In the fall of 2002, Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, dismayed that President Bush appeared intent on invading Iraq without fully vetting the complicated issues involved, demanded that the Central Intelligence Agency produce a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) assessing the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein. The document was a highly politicized one that made the case for invading Iraq by playing up dubious evidence of weapons of mass destruction while de-emphasizing dissenting views from intelligence analysts…
Two years ago, Graham was outflanked when he attempted to force the White House to make public the intelligence assessment on Saddam Hussein’s WMD. Graham has described those events in a new book, “Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia and the Failure of America’s War on Terror.” The book describes a closed-door meeting on Sept. 5, 2002, with George Tenet, in which the Senate Intelligence Committee sought to clarify whether the increasingly dire threat painted by Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration officials was real, and whether it justified a preemptive invasion. Graham and senators Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., assumed an NIE on Iraq must already exist, given the gravity of an invasion. (Such assessments can be initiated either by the White House, Congress or the CIA). And the senators asked to see it. Tenet and other intelligence agency representatives replied with “blank stares,” Graham wrote. The Democratic senators demanded that Tenet get to work immediately on the report.
Three weeks later, Tenet turned over to the congressional intelligence committees a 90-page classified NIE that minimized the view, held by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Department of Energy, that Saddam had probably not reconstituted a nuclear program. The NIE buried their many caveats in footnotes even as it also concluded that Saddam had shown little desire to attack the United States, and that Iraq had few contacts with al-Qaida. Graham pushed for its declassification. He got it on Oct. 4, 2002, only a week before the Congress voted on the Iraq war resolution.
The declassified report was 25 pages long and appeared to have been produced in advance, judging by the slick graphics and maps that accompanied it, Graham said. Gone were the caveats that the classified version had included, and gone were the assessments that Saddam didn’t appear interested in attacking the United States. What was left was “a vivid and terrifying case for war,” Graham wrote.
Source-Salon
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