Weblog

The CIA has been accused of totally botching the prewar intelligence on WMDs in Iraq, and how does acting CIA chief John McLaughlin, who was the agency’s number two man during this episode, respond? With more bad spin.

After the Senate intelligence committee released a report concluding the intelligence community overstated or exaggerated its reporting on Iraq in a manner that hyped the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime–see here–acting CIA chief John McClaughlin embarked upon on a media blitz to defend the CIA and the intelligence community. One stop included an interview Wednesday on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show. Asked about the report’s primary finding–that the intelligence community had possessed no good evidence to back up its assessment that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction–McLaughlin declared, “the whole world anticipated [WMDs] would be there.” This has also been the Bush administration line as well: don’t blame us, everybody before the war assumed that Hussein was swimming in unconventional weaponry. So the CIA and the Bush White House are relying upon a collective-guilt defense. If everyone thought Hussein was neck-deep in WMDs, then they don’t look so bad.

Put aside the argument that the president of the United States (the most powerful man in the world) and the CIA (the lead intelligence service of the most powerful nation in the world) ought to be held to a higher standard than everyone-thought-so. More importantly, McLaughlin and the White House are incorrect when they maintain everyone thought this way.

Look at some of the people who devoted the most time and energy to the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: UN weapons inspectors. Before the war, Scott Ritter, a former inspector, repeatedly argued there was no solid evidence to back up the claim that Iraq remained in possession of significant amounts of unconventional weapons. Ritter, a controversial figure, was not the only one. In an interview in 2000, Rolf Ekeus, the former executive chairman of UNSCOM (the UN inspections force), said, “In my view, there are no large quantities of weapons. I don’t think Iraq is especially eager in the biological and chemical area to produce such weapons for storage. Iraq views those weapons as tactical assets instead of strategic assets, which would require long-term storage of those elements, which is difficult.” Ekeus acknowledged that Hussein retained an interest in WMDs and in producing weapons in the future. But that was, of course, not the same as sitting on massive stockpiles (as the Bush administration claimed the Iraqi dictator was doing).

Hans Blix, who headed the revived UN inspections in the months before the war, also pointed out that the WMDs cited by the Bush administration might not exist. “To take an example,” he said, “a document which Iraq provided suggested to us that some 1,000 tons of chemical agent were ‘unaccounted for.’ I must not jump to the conclusion they exist.” In a post-invasion interview with The New York Times, Blix questioned why the Bush administration had expected to find large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. “What surprises me, what amazes me,” he remarked, “is that it seems the military people were expecting to stumble on large quantities of gas, chemical weapons and biological weapons. I don’t see how they could have come to such an attitude if they had, at any time, studied the reports” of the UN inspectors. He added, “Are the reports from here [the United Nations] totally unread south of the Hudson?”

The day after Secretary Colin Powell delivered his now infamous presentation to the United Nations Security Council in early February 2003, The Washington Post ran several news stories that quoted weapons experts who took issue with Powell’s claims about WMDs in Iraq. Kelly Motz, a weapons specialist, said that “on the question of whether Iraq still has an active [WMD] program, the evidence is still circumstantial and open to interpretation.” Other experts questioned Powell’s assertion that Iraq had developed mobile bioweapons lab. (Those bioweapons labs turned out to be the product of a misinformation or disinformation campaign linked to Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.) And several scientists and analysts–including analysts within the US government–challenged the assertion (pushed by Bush and endorsed by the CIA) that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. And don’t forget–as I noted