U.S. Intelligence and Iraq WMD

It is always nice when the documents reveal what you just know is true, especially if you are a historian.

This appears to be the case with the Bush administrations manufacturing of a case for war with Iraq, as new documents show that intelligence reports were just shaped to match the Bush demands*

read the summaries and the pdfs of the documents here.

U.S. Intelligence and Iraq WMD

"Washington D.C., August 22, 2008 - The U.S. intelligence community buckled sooner in 2002 than previously reported to Bush administration pressure for data justifying an invasion of Iraq, according to a documents posting on the Web today by National Security Archive senior fellow John Prados.

The documents suggest that the public relations push for war came before the intelligence analysis, which then conformed to public positions taken by Pentagon and White House officials. For example, a July 2002 draft of the "White Paper" ultimately issued by the CIA in October 2002 actually pre-dated the National Intelligence Estimate that the paper purportedly summarized, but which Congress did not insist on until September 2002.

A similar comparison between a declassified draft and the final version of the British government's "White Paper" on Iraq weapons of mass destruction adds to evidence that the two nations colluded in the effort to build public support for the invasion of Iraq. Dr. Prados concludes that the new evidence tends to support charges raised by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan and by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in its long-delayed June 2008 "Phase II" report on politicization of intelligence."




...

"We shall offer only a few examples here. First is the case of the CIA white paper, “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs.” That document is dated October 2002 [Document 1] and was issued on October 4. It has been represented as a distillation of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq published two days earlier, with the most sensitive, secret information stripped out. Posted here today is the major portion of the text of the same paper in draft [Document 2], as it existed in July 2002. This document demonstrates that the white paper existed long before the NIE was even requested by Congress. In fact the illustrations in the July version are the same as those in the final report. A close comparison of the text shows, further, that much of the argumentation is identical, and that the differences between the two are strictly in the nature of separating text to insert more charges or to sharpen them. The entire product has the character of rhetoric. Little of the text shows the kind of approach characteristic of intelligence analysis. The fact that this document was in preparation at the CIA in July indicates that the Bush administration was actively engaged in a process of building support for war months ahead of the time it has previously been understood to have done so. In fact evidence exists that the CIA white paper was commissioned as early as May 2002. (Note 7)

This point is made even sharper by recently declassified Department of Defense documents, including a memorandum from the OUSDP that details the kinds of information seen as desirable to obtain from intelligence in order to strengthen the case for war against Iraq [Document 3]. The timing of this document suggests that this text was a response to the draft CIA white paper, created at a point when Pentagon critics of CIA reporting were actively pressing their case against the agency’s refusal to accept arguments that Saddam Hussein was allied with Al Qaeda. Changes in the CIA white paper between its July draft and the final document track closely with the OUSDP comments. The net impression is that the CIA white paper was rewritten to conform to administration preferences. If so, U.S. intelligence a priori made itself a tool of a political effort, vitiating the intelligence function and confirming the presence of a politicized process. The specific analytic failures on Iraq intelligence become much less significant in such a climate, especially in that they all yielded intelligence predictions of exactly the kind the Bush administration wanted to hear.

This impression is strengthened, and suspicions of collusion broadened, when the record of the British government’s white paper on Iraqi WMD is laid side by side with that of the CIA. In the course of British official investigations of the antecedents to the war, and the death of physicist David Kelly, a draft of the British white paper was released that is dated June 20 [Document 4]. As in the American case, the Joint Intelligence Committee, which originated this document and plays a role similar to that of the National Intelligence Council in the U.S., modified its draft to issue a final version on September 24, 2002, that was even more somber [Document 5]. There is a considerable record on the Blair government’s efforts to shape the content of the British white paper in directions not supported by the intelligence. "

* maybe Bush administration intelligence figures should write college administrative reports...