|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Former Inspector's WMD Assertions Raise New Questions About US Intelligence Community |
|
|
|
(Source: Voice of America news; issued Jan. 31, 2004)
|
|
|
|
WASHINGTON --- The assertion by the former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq that prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons was flawed has sparked intense partisan debate. It has also sent shock waves through U.S. intelligence agencies, which are now on the firing line for some sharp criticism. New questions arebeing raised about how U.S. intelligence agencies conduct their business.
At least one, if not several, inquiries are expected to delve into how estimates of Iraq's weapons capabilities - cited by President Bush and his aides as the justification for going to war - could have been so wrong.
Post-war searches have failed to find any stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons. David Kay, who until just recently headed up that search, says Iraq did not have any such stockpiles at the time the war started.
Talking to VOA by telephone, Mr. Kay - who has called for an independent inquiry into the intelligence breakdown - says he believes several factors caused a failure of intelligence. Chief among them, he says, was the inability to determine when Iraqi officials might have been telling the truth instead of lying about their weapons programs.
"Well, my gut tells me partly we were snookered by the Iraqis," he said. "They started lying and cheating, and we didn't notice when the facts had changed and maybe they were genuinely telling the truth when they got rid of things. I think their consistent efforts to frustrate the U.N. inspectors misled us into believing there was something to hide, and we didn't think of alternative explanations, like bluffing for your own internal reasons or external reasons."
Analysts say that what is peculiar is that the prewar intelligence on Iraq's programs was consistent, and that information coming from other countries such as Britain and France was very similar to that collected by U.S. intelligence bodies. That, Mr. Kay says, seems to discount charges that there was pressure from Bush administration policymakers to doctor the intelligence.
"I suspect there will be multiple reasons, and none of them the easy reason - someone simply distorted the intelligence, they were pressured - I don't think that's the answer," said David Kay. "I think the answer is far more complex because other countries also came up with similar estimates, and indeed, the U.N. inspectors themselves when they left in '98 drew a very stark assessment of Iraq's WMD program. So it was a series of people who made errors, and I suspect it will turn out to be a series of errors and not a single one. But we won't know until we conduct the investigation that's required to find out that answer."
Still, say intelligence experts, there is an impetus to smother doubts and erase questions from intelligence estimates. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says policymakers abhor ambiguity in intelligence analyses and intelligence analysts don't like it either because it might cause their estimates to be ignored.
"The intelligence community has always had a problem in expressing uncertainty," he said. "Some people feel that it simply leads decision-makers to ignore intelligence. Many policymakers and, indeed, many professional users of intelligence actively discourage uncertainty from being provided in intelligence. They insist on point [exact] estimates when point estimates are not possible. And this has created a climate very often where you get far more positive statements than should ever be made."
Mr. Kay says that as intelligence analyses move up the ladder, ambiguities and footnotes are often cut away. "What happens is you don't like mushiness, so you tend to tighten them up and firm them up," he explained. "And if you're not careful - and I think there is a good argument that in this case they were not careful - you firm them up beyond what the actual data will support. You become harder, more assertive, more sure, of what you're estimating than in fact the data really supports. And that's a disservice."
Whatever the reason for the intelligence breakdown, the questions about the intelligence community's performance arise at an awkward time politically just at the beginning of a U.S. election year. (ends)
|
|
|
|
|
|
Iraq: US Ponders Failure of Intelligence on Banned Weapons |
|
|
|
(Source: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; published Jan. 30, 2004)
|
|
|
|
U.S. intelligence agencies were criticized for failing to anticipate the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001. Now, the country's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq says these same spy services were unable to determine how well -- or how poorly -- Iraq was armed in the weeks preceding last spring's war. RFE/RL spoke with intelligence experts to explore the possible reasons for this failure.
WASHINGTON --- The Middle East has replaced the defunct Soviet bloc as the chief security threat to the West, but the U.S. intelligence community has not successfully shifted its sights to contend with it.
This conclusion is supported by David Kay, the former United Nations weapons inspector whom the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent to Iraq to find Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. He told Congress this week that -- after an intense search -- he believes there are none.
A week ago (23 January), Kay quit his post as leader of the Iraq Survey Group. Since then, he has given several interviews in which he has said U.S. intelligence agencies were simply wrong when they consistently reported to U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that Hussein had large stockpiles of banned weapons.
Kay stressed that the fault lay with the intelligence gathering, not with the way the Bush administration may have interpreted that intelligence. The administration cited the information as a reason to go to war in Iraq. This week (28 January), Kay urged the U.S. Congress to investigate this intelligence lapse as the only way to get to the bottom of the matter.
He told the Senate Armed Services Committee, "I must say, my personal view -- and it is purely personal -- is that in this case, you [senators] will finally determine that it is going to take an outside inquiry, both to do it and to give yourself and the American people confidence that you have done it."
It is not clear whether such an investigation will be mounted. But one thing is clear. If Kay's assessment of Iraq is right -- that U.S. intelligence was simply wrong -- it would represent a sobering conclusion about the spy agencies that helped bring down the Soviet Union.
But Anthony Cordesman says it is not fair to look at spying during the Cold War through the same lens that was used to examine intelligence gathering against Iraq. Cordesman is a former Pentagon and State Department intelligence official who now studies national security issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington policy-research institute. Cordesman says gathering intelligence on the Soviet bloc during the Cold War was far different -- and in some ways easier -- than learning the details of Iraq's weapons programs, or the weapons status of any proliferator.
Cordesman believes Iraq's weapons capabilities were much more difficult to discern than those of Iran or Libya. He noted that after Israel destroyed the Osiraq nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, Hussein made his country as impenetrable as possible to spies. "We are not dealing with the same kinds of problems when we talk about proliferating countries," he said. "In the case of Iraq, you were dealing with a power which had had the experience of being under attack by Israel, and losing the Osiraq decades before the [2003] Gulf War. That taught Iraq to hide, to lie and conceal. With each year, it learned more about concealment."
Before the war in Iraq began last March, Cordesman said he himself believed Iraq possessed significant stockpiles of banned weapons. Now, he notes, it is apparent that Iraq destroyed these stockpiles -- in other words, that it complied with UN demands -- while making it seem that it was continuing to amass weapons.
Still, Cordesman says he does not believe the Bush administration and the U.S. intelligence community were entirely deceived about Iraq's weapons. "Certainly, when U.S. policymakers use intelligence to make a case, they tend to spin it, invariably, to support the policy case," he said. "But the reality is -- intelligence can't see through buildings, it can't count on human intelligence to provide sources at the moment this is desirable, there won't be the ideal signals intercept, and a lot of the [weapons] technology is very easy to conceal and becoming [easier] to conceal with time."
Leon Fuerth agrees, but puts a heavier burden on the policymakers than Cordesman does. Fuerth served as national security adviser to Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, during the 1990s. Fuerth told RFE/RL that he does not fully accept Kay's assertion that the intelligence community alone should take the blame for the perception that Iraq had a significant arsenal of banned weapons.
He says the responsibility should be accepted at the top -- by policymakers such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, whom he characterizes as "consumers of intelligence." Fuerth sees the Bush administration using Kay's assessment as a way to shift the blame for the Iraq war onto the intelligence agencies. "I think you will see that as the administration is forced away from its original justification [for war with Iraq], it will increasingly take the position that 'we believed what we said because we believed our intelligence community,'" he said.
"As I understand it, a separate intelligence cycle was created in the Department of Defense to draw raw intelligence out of the community and process it and send it up to people who already were committed advocates of going to war with Iraq -- people like Rumsfeld and Cheney."
Fuerth says the Bush administration, having taken the United States to war, cannot escape the responsibility of challenging intelligence and understanding its limitations. If there is a formal investigation into U.S. intelligence about Iraq, Fuerth said, he expects it will find that having spies operating within target countries is the best way to learn about an enemy, and that a lack of such "human intelligence" ought to be a signal that the information is not necessarily reliable.
"One of the lessons that I expect people to be drawing from all of this is that we needed better intelligence on the ground," he said. "Of course, there is a question of how you develop better intelligence on the ground in a system where, if you didn't come from Tikrit [Hussein's hometown], you didn't get very close to anything that was going on. But those problems ought to have made consumers of intelligence wary."
-ends-
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
