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Editorials on CIA intelligence report
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
Posted on Mon, Jul. 12, 2004
(KRT) - The following editorial appeared in the Kansas City Star on Sunday, July 11:
CIA DESERVES SOME BLAME, BUT NOT ALL
In the thickets of espionage, good players must never lose their ability to question
basic assumptions. Those assumptions must be subjected to periodic re-examination in light
of new developments, fresh information and alternate hypotheses.
Like other organizations, however, intelligence agencies can suffer from bureaucratic
inertia, lack of imagination and simple hostility to unconventional thinking.
Certainly these have been persistent problems in the U.S. intelligence system, and a new
report from the Senate Intelligence Committee points again toward such problems in seeking
to explain Washington's mistaken claims last year about weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq.
The devastating indictment of the CIA work on Iraq: "group think.'' The intelligence
committee, led by Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, says assumptions that Iraq had certain
chemical and biological weapons tainted the analyses that went to the White House and
Congress.
Dissenting voices were reportedly downplayed by CIA Director George Tenet, who had
nominal responsibility for the entire U.S. intelligence system.
The Senate panel argues that money alone isn't the answer to the CIA's problems, which
is true. For many years, in fact, American intelligence was a case study in the perils of
excessive funding.
The Senate committee's lengthy report deserves careful consideration by the American
public.
But with a presidential election approaching, it should also be remembered that the
administration and its supporters want to divert blame for White House mistakes on
Iraq.
The CIA and Tenet, who is leaving the agency, should not be used as all-purpose
scapegoats for the "group think'' on Iraq that took place among President Bush, Vice
President Dick Cheney and their other top advisers. They, too, had a responsibility to
question their assumptions.
If the CIA work was skewed in a particular direction, it was in the direction that gave
Bush and Cheney the answers they obviously wanted to hear.
Perhaps that's why the president in January - even after American inspectors in Iraq had
essentially given up hope of finding large stores of chemical and biological weapons - was
still expressing "great confidence'' in the U.S. intelligence system.
The administration wants to forget Bush's "great confidence'' comment now. As Tenet
packs his bags, White House spokesman Scott McClellan is trying to spin the Senate
committee's blast at the CIA as confirming "what we have said'' about the shortcomings of
the intelligence system.
No doubt some in the intelligence agencies have their own bitter spin: We gave them the
answers they wanted, and now we're taking the heat.
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The following editorial appeared in the Detroit Free Press on Sunday, July 11:
PRE-WAR FAILURES EXACT A HUGE COST
If it wasn't true, it would be beyond belief: The work of gathering intelligence for a
presidential decision on committing America to war began with an unproven assumption that
was never really checked out.
This failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to accurately assess the threat posed by Iraq
will surely be one of the most costly blunders in U.S. history, whether measured in lives,
dollars or international standing. And those costs continue to climb.
Left unsaid in Friday's scathing report by the Senate Intelligence Committee was to what
extent the government's intelligence professionals were telling the hawks in the Bush
administration what they wanted to hear about Iraq, and to what extent bad information was
twisted further by the administration to bolster its case for war. Those issues should be
addressed in subsequent committee reports. Every American in Iraq, every family that sent a
loved one into this war, every taxpayer, is entitled to know.
The Intelligence Committee chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., generously said the U.S.
mistakes were part of a ``global intelligence failure'' based on the widespread conviction
that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was trying to get
nuclear arms. But only a select few countries, led and encouraged by the United States,
were willing to act on that fallacious conviction.
The Senate committee report is particularly and deservedly hard on the Central
Intelligence Agency, which has lost enormous credibility in this fiasco. More
significantly, the agency's shoddy work has cost the country a great deal of credibility as
a global leader. The CIA obviously needs to be revamped, but that will have to occur on the
fly because intelligence gathering remains a critical weapon in the war against
terrorism.
Interestingly, the committee found that the CIA came to one reasonable conclusion - that
there were no significant ties between Hussein and the Al Qaeda terrorists who carried out
the 9/11 attacks on America.
But that one, the Bush administration appeared unwilling to believe.
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The following editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday, July 11:
CIA'S CLEAR AND SHINING FAILURE
The Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday told Americans what most probably assumed,
but still hated to hear: The CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies failed abysmally to
accurately assess Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before last year's invasion.
The report offers new mountains of details, but they all point to this conclusion: We
thought they had vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Apparently, they
didn't.
As you might expect, the blame for this mistake is widespread and manifold. The system
failed on many levels, in different ways, and in countries around the world, in order for
such a flawed assessment to be taken as truth.
There's no way to put a positive spin on this. But it is important to highlight what the
panel didn't find. That is, it didn't find evidence that intelligence was mistaken because
of political pressures from the Bush administration. Even though some Democrats dispute
that, the panel's finding was clear and emphatic. What the president and others did with
the flawed information will rightly be part of the next phase of the committee's work. But
this country can't wait for more reports before it fixes the CIA and other intelligence
operations.
The report documents failures at every point. The CIA, which had in the 1990s embraced
technology and turned away from human intelligence gathering, had "no human intelligence
sources inside Iraq" to collect information on WMD after United Nations inspectors were
tossed out in 1998, according to Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the committee's chairman. The
upshot: The CIA didn't penetrate Iraq's closed society and learn the truth about Saddam
Hussein's capabilities.
The conclusions that analysts drew from sketchy and contradictory data represented the
next level of failure. That was not only the fault of U.S. agencies, but of intelligence
agencies elsewhere, the report says. All over the world, analysts fell victim to "group
think" assumptions that Iraq had weapons that it did not, partly because of Iraq's evasions
of UN inspectors in the 1990s. That analysis not only turned out to be "wrong," Roberts
said, but it was also "unreasonable and largely unsupported by available intelligence."
That is, analysts ignored or discounted contradictory information because of their
assumptions that Iraq had the weapons.
That led to a third failure. Analysis of intelligence data is both science and art.
That's why it's important for analysts to be completely forthcoming about what they don't
know, what they merely believe, and to make sure that those gaps in knowledge are clear to
those up the line who read these reports and take action based on them. By and large, that
didn't happen here. In essence, most of the doubts and conflicting data were scrubbed from
the reports, leaving, in many cases, a clear and shining mistake.
Opponents and supporters of the war will see in this Senate committee report what they
want. Would its findings have changed the debate? Certainly. Would they have changed the
decision to invade? That's impossible to say. WMD were not the only reason for going to
war. That debate will continue, no matter what any report says.
But if all this report does is stir new animosities between pro- and anti-war Americans,
then it will be a failure. Yes, it's vital to know what went wrong. But it's more important
to use this report - and others to come - to fix the problems. This nation has mortal foes
eager to exploit its intelligence weaknesses.
The task ahead is enormous. A few months ago, departing CIA Director George Tenet told
the panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that rebuilding the nation's overseas
spy networks will take five more years. Another CIA official testified that the CIA and FBI
still can't share information efficiently. The Sept. 11 commission is due to report this
month and may call for a sweeping overhaul of U.S. intelligence.
The Senate report, Roberts says, "cries out for reform." Last week's warning of a
potential terrorist attack on the United States reminds us that reform can't come too
soon.
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The following editorial appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Sunday, July
11:
CIA MUSTN'T BE LEFT ADRIFT
The central finding-cum-complaint of the Senate Intelligence Committee's new report on
the CIA will surprise few Americans. On Friday, the committee reported that the basic
justification for the invasion of Iraq - that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass
destruction - was based on false or overstated judgments by the intelligence agency.
The CIA's judgments were not only mistaken, but they also were "unreasonable and largely
unsupported by the available evidence," said Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., who heads the
committee. It's important to note that the panel's indictment was not a partisan attack; it
was supported by Republicans as well as Democrats.
While the findings were not startling, they do underline the need for basic changes in
the intelligence community, in both its leadership and in its culture. Simply, the country
cannot afford to delay the appointment of a successor to CIA Director George Tenet. And
that successor should not be Tenet's deputy, John McLaughlin.
Tenet had been under fire for his mistakes. Perhaps anticipating the committee's
findings, he announced his resignation on June 3, effective today.
The White House originally intended to allow McLaughlin to run the agency until after
the November election, when a permanent successor could be named. Fortunately, the White
House is re-examining this timetable.
Delaying the transition could push back the installation of a new intelligence chief
until the start of 2005 - later, perhaps, if Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., is elected
president. Last week, senior administration officials warned that during this very period,
Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenants might mount another act of terrorism on the
United States.
Even on an interim basis, McLaughlin is not the person to be running the CIA during
these critical months. His public remarks show him to be oblivious to the need for sweeping
changes in the agency. He recently told a group of business executives that the CIA's
"shortcomings" resulted from "specific, discrete problems that we understand and are well
on our way to addressing or have already addressed."
Clearly, there is much more work to be done. The committee blamed the CIA's misjudgments
on "groupthink" assumptions about Iraq's weapons, intentions and capabilities. The panel
concluded that agency analysts were not overtly pressured to provide supporting arguments
for invading Iraq. However, it's clear that they operated in a supercharged climate of
opinion that may have made them even more vulnerable to the temptation - prevalent in any
bureaucracy - to try to please their bosses by telling them what they wanted to hear.
The purpose of the CIA is to produce reliable fact and opinion for the use of
policy-makers. The agency can perform that job only if it is shielded, insofar as possible,
from the pressures of politics. McLaughlin cannot be relied on to make the kind of changes
that would provide that level of protection.
There is no convincing reason to believe that a Republican-controlled Senate would
reject a qualified candidate nominated by a Republican president. The name of Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage has been mentioned. Other candidates should be found.
Soon. With bin Laden and other terrorists apparently not sitting on their hands, the
administration and Congress can't afford to sit on their hands, either.
---
The following editorial appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Sunday, July 11:
NATIONAL SECURITY: GROUP THIMK
The British spy novelist John Le Carre once put these words in one of his character's
mouths: "It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and
there a windfall, here and there a scoop."
And here and there, according to the ranking minority member of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, "the most devastating losses and intelligence failures in the history of the
nation."
That's how West Virginia Democrat John D. Rockefeller IV characterized the committee's
assessment of the performance of U.S. intelligence agencies in the run-up to the war in
Iraq. Most of the committee's scathing report was made public Friday, although 20 percent
of it was withheld because of security concerns.
What was released was enough for Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., to say that the CIA's
prewar assessments were not only wrong, but "also unreasonable and largely unsupported by
available evidence." In particular, he said, the agency's assessment of Iraq's nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons programs were skewed by a collective "group think." Given
the results, it could be called group "thimk."
Having failed to develop reliable spy networks - its chief source was nicknamed "Curve
Ball" - the agency relied on electronic intelligence and satellite photos. Relatively
insignificant pieces of evidence were overblown and overwrought by CIA analysts: One
chemical truck became evidence of an entire chemical weapons program. Jealous of its turf
and insecure in its analysis, the agency refused to allow other agencies to analyze its
evidence.
Having gone to war for specious reasons, Rockefeller said, "Our credibility is
diminished. Our standing in the world has never been lower. We have fostered a deep hatred
of America in the Muslim world, and that will grow. As a direct consequence, our nation is
more vulnerable today than ever before."
Panel member Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said the report is "only half the story." Writing on
the op-ed page of The Washington Post, Durbin said, "What's missing is the ways the
intelligence was used, misused, misinterpreted or ignored by administrative policymakers in
deciding to go to war."
Democrats on the committee wanted those issues made public immediately, but committee
Republicans didn't want to include them at all. The compromise: A second report on the
administration response will be released after the Nov. 2 elections.
Anticipating bad news from the committee, outgoing CIA Director George Tenet made a
farewell address to CIA employees Thursday, urging them to resist any efforts "to take us
back in the wrong direction." Tenet said, "This institution is your own."
Not exactly. It belongs to the American people, not to bureaucratic insiders and
whichever party happens to be in power. In the new world order, where terrorist networks
and fanatics daily plot and launch attacks on our allies and interests, the CIA owes the
American people - if not the world - a whole lot better effort, not tailor-made scoops and
windfalls for the ideology du jour.
© 2004, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
Not for publication or retransmission without permission of KRT.
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