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Iraq: What Did Congress Know, And When? - FactCheck.org

Iraq: What Did Congress Know, And When?

Bush says Congress had the same (faulty) intelligence he did. Howard Dean
says intelligence was "corrupted." We give facts.

November 19, 2005

Summary

The President says Democrats in Congress "had access to the same
intelligence" he did before the Iraq war, but some Democrats deny it."That
was not true," says Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean. "He
withheld some intelligence. . . . The intelligence was corrupted."

Neither side is giving the whole story in this continuing dispute.

The President's main point is correct: the CIA and most other US
intelligence agencies believed before the war that Saddam had stocks of
biological and chemical weapons, was actively working on nuclear weapons
and "probably" would have a nuclear weapon before the end of this decade.
That faulty intelligence was shared with Congress - along with multiple
mentions of some doubts within the intelligence community - in a formal
National Intelligence Estimate just prior to the Senate and House votes to
authorize the use of force against Iraq.

No hard evidence has surfaced to support claims that Bush somehow
manipulated the findings of intelligence analysts. In fact, two bipartisan
investigations probed for such evidence and said they found none. So Dean's
claim that intelligence was "corrupted" is unsupported.

But while official investigators have found no evidence
that Bush manipulated intelligence, they never took up the question
of whether the President and his top aides manipulated the public,
something Bush also denies.

In fact, before the war Bush and others often downplayed or omitted any
mention of doubts about Saddam's nuclear program. They said Saddam might
give chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons to terrorists,
although their own intelligence experts said that was unlikely. Bush also
repeatedly claimed Iraq had trained al Qaeda terrorists in the use of
poison gas, a story doubted at the time by Pentagon intelligence analysts.
The claim later was called a lie by the al Qaeda detainee who originally
told it to his US interrogators.

Analysis

The latest round of this continuing partisan dispute started Nov. 11, when
Bush said in a Veterans' Day speech:

Bush: While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the
conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of
how that war began. Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming
we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why
we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate
investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the
intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed
with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed
more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of
weapons of mass destruction. . . . That's why 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.

What Was Congress Told?

The intelligence to which Bush refers is contained in a top-secret
document that was made available to all members of Congress in October
2002, days before the House and Senate voted to authorize Bush to use
force in Iraq. This so-called National Intelligence Estimate was supposed
to be the combined US intelligence community's "most authoritative written
judgment concerning a specific national security issue," according to the
Senate Intelligence Committee. The report was titled "Iraq's Continuing
Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction."

Though most of the document remains classified, the "Key Judgments"
section and some other paragraphs were cleared and released publicly in
July, 2003. The most recent and complete version available to the public
can be read on the [http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB129/]
website of George Washington University's National Security Archive, which
got it from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act.

The NIE as declassified and released by the CIA says pretty much what Bush
and his aides were saying publicly about Iraq's weapons - nearly all
of which turned out to be wrong:

CIA Release of NIE, October 2002: We judge that Iraq has continued its
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions
and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as
missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions. If left unchecked it
probably will have a nuclear weapon within this decade.

Chemical Weapons: The CIA document expressed no doubt that Iraq had large
stocks of chemical weapons. "We assess that Baghdad has begun renewed
production of mustard, sarin, GF (cyclosarin), and VX," it said. "Saddam
probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons (MT) and possibly as much as
500 MT of CW agents - much of it added in the last year." ("CW" refers to
"chemical warfare" agents.)

Biological Weapons: The document also said "we judge" that Iraq had an
even bigger germ-warfare program than before the first Gulf War in 1991.
"We judge Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating BW agents and is capable
of quickly producing and weaponizing a variety of such agents, including
anthrax, for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert
operatives," the report said. ("BW" refers to "biological warfare.")

Nuclear Weapons: The document also said "most" US intelligence agencies
believed that some high-strength aluminum tubes that Iraq had purchased
were intended for use in centrifuge rotors used to enrich uranium, and
were "compelling evidence" that Saddam had put his nuclear weapons program
back together.

On the matter of the tubes, however, the report noted that there was some
dissent within the intelligence community. Members of Congress could have
read on page 6 of the report that the Department of Energy "assesses that
the tubes are probably not" part of a nuclear program.

Some news reports have said this caveat was "buried" deeply in the 92-page
report, but this is not so. The "Key Judgments" section begins on page 5,
and disagreements by the Department of Energy and also the State
Department are noted on pages 5,6,8 and 9, in addition to a reference on
page 84.

Though much has been made recently of doubts about the tubes, it should be
noted that even the Department of Energy's experts believed Iraq did have
an active nuclear program, despite their conclusion that the tubes were
not part of it. Even the DOE doubters thought Saddam was working on a
nuclear bomb.

Connection to terrorism.

On one important point the National Intelligence Estimate offered
little support for Bush's case for war, however. That was the likelihood
that Saddam would give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists for
use against the US.

Al Qaeda: The intelligence estimate said that - if attacked and "if
sufficiently desperate" - Saddam might turn to al Qaeda to carry out an
attack against the US with chemical or biological weapons. "He might
decide that the extreme step of assisting the Islamist terrorist in
conducting a CBW attack against the United States would be his last chance
to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him," the NIE
said.

The report assigned "low confidence" to this finding, however, while
assigning "high confidence" to the findings that Iraq had active chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons programs, and "moderate confidence" that
Iraq could have a nuclear weapon as early as 2007 to 2009.

That was the intelligence available to Congress when the House passed the
Iraq resolution Oct. 10, 2002 by
a [http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2002/roll455.xml] vote of 296-133. The
Senate passed it in the wee hours of Oct. 11, by
a
[http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cf
m?congress=107&session=2&vote=00237]
vote of 77-23. A total of 81 Democrats in the House and 29 Democrats in
the Senate supported the resolution, including some who now are saying
Bush misled them.

A point worth noting is that few in Congress actually studied the
intelligence before voting. The Washington Post reported: "The lawmakers
are partly to blame for their ignorance. Congress was entitled to view the
92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002
vote. But . . . no more than six senators and a handful of House members
read beyond the five-page executive summary."

"Corrupted" Intelligence?

On all key points, of course, that National Intelligence Estimate turned
out to be wrong. No stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons have been
found, nor any evidence that Saddam had an active program to enrich uranium
or make nuclear weapons. The aluminum tubes turned out to be for use in
Iraqi rockets, just as the Department of Energy experts had argued.

That has led to claims that intelligence was deliberately slanted to
justify the war in Iraq. On NBC's Meet the Press Nov. 13, Democratic
National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said the intelligence given to
Congress was "corrupted" and that Bush withheld information.

Dean: The intelligence was corrupted, not just because of the
incompetence of the CIA; it was corrupted because it was being changed
around before it was presented to Congress . Stuff was taken out and not
presented. All of this business about weapons of mass destruction, there
was significant and substantial evidence . . . that said, "There is a
strong body of opinion that says they don't have a nuclear program, nor do
they have weapons of mass destruction." And that intelligence was not given
to the Congress of the United States.

NBC's Tim Russert: It was in the National Intelligence Estimate, as a
caveat by the State Department.

Dean: It was, a very small one, but the actual caveat that the White House
got were (sic) much, much greater. And the deputy to Colin Powell, Lawrence
Wilkerson, just said so. He just came out and said so.

On this point Dean is incorrect . Wilkerson, who was State Department
chief of staff during Bush's first term, actually said there was an
"overwhelming" consensus within the intelligence community. He said the
State Department dissented only regarding a nuclear program, not about
whether Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons.

Wilkerson, Oct. 19, 2005: And people say, well, INR (the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research) dissented. That's a
bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and
running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the
chems and the bios.

. . . The consensus of the intelligence community was overwhelming. I can
still hear (CIA Director) George Tenet telling me, and telling my boss
(Colin Powell) in the bowels of the CIA, that the information we were
delivering . . . (He) was convinced that what we were presented was
accurate.

Wilkerson, it should be noted, is no apologist for Bush. This excerpt
comes from the same speech in which Wilkerson went public with a
well-publicized complaint that decisions leading up to the war were made
by a "cabal" between Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, and "a President who is not versed in international relations
and not too much interested in them either."

Previously, two bipartisan commissions investigated and found no evidence
of political manipulation of intelligence.

In 2004 the Senate Intelligence Committee said, in a report adopted
unanimously by both Republican and Democratic members:

Senate Intelligence Committee: The Committee did not find any evidence
that intelligence analysts changed their judgments as a result of
political pressure, altered or produced intelligence products to conform
with Administration policy, or that anyone even attempted to coerce,
influence or pressure analysts to do so. When asked whether analysts were
pressured in any way to alter their assessments or make their judgments
conform with Administration policies on Iraq's WMD programs, not a single
analyst answered "yes." (p273)

A later bipartisan commission, co-chaired by Republican appeals-court
judge Laurence Silberman and a Democratic former governor and senator from
Virginia, Charles Robb, issued a report in March, 2005 saying:

Silberman-Robb Report: These (intelligence) errors stem from poor
tradecraft and poor management. The Commission found no evidence of
political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war
assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. As we discuss in detail in the
body of our report, analysts universally asserted that in no instance did
political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical
judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor
analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the
inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments.

Although the Silberman-Robb commission was appointed by President Bush, it
included prominent Democrats and Republican Sen. John McCain, whom Bush
defeated for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000.

Misleading the Public?

Neither the Senate Intelligence Committee nor the Silberman-Robb
commission considered how Bush and his top aides used the intelligence
that was given to them, or whether they misled the public. The Senate
Intelligence Committee is supposed to take that up in "phase two" of its
investigation - and there's plenty to investigate.

Vice President Cheney, for example, said this on NBC's Meet the Press
barely a month before Congress voted to authorize force:

Cheney, Sept. 8, 2002: But we do know, with absolute certainty, that he
(Saddam) is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs
in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.

As we've seen, that was wrong. Department of Energy and State Department
intelligence analysts did not agree with the Vice President's claim, which
turned out to be false. Cheney may have felt "absolute certainty" in his
own mind, but that certainty wasn't true of the entire intelligence
community, as his use of the word "we" implied.

Similarly, the President himself said this in a speech to the nation, just
three days before the House vote to authorize force:

Bush, Oct. 7, 2002: We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members
in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases . And we know that after
September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the
terrorist attacks on America.

Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical
weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with
terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving
any fingerprints.

That statement is open to challenge on two grounds. For one thing, as
we've seen, the intelligence community was reporting to Bush and Congress
that they thought it unlikely that Saddam would give chemical or
biological weapons to terrorists - and only "if sufficiently desperate"
and as a "last chance to exact revenge" for the very attack that Bush was
then advocating.

Furthermore, the claim that Iraq had trained al Qaeda in the use of poison
gas turned out to be false, and some in the intelligence community were
expressing doubts about it at the time Bush spoke. It was based on
statements by a senior trainer for al Qaeda who had been captured in
Afghanistan. The detainee, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, took back his story in
2004 and the CIA withdrew all claims based on it. But even at the time
Bush spoke, Pentagon intelligence analysts said it was likely al-Libi was
lying.

According to newly declassified documents, the Defense Intelligence Agency
said in February 2002 - seven months before Bush's speech - "it is . . .
likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn
al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be
describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their
interest. . . . Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of
Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide
assistance to a group it cannot control." The DIA's doubts were revealed
Nov. 6 in newly
declassified
[http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2005/DIAletter.102605.pdf]
documents made public by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, a member
of the Intelligence Committee.

Whether or not Bush was aware of the Pentagon's doubts is not yet clear.

Sources

[http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20051111-1.html]
Transcript:"President Commemorates Veterans Day, Discusses War on Terror,"
Tobyhanna Army Depot, Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, The White House 11 Nov 2005.

[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9967566/] Transcript: "Transcript for
November 13: Guests: His Majesty King Abdullah II, Hashemite Kingdom
of Jordan; Ken Mehlman, Chairman, Republican National Committee; and
Howard Dean, Chairman, Democratic National Committee," Meet the Press,
NBC, 13 November 2005.

Select Committee On Intelligence, United States Senate,
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U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq ," 7
July 2004.

The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States
Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction,
" [http://www.wmd.gov/report/report.html] Report to the President of the
United States ," 31 March 2005.
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[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/11/AR200511110
1832_pf.html]
Asterisks Dot White House's Iraq Argument," The Washington Post , 12 Nov
2005; A1.

Central Intelligence Agency, NIE 2002-16HC, "
[http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB129/nie.pdf] National
Intelligence Estimate : Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass
Destruction," October 2002. Redacted, declassified version released under
Freedom of Information Act to George Washington University's National
Security Archive, posted 9 July 2004.

[http://www.newamerica.net/Download_Docs/pdfs/Doc_File_2644_1.pdf]
Transcript, Remarks of former State Department chief of staff Lawrence
Wilkerson, New America Foundation, Washington DC, 19 Oct. 2005.

Judd Legum, Faiz Shakir, Nico Pitney Amanda Terkel, Payson Schwin &
Christy Harvey, "
[http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=klLWJcP7H
&b=914257&ct=1603133]
Bush's Reverse Slam Dunk," The Progress Report, American Progress Action
Fund 14 Nov 2005.

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economy and politics 2002," Transcript, Meet the Press, NBC, 8 Sep 2002.

[http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html]
Transcript: "President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat," Remarks by the
President on Iraq, Cincinnati Museum Center - Cincinnati Union
Terminal,Cincinnati, Ohio, 7 Oct 2002.

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Use of Pre-War Intelligence Was
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press
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