Where were the whistleblowers?

Where were the whistleblowers?
July 14, 2004 10:38 AM

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones

Did the White House put undue pressure on intelligence analysts in the run-up to the Iraq war? The Senate intelligence report, of course, says no. But at the time, plenty of analysts were saying yes, yes, yes, as evidenced by a KnightRidder story written back in 2002:

"Analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A dozen other officials echoed his views in interviews.

No one who was interviewed disagreed.

How can this possibly square with the Senate's conclusions -- that no intelligence was affected by any sort of pressure? As noted here, the Senate committee may have been looking for the wrong sort of pressure. It's probably not the case that analysts were coerced into changing their conclusions. But analysts may have spent so much time working on administration pet-projects, that they didn't have time to build up proper dissents -- a complaint that had been voiced in the past to writers like Kenneth Pollack.

Anyway, national security journalist Laura Rozen has another, more elegant theory: Analysts were simply too afraid to testify before the Senate.

As a journalist who has been covering the national security beat for a few years, I have intelligence sources who told me in the past couple years about pressure to find a link between al Qaeda and Iraq, and more than pressure, an environment where this was a certain obsession, the holy grail. I called up Pat Roberts' office many months ago and spoke with a staffer there about it, and the staffer said sincerely, tell those people, call us from a payphone, we don't have to know their names, but we want to know. But when I told this to various intel sources, their response was, are you crazy?

- Bradford Plumer