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No evidence CIA slanted Iraq data
Congressional and CIA investigations into the prewar intelligence on Iraqâs weapons and links to terrorism have found no evidence that CIA analysts colored their judgment because of perceived or actual political pressure from White House officials, according to intelligence officials and congressional officials from both parties. Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy CIA director who is leading the CIAâs review of its prewar Iraq assessment, said an examination of the secret analytical work done by CIA analysts showed that it remained consistent over many years. "There was pressure and a lot of debate, and people should have a lot of debate, thatâs quite legitimate," Kerr said. "But the bottom line is, over a period of several years," the analystsâ assessments "were very consistent. They didnât change their views." Kerrâs findings mirror those of two probes being conducted separately by the House and Senate intelligence committees, which have interviewed, under oath, every analyst involved in assessing Iraqâs weapons programs and terrorist ties. The panel chairmen, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), and other congressional officials said in recent interviews that they found no evidence that analysts shaded their findings to more closely fit the White Houseâs known desire to create the strongest, most urgent case for war with Iraq. The conclusion that analysts did not buckle under political pressure does not answer the question of why the intelligence reports were so flawed. Nor does it address allegations -- made by Democrats in Congress and Democratic presidential candidates -- that top Bush administration officials misused intelligence and exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq. On Wednesday, former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay told a Senate committee that he no longer believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in the months leading up to the war. And he called for an independent inquiry into why U.S. intelligence agencies believed the opposite. The White House, which has said it opposes such an outside inquiry, has said final conclusions about Iraqâs weapons programs and U.S. intelligence cannot be made until the Iraq Survey Group, the inspection agency Kay used to lead, completes its work. "I want the American people to know that I, too, want to know the facts," Bush told reporters yesterday. "I want to be able to compare what the Iraq Survey Group has found with what we thought prior to going into Iraq." Bush added that Hussein was a danger and "we dealt with the danger. And, as a result, the world is a better place and a more peaceful place, and the Iraqi people are free." There were instances before the war in which intelligence analysts said they sensed pressure to reach certain conclusions, but the House and Senate investigators said there was no indication they bowed to such wishes. Last year, for example, some analysts at the CIA complained to senior officials when Vice President Cheney made multiple trips to CIA headquarters to question their studies of Iraqâs weapons programs and alleged links to al Qaeda. And analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency told investigators they sensed pressure when civilian Defense Department leaders constantly questioned why their analysis had found only tentative links between al Qaeda and Iraq. But "their constant message" to congressional investigators was "they didnât buckle to pressure," another congressional official said. Neither the CIA inspector general nor the agencyâs ombudsmen received any complaints about outside meddling, a senior intelligence official said. Added one congressional official: "There were no anonymous calls, no letters, nothing." The CIA, congressional intelligence committees, Kerrâs team and the Presidentâs Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board are investigating how the CIA analysis missed the mark so widely. That is a more difficult question to answer and a much more complex problem to fix than situations in which analysts are improperly influenced by elected officials, intelligence experts said. The congressional committees have found that CIA analysts relied too heavily on outdated, circumstantial intelligence and on information from unreliable informants. Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee this week that he had talked to CIA analysts and had found no evidence of "inappropriate command influence." "And, you know, almost in a perverse way," Kay added, "I wish it had been undue influence, because we know how to correct that. We get rid of the people who in fact were exercising that. The fact that it wasnât tells me that weâve got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong. And weâve got to figure out what was there. And thatâs what I call fundamental fault analysis." Kerr said the "analysts believed that the evidence supported their judgment. Whether it did or not is another question." The CIA maintains that it is still too early to say that its assessment was wrong because the search for weapons is not over. There are still millions of pages of documents to be read, hundreds of sites to visit and thousands of Iraqis to be interviewed, the agency says. CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said Kerrâs and the committeesâ findings mirror the CIAâs view of its analystsâ work: "We have long said and still say that our analysts didnât change their assessment of Iraq because of any outside pressure." In fact, some analysts have told Kerr and congressional investigators that they welcomed the attention of Cheney on his visits. "Analysts are very independent people," Kerr said. "When they get pressure, they tend to react the other way. They find it quite easy to stand up" to superiors. "Itâs kind of the culture." Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-01-31 |
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