CIA walks fine line in defending itself

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Last night Stuart Cohen was interviewed on Nightline in reference to a Reuters article No Surprises - Senior U.S. Intelligence Official Stands By Report on Iraqi Weapons (the video clip of the interview is on the same page as the previous link). Stuart Cohen is the Vice Chairman of the National Intelligence Committee and the CIA staffer in charge of producing the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq which the Administration used as justification to invade Iraq. Since no wmds have been found (nor are any expected to be found) the Administration has cast aspersions on the "intelligence" they had leading up to the decisone to invade. The CIA has very quietly defended the quality of its work. The Cohen interviews represent another tightrope attempt to defend the quality of the CIA's work.

It is difficult (politically) to just come out and say that the Administration searched long and hard for justifications to invade Iraq. Essentially Cohen stated that the CIA felt no pressure from the Administration to produce the report (this contradicts reports of others in the intelligence community). What he did say was that there was no credible threat evidence that Iraq had nuclear capability or the ability to deliver a bio-chem attack on the US. He then took that away by stating that Hussein had been "underestimated" in the past. Having stressed this in the Nightline interview several times, one can only see it as a justification for the Administration "creaming" the estimated threat in the report.

One might wonder why the CIA would continue to make an issue of this. Why not just say "we messed up" and get on with it. Politically, that would be the expeditious thing to do. However, the CIA is much longer lasting than any administration. There are problems both internal to the CIA in terms of morale, and international in terms ofd credibility, that are at stake here.

While it may be expedient for the White House to continue to claim they have strong intelligence about the (immediate) threat that Hussein posed, they may do it at the expense of a much larger issue - the credibility of the primary intelligence agency of the US. This is reinforced by the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, and the foot-dragging and obfuscation on that investigation. I am relatively confident that the CIA as a whole is really ticked at the Administration. It most likely feels that it must defend itself, and its work in some way, but doesn't want open warfare with the White House.

On the other hand, Iraq wmd-discrediting reports continue to come in. In an article by Barton Gellman (Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper, Wa. Post, 1/07/04), it is reinforced that the "arsenal" did not exist. Maybe this is ex-post-facto information, and maybe it was known before the invasion. We will have to wait 50 years or more for that to come to light. What has come out of interrogation of one of the top Iraqi weapons engineers - Modher Sadeq-Saba Tamimi - is that while there was a lot of paper design and theorizing on expanding Iraq's weapons, it never got past that point. Iraq was in violation of sanctions by not revealing those papers, but there is a long way from the drawing board to a missle launch.

In the current environment of terrorist threat (and yes I do believe there is such a threat), it does not make me feel secure that there is what appears to be a massive falling out between the intelligence community and the Bush Administration. It seems to me that the intelligence community has been providing the best information it can, but they are not the decision-makers. The decision-makers seem bound to a path of politicizing intelligence information to legitimate the chosen course of action.

The hedged comments that continue to come out of the CIA (and FBI) seem to be more of a heads-up to the public that this discrepancy exists, rather than simply an airing of a dispute. Of course, the whole thing could be part of a massive disinformation campaign to sucker terrorists into believing that the US couldn't find a threat if a sealed invitation was delivered to them.

Posted by rowan at January 7, 2004 10:39 AM | TrackBack | Printable Version | [eMail this article!] |