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THE INTELLIGENCE BATTLE
A long-awaited Senate Intelligence
report released yesterday concludes that the CIA
gave the White House inaccurate, inadequate and
generally sloppy information about the military
strength of Iraq in the months leading up to the
war. The report, signed and supported by Republicans
and Democrats unanimously, may be the closest
admission this country has officially produced that
shows it went to war under a false impression of the
enemy.
The natural follow-up to such a powerful
investigation is reform, and the reshaping of the
intelligence-gathering operations of the United
States may consume Congress for the next couple of
years. Getting this reform right, however, not only
helps protect the nation against terrorism; it could
restore its standing in the world.
The assemblage of examples against the nation's
intelligence community is damning. Its 2002 National
Intelligence Estimate, for instance, stated Iraq "is
reconstituting its nuclear program," "has chemical
and biological weapons" and was developing an
unmanned aerial vehicle "probably intended to
deliver biological weapons." A CIA white paper from
that same year was unequivocal in its conclusion
that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
A notable speech in February 2003 by Secretary of
State Colin Powell to the United Nations was
supposed to contain conclusions about Iraq's
military strength only if those conclusions had been
backed by solid, multiple sources by the CIA. Some
of the details in that speech have been discovered
to have come from a single doubtful source (the
report of mobile biological labs) or an outright
fabricator.
Mindful that the intelligence community made a
convenient target of blame for the White House since
doubts about the extent of Iraq's weaponry became
apparent, Congress has been careful with its
condemnation. A second Senate Intelligence report,
on how the administration handled the information it
was given, is expected after the election, but the
conclusions in yesterday's report make it clear that
a major intelligence overhaul is crucial.
It makes no sense, says Sen. Olympia Snowe, a
member of the committee, to have one person who is
the director of the CIA and also has the conflicting
duty of being responsible for the rest of the 14
agencies within the intelligence community. She
joins with other senators in proposing a director of
National Intelligence "with cabinet-level status -
so that person is guaranteed to the have the ear of
the president now and in the future - and who sole
responsibility is to direct and coordinate the
entirety of our national intelligence community to
ensure consistent priorities and that all the gears
of our intelligence gathering, analysis and
reporting are synchronized and focused."
The turf fight over this proposal, especially for
budget authority, will be ferocious. The stakes of
allowing the bureaucratic ineptness described in the
report to continue are too high not to engage in it. |
