So, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has released its long-awaited report on the quality and quantity of prewar intelligence assessments of Iraq.
The full report (24mb PDF) and the conclusions (2mb PDF) are now on the Committee website.
Committee co-chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller showed himself to be a partisan ass during his press conference with Sen. Pat Roberts this morning. Among other things, despite this statement in the report (to which he signed his name)...
Conclusion 83. The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.Conclusion 84. The Committee found no evidence that the Vice President's visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure analysts by those who participated in the briefings on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, or did pressure analysts to change their assessments.
... Rockefeller stated this in the press conference:
The committee’s report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq when the most senior officials in the Bush administration had already forcefully and repeatedly stated their conclusions publicly.I felt that the definition of pressure was very narrowly drawn in the final report. And that is that, sort of, that if somebody came up to you and you were one of the analysts who had been working on WMD, and they said, "Did anybody tell you that you had to change your point of view?" and the answer was, "No," well that was the description of pressure.
That’s not my description of pressure. That’s a description of pressure. But another description of pressure is the total ambience of this cascade of ominous statements, which continued really up to the present, about what was going to happen or the relationship between Al Qaida and Iraq, Mohammed Atta and the rest of it.
So, to me, pressure also can be defined by what else is in our additional views.
So, 200 CIA analysts said they did not feel pressured, but Sen. Rockefeller finds an "environment" and an "ambience" of pressure. Next, he'll cite "the emanations of a penumbra" of pressure. Seems like someone hunting for evidence of a foregone conclusion.
Posted by Alan at July 9, 2004 12:44 PM