Before last year’s election, things were getting so bad in Iraq that the Bush administration was forced to commission two additional studies of “what went wrong?” The higher-level of these studies was the one the Prez commissioned “personally”– the one headed by former Virginia Senator Chuck Robb and legal eagle Larry Silberman.
That one looked into “why the US intel agencies had gotten it so wrong on so many of the ‘claims’ the administration had made about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, etc, in the lead-up to the war. ” (Wrong question. It wasn’t mainly the work of the intel agencies that was faulty– though certainly, numerous mistakes were made. But it was overwhelmingly the fault of the political leaders who created a clear climate in which the intel chiefs were encouraged to bring in completely skewed intelligence… But the commission wasn’t “allowe” to look into that.)
The other, lower-level and more technical report was one produced by the quasi-nongovernmental Rand Corporation, which looked into the failures of planning for the post-war period in Iraq.
I’ve quickly skimmed the news reports about the Robb-Silberman report, and I think that today’s NYT editorial got it pretty right in its scathing critique of the report this morning:
- The president’s commission on intelligence gathering could have saved the country a lot of time, and considerable paper, by not publishing its report yesterday and just e-mailing everyone the Web addresses for the searching studies already done by the 9/11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee. After more than a year’s dithering, the panel produced some 600 pages of conventional wisdom about the intelligence failures before the war with Iraq, along with a big dose of political spin that pleased the White House but provided little enlightenment for the public.
We were not optimistic when President Bush was pressured into creating this panel in February 2004. Though bipartisan, its membership lacked stature or independence, and Mr. Bush failed to give the commission a sweeping mandate that would go beyond rehashing the distressing but well-known shortcomings of the intelligence agencies. Still, it seemed worth waiting until after the election for the results because it was hard to imagine that the panel would not ask the vital questions.
Sadly, there is nothing about the central issue – how the Bush administration handled the intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and presented them to the public to win support for the invasion of Iraq. All we get is an excuse: the panel was “not authorized” to look at this question, so it didn’t bother. The report says the panel “interviewed a host of current and former policy makers” about the intelligence on Iraq, but did not “review how policy makers subsequently used that information.” (We can just see it – an investigator holding up his hand and declaiming: “Stop right there, Mr. Secretary! We’re not authorized to know what you did.”)
Just compare this job with the work of the 9/11 commission, whose chairman, Thomas Kean, battled the White House over access to documents, fearlessly expanded the inquiry and insisted that policy makers testify in public – and not just about the shortcomings of their subordinates.
The report is right in saying that American claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs were “dead wrong” because the intelligence was old or from highly dubious sources, and because the analysis was driven by a predetermined conclusion that Mr. Hussein was a threat. But we knew that.
The panel said timidly that “it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom.” But it utterly ignored the way President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team, and Condoleezza Rice, as national security adviser, created that environment by deciding what the facts were and saying so, repeatedly.
It does not say that these powerful people knew or should have known that there was no new intelligence on Iraq, and that as the intelligence reports were sanitized for the public, the caveats were stripped out. Instead, it loyally maintains the fiction that Mr. Bush was just given bum information by incompetent intelligence agents.
The way the administration hyped the intelligence on Iraq is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity. It is vital that the public know the answers because Americans are now being asked to accept a new set of claims about nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. A full airing of this issue could help John Negroponte, after his expected confirmation as national intelligence director, ensure that the missteps and misrepresentations are not repeated as the nation grapples with real threats from those and other countries, not imagined threats from Iraq.
As it stands, the report has mainly negative value. It reminds us that the Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to complete and publish its investigation of the handling of the Iraq intelligence. And it shows us what the 9/11 panel’s report might have looked like if Mr. Bush had succeeded in making Henry Kissinger chairman.
Well said. In general, I think the NYT has been doing a great job with its Iraq-related editorials recently.
Of course, with the Republicans having increased their hold on the Senate in the November elections, I don’t think we should hold our breaths waiting for the Senate Intel Committee’s report to come out with a fearless exposé of the intel-handling issue, either.
237 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq that were made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, and National Security Advisor Rice. These statements were made in 125 separate appearances, consisting of 40 speeches, 26 press conferences and briefings, 53 interviews, 4 written statements, and 2 congressional testimonies. Most of the statements in the database were misleading because they expressed certainty where none existed or failed to acknowledge the doubts of intelligence officials. Ten of the statements were simply false.
The page was removed…..
http://www.house.gov/reform/min/pdfs_108_2/pdfs_inves/pdf_admin_iraq_on_record_rep.pdf
And the lie continues and Iraq still under invasion so if the report said Dead Wrong so what is next GET OUT OF IRAQ NOW
Also, Rice and Powell both publicly stated in 2001 that Saddam was contained and not a threat, and that he had no nuclear weapons program.
That was prior to 9/11, btw.
I am still pondering why I was able to see that Iraq was not a threat, had no nuclear WMDs, (if they had chemical or biologial ones, there was no way they could get them to us, short of using UPS)…. and all of our Senate didn’t figure this out. That includes Edwards and Dole, who I told the facts to.
It is easier to figure with Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, etc. They were simply lying.
“Rice and Powell both publicly stated in 2001 that Saddam was contained and not a threat”
Doesn’t this contradict Treasury Secretary O’Neill when he said the Bush administration came to power already wanting to take down Saddam? Or were Rice and Powell simply out of step with their President?
Instead of adding your own insight to the situation, you take at face value the NYT’s editorial on the subject. THE NEW YORK TIMES’ news section cannot be considered an objective, credible judge of this report, much less the editorial page, which is still bitter from John Kerry’s loss last November.
What is ironic is that the claim “Instead, it loyally maintains the fiction that Mr. Bush was just given bum information by incompetent intelligence agents” is a fiction itself. Perhaps you might venture out of your comfort zone and read a conservative paper just once, if just to keep yourself honest.
As the Wall Street Journal (which I’m not denying is conservative, though not partisan and immature like the New York Times) lead editorial today writes,
“[The Robb Silberman Report’s] conlclusions are all terribly inconvenient to those antiwar critics who are still promoting the Dick-Cheney-as-Rasputin fable of Iraq. And, incredibly, their response has been to imply that the Robb-Silberman panel is also in on this Big Con. A few open-minded liberals [e.g., the New York Times] are even suggesting that no one should bother to read the report, which we suppose makes it easier to keep believing in the Grassy Knoll.
“But do they really believe Chuck Robb, a former Democratic Senator and Comission co-chairman, is a dupe? Or that Richard Levin, the President of Yale, and Pat Wald, a former chief judge on the D.C. Circuit appointed by Jimmy Carter, were also played for fools? Senator John McCain was a Commission member, and we know he pounded hard to expose the alleged Pentagon-Cheney “stovepipe” operation, only to come up empty. Is he lying too?”
Apparently, you will never accept a report that doesn’t say what you want it to, i.e. that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld et al deliberately misled the American public about intelligence and pressured the intelligence agencies to make specific conclusions about Iraq’s WMD, which, as this report (produced by a BIPARTISAN, distinguished panel, as noted in the above quote) shows, is patently false. The hypocrisy reflected in your (and the New York Times’) unwillingness to accept the results of this report is truly amazing.
Let me expand on my previous point. The NYT also mistakenly contends that “there is nothing about the central issue – how the Bush administration handled the intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and presented them to the public to win support for the invasion of Iraq. All we get is an excuse: the panel was ‘not authorized’ to look at this question, so it didn’t bother.”
The fact of the matter is that since the Bush Administration relied on the intelligence it had and did NOT pressure intelligence agencies to tell it what it wanted to hear (as this report demonstrates), an investigation of “how the Bush administration handled the intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and presented them to the public to win support for the invasion of Iraq” is NOT the “central” issue, for no matter how the Bush Administration used such reports, it would still be wrong. This report, therefore, exonerates the Bush Administration for “lying” about Iraq — it was telling what it thought to be the truth based on the intelligence it had. If this report were really such “conventional wisdom,” then the New York Times is acknowledging that the Bush Administration cannot be held responsible for the intelligence failures. Assuming that an inquiry into how that intelligence was used would be useful implies that there is a right way to use intelligence that is later found out to be inaccurate. That implication, of course, is absurd, and so is the New York Times’ editorial.
Did the NYT editorial board even read the report before writing the piece, or did it have the editorial all ready to go upon the report’s release? That’s a more legitimate question than the one the NYT poses as the “central” issue.
Am I merely a Bush Administration apologist? Far from it. For example, I believe that George Tenet et al should have been promptly dismissed from the CIA following 9/11, and I think that awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to him is beyond comprehension. I also am agnostic, so I am very suspicious of the Bush Administration’s close association with the religious right. Furthermore, I believe that Bush should be addressing Medicare and Medicaid before Social Security, although that issue should also be on the table. The budget deficit is a problem, and neither side has done enough to reduce it, especially Congress (both sides). To hear the Democrats whine about tax cuts and perpetuate the myth that the tax cuts are mainly responsible for the deficit, however, makes me sick. The abhorrent increase in entitlement spending (i.e., the eligibility based-Medicare and Medicaid) is chiefly to blame, NOT the tax cuts.
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