Misplaced Intelligence Blame
This column from The New Republic was written by John B. Judis
Democrats as well as Republicans are cheering George Tenet's resignation, and rightly so. While Tenet had a few notable successes, such as the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan, he oversaw a disastrous string of intelligence failures, epitomized by September 11. But Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and perhaps the Bush administration, want to make Tenet responsible for deceiving the public about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Roberts has even blamed Tenet for deceiving the White House. "The executive was ill-served by the intelligence community," he declared last fall. An intelligence committee report, due out this month, is expected to make this case in the harshest terms.
Tenet certainly bears some responsibility for misleading the public. But the principal fault for deceiving the public and Congress about Iraq's WMD threat and also about an Iraqi link to Al Qaeda lies with President Bush and with the war's chief architects, Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. They consistently pressured the CIA to make a case for war with Iraq; and when the agency failed to do so to their satisfaction, they invented wild claims of their own that had no basis in the CIA's findings. They also put forth a model of intelligence that, if followed by the next CIA director, will result in deeply flawed findings.
In assessing Iraq's military threat from 1998 to the spring of 2002, Tenet and the CIA followed a scientific model of inquiry. They let the evidence dictate the conclusions. As a result, the agency produced sober and cautious results that were consistent with those of United Nations arms inspectors. While assuming, based on past UN findings, that Iraq possessed some chemical and biological weapons, the CIA discounted any looming nuclear threat. Immediately after September 11, the agency also rejected for lack of evidence a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. But from early 2002 (when the White House set itself on a path to war with Iraq) through the onset of the war in March 2003, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and their deputies subjected Tenet and the CIA to constant pressure to come up with results that would provide a public justification for war.
Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were subjecting the CIA to a medieval, scholastic rather than a modern, scientific approach to knowledge. They demanded that the CIA use its resources to reach pre-conceived conclusions that would justify the war. Ideally, the CIA director should have resisted these pressures; but CIA directors are political appointees who are susceptible to exactly this kind of pressure. And Tenet was certainly no exception. Beginning in September 2002, Tenet and the CIA made subtle concessions to pressure. CIA officials didn't lie about what they knew; but they highlighted evidence--for instance, about Iraq's importation of aluminum tubes--that buttressed the administration's case for war and downplayed any contrary findings. Tenet didn't deceive the White House, as Roberts suggested; the White House and Pentagon pressured him to deceive the public, and he succumbed.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other top administration officials also made statements about Iraq's WMD and about the link to Al Qaeda that had no basis whatsoever in any CIA finding. On the eve of the war, for instance, Cheney claimed that "we believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Rumsfeld in September 2002 claimed to have "bulletproof" evidence of links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. These statements were not simply misleading; they were falsehoods intended to deceive the public about Iraq's threat. They were not intelligence, but propaganda. They displayed a contempt for intelligence and for the public.
The White House's preference for propaganda over intelligence was most evident in Bush's claim in his January 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to purchase enriched uranium from Niger. In October 2002, the CIA had sent three memoranda to the White House advising it not to include this claim in a speech Bush planned to make on October 7. It dropped the claim from the speech, yet in January, the White House included it in the draft of the State of the Union. When a CIA official objected, NSC official Robert Joseph argued for its inclusion, and it appeared in the final speech. When the controversy over the speech erupted six months later, the White House and Roberts tried to blame Tenet for allowing the reference to Niger in the speech. Tenet maintained implausibly he had not proofed the final draft. That was further evidence of his weakness, but not of his guile. The urge to deceive lay squarely in the White House and not the CIA.
It remains unclear whether Tenet resigned on his own or was pushed out the door. It may take years to find out what really happened. But if Bush meant Tenet's departure as evidence of his own determination to "clean house" in the wake of the Iraq imbroglio, he has barely begun. The real architects of disaster and deception did not reside in Langley, but at the Pentagon and White House. If Tenet deserved to go, then so, too, do Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz.
John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
By John B. Judis
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