The Ashford Zone Blog

Glenn Reynolds notes with approval this "pushback" from National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley:

"We need to put this debate behind us," he said. "It’s unfair to the country. It’s unfair to the men and women in uniform risking their lives to make this country safe."

Sadly, "don’t look behind the curtain" is not a convincing argument.  It’s what the Wizard says to Dorothy when he’s in the process of being exposed as a fraud.

Top Bush administration officials argued before the 2003 invasion that the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was working toward a nuclear weapon.

Hadley said the intelligence Bush used for those arguments "was roughly the same intelligence that the Clinton administration saw."

So that’s the argument?  The "Bush intelligence" was "roughly the same" as the "Clinton intelligence"?

Setting aside the obvious weasel word "roughly" — if what Hadley is saying is true, then there is a significant point he is overlooking:  that intelligence, whatever it was, was 4-5 years old when Bush "used" it. 

In other words, when Clinton was using it, it was fresh intelligence; when Bush was using it, it was old.

And that’s an important, indeed crucial, difference.  Intelligence has a shelf life.  A banana may be "the same" banana as it was five years ago when it was picked from the tree, but I assure you that it is no longer a banana I would consider "good".

I honestly think that some neo-cons don’t understand the concept of time.  I imagine Hadley probably opens milk that is months past the expiration date, takes a big swig, and spits it out.  Examining the carton, he thinks "That’s strange!  It’s the same milk that I drank from two months ago.  And it was just fine back then!"

Furthermore, to argue — as Bush did — that Iraq posed an "urgent threat", he really should not have relied on "the same intelligence" as Clinton.  And this is, of course, where the neo-con argument breaks down.  To say that "Clinton believed it", or that "everyone believed it based on the same intelligence that Clinton had" belies the urgency, conveyed by Bush and others, that Iraq was an "urgent threat" and we needed to do something — right then — lest we see ourselves enveloped in a "mushroom cloud".

Kevin Drum does an end-run around name-calling, and simply offers the evidence (with supporting links):

The case for manipulation is pretty strong. It relies on several things, but I think the most important of them has been the discovery that the administration deliberately suppressed dissenting views on some of the most important pieces of evidence that they used to bolster their case for war. For future reference, here’s a list of five key dissents about administration claims, all of which were circulated before the war but kept under wraps until after the war:

1. The Claim: Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al-Qaeda prisoner captured in 2001, was the source of intelligence that Saddam Hussein had trained al-Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons. This information was used extensively by Colin Powell in his February 2003 speech to the UN.

   What We Know Now: Al-Libi’s information was obtained under torture. Link. As early as February 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency circulated a report, labeled DITSUM No. 044-02, saying that it was "likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers." Link. This assessment was hidden from the public until after the war.

2. The Claim: An Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball" was the source of reporting that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of mobile biowarfare labs. Curveball’s claims of mobile bio labs were repeated by many administration figures during the runup to war.

   What We Know Now: The only American agent to actually meet with Curveball before the war warned that he appeared to be an alcoholic and was unreliable. However, his superior in the CIA told him it was best to keep quiet about this: "Let’s keep in mind the fact that this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn’t say, and the powers that be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he’s talking about." Link. This dissent was not made public until 2004, in a response to the SSCI report that was written by Senator Dianne Feinstein. Link.

3. The Claim: Iraq had purchased thousands of aluminum tubes to act as centrifuges for the creation of bomb grade uranium. Dick Cheney said they were "irrefutable evidence" of an Iraqi nuclear program and George Bush cited them in his 2003 State of the Union address.

   What We Know Now: Centrifuge experts at the Oak Ridge Office of the Department of Energy had concluded long before the war that the tubes were unsuitable for centrifuge work and were probably meant for use in artillery rockets. The State Department concurred. Link. Both of these dissents were omitted from the CIA’s declassified National Intelligence Estimate, released on October 4, 2002. Link. They were subsequently made public after the war, on July 18, 2003. Link.

4. The Claim: Saddam Hussein attempted to purchase uranium yellowcake from Africa as part of his attempt to reconstitute his nuclear program. President Bush cited this publicly in his 2003 State of the Union address.

   What We Know Now: The primary piece of evidence for this claim was a document showing that Iraq had signed a contract to buy yellowcake from Niger. However, the CIA specifically told the White House in October 2002 that the "reporting was weak" and that they disagreed with the British about the reliability of this intelligence. Link. At the same time, the State Department wrote that the documents were "completely implausible." Link.

   Three months later, in January 2003, Alan Foley, head of the CIA’s counterproliferation effort, tried to persuade the White House not to include the claim in the SOTU because the information wasn’t solid enough, but was overruled. Link. Five weeks later, the documents were conclusively shown to be forgeries. Link. In July 2003, after the war had ended, CIA Director George Tenet admitted publicly that that the claim should never have been made. Link.

5. The Claim: Saddam Hussein was developing long range aerial drones capable of attacking the continental United States with chemical or biological weapons. President Bush made this claim in a speech in October 2002 and Colin Powell repeated it during his speech to the UN in February 2003.

   What We Know Now: The Iraqi drones had nowhere near the range to reach the United States, and Air Force experts also doubted that they were designed to deliver WMD. However, their dissent was left out of the October 2002 NIE and wasn’t made public until July 2003. Link.

This is not a comprehensive list, so feel free to add other specific examples of suppressed intelligence in comments.

And I wholeheartedly endorse Kevin’s thoughts here:

One final word on this: the issue here is not who was right and who was wrong, or even whether the overall weight of the evidence was sufficient to justify the war. It would have been perfectly reasonable for the White House to present all the evidence pro and con and then use that evidence to make the strongest possible case for war. But that’s not what they did. Instead, they suppressed any evidence that might have thrown doubt on their arguments, making it impossible for the public to evaluate what they were saying. In fact, by abusing the classification process to keep these dissents secret, they even made it impossible for senators who knew the truth to say anything about it in public.

And the responses are great.  Here’s a sample:

Josh Marshall:

The fact that the administration’s push for war wasn’t even about WMD in the first place. Scarcely a week goes by when I don’t get an email from a reader who writes, "I always knew that Saddam didn’t have WMDs. How is that you, with all your access and reporting, didn’t know that too?" Good question. They were right. And I was wrong. But like many things in this reality-based universe of ours, this was a question subject to empirical inquiry. No one really knew what Saddam was doing between 1998 and 2002. And US intelligence made a lot of very poor assumptions based on sketchy hints and clues. But the solution, at least the first part of it, was to get inspectors in on the ground and actually find out. That is what President Bush’s very credible threat of force had done by the Fall of 2002. But once there the inspectors began making pretty steady progress in showing that many of our suspicions about reconstituted WMD programs didn’t bear out, the White House response was to begin trying to discredit the inspectors themselves. By early 2003, inspections had shown that there was no serious nuclear weapons effort underway — the only sort of operation which could have represented a serious or imminent threat. From January of 2003 the administration went to work trying to insure that the war could be started before the rationale for war was entirely discredited. They wanted to create fait accomplis, facts on the ground that no subsequent information or developments could alter. The whole thing was a con. It wasn’t about WMD.

***

In the president’s new angle that his critics are trying to ‘rewrite history’, those critics might want to point out that his charge would be more timely after he stopped putting so much effort into obstructing any independent inquiry that could allow an accurate first draft of the history to be written. In any case, he must sense now that he’s blowing into a fierce wind. The judgement of history hangs over this guy like a sharp, heavy knife. His desperation betrays him. He knows it too.

Kevin Drum:

On Friday, George Bush said that, based on the intelligence known at the time, "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate…voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power." In tomorrow’s Washington Post, one of those Democrats, John Edwards, says this:

It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002….The information the American people were hearing from the president — and that I was being given by our intelligence community — wasn’t the whole story. Had I known this at the time, I never would have voted for this war.

Legal Fiction:

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth re-emphasizing in light of Bush’s speech. The argument of critics is not that Bush mistakenly thought that Iraq had WMDs. A lot of people thought that – and that was a reasonable assumption. The argument is that the administration made specific exaggerations about specific pieces of intelligence. In doing so, it misled the American people.

Washington Post:

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

In the same speech, Bush asserted that "more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power." Giving a preview of Bush’s speech, Hadley had said that "we all looked at the same intelligence."

But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President’s Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community’s views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.

Duncan nails it:

I think that the recent statements of Stephen Hadley are really all we need to put the final nail in the coffin of the Bush adminsitration’s credibility on anything. These people are just quite literally loathsome.

Hadley argues that Democrats had the same intelligence because "parts of" the NIE[National Intelligence Estimate] "had been made public."

Right, and the parts of the NIE which weren’t made public were the parts which suggested that the parts which were made public were full of shit.

Any talking head who overlooks this fact to try to claim that "democrats had the same intelligence as Republicans" is just completely full of shit. They only the had the bits that made their case, not the bits which took away from it.

And people question my patriotism?

Matt Yglesius provides the supporting facts regarding the NIE.  An excerpt:

[Democratic Senators] Graham and Durbin had been demanding for more than a month that the CIA produce an NIE on the Iraqi threat–a summary of the available intelligence, reflecting the judgment of the entire intelligence community–and toward the end of September, it was delivered. Like Tenet’s earlier letter, the classified NIE was balanced in its assessments. Graham called on Tenet to produce a declassified version of the report that could guide members in voting on the resolution. Graham and Durbin both hoped the declassified report would rebut the kinds of overheated claims they were hearing from administration spokespeople. As Durbin tells TNR, "The most frustrating thing I find is when you have credible evidence on the intelligence committee that is directly contradictory to statements made by the administration."

On October 1, 2002, Tenet produced a declassified NIE. But Graham and Durbin were outraged to find that it omitted the qualifications and countervailing evidence that had characterized the classified version and played up the claims that strengthened the administration’s case for war. For instance, the intelligence report cited the much-disputed aluminum tubes as evidence that Saddam "remains intent on acquiring" nuclear weapons. And it claimed, "All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons and that these tubes could be used in a centrifuge enrichment program"–a blatant mischaracterization.

Think Progress also has an excellent rundown of important difference between the classified NIE and the declassified NIE.

Other examples abound, i.e., this NYT report from 10/3/04 (emphasis added):

From April 2001 to September 2002, the agency wrote at least 15 reports on the tubes. Many were sent only to high-level policy makers, including President Bush, and did not circulate to other intelligence agencies. None have been released, though some were described in the Senate’s report.

But several Congressional and intelligence officials with access to the 15 assessments said not one of them informed senior policy makers of the Energy Department’s dissent. They described a series of reports, some with ominous titles, that failed to convey either the existence or the substance of the intensifying debate.

Well, the Bush campaign-style strategy to respond to criticisms about his Iraqi War intelligence exaggerations, is under way.  Bush just gave a speech.

And according to CNN, he said this:

Speaking at a Veterans Day event in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, Bush said, "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began."

"Rewriting history" is going to be the phrase of the day (and possibly many days), and it doesn’t work to Bush’s benefit.

That was a faux pas.  The history is recent enough to be in every American’s mind.  Words and phrases like "imminent threat", "mushroom cloud", "we know where the WMDs are", "yellowcake from Africa", etc..  To pretend now that these weren’t raised in the pretext of invading Iraq is serious historical revision, Mr. President.  And you’re the one doing it.

Let me this as simply as I can, Mr. President:  Unless and until you (or any of your supporters) can point to a speech during the run-up to the war — from anyone in your administration — in which you revealed CIA doubts about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, I’m not receptive to your charge that people outside the Administration engaged in revisionism.