Bush Sets Narrow Limits on Inquiry

Bush Sets Narrow Limits on Inquiry
Critics urge broader scope for Iraq panel

By Stephen J. Hedges
Washington Bureau

February 8, 2004

WASHINGTON -- President Bush has established a narrow charge for his new independent commission on U.S. intelligence capabilities, directing the panel to focus on flawed prewar intelligence assessments of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and other nations.

But the commission may quickly find itself pressured to explore broader events and discussions that formed the tangle of spy data and policymaking leading up to the March 20 invasion of Iraq.

Those uncharted lines of inquiry that administration critics are urging the group to address include:

- The role of Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff, including Cheney's visits to the CIA to review intelligence reports and his trips to Capitol Hill to describe, in closed briefings, the prewar dangers posed by Iraq.

- The role of George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, who in an impassioned defense of his agency and its work Thursday said Bush "gets his intelligence from one person and one community--me."

- The reliance on questionable human sources, including Iraqi defectors and foreign opposition leaders, who had much to gain from U.S. intervention.

- The role of the Pentagon, especially its consumption of intelligence reports by newly established groups such as the Office of Special Plans, which was formed to plan for postwar Iraq. Like Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a strident proponent for ending the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein, once saying of Iraq's weapons: "We know where they are." Rumsfeld explained to the Senate last week that he meant the U.S. knew where Iraq's weapons sites were located--not the weapons themselves.

- The objections raised by those within the administration, particularly at the State Department, where a good bit of the intelligence on Iraq was discounted as untrustworthy.

Bush charged his panel to "examine intelligence on weapons of mass destruction," comparing what has and has not been found in Iraq to date to what his administration believed existed before the war.

It could be a challenge for this commission. Only one of its seven members, retired Adm. William Studeman, has been involved directly in intelligence work. Studeman was once deputy director of the CIA.

One of the panel's co-chairmen, Charles Robb, a former Democratic senator from Virginia, was a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The panel's other four members include two federal jurists, commission co-chairman Laurence Silberman, of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, and Patricia Wald, a former member of the same court. The others are Lloyd Cutler, a former White House counsel during the Clinton and Carter administrations, and Richard Levin, president of Yale University. Two other members will be named later.

Administration critics were quick to charge that with the post-election deadline Bush set for a report--it is due in March 2005--the commission is a thinly disguised attempt to shelve the growing controversy over prewar intelligence and the decision to go to war in Iraq.

"This is the most ill-prepared snow job I have seen in a long time," said Ivo Daalder, a National Security Council adviser in the Clinton administration and now a Brookings Institution fellow. " . . . The commissioners he has named know absolutely nothing about the subject matter."

Asked about the report's deadline in a "Meet the Press" interview to air Sunday, the president said the commission needed time for its work.

"There is going to be ample time for the American people to assess whether or not I made ... good calls--whether I used good judgment, whether or not I made the right decision in removing Saddam Hussein from power," Bush said.

He also said in the interview that Tenet's job was safe.

Others weighing the commission's prospects said the panel could bring measured focus to the issue of U.S. intelligence-gathering and its shortcomings.

"I'm happy with the commission so far," said W. Patrick Lang, a former top Defense Intelligence Agency official who has been a frequent critic of the administration. "They took a more sophisticated approach and decided to pick people who probably will really want to do the job."

As for the members' lack of direct intelligence experience, Lang said: "That's good. They don't need it. Intelligence is a matter of applied logic and reason."

Though once insistent that weapons of mass destruction would be uncovered in postwar Iraq, Bush and some prominent members of his administration have recently backed away from such claims.

Even so, the president says the war was justified, no matter how the search for weapons concludes.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said that he might not have supported the war had he known what he knows now about Iraq's weapons programs, a statement he later recanted.

Tenet also raised doubts about what the administration once portrayed as a near-certainty. The CIA director said last week that his analysts described Hussein, who was captured in December, as an unpredictable despot with a history of deploying deadly unconventional weapons. But no one from his agency, Tenet said, told the administration that the Iraqi threat "was imminent."

The starting point for the new panel's work undoubtedly will be the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, an assessment that was quickly drafted in the fall of 2002 at the request of Congress.

At the time, Bush was seeking congressional approval for the authority to wage war if Iraq refused to comply with United Nations resolutions demanding weapons inspections. But some lawmakers wanted to know how dire the Iraqi threat really was.

In just a few weeks, Tenet's team of analysts brought together the evidence they had compiled, much of it based, according to intelligence officials, on information gathered by UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. Those inspections had been halted four years earlier, suggesting that some of the CIA's evidence was outdated.

The estimate states that the CIA has "high confidence" that "Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles" and that "Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material."

Tenet said Thursday that the analysis "concluded that in some of these categories Iraq had weapons, and that in others where it did not have them, it was trying to develop them."

"Analysts differed on several important aspects of these programs, and those debates were spelled out in the estimate," he said.

But some former intelligence officers and congressional critics say the intelligence estimate made far too much of Iraq's weapons capabilities and had few of the caveats typically found in such documents to qualify intelligence sources.

"The estimate was wrong, at the end of the day," said Larry Johnson, an ex-CIA analyst. "But even though the estimate was wrong, there's nothing in the estimate that would lead you to the conclusion that you should invade Iraq immediately."

The report, though, formed the basis for the administration's strongest claims about Iraq, especially in Congress, where Bush won important support for the war in October 2002.

Cheney, a former member of the House, proved to be particularly effective at lobbying his former colleagues. But since then, some lawmakers have expressed doubts about the briefing they received before the war vote.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) is among them. Nelson said he voted for the war after he and his colleagues were told that Iraq had developed unmanned aerial vehicles that could be launched from ships and disperse deadly chemical agents. The likely targets, they were told, included cities along the East Coast.

"Not only was that false," Nelson said in a recent interview, "but they also did not tell me, and I only found out recently and after the fact, that there was a huge dispute over the veracity of this claim" within the intelligence community.

"What I'm trying to find out," he asked, "is why would they tell me something that was false?"