David Martin Dispatch: Doing The Old Potomac Two-Step
For the past several months, I've been trying to get my hands on a copy of an intelligence assessment written two months before the U.S. invaded Iraq which warned that unless American troops moved quickly to restore essential services and provide security they would be viewed as occupiers, not liberators. In other words, it predicted exactly what happened, but it was ignored by senior officials in the Bush administration who insisted right up to the day of the invasion that American troops would be greeted as liberators.
Normally, an intelligence assessment like that is a highly classified document, but in this case I had been told that an unclassified version had been prepared by the CIA in the summer of 2003 in anticipation of releasing it publicly. So I called the CIA public affairs office and asked for a copy. The answer was that the assessment had been prepared by an organization called the National Intelligence Council and that as a result of the post-9/11 intelligence reforms the NIC, as it is called, no longer came under the CIA. It now reports to the newly-created Director of National Intelligence. So I called DNI public affairs. They told me I would have to file a Freedom of Information Act request. I filed an FOIA. Last month, I received my response. It said that since the assessment was written in January of 2003 when the National Intelligence Council was still under the CIA, my request was being forwarded to the CIA. I was back where I started from. This week I received a letter from the CIA warning that because of the backlog of FOIA requests, there's no telling when they'll get to mine. I'd call that a bureaucratic run around.
At exactly the same time I was playing hide-the-memo with the Director of National Intelligence, the author of the assessment, a now retired CIA officer named Paul Pillar, was writing an article for Foreign Affairs magazine in which he described the document and the warnings it had raised and described at length how the Bush administration had simply disregarded any pre-war intelligence which didn't fit their game plan. Before that article could be published, it had to be reviewed by the CIA to make sure it didn't contain any classified information. Why did I get the run around while Pillar was given permission to publish? Only the bureaucracy knows. Someday I'll get a response to my FOIA request. The document will no longer be newsworthy by then, but that's O.K. When Pillar's article appeared, I interviewed him and did a story for the Evening News.