Eric Umansky

Here's What I Don't Get

Exactly what classified information did the Wash Post's CIA jails story apparently leak? After all, the general existence of such jails has long been reported. The one new fact that the Post seemed to get even close to exposing was that some of the prisons are in "Eastern European countries."  But of course, the Post decided not to name names.

So what could the Post have spilled the beans on? Obviously, the CIA thinks it's something. I just don't know what.

Whitewash Watch (Preview Edition)

From the WP in a story about the Senate Intel Committee's much delayed report on whether administration officials accurately presented pre-war intel:

Under last year's agreement, it was unclear whether the committee would consider whether there were contradictory or competing intelligence reports circulating at the time public statements were made that could call them into question, or whether the panel would simply check to see whether each statement could be backed up by at least one piece of intelligence.

For example, in a Sept. 8, 2002, appearance on CNN, Condoleezza Rice said Iraq was receiving "high-quality aluminum tubes that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." At the time, there were serious disagreements within the intelligence community over whether those tubes were meant for centrifuges -- which can be used to extract weapons-grade uranium -- or whether they were meant for anti-aircraft rockets, which proved to be the case. If it could be shown that there was at least one intelligence report that substantiated Rice's statement, that might be enough to justify her statement under terms of the panel's earlier agreement.

As one senior committee staff member put it, "This study will not punish 'cherry-picking' intelligence, whether by the administration or by Democrats."

Read the whole story ;the WP's Pincus  isn't the clearest of writers but the story suggests that none of this has been settled yet.

How to Be a Newspaper Editor

Let's say documents are released showing that before the war  intel agencies said they  didn't buy a jailed al-Qaida suspect's   "confessions" linking Saddam and AQ.  And let's say this suspects "confessions" were the primary basis for the White House's pre-war allegations about purported AQ-Saddam connections.

Would that new info--for example, the  Defense Intelligence Agency's pre-war conclusion that it "likely this individua " is intentionally misleading the debriefers"--be worth Page One coverage?

If you think it is, clearly you don't have what it takes to be  a newspaper editor.  (That second  story, in the NYT, doesn't  cite a page online. But, thanks to Nexis, we know it was printed on Pg. 14.)
 

A Lingering Mystery--and the WH's Sexing-Up Scandal

In the run-up the war, the administration relied on what's called a National Intelligence Estimate for Iraq. NIE are supposed to represent the combined judgements of all major intel agencies. But something funny happened with the NIE for Iraq. The classified report, which was compiled in a matter of weeks rather than the usual months, played up threats and played down caveats. Then a declassified versio, which was released before the the war,went a step further, eliminating caveats while adding hyperbolic phrases. For an example, let's turn to the LAT (one of the few papers that covered the report's morphing, albiet inside the paper):

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.

The LAT story was based  on a Senate committee report. As the LAT put it, the committee report "laid out numerous instances in which the unclassified version omitted key dissenting opinions about Iraqi weapons capabilities, [and] overstated U.S. knowledge about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons."

And who exactly was reponsible for the changes? Was it  a case of institutional ass-kissing, people at every turn  just trying to please the bosses?  I'd vote for that. But who knows, it's possible it was something more pernicious. And here-in lies the mystery. Back to the LAT for a moment:

During a briefing before the report was released, one committee aide said the Senate panel had asked [former CIA chief] 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."

And there the question lies for the moment.

P.S.   One reason this sexing-up scandal hasn't hit the frontpages: It's a bit hard to compare the more carefully written classified NIE with its public version.   Why?  Well, the classified version has been released  but--slight bump in the road here--79 of the 93 pages have been completely blacked out.

Tips for (This Week's?) Coming WMD Report

After being out-maneuvered last week, the Republican chair of the Senate intel committee has suggested that he's about to release  the committee's long-MIA report  on whether the administration accurately portrayed pre-war intel. The chairman, Senator Roberts, has suggested the report will exonerate the administration and find that the White House did nothing really wrong.

Assuming his suggestions accurately portray what's in the report, I thought I'd offer a bit of preemptive...context:

Roberts suggests that the committee found no evidence that the White House pressured intel analysts, which is a reasonable conclusion and as it happens irrelevant. After all, you don't need to bully intel analysts in order to distort intelligence; you can just ignore their conclusions.

Second, we'll be hearing a lot-- at least from talking head types--about how everybody thought the case was a, ahem, slam-dunk. I just have a minor clarification: That's not true.  (Suggested reading, two Wash Post (buried) stories published before the war: 1. Bush Clings Dubious Allegations About Iraq. 2. U.S. Lacks Specifics on Banned Arms. And bonus reading #3 and #4: Pre-war doubts from experts.)

What “most everybody” thought was that Saddam might have some chemical weapons, that he might have a few biological weapons. What “most everybody” people did not think was that Saddam was anywhere near the finish-line on getting nukes. (The use of the brilliantly manipulative term "weapon of mass destruction"—conflating the vastly lower threat posed by chemical and biological weapons with that of nukes— helped to muck up that debate.)

The pre-war debate, such as it was, was whether Saddam posed a threat to the U.S.

The answer to that question, logically, didn’t rest on the binary question of whether or not Saddam had “WMD.” After all, I thought Saddam had “WMD.” But I didn’t think Saddam was a threat. Why? Because I figured he just had a handful SCUDs filled with near-the-expiration date mustard gas. That, of course, put me solidly in “he has WMD!” category and far, far away from agreeing that Saddam was an impending threat to the U.S.

As it turns out, contrary to the defensive rhetoric nowadays, the administration was plenty of sensitive to those distinctions during the run-up the war.

One could have made an honest argument for war by saying something along the lines of, “Saddam is a bad guy, he might have chemical and biological weapons, and he obviously wants nuclear weapons. We don’t have hard evidence that he has the weapons or has restarted his nukes program. But our intel capabilities are limited and in this post-9/11 world we simply can’t wait.” The problem is while that line would have been good enough for Andrew Sullivan, it might have been a wee bit underwhelming for the nation-at-large.

The White House knew that. So again and again it played up a potential threat to the U.S. Whether consciously misleading or not, White House officials went beyond intel agencies’ assessments, warning about the potential for being six moths from a  “mushroom cloud,” about Saddam backing al-Qaida men including possible sleeper cells in the U.S.., and about drones that could be used “for missions targeting the United States.” That’s how you mislead citizens and, not coincidentally, how you rally them to war.

Infiltrators in Iraq and the 'Class of 05' Problem

Newsweek has an interesting kind of sprawling  report on the seemingly large numbers of infiltrators among Iraqi government forces. Then there's this depressing and unsurprising bit at the end:

The CIA produced a study this May on a topic so sensitive that even the title is classified. The paper discussed the environment in which jihadists trained at Al Qaeda's camps in Taliban-run Afghanistan, contrasting that against the environment in which Iraq's insurgents are mastering the techniques of urban warfare. For starters, not all new recruits in Afghanistan necessarily hated America before undergoing Al Qaeda indoctrination.

In Iraq, on the other hand, hostility toward America is practically the only thing that all insurgents agree on—foreign infiltrators and native recruits alike. And jihadists in Iraq are getting direct, on-the-job training in a real-life insurgency, with hands-on experience in bombing, sniping and all the skills of urban warfare, unlike the essentially artificial training that was given at Al Qaeda's rural Afghan camps.

One of the paper's main points is that America's Iraqi troubles will not end with the insurgency. In effect, Iraq is producing a new corps of master terrorists with an incandescent hatred for the United States—the "class of '05 problem," as it's called in the shorthand of CIA analysts. This war is proving to be longer and nastier than almost anyone expected. One day, its results may be felt closer to home.

The silver-lining: At least the CIA recognizes  the dynamic. 

John Bolton, distilled

From the NYT:

"It's perfectly all right for a policy maker to express disagreement with an N.I.O. or an analyst, and it's perfectly all right for them to challenge such an individual vigorously, challenge their work vigorously," Mr. McLaughlin told the committee on April 29, according to an unedited transcript. "But I think it's different to then request, because of the disagreement, that the person be transferred. And - unless there is malfeasance involved here, and in this case, I had a high regard for the individual's work - therefore, I had a strong negative reaction to the suggestion about moving him."

That's former deputy CIA director John McLaughlin talking about how Bolton tried to smush one analyst. McLaughlin said it was "the only time I had ever heard of such a request" in his 32 years of service.  Remember McLaughlin's logic when you hear administration suck-ups and lackeys defenders  insisting that Bolton was just engaging in a bit of good ol' American give-and-take.

Tick tock...

I wonder how long this can keep up until Bolton bolts (or, less punnily but more accurately, Bolton  gets his ass dumped) . From Saturday's NYT:

An attempt in 2002 by John R. Bolton to remove the national intelligence officer for Latin America from his post prompted John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director of central intelligence, to intervene against the request, according to current and former intelligence officials.

[...]

John C. Gannon, who preceded Mr. Cohen as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said in an interview on Friday that he believed that Mr. Bolton's behavior had been "inexcusable."

"If you don't like the results of analysis, then you don't accept it," said Mr. Gannon, who left government recently after serving as the Republican-appointed staff director of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. "But you don't try to remove the people whose view you disagree with."

Now, given that they nominated this winner, I can't be surprised that the administration is still insisting he's a great dude:

Appearing on Friday before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended Mr. Bolton in response to a question from the audience. "I have known him as someone who is intelligent and strong and who is going to go after any job that he is given with a lot of fervor and interest and commitment," she said.

But I can be disgusted. Thank you very much.

The most important sentence in the commission report

"We were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the
intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence
Community," - Page 8.

Thanks to Steve Aftergood, who also noted that President Bush thanked the commission for its "unvarnished" review.

P.S. Now see if you can find that sentence in the NYT's happy-to-get-played take on Monday: "Panel's Report Assails C.I.A. for Failure on Iraq Weapons."

Kicking the Can Down the Road (Part IX)

To review: In January of 2004, former top  weapons searcher David Kay announced:  "We were all wrong" and that Saddam had neither banned weapons nor  even programs.  That had been obvious for a while, but in the weird world of news, a kerfuffle ensued. And the White House, facing pressure, named a commision that appeared  to answer the  calls. 

Except it was a Potemkin Panel. The commision didn't have subpoena power nor was it tasked with looking at pre-war intel assessments. Rather it was larded it up with a wide-ranging  to-do list, mostly generic stuff about how to deal with future WMD threats.  As one GOP staffer explained, the White House's strategy was to "kick the can down the road."

Which brings us to the present: The commision is scheduled  to  present its report next month. Meanwhile, the president has been adding items to  its to-do list. From a recent Wash Post piece:

Since its appointment Feb. 6, 2004, Bush has given the commission additional responsibilities beyond reviewing intelligence successes and failures over the past four years. For example, after the president signed the intelligence restructuring bill on Dec. 17, the panel was ordered to review how it could be implemented.

Bush also directed that CIA Director Porter J. Goss send the panel his recommendations for increasing by 50 percent the number of case officers and analysts. And the president ordered the Pentagon and CIA groups looking at future handling of clandestine paramilitary operations to send their reports to the commission.

One word that didn't merit mention in the Post's panel check-in: Iraq.