Everyone got it wrong! That’s one of the key defenses of Bush supporters against critics who contend that Bush misled the country into going into Iraq. (Or in blunter temrs that some call a “slander,” “Bush lied, people died.”)
You can’t blame Bush, or suggest he was acting dishonestly, because he was acting on the best information available. Other intelligence agencies said the same thing. C’est la vie.
This argument, however, ignores that the Bush Administration’s claims about Iraq's capacity and capabilities were crumbling as the invasion date approached. The UN investigators weren’t finding any evidence that Saddam was reconstituting a nuclear program.
The argument also ignores the fact that many in the intelligence community – though not those high up in the administration nor in the veep’s or the Pentagon’s so-called intelligence operations – were not finding the evidence that the administration wanted. So it was ignored.
From Thomas E. Ricks’ “Fiasco”: (pp. 54-55)
This particular official is more sympathetic than most of his peers to the Bush administration, but still emphatically rejects the administration’s ex post facto defense that everybody got it wrong. The core conclusion of the best intelligence analysts was, he said, that “we were looking for evidence, but we weren’t finding it.” But the failure to stop 9/11 had tarnished the credibility of the intelligence professionals and lessened the deference that one might give them. On top of that, relative amateurs working for Feith and Cheney felt free to seize on existing bits of data and push them as hard as they could, this official added. “The would take individual factoids, build them into long lists, and then think because of the length of the list, it was credible.” When the lists were rejected by intelligence professionals, they would be leaked to friendly journalists. …
Others lower in the intelligence hierarchy are less forgiving of themselves and of the Bush administration. Basically, said Greg Thielmann, the State Department proliferation expert, the administration was looking for evidence to support conclusions it already had reached. “They were convinced that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons, that whe was reconstituting his program, and I’m afraid that’s where they started,” he said. “They were cherry-picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it that fit their overall interpretation. Worse than that, they were dropping qualifiers and distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem even more alarmist and dangerous than the information that we were giving them.” The impulse to push the conclusions was especially worrisome, he added, because the intelligence community, not wanting to be caught napping, already tends “to overwarn, rather than underwarn.”
“What I saw was that a lot of analysts, of low-level people, had it about right,” said a senior military intelligence official specializing in Middle Eastern affairs who is still involved in this area and so couldn’t speak on the record without endangering his security clearances. But as the intelligence moved up the chain of command rather than have its level of certainty diluted, as is generally the case when information is passed upward, in this case it was treated as more definite. “By the time you get to the executive summary level, it didn’t look a lot like the analysts’ views,” he said. “And by the time you get to the unclassified public portion, all the mushiness and doubts were washed out.”
Feith and his subordinates, especially Bill Luti, a former Navy officer who became a factotum for the administration hawks, “were essentially an extra-governmental organization, because many of their sources of information and much of their work were in the shadows,” said Gregory Newbold, the Marine general who was then the Joint Staff’s operations director. “It was also my sense that they cherry-picked obscure, unconfirmed information to reinforce their own philosophies and ideologies.”
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