A Lack of Intelligence

[struggle4progress]

By JACOB HEILBRUNN
Published: April 13, 2008

... From the outset, the Bush administration tried to block not only the creation of the commission but also public Congressional hearings on pre-9/11 intelligence failures. Shenon reports that Vice President Dick Cheney called Tom Daschle, then the Senate majority leader, in January 2002 to warn him that questions about errors would be a “very dangerous and time-consuming diversion for those of us who are on the front lines of our response today. We’ve got our hands full.” Indeed they did. Bush and Cheney were embarking upon a new intelligence fiasco — falsely linking Saddam Hussein to weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda. But as public pressure mounted and Senator John McCain signed on to the idea, Bush caved and created the commission, albeit with an insultingly small budget of $3 million, compared with more than $40 million for the commission that investigated the 1986 Challenger disaster ...

The very first expert witness to appear before the commission was the State Department’s legal adviser during the Reagan administration, Abraham Sofaer, who championed the notion of pre-emptive war in his testimony ...

In addition, Zelikow extended an invitation to Laurie Mylroie, an eccentric academic at the American Enterprise Institute who believed that Saddam Hussein had been behind the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, to testify that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were linked. “After the hearing with Mylroie,” Shenon writes, Zelikow “made it clear to the commission’s staff that he wanted the issue of Al Qaeda-Iraq links pursued aggressively.” Shenon’s verdict is unequivocal: “He wanted to put the commission’s staff on record as saying that there was at least the strong possibility that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had collaborated to target the United States before 9/11.” The commission staff rebelled and Zelikow retreated ...

Other difficulties the commission encountered were highly questionable accounts from officials like the former C.I.A. director George Tenet: he claimed that he had not informed Bush about an Aug. 6 Presidential Decision Brief warning of a possible hijacking attempt, only to reverse himself. “Either Tenet’s memory was faulty to the point of dementia or he had lied,” Shenon writes, “hoping that no one would learn what had been discussed between him and Bush” ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/books/review/Heilbrunn-t.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin