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Secrets, Evasions and Classified Reports
The CIA leak case isn’t just about whether top officials will be
indicted. A larger issue is what Judith Miller’s evidence says about
White House manipulation of the media
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
10/19/05 "Newsweek"
-- -- The lengthy account by New York Times
reporter Judy Miller about her grand jury testimony in the CIA leak
case inadvertently provides a revealing window into how the Bush
administration manipulated journalists about intelligence on Iraq’s
nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
Whatever the implications for special prosecutor Patrick
Fitzgerald’s probe, Miller describes a conversation with Vice
President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, on
July 8, 2003, where he appears to significantly misrepresent the
contents of still-classified material from a crucial prewar
intelligence-community document about Iraq.
With no weapons of mass destruction having been found in Iraq and
new questions being raised about the case for war, Libby assured
Miller that day that the still-classified document, a National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE), contained even stronger evidence that
would support the White House’s conclusions about Iraq’s weapons
programs, according to Miller’s account.
In fact, a declassified version of the NIE was publicly released
just 10 days later, and it showed almost precisely the opposite. The
NIE, it turned out, contained caveats and qualifiers that had never
been publicly acknowledged by the administration prior to the
invasion of Iraq. It also included key dissents by State Department
intelligence analysts, Energy Department scientists and Air Force
technical experts about some important aspects of the
administration’s case.
The assertion that still-secret material would bolster the
administration’s claims about Iraqi WMD was “certainly not accurate,
it was not true,” says Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, who coauthored a study last year,
titled “A Tale of Two Intelligence Estimates,” about different
versions of the NIE that were released. If Miller’s account is
correct, Libby was “misrepresenting the intelligence” that was
contained in the document, she said.
A spokeswoman for Cheney’s office said today that she could not
respond to Miller’s account because it described grand jury
testimony in the Valerie Plame leak case. Following standard White
House policy, the vice president’s office does not intend to make
any public comments on any matter relating to the investigation
until after it is complete.
Libby’s comments about the NIE may seem at this point a sideshow to
the pressing question that is currently consuming much of
Washington: whether he or any other White House official will be
charged with any crimes stemming from the outing of CIA agent Plame,
the wife of former ambassador and administration critic Joseph
Wilson.
But Libby’s comments do touch on what many believe is a larger issue
raised by the case: whether the administration accurately
represented the nature of what the U.S. intelligence community knew,
and didn’t know, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs before the
nation went to war.
The NIE was no small matter in that debate. Hastily prepared in the
fall of 2002 at the request of members of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, the NIE was supposed to be a blue-ribbon document that
represented the consensus view of U.S. government intelligence
agencies. A white paper based on the NIE was publicly released by
the administration in early October 2002—just one week before
Congress voted on a resolution authorizing the president to go to
war.
The publicly released white paper unequivocally backed up the White
House’s case about the dangers posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) programs. It stated boldly and without caveats in
the first paragraph that Baghdad “has chemical and biological
weapons” and “if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear
weapon during this decade.” If Iraq obtains sufficient weapons-grade
material from abroad, the white paper further warned, Baghdad could
make a nuclear weapon “within a year.”
To support its conclusions about an Iraqi nuclear program, it
prominently cited, among other factors, Iraq’s “aggressive attempts”
to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes—an effort that Miller and
her colleague Michael Gordon had first written about in an
influential front-page story for The New York Times the previous
September.
When Miller met with Libby for two hours at Washington’s
Ritz-Carlton Hotel on July 8, 2003, the vice president’s top aide
provided an additional detail that was not contained in the white
paper, according to Miller’s account published in last Sunday’s New
York Times. The still-classified NIE, Libby told her, “had firmly
concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium” for a nuclear bomb.
The new information was potentially significant at that moment
because it came just two days after a New York Times op-ed by Wilson
challenging the administration’s claims about Iraqi attempts to
purchase uranium. In the op-ed, Wilson had come forward for the
first time to say that he had personally undertaken a CIA-sponsored
mission to Niger the year before and concluded that reports of Iraqi
attempts to purchase uranium from that country could not be
substantiated.
As Miller describes it, Libby’s principal message during their
two-hour breakfast meeting that day was to rebut Wilson’s attacks,
launching what she describes as a “lengthy and sharp critique” in
which he laid out the “credible evidence” of Iraqi attempts to buy
uranium from Niger.
But Miller wanted more specifics. She “pressed Mr. Libby to discuss
additional information [about Iraq’s nuclear program] that was in
the more detailed, classified version of the estimate,” Miller
wrote, referring to the NIE. If the Times was going to do an
article, “the newspaper needed more than a recap of the
administration’s weapons arguments.”
Libby, though, “said little more than that the assessments of the
classified estimate were even stronger than those in the
unclassified version,” Miller wrote.
Even when she sought to change the subject to Iraq’s chemical and
biological weapons programs, Miller continues, “my notes show that
Mr. Libby consistently steered our conversation back to the
administration’s nuclear claims. His main theme echoed that of other
senior officials: that contrary to Mr. Wilson’s criticism, the
administration had had ample reason to be concerned about Iraq’s
nuclear capabilities based on the regime’s history of weapons
development, its use of unconventional weapons and fresh
intelligence reports.”
What Miller didn’t mention in her article is that on July 18, 2003,
the White House did release a more detailed version of the NIE. At
the time, White House aides were trying to explain how the claims
about Iraqi uranium purchases in Africa had mistakenly found their
way into the president’s State of the Union Message that year—even
though, it turns out, they were partially based on documents that
were forged.
But contrary to what Libby told Miller, the more detailed version of
the NIE was hardly stronger. In fact, it revealed for the first
time, in the very first paragraph—right after the sentence that “if
left unchecked, [Iraq] probably will have a nuclear weapon during
this decade”—the fact that the State Department’s intelligence arm,
the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), had an “alternative
view” of the matter.
That alternative view, relegated to a boxed footnote inside the
document, stated that while INR believed that Saddam “continues to
want nuclear weapons” and had a “limited effort” underway to acquire
nuclear capabilities, the evidence does not add up to a “compelling
case” that Iraq was pursuing a full-scale nuclear weapons program.
“Iraq may be doing so,” the footnote read, “but INR considers the
available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment.”
Specifically, the INR analysts challenged the assertion that Iraq’s
purchase of aluminum tubes was for the purpose of advancing a
nuclear program. They noted that “technical experts” at the Energy
Department didn’t believe they were suited for such uses. In fact,
INR—citing the large number of tubes being purchased and the
“atypical lack of attention to operational security in the
procurement efforts”—concluded that the tubes are “not intended for
use in Iraq’s nuclear weapon program.”
As for the purported Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from Africa,
the NIE did indeed assert that Iraq had been “vigorously trying to
procure uranium ore and yellow cake.” It based that assessment on
foreign government “reports” about attempted purchases from Niger
and two other African countries.
But the NIE also included an INR written annex in which the State
Department analysts concluded that claims of Iraq uranium purchases
in Africa were “highly dubious.”
Those weren’t the only dissents included in the INR that had not
been revealed in the earlier white paper. The original pre-Iraq war
white paper had asserted that Iraq was developing an unmanned aerial
vehicle (UAV) or missile that was “probably intended to deliver
biological warfare agents” and could even threaten “the U.S.
homeland.” The white paper had attributed these conclusions to “most
analysts.”
In fact, the newly declassified NIE disclosed for the first time
that the U.S. Air Force’s intelligence agency, the Office of
Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, had a different view.
The Air Force intelligence agency “does not agree” that Iraq’s UAVs
were “primarily intended” for delivering biological weapons and
believed they were more likely to be primarily for reconnaissance,
although unconventional weapons delivery was “an inherent
capability.”
As Carnegie president Mathews noted in her study last year, the
actual NIE had other caveats and qualifiers that were not in the
declassified white paper that was released before the war. In the
prewar white paper, the words “we judge” and “we assess” were
deleted from five key findings of the NIE, making the conclusions
seem like flat declarative statements rather than more nuanced
judgments. More significantly, key sentences that were in the
NIE—and revealed seeds of doubt about some matters—were omitted from
the prewar white paper. Among them: “We lack specific information on
many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD program.” Also: “We have low
confidence in our ability to assess when Saddam would use WMD.”
Miller, who had been among the most aggressive reporters in the
country writing stories about the threat posed by Iraqi WMD, was
quoted in a New York Times article that accompanied her piece last
Sunday as saying for the first time” “WMD—I got it totally wrong.
The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them—we
were all wrong.”
Today, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the
need for a federal “shield” law to protect journalists from having
to disclose their sources, she elaborated a bit: “As I painfully
learned while covering intelligence estimates of Saddam Hussein’s
weapons of mass destruction, we are only as good as our sources. If
they are mistaken, we will be wrong.” She made no reference to
Libby.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc. - © 2005 MSNBC.com
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