Cheney Implicitly Points His Finger at Career Intelligence Officers

Vice President Cheney delivered his remarks on prewar intelligence yesterday. As I read them, I experienced cognitive dissonance. I heard Cheney speak when he was Secretary of Defense. He is so knowledgeable that I do not believe he would be mistaken or tell an outright lie. Yet his remarks contradict what I believe to be the truth about prewar intelligence.

Maybe a careful parsing of his remarks will resolve the contradictions.

Cheney:

”What is not legitimate and what I will again say is dishonest and reprehensible is the suggestion by some U.S. senators that the president of the United States or any member of his administration purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence.”

Look closely at this sentence. The sentence is a double negative. It doesn’t tell what the truth is; it merely states that it is “dishonest” to say that “any member of the administration purposely” misled the American people. Cheney didn’t say it was false, merely dishonest.

Previous reports about the “Powers that Be” email and DITSUM 044-02 indicate that career intelligence officers challenged the viewpoints justifying the war. Some other officials found this challenge unacceptable at the policy level. For Cheney’s statement to be true, these officials either
• were not members of the administration, i.e. they were career civilian or military intelligence officers, OR
• they did not purposely mislead, i.e. they honestly believed the challenges from career intelligence officers were in error.

In either case, what we have is an exercise in implicit finger pointing- as if to say: “It wasn’t our fault, it was the people who worked for us.”

Skipping ahead in Cheney’s remarks.

“The flaws in the intelligence are plain enough in hindsight. But any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false.”

Is the Vice President admitting that someone else – not the President or a member of the administration – might have distorted the prewar information? My reading of the record is that at least two sources – Curveball and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi – distorted the prewar information. Some intelligence officers caught the distortion and attempted to warn the administration. If we are to believe Cheney, the administration was never informed about these warnings.

In short, the members of the administration failed to exercise due diligence in leading the nation into war.

Cheney talked about the burden of proof:

“The burden of proof was entirely on the dictator of Iraq, not on the U.N. or the United States or anyone else. And he repeatedly refused to comply throughout the course of the decade. “

In addition to Patrick Lang’s remarks I would like to add this comment: “While Saddam may have had the burden before the international community, I am a husband, grandfather, father, and uncle of serving Army officers. As such, I will decide who bears the burden of proof when they send my nephews into combat. As a citizen, I will exercise this power of decision the next time I step into the voting both."

Cheney gave some reasons for overestimating the WMD threat.

“Although our coalition has not found WMD stockpiles in Iraq, I repeat that we never had the burden of proof; Saddam Hussein did. We operated on the best available intelligence gathered over a period of years and within a totalitarian society ruled by fear and secret police.
We also had the experience of first Gulf War, when the intelligence community had seriously underestimated the extent and progress Saddam had made toward developing nuclear weapons.
Finally, according to the Duelfer report, Saddam Hussein wanted to preserve the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted. And we now know that the sanctions regime had lost its effectiveness and been totally undermined by Saddam Hussein's successful effort to corrupt the oil- for-food program.”

There was an underlying analytical failure the led, in part, to misleading prewar intelligence. The administration, and the intelligence community focused on proving the existence of WMD programs in Iraq. While the evidence shows that small-scale programs did exist, no one seems to have asked if these programs resulted in a military force trained and ready to use WMD.

One can argue, that the country should initiate preemptive strikes against a threat not yet in being. This is a very different argument. It is one that the administration probably did not want to make.

I’ve always respected Cheney. He is smart and passionate about being in control of the facts. While I still respect him, these remarks are an exercise blame shifting. Even that would be – barely – acceptable if it were accompanied by a genuine bi-partisan effort to reform the intelligence community. Finger pointing will not do.

P.S. Please don't get me wrong. This war is being fought for a just cause. Our victory has become a vital interest to the nation and to the people of the Middle East. I pray for our troops - and do what little I can with this blog to hold the administration responsible for its intelligence failures.

NOTE: Linked with Beltway Traffic Jam for 11/22/05