This is off my normal beat, but more evidence is emerging that the Bush administration’s use of intelligence during the run up to the decision to invade Iraq was, at best, incompetent. The New York Times has an article entitled Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts.
A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.
The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.
The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al 8Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.
Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’’
Some of you may remember that the October 2002 Cincinnati speech was the one where the Niger/Iraq/yellowcake assertions were originally included, but removed before the speech because of concerns by the CIA that the assertions were false, or at least too shaky to be included in a Presidential speech. For some reason, however, those assertions reappeared in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech. That led to Joseph Wilson’s criticism of the Bush administration and revelation that he had gone to Niger and reported back that those assertions were not credible. That, in turn, led to the efforts of the Bush administration to get back at Wilson that now has Scooter Libby indicted. (Daniel Schorr has a good column in the Christian Science Monitor cautioning us not to get bogged down in the details of who leaked what to whom in the Libby case and focus more on the general dubiousness of the WMD evidence.)
The New York Times article goes on to say:
The report issued by the Senate intelligence committee in July 2004 questioned whether some versions of intelligence report prepared by the C.I.A. in late 2002 and early 2003 raised sufficient questions about the reliability of Mr. Libi’s claims.
But neither that report nor another issued by the Sept. 11 commission made any reference to the existence of the earlier and more skeptical 2002 report by the D.I.A., which supplies intelligence to military commanders and national security policy makers. As an official intelligence report, labeled DITSUM No. 044-02, the document would have circulated widely within the government, and it would have been available to the C.I.A., the White House, the Pentagon and other agencies. It remains unclear whether the D.I.A. document was provided to the Senate panel.
This raises questions about various claims by the White House and its supporters about investigations having cleared their good name. It’s not entirely clear that these investigators had access to all of the relevant material and, therefore, their conclusions are suspect. Some of the leftie blogs I frequent have highlighted another misleading variant on the “investigations have cleared our good name” approach:
Bill Kristol, 11/04/2005: “After all, the bipartisan Silberman-Robb commission found no evidence of political manufacture and manipulation of intelligence.”
Silberman-Robb Commission Report, 3/31/05: “[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community. Accordingly, while we interviewed a host of current and former policymakers during the course of our investigation, the purpose of those interviews was to learn about how the Intelligence Community reached and communicated its judgments about Iraq’s weapons programs–not to review how policymakers subsequently used that information.”
In that case, Kristol has just made up something about the conclusions of the report, relying on the fact that most of us don’t have time to parse this report and that report to see if he’s telling the truth.
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