Silberman-Robb report a whitewash

As expected, the president's public report from the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction denies the real story


Headlines highlight the panel's statement that ``U.S. intelligence agencies were `dead wrong' in their belief that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction,' but reporters fail to pursue a suspect conclusion in the report saying, ``The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure
cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments.''

As Deep Blade Journal noted a few days ago, official probes into intelligence on Iraq's weapons have failed to even mention the rogue Pentagon intelligence shop known for over a year prior to the invasion as the Office of Special Plans (OSP). As far as I can tell, the Silberman-Robb report contains no reference to this operation.

Here is how Dreyfuss and Vest, writing in The Lie Factory (Mother Jones, January/February 2004) describe the political ``pressure'' emanating from Vice President Dick Cheney's office:

According to Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, Luti and Shulsky ran NESA and the Office of Special Plans with brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the party line. "It was organized like a machine," she says. "The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission." At NESA, Shulsky, she says, began "hot-desking," or taking an office wherever he could find one, working with Feith and Luti, before formally taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues like Iraq's WMD and its links to Al Qaeda. Shulsky constantly updated these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney. "Of course, we never thought they'd go directly to the White House," she adds.

When PBS Newshour correspondent Margaret Warner interviewed Silberman and Robb on Thursday, she asked a good question about ``pressure'' but did nothing to show she had any background or ability to critically examine the obfuscating answers her guests gave.

MARGARET WARNER: Let me finally ask you, Judge Silberman, about what you concluded. When you started this work were there a lot of charges being made by critics of the administration and Congress, about news reports, about politicization. And there were two elements to this: One was that in some way policy makers exerted pressure on intelligence analysts to come up with certain conclusions, and two, that the president and others did not accurately convey the caveats that were in the intelligence when they spoke publicly. What are your conclusions on those two points?

JUDGE LAURENCE SILBERMAN: Well, on the second point, we duck. That is not part of our charter. We did not express any views on policymakers' use of intelligence -- whether Congress or the president. It wasn't part of our charter and indeed most of us didn't want to get into that issue because it's basically a political question and everybody knows -- you can look at the newspaper and see what people said and make your own judgment. On the former question, as to whether or not there was any policymaker effort to influence the intelligence, we found zip, nothing, nothing to support --

CHARLES ROBB: Margaret, could I add to that?

MARGARET WARNER: Actually, we're just -- we're really just about out of time. Let me just ask you quickly about -- there was one case where two analysts said they really doubted this curve ball agent, they thought he was fabricating. And they were essentially run out of the division. You wouldn't call that pressure?

JUDGE LAURENCE SILBERMAN: Oh, there was certainly pressure within the intelligence community.

CHARLES ROBB: Within the division, that's right.

JUDGE LAURENCE SILBERMAN: -- in the intelligence community.

CHARLES ROBB: The intelligence community imposed pressure on itself. There was a conventional wisdom and there certainly was a feeling articulated by some that they did not want to go against the conventional wisdom.

The notion that intelligence had to be cooked to Cheney's liking (yes, let's name the ``policy maker'') is radioactive in the context of these official investigations. Likewise, Senator Olympia Snowe expended great effort to turn media away from examination of the nature of the ``pressure'' when the Senate Select Committee's document was released last July, emphasizing to a Bangor Daily News reporter that

... analysts were not pressured by superiors to justify the invasion of Iraq.

That's not the conclusion of the committee report ... that was unanimously agreed to by the committee," Snowe said on NBC's "Today" show. "In fact, they interviewed a number of analysts, any analyst that would indicate that they were pressured to reach certain conclusions.

"The fact is ... that what happened here was a systemic failure throughout the intelligence community" [Snowe said]

Evidently, in the manner of assigning blame for prisoner torture only on low-level ``rotten apples,'' only failures of intelligence bureaucrats, not the criminal mendacity of Cheney and his henchmen can be discussed.

Nonetheless, the Silberman-Robb report does make for interesting reading as it does some storytelling that with proper critical analysis could form part of the basis of an accurate history of the war crimes the Bush Administration has committed with its invasion and taking of Iraq. For example, this Post story, Doubts on Weapons Were Dismissed, tells of how ``CIA officers sent urgent e-mails and cables describing grave doubts'' about the charges former Secretary of State Colin Powell was to make before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, but that former CIA director Tenet ``relayed no such concerns to Powell.''

See, it's all the fault of guys now out of government.

Tellingly, however, the report leaves an ominous blank -- how the US is and will treat WMD intel with respect to North Korea and the country in the immediate crosshairs, Iran. Here is how Silberman replies to a pretty good question from Margaret Warner.

MARGARET WARNER: Let me ask you about something. I mean, North Korea and Iran being the two cases that are most preoccupying the administration right now, in the regular version of the report, this is all you have about North Korea and Iran and you essentially say we can't say anything because it's classified. Without giving us any classified information, I mean, the president is making public assertions about these programs, can you tell us if U.S. intelligence has what you would consider a solid understanding of either one of these countries' weapons programs?

JUDGE LAURENCE SILBERMAN: We can't answer that question; we simply can't answer that; there's no way we can say anything about those subjects without revealing something that would be injurious to the United States. One of the things we found when we did this study is that authorized and unauthorized leaks of intelligence information have cost the United States billions of dollars and seriously worsened our security problem. So we don't want to add to it.

It is happening again. A secret office somewhere in the Pentagon or vice president's office is developing a strategy for public dissemination of a blend of true and false intelligence, all aimed in one direction -- to whip up support and a false legal basis for criminal military action.