Bogus intelligence

THE SPECTACLE of the world’s only superpower being betrayed by a totally inept intelligence organisation is both amazing and disturbing. This is a country that launched a war on terror after the 9-11-01 bombings which badly exposed the weakness of its intelligence gathering capacity. This failure to detect the worst enemy attack on US soil should have taught the Bush administration a lesson, but it obviously did not. It should have driven home the fact that the CIA, which bore an awesome reputation around the world, was in fact a grossly incompetent organisation and should not really be trusted. If it were caught unawares by this terrorist attack on the US, how effective was the spy agency in assessing threats from abroad?

But we know that even before the September 11 bombings, the Bush administration had taken the decision to invade Iraq and it must have been expecting the intelligence community to support its plan for a pre-emptive strike aimed at getting rid of Saddam Hussein. So once the CIA, responding to that kind of rhetorical and jingoistic pressure,  provided it with the kind of intelligence report it needed, it promptly and comprehensively accepted it without any thought of questioning its validity. How indecently bogus was the CIA analysis of Saddam’s threat has now been revealed in the first report of the bi-partisan US Senate Intelligence Committee which was issued yesterday. The fact is that US intelligence agencies had nobody on the ground in Iraq and, according to the report, succumbed to a “group think dynamic” which led “analysts, collectors and managers to both interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD programme as well as ignore or minimise evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding weapons of mass destruction programmes.”

These assumptions, the Committee said, “led analysts to inflate snippets of questionable information into broad declarations that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons.” According to the report, no evidence was found that the agencies came under pressure from the White House “to deliver certain findings,” but the Committee’s top Democrat, Senator Jay Rockefeller strongly disagreed with such a view at yesterday’s press conference, expressing his disappointment that the panel did not look into what he called “exaggerated” claims of the Iraqi threat by top administration officials. He accused senior White House officials of delivering “a cascade of ominous statements” and creating an environment or ambience of pressure after they had made up their minds about going to war. Rockefeller also charged George Tenet, the CIA director who has since resigned, of calling on analysts to do what they could “to ease up the pressure.”

It is our considered view, in light of all this, that the CIA analysts simply bowed to that sort of pressure from the White House and concocted the kind of intelligence they knew the Bush warmongers wanted in order to justify the decision they had already taken to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iraq. Why else would they rely on such bogus sources, why else would they snatch at questionable snippets from anti-Saddam Iraqi expatriates and cook up such a fraudulent intelligence profile? The fact is, the pressure was on and nobody in the CIA wanted to be a nay-sayer or even raise a cautionary voice against Bush’s obsessive thrust to topple Saddam Hussein. Bush and his war hawks, whipping up mass paranoia in their post-September 11 “war on terrorism,” virtually asked for it and the CIA dutifully but dishonestly delivered. In our view they are both equally to blame for this terrible fiasco.