. The Vice President, who had publicly asserted the uranium story as proof Saddam was acquiring nuclear weapons, insisted that CIA analysts were not looking hard enough for the evidence. As a result of this pressure, CIA's Non-Proliferation Center
sent Joe Wilson to Niger for a fact-finding trip.
Now read
this and draw your own conclusions:
We noted yesterday that the main motivation of the White House campaign to discredit the Wilsons had to do with "the particular lie that Joseph Wilson exposed and the essential role it played in the administration's plans. The lie was that Iraq was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons and that, despite Iraq's inability to deliver such weapons on the U.S., this somehow posed a "grave and gathering" threat. The plans were to use that ominous specter to deceive Congress into approving war on Iraq. The problem was that not even the obsequious George Tenet could come up with evidence that could withstand close scrutiny.
This was a problem, especially since U.N. inspectors and U.S. intelligence knew that Iraq's nuclear program had been destroyed after the Gulf War and there was no persuasive evidence that Baghdad was moving to reconstitute it. Even the intelligence imagery analysts, whom former CIA director John Deutch gave away to the Pentagon in 1996, could not come up with the evidence needed, despite very strong incentive to please their boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
What a welcome windfall, then, when a deus ex machina appeared in early 2002, in the form of a report alleging that Iraq was seeking uranium in the African country of Niger. Since Iraq had no other use for uranium, the White House spin machine went into high gear, playing up the report as proof that Baghdad was reconstituting its nuclear weapons development program. The intelligence analysts had to hold their noses--not only because of the dubious sourcing but because the substance of the report made little sense. They knew (and Wilson confirmed) that all the uranium mined in Niger is controlled by a French-led international consortium that exercises super-strict control over exports from Niger. It just couldn't happen.
Provenance and likelihood be damned. The White House now had a "report" that could be used effectively with Congress, and Tenet could be counted on to keep his nose-holding professionals out of sight. The Iraq-seeking-uranium-from-Africa canard assumed such prominent importance to the administration's case that it simply could not be dropped altogether--either in Washington or in London. Accordingly, none of us in VIPS were in the least surprised to learn recently of the line taken by Karl Rove with Time reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003. In an email that Cooper sent his bosses at Time , Rove insisted that Wilson's findings on Niger-Iraq were flawed. According to Cooper, Rove "implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium from Niger." That was false. Neither British nor U.S. intelligence has come up with anything to throw the slightest doubt on Wilson's conclusions.
*Normally my friend Eric Massa, a candidate for the US Congress in New York's 29th district (link), live-blogs on Sundays. Today he has to attend a fundraiser in his district. This week his candidacy was discussed by Roll Call as being one of the top-tier races in the country. Mostly because he spent the entire month of September working on Katrina relief efforts, his third quarter fundraising looked weak and that was also mentioned in the Roll Call article. So he is under a lot of pressure to raise funds. Because he wants to keep in touch with the netroots at least once a week, Eric is trying to set up a live-blogging event from DC on Tuesday. Eric's friend and mentor General Wesley Clark (link) will also be there so don't be surprised if he makes a guest appearance and live-blogs some with Eric.