Feb 1, 2006
On the day that Ayman al-Zawahiri
appeared in his nine thousandth video from -- assumedly -- the
remarkably technologized wilds of the Afghan-Pakistan border region,
mocking President Bush for a botched Predator-drone missile attempt on
his life, another article caught my eye. In a piece in the Los Angeles Times, headlined CIA Expands Use of Drones in Terror War,
Josh Meyer reported: "Despite protests from other countries, the United
States is expanding a top-secret effort to kill suspected terrorists
with drone-fired missiles as it pursues an increasingly decentralized
Al Qaeda, U.S. officials say." These high-tech, long-distance "targeted
killings" from the air -- they used to be called assassinations and Chris Dickey of Newsweek
files them away under the rubric of "boys with toys" -- turn out, like
acts of torture, to be staggeringly counterproductive. This one, which
reportedly killed a number of women and children, shook the regime of
Pakistani military strong man and U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf.
Like National Security Agency warrantless spying on U.S. citizens, the
waterboarding of captives, and so many other actions of this
administration, such assassination attempts rely on the shakiest and
most dubious of legal findings produced more or less out of thin air.
In fact, thanks to a recent Newsweek investigative piece, Palace Revolt
by Daniel Klaidman, Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas, we know a good
deal more about just how thin that air was. As they report, with the
President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and
CIA director George Tenet convinced that the 9/11 attacks "and the
threat of more and worse to come -- were perfect justification for
unleashing the CIA and other long-blunted weapons in the national
security arsenal," all that was needed was "legal cover, so [the CIA]
wouldn't be left holding the bag if things went wrong."
Here's where what we now know as the "unitary executive theory,"
the idea of an unfettered presidency in which George Bush would be
commander-in-chief not just of the military but of all of us, came into
play. As the three reporters describe the process, David Addington,
then the Vice President's legal counsel (now his chief of staff),
fearing opposition within the bureaucracy, "came up with a perfect
solution: cut virtually everyone else out." Thus, a legal cabal
supported the Rumsfeld/Cheney "cabal" former Colin Powell Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson has written about so vehemently.
In this way, a wide-ranging legal justification for the President's right to do whatever he cared to do as long as we were "at war"
burst from the fevered brows of a few top officials and a small group
of administration lawyers. From the point of view of my own fevered
brow, a single institutional law seems to apply to the administration's
subsequent efforts: Always expand. All programs involving the secret
powers of the president -- to torture, imprison, create global prison
networks, assassinate, spy on citizens and others, or generally involve
the military in civilian life -- started from modest seeds and simply
grew and grew without bounds or even any particular relationship to
their efficacy. Take the Pentagon's three year old Counterintelligence
Field Activity or CIFA.
Initially a small office charged with "protecting military facilities
and personnel," it now has nine directorates, a staff of 1,000, a large
secret budget, and its own full-scale secret spying program, code-named
Talon, that reported as a "national security threat" ten peace
activists "who handed out
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches outside Halliburton's headquarters
in Houston in June 2004." The same could be said of CIA secret prisons,
NSA domestic spying operations, or the new U.S. Northern Command that the administration set up in 2002.
Thomas Powers, author of Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda,
explores the meaning of the recent NSA spying scandal below in
fascinating detail and the abject failure of Congress (or the American
public) to rein in this administration. As he writes trenchantly, "In
public life as in kindergarten, the all-important word is no." It's
clear that the expansion of secret (and not so secret) "war-time"
powers proved a heady, addictive experience for top officials of this
administration. (Where's Nancy Reagan and her "just say no" program
when we need them most?) Powers' superb essay will be running in the
February 23 issue of the New York Review of Books
just now heading toward the newsstands. It appears here as an on-line
exclusive thanks to the kindness of that magazine's editors. Tom
The Biggest Secret
By Thomas Powers
A Review of State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration by James Risen.
1.
The challenges posed to American democracy by secrecy and by unchecked
presidential power are the two great themes running through the history
of the Iraq war. How long the war will last, who will "win," and what
it will do to the political landscape of the Middle East will not be
obvious for years to come, but the answers to those questions cannot
alter the character of what happened at the outset. Put plainly, the
President decided to attack Iraq, he brushed caution and objection
aside, and Congress, the press, and the people, with very few
exceptions, stepped back out of the way and let him do it.
Explaining this fact is not going to be easy. Commentators often now
refer to President Bush's decision to invade Iraq as "a war of choice,"
which means that it was not provoked. The usual word for an unprovoked
attack is aggression. Why did Americans -- elected representatives and
plain citizens alike -- accede so readily to this act of aggression,
and why did they question the President's arguments for war so feebly?
The whole business is painfully awkward to consider, but it will not go
away. If the Constitution forbids a president anything it forbids war
on his say-so, and if it insists on anything it insists that presidents
are not above the law. In plain terms this means that presidents cannot
enact laws on their own, or ignore laws that have been enacted by
Congress.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 is such a law; it
was enacted to end years of routine wiretapping of American citizens
who had attracted official attention by opposing the war in Vietnam.
The express purpose of the act was to limit what presidents could ask
intelligence organizations to do. But for limits on presidential power
to have meaning Congress and the courts must have the fortitude to say
no when they think no is the answer.
In public life as in kindergarten, the all-important word is no. We
are living with the consequences of the inability to say no to the
President's war of choice with Iraq, and we shall soon see how the
Congress and the courts will respond to the latest challenge from the
White House -- the claim by President Bush that he has the right to
ignore FISA's prohibition of government intrusion on the private
communications of Americans without a court order, and his repeated
statements that he intends to go right on doing it.
Nobody was supposed to know that FISA had been brushed aside. The
fact that the National Security Agency (NSA), America's largest
intelligence organization, had been turned loose to intercept the
faxes, e-mails, and phone conversations of Americans with blanket
permission by the President remained secret until the New York Times
reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau learned over a year ago that
it was happening. An early version of the story was apparently
submitted to the Times' editors in October 2004, when it might have affected the outcome of the presidential election. But the Times,
for reasons it has not clearly explained, withheld the story until
mid-December 2005 when the newspaper's publisher and executive editor
-- Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller -- met with President Bush in
the Oval Office to hear his objections before going ahead. Even then
certain details were withheld.
What James Risen learned in the course of his reporting can be found in his newly published book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,
a wide-ranging investigation of the role of intelligence in the origins
and the conduct of the war in Iraq. Risen contributes much new material
to our knowledge of recent intelligence history. He reports in detail,
for example, on claims that CIA analysts quit fighting over exaggerated
reports of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as word spread in the
corridors at Langley that the President had decided to go to war no
matter what the evidence said; that the Saudi government seized and
then got rid of tell-tale bank records of Abu Zubaydah, the most
important al-Qaeda figure to be captured since September 11; and that
"a handful of the most important al Qaeda detainees" have been sent for
interrogation to a secret prison codenamed "Bright Light." One CIA
specialist in counterterror operations told Risen, "The word is that
once you get sent to Bright Light, you never come back."
Digging out intelligence history is a slow process, resisted by
officials at every step of the way, and Risen's work will be often
quoted in future accounts of the Iraq war. But nothing else in Risen's
book rivals the NSA story in importance, revealing that the President
not only authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans without seeking
court orders, but to listen in a new way, by intercepting a large
volume of communications among categories of people, and then analyzing
or "mining" the data in those calls for suspicious patterns that might
offer "potential evidence of terrorist activity."
"This is the biggest secret I know about," one official told Risen.
The eavesdropping effort is technically known as a "special access
program" (SAP), which means that its existence and the information it
collects are both tightly held. Within the government, Risen tells us,
witting officials referred to it simply as "the program," and even the
legal opinions justifying it are classified. Risen traces the origins
of the program back to the brief war that overthrew the Taliban
government in Afghanistan and resulted in the capture of many al-Qaeda
suspects along with their cell phones and computers. These suspects had
been calling and e-mailing people throughout the world, many of whom,
inevitably, were in the United States, raising understandable fears of
new terrorist attacks. But according to Risen, the NSA does not limit
itself to monitoring numbers provided by the CIA from captured al-Qaeda
phone books, targets for which there is some degree of "probable cause"
to think they might be terrorist-connected. Those phone numbers provide
only the jumping-off point for the program. The NSA has since broadened
its effort by establishing "its own internal checklist" to pinpoint
phone numbers and addresses of interest, and it is likely that the
items on the list are checked off by a computer program in a
nanosecond, not by analysts exercising deliberate judgment.
How big is the target list? At any given moment, Risen believes, the
NSA may be "eavesdropping on as many as five hundred people in the
United States...." But his number of five hundred should not be
interpreted as an outer limit. The actual volume of intercepted calls
is almost certainly a very great deal larger, going beyond
communications between known, named persons. Modern eavesdropping
seldom mirrors the classic wiretap of yesteryear when FBI agents with
earphones might record hundreds of hours of a Mafia chief chatting with
his underboss in New York's Little Italy. The idea now is to see if
anyone on the phone in New York or New Jersey sounds in any way like a
Mafia chief. A dinner of linguine with clams in a known Mafia hangout
could be enough to warrant a further look. The al-Qaeda phone book
numbers were the crack in the door; follow-up targets are simply
numbers or e-mail addresses, leading to other numbers and e-mail
addresses, all plucked from the torrents of traffic transmitted by the
switching systems of the major American telecommunications companies,
which daily handle two billion phone calls and perhaps ten times as
many e-mail messages. What Risen discovered, in short, was a program
best described as "big."
2.
Under existing law the NSA should have sought permission from the
secret FISA court in Washington before listening in on the
communications of any "US persons" -- basically, American corporations,
citizens, and others lawfully inside the United States -- who had
turned up in al-Qaeda phone books and directories. The law makes
provision for emergencies: if investigators feel they don't have time
for legal rigmarole they can act first and then seek permission within
the following three days. This was not done. President Bush insisted on
New Year's Day that "This is a limited program... it's limited to calls
from outside the United States to calls within the United States. But
they are of known -- numbers of known al-Qaeda members or affiliates."
But it seems clear that the NSA program quickly spilled beyond its
original limits; the real reason for ignoring the FISA courts is
probably a savvy guess that the courts would not approve what the
administration wants to do.
Listening to specific persons was only part of it, and not the
greater part. What Risen learned, which has been backed up by other
press accounts in recent weeks, is that the counterterror investigators
from the beginning wanted to cast the net wide -- to listen to all the
people in the al-Qaeda phone books, and then broaden their search to
the still wider circle of people the phone book names were in touch
with, and go on to check out all their contacts as well. If the first
generation of targets numbered a hundred, let's say, and each of them
had been talking to a hundred people in a second generation of targets,
then even a third generation search could easily sweep up a million
people. You can see why investigators desperate to prevent any
repetition of the attacks of September 11 would have favored this rapid
and wide casting of the net, but that sort of industrial-scale fishing
expedition is exactly what the FISA courts were established to prevent.
In the days after the Risen–Lichtblau story first appeared President
Bush, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the head of the NSA at the
beginning of the program, General Michael Hayden, and others all
defended the program as urgent, successful, justified by acts of
Congress and the President's powers under the constitution, sharply
limited in scope, approved by members of Congress who had been briefed
on the program, and carefully managed to protect the civil liberties
and other rights of Americans.
"The whole key here is agility," said General Hayden.
"What we're trying to do is learn of communications, back and forth,
from within the United States to overseas members of al-Qaeda," said
Gonzales. "That's what this program is about. This is not about
wiretapping everybody. This is about a very concentrated, very limited
program focused on gaining information about our enemy."
"Dealing with al-Qaeda is not simply a matter of law enforcement," President Bush said in a press conference on December 19.
"It requires defending the country against an enemy
that declared war against the United States.... So, consistent with US
law and the Constitution, I authorized the interception of
international communications of people with known links to al-Qaeda and
related terrorist organizations.... Leaders in the United States
Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this program....
I've reauthorized this program more than 30 times since the September
the 11th attacks, and I intend to do so for so long as... the nation
faces the continuing threat...."
The President's carefully worded statement casts a troubling new light
on his insistence that we are fighting a "war on terror" and that he is
a "wartime president." Constitutional lawyers have long argued about
the limits of presidential or executive power, but all agree that the
limits are more elastic in wartime, and it is increasingly evident that
the Bush administration has treated this distinction as a barn door.
The shock caused by the revelation of the NSA program is not centered
on concern for the civil liberties of al-Qaeda terrorists but on the
scale, still unknown, of the eavesdropping authorized by the President;
on his refusal to use the courts or seek any change in the governing
laws; and on his blanket claim that Article Two of the Constitution
gives him, as president and commander in chief of the armed forces,
both the responsibility for defending the country and "the authority
necessary to fulfill it."
Even some Republican leaders find this broad claim troubling.
Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate's Judiciary Committee,
has announced that he will hold hearings on the NSA program. "I am
skeptical of the attorney general's citation of authority, but I am
prepared to listen," he said in December. "You can't have the
administration and a select number of members [of Congress, those
briefed by the White House] alter the law. It can't be done."
In an interview with Fox News on January 19, Vice President Dick
Cheney said such briefings "have occurred at least a dozen times. I
presided over most of them." One of those briefings, possibly the
first, was held in Vice President Cheney's office on July 17, 2003,
four months after the American invasion of Iraq and a year after the
NSA program began. Present were Representatives Jane Harman and Porter
Goss, now the director of the CIA; and Senators Pat Roberts and John D.
Rockefeller. Briefing them were Goss's predecessor at the CIA, George
Tenet, and General Hayden of the NSA. There has been no published
account of what the members of Congress were told about the nature,
rationale, justification, and scale of the program. They were neither
permitted to take notes nor to discuss what they heard with any other
persons. Far from feeling that the administration had fulfilled its
obligations under existing law, Senator Rockefeller handwrote a brief
letter to Cheney the same day
"to reiterate my concern regarding the sensitive
intelligence issues we discussed today.... Clearly, the activities we
discussed raise profound oversight issues.... Given the security
restrictions associated with this information, and my inability to
consult staff or counsel on my own, I feel unable to fully evaluate,
much less endorse these activities. As I reflected on the meeting
today, and the future we face, John Poindexter's TIA project sprung to
mind, exacerbating my concern...."
TIA stands for Total Information Awareness, an intelligence program
conceived in the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) in the year following the attacks of September 11. It was
designed to collect and exploit digital records of all kinds from
private and public compilers of information -- phone records, bank
records, credit card records, police records, medical records, travel
records -- basically everything that is recorded about individuals.
Running the program was John Poindexter, a former Navy admiral and
national security advisor under President Reagan who had been indicted
and convicted on seven felony charges during the Iran-contra
investigation in the early 1990s, convictions later overturned on
appeal. When the New York Times
first published a description of TIA in December 2002, the fact that
Poindexter was running it proved a fatal debility, and in September
2003 Congress killed funding for the Pentagon's Information Awareness
Office.
But Poindexter's retirement and the end of the IAO did not
extinguish official hopes for "data-mining," a computer-intensive
approach to finding meaning in apparently random patterns. This, in
fact, is basically what the NSA has always done -- collect
communications from targets of interest and attack them with "tools,"
which are basically computer programs that seek patterns in apparently
random letter and number groups. Data-mining seeks patterns in random
actions -- buying, selling, check-writing, getting on planes, and so on
-- rather than in the numbers and letters that make up codes.
Data-mining is not a way to find out what persons of interest have been
up to; it is a way to identify persons of interest among the general
population -- persons, in short, who have not been detected doing
anything that might convince a judge on the FISA court to issue a
warrant for surveillance. Checking out US persons contacted by al-Qaeda
would have raised no red flags with FISA judges; the larger and more
significant part of the program uncovered by James Risen -- the part
which the administration did not want to describe to the FISA court or
to members of Congress who could have amended the law; the part, in
fact, which the administration still hopes to keep secret and continue
-- is the use of data-mining techniques by the NSA to do what Congress
refused to allow Poindexter and the Pentagon to do. And that is to
generate large numbers of names -- not dozens, thousands -- for the FBI
to investigate.
John Poindexter and Total Information Awareness were one bell that
rang loudly in the mind of Senator Rockefeller after his briefing in
Cheney's office. It is probable that another has rung since -- the
testimony of John Bolton during his confirmation hearings last summer
to be U.S. ambassador to the UN, when he said that on ten occasions he
had formally asked the NSA to identify the "U.S. persons" who had been
party to, or perhaps only mentioned in, communications intercepted by
the agency and included in reports distributed to others in the
government. The fight over the administration's refusal to identify the
nineteen persons who aroused Bolton's curiosity in those ten
communications was one reason President Bush abandoned efforts to force
a Senate vote and instead made an interim appointment of Bolton to the
UN post while Congress was in recess. But the argument while it
continued jarred loose additional information about the scale of NSA
activity -- for example, the State Department's admission that Bolton's
colleagues had made over four hundred requests for the identities of
U.S. persons in NSA reports; that the NSA had been asked as many as
3,500 times by other agencies to fill in the names of U.S. persons, and
that the total number of names provided to other agencies was greater
than 10,000.
Who are these people? Some of them were probably included in a
database of 1,519 "suspicious incidents" compiled by the Pentagon's
Counterintelligence Field Activity, an office charged with defending
military bases, according to a report broadcast by NBC a few days
before the original New York Times
story on the NSA program. On examination, the Pentagon's "suspicious
incidents" were simply public protests of the sort watched,
photographed, investigated, and wiretapped during the Vietnam War under
the program that led to the enactment of FISA twenty-five years ago. At
that time the Pentagon's database had ballooned to 18,000 names.
Of the numerous questions facing investigators for the Judiciary
Committee the easy ones will concern the legality of the program. It
was patently illegal under FISA and the only argument for letting the
President get away with ignoring FISA is that he is prepared to make a
fight of it. No committee headed by Republicans will do more than chide
him on the law. The questions hardest to answer will be what the NSA
actually did, and whether it served any useful purpose. A recent New York Times
story contradicts the President's claim that the NSA program was
"limited... to known al-Qaeda members or affiliates." Citing anonymous
FBI officials, the Times claimed that the NSA flooded the
bureau with "thousands" of names per month to check out for possible
terrorist connections. Far from being a "vital tool," as described by
President Bush, the program was a distracting time waster that sent
harried FBI agents down an endless series of blind alleys chasing
will-o'-the-wisp terrorists who turned out to be schoolteachers. And
far from saving "thousands of lives," as claimed by Vice President Dick
Cheney in December 2005, the NSA program never led investigators to a
genuine terrorist not already under suspicion, nor did it help them to
expose any dangerous plots. So why did the administration continue this
lumbering effort for three years? Outsiders sometimes find it tempting
to dismiss such wheel-spinning as bureaucratic silliness, but I believe
that the Judiciary Committee will find, if it is willing to persist,
that within the large pointless program there exists a small, sharply
focused program that delivers something the White House really wants.
This it will never confess willingly.
3.
Over the next few months the White House will be fighting a
two-front war to preserve its secrets -- one against the Judiciary
Committee, as just described, and a second against the Senate
Intelligence Committee, which has committed itself to a renewed effort
to investigate the administration's drum-beating for war with Iraq by
citing scary reports of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction --
reports that were virtually all wrong, and in some cases were little
short of fabricated.
The committee's chairman, Senator Pat Roberts, promised before the
2004 presidential election that "phase two" of its investigation would
address the administration's actual use of the intelligence it
received, flawed as it was. This was something of a minefield. On their
face, many statements by Bush, Cheney, National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appeared to
go well beyond even the exaggerated claims made by the CIA. After Bush
won a second term the Republican Roberts not surprisingly dropped
"phase two," saying he no longer saw the point. But in November Senator
Harry Reid, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, revived
phase two when he invoked a rarely used parliamentary rule to call for
a secret session of the Senate to discuss new evidence suggesting that
substantial doubts about WMD intelligence had been suppressed before
the war.
Risen found evidence of that, too. Included in his book is a new
account of a pre-war CIA program conceived by the agency's assistant
director for intelligence collection, Charles Allen, to send
Iraqi-Americans to Baghdad to ask scientist-relatives about WMDs. A
chief target of the new program was Iraq's effort to develop nuclear
weapons, the subject of intense ongoing scrutiny after a son-in-law of
Saddam Hussein defected in mid-1995 to Amman, Jordan, where he
described WMD programs to UN officials. Sawsan Alhaddad, a woman doctor
working and living in Cleveland, was one of about thirty Iraqis
dispatched to Baghdad under this program in late summer 2002. When she
returned in September she told CIA debriefers in a Virginia hotel room
that her brother, an electrical engineer who had joined the Iraqi
nuclear program in the early 1980s, had insisted the nuclear weapons
program was dead, shut down years earlier. The other Iraqis all said
the same thing only months before the US invasion of Iraq in March
2003, but their reports were bottled up in the CIA.
The agency, it turns out, had heard the same thing from many
sources, including Hussein's defector son-in-law, General Hussein
Kamal, who was fool enough to return to Baghdad, where he was executed.
But before leaving, Kamal told the UN that Iraq's WMD program, larger
and more advanced than the CIA had believed before the first Gulf War
in 1991, had been closed down
"after visits of [UN] inspection teams. You have
important role in Iraq with this. You should not underestimate
yourself. You are very effective in Iraq.... All chemical weapons were
destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons
-- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed.... In the
nuclear area, there were no weapons. Missile and chemical weapons were
real weapons. Our main worry was Iran and they were [intended for use]
against them."
Kamal's report, like Sawsan Alhaddad's and many others, were never
cited in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate used to
convince Congress to vote for war. The pattern is clear; evidence of
Iraqi WMDs, however flimsy, was treated like scripture while
information contradicting that evidence, however clear, was bottled up
and never left the building. On three separate occasions, for example,
in mid-2001, mid-2002, and January 2003, just before the war, the CIA
asked the French for their evaluation of the now-infamous reports that
Iraq was trying to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore from Niger. According
to the Los Angeles Times
of December 11, 2005, the French intelligence chief at the time, Alain
Chouet, said that the answer was the same in each instance -- nothing
to it.
The French were in a position to know; uranium ore in Niger was all
mined by French companies. In mid-2002 the French even told the CIA
that the Italian documents reporting the purchase were forgeries,
something the CIA did not even attempt to examine on its own for
another year; and a few months later, "at about the same time as the
State of the Union address" when the President cited the yellowcake as
alarming evidence of Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions, the Italians
also told the Americans that the documents were forgeries. In similar
fashion, claims that Iraq was providing al-Qaeda with training in the
use of poison gases, cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN
in February 2003, were also contradicted by reports the CIA had but
chose to ignore.
In public debate it is customary at this point to ask, in a voice of
amazed horror: How could this have happened? Are these intelligence
professionals all community college dropouts? Have they forgotten
everything they learned in spy school? My own view is that inconvenient
evidence that angers policymakers and threatens careers cannot be
pushed under the rug by intelligence officers unless they are fully
aware of each step in the series -- they know it is evidence, they know
it is inconvenient, they know it will anger policymakers, they know
their careers will be threatened, and they know they are pushing
evidence in the direction of a rug.
James Risen is not willing to go so far. His book is filled with
evidence supporting this interpretation, but he seems reluctant to
embrace it. "[Paul] Wolfowitz personally complained to Tenet about the
CIA's analytical work on Iraq and al-Qaeda," Risen says in discussing
the use of intelligence to justify the war. Can we be in doubt why
Wolfowitz complained, or why the agency assured Powell that Iraq was
training al-Qaeda, scout's honor? When CIA officers told Tenet the war
would be a mistake, Risen notes, "he would just come back from the
White House and say they are going to do it." Risen sums up Tenet's
attitude thus: "War with Iraq was inevitable, and it was time for the
CIA to do its part." That seems clear enough; surely Risen means that
the agency's part was to help beat the drum for war. But then Risen
swings back, like a man facing snakes on one side and alligators on the
other. Why was the information reported by Sawsan Alhaddad and the
other Iraqis bottled up at the agency? "Petty turf battles and tunnel
vision of the agency's officials" is Risen's first answer. In the next
sentence he braces up, then wilts again:
"...Doubts were stifled because of the enormous
pressure that officials at the CIA...felt to support the
administration. CIA director George Tenet and his senior lieutenants
became so...fearful of creating a rift with the White House, that they
created a climate within the CIA in which warnings that the available
evidence on Iraqi WMD was weak were either ignored or censored. Tenet
and his senior aides may not have meant to foster that sort of work
environment -- and perhaps did not even realize they were doing it...."
What can Risen be thinking? How could they not realize they were doing it? They were running the place.
Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense, was not the only
official to let the CIA know what he wanted to hear. Rumsfeld set up a
special office in the Pentagon to "re-look" the intelligence on Iraqi
WMDs and then urged Tenet to listen to its findings. Vice President
Cheney crossed the Potomac more than once to ask questions -- the same
questions, over and over. John Bolton tried to fire resistant analysts
in the State Department's intelligence shop and at the CIA; they kept
their jobs, but who could fail to get the message? Robert Hutchings, a
former chief of the National Intelligence Council, the group that wrote
the October 2002 NIE, described Bolton's way of mining intelligence
reports to come up with the administration's version of the world. "He
took isolated facts and made much more to build a case than the
intelligence warranted," he said. "It was a sort of cherry-picking of
little factoids and little isolated bits that were drawn out to present
the starkest-possible case."
These were not intellectual exercises; Bolton needed custom-built
intelligence to support the administration's policies. "When policy
officials came back repeatedly to push the same kind of judgments, and
push the intelligence community to confirm a particular set of
judgments," Hutchings said, "it does have the effect of politicizing
intelligence, because the so-called 'correct answer' becomes all too
clear." Has the Senate Intelligence Committee got the fortitude to
accept the implications of these facts and many others just like them?
The systematic exaggeration of intelligence before the invasion of
Iraq and the flouting of FISA both required, and got, a degree of
resolution in the White House that has few precedents in American
history. The President has gotten away with it so far because he leaves
no middle ground -- cut him some slack, or prepare to fight to the
death. The fact that he enjoys a Republican majority in both houses of
Congress gives him a margin of comfort, but I suspect that Democratic
majorities would be just as reluctant, in the end, to call him on
either count. Americans were ready enough to believe that one president
might lie about a sexual affair; but they balk at concluding that his
successor would pressure others to lie, and even would utter a few
whoppers himself, so he could take the country to war.
Risen helps to explain how it was done, but lets it go at that. In
his Fox News interview Vice President Cheney did not give an inch on
the necessity of the NSA spying or of the war itself. "When we look
back on this, ten years hence," he insisted, "we will [see that we]
have fundamentally changed the course of history in that part of the
world." A decade down the road we'll know if Cheney is right or wrong,
and if the change is the one we wanted. The question now is whether the
President could do it all again -- take the country to war, and scrap
restraints on spying, just as he pleases. The answer is yes, unless
Congress and the courts can say no.
Thomas Powers is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and is the author of Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda; The Man Who Kept the Secrets; and Heisenberg's War.
This article appears in the February 23 issue of the New York Review of Books
Copyright 2005 Thomas Powers
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