Media, White House push falsehoods on
prewar Iraq intel
Media Matters
November 15, 2005
In recent days, conservatives have pushed two principal falsehoods -- echoed
by President Bush in a November 11 speech and uncritically reported in
mainstream news reports -- to rebut Democratic criticism that the White House
manipulated intelligence to build the case for war in Iraq. First,
conservatives have claimed that the White House's Democratic critics saw the
same intelligence as the Bush administration and similarly concluded that Iraq
was a significant threat. Second, the administration's defenders have conflated
two issues: whether the administration pressured intelligence analysts to
produce intelligence supporting its case for war, and whether the
administration manipulated or cherry-picked the intelligence it received. By
conflating the two questions in news reports, the media have advanced the Bush
administration's line that several government inquiries have already cleared
the administration of both pressuring intelligence agencies and manipulating
intelligence. In fact, Media Matters for America has debunked each of these
claims, documenting that: 1) The White House had access to intelligence that
was unavailable to Congress and began making claims about the Iraqi threat
months before Congress received any substantial intelligence analysis; and, 2)
while several reports found that analysts felt no "pressure" from senior
policy-makers in reaching their intelligence assessments -- a conclusion that
has since been challenged by several senior intelligence officials -- no
government entity has thus far investigated and reported on whether Bush
administration officials manipulated that intelligence once they received
it.
Falsehood #1: White House, congressional Dems saw "same intelligence"
When Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) forced the Senate into
closed session November 2 and demanded a pledge that the Senate Intelligence
Committee complete its investigation into whether the Bush administration
manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the war, numerous White House
officials and conservative media figures responded that both the White House
and Congress possessed the same flawed reports and came to the same incorrect
conclusions, as Media Matters has documented.
Since President Bush echoed the claim in a November 11 speech by asserting
that "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate -- who had
access to the same intelligence -- voted to support removing Saddam Hussein
from power," it has been increasingly reported -- without correction -- in
mainstream news reports. For example, on the November 11 broadcast of ABC's
World News Tonight, correspondent Jake Tapper uncritically reported that "the
president charged critics with hypocrisy, saying many Democrats also believed
the same intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein had a dangerous arsenal."
Similarly, in a November 12 article, New York Times reporter Richard W.
Stevenson also uncritically reported Bush's assertion that "the resolution
authorizing the use of force [against Iraq] had been supported by more than 100
Democrats in the House and Senate based on the same information available to
the White House."
But while Bush accused his critics in the speech of "rewrit[ing] the history
of how that war began," it is those who are pushing the "same intelligence"
argument who are engaging in revisionism. As Media Matters documented, the
White House had access to intelligence assessments such as the Presidential
Daily Briefing (PDB) that Congress never was able to review, and the
administration failed to provide lawmakers with certain dissenting views within
the intelligence community. The administration also received information
directly from two alternative intelligence sources that were doubted by the
Intelligence Community at the time and have since been discredited: The Office
of Special Plans and Iraqi National Congress. Even among the intelligence that
Congress did ultimately receive, most lawmakers did not see a full assessment
of the Iraqi threat prior to the delivery of the National Intelligence
Estimate, the classified October 2002 document summarizing the intelligence on
Iraq's weapons programs, whereas the Bush administration began making
definitive claims about the Iraqi threat months earlier. Democrats have alleged
that the administration's early public pronouncements may have contributed to
the intelligence community's faulty judgments on Iraq, and more recent evidence
-- such as the Downing Street Memo -- has further suggested that the
administration participated actively in the interagency debates concerning what
information would be included in intelligence reports on Iraq. Moreover, the
White House's failure to declassify the caveats and dissenting views in the NIE
limited lawmakers' ability to speak publicly about discrepancies between the
administration's statements and the underlying intelligence.
Falsehood #2: Pressuring intelligence analysts equals manipulating
intelligence
The second falsehood pushed by conservatives to absolve the Bush
administration of charges that it misled the country into war, also identified
by Media Matters, has been to deceptively conflate manipulating or misusing
intelligence with "pressuring" intelligence analysts. Senate Intelligence
Committee chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) appeared to do just that on the November
6 broadcast of CBS' Face the Nation, claiming that phase one of the Senate
Intelligence Committee report, as well as the March report of the Commission on
the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass
Destruction (i.e. the Robb-Silberman Commission) and the Butler report on
British intelligence, came to the "same conclusion" that there was no
"political manipulation or pressure" by the Bush administration. Bush appeared
to follow suit in his November 11 speech:
Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the
intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These
critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no
evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments
related to Iraq's weapons programs.
This falsehood has also gone uncorrected in many news reports since Bush
adopted it. For example, while noting that some of the administration's prewar
claims have been proven to be "overstated or wrong," the Times' Stevenson wrote
that "[t]wo official inquiries" -- phase one of the Senate Intelligence
Committee investigation and the Robb-Silbermann report -- "stopped short of
ascribing the problems to political pressures," and then directly quoted Bush's
statement that conflated pressuring intelligence analysts with manipulating
intelligence.
In fact, the yet-to-be-completed "phase two" of the Senate Intelligence
Committee report on pre-war Iraq intelligence would mark the first assessment
of whether proponents of the war misused intelligence to exaggerate the threat
posed by Saddam Hussein's regime. As Media Matters has documented, the first
phase of the Senate Intelligence report concluded that intelligence assessments
were not tainted by "pressure" that analysts received from policy-makers, but
the committee postponed until after the 2004 presidential election analysis of
whether the Bush administration misused that intelligence, pledging to include
it in the second phase of the report. The Robb-Silberman report similarly
excluded examination of the use of intelligence, noting: "[W]e were not
authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments
they received from the Intelligence Community." Finally, the Butler report
focused on whether intelligence was "distort[ed]" in assessments by the British
Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), not in statements by the Bush
administration. The Butler report did conclude that President Bush's 2003 State
of the Union address claim that Iraq had "sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa" was "well-founded" -- an assessment that was contradicted
in July 2003 by then-CIA director George J. Tenet -- but produced no new
evidence in support of this conclusion and instead relied upon anonymous
"intelligence assessments at the time."
Even the conclusion reached in the first phase of the Senate Intelligence
report and in the Robb-Silberman report -- that analysts received no "pressure"
in gathering intelligence -- has been disputed by several senior intelligence
officials, including W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of the Middle East
office of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and Richard Kerr, a
onetime acting CIA director who led an internal investigation of the CIA's
failure to correctly assess Iraq's WMD capabilities.
Several media outlets identified Bush's false intel talking points
While many media outlets uncritically reported Bush's false statements, a
front-page article on November 12, The Washington Post documented that neither
of Bush's arguments were "wholly accurate":
Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence
information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to
provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding
that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their
conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration
exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.
On the November 11 broadcast of the CBS Evening News, White House
correspondent John Roberts also addressed the difference between inquiries
absolving the administration of pressuring intelligence analysts and of
manipulating intelligence:
ROBERTS: [A]n investigation found "no evidence of political pressure to
influence the intelligence community's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons
programs." But investigators were not allowed to look into how the White House
used the intelligence.
Later on the Evening News, correspondent David Martin referenced the recent
revelation that the White House did not seek out -- or even ignored -- a 2002
report by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that seriously
questioned the reliability of a captured senior Al Qaeda operative at the time
that the administration was relying on the detainee to allege a connection
between the terrorist organization and Saddam Hussein's regime. After noting
that the CIA disputed Bush's claim that "you can't distinguish between Al Qaeda
and Saddam," Martin concluded:
MARTIN: The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded "there was little useful
intelligence collected that helped determine Iraq's possible links to Al
Qaeda," but you would never know that from listening to the president and his
aides.
From the November 11 broadcast of ABC's World News Tonight:
TAPPER: Speaking at an army depot near Scranton, Pennsylvania, the president
charged critics with hypocrisy, saying many Democrats also believed the same
intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein had a dangerous arsenal.
BUSH [video clip]: While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision
or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of
how that war began.
[...]
TAPPER: It is true that at the time even some anti-war Democrats thought
Iraq was a serious threat.
[begin video clip]
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (ABC host): According to Iraq, they have no weapons of
mass destruction. Do you believe them?
FORMER VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: Oh, of course not.
REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): Saddam Hussein certainly has chemical and
biological weapons. There's no question about that.
[end video clip]
TAPPER: But Democrats say Bush misrepresented the urgency of the threat.
PELOSI [video clip]: It never, ever, ever said that there was an imminent
threat to the United States. And I guess because he knows he is wrong, he has
got to flail out and attack others.
From the November 12 New York Times article titled "Bush Contends Partisan
Critics Hurt War Effort":
In his speech, Mr. Bush asserted that Democrats as well as Republicans
believed before the invasion in 2003 that Saddam Hussein possessed banned
weapons, a conclusion, he said, that was shared by the United Nations. He
resisted any implication that his administration had deliberately distorted the
available intelligence, and said that the resolution authorizing the use of
force had been supported by more than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate
based on the same information available to the White House.
Before the war, the administration portrayed Iraq as armed with weapons that
made it a threat to the Middle East and the United States. No biological or
chemical weapons were found in Iraq after the American attack, and Mr.
Hussein's nuclear program appears to have been rudimentary and all but
dormant.
Mr. Bush has acknowledged failures in prewar intelligence but has maintained
that toppling Mr. Hussein was still justified on other grounds, including
liberating Iraqis from his rule.
Two official inquiries - by the Senate Intelligence Committee and by a
presidential commission - blamed intelligence agencies for inflating the threat
posed by Iraq's weapons programs, but stopped short of ascribing the problems
to political pressures.
But the Senate review described repeated, unsuccessful efforts by the White
House and its allies in the Pentagon to persuade the Central Intelligence
Agency to embrace the view that Iraq had provided support to Al Qaeda.
According to former administration officials, in early 2003, George J. Tenet,
then the director of central intelligence, and Colin L. Powell, then the
secretary of state, rejected elements of a speech drafted by aides to Vice
President Dick Cheney that was intended to present the administration's case
for war, calling them exaggerated and unsubstantiated by intelligence.
And some assertions by administration officials, like Mr. Cheney's statement
in 2002 that Mr. Hussein could acquire nuclear weapons "fairly soon" and
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's statement the same year that Iraq "has
chemical and biological weapons," have been proven overstated or wrong.
In defending his administration against the new round of Democratic
criticism, Mr. Bush said Friday, "While it is perfectly legitimate to criticize
my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite
the history of how that war began."
"Some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the
intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war," he said.
"These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no
evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments
related to Iraq's weapons programs.
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