The New York Times reported on April Fools’ Day 2005 that the report to the president of the “Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction” was “a scorching assessment of chronic dysfunction inside American intelligence agencies.” -- But in reality, the report is merely the last of a series of pseudo-events. -- Its inconsequential nature was underscored by the president’s hint on Thursday that insofar as he considers the report at all, he intends to use it to justify further acts of aggresssion, like those being planned against Iran. -- Scott Shane and David Sanger of the Times reported: “Though much of the report concentrates on how the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other corners of the intelligence world exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq before the American-led invasion, Mr. Bush took a very different view of its main message. He put his emphasis on the opposite problem: the hazard of missing or underestimating threats ‘in a dangerous new century.’ ‘ Our collection and analysis of intelligence will never be perfect, but in an age where our margin for error is getting smaller, in an age in which we are at war, the consequences of underestimating a threat could be tens of thousands of innocent lives,’ Mr. Bush said. ‘And my administration will continue to make intelligence reforms that will allow us to identify threats before they fully emerge so we can take effective action to protect the American people.’ The president never discussed how the overestimation of Iraq's threat contributed to his decision to go to war, and the commission -- citing the mandate he gave it more than a year ago, when the White House feared that the issue could affect the election -- never delved into that issue.” -- In a “news analysis” published on Friday’s front page alongside its article on the report, the Times called the commission’s report “the latest and presumably the last official review” of the intelligence upon which the Iraq war was based.[2] -- As such, the report provides a coda to the sad spectacle of Congress’s refusal to investigate the president’s reponsibility for leading the nation into war under false pretenses -- a series of acts which are “high Crimes” (U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 4) in the estimation of many -- and its willingness to accept, instead, the anodyne conclusions of a “presidential commission.” -- Times reporter Todd Purdum is surely wrong to say that the report “leaves unresolved what may be the biggest question of all: Who was accountable, and will they ever be held to account for letting what amounted to mere assumptions ‘harden into presumptions,’ as Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of the commission, put it.” -- The answer to this “biggest question of all” is clear enough: no one will ever be held accountable. -- As John Pilger said in a speech on the second anniversary of the war, the Iraq war was "an invasion, which, under the universally acknowledged and respected terms of the Nuremberg judgment in 1946, the cornerstone of international law, was 'a paramount war crime.' That's not my rhetoric, nor is it agit-prop. It's the law of civilized people. And it's our job to help people understand the great crime committed in their name, and how those who claim to speak for us, such as the media, have normalized the unthinkable: as if no crime has been committed, as if thousands of people have not been murdered, as if it was all merely a respectable adjustment of the 'world order.' My point is, they are not respectable; they may wear the suits of respectability and travel with their fawning courts, but they are prima facie criminals, be assured." -- Todd Purdum knows all this quite well, and he can hint at it, even if he can’t say it: “A full accounting awaits the work of historians. But already some people have been judged, albeit it indirect ways, while others have been rewarded, even promoted. Some who foresaw potential disaster were punished or pushed aside, while the president and vice president were given new terms.” -- In the end, historians will view the investigations of the“intelligence failures” of the U.S. national security state as pseudo-events, to use the term Daniel Boorstin introduced in The Image (Vintage, 1961). -- A "pseudo-event" has four characteristics: (1) "It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it." -- (2) "It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced. . . . Its success is measured by how widely it is reported." -- (3) "Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous. Its interest arises largely from this very ambiguity. . . . Without some of this ambiguity a pseudo-event cannot be very interesting." -- (4) "Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy." -- The investigations of pre-war intelligence were all these things: planned events meant to create a show of inquiry that could be reported, but whose nature remains ambiguous and whose pre-ordained outcome is the devotion of even more resources to “intelligence.” ...
1.
Washington
BUSH PANEL FINDS BIG FLAWS REMAIN IN U.S. SPY EFFORTS
By Scott Shane and David E. Sanger
** Scathing Report -- Studying Errors in Iraq, Commission Calls for Broad Overhaul **
New York Times
April 1, 2005
Page A01
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/01/politics/01intel.html
WASHINGTON -- In a scorching assessment of chronic dysfunction inside American intelligence agencies, a presidential commission told President Bush on Thursday that the underlying causes of the failure to have understood Iraq's weapons programs "are still all too common." It also warned that the United States "knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors."
In the bluntly worded, 601-page report, the nine-member commission flatly stated that harm done to American credibility because of the Iraq failure would take "years to undo." It also warned of specific new vulnerabilities, especially in understanding the spread of biological weapons programs.
Even before John D. Negroponte begins his confirmation hearings as the first director of national intelligence, it urges him to undertake a radical reorganization of many of the nation's 15 intelligence agencies to end for good the long-running turf wars that have divided them. It also calls on him to encourage a culture that challenges assumptions before they turn into accepted wisdom, as they did about Iraq in the prelude to the American-led invasion.
The commission, headed by Judge Laurence H. Silberman and former Senator Charles S. Robb of Virginia, noted acidly that despite several previous investigations lambasting deep flaws in the intelligence services, they have "an almost perfect record of resisting external recommendations."
In its opening letter to Mr. Bush, it called the spy agencies "headstrong," and in a clear reference to Mr. Negroponte, it warned: "Sooner or later, they will try to run around -- or over -- the D.N.I. Then, only your determined backing will convince them that we cannot return to the old ways."
The breadth and detail of the indictment, written in vivid, colloquial language rare in Washington, went beyond previous critiques. The report was particularly blistering about the low quality of the "President's Daily Brief," the morning intelligence review that once was deemed the gold standard of American intelligence.
Mr. Bush had resisted turning over such briefing documents to the 9/11 commission that reported its findings last year. He did provide them to this panel, which operated under a far greater cloak of secrecy.
Without revealing details of the briefs on Iraq, this commission concluded that the briefs were even "more alarmist and less nuanced" than the far more detailed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons. The panel concluded that the intelligence estimate, intended to be the government's most authoritative analysis of the Iraqi threat, was "dead wrong."
Mr. Bush met with the full commission for more than an hour Thursday morning, and emerged to declare that "we will correct what needs to be fixed, and build on what the commission calls solid intelligence successes."
He was referring to a case study singled out by the commission that praised the intelligence agencies' discovery of Libya's nuclear program, in large part by piercing the nuclear black market network run by the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. Two months after a ship bearing nuclear centrifuge parts to Tripoli was intercepted on the high seas, Libya agreed to dismantle its nuclear program.
But the commission, formally called the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, described that success as a rarity that intelligence agencies are "not well-postured to replicate."
"They're still, in some respects, fighting the last war," Mr. Robb said, noting how many times outside studies have called for the intelligence agencies to adapt to a very different world of threats, and how steadfastly they have resisted change.
Though much of the report concentrates on how the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other corners of the intelligence world exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq before the American-led invasion, Mr. Bush took a very different view of its main message. He put his emphasis on the opposite problem: the hazard of missing or underestimating threats "in a dangerous new century."
"Our collection and analysis of intelligence will never be perfect, but in an age where our margin for error is getting smaller, in an age in which we are at war, the consequences of underestimating a threat could be tens of thousands of innocent lives," Mr. Bush said. "And my administration will continue to make intelligence reforms that will allow us to identify threats before they fully emerge so we can take effective action to protect the American people."
The president, however, never discussed how the overestimation of Iraq's threat contributed to his decision to go to war, and the commission -- citing the mandate he gave it more than a year ago, when the White House feared that the issue could affect the election -- never delved into that issue.
George J. Tenet, who was director of central intelligence from 1997 until last summer, released a statement on Thursday defending his record. "I wish the commission had spent more time reflecting on how far the intelligence community has come in rebuilding American intelligence," he wrote.
Mr. Tenet said that by the late 1990's, budget cuts had left the agencies "nearly in Chapter 11." He added that "we put in place a deliberate program to rebuild capabilities and recruit a modern work force," changes that were still in progress when the Iraq assessment was undertaken.
Deleted from the commission's public report were 91 additional pages that appear in a classified version, mostly a discussion of the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, and of covert operations. According to officials who have reviewed the commission's 11 specific findings about those two nations, which Judge Silberman and Mr. Robb declined to discuss even in general terms, the classified version includes a review of the parallel pitfalls that could affect judgments of how many nuclear weapons North Korea has built, or how long it will be until Iran can manufacture its own uranium weapons.
The nature of intelligence about Iraq differed greatly from what is known about the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. But when asked whether the current assessments of those two countries suffer from the same problem the commission said had plagued the Iraq analysis -- an assumption that because a country is caught buying illicit goods, it knows how to assemble them -- Mr. Robb would say only, "We found systemic problems throughout the community." But Judge Silberman interjected, saying those problems did not necessarily affect assessments of Iran and North Korea.
Like the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued last year, this report documented sweeping failures of intelligence collection and analysis, debilitating turf battles, multiple agencies doing the same work, lagging technology and meager ranks of human spies. But it did so in much more vivid terms.
The C.I. A. and the National Security Agency "may be sleek and omniscient in the movies, but in real life they and other intelligence agencies are vast government bureaucracies," it said, "prone to develop self-reinforcing, risk-averse cultures that take outside advice badly."
As a central remedy, the commission prescribes the integration of the scattered agencies under the strong control of the new national intelligence director, Mr. Negroponte, a longtime diplomat who most recently served as ambassador to Iraq and to the United Nations. Under the director, "mission managers" would each be responsible for coordinating intelligence from all agencies on a certain target, which might be a country or a type of weapon.
Mr. Bush assigned his homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend, to oversee the carrying out of the commission's recommendations.
Ms. Townsend said she had already met with cabinet members and asked them to identify recommendations that could be adopted immediately, others that required review and "a small handful" that would require new legislation.
Among the commission's 74 recommendations are the creation of a nongovernment research body to play permanent devil's advocate, challenging the agencies' assessments, and of a National Intelligence University to improve the training of analysts and spies.
The commission proposes the creation of a National Counterproliferation Center of fewer than 100 people to manage and coordinate intelligence on the threat of weapons proliferation, especially from private networks like Dr. Khan's. It would join the National Counterterrorism Center as coordinating bodies under the director of national intelligence.
Other ideas are likely to face stiff resistance from the agencies. Saying the Central Intelligence Agency's existing clandestine service is unlikely to overcome a history of poor performance, the report recommends creating a new Human Intelligence Directorate within C.I.A. to build a better spy service. It also urges major reshuffling of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department.
At the heart of the report is the dispiriting, though increasingly familiar, account of the failure on Iraqi weapons. The intelligence service was "crippled by its inability to collect meaningful intelligence on Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs," it said, and fell back on "old assumptions" based on Saddam Hussein's past behavior that he must be aggressively building an unconventional arsenal.
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi weapons produced in 2002 took the assumptions "and swathed them in the mystique of intelligence, providing secret information that seemed to support them but was in fact nearly worthless, if not misleading," the commission said.
The commission provides a strange sort of exoneration for the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmad Chalabi, the onetime Pentagon favorite who was accused of fueling the drive to war by providing false information about Mr. Hussein's arsenals to American officials and the news media. Quoting a C.I.A. investigation conducted after the war, it said "I.N.C.-related sources had a minimal impact" on the administration's assessments. But it also calls two sources in the I.N.C. "fabricators."
On one of the most delicate questions raised by the Iraqi intelligence failure, the report said "the analysts who worked the Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."
But the commission added a caveat. Apparently referring to repeated statements from Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top policy makers suggesting that Mr. Hussein had illicit weapons stockpiles, the report said, "It is hard to deny that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom."
The report said the intelligence agencies were behind the technological curve in crucial areas, notably biotechnology, and woefully ignorant of important cultural issues. During the cold war, the agencies had impressive expertise on Soviet society and ideology, the report noted, but it said, "No equivalent talent pool exists today for the study of Islamic extremism."
While C.I.A. gets the most attention, the eavesdroppers of National Security Agency also get a very critical look. While writing in vague terms to avoid compromising sources, the commission said Mr. Hussein's government was able to foil many of N.S.A.'s eavesdropping attempts.
Technological changes in telecommunications have put major sources of intelligence out of reach of N.S.A.'s signals intelligence, the technical term for eavesdropping, it said, adding, "Regaining signals intelligence, access must be a top priority."
The commission takes a strong stand against leaks to the news media of classified intelligence information, which it says have "cost the American people hundreds of millions of dollars, and done grave harm to national security." It proposed that an inspector general working for the director of national intelligence be assigned to investigate all leaks and deter them by firing or prosecuting identified leakers.
In a brief note on interrogations, the commission said that captured detainees provided one source of critical intelligence and added that it had had been assured that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales personally approves interrogation techniques that go beyond methods that are openly published, apparently referring to publicly known military interrogation guidelines.
The report adds, "Where special practices are allowed in extraordinary cases of dire emergency, those procedures should require permission from sufficiently high-level officials to ensure compliance with overall guidelines."
Reaction to the report was generally positive. Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, praised the commission but said its recommendations could still languish without strong support from the president, Congress, and Mr. Negroponte. "There's about a six-month window before turf battles and the inertia of Washington will sink this," she said.
2.
Washington
News Analysis
A FINAL VERDICT ON PREWAR INTELLIGENCE IS STILL ELUSIVE
By Todd S. Purdum
New York Times
April 1, 2005
Page A01
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/01/politics/01policy.html
WASHINGTON -- It found no evidence that intelligence had been politically twisted to suit preconceptions about Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, and made no formal judgments about how top policy makers had used that intelligence to justify war. Yet in its own way, the presidential commission on intelligence left little doubt that President Bush and his top aides had gotten what they wanted, not what they needed, when they were told that Saddam Hussein had a threatening arsenal of illicit weapons.
"It is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom," the commission said. But that understated indictment is about the extent of the commission's effort to explain the responsibilities of the nation's highest officials for one of the worst intelligence failures of modern times.
So the latest and presumably the last official review of such questions leaves unresolved what may be the biggest question of all: Who was accountable, and will they ever be held to account for letting what amounted to mere assumptions "harden into presumptions," as Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of the commission, put it.
A full accounting awaits the work of historians. But already some people have been judged, albeit it indirect ways, while others have been rewarded, even promoted. Some who foresaw potential disaster were punished or pushed aside, while the president and vice president were given new terms.
President Bush's election-year order creating the commission (and a schedule that assured it would report well after the election) did not authorize it to investigate how policy makers had used the intelligence they received. In the end, the commission reserved by far its sharpest criticism for the agencies that provided the intelligence, blaming them over and over again in its 601-page unclassified report for "poor tradecraft and poor management."
By comparison, the commission made a tantalizing but oblique reference to the president. It came in a passage criticizing the vaunted President's Daily Brief, the super-secret intelligence document that Mr. Bush and his predecessors have received each morning, complaining that its "attention-grabbing headlines and drumbeat of repetition" left misleading impressions, and no room for shadings. "In ways both subtle and not so subtle, the daily reports seemed to be 'selling' intelligence," the commission found, "in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested."
The clearest casualties of the Iraq intelligence failures -- and the most direct targets of the commission -- were the top leaders of the C.I.A., beginning with George J. Tenet, who resigned as director of central intelligence last summer in the face of rising criticism. President Bush later awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
After he left, Mr. Tenet's top leadership team was effectively replaced by his designated successor, Porter J. Goss. Among those to go were Mr. Tenet's deputy, John McLaughlin; James L. Pavitt and Stephen R. Kappes, top officials in the agency's clandestine service; and Jami Miscik, the deputy director for intelligence.
The old C.I.A. leadership is portrayed by the commission as either troublingly unaware or disturbingly dismissive of deep concerns within the agency that the principal source of prewar intelligence about Mr. Hussein's chemical and biological weapons programs was reported to have problems with drinking, reliability and truthfulness. At the same time, warnings [from] unnamed analysts within the agency who questioned this information before the war were disregarded. Others who sought after the invasion to correct the informant's lies were branded as troublemakers and pushed out of their jobs, the commission found.
President Bush himself has never publicly blamed anyone in his administration, and some officials intimately involved in the review and public discussion of prewar intelligence including Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, and Stephen J. Hadley, now national security adviser, have since been promoted. Others, like Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and now president of the World Bank, have been publicly praised and rewarded.
Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican majority leader, called the report "a forceful reminder of the need to transform America's intelligence community to improve intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination, including its communication to policy makers."
Former Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who was one of the few leaders in either party before the war to vigorously and publicly question the administration's assertions about Iraq's capacities, was considerably more critical.
"Thus far, this administration has been characterized by a stunning amount of indifference to what has occurred," he said, adding: "This administration has held nobody accountable for anything, unless you count Tenet's resignation. Of course, he then turned around and received the nation's highest civilian award. They have been less than fully cooperative with the nonexecutive agencies which have attempted to find out what happened. It's inexplicable to me, at a pure level of management, why the administration has not held people accountable."
That is arguably so. But there may be another measure. With the exception of Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, there has now been considerable turnover in many of the administration officials most involved with prewar intelligence. At the Pentagon, Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary for policy who was deeply involved in intelligence matters, is leaving to return to private life soon.
While acknowledging the intelligence agencies' past success maintaining the status quo, the commission's co-chairman, former Senator Charles Robb, Democrat of Virginia, said the shifts in leadership that had already occurred, including Mr. Bush's nomination of John D. Negroponte to be the first director of national intelligence, meant it would be "a whole lot easier to instigate change."
Mr. Robb said that the commission had kept an open hot line for complaints, and "ran to ground" every report or rumor that came its way about potential political interference with intelligence-gathering and analysis, including reports that some C.I.A. analysts felt pressured by Mr. Cheney's repeated personal visits to the agency. But he said it had found "absolutely no instance" of anyone reporting pressure to change a position.
For his part, Judge Silberman noted that the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies had vigorously disputed any suggestion of a link between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda, but had not resisted the consensus opinion that Iraq had unconventional weapons. "They pushed that position," he said of the intelligence agencies, but were "absolutely uniform and uniformly wrong."
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