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A Daily Chronicle of Bush Administration Distortion November 4, 2003

     

Bush Administration "Neo-Cons" Oversold Prewar Intelligence to Justify War in Iraq



Facing increased pressure from ongoing and escalating violence in Iraq, President Bush held a press conference last week to calm critics, saying, "We took action based upon good, solid intelligence."1 But the President's assertion has been challenged by both the House and Senate intelligence communities and interviews with intelligence officers, one of whom said, "There seemed to be an unseemly eagerness to believe any information which would portray the Iraqi threat as being extremely grave and imminent."2

The House and Senate intelligence committees have both concluded that intelligence assessments leading up to the war were, in the words of House Chairman Porter Goss, "not 100 percent on target."3

While the intelligence committees look for answers in the quality of information gathering, some claim the disparity is less about actual intelligence than about the process by which selective intelligence made its way to the White House. One former National Security Council official, Kenneth Pollack says that the Bush people, "dismantle[d] the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information... Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from [the top leadership."4

Other evidence suggests that the decision to go to war occurred as early as a year before it actually began. In an unscheduled appearance in March with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Republican and Democratic Senators, Bush cursed Saddam and vowed, "We're taking him out." Weeks later, Vice President Dick Cheney said to a Senate Republican policy lunch that the question of attacking Iraq was not if, but when.5

A new documentary, Truth Uncovered, supports that view through interviews with several former intelligence and defense officials. Chas Freeman, a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Assistant Secretary of Defense said, "I don't think it's an accident at all that so much of the justification turned out to be fallacious - misleading-deliberately so. These people, the neo-conservatives are very committed advocates of a policy. They apparently were not troubled by distorting the truth in order to sell the policies that they believed in."6

Sources:
  1. Presidential Press Conference, 10/28/03.
  2. "Turf Wars and the Future of Iraq," PBS, 9/03.
  3. "Intelligence Dispute To Be Aired in Public," Financial Times, p. 4.
  4. "THE STOVEPIPE; How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq's weapons," The New Yorker, 10/27/03, p. 77.
  5. "We're Taking Him Out," Time.com, 5/5/02.
  6. "Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War" 11/03.



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