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."