Are Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson partisan cons?

Of 'Lies' and WMD
The Senate vindicates President Bush and exposes Joe Wilson as a partisan fraud.

Monday, July 12, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

"The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities."

So reads Conclusion 83 of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar intelligence on Iraq. The Committee likewise found no evidence of pressure to link Iraq to al Qaeda. So it appears that some of the claims about WMD used by the Bush Administration and others to argue for war in Iraq were mistaken because they were based on erroneous information provided by the CIA.

A few apologies would seem to be in order. Allegations of lying or misleading the nation to war are about the most serious charge that can be leveled against a President. But according to this unanimous study, signed by Jay Rockefeller and seven other Democrats, those frequent charges from prominent Democrats and the media are without merit.

Or to put it more directly, if President Bush was "lying" about WMD, then so was Mr. Rockefeller when he relied on CIA evidence to claim in October 2002 that Saddam Hussein's weapons "pose a very real threat to America." Also lying at the time were John Kerry, John Edwards, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and so on. Yet Mr. Rockefeller is still suggesting on the talk shows, based on nothing but inference and innuendo, that there was undue political Bush "pressure" on CIA analysts.

The West Virginia Democrat also asserted on Friday that Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith has been running a rogue intelligence operation that is "not lawful." Mr. Feith's shop has spent more than 1,800 hours responding to queries from the Senate and has submitted thousands of pages of documents--none of which supports such a charge. Shouldn't even hyper-partisan Senators have to meet some minimum standard of honesty?

In fact, the report shows that one of the first allegations of false intelligence was itself a distortion: Mr. Bush's allegedly misleading claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had been seeking uranium ore from Africa. The Senate report notes that Presidential accuser and former CIA consultant Joe Wilson returned from his trip to Africa with no information that cast serious doubt on such a claim; and that, contrary to Mr. Wilson's public claims, his wife (a CIA employee) was involved in helping arrange his mission.

"When coordinating the State of the Union, no Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts or officials told the National Security Council (NSC) to remove the '16 words' or that there were concerns about the credibility of the Iraq-Niger Uranium reporting," the report says. In short, Joe Wilson is a partisan fraud whose trip disproved nothing, and what CIA doubts there were on Niger weren't shared with the White House.
The broader CIA failure on Iraq's WMD is troubling, though it is important to keep in mind that this was a global failure. Every serious intelligence service thought Saddam still had WMD, and the same consensus existed across the entire U.S. intelligence community. One very alarming explanation, says the report, is that the CIA had "no [human] sources collecting against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after 1998." That's right. Not one source.

When asked why not, a CIA officer replied "because it's very hard to sustain." The report's rather obvious answer is that spying "should be within the norm of the CIA's activities and capabilities," and some blame for this human intelligence failure has to fall on recently departed Director George Tenet and his predecessor, John Deutch.

The Senate report blames these CIA failures not just on management but also on "a risk averse corporate culture." This sounds right, and Acting Director John McLaughlin's rejection of this criticism on Friday is all the more reason for Mr. Bush to name a real replacement. Richard Armitage has been mentioned for the job, but the Deputy Secretary of State has been consistently wrong about Iran, which will be a principal threat going forward, and his and Colin Powell's philosophy at the State Department has been to let the bureaucrats run the place. We can think of better choices.

One real danger now is that the intelligence community will react to this Iraq criticism by taking even fewer risks, or by underestimating future threats as it has so often in the past. (The failure to detect that Saddam was within a year of having a nuclear bomb prior to the 1991 Gulf War is a prime example.) The process of developing "national intelligence estimates," or NIEs, will only reinforce this sense of internal, lowest-common-denominator, conformity. If the Senate is looking for a place to recommend long-term reform, dispensing with NIEs would be a good place to start.
Above all, it's important to remember that the Senate report does not claim that the overall assessment of Iraq as a threat was mistaken. U.N. Resolution 1441 gave Saddam ample opportunity to come clean about his weapons, but he refused. The reports from David Kay and his WMD task force have since shown that Saddam violated 1441 in multiple ways.

Saddam retained a "just-in-time" capability to make WMD, even if he destroyed, hid or removed the "stockpiles" that the CIA believed he had. It's fanciful to think, especially in light of the Oil for Food scandal, that U.N.-led containment was a realistic option for another 12 years, or that once containment ended Saddam wouldn't have expanded his weapons capacity very quickly. The Senate report makes clear we need a better CIA, not that we should have left in power a homicidal, WMD-using dictator.