They
say that history repeats itself. And so it does.
Two
years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency released reams of intelligence
documents on the former Soviet Union that had been classified for
nearly 30 years. The findings were damning: the CIA for
more than 10 years greatly exaggerated the nuclear threat the communist
country posed to the world.
The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Raymond Garthoff, a longtime
C.I.A. military analyst, admitted in 2001 "there were consistent
overestimates of the threat every year from 1978 to 1985."
Fast forward to 2003 and the CIA finds itself in a similar pickle.
This time it's intelligence on Iraq's alleged stockpile of chemical
and biological weapons and the country's nuclear ambitions appear
to be in doubt. Two months have passed since major combat in Iraq
has ended and those weapons of mass destruction, the reasons the U.S.
launched a preemptive strike against Iraq, are nowhere to be found.
Some lawmakers have suggested that the Bush administration may have
exaggerated the CIA's intelligence reports on Iraq and the CIA is
coming under fire for including erroneous information in its October
2002 report to show that Iraq was an imminent threat to the U.S.
Last October, the Los Angeles Times reported that senior Bush
administration officials were pressuring CIA analysts to tailor their
assessments of the Iraqi threat to help build a case against Saddam
Hussein, intelligence and congressional sources told the paper.
The difference between the threat assessments in the Soviet intelligence
reports that were declassified in 2001 and the reports the CIA supplied
on Iraq is that the latter got us into a real war. But the CIA's erroneous
information on the former Soviet Union helped influence U.S. military
spending and Washington's defense and foreign policies, exactly what
the agency's intelligence analysis did for Iraq.
If Congress discovers that the CIA supplied the White House with wrong
intelligence information on the Iraqi threat it will surpass the agency's
blunder on the so-called Soviet nuclear threat, which turned out to
be one of the biggest embarrassments in the agency's history when
those documents were released two years ago.
When the 19,000 of pages of documents titled "Intelligence Forecasts
of Soviet Intercontinental Attack Forces: An Evaluation of the Record,"
were declassified in 2001 it raised questions about how well the CIA
and other U.S. intelligence agencies ability to gather intelligence
on newer threats, such as Iraq and North Korea, according to several
former CIA officials.
In a March 9, 2001 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer on
the declassified intelligence said: "during the Cold War, the
Soviet Union's force of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles
(ICBMs), submarines, and long-range bombers was the U.S intelligence
community's primary target. But today's spies must try to keep track
of international terrorists, rogue nuclear-weapons programs and computer
hackers, and also plumb the minds of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein
and North Korea's Kim Jong Il, all of which is much harder than counting
missile silos in Kazakstan or estimating the wheat crop in Ukraine.
Based
on the intelligence gathered for the CIA's October 2002 report on
the Iraqi threat, it appears that the agency suffered from an intelligence
failure. Much of the information in that report has been hotly disputed.
For example, in October 2002, President Bush gave a speech in Cincinnati
and spoke about the imminent Iraqi threat, the country's alleged ties
with al-Qaeda and its endless supply of chemical and biological weapons,
which was based on a CIA report released during the same month.
"We've discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing
fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to
disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas,"
Bush said. "We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using
these UAVS for missions targeting the United States."
However, these claims have since been disputed. Moreover, the administration
has never offered up any evidence to prove Iraq has ties with al-Qaeda.
Bush also said last September in a speech that attempts by Iraq to
acquire the tubes point to a clandestine program to make enriched
uranium for nuclear bombs. But experts contradicted Bush, saying that
the evidence is ambiguous at best.
David Albright, a physicist who investigated Iraq's nuclear weapons
program following the 1991 Persian Gulf War as a member of the International
Atomic Energy Agency's inspection team, the Post reported, authored
the report.
"By themselves, these attempted procurements are not evidence
that Iraq is in possession of, or close to possessing, nuclear weapons,"
the report said, according to the Washington
Post. "They do not provide evidence that Iraq has an
operating centrifuge plant or when such a plant could be operational."
Melvin Goodman, a former senior CIA Soviet analyst, told the Philadelphia
Inquirer in March 2001 that when the Soviet documents were declassified
it would bolster criticism that intelligence assessments of the Soviet
threat were deliberately inflated to justify increases in U.S. defense
spending and nuclear forces.
"This is the first time that the CIA has gone on the record confirming
the exaggeration of [Soviet] force modernization," Goodman, who
teaches at the National War College in Washington, told the Inquirer.
In the case of Iraq, some argue that intelligence reports were inflated
to justify a war..
"I am concerned about the politicization of intelligence,"
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who echoed complaints of other members
that the administration has been selective in the intelligence it
cites, overstating its case in many instances, told the Times.
