In his speech yesterday, President Bush claimed that members of Congress who voted for the 2002 Iraq war resolution “had access to the same intelligence” as his administration. This is false.
Never mind that much of the intelligence offered to the public and to Congress was inaccurate and misleading, or that according to the Downing Street memo and other documents, such intelligence was likely intentionally “fixed.” It is simply not true to state that Congress received the “same intelligence” as the White House:
FACT – Dissent From White House Claims on Iraq Nuclear Program Consistently Withheld from Congress:
[S]everal Congressional and intelligence officials with access to the 15 assessments [of intel suggesting aluminum tubes showed Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program] said not one of them informed senior policy makers of the Energy Department’s dissent. They described a series of reports, some with ominous titles, that failed to convey either the existence or the substance of the intensifying debate. [NYT, 10/3/04]
FACT Kerry. Kerrey: Bush “Has Much More Access” to Intel Than Congress:
Former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE), ex-Senate Intelligence Committee vice chairman: “The president has much more access to intelligence than members of Congress does. Ask any member of Congress. Ask a Republican member of Congress, do you get the same access to intelligence that the president does? Look at these aluminum tube stories that came out the president delivered to the Congress” “We believe these would be used for centrifuges.” “I didn’t deliver to Congress the full range of objections from the Department of Energy experts, nuclear weapons experts, that said it’s unlikely they were for centrifuges, more likely that they were for rockets, which was a pre-existing use. The president has much more access to intelligence than any member of Congress.” [10/7/04]
FACT – Rockefeller: PDBs, CIA Intel Withheld From Senate:
Ranking minority member on the Senate Intelligence Committee Jay Rockefeller (D-WV): “[P]eople say, ‘Well, you know, you all had the same intelligence that the White House had.’ And I’m here to tell you that is nowhere near the truth. We not only don’t have, nor probably should we have, the Presidential Daily Brief. We don’t have the constant people who are working on intelligence who are very close to him. They don’t release their ‘ an administration which tends not to release ‘ not just the White House, but the CIA, DOD [Department of Defense], others they control information. There’s a lot of intelligence that we don’t get that they have.” [11/04/05]
FACT – War Supporter Ken Pollack: White House Engaged in “Creative Omission” of Iraq Intel:
In the eyes of Kenneth Pollack, “a Clinton-era National Security Council member and strong supporter of regime change in Iraq,” ‘the Administration consistently engaged in “creative omission,” overstating the imminence of the Iraqi threat, even though it had evidence to the contrary. “The President is responsible for serving the entire nation,” Pollack writes. “Only the Administration has access to all the information available to various agencies of the US government ‘ and withholding or downplaying some of that information for its own purposes is a betrayal of that responsibility.'” [Christian Science Monitor, 1/14/04]
FACT – White House Had Exclusive Access to “Unique” Intel Sources:
“The claim that the White House and Congress saw the ‘same intelligence’ on Iraq is further undermined by the Bush administration’s use of outside intelligence channels. For more than year prior to the war, the administration received intelligence assessments and analysis on Iraq directly from the Department of Defense’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), run by then-undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas J. Feith, and the Iraqi Nationalcaliphss (INC), a group of Iraqi exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi.” [MediaMatters, 11/8/05]
Reprinted from Think Progress
As the Washington Post pointed out Saturday, “Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material.” For instance, in the lead up to war, the Bush administration argued that Iraq had made several attempts to “buy high-strength aluminum tubes used in centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.” The White House sent 15 intelligence assessments to Congress supporting this notion, but according to the New York Times, “not one of them” informed readers that experts within the Energy Department believed the tubes could not be used to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program. Even Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) — who has led efforts to delay and downplay the need for investigating prewar intelligence — confirmed this broader point yesterday. Asked whether the differences between the intelligence available to the White House and to Congress was a “legitimate concern,” Roberts acknowledged that it “may be a concern to some extent.”
Bush claimed that “a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs.” That argument is wrong on at least two counts. First, “the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions.” The so-called Phase II of the pre-war intel investigation is not expected to be completed this year. Second, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Phase I report found, according to the Los Angeles Times (7/10/04), that the unclassified public version of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was manipulated. “are fully qualified conclusions were turned into blunt assertions of fact.” For example, the classified version of the NIE said, “Although we have little specific information on Iraq’s CW stockpile, Saddam Hussein probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons” of certain poisons. The phrase “although we have little specific information” was deleted from the unclassified version. Instead, the public report said, “Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents.”
Above all the flaws in intelligence up to and leading into the occupation of Iraq, the world leaders were unanimously opposed to Pres. Bush’s allegations about the threats Iraq posed to the US or any other world nation. This is rebuffed and the acceptance of US intelligence was fabricated in the US media to further garner public support.
One frequent talking point of Bush’s defenders is that the pre-war intelligence failure was a global failure. “Every intelligence agency in the world, including the Russians, the French…all reached the same conclusion,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Similarly, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) claimed, “This was a worldwide intelligence failure,” citing the French and Russians, among others. In fact, many of our friends and allies believed that, based on the intelligence they had, the threat of Iraq did not rise to the level of justifying immediate force. French President Jacques Chirac said, “e just feel that there is another option, another way, a less dramatic way than war.” German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said he did not believe the threat rose to the level requiring the “‘ultima ratio,’ the very last resort.” And Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said, “It is our deep conviction that the possibilities for disarming Iraq through political means do exist.”
Despite the world’s political objections to both our intel and agenda, the Bush Administration spearheaded the campaign to invade the sovereign nation of Iraq.
Even if the Administration were to openly admit the failings of the intelligence and reasoning to enter Iraq, they would still fall back on the notion that Iraq and its people are better off without their dictator. Should this be true, it remains to be seen.