Secret Obsessions at the Top
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: February 7, 2004 New York Times

"When a country's capital is in the grip of hard-line ideologues who demand a certain kind of intelligence, they'll get it. The result is an intelligence failure. And, more fundamentally, it's a political failure by the top leaders themselves.

So to me, the administration's recent effort to blame the intelligence community for the Iraq mess is as misleading as the drive to war itself. Nothing the C.I.A. did was as harmful as the way administration officials systematically misled Americans about the incomplete and often contradictory mountain of intelligence.

For example, in September 2002 the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a still-classified report saying "there is no reliable information" on whether Iraq had chemical weapons. Yet in the same month Donald Rumsfeld was telling a House committee the opposite: "We do know that the Iraqi regime currently has chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, and we do know they are currently pursuing nuclear weapons."

I've been canvassing people in the intelligence community, and one person at D.I.A. tells me: "I never saw anything that justified the idea that Saddam was an immediate threat, or that we knew with certainty what he had. Everything I saw was laced with `possibles' and `probables'; in fact, what I saw about those aluminum tubes, for instance, seemed to me to leave the impression that they probably were not nuclear-related."

Lt. Col. Dale Davis, a former Marine counterintelligence officer now at the Virginia Military Institute, says he hears from his former intelligence colleagues that top officials "cherry-picked the intel for the most damning, and often least reliable, tidbits and produced alarming conclusions — the 45-minute chemical attack scenario, the African uranium and the Al Qaeda connection. The C.I.A. never supported these assertions."

Another person with long experience in military intelligence put it this way: "Everyone knew from the start that there was no smoking gun and the assessment was based on speculation, anecdote and outdated information, not current evidence. We didn't have the `humint' [human intelligence] capability to confirm anything one way or the other."

The administration could have been truthful, saying that the intelligence about W.M.D. was incomplete but alarming — and that in any case Saddam was a monster. Instead, officials from the president down warned us that unless we went to war, we risked a mushroom cloud at home.

That was worse than an intelligence failure. That was dishonesty."