WMD Commission Stonewalls

The stonewall continues.

On Thursday, President Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction intelligence released a 692-page report that harshly criticizes the U.S. intelligence establishment. It notes that "the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of it pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure." That's no news flash. The Senate intelligence committee issued a report last July that said the same. But like the Senate committee, Bush's commission--cochaired by Judge Laurence Silberman, a Republican, and former Sen. Chuck Robb, a Democrat--ignored a key issue: whether Bush and his aides overstated and misrepresented the flawed intelligence they received from the intelligence agencies. As I wrote about days ago, Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the intelligence committee, promised last summer that his committee would investigate the administration's prewar use (or abuse) of the WMD intelligence after the 2004 election, but more recently Roberts backed away from that vow, claiming such an inquiry would now be pointless. The commission, which claimed it found no evidence that Bush officials pressured intelligence analysts to rig their reports, notes in a footnote:

Our review has been limited by our charter to the question of alleged policymaker pressure on the Intelligence Community to shape its conclusions to conform to the policy preferences of the administration. There is a separate issue of how policymakers used the intelligence they were given and how they reflected it in their presentations to Congress and the public. That issue is not within our charter and we therefore did not consider it nor do we express a view on it.

So two years after Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, there still has been no official inquiry into how he and his lieutenants handled the pre-war intelligence. The question is whether Bush and other administration officials exaggerated the intelligence community's overstatements. And the evidence suggests they did. Bush claimed Saddam Hussein was "dealing with" al Qaeda before the war, but the CIA had not reported that. Bush said Hussein had amassed a "massive stockpile" of biological weapons, yet the intelligence community had only reported (errantly) that Iraq had an active research and development program for biological weapons. Bush and his Republican allies in Congress have so far succeeded in keeping his role in the WMD scandal out of the picture. (Democrats, where are you?)

The presidential WMD commission found numerous problems within the intelligence community. It says, "we still know disturbingly little about the weapons programs and even less about the intentions of many of our most dangerous adversaries." (This is bad news for anyone who wants to bomb Iran or North Korea.) The report is mostly depressing, as it describes severe dysfunctions within the intelligence establishment. But the commission casts little, if any, blame toward the person ultimately responsible for the intelligence community: the president of the United States. And the current president even bestowed upon former CIA Director George Tenet, who was at the helm during this period of screw-ups, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz received one, too. And yesterday the Rand Corporation released a report concluding that his Pentagon failed to plan adequately for the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. The Rand study says that stabilization and reconstruction issues "were addressed only very generally" and "no planning was undertaken to ensure the security of the Iraqi people.")

The WMD commission took only a few modest steps toward addressing--in the most general terms--the role played by Bush and the policymakers in the Iraq WMD intelligence failure. For instance, the commission notes:

The Intelligence Community needs to be pushed. It will not do its best unless it is pressed by policymakers-sometimes to the point of discomfort. Analysts must be pressed to explain how much they don't know; the collection agencies must be pressed to explain why they don't have better information on key topics. While policymakers must be prepared to credit intelligence that doesn't fit their preferences, no important intelligence assessment should be accepted without sharp questioning that forces the community to explain exactly how it came to that assessment and what alternatives might also be true.

It's obvious that Bush did not push the intelligence services in this fashion. As the White House has conceded, Bush did not even read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq produced in October 2002. This was the intelligence community's ultimate summary of its intelligence on Iraq. A close reading of the document could have led Bush or national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (who also did not read the 90-page paper) to raise the sort of questions the commission suggests. But that did not happen. When Silberman was asked at a press conference if Bush had been inquisitive enough, he referred to a passage in Bob Woodward's latest book in which Bush is depicted asking Tenet if the intelligence is sound and Tenet maintains it is a "slam-dunk." That clearly was not good enough.