Debunking Prewar Intelligence Falsehoods

In recent days, conservatives have pushed two principal falsehoods -- echoed by President Bush in a November 11 speech and uncritically reported in mainstream news reports -- to rebut Democratic criticism that the White House manipulated intelligence to build the case for war in Iraq.

First, conservatives have claimed that the White House's Democratic critics saw the same intelligence as the Bush administration and similarly concluded that Iraq was a significant threat. Second, the administration's defenders have conflated two issues: whether the administration pressured intelligence analysts to produce intelligence supporting its case for war, and whether the administration manipulated or cherry-picked the intelligence it received.

By conflating the two questions in news reports, the media have advanced the Bush administration's line that several government inquiries have already cleared the administration of both pressuring intelligence agencies and manipulating intelligence. In fact, Media Matters for America has debunked each of these claims, documenting that:

1. The White House had access to intelligence that was unavailable to Congress and began making claims about the Iraqi threat months before Congress received any substantial intelligence analysis; and;
2. while several reports found that analysts felt no "pressure" from senior policy-makers in reaching their intelligence assessments -- a conclusion that has since been challenged by several senior intelligence officials -- no government entity has thus far investigated and reported on whether Bush administration officials manipulated that intelligence once they received it.

Falsehood #1: White House, congressional Dems saw "same intelligence"

When Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) forced the Senate into closed session November 2 and demanded a pledge that the Senate Intelligence Committee complete its investigation into whether the Bush administration manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the war, numerous White House officials and conservative media figures responded that both the White House and Congress possessed the same flawed reports and came to the same incorrect conclusions, as Media Matters has documented.

Since President Bush echoed the claim in a November 11 speech by asserting that "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate -- who had access to the same intelligence -- voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power," it has been increasingly reported -- without correction -- in mainstream news reports.

For example, on the November 11 broadcast of ABC's World News Tonight, correspondent Jake Tapper uncritically reported that "the president charged critics with hypocrisy, saying many Democrats also believed the same intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein had a dangerous arsenal." Similarly, in a November 12 article, New York Times reporter Richard W. Stevenson also uncritically reported Bush's assertion that "the resolution authorizing the use of force [against Iraq] had been supported by more than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate based on the same information available to the White House."

But while Bush accused his critics in the speech of "rewrit[ing] the history of how that war began," it is those who are pushing the "same intelligence" argument who are engaging in revisionism. As Media Matters documented, the White House had access to intelligence assessments such as the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) that Congress never was able to review, and the administration failed to provide lawmakers with certain dissenting views within the intelligence community. The administration also received information directly from two alternative intelligence sources that were doubted by the Intelligence Community at the time and have since been discredited: The Office of Special Plans and Iraqi National Congress.