Documents reveal PR push for Iraq war preceded intel findings

"White Paper" Drafted before NIE even Requested

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 254

Posted - August 22, 2008

For more information contact:
John Prados - (202) 994-7000

Washington D.C., August 22, 2008 - The U.S. intelligence community buckled sooner in 2002 than previously reported to Bush administration pressure for data justifying an invasion of Iraq, according to a documents posting on the Web today by National Security Archive senior fellow John Prados.

The documents suggest that the public relations push for war came before the intelligence analysis, which then conformed to public positions taken by Pentagon and White House officials. For example, a July 2002 draft of the "White Paper" ultimately issued by the CIA in October 2002 actually pre-dated the National Intelligence Estimate that the paper purportedly summarized, but which Congress did not insist on until September 2002.

A similar comparison between a declassified draft and the final version of the British government's "White Paper" on Iraq weapons of mass destruction adds to evidence that the two nations colluded in the effort to build public support for the invasion of Iraq. Dr. Prados concludes that the new evidence tends to support charges raised by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan and by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in its long-delayed June 2008 "Phase II" report on politicization of intelligence.



U.S. Intelligence and Iraq WMD
Compiled and edited by Dr. John Prados
Note: The following documents are in PDF format.
You will need to download and install the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view.

On June 5, 2008 the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released a report examining whether the public statements made by U.S. officials, including President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and others were consonant with U.S. intelligence information. This report forms part of a second phase of the SSCI’s investigation of Iraq intelligence issues, most especially Saddam Hussein’s possible Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program, originally approved by the Intelligence Committee in February 2004 but stalled by its Republican majority for several years, until the majority changed with the current 110th Congress. Committee chairman Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV) then ordered work on this inquiry resumed, and the present report is the result.

The appearance of this long-awaited SSCI “Phase II” report coincided with controversy over the revelations of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan who, in a memoir appearing almost simultaneously, argued that “in the fall of 2002, Bush and his White House were engaging in a carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage.” (Note 1) A review of new evidence along with previously-available documents sheds important new light on this debate. Among the findings:

* The Phase II report on Bush administration public statements, in conjunction with the SSCI’s original July 2004 report on Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction, indicates that political manipulation extended beyond the intelligence itself to affect investigation of the intelligence failures on Iraq as well as the Bush administration’s use of that information.
* In conjunction with other recently declassified materials, the Phase II report shows that the Bush administration solicited intelligence then used to “substantiate” its public claims.
* A recently declassified draft of the CIA’s October 2002 white paper on Iraqi WMD programs demonstrates that that paper long pre-dated the compilation of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi capabilities.
* The timing of the CIA’s draft white paper coincides with a previously available draft of the British Government’s white paper on Iraqi WMD, demonstrating that the Bush administration and the Tony Blair government began acting in concert to build support for an invasion of Iraq two to three months earlier than previously understood.
* A comparison of the CIA draft white paper with its publicly released edition shows that all the changes made were in the nature of strengthening its charges against Iraq by inserting additional alarming claims, in the manner of an advocacy, or public relations document. The draft and final papers show no evidence of intelligence analysis applied to the information contained. Similar comparison of the British white paper shows the same phenomenon at work.
* Declassified Pentagon documents demonstrate that the CIA white paper was modified in ways that conformed to the desires of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and his office, in much the same way that British documents indicate that country’s white paper was changed to conform to the desires of the Blair government.

The many official investigations and unofficial investigations carried out, plus the statements and speeches of former CIA officials defending themselves against charges of distortion, have established a few points beyond question. Most important, following Saddam Hussein’s 1998 final expulsion of UN weapons inspectors from Iraq, very little new information fell into the hands of U.S. intelligence. Notable exceptions include data from Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, recruited as a CIA source (Note 2), and from Iraqi scientists clandestinely approached by the CIA under a covert program. (Note 3) Both these streams of information denied the existence of Iraqi WMD. On the other side were data from Iraqi exile sources that claimed all sorts of WMD and a set of fabricated documents alleging an Iraqi deal to buy uranium ore in Niger. The only concrete “find” was of a shipment of aluminum tubes being imported into Iraq, but analysts were divided over whether these tubes had anything to do with WMD at all. U.S. intelligence largely discounted the (accurate) details from Sabri and the scientists and—despite the CIA’s expressed misgivings—made use of the exile data. This thin data conditioned the intelligence analysis.

There was also a source of intelligence failure that flowed not from bad information but from analytical procedures. American intelligence knew that Saddam had worked through the 1990s to deceive UN weapons inspectors—they assumed he was hiding his WMDs rather than concealing the lack of them. On specific weapons, for example long-range Iraqi missiles, intelligence took a standard accounting approach, and since they could not account for every Iraqi missile, assumed Saddam was hiding a covert force of ballistic missiles. U.S. intelligence was coming off a record of underestimating Iraqi WMD progress in the 1980s and now overcompensated in the other direction.

The recent SSCI Phase II report concludes that Bush administration statements, while “substantiated” by the CIA reporting, went beyond that data. The Republican minority on the committee attacked that conclusion. The main defense offered—and repeated by media commentators—is that the root cause of the administration’s Iraq hysteria was intelligence failure, not intent to manipulate the American public. A typical formulation is that of columnist Fred Hiatt in the Washington Post, who argued that “the phony ‘Bush Lied’ story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong.”