Intelligence Failure: Inside This Month's Senate Report

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http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/06/16/intelligence-failure-inside-this-month-s-senate-report.aspx

Intelligence Failure: Inside This Month's Senate Report


The Senate intelligence committee released its two-part report this month exploring pre-war intelligence on Iraq and its use by the Bush administration. We asked James Martin, a Paul Mellon fellow at Cambridge University who writes on international security issues, to wade through the 172-page report for us. He'll be guest-posting his findings here over the next few days.

Released only three days after the publication earlier this month of Scott McClellan's damning indictment of the Bush administration, What Happened, new reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee on prewar Iraq intelligence seem to confirm the conclusions of the former press-secretary's mea culpa: that the administration misused and misrepresented the findings of the intelligence community in the run-up to the war.

snip//

But as Dan Froomkin at the WashPost points out, the fact that Congress "bought the administration line" does not necessarily mean that the two were operating on a level playing field: "It takes a lot of chutzpah to defend yourself against charges that you've engaged in a propaganda campaign," he writes, "by noting that it worked."

It's likely that the administration had access to more intelligence on Iraq than Congress, as Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has recently argued, although the extent of its knowledge remains unclear. Unfortunately, the Senate committee report takes into account only a handful of official intelligence estimates and excludes from consideration "less formal communications" between the White House and the intelligence community that undoubtedly contained even more details on the status (or non-status) of Iraq's WMD programs. A more comprehensive investigation into these other intelligence channels would help clarify what information exactly was available to the White House and what to Congress, and the extent to which we can rightfully accuse the former of having lied to the public about the reasons for going to war.

--James Martin