Did the Decision for War Predate Info?
W A S H I N G T O N, June 16, 2003 -- Three months after they first rolled into Iraq, U.S. troops have yet to discover the weapons of mass destruction that administration officials insisted Baghdad possessed. Was their intelligence faulty — or could it have been distorted or suppressed to make the case for war?
President Bush at least paid lip service to the idea that his final decision on war would hinge upon U.S. intelligence evaluating the threat Saddam Hussein posed.
"America needs to know I'll be making up my mind based on the latest intelligence and how best to protect our own country, plus our friends and allies," he told reporters in Crawford, Texas, last August.
But Vice President Dick Cheney's remarks just 10 days later indicate that he, at least, had already made up his mind about the nature of the Iraqi threat.
"Simply stated," Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars, "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction; there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."
But in September 2002 the first major intelligence report — from the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency — made far less categorical claims. "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons," it reads.
"We could not specifically pin down individual facilities, operating as part of the weapons of mass destruction programs, specifically the chemical warfare portion," DIA Director Adm. Lowell Jacoby explained this month. But he insisted that this lack of information "is not in any way intended to portray the fact that we had doubts that such a program existed, that such a program was active, or such a program was part of the Iraqi WMD structure."
The administration continued to build its case, adding not only that Iraq possessed the weapons, but that it posed an imminent threat. "The danger to our country is grave," the president said in September 2002. "The danger to our country is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons."
Across the Atlantic, Bush ally Tony Blair, British prime minister, had likewise begun assembling his argument for war.
"Saddam has continued to produce them," he said before Parliament on Sept. 24. "He has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons which could be activated within 45 minutes."
Were these assertions supported by fresh intelligence? Or had officials already made the decision for war, regardless?
Decision for War vs. Intelligence Supporting It
According to Vince Cannistraro, an ABCNEWS consultant and former chief of counterterrorism at the CIA, agenda may have defined analysis. "I think that early on in the administration — sometime within the first five to six months after Sept. 11, 2001 — the decision was made that Iraq had to be dealt with. The intelligence community was tasked to collect information," he said.
Official rhetoric exaggerated the degree of danger posed by Iraq, says former U.N. nuclear weapons inspector David Albright, even while intelligence services appear, to some, to have remained cautious.
"I saw that the administration was picking evidence quite carefully to support that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program," Albright said. "For example, there were defectors, credible defectors that said, 'Iraq has no nuclear weapons programs.' I never heard the administration talk about them."
Instead, the president told a Cincinnati crowd in October 2002 that Iraq "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression."
"I don't think the evidence supported such a clear statement" of threat, Albright said. "It's very hard to understand a country's secret weapons of mass destruction activities, and there was not the evidence to support those kinds of statements."
CIA Qualifiers
An October 2002 CIA white paper in fact qualified its case against Saddam. "Although Saddam probably does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them," it reads.
There were a lot of words like "probably" and "could be" in the intelligence reports, Cannistraro said. "The underlying material was very conditional. And I think the problem here is that the policy-makers were very selective in what they drew from the intelligence assessments," he said.
But Pentagon adviser Ken Adelman brushes aside that suggestion, insisting that the qualifiers contained in intelligence reports referred only to "the details."
"I think that the qualifiers were about specific kinds of chemical weapons or biological weapons or nuclear weapons programs at specific locations," he said. "The overall conclusion I don't think had any qualifier: that Saddam Hussein had a massive WMD program in the '90s. He had not accounted for how he got rid of that, so therefore any intelligent human being had to presume that he still has it."
Selective Sources
Yet neither the administration — nor the United Nations — had much hard evidence to back up such claims.
Much of the human intelligence available came from Iraqi expatriates and defectors who'd been out of the country for years, and of whom the CIA remained suspicious.
Yet Iraqi exiles found a more receptive audience at the Pentagon, where, just a few weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had set up his own small office to gather intelligence outside the established channels of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency.
"The Iraqi opposition, particularly the group led by Ahmed Chalabi, whose intelligence was underwritten by the Pentagon, played a crucial role in informing the Pentagon," said Cannistraro.
He said they did so "with information that looks, from this vantage point, like it was fraudulent, in many cases was fabricated, and the most benign interpretation was that it was just flat wrong."