Eric Umansky

Me Voy...

And I'm off. I'll back and tanned in two weeks.

George, Tony and WMDs: Only Dishonest and Disingenuous

I think the Economist gets it right when it pronounces: George Bush and Tony Blair "believed what they said, but they said more than they knew." In other words, they didn't know they were wrong, but they also didn't know they were right even though their public rhetoric and reports claimed otherwise.

That's one of the key--and I think underappreciated--takeaways from the recent Senate Intel report as well as the British Butler report. The two government's public claims about Iraq, whether in the U.S.'s unclassified CIA report in October 2002 or the British dossier published around the same time both went significantly beyond the intelligence services' assessments.

To put it in journo terms, Bush and Tony weren't Stephen Glasses. They were just like dishonest magazine writers: They included only those facts that supported their thesis; when those weren't available they took hypothoses and portrayed them as fact, even if the hypothoses were weak filmsy as balsa wood. It's the kind of stuff any 22-year-old fact-checker would flag and, at any honestly run magazine would get the writers fired.

But of course, our elected leaders, who you know, decide matters of war and stuff, shouldn't be forced to hold the same high standards.

Havana-bound

Next week, I'm heading to Cuba in two weeks. Anybody who's been there recently, I'd love hear to your hear tips or post in the comments section for all.

Note to Treasury Department personnel: I have a permit, thanks!

Note to potential robbers: I also have a house-sitter, thanks!

Remember Steven Hatfill?

Well, he's still pissed. He's suing the New York Times and Nicholas Kristof for purportedly defaming him in a series of articles Kristof wrote two years ago suggesting that Hatfill was the anthrax mailer. Kristof didn't name Hatfill, instead ID'ing him as "Mr. Z." But as I mentioned at the time, it wasn't hard to figure out who Kristof was fingering.

Cooking the Books Con't

So I've been wondering--and wondering--what caused the change between the classified version of the intel community's official assessment of Iraq in 2002 and unclassified version released just a month or so later that was sexed up. (I'm also curious why this angle isn't getting more attention from reporters.) Was it pressure from the WH? Is so, was it implicit or explicit (which, btw, i think is a significant distinction)?

Well, Laura Rosen (or one of her readers, actually), has dug up the following Knight Ridder story published in October 2002:

While President Bush marshals congressional and international support for invading Iraq, a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war.

These officials charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses -- including distorting his links to the al-Qaida terrorist network -- have overstated the amount of international support for attacking Iraq and have downplayed the potential repercussions of a new war in the Middle East.

They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary.

"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.

Media crit moment: Imagine for a moment if Knight Ridder hadn't this run back in 2002--and instead it had been broken by the New York Times. [Thus ends my pedantic NYT-bashing moment.]

Drawing a Blank

Yesterday, I noted the difference between the classified version of the 2002 CIA report on Iraq and the one that was made public a few months later that stripped caveats and spiced up the warnings.

Turns out it going to be hard to compare the two reports in-depth. That's because the first, more carefully worded report has been almost totally blanked out by censors. According to the National Security Archive 79 of the 93 pages contain nothing but white-out.

The U.S.'s Sexing-up Scandal

As I suggested yesterday, many of the CIA's flawed contentions came from a report, called a National Intelligence Estimate, it publicly released in October 2002, while the earlier classified version of the report was far more hedged. Well, a piece buried in Saturday's Los Angeles Times digs into the differences between the reports. It's sobering stuff:

Dedicating a section of its 511-page report to discrepancies between the two versions of the crucial October 2002 NIE, the panel laid out numerous instances in which the unclassified version omitted key dissenting opinions about Iraqi weapons capabilities, overstated U.S. knowledge about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons and, in one case, inserted threatening language into the public document that was not contained in the classified version.

"The intelligence community's elimination of the caveats from the unclassified white paper misrepresented their judgments to the public, which did not have access to the classified National Intelligence Estimate containing the more carefully worded assessments," the Senate panel's report concluded.

[...]

The committee's report describes not just sins of omission, but of addition.

The classified NIE stated, for instance, that "Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating BW [biological weapons] agents and is capable of quickly producing … a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives."

In the unclassified version, the words "potentially against the U.S. homeland" are inserted at the end of the statement.

Everybody is jumping on the CIA for how its culture its broken, its analysts b-list, and so forth. I'm sure there's truth to those charges. But judging from the LAT's piece, the analysts themselves at least sometimes seem to have properly hedged. And then something or somebody excised those caveats. (The LAT notes, "NIEs commonly take months to prepare, but the Iraq report and its unclassified version were compiled in a matter of weeks.") So what happened? Was just higher ups at the CIA looking to please their bosses at the WH? Was it the WH itself? Perhaps a combo?

P.S. The commission does appear to have given at least a swing at answering this. It came up blank (or stonewalled). Say the LAT: "During a briefing before the report was released, one committee aide said the Senate panel had asked Tenet and Stu Cohen — who, as acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council, oversaw production of the NIE — who was responsible for inserting those words into the unclassified document. 'They did not know and could not explain,' said the aide, speaking on condition of anonymity."

Another Reason the CIA Screwed-up: Secrecy

A few months ago I was chatting with Steven Aftergood, pondering doing a piece arguing that overzealous classification and secrecy was one of the reasons the intel services didn't catch on to the 9/11 plotters. Basically, whille some secrecy is neccesary you want to have as little of it as possible because it makes sharing harder and tends to centralize it. (For example, in the case of 9/11 information, while the CIA knew two AQ men were in the U.S., the agency spooks couldn't just send the tips to their counter-terrorism counterparts at the FBI. Instead the information had to go up the ladder at the CIA across to the FBI and then down the ladder there. Not exactly a peer-to-peer network. And imagine if there had been a simple, secure, list-serv for AQ-focused agents at all relevant agencies.) In any case, I never got around to the story. But Steve points out secrecy also seems to have played a part in the CIA's mishandling of intel on Iraq. At least the Senate Intel Committee thinks so. From Conclusion 6 in its report:

"Another significant problem found by the Committee is the fact that the CIA continues to excessively compartment sensitive HUMINT reporting and fails to share important information about HUMINT reporting and sources with Intelligence Community analysts who have a need to know. In the years before Operation Iraqi Freedom, the CIA protected its Iraq weapons of mass destruction sources so well that some of the information they provided was kept from the majority of analysts with a legitimate need to know."

Redactions Infractions?

The CIA initially tried to black out about 40 percent of the Senate report. That caused a bit of stink and now only 20 percent is inked out, apparently plenty of room for one or two inappropriate redactions. The NYT says "congressional officials" believe that " most" of the blackouts are legit. The paper adds:

Tom Blanton, the executive director of the National Security Archive, a research group affiliated with George Washington University, asserted that the deletions were intended to prevent embarrassment at the agency.

Mr. Blanton said the public report deleted the committee's reasoning for three key conclusions: that the agency knowingly misled Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; that it withheld reservations about its information from an October 2002 white paper that was instrumental in making the case for war against Iraq; and that it misled Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat.

I have a few calls in about this.

Conformity, the CIA, Iraq, and the White House

So the CIA appears to have done a remarkably poor job on Iraq. One key to understanding that, I think, is that the agency once had a more careful, accurate assessment and then changed that without significant new evidence coming into play. That didn't happen slowly or over a period of years. Take a look at this New Republic piece written last summer:

In the late summer of 2002, [the Senate intel committee] had requested from Tenet an analysis of the Iraqi threat. According to knowledgeable sources, he received a 25-page classified response reflecting the balanced view that had prevailed earlier among the intelligence agencies--noting, for example, that evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program or a link to Al Qaeda was inconclusive. Early that September, the committee also received the DIA's classified analysis, which reflected the same cautious assessments. But committee members became worried when, midway through the month, they received a new CIA analysis of the threat that highlighted the Bush administration's claims and consigned skepticism to footnotes. According to one congressional staffer who read the document, it highlighted "extensive Iraqi chem-bio programs and nuclear programs and links to terrorism" but then included a footnote that read, "This information comes from a source known to fabricate in the past." The staffer concluded that "they didn't do analysis. What they did was they just amassed everything they could that said anything bad about Iraq and put it into a document."

I don't think the White House told the CIA to lie. But I think it's also pretty obvious the the CIA didn't just get this wrong on its own. That doesn't mean the White House was being nefarious. But how about intellectually irresponsible?

Also, judging from newspaper accounts of the Senate's just-released report--which, no, I haven't read--the report bases its critique of the CIA and other intel agencies on an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that the intel community put together on Iraq. It's worth keeping mind that at least the unclassified version of the NIE report, was criticized at the time it was published for hyping the administration's line and stripping out qualifications from previous reports. Again from the TNR report:

It omitted the qualifications and countervailing evidence that had characterized the classified version and played up the claims that strengthened the administration's case for war. For instance, the intelligence report cited the much-disputed aluminum tubes as evidence that Saddam "remains intent on acquiring" nuclear weapons. And it claimed, "All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons and that these tubes could be used in a centrifuge enrichment program"--a blatant mischaracterization.

Again, why did this stuff change? I don't think it was a conspiracy. It's partially about human nature; the drive in most of us to conform most of the time. (See the Asch experiments.) But just because something is deep within us doesn't mean it has to drive our actions. That's where checks and balances and healthy institutions come in. So yes, there was "group think," but that's basically normal. The problem is that 1) intel agencies didn't have the structural mechanisms to combat the tendency. 2) The White House wasn't just part of it--it was driving it.

P.S. I also think social pyschology can help us understand the media's role in the run-up to the war. It's not a perfect parallel, but again take a look at the results from the Ash experiment.