Scrutiny of the CIA is mounting, with the baffling case of Iraq's WMD providing fuel for the fire. Now an internal CIA review is coming to similar conclusions as those made by David Kay: the agency has fundamental problems in intelligence collection and analysis. President Bush seems to have utter confidence in George Tenet and his team, but it's hard to see how that is justified.
Either the President and the GOP will lead a hard look at the CIA or the Democrats will make relentless use of these criticisms as a political weapon in a crucial election year. It's Bush's choice.
The beleaguered CIA faces new criticism in an internal report submitted this week by a veteran officer, who found serious fault with the agency's analysis on Iraq and said he believes intelligence officials have not come to grips with the causes or scope of the failure.Posted by Alan at January 31, 2004 10:28 AMAfter spending three months reviewing virtually every piece of raw intelligence that went into the CIA's assessments on Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War, Richard J. Kerr, the former deputy director of the agency, said he found failings with the way the data was analyzed and presented, and gaps in the underlying intelligence itself.
"It is very hard to see (the prewar analysis on Iraq) as anything but a failure in terms of the specifics that we provided" to policy-makers, Kerr said in a telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times. He said he submitted a report of his findings to CIA Director George J. Tenet this week that in many respects echoes the criticism raised in recent days by David Kay, who resigned last week as head of the U.S. weapons search team in Iraq.
Kerr stressed that Iraq was an extremely difficult target, and that many of the intelligence community's judgments were understandable, even if they were wrong. Kerr, like Kay, said he found no evidence that analysts shaded their estimates to support the Bush administration's case for war.
But Kerr challenged some of Kay's broader criticisms, saying he did not believe the former weapons inspector was qualified to pass judgment on whether the intelligence community needs wholesale restructuring or reform.
Even as he came to the CIA's defense on certain points, Kerr said that, overall, the agency has not owned up to fundamental problems exposed by the failure to find banned weapons stocks in Iraq.
"They're going to have to face up to it and deal with it in a direct way, and I don't think they have," Kerr said. "I don't think they have systematically looked at how they did this, at this whole problem, looking at the lessons and trying to understand the strengths and shortcomings" of their assessments on Iraq.
Kerr submitted his report during a week in which the agency was tossed by a storm of criticism. In his appearance on Capitol Hill and a series of interviews with the media, Kay said there had been "major shortfalls" in the intelligence on Iraq, and that he did not believe there were any stocks of weapons in the country when the United States invaded last year.
Kerr's comments are likely to carry particular weight within the intelligence community because he is a respected, 32-year veteran of the agency. A Soviet analyst during the Cuban missile crisis, he went on to hold a number of prominent positions, including interim director of the agency during the administration of President George H.W. Bush. He retired in 1992.
Kerr said his inquiry focused on the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- a document that represented the intelligence community's most thorough assessment of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capabilities. It concluded that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."
As the suspected stocks of weapons failed to turn up after the war, Tenet tapped Kerr to lead a team of agency retirees to review the document and determine whether its assertions were supported by the raw intelligence collected over the past decade by spies, inspectors, satellites, signals intercept equipment and other sources.
Kerr said the outcome of his review "is a fair report, and I think it understands the problem, but it's critical in some areas of how the analysis was done and the presentation of the estimate."
Via the Los Angeles Times (registration required)